Page 116 of Halfling
Not the male they’d ever think Sorcha would bring home to them.
The mate-bond drew taut inside him, seeking that connection to his female. As if she was orc-kin herself and could sense the pull, Sorcha glanced up at him and grinned, giving his hand an assuring squeeze.
It was a comfort, but it didn’t go unnoticed.
The father drew himself up as tall as he could—still barely to Orek’s shoulder. The elder brothers followed their father on instinct, bodies pitching infinitesimally forward at the possibility of a threat.
The air in the meadow shifted, shoulders going tense as Orek stood his ground beside Sorcha. She continued to tell of her experience being brought to the Stone-Skin camp, but he doubted her father and brothers heard. Their attention was riveted on Sorcha’s hand held in his, how every so often she’d touch his arm with her other hand in a gesture of affection.
The beast inside him gnashed its teeth, daring them to try. He’d no intention of fighting her family, but hewouldn’tbe parted from her.
“Is that a raccoon?” The question, from a younger sister—Blaire, he thought—cut through the tension as every eye fell on the furry face poking out of Orek’s hood.
“Darrah is a baby raccoon, a kit,” Orek answered, pulling him out to show the younger girls.
They cooed and held their fingers out for Darrah to sniff.
“He’s awfully big for a baby,” Blaire told him.
“That’s because he’s fat,” Sorcha muttered.
“Well fed,” he corrected.
Orek watched the adults from the corner of his eye as the Brádaigh girls exclaimed over the raccoon, and Darrah did his part to be as charming as possible, holding onto their fingers with his little raccoon hands.
The father and brothers continued to scowl, but the inherent threat cooled. Orek hadn’t survived within an orc clan so long without learning to attune to the smallest nuance of expression; it could mean the difference between dodging a blow and getting his nose shattered again.
While the father and brothers still weren’t pleased with his presence, they were willing to see how this played out.
So long as they didn’t try to separate him from his mate, he’d continue to let them think they had any advantage.
Within another few minutes, the younger boy and older girl—Calum and Maeve—had even started taking an interest in Darrah. The kit enjoyed the fawning, and he happily leapt onto one of the girl’s shoulders. The young ones squealed in delight as Darrah clambered up to stand on her head.
As the young ones laughed, the father straightened, putting his hands on his hips to regard Sorcha and Orek. “Well, let’s get you inside and hear the rest. Especially how you came to be here with an…orc.”
“Half-orc.” He met the father’s assessing gaze, refusing to flinch or back down.
The father’s brows ticked up but otherwise he remained impassive to that tidbit of information.
The mother took over then, throwing her arms around Sorcha to squeeze her tight. “Yes, inside, we’ll have early dinner and you’ll tell us everything. And we’ll get some food in you—look at how gaunt you’ve gotten!”
And with that they were swept along in a wave of chatter and questions, pausing only long enough to retrieve their packs. Orek would’ve been left behind by the rolling tide of Brádaighs if Sorcha hadn’t kept a firm hold of his hand. He was glad of the contact, focusing on the warm feel of her palm pressed to his to tune out all the noise and unfamiliar smells.
The short walk was spent mostly assuring the mother that they had, in fact, eaten plenty, though her mother continued to make unhappy noises at the state of her cheeks. Sorcha bore it with affectionate exasperation.
It left Orek to take in the Brádaigh home.
Cara and Anghus’s farmstead and the towns Sorcha had brought him to were the most experience he’d had with human dwellings. Whatever he might have thought the Brádaigh home was—small or cramped or isolated—he was most definitely wrong.
The house was a tall stone construction, with a turret at the northwest corner. Mats of thick ivy clung to the walls, winding around windows and flowerboxes brimming with late-season blooms. Diamond-patterned leaded windows had been opened to let in the mild afternoon breeze, filling the surrounding air with hearty cooking smells.
It was at least three stories, with a large, arched double door at the front. Decorative scrolling was etched into the stone around the frame, and a set of prancing horse statues had been affixed above it. The home was three or four times the size of Cara and Anghus’s homestead and likely much older, too, the corners rounded with age and the flagstones of the front courtyard well-worn. A blue metal roof slanted over the stones and extended on the eastern side to cover a wide work area.
Beyond, Orek saw the stables Sorcha had spoken so much about. He supposed he’d imagined the barn they’d stayed in with Cara and Anghus, but again he was wrong.
If the home was large, the stables were enormous. Easily five times as long, with a pitched roof that spoke of a second level, the stables ran off into the distance. Through five sliding barndoors, a dozen humans and many more horses milled about, walking for the fenced paddocks surrounding the stables or off toward a cleared field to the west.
Many other smaller buildings dotted the area, workshops and smithies and kitchens and barracks, as well as smaller pens with other livestock like goats and sheep and donkeys.
