The two elves looked to Djoveeve, who took the child into her arms. “She’s tired,” she told them defiantly. “And today she nearly died. She might well be the great Sava’an’Lansom you all are so cocksure she will be, Tidalwrath’s very champion, I am sure, but today, right now, she’s simply a tired, frightened little girl.”
“Well, tomor—” Seawind began.
“Damn your tests! And damn your prophecies!” Djoveeve’s voice was the snap of a whip, a loud crack that struck him to silence. “Get out! Both of you. Before I put a spear in you and ride you both out to sea.”
Chapter 47
“I
won’t do it,” Pernie said as Seawind brought in the orc captive they’d been threatening her with all year—threats were how she saw it anyway. “I won’t fight him. You’ll just have to pull his knives out of my guts like the sargosagantis’ horn.”
“He hasn’t got knives,” Seawind said. “He’ll have only his magic, which you can see if you choose to look. The sargosagantis was proof enough of that.”
“Then why must I fight him? You said yourself there is a difference between killing and murder.”
Djoveeve laughed from her place next to Pernie. “You see, she does listen.”
“You must face this creature and be rid of fear.”
“I’m not afraid. I rode the sargosagantis. Djoveeve and Sandew saw.” Even she didn’t believe it, though. The very sight of the orc, even as thin as it had become for want of proper exercise, filled her with memories of dread. Her whole body shuddered, nearly convulsed, as she thought about it touching her with its green hands, its bruising, powerful fingers biting into her flesh before its wicked fangs got hold. It would eat her if it could. She knew it not just in her guts, but in her memories. She could still feel the coarse flour they’d doused her with as they readied her for the cook pot not even four short years ago. She would have been eaten too, were it not for Master Altin coming to the rescue. He’d even apologized later that she’d been hurt, which is when she knew that he loved her.
Maybe he’d finally come and take her out of here. He had rescued her from orcs before. He might come. Though she knew he wouldn’t.
Seawind took the silvery chains off the orc’s wrists, neck, and ankles and pushed him into the center of the chamber. A bare room, barely forty paces across, roughly round, with a ceiling a little less than two spans above Pernie’s head.
Shadesbreath stood near the entrance where Seawind had come in, holding a spear and a long knife made of steel, a human-made weapon rather than the volcanic glass the elves preferred.
“I can see the fear in your eyes, little Sava,” Seawind said. “So can this creature here. You cannot move on in your preparations to become Sava’an’Lansom until you are over this. The time has come. As you said, you have ridden the sargosagantis. This orc should take you mere moments to dispatch.”
“I won’t,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “You can’t make me.”
“We shall see.”
Shadesbreath came across the room and tried to hand her the spear and the knife. He studied her out-thrust lips and the petulant defiance in her eyes. She seemed a most curious object to him, judging by the look that moved his features ever so slightly. He made no other expression and simply dropped both weapons at her feet. He resumed his position by the door, though only briefly, and then he vanished without a word.
Seawind vanished as well, and Pernie blinked her eyes and watched the wisps of mana curling around where he’d gone. She couldn’t find him in it now, but she saw what he had done.
Djoveeve took her gnarled hand off of Pernie’s shoulder. “Just get it over with, child,” she said. “You’re more than a match for it now. Respect its power, but have it over and done.” She sang a few lines of a spell she knew and became a crane fly, which flew up and disappeared into the shadows somewhere near the upper reaches of the room, leaving Pernie in the silence and the near darkness of the cave.
She crouched and grabbed the weapons, then immediately muttered an illusion, her familiar variety of sight, sound, and smell. Then she stood and watched the orc as she fidgeted with the spear and knife. The knife was longer than she was used to, but she could wield it well enough if she needed to. She slid it carefully into her belt.
The orc was just standing there, rubbing its wrists. Her heart was pounding as she waited for it to do something to her.
She also thought that one throw of the spear would end it. It wasn’t even moving.
Her eyes fluttered as she watched the movement of mana around the orc. They were rumored to have magic more like animals than men, raw magic shaped by emotions rather than thoughts and words, though she didn’t know if that was true. She’d had animal magic at one time too, barely a year ago. It was surprising how quickly that had been lost.
She kept watching the orc for quite a long time, but it simply stared into the place where she stood. She wondered if it saw her. It wasn’t channeling any mana that she could see.
She moved carefully around it, silent on her feet despite the silence spells. Illusions failed constantly, especially when cast upon those who knew enough and had reason to disbelieve.
She snuck up right near it, her whole body trembling as she did. The stink of its unwashed body struck her like a blast of wind, driving her back a step. It smelled like death and misery. She could not help remembering the terror of that day in the courtyard back at Calico Castle. All the screaming and the blood. Fire and smoke everywhere. Tytamon lying on the ground and looking dead. Sir Altin almost cleaved in two. And Kettle. Pernie heard the snap of Kettle’s forearm breaking, loud in her memory like the sundering of some great tree branch.
With those images in her head, those sounds, a vision of Kettle standing there, bones jutting through her sleeve, bloodstains spreading dark and terrifying, Pernie thrust her spear straight into the orc, right between its ribs. One rib cracked as the weapon drove for the orc’s lung, echoing the sound in Pernie’s mind. She yanked the weapon out as the creature fell.
A rattling gasp came from the wound she’d made, and the orc slid down the wall and landed on its back.
It lay there doing that for a time, gasping, gurgling, both from its mouth and from the hole she’d made in its side. Watching it reminded her of the monkey and the latakasokis she’d killed. She watched it staring up at the ceiling, its green brow wrinkled in pain, shaping little Vs in its skin like angular ripples in the wake of its nose.
Pernie watched it, and her fear slipped away, the terror inside her evaporating like steamy condensation from a plate of glass. Clarity followed, and fear was replaced by recognition of a simple fact. The orc wanted to die.
Pernie wondered how that could be.
But if the orc wanted death, then it wasn’t going to get it from her.
She dropped to her knee and let go the invisibility. She touched the orc on its clammy green shoulder, and she sang the healing spell she knew, the simple one she’d learned before coming to live with the elves. She sang the song and funneled mana into it, and in the course of a few moments, the hissing gurgle from the orc’s lung had disappeared, as had, to a large extent, the wound.
She stood and stepped away from it, prepared to fight it now that it could see her, fully expecting it to leap up and attack. She wasn’t going to kill it, though. That’s what it wanted her to do. And that’s what they wanted her to do.
But the orc just lay there. It didn’t get up. It didn’t move. It lay prone, motionless, its big dark eyes staring into the black shadows in the ceiling of the cave. Then Pernie noticed the strangest thing. She saw a tear running down its face.
She couldn’t believe that such a thing could be real, for it defied everything she’d ever heard and seen. With no thought for her own safety, or perhaps with absolute confidence in its security, she approached the orc again.
It didn’t even look at her. It simply stared up at the ceiling still.
She wondered if she hadn’t healed it properly. She did know that broken ribs could be very painful things, so she put her arm back on its chest and cast the spell again. She didn’t know if it did anything or not. Her training with healing magic was nonexistent beyond her single bit of magic, and that really intended for unwilting daffodils.
The tear had run down and fallen into the grit of the cave floor, and there was not a second to follow. She saw merely the empty sadness of the creature lying there. Which frustrated her to the point of speech.
“What kind of orc is it that cries?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
The orc stared at the ceiling.
“Hey,” she said, prodding the orc in the hip with her boot. “What’s the matter with you?”
Still nothing.
She looked around the room, expecting Seawind or Shadesbreath or Djoveeve to appear, but none of them did. She called out for them. “I already killed him,” she said. “Well, sort of. Then I brought him back. But that means I passed the test. So you can come back now.”
She turned full circle, but nobody appeared.
She harrumphed at that and looked back down at the orc.
“Is it because you want to go home?” she asked it after a while. When it didn’t answer, she very nearly gave up and left. Orcs were probably too stupid to speak anyway.
“Home,” it said as she started toward the exit where Shadesbreath had disappeared. “Death.”
She turned back and retook her place, looking down at it. “You want to go home to die?”
“Yes. Home to die.”
“You speak pretty good human for an orc,” she said, cocking her head sideways and rather caught up with such novelty. “Nobody ever said you could. Is that so you can talk to your food?” The thought came out before the ramifications did, and she took a step back suddenly, her spear pointed at it again.
“Kill Gromf,” it said. “Or take home. Kill Gromf or take Gromf home.” It sounded more agitated now.
“What is
Gromf
?” she asked.
“I Gromf. You Sava. Sava please kill or take to north clan for die.” It was actually a mix of the common tongue of Kurr and the elven tongue, which made Pernie wonder where it had learned any elven words. She wondered if it had been listening somehow while Djoveeve worked with her at night. But the most striking thing to her was not the common words or the elven ones that it spoke. It was the “please.” The very thought of an orc saying please was the most confounding thing Pernie had ever considered before.
She had to think about that very hard. Why would an orc say
please
to her if it would eat her when it got the chance? But as soon as she thought it, she realized she often talked to animals that she liked to eat as well. She’d had a pet frog once, yet she could kill them by the basketful when gathering frog legs for Kettle’s pot. She’d been quite good friends with the calves that Gimmel’s cow gave birth to, and twice they’d had them for dinner and many other things. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that people often talked to their food. And while she wasn’t quite happy about the fact that orcs would pick on little girls, she supposed she could understand it in the way of natural things.
She knew for sure she wouldn’t let an orc ever try to eat her again.
And as she realized it, she also realized that her fear was truly gone. The orc was no more dangerous than a man, or an elf, or even a sargosagantis swimming in the sea. Likely less so than the last. Likely less so than any of them. She supposed they might always give her the shivers if she thought about them wrong, but in a way, they were no different than poisonous parrots, pythons, or giant mantises. Things to be wary of, but nothing to be feared.
Once again she turned around and looked out into the empty spaces around the room. “I’m not killing it,” she said again. “It’s sad, and it wants to go home. Keeping it here all this time was mean. You should have killed it or let it go.” She turned and looked back at the orc and shook her head, then corrected what she had said. “You should have killed
him
or let him go.” Then, as if realizing the possibility of a mistake, she asked the orc, “You are a boy, right?” The orc didn’t have any breasts like human women did, or like the glistening bosoms of the splendid lady elves.
It wrinkled its brow at her, less in agony than as if for the first time its own interest had been piqued. “Human whelp?” It seemed like a question. “Whelpling?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a polite way of saying it,” she said, “but I am a child, if you must know.” She looked down at herself, at her skinny little frame, and frowned. She looked back at him. “And I’m a girl, just in case you want to know.”
He sat up and stared at her for a time, and for some unknown reason, he began to laugh. It was a great, bass, throaty thing that filled the whole chamber with noise, larger than his emaciated body ought to have been able to produce.
“What’s so funny?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
He said something, five words in a coarse, guttural tongue that she knew was orcish, but that she didn’t realize were the words to a spell until it was too late.
A ring of fire appeared, just a half step behind where she stood. Its heat beat upon her back. Her spear was already swinging butt end around in the instant it appeared, and before she realized the wall of fire was washing outward from the orc, she’d already knocked him flat with a solid thwack to the forehead, delivered by the butt of her spear.