Page 57 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

However, the fact that he had declined to go to bed with her, this was troubling.

And then he was different with her afterward.

That evening, he was quiet and solicitous towards her as they ate the food they’d brought from her home. He kept staring at her, however, staring at her as if he had never seen her before or something like that, as if she was this curious oddity that he wanted to make sense of.

The next day, they rode in utter silence, and she looked up and found him staring at her again, in much the same fashion, all through the morning and all into the afternoon. They stopped to rest the horses at midday, but he was mostly quiet throughout all of that, doing little but looking at her.

That evening, feeling more than a little out of sorts about it, she decided to try to engage him on the topic of dragons.

He did speak of them, but he did not look at her when he did so. He gazed off into the distance or into the fire or down at his own open palm.

“When I was a boy, I had a theory that they did not take the captives because they wished to harm them, but because they were lonely,” he said. “They almost never took small boys as captives, which was quite a pity, because I desperately wanted to be taken away by a dragon back then.”

This was more about his father that he likely wasn’t going to tell her. “Because your father is so awful?”

“Mmm,” he said. “Anyway, the problem with all of it is that we don’t know much about the captives, because they were forbidden from doing it in all the treaties, and they seem to have stopped. But they might not have, because—instead—they might have simply taken their captives secretly. And then, if the people never came back, then they might have never been able to tell us that they were captured by dragons.”

“If I guessed things about your father would you tell me if I was right?”

He glared at her. “It’s not so simple, truly.”

“So, he didn’t take a belt to you or publicly humiliate you or beat your mother in front of you or something of that nature?”

Iahir sighed. “At the time, when I wanted to be taken away by a dragon, I wanted the captives to like it, to be happy there with the dragons. I wanted that rather spectacularly. But that is not the way of being a captive, is it? If people were surreptitiously taken away by dragons, they were probably taken entirely from their families to some smoky dragon’s lair and they were miserable there. And if they did not come back, it is likely because they died. Either in captivity or trying to escape.”

She sat up straight. “You think my mother’s going to die after all.”

He met her gaze for one moment and then looked away again. “I think we must make haste.”

“We can’t go any faster than we’re going,” she said. “I know, in the Vale, one can stop at an inn every twenty miles and change out the horses, but we do not have that luxury.” Nor was she leaving her horse, who she had yet to name. She had grown quite attached to the creature, however.

“No, of course, you’re right,” he said. “But we should reach the foot of the mountains tomorrow.”

She thought so, too. The mountains were definitely closer now than they had been at the beginning of the journey.

“Do you know where to look once we get into the mountains, however?” he said. “Do you have any idea where the dragon’s lair might be?”

“I think in the southern part of the mountains,” she said. “It always seemed the dragon was circling there.”

“Well, that bodes well, since we are heading north and we will come to the southern part of the mountains first,” he said. “But the dragon could have been circling there because it was hunting. Perhaps those were its hunting grounds. Whatever the case, if we see it, we can follow it.”

“Yes,” she said.

But they had not seen the dragon, not in the days that they had been journeying.

There was a long silence, and he stared into the fire, and she tried to think about her mother, who she had always sort of taken for granted, in the way that one takes a parent for granted. Her mother had always been there, and she had expected her mother to continue to always be there, and the idea of her mother not being there anymore…

Well, she didn’t know if she could bear something like that, not in the end. She thought it might crush her. Perhaps it was only that everything else in her life seemed to have fallen to pieces recently. She had spent all that time training for the orc army, and now she was a deserter, and she could not go back, not even if she had helped to kill the High King.

She should have thought it through, should have brought some sort of proof. Maybe then she would have been celebrated and accepted back into their ranks.

Ah, but then she would not have found out about her mother, and she wouldn’t have had the chance to go and get her back from the dragon.

“It’s not as if it’s simple to explain like that,” he said. “My father, I mean. It’s not as if there’s one thing.”

She looked at him, but he didn’t look at her. She waited.

He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for my pipe.”