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Melody peeps around Bard’s legs at me… and Doug. She is most assuredly fascinated by Doug. The fairy child I’m to help care for is as pretty as her name, with red-gold hair and strange whirling silver eyes.
“I’ll leave you to your duties,” the gruff steward says, before striding away.
“She is faking shy,” Bard says with a sigh. “And does not like the company of the steward.”
Melody continues to eyeball Doug around Bard’s legs before she suddenly emerges and takes a meandering route over to him. Doug watches her approach with a raised brow.
“Melody,” Bard says, a warning in his voice.
Does he think Doug will hurt the child? I’m about to come to Doug’s defense when Melody closes her small hand around Doug’s large one.
Doug blinks as the tiny fairy begins to stroke his hand as though seeking to gentle the beast.
I bite my lip to hide my smile.
Bard grimaces. “Melody, what did we talk about? Orcs are not for petting.”
“You are so beautiful,” she says, eyes taking on a gleam of deep admiration and ignoring Bard. “Did the Goddess paint you with snowflakes?”
Doug offers a grunt, but I see his lips tug up on the orc’s equivalent of a grin.
And so a new stage of my life begins.
* * *
Walking anywhere fast in Krug in summer is simply not to be done. According to Penny, it is frigid here during winter, but the extreme summers offer a brief respite when the blistering winds travel from the deserts that are to the west of Imperium lands, and bathe the city in red dust and waves of heat.
The air is so arid it makes a desert of your mouth and wraps you under a blanket of sluggishness. The red sand blown in from afar leaves a gritty layer over the narrow streets of the capital, where the buildings squeeze close. On the outskirts of the sprawling city, the dwellings devolve into mud huts. Here, in the center, they are also mud but interconnected to form endless irregular passages in variations of color from gray to brown. They have rough walls, flat wooden roofs, small shuttered windows, and their wide cloth awnings reach out from the frontage into the paths to tangle with neighbors in a kaleidoscope of color and fabric.
The inhabitants of Krug are surprisingly diverse. Living among the orcs are many humans and members of other races. One might presume that they would be downbeat, living among the Blighten. But this is not the case. They are vibrant, animated people living in dense communities. Every day they set up stalls outside their homes in these narrow streets, where they communicate with each other and passers-by in an exuberant babble.
In counterpoint to the hawkers’ cries come the creak of carts, drawn slowly in the heat, and the general din of many people and orcs who fill these constricted routes—the quicksilver of darting children, the steady pace of the old—orc, human, and everything in between.
As we pass a temple to Emedicus, the god of dreams, a song prayer begins as a single voice that becomes two, and then three. And then many join together, rising to a peak only to return to that single haunting soprano.
One does not think of orcs as pious, yet the many temples suggest they are.
Krug is a surprise, all around.
“Can I have a toffee apple?” Melody asks, in her sweet, high voice.
“We do not have time for toffee apples,” Bard admonishes softly. The tall, gray-haired bondservant is often stern with the child, although none of that deters Melody.
If Krug has been a revelation, then the tiny fairy child—who would do anything for a sweet treat—is a revelation of the highest order. Although she wears no collar at her throat, she is most assuredly a possession of orcs, one who offers a particular form of usefulness to our masters. Yet her indomitable spirit is uncowed by her circumstances, neither those that led to her being a bondservant nor what has followed since.
How I envy her ignorance.
We march for the palace, where Melody will have an audience with the portal master. It is not unusual for us to be out of a day. Melody is gregarious and loves nothing more than to get out among people—she has already befriended several vendors. Her quarters are within the home of a Blighten general who is surprisingly accommodating and we are allowed out so long as we have an escort and return in a timely manner.
At my side is Doug, who is now acknowledged as my mate —even though he has not consummated the matter, which is the only sore point between us.
He is allotted as a guard to Melody, along with a dozen more orcs who surround us as we pass through the busy streets.
Melody peeks back over her shoulder at me, her red-gold curls bouncing and her arresting silver eyes whirling with mischief. Doug grunts, already onto the child. I shake my head slowly at Melody. She wants me to get her a toffee apple from the stall coming up—one she has been to before. The shopkeeper, utterly charmed by the sweet fairy child, has taken to setting aside one of his choicest toffee apples on the chance that she may come along.
However, our pace is swift, and I dare not step aside even to get her a treat.
“We will get you one on the way back,” Bard says, by way of compromise. “Knowing Derry, he will have saved you one, just in case.”
