Page 28 of Bound to the Orc Guardian

“Oh!” Surprise ripples through me.

Before I can answer, Sturrm growls, “Let her learn more about Alarria, unicorn. She needn’t make promises until she understands the full weight of them.”

He’s right. I know nothing about how things work here. “What consequences would there be in making Dash my mount?”

“You’d have to listen to him every day,” Sturrm says, his deep voice so perfectly dry it makes me giggle.

“Oh, ha ha,” Dash says. But he doesn’t sound truly upset.

I settle back into Sturrm’s embrace, trying to picture a life like this, riding with these two, off on important quests, healing people everywhere we go.

Got to say, I don’t hate it.

We travel late into the evening, so that night is a rush of setting up camp and eating the food Sturrm had in his pack. Super tired, I crawl into the tent, happy to sleep on cushioning furs. It isn’t until morning that I realize Sturrm didn’t join me.

Our travel the next day is full of conversation as I learn more about this new world and how its inhabitants are a mix from all the realms of Faerie, each carefully chosen by the Moon Goddess.

“No one knows how she chooses,” Sturrm says with a shrug that moves the arms holding me. Then he growls, “It’s not all good. She brought the sluagh and the ogres here.” His muscles tighten as he says that, his body thrumming with anger.

“There are good things, too. Unicorns and pooka don’t even come from the same realm,” Dash says. “I would never have been born if she hadn’t brought both sets of my ancestors here. And that would be atrueloss.”

I laugh along with Dash, and Sturrm’s muscles relax as we continue to ride along.

When we finally stop for the evening and make camp, everything’s better now that Sturrm has all of his supplies. Besides the tent and lots of furs, there’s cooking equipment. Camping rough gets an upgrade to camping, though with the magic of the cleaning cloth, glow stones, and fire stones, maybe I should go right ahead and say we’re glamping. Especially when Sturrm cooks me a meal of pheasant with blackberry sauce accompanied by curly green fiddleheads sautéed until they’re tender.

I polish off another bite, the slight gaminess of the bird perfectly offset by the sweet-tart sauce. “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

“As one of the king’s guard.” He adds another stick to the fire, which leaps, light reflecting off the nearby tree trunks of the small glen. “We spent much of the year traveling from one orc village to the next, so King Aldronn can keep in touch with his people. In each village, we’d eat the food of the best cooks, and on the trail in between, we had to feed ourselves. The contrast in quality was often glaring.” His lips twitch.

I like him like this, talking and comfortable.

“After a while, I realized I had years of such unsatisfactory meals in front of me unless I did something about it, so I started paying attention to the cooks in the villages. Now I carry extra spices with me whenever I travel. It’s well worth it.”

“Especially when you’re not the one doing the carrying.” Dash lifts his head from where he’s grazing the underbrush.

“The spices weigh almost nothing.” Sturrm bites into a drumstick, his tusks tearing off large chunks.

“It’s true nothing else compares to you, orc.”

Sturrm’s eyes narrow at the phrase that’s normally a compliment but isn’t in this context.

The unicorn whinnies a laugh, the firelight catching on the golden grooves of his horn.

I grin, soak up the last of the blackberry sauce with the heel of my bread, and pop it into my mouth with a satisfied sigh. “This was amazing. Thank you.”

Sturrm offers me one of the special berries he carries in his pack.

A tingle of magic fills my mouth, along with a sweet minty taste as I chew. “What are these?”

“Tooth cleaning berries. They’ve been imbued with the magic of the cleaning stone, just like the cleaning cloths.”

“This place really is magical.” I roll my seating log closer to the fire and rub my bare arms. It’s getting a little colder each day as we climb into the mountains, and I wish I had on long sleeves.

After wiping his hands an extra time, Sturrm pulls a piece of leather from his pack. His eyes flicker over me as he spreads it across his lap and slides his palms over it. Those big, strong hands stroke the supple brown material, and a whisper of magic sings in the air. Over and over, they work the leather until it flows and joins into a new shape.

“It’s a jacket!” A me-sized one!

A rusty chuckle rumbles from him, and he smiles.

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