THE ORC KING'S MATE

"You are not what I expected." Those were the first words Kael said to her. Lira had been standing in the middle of a stone hall the size of a cathedral, surrounded by orc warriors twice her height, wearing a traveling dress that was dusty from three days on the road. She had told herself she would not cry. She had told herself she would not beg. She had promised her mother she would be brave. She had not promised anything about staying quiet. "And you," she said, looking up at the giant of a man seated on a throne carved from black rock, "are exactly what I expected." A few of the warriors in the room made sounds she could not quite name. Low, rumbling sounds. She realized after a moment that they were laughing. Kael did not laugh. He looked at her for a long time, his green face unreadable, his gold eyes steady. Then he stood, and Lira had to stop herself from stepping back. He was enormous. Not just tall but wide, built like someone had taken two men and pressed them together. He wore no crown. Just armor. "Bring her to her rooms," he said. "She will rest before the ceremony." And that was it. That was the whole conversation. Lira watched him leave the hall and thought, this is my life now. Three weeks ago She had been home, at Veld, a border town built between two low hills, close enough to orc territory that the people there kept shutters on their windows and dogs in their yards. Lira had grown up in Veld the way most children did there. She knew which sounds at night were animals and which ones made you wake your parents. She knew that the northern road was safe in summer and dangerous in winter. She knew that her brother Davan left every spring with the border soldiers and came back every autumn thinner and quieter than before. She also knew every story about orcs that a person could know. They burned villages. They took prisoners and never returned them. They respected nothing and no one. Their king was the worst of all of them, a warlord who had been fighting since before Lira was born, a creature of pure destruction who had left entire towns as ash. Lira had believed all of it. She had believed it on the morning three weeks ago when a royal messenger arrived at her family's home with a sealed letter and an expression that said he was very glad his own name was not in that letter. Her father read it twice. Then he sat down. Her mother said, "No." Her father said, "We don't have a choice." Lira stood in the doorway and watched both of them and felt something cold settle in her chest. "What does it say?" Her father looked at her. He had the face of a man who loved his daughter and was about to do something terrible to her. "The king has made a decision about the peace treaty." "What peace treaty?" "The one he is making with the orcs." He set the letter down on the table very carefully, like it might break. "He needs a bride for King Kael. Someone from a noble bloodline. Someone who can make the marriage legitimate." Lira looked at the letter. Then she looked at her father's face. Then she looked at the letter again. "No," she said. "Lira—" "I am not a princess. I am not even close to a princess. I am the daughter of a border family in a town that the capital barely knows exists. There are a hundred women with better bloodlines than mine. A thousand." "Yes," her father said. "But most of them have fathers with enough power to say no." The room went quiet. Her mother cried silently. Lira understood then. She was not chosen because she was valuable. She was chosen because she was close enough to acceptable and easy enough to sacrifice. The king needed someone noble enough to make the treaty real and powerless enough that no one would complain if things went wrong. Things going wrong, in this context, meant Lira ending up dead. "How long do I have?" she asked. Her father could not look at her. "They leave in four days." She spent those four days in a state that moved between fury and terror, sometimes both at once. She wrote a letter to Davan but she did not know where he was stationed and she was not sure it would reach him. She packed a bag and then unpacked it and packed it again. She sat with her mother every evening and they talked about ordinary things because neither of them could stand to talk about the real thing. On the third night her mother came to sit beside her on the bed and held her hand and said, "You are the bravest person I have ever known." "I am terrified," Lira said. "That is what makes you brave." Lira left on a Fourth morning with four royal guards, a maid she had never met, and a trunk full of clothes that had been sent from the capital because apparently her own clothes were not suitable for meeting an orc king. She stood at the door of her house and looked at her parents and the town behind them and she thought, I am going to find a way through this. She did not know how. But she had never found anything by giving up. The journey north took three days. The guards were polite but quiet. The maid, whose name was Senna, was young and nervous and kept looking at the road ahead like she expected something to jump out of the trees. Lira spent most of the journey looking out the window of the carriage and trying to learn whatever she could about what was coming. She knew almost nothing about orc society. Everything she had been told was stories, and stories told by people who had never actually been inside orc territory. She knew they had clans. She knew they had a king. She knew the king's name was Kael and that he had been in power for over fifteen years. "Senna," she said on the second day. "Have you ever been to the orc capital?" Senna looked at her like she had asked something very strange. "No, my lady." "Has anyone you know?" "Not that came back to tell about it." Lira looked out the window again. That was not helpful. On the morning of the third day the landscape changed. The flat farm country they had been traveling through gave way to hills, and then the hills grew bigger, and then they were moving through a narrow valley between mountains that blocked out most of the sky. The road here was paved with flat stone, smooth and well-maintained. That surprised her. She had expected rough wilderness. The city appeared around a bend in the road. Lira pressed her face against the carriage window like a child. It was massive. Built into the side of the mountain itself, stone buildings rising in layers, towers that caught the morning light, walls that had clearly been built to last centuries. There were people moving through the streets, orc men and women and children, and for a moment she was so distracted by the sheer size of everything that she forgot to be afraid. Then the carriage stopped and the door opened and she remembered why she was sent here.