Chapter 5 - Tomorrow, Orc

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The fever broke sometime before dawn. The grotto stayed wet and close, but the fire under my skin was gone, like someone pulled it out of me by the root.

The wound is closed. The skin is pink and tight where yesterday it gaped. I have taken injuries. Axe-strokes across my shoulders. A jaguar's claws down my thigh. None of them knit like this, in a single night. I tell myself it is the poultices. The herbs she packed into the gash. I tell myself it is my body, doing what my body does. Surviving.

The vines are warm against my skin. Warmer than the air. The ones on my wrists are wrapped twice, which means she came back while I slept and reinforced them. I could sneeze and lose three.

She arrives the way she always does, feet first, the sound of someone trying to be quiet and failing because the jungle floor is made of things that snap. The string bra has shifted from her walk, one triangular cover riding up, the dark swell of her breast spilling from the bottom edge. The nipple is half-exposed, dark against the copper of her skin. She doesn't fix it. My mouth goes dry.

She doesn't go for the bandage.

Her hand slides down my stomach. Below the vine-wrap. Below the X of thorns across my chest. Her fingers are cool against my skin, shaking, and they do not stop.

"Hold still."

Her voice cracks on the second word. She patches it and lifts her chin. The bone spear is three feet away, propped against the root wall. She put down her weapon.

"I'm going to touch you now," she says.

Her hand finds the loincloth. Pushes it aside. Her fingers close around my cock, and it is soft and heavy in her grip. She holds it the way she'd hold a weapon she's never trained with, uncertain where the grip goes.

Then she pulls the foreskin back hard, like peeling bark off a branch.

Every vine on my body goes taut. My spine arches off the stone and a sound comes out of me that is not the sound a warchief makes.

"OW."

She yanks her hand back. Stares at me. Stares at my cock, then back at me.

"What?"

"You can't-" I am breathing through my teeth. The thorns at my throat bite and I don't care. "That is not how it works."

"I know how it works."

"You do not know how it works."

"I have seen-"

"You have seen nothing. Amazons hunt human men. Human men are-" I don't know the word. "Different. Smaller. You cannot just peel it back like a-" I don't know the word for what she did. "Like that."

She is staring at my cock with the expression of someone who has been told her weapon is loaded wrong. Her jaw works. Her cheeks darken. The copper skin goes red at the edges and she is embarrassed and furious and she will not admit either.

"Show me," she says.

"I am tied up."

"You are my prisoner. You will tell me."

I look at the ceiling of the grotto and exhale. I am the warchief of the Gorrath. I have killed jaguars. I am tied in paper vines explaining to an amazon warrior how to touch my cock.

"Slow," I explain as her vines wiggle around me. "The skin moves. Don't force it. Let it-" I don't have words for this. Orcs don't talk about this. Mounting is public and nobody explains anything because explaining is weakness. "Just. Slow. Grip the shaft. The skin slides on its own."

Her hand comes back, careful this time. Her fingers close around the shaft and she grips and slides and the foreskin moves with her hand and something unlocks in my spine. I feel myself thicken under her grip, the blood answering, the shaft swelling against her palm.

Her hand stops.

I watch her face. She is staring at what she is holding and her eyes are getting wider and her mouth is opening and she is recalculating everything she thought she knew. The thing she poked yesterday, the thing she called small, the thing she compared to her thumb, is not the size of her thumb anymore. It is growing in her hand and she can feel it pulse with each heartbeat and her fingers can no longer close around it. Dark veins surface along the shaft, red and purple against the green, and the head swells past the foreskin and she makes a sound in the back of her throat that is not a word.

"That," I say, "is not dead."

Her eyes snap to my face. Back down. Back to my face. Her grip tightens and the sensation rips through me.

"Like that?"

"Yes." The word comes out strangled.

She does it again, slower. Her thumb finds the ridge below the head where the foreskin gathers and she traces it. My hips buck one inch before I can stop them.

Something warm stirs at my left wrist. A fresh green shoot has crept over the break while she slept. My hips buck and it tears loose with a wet peel. I close my fist over the gap.

She doesn't notice the vine. She noticed the buck. Her chin lifts.

"Good?"

"Yes."

She grins, that grin of hers, small and sharp and terrified underneath and she doesn't know I can see the terrified part. She brings her other hand up because one is not enough anymore. Both hands wrap around the shaft and her fingers still don't meet and I watch her process that, the slight widening of her eyes, the way she adjusts her grip and then adjusts it again.

I have been touched before, by Durga. She gripped me the way she gripped a weapon, hard and efficient, and I came fast and she came away bruised because my hand was on her hip and I squeezed when I finished and her hipbone cracked under my palm and the sound it made stayed with me. Others came before Durga, and all of them hurt. The pattern does not vary.

Etzin's hands move, slow and learning. Both of them working the shaft now, sliding together, and the foreskin glides under her palms and she's figured out the mechanism and now she's exploring it. She is mapping me the way I'd map a weapon, testing what makes me twitch, what makes me hold my breath. Her hands are shaking and she doesn't stop.

"You like that?" Her voice shakes on the last word. She clears her throat. "Tell me."

"Yes."

It is one word and her eyes snap to my face. She didn't expect me to answer. Her grip tightens.

She strokes once, twice. My cock is harder than it has ever been. Her hand is small enough that she has to use both. Her palms are slick with sweat. Both hands sliding the length of me in the blue-green fungal light.

The vine at my throat tightens as my neck cords. Thorns prick into my skin. My fingers gouge the moss beside my hips and find rock underneath and I dig into the rock because digging into rock is better than grabbing her wrist.

She speeds up. Finds a rhythm. My breathing goes ragged and she hears it and her chin lifts and her hands are still shaking.

"Your hands are shaking," I say.

Her jaw clenches. Her grip goes tighter. Punishing. "Shut up."

Something behind my ribs makes a sound that is not pain.

"Not yet."

She stops. Takes her hands off me. The air hits wet skin and I make a sound that comes from somewhere deep enough that I didn't know it was there, low and involuntary. The warchief does not make sounds like that. The warchief is always watched.

This is the first time there is no one watching.

She waits. My cock twitches in the dark, slick, the head swollen and flushed. She watches it, her gaze assessing and hungry. She puts her hands back. Strokes until my vision blurs and the vine at my right wrist creaks loud enough to echo.

We freeze. Both of us. Her hands on me, my hand closed over the slack at my wrist. Nothing moves.

It holds.

"You stop when I say stop." Her voice is steadier now.

She pulls back, waits, returns. The pattern crystallizes. She edges me, stops, waits for the shaking to ease, edges me again. Her technique is clumsy and pure. Her hands move like she is learning a weapon. The warband watches and the warchief performs and it is over and everyone saw and no one touched anything.

She touches everything.

Her palm flat against the underside, then both hands around the shaft, sliding and twisting, her thumb dragging across the head. She finds the spot below the head where the skin pulls tight and I jerk and the throat-vine bites and she grins. She grins and her teeth show and her knee presses against my hip for leverage and I am shaking.

"Harder," I say.

She freezes. Stares at me. Her mouth opens and closes. Her grip tightens, harder.

"Good girl."

She makes a sound that is not words. Her whole face goes dark and her hands move faster and her jaw sets and she doesn't look at me and I should not have said that because something in my chest did something and I don't have a name for it.

She edges me until my arms shake, until the rock under my fingers has grooves. She stops, I break. She keeps going, I hold still.

She doesn't let me finish.

She sits back, breathing hard, sweat beading on her forehead. Her hands are wet with me. She doesn't wipe them. She looks at her slick fingers and then at my cock, still hard, still twitching, and something shifts in her face. She made the warchief of the Gorrath shake.

Her hand drops lower. Cups beneath the shaft, finds the weight there, rolls it in her palm. She looks up at me with that grin, the real one, teeth and copper skin flushed dark.

"And what about these?"

Every muscle in my body locks. "Woman. Those are not for playing."

Her grin widens. She squeezes, gentle, testing, and my spine arches off the stone and three vines creak at once and I catch every single one of them.

"They seem important," she says. She is sweating and grinning and her fingers are exploring and she has no idea what she is doing and she is having the time of her life. The runt of the Omazin, holding the warchief's balls in her palm, and she looks like she just conquered a city.

The vine across my chest pulses warm with her warmth, not the grotto's. It surged when she tightened her grip. The warmth is coming from her, pouring through the vines.

The grotto is a shell and the ruins are dead stone. The magic is coming from her. Every time she touches me, the wound knits faster, and she does not know.

I crossed the Itzince and lost my warband to find druidic magic. It has been wrapped around me the whole time, pouring out of a girl who thinks she is only good for clearing trails.

She picks up her spear. Checks the bindings, the throat-vine, the wrist wraps. A new vine has laced itself over my left wrist while she worked me, thin and green and eager. She tightens the one on my right and I flatten my hand so she doesn't feel the give underneath. She nods. She loops another vine around my thigh, pulls my legs apart an inch, cinches it tight. Her fingers linger on the inside of my knee. She leans close, her breath warm against my skin, and I can smell the sweat on her and the crushed herbs on her fingers.

"Tomorrow, orc." She leans close enough that her breath hits my ear. "Tomorrow I take you."

She leaves.

I lie in the dark, my cock still throbbing, still wet from her grip. The vines pulse with her fading warmth. The rock under my fingers has grooves where I held on. Everything smells like wet bark and her.