I nearly drop my knives. He has offered me ten gold marks. That’s a lot of money. It would set Wren and me up for the winter, and I could search for work that actually paid a decent wage. I could buy Wren a new coat and sheepskin-lined boots.
There has to be a catch, though.
Turning slowly, I meet Vark’s gaze. “What happens if I can’t beat you?”
He’s so close, I see his scar up close for the first time. It’s brutal, and I find myself wishing I could have protected him from the injury. I track my gaze from his leather eye patch to his good eye, noticing for the first time that his iris isn’t a solid black like I’d thought but a dark, earthy brown.
He must have been so beautiful.
He’s still handsome, but the moment he catches me staring at his scar, he retreats two steps, visibly closing himself off. I try not to react, instead sizing him up as an opponent, which is what I was supposed to be doing instead of daydreaming about him.
When he disarmed me just now, he wasn’t even out of breath. Did I put all of my skill into the fight? No. But I wasn’t sure I could best him in close combat. Maybe if I had the element of surprise and caught him sleeping or with his pants down…but given how sharp his hearing and eyesight seem to be, I doubt even that would work.
Not that I would want to see Vark with his pants down.
My gaze strays on its own, to where Vark’s thick, muscular thighs are encased in soft leather pants. He’s so strong, so powerfully built, my mind flashes with an unwanted image of him naked, underneath me. My legs straddling those thighs. I slam a mental wall around those crazy thoughts, taking a deep breath to clear my head. Then I jerk my attention back up, only to find him…smirking at me?
No, that curve of his lips can’t be counted as a smirk, more a grimace. He caught me ogling him, and now I have to live with that shame on top of him beating me. Heat shoots into my cheeks, and I thank the gods for my tan skin. If I was pale-skinned like Wren, I’d be red from my neck all the way up to my hair.
“If I win,” he says, “you and Wren will come to the Hill for the winter.”
“The Hill?” I ask.
“The Black Bear Hill. Our stronghold,” Vark says. “It’s built underground.”
I glare at him. “So you do live in burrows?”
He shrugs as if to say, And?
“Why would we come with you?” I stick all my blades back where they belong.
He leans against the side of the wagon. “If you win, you won’t have to.”
I don’t reply, instead taking off toward where I left the satchel and the blanket.
“Twenty marks,” Vark calls after me.
Damn him.
He must know I can’t say no to an offer like that. I couldn’t make that kind of money in a year, and now I have a chance to get it by winning one stupid fight?
I turn back to him. “Are you good for the money?”
A muscle jumps in his cheek—he’s clearly annoyed at my questioning him. But he reaches under the seat of his wagon and pulls out a heavy leather purse. He throws it at me, and I catch it against my chest. It’s heavy, the coins inside jingling. My fingers tremble as I pry open the drawstring, and I can’t help but gasp.
Yellow gold stares up at me. It’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one place. Quickly, I palm one of the gold marks, tighten the string as if nothing happened, and throw the purse back to Vark.
“So I only have to win once?” I ask, slipping the coin into my coat pocket.
“Aye.”
I purse my lips, thinking. “Do I have to fight fair?”
Now, he smirks. “No.”
The reckless side of me wins. “All right, it’s a deal.”
Vark sticks out his hand, and I take it, letting him close his palm around mine. He runs the callused pad of his index finger over the sensitive skin at the inside of my wrist. My insides liquefy, something soft and powerful replacing the anger pulsing inside me. A shiver of awareness runs over my back, and I pull away, cradling my hand against my chest as if his touch had burned me.
Vark stares down at me for a long moment, his lips parted, his tusks gleaming. Then he seems to retreat back into himself. He straightens his shoulders and points his thumb over his shoulder at the wagon. “I have to hitch the horses. We’re leaving soon. You and Wren ride with me.”
“Hey,” I protest. “I want my chance to win.”
He snorts. “I just beat you, pet. You’ll have to do better than that to win my money, so I suggest you think hard before you take me on again.” He jerks his head in the direction of the road. “Besides, we should get moving. Got a lot of ground to cover today if we want to outrun whoever might be coming after you.”
With that, he lopes away, his movements reminding me of a wolf on two legs. It’s true, we should be trying to get as far away from Ultrup as possible, but I’d let Vark and his damn bet distract me from my most important goal. That makes him incredibly dangerous. Yet at the same time, he’s offering me a chance to secure my future.
I tell myself I’m only watching him go because I need to assess him as an opponent, not because I’m wondering what his ass looks like in those leather pants. It’s a shame his big traveling cloak reaches all the way to his knees. He’s much too large to be this—this graceful, and yet he’s so fluid in the way he walks. He’s incredibly fast in a fight, too, so that and the fact that he could crush me with his bare hands will be my greatest hurdles in this challenge.
But I’ll win. I have to. Twenty marks would change our lives, and that’s exactly why Wren and I escaped from Ultrup. To live.
I gather Wren from Korr, who slips her another bread roll and goes off to hitch his own horses. The fact that I was comfortable leaving her with a strange orc has me thinking I need to have my head examined. But not one of these orcs has done anything to provoke me. On the contrary, they’ve been going out of their way to make us both comfortable.
I try to think of a time I felt this safe in a group of human men and fail to come up with a memory.
I take Wren behind some bushes to go to the toilet, then bundle her up in a blanket and set her up on the driver’s seat, waiting for Vark. For the first time in a long while, she’s excited and chatters quietly about the horses she met. Apparently, none of them had names, so she asked Korr if she could name them.
“These two are now called Apple and Sky,” she chirps. “Apple is a girl, and Sky is a boy.”
I inspect the black horses, all but identical in stature. Then I glance over at the rest of the animals. They must be of the same breed, developed specifically for orcs, because I’ve never seen beasts this size.
“How can you tell who’s who?” I ask.
She points at the horse on the left. “She has a diamond on her forehead. Korr told me to remember their differences, and then the horses told me that’s what they’re called.” Twisting around, she pokes her arm from under the blanket and enumerates the horses one by one. “That’s Night, Star, Comet, and Soot,” she says.
Vark appears from behind the wagon, and Wren lowers her hand, growing silent.
“Those are good horse names,” he says as he motions for me to climb up.
In front of us, the caravan of wagons moves, the drivers calling out to their horses to get them back to the road. Wren ducks her head between her shoulders and leans into my side. I position her so she’s sitting between Vark and me, afraid she might topple off the wagon.
The orc snaps the reins lightly, and the wagon rolls forward. We sit in silence, Wren and I wrapped in blankets, and watch the countryside roll past. We’re not in orc territory yet, Vark informs us. We’ll travel for several days to reach it. I never knew it was that far to the border, but then I’d never left Ultrup. It’s a vast world out there, and I want to see more of it—even though it’s terrifying at the same time.
On the low, windy plains stretching out from the big city, we pass human homesteads and small villages where the people stare at us with suspicion in their eyes. For some reason, this makes me want to jump from the wagon and explain that the orcs aren’t bad, that they won’t hurt them or steal their chickens. When a mother ushers her children off the street with a fearful glance over her shoulder, I turn to Vark. His shoulders are hunched, and he draws the hood of his cloak up, disguising his missing eye and scar.
Wren droops into my lap at that moment, so I push open the canvas behind us and enter the wagon through the same gap that Vark first peeked at us yesterday. I make a nest for Wren on the floor, between the sacks of grain, and tuck her in. She must still be catching up on the sleep she missed over the past weeks.
Then I climb back out, taking my seat next to Vark.
“I’m sorry I assumed the worst about you.”
We drive over a stone bridge spanning a rushing river and leave the village behind. Vark remains quiet, his gaze fixed ahead.
“You couldn’t know,” he says finally. “About us. Humans are afraid of things they don’t know.”
I peer up at him. “But not orcs?”
He huffs. “Orcs aren’t afraid of anything.”
“Of course not.”
I hide my smile, fixing my blanket around me. The day is clear but windy, and staying motionless on top of the wagon exposes us to the worst of the chill. Vark’s arm twitches as if he wants to reach for me, but he turns back to the front. He ties the reins to a metal ring in front of him, takes an apple from his coat pocket, and cores it deftly with his knife. He offers me a piece and munches on another as the horses’ steady gait carries us forward without his instructions.
At my worried glance, he says, “They’ll follow the wagon in front of us unless I tell them otherwise.”
“So you make trips like this often?” I ask.
Vark shrugs. “Three or four times a year to Ultrup. More if there’s need.”
“And you’re a driver?” I prod.
“I take care of the animals,” he says, but there’s a strange inflection to his words, as if he had to force himself to speak them.
“I ask because you seem to handle weapons well.” I’m fishing, but I need to get a better picture of him if I’m to win that bet. “I thought you were a guard, or a warrior.”
“No.” He drops his gaze to another apple. “Not a warrior.”
He quiets after that. He hands me more apple quarters, until I wave him off. I take the time to ponder my plan. He would see any straight-on attack coming from a mile off, so I’ll need to use subterfuge. I’ll have to hobble him somehow—slow him down enough to give myself a chance.
I could poison him. A nightshade berry in his porridge, mixed in with the raisins, perhaps? One berry wouldn’t be enough to kill him, but it might make him sick.
I discard that option immediately. The orc said I didn’t have to play fair, true, but that level of viciousness would mean a hollow victory. Besides, it wouldn’t prove anything about my ability to protect myself and Wren—anyone who wanted to hurt us would hardly sit still long enough for me to poison them.
“Thinking of ways to murder me?” Vark asks, taking up the reins again.
“I might be,” I mutter, annoyed that he figured me out.
He leans back against the wagon, the picture of calm. “Ah, a woman after my own heart.”
I twist to face him fully. “Am I? Last night, you seemed convinced otherwise.”
He throws me a sideways look. “Do you want to be?”
“Stop answering my questions with more questions,” I snap.
“Hmm.” Vark lets out a sigh, and though he remains in the same position, his body doesn’t seem relaxed anymore but coiled tight, ready to spring. “I’m sorry I told you.”
That has me lifting my eyebrows. “Why?”
“I don’t want you to feel the burden of that. I know humans don’t feel about their mates as we do.”
I clench my fingers around the edges of the blanket to keep from reaching for him. The impulse is strange and completely unexpected, and I don’t know what to do with it.
“How do you feel?” I ask quietly.
He swallows, then says, “As if the gods are playing a cruel trick on me.”
“Oh. Why?”
The muscle in his jaw twitches. “They matched up a woman like you with a male like me.”
“A woman like me?” I prod.
His dark gaze settles on me. “Aye, a woman like you.”
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but he doesn’t seem inclined to tell me more. I worry my lip with my teeth, trying to think of a way to get a clear answer from him.
“You know,” he says suddenly, as if he’d been keeping the words to himself and they all but exploded from him. “If I found an orc mate, the woman would have run to me the moment we laid eyes on each other. It would have been a mutual thing.”
A sharp stab of pain in my chest shocks me. From everything he’d said so far, I knew he wasn’t happy with the gods’ choice, but he didn’t have to rub salt in my wound. I hate that this male has the power to hurt me, even if it’s only with words.
“I’m sorry you were robbed of that,” I whisper. “I didn’t intend for this to happen.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he growls through gritted teeth, turning toward me.
I rear back from the force of his stare. “Well, how else should I understand what you’re saying?”
He pauses for a moment, then expels a breath and faces forward again. “I know you’re scared of me.”
I go to protest—but he shakes his head.
“I can smell it on you,” he says. “It’s no use denying it.”
Silently, I struggle with that revelation. I didn’t know anything about orcs apart from the clearly made-up stories of their brutality, but every bit I learn confirms the suspicion that they’re nature’s perfect creation—big, powerful, lethal. Attuned to the world around them in ways that humans could only dream of.
If I had his skill set, I would never have to be afraid.
“I don’t want to be scared anymore.”
The words pop out of my mouth before I can think better of them.
Vark glances at me. “I won’t hurt you, I told you that. I don’t know how to make you believe it.”
“No, I know.” I push my short hair back, fidgeting. “I don’t want to be afraid of anyone. Like you. I want to be able to protect Wren and not worry about whether we’ll survive the inevitable moment our past catches up with us.”
I don’t know where this confession is coming from, but now that I’ve started, I don’t know how to stop. “The man who hurt Wren. He’ll come searching for us when he learns we’ve escaped. And he’ll bring friends. I owe him money, and—”
“I’ll kill him,” Vark interrupts me. “For you.”
My throat clogs up, painful and unpleasant. “You say that, but you don’t want to confirm all the stories about brutal orcs who kill humans, I know you don’t. And our troubles shouldn’t become yours.”
I don’t add the fact that he doesn’t even seem to want me here. He’s made it clear that he expected a better mate. The last thing I want is to become a burden to him—the woman he feels obligated to because of some unlucky twist of fate but can’t get rid of either.
He’s silent for a long while. I gather the blanket closer to my chest, staring out at the countryside. With the rising sun, the frost is starting to thaw, leaving mud everywhere. The main road traveling north is still well maintained here, but I know it’ll deteriorate the farther we go from Ultrup. I imagine trying to wind around the muddy potholes with Wren in tow and have to admit that walking all the way to the sea and the town of Sigda—which might not even be enough to escape Timo’s notice—doesn’t sound pleasant at all.
A plan starts forming in my mind. Not to defeat Vark but to learn from him. He says he’s not a warrior, but his movement tells a different story.
“You could teach me how to fight,” I say, thoughtful. “Right?”
He tenses beside me. “No.”
That has me sitting straighter. “What do you mean, no? You can clearly fight better than me.”
“I told you, I’m not a warrior,” he replies without looking at me.
“You don’t have to be a warrior to teach me,” I insist. “You’ve had military training, yes?”
“I cannot do it,” he says, his voice final.
I sit back, arms crossed over my chest. “Fine.”
We lapse into silence again, and I try to think of a way out of this.
“Can Wren and I still travel north with you?” I ask finally.
He frowns at me. “Of course.”
“And our bet still holds?”
“Aye.”
I smile to myself. If that’s true, I have a plan.
