Chapter 2 - The Worst Captive

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I cleared this trail two days ago. But Teotzin said clear the trail, so I'm clearing the trail, because that is what happens when you are the runt of the Omazin and the Elder Council needs you somewhere that isn't underfoot.

I hack a vine that was already dead. My spear bites dead wood and the bite is satisfying.

The others are in the outpost with their catches. In the breeding huts. On pallets, on furs, under mosquito netting, legs spread and laughing and getting what we were raised for. I got told to clear a trail. Teotzin didn't even bother to make it sound kind. She looked me over, looked at these arms and sent me into the green with a blade like I was twelve.

My age-mates are getting bred and I am chopping brush. They will come out sore and swollen and full of stories. I will come back with leech bites and bark on my calves and everybody will know exactly why I was not there.

The Itzince is thick today, the canopy so tight overhead the light comes through green and sideways. Rain drips from every surface. My thong clings to my hips and the leather bra sticks to my chest and I don't notice because this is how the air has always been, warm and mine.

I smell copper and rot, the flat mineral stink of blood, and a lot of it. I stop walking. My spear hand tightens. My other hand, the one I don't think about, the one that makes the vines twitch when I'm scared, curls at my side.

I follow the smell.

The river crossing is a slaughterhouse. Dead orcs in the shallows, rain washing pink streaks into the current. Weapons in the mud. An axe with no owner. A hand with no body. The troll's track gouges the earth in a line of splintered saplings heading northeast. The river runs. The jungle holds its breath.

I count six dead. All orcs. All massive. The smallest one is twice my weight.

I should go back. I should report this to Yahetzin, let the real warriors come assess the damage.

I keep walking.

He's at the base of the ceiba tree, in the hollow where the roots make walls. He is collapsed against the trunk. Blood everywhere, down his side, pooling in the moss, the rain washing it into the earth until the mud is more blood than ground. The fungi along the roots pulse blue-green over his body.

I see the tusks.

Every Amazon knows that face. Thick as my fingers, curving up from a jaw that could bite through ironwood. The shoulders are wider than the doorframe of a longhouse. Scars layered on scars. Every one of them healed. Brath of the Gorrath. The one who killed Tessa at the river. The one who broke Mahra's spine in open combat. The one who walked out of the Gorge alone. The one the elders use to frighten young warriors into taking their training seriously.

He is unconscious and bleeding and three feet from me, and my hands are shaking so hard the spear rattles against my thigh.

I should open his throat. The law is not complicated. Orcs die on sight. This orc dies on sight more than any orc who has ever lived. I grip the spear. I step forward. My magic stirs in my chest, the vines along the roots reaching, curling, the undergrowth pressing toward me the way it always does when I'm scared, and I hate it. I hate that the vines answer when my arms lock up and do nothing.

I lower the spear.

I stand there with the spear raised and the rain running down my arm. The most dangerous orc on the border, unconscious and bleeding. I could keep him. No one would ever hand me a prize like this. I would have to steal one.

The others went to the villages and dragged home soft men. The jungle drops Brath at my feet.

Etzin the runt. Etzin who came back empty from three mate-hunts while the others dragged human men home by their hair. Etzin whose magic came in wrong, druidic and wrong-shaped for a warrior, flowers instead of fists. That Etzin is going to capture a warchief. That Etzin is going to mate with a monster. That Etzin is going to prove she is a real Amazon with the one catch no real Amazon would be insane enough to attempt.

My magic answers before I decide. Vines crawl from the roots, from the undergrowth, from the ceiba itself. They wrap his wrists, his ankles. They cross his chest in thick bands, loop his throat where the pulse beats slow. Little thorns poke out from the younger growth, pressing against his skin. I pour everything I have into them. My nose bleeds. I taste salt and iron and I don't stop, pushing more, tighter. The vines thicken, grip, hold. His body shifts under the weight and does not wake.

I grab his ankle and drag.

"You are going to cooperate," I tell him. He is unconscious. He does not cooperate.

He is the heaviest thing I have ever moved. My shoulders scream. My feet slip in the mud. I pull and the undergrowth parts around me. The troll is in the canopy dark. I am hauling its prey through the jungle by one leg like a meal I stole. I keep my eyes on my grip, on my grip alone.

"Move your legs. Help me. Do something." He does nothing. His head lolls against a root and I yank harder. "You are the worst captive I have ever had."

I haul him over roots and through standing water, past fungal shelves that glow and go dark as I pass. My arms burn. The magic is eating me alive. The vines around him stay tight and the thorns press and he doesn't wake and I check over my shoulder so many times my neck cramps.

"Stay," I tell him at the entrance. As if he's going anywhere. As if the unconscious orc is going to roll himself into the jungle out of spite. "Stay."

Inside the grotto I tie him properly. More vines, anchored to the root-walls, threaded through the ones already holding him. He's spread against the stone and moss, wrapped in vines, thorns catching at his throat. He is captured.

I strip what's left of his armor. Boiled leather chest piece cracked in half, shoulder guards shattered, iron bracers bent, soaked in blood and useless. I pull the pieces away and underneath there is nothing but a leather loincloth and skin.

The muscles move under his skin, dark green and enormous. Each breath shifts the vine-bands across his chest. The wound at his ribs is ugly, deep enough to see tissue working underneath, and I should look at that first. I should be assessing the injury. That is what I am doing, a tactical assessment.

His cock strains the loincloth even soft, thick against his thigh, dark green like the rest of him. I can see veins through the leather, red and purple against the green skin. The other Amazons talk about the men they bring back from the hunts. I never paid attention. I never got close enough to need to. My mouth goes dry.

I clean the wound.

Herb poultice from my pack, pressed into the gash. I have to hold my wrists steady with the other hand. I bandage it with strips torn from my belt pouch. My fingers on his skin. He's burning, fever-hot. My palms are cold from the rain and his skin burns through them.

I sit back on my heels. The most dangerous orc alive is wrapped in my vines, locked in my magic, and he is mine.

He's mine and I caught him and my nose is still bleeding and I am an Amazon.

My arms hurt so much I can't lift them.