Page 35 of Alien Orc's Prize

“Please. If you can put up with that selfish prick in bed, then you’ll marvel at what I have to offer. I’d make a far better lover than Gal. Just like I’d make a far better king. Can you imagine,” he asked, suddenly sounding almost vengefully gleeful, “what it would be like if I put my baby in the high princess’ belly the same season that the crops failed?”

“Yourbaby?! But I’m already… I’m with Galbrath!”

“There’s no need to look at me like that,” he chided. “It’s not like I’d be forcing you. I have very little interest in lying with unwilling women. I’d make sure you enjoyed yourself.Immensely. And even if Gal’s already rutted you, having me knot you now would put doubt into the lineage. At least until the child is born and can be tested for paternity.”

My blood turned to ice in my veins. This no longer seemed like some horny asshole crossing boundaries for shits and giggles. This felt malevolent, far-reaching, meticulously planned.

Althrop wasn’t just trying to make a move on his cousin’s new wife. He was trying to destabilize an entire kingdom.

Fear sloshed inside me, but so did rage. Rage at what Althrop was trying to do to me, but almost even more so, I was furious over what he was trying to do to Galbrath.

“Clearly, you don’t know me very well,” I spat, “because if you think I’m going to stand here and let you use me to betray my husband, you are sorely fucking mistaken.”

Althrop’s smile dropped instantly, his gaze turning vicious.

“Why are you even protecting him?” he demanded, as if he had a right to ask anything of me at this point. “Why are you loyal to him when he doesn’t give a single sea-soaked shit about you? You’rehuman.” He sneered. “Gal could have had any woman on this planet. Rich, fertile, beautiful. But he turned them all down. He refused to give into his family’s meddling. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain in their head that he only married you as a sick and twisted joke, a way to get back at them.”

His words landed like blows. They took my breath away, left me reeling. As if sensing this, Althrop’s eyes sharpened keenly and he went in for the kill. “Why do you stand by him now,” he asked with satiny darkness, “when henever even wanted you at all?”

My eyes filled with tears of humiliation, and in the blurring veil I thought it was a trick of the light at first. The way it looked like a blade had suddenly appeared at Althrop’s throat.

But there was no mistaking that low, familiar voice, metallic with cold fury, that told Althrop to get down on his knees.

“Put the knife, down, Gal. It’s all just a bit of –ah!”

Althrop cried out as the blade bit down. Thin lines of blood ran from beneath his chin, soaking into the fine linen of his shirt. I’d blinked away the tears, and now I could see Galbrath, a hulking, shirtless, shoeless, demonic presence behind his cousin, one meaty fist around the handle of the bladeat Althrop’s throat, the other wrapped around Althrop’s braid, holding his head in place.

“On. Your. Knees.”

Althrop grimaced, then slowly lowered himself to the ground. Galbrath remained standing. In two swift strides he was beside me, then shoving me behind his back as he brandished his long blade at Althrop from the front.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, you know,” Althrop simpered, just as he’d done this afternoon. His eyes cut to me where I peeked out from behind Galbrath’s back. “I was only meeting the high princess out here as she requested. She lured me out here and then tried to seduce me and-”

A sharptwang!filled the air.

Galbrath had smacked him with the flat of his blade. Althrop collapsed to the side, and took a long time to fight his way back up to his knees. As Althrop appeared to oscillate somewhere between puking and passing out, Galbrath crouched down, shoved the point of the blade beneath his cousin’s chin, and whispered, “Put one more lie on my wife’s name and I will slit you throat to belly. You will have no trial and you will have no funeral.” He jabbed the blade forwards, creating a new, bleeding nick under Althrop’s chin.

Then, in a dizzyingly quick movement, especially for someone so big, he shot back up to his feet. With his free hand, he reached behind himself and grasped my shirt, tugging until I was nestled against his back.

“I, Prince Gal of the Orhalla Northlands, charge you, Lord Althrop, with treason.” He shoved his blade back into its place at his belt, took out a small tablet from a pocket in his trousers. “Padreth,” he snarled, “get out here. To the east fields. Ping my tablet’s location. Bring castle guards with you.”

As Galbrath snapped instructions at Padreth and stared at Althrop like he could burn him alive with his eyeballs, my mindwas working about a thousand lightyears a second, spinning over questions and words and thoughts. I felt like I was about to figure something out, and something important. Treason. Althrop. The vehicle. The wheat.

I had to stop and stay at a nearby inn, Althrop had said.

I was just out at a field, down by a nearby inn,Galbrath had said.Nothing around it is affected, but out of nowhere the wheat there is suddenly dying away.

“It was him!”

Galbrath shoved his tablet back into his pocket and finally turned back to look at me. His expression was so carved with fury that I couldn’t read any other emotion there right now.

“I think it was Althrop,” I said, my words coming so fast it felt like they were sliding into one another, like people careening down a slope and landing in a pile. “The wheat. You said you don’t know how it’s spreading, right? And that this plague or whatever randomly just popped up at a field by an inn? The exact same inn Althrop just stayed at?”

Something in Galbrath’s dark gaze flickered.

“Check his bike. His… craft. Whatever you call those things,” I said, pointing to the parked vehicle. I knew I was right even before Althrop started scrambling towards the thing, as if he meant to leap up onto it and flee.

I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of watching Galbrath grab Althrop by the braid and slam him down to the ground.

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