THE ORC KING'S MATE

Getting To Know Him

On her fourth morning in the orc capital, Lira got lost. It was not entirely her fault. The main building was larger than it looked from the outside, which should not have been possible but it was.

It had corridors that turned into other corridors, staircases that went up when she expected them to go down, and rooms that opened into other rooms in ways that made no architectural sense. She had been trying to find the courtyard Brea had shown her the previous afternoon. She found instead a long gallery full of carved stone portraits, a room that smelled of powerful spices, and a door that opened onto a drop of about twenty feet into a lower courtyard.

She stepped back from that one quickly.

"You are going the wrong way."

She turned around. Kael was behind her in the corridor, which was not a wide corridor, which meant he filled most of it. He was not in his armor today. He was wearing a dark tunic and trousers, and he looked somehow larger without the armor, which was not fair.

"I know," she said.

"The courtyard is left at the gallery, not right."

"I found the gallery. I went right."

"I said left."

"You did not say anything. Brea said it and Brea said right."

His lips formed a smile softly, but it was gone before she could name it.

"Brea was wrong."

"I will tell her you said so."

"She will not be surprised." He turned and started walking back the way he had come. After a moment he glanced back at her.

"Come. I will take you."

Lira stood where she was for a second and decided to follow him.

He walked fast and she had to work to keep up with his stride. The corridors looked different with him in them. People they passed moved aside and stood straighter and gave him nods that he returned briefly, without slowing. He knew this building so well.

"How long have you lived here?" she asked.

"All my life."

"Were you born here?"

"Yes."

She thought about that. He had grown up in these corridors. Learned them as a child. Somewhere in this massive stone building there was a room where a much smaller version of Kael had run and probably gotten lost in the same places she was getting lost now.

She found that thought strange and oddly human.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing."

"You had an expression."

"I have lots of expressions. It is a habit."

He stopped at a door and pushed it open and there was the courtyard, exactly as she remembered it, a wide square of open sky with a training ground on one side and a garden of some kind on the other.

"Left at the gallery," he said.

"Thank you," she said.

He gave her a look that was brief and unreadable and walked away. She watched him go and told herself she was not trying to figure him out. Then she told herself that was a lie, because she was absolutely trying to figure him out, and she might as well be honest about it.

_________________________

The training ground was where she made her second mistake of the day.

She had not meant to watch. She had been sitting on the low wall that separated the garden from the training ground, looking at the plants and trying to identify which ones she recognized, when the noise started. She looked up and there were a dozen orc warriors in the open space, doing what warriors do, and in the middle of them was Kael.

Without the armor.

He was fighting one of his men, a sparring match with blunted weapons, and the man he was fighting was enormous, as large as anyone Lira had seen since arriving, and Kael was beating him without appearing to work very hard at it.

He moved in ways she would not have expected from someone that size. Very fast and flexible without much effort, each move was exactly what it needed to be and nothing more.

The warrior said something and laughed and swung wide, and Kael sidestepped and caught his arm and the warrior went down onto his back on the ground with a sound like a tree falling.

Everyone watching made the laughing sound she had heard in the hall.

The warrior on the ground was laughing too. Kael reached down and hauled him upright with one hand and clapped him on the shoulder and said something that made the man grin. Then he turned and saw Lira sitting on the wall.

She did not look away. That was a decision she made in about half a second. She was not going to be caught looking and then pretend she had not been. She met his eyes directly.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he said something to the men around him and walked toward her. Lira stayed on the wall.

"You are watching," he said.

"I was looking at the garden. You were in the way."

He looked at the garden, which was behind her and therefore not in view of the training ground at all. He looked back at her. He did not say anything about the geography of this.

"Did you have a question?" he asked.

"Several. But not about the sparring."

"Then ask."

She had not expected that. She had expected him to tell her to go back inside, or to make it clear that this was not a place for her, or to be dismissive in the way powerful men so often were. She looked at him and reorganized what she had been planning to say.

"Brea told me the raids on the border villages have been getting worse," she said. "But the treaty has been in discussion for months. Why would anyone raid while a peace treaty is on the table?"

Something shifted in his expression. Subtle, but she caught it. "Where did you hear it was raiding?"

"Everyone in Veld talks about the raids. My brother has been fighting border soldiers for years. The raids are the reason the war keeps going."

"And who told you the raids came from us?" She opened her mouth and then closed it again. She thought about it. "Everyone," she said. "That was just always the answer. The raids came from orcs."

"Ask Brea to show you the incident records," he said. "From the last three years. She has them."

"Why?"

"Because you are smart enough to look at evidence and draw your own conclusions." He said it without flattery, as a simple statement of fact, which was more startling than a compliment would have been.

"Read them. Then tell me what you think."

He turned and walked back to his men.

Lira sat on the wall for another minute, thinking about the way he had listened to her and answered her, she felt seen and maybe a little bit important than she thought. Well, she decided to look for Brea and put every thought of the king out of her heart.