Page 104 of Wed to the Orc Captive

I hit the ground next to Vrathgar, looking for what to do, anything to do. There was pink showing at his stomach, red soaking the earth. He licked his lips, blood in his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” I whimpered.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted…so much more time.” He reached up a hand, and I caught it against my face. I was crying on him. “The kids are safe,” he said. “You got them safe.”

In the distance, someone was stabbing a bird

His breath came in, deep and rattling. “Sing for me,” he said.

I was crying. “I can’t fix this,” I warbled. “It’s too much.”

“I didn’t ask you to fix it, Nora. Just sing for me, please.”

Khal lowered him to the ground and ran.

I gathered Vrathgar’s hand in mine, and at first it came out weak and wavering, but I sang.

I sang the patter of that angry, aching lullabye, the cadence from the night I’d realized I was falling in love. My tears fell on his face, and I sang what I couldn’t say, what I’d never been able to say. “You’re glorious.” “I fell in love with you when I saw you sleep, when you smirked at me, when you said my name, when you called me barbarian.”

Everything about this was unfair.

If anyone deserved a chance to be loved, it was the man in my arms. He was everything the world needed and he never knew. How dare there be people who loosed horrors into this world? How would anything ever be right again? How dare there have ever been wizards, if they just sent poison into the world and left it?

And I realized the clanging sounds, thuds and cries, had stopped. The black shapes of feather and death had stopped moving, and the battlefield was only orcs, ashen-faced, looking towards us.

Why couldn’t they have loved him while he was still alive?

I held his hand and sang a protest against whatever power had made me, because why if there was any real power in this world were men allowed to meddle and twist and poison? Why didn’t this earth reject the evil and make it right? Why did monsters exist, and why did it fall to people like Vrathgar to pay the difference?

The words of the song rippled over each other, the glow from the pillars sending a gleam across his face, across the ink-black of the abominations’ feathers. “I love you, and I’m glad for a moment, we mattered to each other.”

I found the breath, found the power for one last note, and then my voice was gone.

His breathing was shallow. Blood and bone.

“You did it,” he murmured. “They’ll know now. That you’re a blessing.” I hated the blood on his lips.

“Please,” I choked, “don’t leave me.” And that wasn’t fair. That wasn’t fair, because this wasn’t his choice anymore.

His hand found mine again, and he opened his mouth again to speak, but his eyes went past me. “Chieftain,” he rasped. “I trust you’ve witnessed the bravery of my wife.” His breath rattled in his chest.

“I have.” Drazha stood behind me, blood on her own face, as well, looking every inch a war leader. “And your own.” She nodded. “You have my thanks, singer’s-husband.”

She said something in Orcish. I recognized, in the haze, others of the faces I’d seen in that judgement circle, the tall man, Tyralk’s father, then Grezha. And then Grezha was beside me, moving his hands off his stomach, looking up at the chieftains, at him. She shook her head.

“You have…a place here,” Vrathgar said. “Whatever happens, whatever you choose. This place is yours.”

“I chose you,” I whispered. “I chose you.”

“I know, barbarian. I know.” His eyes squeezed closed.

Someone shouted. Someone was arguing, in their language with no one to teach me, with a lifetime eking away, but I heard Drazha shout above the rest, “Then it is settled.”

The taller chieftain stalked away.

Drazha, this woman who’d slammed my head into the floor when we first met, knelt next to me, and I resisted the urge to shove her away from him, this person who hadn’t seen his worth. But she reached into a pouch at her side, and Vrathgar’s eyes widened, froze.

“I do the ritual in Common, for the singer’s sake,” she said, her voice still cold. How could she be so cold? His grip tightened, and Drazha spoke. “This was paid for,” she said, “with the life of one of ours.” There was a glass vial, in her hand, with a sluggish red liquid moving inside. Gasps were traveling, and I didn’t know what they meant, didn’t know what this could be. “With it, we give life back to one that we need. Be a root, Vrathgar singer’s-husband. Be a root, and come back to us.” She passed it to me.