Page 2 of The Orc's Captive Bride
The academic in her perked up despite the absurdity of her situation. This was a puzzle, and puzzles had solutions. Solutions simply required data.
She moved around the stone, her fingers hovering just above the engravings. Each symbol tugged at her memory in different ways, like a language she didn’t speak but somehow understood.Thresholdone symbol seemed to whisper. The word felt right, logical even, but how did she know?
The line of symbols curved around the monolith’s base, and she followed it automatically, searching for more of those flashes of meaning. The grass gave way to packed earth between the stones, and the wind grew stronger outside the circle. She should have felt the cold, but she didn’t. She should have been terrified, but the part of her brain that couldn’t let questions go unanswered was in control.
The engravings continued around the stone, and she squinted at a particularly complex knot of symbols that seemed to fold in on themselves. She turned to take a few steps back to get a different perspective… and walked straight into something solid.
Or rather, someone.
Her nose connected with what felt like a wall of sun-warmed leather. She bounced back with a squeak that would have mortified her under any other circumstances, landing hard on her backside in the dirt.
She looked up.
And up.
Andup.
The man—creature? being?—towered over her, easily seven feet tall and built like he’d been carved from the same granite as the stones. But it wasn’t his size that made her breath catch. It was the wrongness of him. The impossible, undeniable otherness.
He had green skin. Not metaphorically green, not sickly pale green, but the deep emerald of spring leaves. He was lean rather than broad, but his muscles looked as if they’d been sculpted with the specific purpose of intimidation, rippling beneath his skin as he shifted his weight. Scars—pale against the green—crossed his bare arms in patterns that might have been decorative or might have been the record of a brutal life.
Tusks curved up from his lower jaw, each one as long as her thumb and filed to a sharp point.
His hair, black as ink and bound in a warrior’s knot, framed a face that was simultaneously human and absolutely not. He had high cheekbones, a broad nose that looked like it had been broken and reset, and a deep scar that angled from his temple to the corner of his mouth. His eyes were the color of old gold, sharp and intelligent, and when they met hers something passed between them—a flicker of recognition she didn’t understand.
Orc.The word surfaced in her mind from a lifetime of fantasy novels and D&D campaigns. Except this wasn’t a game. This was a living, breathing creature that couldn’t exist standing three feet away from her, wearing leather armor and carrying weapons that looked far too real.
He didn’t crouch down to her level or extend a hand. He simply stood there, looking at her the way she might look at an unexpected spider—with a mixture of irritation and resignation.
She should have been terrified. Some distant part of her was screaming that she should be running, hiding, doing literally anything except sitting naked in the dirt staring up at a creature that belonged in a fevered hallucination.
Instead, she heard herself say, “Well. This is awkward.”
Her voice came out surprisingly steady.Good.She’d take whatever victories she could get at this point.
The orc’s eyes narrowed. He said something in a language that sounded like gravel being crushed, harsh and guttural and utterly incomprehensible.
She blinked. “I… don’t understand.”
He tried again, slower and louder, as if volume and enunciation would somehow bridge the linguistic gap, but the sounds meant nothing to her. They didn’t even feel like language—more like the rumble of distant thunder given syllabic form.
He made a noise that might have been frustration or might have been a curse. It was hard to tell. Then he looked down at her, really looked at her, and his gaze swept over her in a way that made her suddenly, painfully aware of her nudity.
She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Enjoying the view?”
The words came out more sarcastically than she’d intended, but he couldn’t understand her anyway. Except his expression shifted slightly. His eyes—those unsettling gold eyes—flicked back up to her face, and she could have sworn she saw the corner of his mouth twitch in a faintly mocking smile.
He understood the tone, at least.
She leveraged herself to her feet, keeping her movements slow and non-threatening. She’d dealt with enough feral cats during her undergraduate days to know that sudden movements were a bad idea around creatures with teeth.
Standing didn’t help much—he still towered over her by more than a foot—but it felt better than cowering on the ground.
“Right,” she said, more to herself than to him. “So. I’m somewhere that isn’t Norway. Somewhere that has impossible stone circles and even more impossible people. You don’t speak English. I don’t speak…” She gestured vaguely at him. “…whatever that was. And I’m naked. Great. Excellent. This is fine.”
This is not fine.
The orc watched her babble with an expression that might have been patience or might have been the calm that preceded violence. It was impossible to tell. She’d built her career on reading context and subtext, but she had no framework for this encounter. Every cultural reference point she possessed was useless here.
