Page 28 of Agor

A large group of the villagers must’ve ambushed him all at once, and he’d put up quite a fight by the looks of him. His sage-green skin was covered with cuts and bruises. Blood smeared his clothes and hair. A blow to the side of his head had split his skin on the temple. Blood flooded his right eye that appearedto be swelling already. The other eye, green like the moss of the wetlands, focused on me. For a moment, I thought in horror that his tusks had been knocked out. Then I realized the settlers had tied a green cloth over his mouth to keep him quiet.

The crowd seemed to support the elder’s gory proposition of chopping up the orc.

“That’s right!” they shouted. “Kill him! That will teach them.”

I adjusted my armor, coming closer.

“Killing him won’t help us,” I said calmly. “It will most likely bring the rest of them here for revenge.”

“And we’ll meet them here with a sword!” Simon, a wiry, jumpy guy, shook his fist toward the woods.

I doubted Simon even remembered how to use a sword. The last three times I had to assemble a team of guards to accompany the women on their gathering and foraging expeditions, a mysterious illness suddenly gripped Simon, rendering him unable to get out of bed to join us. And every time, the illness was miraculously cured by dinner time.

Normally, I’d have no qualms about reminding Simon of that. But I feared an argument would just heat the tempers, which would hurt Agor’s chances of survival. I’d never wished for him to get hurt. I definitely didn’t want him to die.

“He broke my Stephan’s arm,” Martha, the wife of one of our best warriors, Stephan, complained.

“And Dimitri’s arm too,” came from the crowd.

“And Vadim’s both legs.”

“He threw Boris and Ambroise so far up into a tree, we had to use a ladder and a lot of ropes to get them both down,” someone else complained.

It was a miracle that no one died. An orc, when cornered, could’ve caused much more damage than this, especially if fighting against so many. I heaved a furtive sigh of relief. Bones could be healed. We had two great medicine women in thesettlement to take care of the wounded. The important thing was that there’d been no deaths.

“He needs to die, Becca, to send a message to other orcs,” the elder professed grimly.

“Or we can trade him for food, to help us make it through the winter,” I suggested.

“We’re not trading with the dirty orcs!” Simon shrieked.

But some people in the crowd looked intrigued by my proposition.

“What can we trade him for?” Martha wondered out loud. “How much can we get for just one orc, anyway?”

I decided to take a gamble.

“He’s not just any orc. It’s Agor, the High Chief of all bog orcs in the entire wetlands.”

A murmur rolled through the crowd. Everyone looked at Agor again, while he stared at me, unblinking. If he thought I was betraying him, I couldn’t help it. I saw no other way to save his life.

“How do you know that?” Another elder, Artyom, squinted at me suspiciously.

I propped my hands on my hips. “I’ve been to his keep and to his house. I only narrowly avoided being chained to his bed.”

At that, Agor smirked. I wondered if he’d thought about my being in his house as often as I had.

“Listen,” I addressed the crowd, loud and clear. “I have plenty of reasons to wish this orc dead. He abducted me and dragged me to his keep. He would’ve made me his slave had I not escaped. But he’s worth so much more to us alive. Just think about all the things we could get from the orcs for him. Food. Meat. They even have flour. And also boots that don’t take in water.”

The settlers looked at each other in bewilderment.

“There are boots like that? Really?” Simon asked.

Martha scratched her chin. “Where do they get flour from? Nothing grows in this swamp.”

“But it’s true.” Faeena stepped forward with Sveta, her youngest, already on her hip and Anna, the eldest, holding on to her skirt. “They do have flour. Becca brought some meat pies for my girls the morning she escaped from the orcs.”

“Real pies? Baked with flour?” Martha clapped her hands, her eyes lighting up with excitement.

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