Page 77 of Wed to the Orc Captive

“No,” he snarled, “you are lucky. You’re lucky that she lived.” Grezha was touching my neck, and with her soft oak-colored eyes filling my vision, I heard what he declared over that crowd. “Because if she died nothing would stop me from cutting your heart out of your chest, whether they let me drag you to the circle or not.”

Grezha moved out of the way, and I could see him again. The bruises my people had left across his jaw were almost faded. It was almost like he never got to heal before the next hit. I wanted to touch his face. I was afraid to move any of me.

“Drazha,” he boomed across the clearing. “Are you going to stand for this? Is this an evil you’ll accept, too?”

Khal’s mother spoke, icy, aloof, while I only watched his face. “I will speak to the young women. We will find out what happened here.”

“What happened here? They threw her in the pit!”

“It will be examined. You have my word, Rootless One. The ways will be upheld.”

Larrakh, on the edge of that circle, flinched.

Vrathgar’s head hung over mine, his breathing ragged. There were shadows under his eyes. What had he done the last day, the long night? “Drazha,” he said. “If our ways allow us to oppress the foreigner, to lord it over the weak, what good are they? What good are we?” His voice rose, and it had to, because people shouted in protest, were yelling, and over the crowd he roared, “If the letter of your law is more precious to you than the lives of innocents, then how are you better than the Droth? At least the Droth don’t lie about what they are!”

Drazha’s voice was cold. “You go too far, Rootless One.”

His lips drew back over his teeth. “And you let your roots rot.”

Drazha raised her staff over the crowd, forcing the throng quiet. “We will reconvene a month’s time from now. We have testimony to weigh. If something must come before the assembly⁠—"

“I object!” Sareet, the one who’d given me the knife. “He slanders the warriors of the people! Who is my accuser here? I have done nothing wrong!” The crowd murmured. She raised her staff, pointed it. “He wants to keep his human as a pet, and not an equal. He objects that we gave her a chance to join our people, that we treated her like any one of us! And he’s angry at us that he brought a weakling into our midst?” She bared her teeth. “I will not be lectured on our ways by someone so lowly he had to take a human to wife!”

He looked so jaded, his face raw, bitter. “Lowly?” he said. “Is that how you want to do this?” His teeth clenched. “That's not what you were saying when your legs were around my⁠—"

I was glad I couldn’t hear. I was glad that they shouted him down, even with the yelling hammering through my skull. The light was too bright, the sounds were too much. I was too much.

“Enough!” Drazha roared over the assembly. “Enough. You fight like children. And Sareet, you are too old for children’s pranks, and not too young to be held accountable for them with your sisters.”

On the edge of the crowd, my kidnapper snapped her jaw shut. Hatred was in her eyes.

“Rootless One, tend to your wife. We can discuss your challenge at the assembly. I will ignore your execration as a moment of high temper under this stress. Do not let it happen before me again.”

He didn’t answer. His shoulders were hunched.

The crowd was dispersing. Larrakh stepped forward, pulled back.

Grezha spoke to him. “If you’re going to carry her, you need to move. She needs better than this open earth.”

He stood, a little unsteadily, kept me cradled against his body. “I’m taking you to Grezha’s,” he said. “You’re going to be fine. Just a little longer.”

The sun wheeled through the leaves, glowed and dappled over his face, and I focused on it, to ignore the horror. “You said the Drashik valued something other than strength,” I said, that frustrating, twisting magic on my tongue. “They seem to want me strong or dead.”

“It seems there’s a lot I was wrong about.” His voice was rough. “Maybe we’re all really monsters.”

I was too sick to have this conversation, shouldn’t be making him sad, not when I was the one who’d failed to climb the wall. “I’m sorry,” I got out. “Compared to the Droth, they’re still kind.”

He was limping, I could feel, but he didn’t ask for help, and he didn’t set me down. “I guess a lot of evils slip out of notice, when you’re always comparing to the Droth.”

The world would come together, come apart, pieces of fragmenting space, binding agony. Grezha, her fire, hands on my skin, draughts down my throat. Horror, relief, in and out. I think the last of the Orcish I understood before the spell ran out was “...not her spine.”

I woke, afraid to move.

The lying still ached, but I didn’t know what movement would provoke the razor blades in my hips, my pelvis. Could I move my arms? Turn my head? Rolling was out. I knew I couldn’t roll.

“You need sleep.” Khal was speaking. In the dim glow of the coals banked under the cauldron, I made them out by the door, the sorcerer’s husband and mine. Vrathgar’s profile was harsh against the night.

“I’m not leaving my wife.”