Honor Among Orcs (Orc Saga)

HONOR

among

ORCS

Orc Saga: Book One

Amalia Dillin

Honor Among Orcs

Copyright © 2014 Amalia Dillin

www.amaliadillin.com

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1496011805

ISBN-13: 978-1496011800

Cover Art created by Melissa Stevens

www.theillustratedauthor.net

Formatting by Caitlin Greer

All rights reserved.

Reproduction and distribution of this work without permission of the author is illegal. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between characters or events in this story and with any other person or creature, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Praise for HONOR AMONG ORCS

“Dillin weaves a tale fraught with adventure and true love, in a dynamic and fast moving tale that turns all the classic fantasy tropes on their heads. I loved it from the start!”

~Caitlin Greer, Author of
ParaWars: Uprising

“Amalia Dillin creates a fascinating realm where betrayal runs rampant and nothing is as it seems. Majestic storytelling, a breathtaking, larger than life world, and characters that offer new perspectives on long-standing traditions, HONOR AMONG ORCS is a fantasy triumph.”

~Diana Paz, Author of
Timespell

“HONOR AMONG ORCS [...] takes you by surprise and doesn't let go of your imagination even after you've finished it. A truly unique take on romance, reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast that I absolutely loved. The writing, characters, and story line were so well done I stayed up late to finish the book in one day and [...] can't wait for the second book in this series.”

~Shannon Mayer, Bestselling Author of the Rylee Adamson Series

FOR ADAM

Who listened to me talk my way through this book, start to finish, and only complained a little. Thank you for your patience and your kindness and your love and support in all the things.

And also for Di, because she loved this book from the very first page.

NINE YEARS BEFORE

Rodric shoved her behind him, and Arianna’s palms burned, skinned on the cold stonework. “Ow!”

“Shh!” he hissed. “It’s the king!”

She went still, her heart freezing in her chest. If her father found her on the castle walls, he would whip her, and worse for Rodric. Ever since she had been caught riding astride behind Rodric on his pony, she’d been forbidden to see him again. But how was she supposed to gallop anywhere riding side-saddle?

“Quick,” Rodric said. “Between the barrels.”

Arianna scrambled to do as he bid, glad she was still flat-chested enough to fit. Isabel already had the beginnings of a woman’s breasts, and they were only a year apart. “What about you?”

Rodric was already following, pushing her hard against the stone tower at her back. He had to fold himself nearly in half to keep his wiry black hair from showing above the barrels, though he blended far more easily with the shadows than she could. His elbow dug painfully into her side and they had barely arranged themselves when she heard her father’s boots ringing on the stone.

Arianna sucked in a breath and held it. Maybe he wouldn’t stay, and they could slip back inside before anyone saw them. But he stopped, and though she couldn’t see him, she felt his presence like a chain around her neck. Already, she could feel the sting of the whip on her back. Her eyes burned.

“The queen, my lord,” one of the guards said, his soft-heeled boots making little sound in warning. Arianna nearly squeaked, but Rodric covered her mouth with his hand, half-smothering her.

“You may go, Ragnar.”

Arianna saw a sliver of the guard’s body as he bowed, and then he disappeared behind a screen of red velvet.

She jostled Rodric until she had a better view between the barrels, prying his hand from her mouth. Her mother stood tall and graceful, her hands held neatly before her stomach and her head tilted just so. A queen did not bow and scrape, even before the king, but when Arianna had dared to lift her chin too high, her father had struck her so hard, she’d seen stars.

“My lord,” the queen said. “It is cold upon the wall. Would not the solar serve us better?”

“My lovely queen, golden as the sun.” He stepped forward, framing her face in both of his hands. The wind lifted tendrils of her hair, blowing them across her cheeks. “And your eyes, so brilliant blue, clear as the sky above.” His fingers fell away, and he guided her toward the edge of the wall, a hand at the small of her back. “A shame you were not even so constant as the moon in all its phases.”

“My lord?” the queen asked.

The king’s fingers closed around the back of her neck. “One of your daughters is not mine, Signy. And were that your only offense, perhaps I might overlook it, but there is the matter of the mirror to consider. And the letters.”

Arianna’s stomach twisted, though her mother did not so much as twitch. “You cannot truly question my loyalties, Gunnar. After all I have done, all my family has done to support you.”

“Did you think I would never learn the truth of it? That the Seithr women wouldn’t know with one glance? And not just the girl, but the taint of your blood. I should have known there was some trick to it all, beautiful as you are. Did you think you could blind me forever? Persuade me?” He shoved her forward until she leaned out over the edge of the wall, the wind beyond the crenellation tearing at her gown, tugging against his grip. Only her slippered toes kept purchase on the stone. “Tell me who.”

The queen struggled against him now, her arms reaching back, trying to grasp his arm behind her, trying to grasp anything. Arianna’s throat thickened, her body tensed. If only she could reach her mother, catch her hand to pull her back—Rodric squeezed her hand, his grip like iron.

“Gunnar, please!”

“His name, Signy!” He demanded. “There is little I can do about your family, as yet, but your cuckoo is another matter. You’re fortunate that she’s beautiful. She’ll make one of my nobles a very fine bride, and I need not care what he’ll do to her. I need not even care if he remains loyal. Treason would be a fitting end to her, do you not think?”

“You are a fool of a king!” She twisted, but he forced her farther out. Her toes began to slip and she made a strangled noise.

“I am certain Alviss has need of two beautiful women to bait his traps in the mountains.” Arianna could not see her father’s face, but the tone of his voice was so pleasant, so easy. Tears streamed down Arianna’s cheeks silently, as she had been taught. As her mother had taught her. The king did not care to hear his children sob. “His name, and I will spare you both such a fate.”

The queen laughed, bitter and broken. “I’d just as soon spread my legs for an orc. It would be no worse than lying with you.”

The king sneered. “I should have known you were a whore, the way you came to my bed.”

“Only a whore would ever come to you of her own will, Gunnar, king or not.”

He cursed and threw her from him. She hung for a moment, as if the sky had opened its arms and the wind would carry her to its breast. Then the queen was falling, another laugh still rising from her throat, smothered by the breadth of stone as she dropped below its edge.

Arianna surged from her hiding place. Rodric clapped his hand over her mouth again, muffling her cry and pulling her tight against his body when she would have burst from the barrels. Her body trembled with the need to run, to help her mother, to reach for her.

“If he sees you now, he’ll kill you, too,” Rodric breathed into her ear. “He will kill us both, Arianna.”

“Ragnar!” the king called.

It was only a moment before the guard returned. “My lord?”

“My wife slipped. Have the children brought to the solar at once.” His heels clicked against the stone as he turned away. “And clean up the mess Signy made of herself. If she is not already dead, I am certain she will not survive the night.”

CHAPTER ONE

Arianna snuck into the walled herb garden, checking again to be sure she had not been followed. Lord Alviss had been stalking her for days now, since before the king had whipped and banished Rodric to the castle walls. And Alviss had grown bolder with each following day.

Rodric had been Arianna’s last defense. No other guard would dare interfere, for fear of the king’s anger. And everyone knew Alviss looked for any opportunity to curry favor. The nobleman had taken special joy in informing on Rodric, in particular, even going so far as to ensure that Rodric was caught speaking intimately with her sister, Isabel. Anyone else would have been executed, found in the princesses’ rooms without a chaperone, and Arianna could have killed them both for being so careless.

“Princess Arianna, what a pleasant surprise.”

Especially now, she decided. Alviss himself waited beneath the pear tree. At least if she’d murdered her sister, Alviss wouldn’t still be hunting her. The stables. Next time, she would go to the stables. Alviss would never risk dirtying his gleaming boots there. But that wouldn’t save her now, and kitchen maids didn’t make for any kind of protection. Foolish and careless, both. She was no better than Isabel, after all.

“Struck mute with pleasure, I see,” Alviss smiled, rising from the stone bench where she’d often spent her days reading, undisturbed and safe. Never again. “I do so love the smell of the herbs. It is no wonder you enjoy it here, so. Much better than the stink of horse manure, I must say.”

“Lord Alviss,” she said formally, determined not to let him see her fear. She smoothed the satin sash at her waist to hide the trembling of her hands. It seemed the stables would no longer be safe either. And the way his gaze traced over her body, blue eyes cold and liquid, made her stomach churn. “I fear I only came for a sprig of parsley.”

He waved a hand at the herb beds. “I would not dream of stopping you from freshening your breath.”

But the parsley lay beyond him. She would have to pass him by, within arm’s reach, and then he would stand between her and the door. She would be trapped against the wall, too high to climb, even if her skirts would not tangle her legs, and her fingers could find purchase in the mortar.

His smile, thought so charming by the maids, took on the curl of a smirk. How they could think him pretty, Arianna did not know. Not when he looked on her as if he could not wait to pull her apart into pieces and find what secrets were trapped inside. He was too much like the king, determined to have his way no matter what the cost. And he wanted her. Whether it was for her body, or what she might know of the king, or the claim she might give him to the throne, she did not want to find out. Much too much like the king, preferring games of cruelty and manipulation, finding pleasure in seeing others cower in fear.

Her father’s favorite noble. And if she were found alone with him in the garden, it would not be Alviss who was punished. For although Alviss might have been the king’s favorite, Arianna most definitely was not.

He stepped forward.

“I hear my sister calling.” She stepped back. “Another time, perhaps.”

Arianna darted through the kitchens, but before she had reached the hallway, Alviss was calling to her. A glance over her shoulder told her he meant to follow, a hunter’s grin curving his lips. And she his prey.

He shoved a maid out of his way, the girl falling with a cry against the hearth, then a scream from the burning hot stones. Arianna’s eyes pricked with tears, guilt closing around her heart, but she did not dare stop. If Alviss caught her now, there was no telling what he would do, and if he violated her—she did not want to think what it would mean. She could not think of it and escape.

Arianna ran. Down one darkened corridor, through another room, with a passage behind a tapestry she and Rodric had found as children, and up the crumbling old stairs. She could not hear Alviss behind her, but her blood was roaring and she did not trust her ears. Through another room, and into the hallway, then down the main stairs, and…

There was only one place even Alviss would not dare to search. Arianna hesitated only a moment to be sure no one saw, then turned right. The north tower. The king’s tower, and the room that had once belonged to the queen. She stopped before it, bent almost double from the stitch in her side, and tried to catch her breath. But the sound of boots ringing against stone had her heart racing even faster, her skin prickling with fear. If she were caught here—she could not be caught here.

Arianna grabbed the iron ring of the heavy wooden door and jerked it open, throwing herself inside.

Entering the room was forbidden, but standing inside the dim chamber, she didn’t understand why. It was empty, and once the door shut, the only light came from two arrow slit embrasures. No tapestries hung on the rounded walls, no furnishings cluttered the floor, and no hearth for a fire against the frozen north wind that bit at her nose. Just a single, framed mirror, hanging opposite the door.

Her mother’s mirror, she realized, for the markings on its frame were distinct in their strangeness. The same mirror that had hung behind a tapestry in the queen’s room. Hidden away from prying eyes. And by the time Arianna had learned of it, she had known, too, that her mother had reasons for keeping things from her king, but she’d thought it only some small vanity, nothing more.

Until now. At first, Arianna only saw her own reflection in the silvered glass, no more than a shadow. But when she stepped toward the narrow windows, something else stirred in the dark. A low growl filled the silence of the room, knotting her stomach. She pressed back against the cold stone wall and froze.

“Have you come to gloat?” a harsh voice called, thick and deep. “Is it not enough that you hold me hostage, you must taunt me as well?”

A breath of fear escaped her lungs, overloud to her ears, and the too-tall shadow in the mirror shifted again, with a clank of chains and a flash of sickly grey skin behind the glass. Inside the glass? It must be. Nothing stood at her back to cast such a reflection. Whoever it was, she was near enough the door. She could flee before it reached her. Before it knew her face to tell the king.

“Who’s there?” the voice called.

She didn’t dare answer. If whatever lived behind the glass told the king she had been in the tower, she’d be fortunate to escape with less than ten lashes. He demanded absolute obedience, even from his daughters. Especially from his daughters. With the queen’s death, nine years before, he had made that much clear. And now this. She’d always wondered what he’d meant, that day upon the wall, when he’d spoken of a mirror, but she’d never imagined this.

“I can hear your heart beating, hard and fast.” Another clink of chains and a large hand pressed against the mirror, thick fingered with a calloused palm. A warrior’s hand, worn from handling swords and spears, cut by the reins of a horse.

Or by a whip, she realized with a shiver. The king favored his whip, the leather thin enough to slice skin and tipped with steel as sharply honed as any blade. Her heart drummed in her ears even louder. It had been some time since she had been foolish enough to give him reason to use it on her own back, but barely a month ago, he’d whipped a woman from the village. A peasant’s wife. Arianna wasn’t certain how exactly the woman had displeased him, only that he had been furious. He had turned the flesh of her back into ribbons, and still he had not stopped. Not until she no longer screamed in pain, but slumped witless against the post.

The woman hadn’t lived.

“Show yourself,” the shadow demanded, his voice echoing off the bare walls.

It was the command of a king, and she had been long trained to respond at once to such a tone. Her whole body tensed, wanting to step forward, to reveal herself upon his order, fearing the punishment that would come if she did not. And the punishment that would come if she did.

Arianna picked up her skirts and fled. Through the door, down the hall, hurtling down the stairs before anyone might notice from which direction she’d come.

She didn’t pause until she reached the bottom of the stairwell, where she leaned against the stone wall. The rock warmed her icy fingers, but she shivered in remembered cold. Did he feel the chill of the tower inside the mirror? She closed her fingers into her palm and shook the errant thought from her mind. It was no business of hers. Whoever he was, he belonged to the king, and no doubt the king had reasons for keeping him there in the cold. The king always had reasons.

She blew out a breath and forced herself not to think of the prisoner’s palm, cut deeply and scarred beneath. It would be her body that suffered the same if the king ever learned she had been there to see that hand at all. Arianna smoothed her skirts and straightened her shoulders. No one had seen her, not even the man in the mirror.

And this time, at least, Alviss had not followed.

“Your Highness,” Lord Alviss bowed deeply and Arianna suppressed a shudder at the press of his fingers against hers and the dampness of his kiss upon her knuckles.

“My lord,” she murmured the barest of acknowledgments, searching beyond him for some escape. Her sister, perhaps, or one of her brothers. What she would have given for even their unkind teasing now, to remind the noble of his place. “If you’ll excuse me…”

His grip tightened on her hand when she tried to snatch it back. “But I’ve been promised the pleasure of your company for supper.”

“Oh,” she said faintly. “I’m afraid the king made no mention—”

“Your father smiles upon us even now,” Lord Alviss said, squeezing her fingers.

The bones pressed together uncomfortably but she mastered her expression, forcing a smile to her lips as she glanced to the king, sitting upon his throne. He did smile, his grey eyes untouched. She dropped her gaze almost at once, that he would not think her disobedient to his command.

“Come,” Alviss said. “We’ve a little time yet, before we must find our seats, and I have longed to have you to myself. Now that we have the king’s blessing, you need not run from me again.”

“Surely it would serve you better to be seen at my side in the great hall,” she suggested, when he tried to lead her to a lesser used corridor. “That all the other Lords would see how you have been rewarded.”

His lips twitched from his most charming smile into a sneer. “I would not share even the sight of you with any of them.”

She did not dare to pull her hand free, feeling the king’s eyes burning into her back. Obedience first. Always obedience. If she caused a scene, forced the king to interfere, she would not be able to sit down to supper for a week without pain. He would see to it. Or worse, call upon Rodric to deliver the blows. Isabel would never forgive her.

“Of course, my lord,” Arianna mumbled. “As you wish.”

“The king did say you would be pliable,” Alviss said, guiding her beneath the small arch into the darkened passage. “He’s promised me anything I wish from you, but your maidenhead.”

Her stomach twisted and her lungs seized. “My lord?”

“His reward for my loyal service this past year, holding my lands against the barbarians in the North.” Alviss smiled, but like the king’s it held no warmth, and the twist in her stomach became a lurch, her whole body trembling. “You will be my companion for a fortnight, and perhaps, if I continue to please him, he will honor me with a more permanent arrangement.”

No.
Her lips formed the word, but she had not the air to say it.
No, no, no!

He pressed a wet kiss to the column of her throat, his hand roaming over her backside in far too familiar a fashion.

She jerked away, tearing her hand from his. “Please, my lord! I beg you.”

Alviss grabbed her by the arm, his fingers bruising. “You do not mean to disobey your king, I’m sure.”

“No!” Her eyes blurred and she forced herself to go on more quietly. If the king learned she had so much as raised her voice… “It is only—I am overwhelmed b-by the honor. And I have never…” she swallowed. “I have been sheltered all my life, my lord. Forgive me, please.”