Page 103 of Wed to the Orc Captive

I wished I’d had the presence to pick up a branch, a stick, anything.

One of them grazed his arm. Blood flowed red. Now the creatures were getting frenzied, more crowding in.

He needed more time. We needed more swords, more arms. We needed the children out of here. We needed time. Surely someone had heard the screaming.

Maybe my voice would make it worse, maybe I sang and called all the monsters of the world down on us, but we needed time. I remembered the snake-creature freezing, and grabbed at my last thread of something to try.

“Vrathgar,” I shouted. “I’ll hold them back. Take the children.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the terror-birds, but his voice made it clear he thought me mad. “What?”

I sang.

They wanted blood. I sang blood.

I sang my father’s guts spilling out on the floor. I sang the bandit in the forest bleeding out, hot and sticky over my hands. I sang my hands smearing red across the rock of the pit.

The birds’ heads rose.

I sang. For the moment they weren’t attacking Vrathgar, their eyes set on me. I pried a child’s hand off my leg, pushed her towards my husband. Vrathgar turned to look at me, his eyes stricken, and I kept the cadence as I held out the one in my arms.

He didn’t argue, didn’t waste the time I could make. He scooped up the children, one around his neck, the one on his shoulder, another in his arms. “I’ll be back,” he hissed, and I nodded. I sang.

More serpentine birds appeared through the trees.

I sang Vrathgar’s headwound in that cell, the cut on his lip copper on my mouth. More moved in, and they were hungry, they would strike if I wavered. I tried to get them to sway, like the serpent had back on Tyralk’s hunt I’d been afraid to speak to, to test how far I could maintain the control. If I could tell them what to do, could I make them run away? I tried a trill of revulsion, Todderick blocking the narrow alley, and one of them made a move closer, stepped forward, and I doubled back to blood again, Mercy Owens soaking the sheets red as Bogdanna shouted orders. When I sped up, I risked them closing in. When I slowed down, I risked losing control.

I started smacking my palm against my thigh to keep time.

I sang my mother’s broken nose. I sang the blood in my mouth. I sang my terror when my own womb had started its courses.

There was movement in the forest, where Vrathgar and the children had disappeared. I couldn’t look, but my ears caught the footfalls, the breaks in rhythm. The birds were getting restless. I looped back to the axe, like a chorus, and they swung towards me again. One stepped closer.

There were at least two dozen now. Five of them were close enough to touch. If the approaching force of the orcs disturbed the song, was there any way I would survive?

Then the sound changed, a rhythmic slap. Someone else was keeping time.

Footfalls moved with the music. I pushed the song up again, into the chorus, the axe and the blade. The birds stayed still as faces I recognized filtered into the clearing. Hagmar, Larrakh, and others, so many whose names I'd never come to learn. Larrakh's eyes were wide. I was doing it. I had them. The birds stayed suspended in space, and I realized Vrathgar was beside me.

The birds were surrounded.

I sent out one last crescendo, the memory of the birds’ blood speckling Vrathgar’s face, as he raised his sword and yelled.

Scaled heads split from necks. Talons flailed. Larrakh stabbed one through and wheeled to take a second. Vrathgar’s blades wheeled, and nothing touched me.

A sheet of flame took five of them that tried to run. I yiped shock as Vrathgar laughed. Oh. Rowena. She was a sorceress.

It was too good. It was too much hope. Too much safety.

Vrathgar turned from the bodies arrayed around him, back to me, his smile that same, crooked shape I’d first met in a village cell, his eyes so carefree. He was saying something, about the children, the little ones I’d shoved at him. One of the younger orcs had cut off one of the monstrous heads close to the top of that snake-neck, and the dark body flailed, spasmed. I screamed warning, and Vrathgar turned.

Right as the claw struck him in the gut.

Another orc tackled the body, brought it down. They were stabbing. Blood was pouring from my husband’s body, his chest.

I screamed.

I screamed and runes lit the fallen pillar, running symbols up the stone, the very air humming. Khal turned and dove to catch him as he fell, his bladed staff falling in the dirt. Tyralk was running towards us.