Chapter 6

Becca

“ W e should come back here again,” Faeena said, stuffing her satchel with freshly cut mushrooms

There were plenty of mushrooms this time of year. They also grew close enough to the edge of the woods for us not to risk running into orcs out here. That was the reason our village elders allowed for just the two of us to go forage for mushrooms this afternoon.

Faeena did most of the foraging. I was here to protect her. But wishing to be more useful, I brought my own satchel and had filled it half-way with mushrooms already.

“It’s a good patch,” she said. “We should come here again to get more mushrooms to dry. I’m afraid we still don’t have enough to last us through the winter.”

She sighed. Her worries echoed through my mind with dread. This winter promised to be especially brutal since we had so little extra food to preserve for the cold, hungry months ahead.

“We’ll come back,” I promised, stuffing more mushrooms into my satchel.

Weighted down by worries, we worked in silence for a while, then Faeena asked out of the blue, “You know what I keep wondering about?” She glanced at me with her gray-blue eyes from under a strand of long dark hair that made it out from under her embroidered headcloth. “How do orcs kiss? Don’t those tusks of theirs get in the way?”

I focused on cutting the thick, firm stem of a mushroom. There were two kinds that we found today. Bright orange mushrooms with frilly cups shaped like funnels smelled amazing when fried. They made even the boring water spinach dish taste delicious when added to it. The chubby brown ones with wide bulbous stems like the one I’d just cut kept well after being dried over a stove. Women would string them onto ropes, then hang them all over their kitchens to add to soups in the winter. The pleasant woodsy smell of the dried mushrooms had already filled many of our wagons in preparation.

“You don’t have to answer it,” Faeena added quickly. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. I—”

“It’s fine. I don’t mind,” I assured her.

For the four days since my return from the orcs’ keep, Faeena had been acting as if treading on eggshells around me. Ever since I told her that I ended up spending the night with an orc, she’d been treating me like a victim, when I refused to think of myself as such. My experience with the orcs’ chief was not traumatizing. Many things that happened that night were brutal. But Agor was not one of them.

I actually liked recalling my time with him. The memories excited me just as much as being with him did. Just last night, I made myself come so hard on my hand, I left teeth marks on my forearm, trying not to scream out loud so as not to wake up the entire settlement, as I imagined riding his pierced cock again.

“But I can’t answer your question,” I said to Faeena. “I don’t know about the tusks. I didn’t kiss the orc.”

“You didn’t?” She stared at me wide-eyed.

I shrugged. “It was just sex, Faeena. Nothing more.”

To him, it probably was. But to me, it wasn’t just sex with Agor that had occupied my thoughts a good chunk of the time since we parted. He’d made me feel things I’d never experienced with any other man before. And it wasn’t just the sexual things.

I had male friends. I’d had lovers. Over the years of protecting our village, I’d led many men into a battle. Men usually either accepted my leadership completely, looking up to me for commands and directions, or fought my authority at every opportunity, wasting our combined energy on a useless struggle for dominance.

With Agor, I got the thrill of my life when dominating him in his house. But when I needed his skills and experience to fight the bog hydra later, he stepped in and took charge effortlessly.

I remembered how completely I trusted him at that moment. I put my life into the hands of the orc, turning my back to him to face the hydra’s many heads. We fought like a team, needing few words to understand each other. Like true equals.

I remembered how amazing it felt to lean onto someone strong like myself, and I missed that feeling. It proved infinitely more addictive than even the mind-blowing sex.

“Well.” I cleared my throat, fighting the lump of unexpected longing stuck in it. “We should probably head home. Time to clean these mushrooms for dinner and for drying.”

Most days, we had communal dinners. Fried mushrooms tasted the best, but they fed more people when cooked in soups and stews, watered down in huge caldrons. At least, water was the one thing we had no shortage of in the wetlands.

As the trees thinned, with the roofs of our colorful wagons coming into view from the edge of the woods, Faeena pointed at something hanging low on a branch.

“Hey, isn’t it your breast plate?”

I squinted at it, shielding my eyes from the evening sun with my hand. My mother’s armor was hanging in the branches of a black willow tree. The last time I saw the breastplate, it was gripped tight in the hands of the orc girl who called it “a vest.” I doubted she would’ve brought it here.

“Weird.” I scanned the nearby trees, searching for a trap, but found nothing suspicious—no ropes or snares.

Gripping my knife in my hand, I walked around the tree to make sure no one was hiding behind it, either.

“Do you think he felt bad and returned it?” Faeena asked in a half-whisper, as if someone was watching us and could hear us.

He, not she.

Faeena also thought the girl wouldn’t have been the one to bring it back.

“Why would he?” I carefully inspected the breastplate before taking it off the branch.

It looked better than when I wore it. The mud had been cleaned off it, the leather looked freshly oiled, and the worn, rusty iron buckles had been replaced with the shiny brass ones. The stretched leather cords that connected the front and back parts on the shoulders had also been replaced with what looked like a braided cord of black snakeskin.

“It looks prettier than ever,” Faeena noted.

I clutched the armor under my arm, determined never to give it up again.

As we approached the settlement, the evening seemed noisier than usual.

“What’s that commotion all about?” Faeena craned her neck, trying to peer between the wagons behind the fence.

I took my knife out again, just in case, and put my armor on.

Shouting came from the main square behind the community hall—the only building we managed to construct in over a year since we’d first arrived in the wetlands. As the only indoor space capable of accommodating the entire population of the settlement, it served as a courthouse, a wedding venue, a place of worship, and for any other purpose that required gathering a few hundred people under one roof.

On a mild day like today, however, most of those events took place outdoors, in the large open space in front of the hall. That was where the commotion seemed to happen now.

“Is there a fight?” Faeena wondered.

As we rounded the hall, the plaza in front of it came into view. Almost the entire settlement seemed to have gathered here around a massive orc. Tied to the pole in the middle of the square, he towered over the crowd. His long pine-green hair blew in the wind, tied into a high ponytail in the middle of his otherwise bald head. The long beard of the same color looked disheveled and tangled, with its skin-snake tie gone.

I knew exactly who it was.

Agor.

But I didn’t say his name out loud. There was no need to reveal it to anyone yet, at least not until I found out what exactly was going on.

“Cut him up!” someone shouted from the crowd. “Chop his corpse into pieces and toss them all over the woods to teach his kind not to come here again!”

I peered into the crowd to see who was talking. Elder Kazimir pointed with his walking stick at Agor, sharing his gory plan, while people around him nodded in agreement.

The orc glared at the elder but couldn’t do much to defend himself. His hands were tied to the pole, with his arms stretched above his head. The thick rope also coiled around his torso and his legs, tying his entire body to the pole.

A large group of the villagers must’ve ambushed him all at once, and he’d put up quite a fight by the looks of him. His sage-green skin was covered with cuts and bruises. Blood smeared his clothes and hair. A blow to the side of his head had split his skin on the temple. Blood flooded his right eye that appeared to be swelling already. The other eye, green like the moss of the wetlands, focused on me. For a moment, I thought in horror that his tusks had been knocked out. Then I realized the settlers had tied a green cloth over his mouth to keep him quiet.

The crowd seemed to support the elder’s gory proposition of chopping up the orc.

“That’s right!” they shouted. “Kill him! That will teach them.”

I adjusted my armor, coming closer.

“Killing him won’t help us,” I said calmly. “It will most likely bring the rest of them here for revenge.”

“And we’ll meet them here with a sword!” Simon, a wiry, jumpy guy, shook his fist toward the woods.

I doubted Simon even remembered how to use a sword. The last three times I had to assemble a team of guards to accompany the women on their gathering and foraging expeditions, a mysterious illness suddenly gripped Simon, rendering him unable to get out of bed to join us. And every time, the illness was miraculously cured by dinner time.

Normally, I’d have no qualms about reminding Simon of that. But I feared an argument would just heat the tempers, which would hurt Agor’s chances of survival. I’d never wished for him to get hurt. I definitely didn’t want him to die.

“He broke my Stephan’s arm,” Martha, the wife of one of our best warriors, Stephan, complained.

“And Dimitri’s arm too,” came from the crowd.

“And Vadim’s both legs.”

“He threw Boris and Ambroise so far up into a tree, we had to use a ladder and a lot of ropes to get them both down,” someone else complained.

It was a miracle that no one died. An orc, when cornered, could’ve caused much more damage than this, especially if fighting against so many. I heaved a furtive sigh of relief. Bones could be healed. We had two great medicine women in the settlement to take care of the wounded. The important thing was that there’d been no deaths.

“He needs to die, Becca, to send a message to other orcs,” the elder professed grimly.

“Or we can trade him for food, to help us make it through the winter,” I suggested.

“We’re not trading with the dirty orcs!” Simon shrieked.

But some people in the crowd looked intrigued by my proposition.

“What can we trade him for?” Martha wondered out loud. “How much can we get for just one orc, anyway?”

I decided to take a gamble.

“He’s not just any orc. It’s Agor, the High Chief of all bog orcs in the entire wetlands.”

A murmur rolled through the crowd. Everyone looked at Agor again, while he stared at me, unblinking. If he thought I was betraying him, I couldn’t help it. I saw no other way to save his life.

“How do you know that?” Another elder, Artyom, squinted at me suspiciously.

I propped my hands on my hips. “I’ve been to his keep and to his house. I only narrowly avoided being chained to his bed.”

At that, Agor smirked. I wondered if he’d thought about my being in his house as often as I had.

“Listen,” I addressed the crowd, loud and clear. “I have plenty of reasons to wish this orc dead. He abducted me and dragged me to his keep. He would’ve made me his slave had I not escaped. But he’s worth so much more to us alive. Just think about all the things we could get from the orcs for him. Food. Meat. They even have flour. And also boots that don’t take in water.”

The settlers looked at each other in bewilderment.

“There are boots like that? Really?” Simon asked.

Martha scratched her chin. “Where do they get flour from? Nothing grows in this swamp.”

“But it’s true.” Faeena stepped forward with Sveta, her youngest, already on her hip and Anna, the eldest, holding on to her skirt. “They do have flour. Becca brought some meat pies for my girls the morning she escaped from the orcs.”

“Real pies? Baked with flour?” Martha clapped her hands, her eyes lighting up with excitement.

Faeena’s toddler, Sveta, smacked her lips. “It was yum.”

Kazimir raised his walking stick over his head, calling for attention. “You can’t let your stomachs make an important decision like this.”

Simon’s stomach rumbled loudly at that very moment, as if vehemently disagreeing with the esteemed man.

“We must intimidate the orcs,” Kazimir continued, shaking his stick at Agor, then at the woods outside of the settlement. “We’ll show them that we’re not afraid, that we’re strong enough to defeat the strongest of them, that we overpowered even the most powerful one of them, their High Chief.”

The support for his idea remained strong among the people. After everything we’d been through at the hands of so many other orcs, I couldn’t blame them. We might be new to the wetlands, but we’d had more than enough lethal encounters with other orc clans. Every family in this settlement had lost someone in the battles with these creatures, sometimes with little or no retribution. Now, they directed all their hatred and their thirst for vengeance on the one orc they finally got their hands on. Of course, it didn’t help that Agor had personally maimed a few of them too.

Irina, our third elder, stepped out, wrapped into a black-and-red flowery shawl over her woolen dress. “This is not a decision to be made lightly. We have to discuss it and, if needed, put it to the vote.”

Kazimir huffed impatiently, but Artyom nodded.

“Bring the prisoner into the community hall for now,” Artyom ordered.

As the three of them departed to Irina’s wagon for deliberation, about two dozen men removed Agor from the stake, then carried him inside.

He wasn’t safe yet, but it was an improvement. I preferred him locked out of sight and away from any further harassment, taunting, and abuse.

“Well, I’ll go deal with those mushrooms.” Faeena took the girls to her wagon where Gleb stood in the doorway with our two satchels in his hands.

I followed her to speak with Gleb.

“Were you there when they caught the orc?” I asked him.

“Me? No.” He shook his head. “I was here, fixing a kettle and watching the girls while Faeena was foraging. I heard Ilya spotted the orc in the forest while collecting firewood and ran back here to alert the others. It’s a blessing you two didn’t come upon that monster. Ilya said he heard your voices while collecting the wood. You know how timid that boy is. He made sure to keep close to you two, afraid to be in the woods on his own. The orc happened to lurk nearby, too, for some reason.”

I tugged at the end of the brand-new snake-skin cord of my armor. Agor hadn’t just “lurked.” He’d come imprudently close to the settlement to return my mother’s armor. I was sure of it. There simply wasn’t anyone else who could’ve done it. No other orc cared enough to do such a thing for me.