Page 111 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

Kinsahad went out and came back with an inkwell and a sheet of paper. He set them down in front of Iahir on the floor. After all, there was no writing desk in the room.

Iahir sat down and contemplated the blank page.

The door shut as Kinsahad left him alone.

GATHREN WENT DIRECTLY to the castle when she got to Renegahan, but she did not go to see her father. Instead, she lingered and stayed to the periphery. No one paid her much mind, and there were orcs everywhere, so she blended in. The orcs had taken all of it over. They were sleeping in beds at court, dining on the fine plates in the dining halls, dancing in the ball room to music made by orcs on the instruments left by the elves. She could not deny that something about a scene like that—the triumph of her people after they had been held down for so long, it appealed to her in a fierce and primal way.

She enjoyed watching.

She did not go to find her father though, and she did go back to the army, and she began to wonder if she would. She didn’t have any other options, really, so it was mad to think of simply abandoning it all.

At night, in whatever place she found to curl up—the bedchambers in the castle were all taken over by orcs, so she took blankets into closets, slept in the pantry once—she would take out the letter her brother had written and look it over. It made her out as the hero of the orc side, risking everything to kill the High King, infiltrating the court, achieving everything for the orc cause.

It might be nice to be this, she thought, but it would be conspicuous. Everyone would look at her if she was the hero her brother purported her to be.

She left the castle sometimes to walk the streets, and this was how it became illustrated to her that the city was divided, that there was an elvish section and an orcish section now. The orcs were not killing anyone anymore, so everyone was existing in some kind of wary truce, she thought.

One day, she got distracted by someone being dragged through the side streets in the elvish part of town, because the elves were making quite a racket about it, stomping their feet and yelling out wild cries. When she understood that they were yelling, “Kingkiller,” she stopped to watch.

She could not believe it.

Could she not leave this man alone for any time at all before his own people were trying to kill him?

How many times had she saved his life now?

Iahir was tied and gagged on the back of a horse, his expression blank and unseeing as he was paraded through the streets. The elves threw things at him. They yelled about how they would watch him twitch at the end of a rope.

Gathren followed the procession to its end, and she saw them take him inside a house that might as well have been a fortress. It was not one of the newer built houses, but something far more old, built with stone, and she did not see how she was going to get into it and get Iahir out.

She began to formulate a plan that she would simply have to wait until the execution, and then she could possibly do something.

Of course, she didn’t like that plan.

Too public. Too dangerous. Too many elves with swords or pistols or what-have-you.

She formed another plan, one that involved her going in with a row of loaded pistols, all at the ready, and she would simply use one, shoot an elf dead, toss aside the pistol, and pick up the other one. She’d do that until she shot her way to her lover.

But obviously she didn’t have that many pistols, and she couldn’t even imagine how long it would take to load that many pistols, and that plan was simply a fantasy.

By this time, it was late, and she knew that the execution might not be for days, for weeks, and she would have to come up with some other plan. For now, however, she had nowhere to sleep and she was in the elvish part of the city.

She was slinking off into the growing darkness to see if she could find some abandoned house where she could spend the night when she saw Katil, the woman from court who had told her that she was envious of Gathren’s freedom.

Katil looked a bit worse for wear, her hair no longer coiffed and braided but hanging free, her dress smudged and torn here and there. She seemed to be carrying buckets of water into the very house where Iahir was being kept.

Gathren tilted her head to one side, remembering this woman saying something about wanting an adventure. She supposed that Katil had probably had her fill of adventures now.

But that woman could get into the house.

How could Gathren use that?

Gathren watched Katil enter the house, and then she left. She did find an abandoned house to bed down in, sleeping in the master’s bed on silken sheets and awakening to open the shutters onto the dawn and look out over the town, gleaming in the morning light. What must it have been to be a lord of a house like this?

She went directly back to where Iahir was being kept, and she waited to see Katil.

But when Katil came out, sometime later, with empty water buckets, she was in the company of another elf lady, someone who Gathren remembered from court. This lady looked similarly disheveled. She and Katil walked together, their heads down.

Gathren waited throughout that day as well, but she never saw Katil again, and she began to think that she was going to have to think of something else.