Chapter 4 - Is It Dead

---

I am going to mount him.

That is the plan. The plan is simple. My vines held, my magic worked, and now I am going to mate with him. They don't sit in a grotto staring at the thing they caught. They don't make poultices and retie bindings and check the perimeter four times. Cochitl had her mate pinned inside an hour. The others cheered. They mate. So I am going to mate.

I check the vines first. The wrists are secure, the ankles tight. The chest bands hold when I tug. The throat vine sits snug against his pulse and the thorns press little dimples into the skin below his jaw. Everything holds. My magic did this and my magic holds.

He watches me check. Those amber eyes follow my hands from binding to binding, and his expression is the problem. He looks like someone watching a bird build a nest, patient and faintly curious. I want him afraid and he is calm.

"Enjoying yourself?" he says.

My hand goes to the obsidian dagger at my hip. The crystal edge catches the blue-green light. His eyes drop to it. Good.

"You are my prisoner." My voice comes out hard and commanding, the warrior voice. The one I practiced on trees while the real warriors were out hunting. "Everything on you is mine. Your weapons. Your armor. You."

His eyes move from the dagger to my hands. Not the blade hand. The other one. The one resting on the vine at his chest. He watches it the way you watch something you want, and I don't know why and I don't like it.

I mount him.

The way you mount a jaguar. One leg over, grip with the thighs, settle your weight. The Amazons ride jaguars in the border hills and I've done this a hundred times, the swing of the leg, the press of the knee, the way your body locks into the animal. Except a jaguar is narrow and Brath is not. I get one knee over his hip and he is so wide that the stretch burns in my thighs and I have to grab a vine to pull myself across. His skin is furnace-hot under me, the fever baking through him, and his ribs expand with each breath and the vine-bands shift across his chest, and I settle my weight onto his stomach and the leather of my thong is the only thing between my skin and his. He is solid underneath me, the muscle so dense I can feel each ridge through my thighs.

I turn around. I need to see what I'm working with. The loincloth is right there, warm from his body, and I lift the edge with two fingers and look.

It lies against his thigh. Dark green, soft, not moving. I tilt my head. Cochitl scratched sketches into the longhouse beams after too much palm wine, bragging about the men she'd taken. Those were rigid. Thick. Standing at attention like soldiers. This is just lying there.

"Why is it so small? Is it dead?"

I lean closer. Maybe orc ones are different. It should be hard. Why isn't it hard. What am I doing wrong. The great Brath of the Gorrath, terror of the Itzince border, and his cock is the size of--

I poke it.

"WOMAN." His whole body goes rigid and the vine at his throat snaps taut and his voice comes out like a thundercrack. "YOU KNOW NOT WHAT YOU SPEAK OF!"

I jump so hard I almost fall off him. The obsidian dagger is in my hand before I know I've drawn it and I'm pointing it at his face and I'm sitting on his stomach backwards with my ass toward him holding a knife and he is FURIOUS, the amber eyes blazing, tusks bared, every vine on his body creaking, and my heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

"Don't," I say. My voice is shaking. "Don't you move."

"Then don't TOUCH it like you're inspecting a fish at market."

"I wasn't inspecting. I was..." I don't have a word for what I was doing. "It's not working."

"It's not SUPPOSED to work. I'm BLEEDING."

We stare at each other. He is heaving, chest rising and falling, and the vines ride the motion and the thorns press fresh dimples into his skin and he doesn't seem to notice. I am sitting backwards on the most dangerous orc in the region, holding a dagger, and the loincloth has fallen back into place and his cock is still doing absolutely nothing and I want to scream.

"You have to..." He stops. Clenches his jaw. The fury drains out of his face and something else replaces it, something I have never seen on an orc. He looks embarrassed. "There is a process."

"A process," I repeat.

"It requires..." He looks at the ceiling. The fungi pulse blue-green. He looks back at me. "Attention."

"I was giving it attention."

"You were POKING it."

I climb off him. My thighs ache from the stretch and my face is on fire and his cock is still asleep and there is a process, apparently, that I don't know because nobody teaches me anything.

He is burning up. The fever is eating him. Sweat glazes his skin and his breathing is wrong, too shallow, too quick. The wound seeps through my bandage when I peel the edge back, pink and ugly, the flesh angry. He needs herbs before he needs anything else.

"I'm addressing the wound first," I say, and my voice comes out steady because I planned this sentence on the way down. "Then we're going to discuss this... process."

He closes his eyes. The almost-smile is back. I want to stab it.

I pull my herb pouch from my pack and kneel at his side, and my hands are steadier here because this I know. Herbs, I know. The runt-work they gave me because they didn't trust me with anything that mattered. Turns out that work matters now.

I clean the gash. Fresh water from the bromeliads above, squeezed through moss, and he sucks air through his teeth when it hits. The mighty Brath of the Gorrath, killer of Amazons, flinching at water.

"Look who's a baby," I say. The words are out before I can stop them. The warrior voice is gone. That was just me.

His eyes open. The amber locks onto my face and his jaw works and I think I have just made a terrible mistake.

"That," he says, "was a grimace of joy, little one."

I press the poultice into the wound. His ribs expand under my hands and the tight pull in them goes loose and I can feel the relief run through his body.

"Was it," I say, and I press harder.

He sucks air again. His whole body locks. The vine at his throat goes taut and his fingers dig into the moss and a sound comes out of him that he did not want me to hear.

I rewrap the bandage. Tighter this time. My hands move along his ribs, pressing the poultice flat. Ridges of scar tissue, muscle that twitches when I press too hard. The dark green of his skin fades to something paler along his sides, softer, where the scars thin out and the flesh is almost smooth.

"You're the smallest Amazon I've ever seen."

My hands stop. I squint at his face and he looks back with that same patient expression, jaw loose, eyes steady on me.

"Shut up."

"Small hands. Good for herbs."

"I said shut up." My voice cracks. I patch it. "You are my prisoner and you will be quiet."

He watches me. I can feel it while I work, his gaze tracking my hands, my fingers, the way I tear cloth strips with my teeth. He watches me stay. I pack the herbs, check the vines again, tighten the ones at his chest because tightening them makes me feel like I'm doing something. The thorns catch fresh points in his skin and he doesn't react, doesn't flinch. The thorns are nothing to him and I know this somewhere I refuse to look.

"When you're healed," I say, and my hands are shaking under the bandage scraps. "When you're strong enough. I'm going to mate with you." The words leave my mouth and I hear them from outside myself and they sound insane. I sound insane. The other Amazons would be on the floor.

He looks at me. The fungi pulse. Rain drips into the grotto, warm, finding the back of my neck. He doesn't look away.

"In front of who."

I blink. "What?"

"When your tribe mates." He shifts his jaw. The vine creaks. "Who watches?"

"Nobody watches." The words come out too fast. "Why would anyone watch?"

His face does something I can't read. The amber eyes hold mine and whatever moves behind them stays behind them.

"All right," he says.

He says two words in that low gravel-voice. His jaw moves when he swallows, and the vine at his throat creaks, and I look away before I figure out what that means. I sit back on my heels with my bloody hands on my thighs and something behind my sternum hitting the inside of my ribs. The vines hold. I have him. My magic works.

That is enough. For now, that is enough.