“It was wonderful,” he said, rubbing his neck, feeling shy. “It was like meeting someone and not having all the normal elements of distrust and fear. Just feeling as if I was… normal to them, I suppose, straightaway.”
“Oh,” she said in a voice that was full of pity.
He continued to rub his neck. “You needn’t feel sorry for me, you know. I don’t need you to do that.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she protested.
“It’s another way we can never be equals,” he muttered.
“Yes, perhaps I had never thought about what it must be like for you,” she breathed.
“Maybe I hadn’t either.” He lifted a shoulder. “I had never experienced anything else.”
She went to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed close and kissed his cheek.
He fought the desire to push her away and the desire to sag into her and accept this show of affection from her. He did not wish to do either, so he just stayed where he was and let her hold him.
“You will come with me to visit Elrion, though,” she said.
Of course he would go. How could he resist?
“MY NATHRE ISenamored of your orc,” said Elrion as he offered Aerhril a plate of biscuits.
She was so startled she nearly dropped her tea, but then she recovered. “Oh? Really? Dathor?”
“He is handsome, I think,” said Flaihir. “In a sort of rugged way, I suppose. He’s got such large hands, does he not?”
Aerhril took a biscuit. “I suppose. I have grown up with him, you know. He is rather like a brother to me.”
“Brother to an orc?” said Elrion. “How extraordinary. You are such a radiant soul, I think, Lady Aerhril. You mustshare your radiance with others. It would do such good for the world.”
“I agree,” said Flaihir. “I have been quite blessed to work with her here. She is a gleaming jewel hidden away in the rough countryside.”
“That she is,” said Elrion.
There was a plan. She and Flaihir had ruminated on it for some time. She was going to feign reinjuring her ankle, saying that it bothered her from time to time, and that she had been told that if she twisted it again, it could easily be quite serious.
In truth, she’d been told no such thing, but Elrion would believe it and insist that she stay at Thelandel Chapel, where she would be bedridden and he would come to look in on her and read to her and say sweet things to her, and her business was to throw herself upon his kindness and flirt with him mercilessly and hopefully get him to agree to buy her bride price.
Getting him to take Dathor should also be no problem whatsoever.
It was all very close, and she could practically taste it.
She must not be distracted by thinking of Dathor and that female orc, or of Dathor’s large hands, or anything like that.
“But she’s so disappointed he isn’t here today,” said Elrion.
“He could not be spared from his duties, sadly,” said Aerhril, though the truth was that Dathor had been purposefully excluded because he would probably volunteer to carry her all the way back to Foxglove Peak, even though she and Flaihir had come on horseback.
He had come a number of other times, though.
He liked the orcs and they liked him. When he came back from being with them, he would often have this sort of boyish smile on his face, this innocent smile of a being with no cares in the world, the sort of expression that had never been on his face when he actually was a boy, and it would make her insides squeeze so tightly that she would hardly be able to breathe.
She would feel a sensation, then, and she could not account for it, for the sensation felt a great deal like guilt, and she did not know what she had to be guilty for. She had not hurt him. She was the only person helping him. She was the only person who truly loved him.
But she supposed she could see that there was an entire world, a whole system that worked on the idea of denying him, and that she benefited from the system and that she was not doing anything about it. She was enforcing it. She certainly wasn’t making a stand or trying to change things or make things better for him, for orcs.
Elrion talked of protests when he had been a student at university. He had gone straight there after his wardship had ended, straight to school. He talked of carrying signs and marching arm-in-arm with orcs through the streets of Cairnil, the city where he had gone to school.
