Misconstrued, p.14
Misconstrued, page 14
His face darkened and he nodded.
I paused to consider how to even begin to address that. “You know that sooner or later, I’m going to have to pick one of you.”
Tybalt just shrugged. “Could pick all.”
“Humans don’t really do that,” I said, gently.
He frowned at me then. “Yes. Man in camp pick six womens.”
“Yeah … that isn’t normal,” I tried.
“Could be,” he repeated. “Erika picked three.”
I wanted to point out that she was only having sex with Lucky, but it occured to me that I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days, and that might have changed. I wanted to go ask her, but one look out the window dissuaded me.
“I thought you didn’t like to share,” I protested.
“Better sharing than none,” he countered.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but there are more women than men in the camps. If I don’t pick you, you can always find someone else.”
He firmly shook his head at that one. “No. Want you.”
“Why?” I demanded. “I’m nothing special.”
“Yes,” he disagreed, falling into a bit of a sulk.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went back to counting out the cards. I wondered if the other three could hear the conversation from where they were sitting in the living room.
I got to the end and left the cards in two piles as I thought about what to do next. The light coming in through the windows wasn’t exactly bright and cheerful. I didn’t know If I wanted to try to teach the rules for a card game just now.
“Do orcs have ghost stories?” I asked.
Tybalt gave me a puzzled look.
“It just seems like good ghost story weather,” I mumbled.
“Good weather for snuggles?” he suggested.
I laughed. “I’ll tell you what. If you want to tell me stories, we can snuggle on the couch.”
Tybalt jumped up and headed to the living room. Romeo and Mac both appeared as if by magic from their rooms. Tybalt and I sat on the couch, and they knelt at my feet before I banished them to the chairs.
It turned out that ghost stories weren’t a concept they understood. They told me stories of their childhoods, which were worse. It all sounded like child abuse to me. None of them saw it that way.
Finally, Tybalt, who had been smirking the whole time, announced, “I have TWO sisters!” like he was laying down an ace.
Romeo and Mac groaned. They all looked at me expectantly.
“Um … good?” I hazarded. “Were you nice to them?”
It was the wrong question. It didn’t even seem to translate.
“Didn’t get to see them,” he mumbled.
“Why not?” I asked.
Once again, there was no sign of understanding.
Mac, who had been frowning, now growled, “Half-sisters.”
“Maybe not!” Tybalt snapped.
“I feel like I’ve entered the twilight zone.” Once again they were looking at me with a polite lack of understanding. “How can you not know if they’re your half-sisters or not?”
“Father is who mother says,” Mac explained. “I bet she said not his father.”
“But,” I tried to phrase my question with care, “you can check for that, right?” There was much shaking of heads. “You have interstellar space travel but not paternity testing?”
“Not in generations,” Romeo answered. “Mothers didn’t like it. No one wants to upset them.”
“But then how do you avoid inbreeding?” I asked.
“Sisters live separate.” Romeo said, like it was the most obvious thing.
“Wow. Okay. Well, you do know how to tell a scary story, I’ll give you that.” I looked out at the window, where there was no sign of a break in the weather. “Now, the important question is—who is going to go out in the storm with me to find dinner?”
“Iago go,” Tybalt immediately volunteered.
“No, Iago has already gone twice. It’s someone else's turn.”
“I went,” Romeo reminded me.
“I’ll go,” I assured him. “I was just wondering if anyone would come with me.”
Mac shook his head. “You go out in storm, we get in trouble. I go.”
Tybalt was clearly torn on that. “I get breakfast?” he suggested.
Mac just shrugged and headed towards the door.
“Thank you!” I called.
Tybalt frowned, then hurried out the door, to Romeo’s amusement.
“Spoiled!” he laughed. “Probably does have sisters.”
“How did you end up buying me with him if you think he’s spoiled?” I mused.
Romeo really looked at me then. “You scared—you were scared,” he corrected himself, “and hungry, I could help.”
I frowned at him, suspecting that Romeo knew more about me than I knew about him.
“Romeo?” I whispered. “Are there any places left in the world where humans just get to live their lives and the orcs don’t interfere?”
He considered this. “There is some, far away. Soon will be more. Places where orcs and humans live together. Better than here.”
“What happens if you find some humans living on their own?” I pressed.
Iago came out of their room and looked at me. “If they aren’t hurting each other and they don’t need help, we don’t bother them.”
“I wasn’t hurting anyone and I didn’t need help when you found me, and I was brought here anyway.”
“One person alone is not enough,” he explained. “Need to have enough people to protect each other.” He stopped and thought for a moment, then added, “Commune, but with no hurting the kids.”
“Communes aren’t for hurting kids!” I protested.
He just shrugged. I watched him stare at me for a while before he added, “I don’t have any sisters.”
“So?” I asked. “Neither do I. It was just me and three brothers.”
“What happened to them?” Romeo asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “They had moved away when you got here, and I wasn’t able to get in touch with them once you were. And you’ve told me there is a fifty-fifty chance that they didn’t make it.”
Romeo opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and walked away. Iago was just watching me like a hawk, waiting to see what I would do next. In that moment, I could understand what Iago must have felt like when we were talking. Sometimes, I could see him force himself to let go of something in order to stay in the room with me. Now it was my turn.
None of these particular orcs were personally responsible for whatever had happened to my family. I had to keep that in mind, but it wasn’t easy. The alternative of being angry at them all the time hadn’t worked for me either, though. I needed to find a way to live in the world I had, rather than the world as I wanted it to be.
It felt like giving up.
I hated that.
“Iago?” I was afraid to ask, but I needed to know. “Were there any people living in Siobhan Hall?”
“We made lots of noise going in. If there were humans, they could have left,” he said, as though he was offering me an olive branch.
“What happened to your arm?”
Now he snorted and laughed. “Creature knocked over metal on me.”
“What kind of creature?” I pressed.
“Hmmm,” he said, considering this. Then he traced circles around his eyes with his finger and said, “Striped tail? Not an animal from stories. Not a cat or a dog.”
“A racoon,” I muttered. Yeah, that made sense. They got everywhere. “If there were humans at Siobhan Hall, can we leave them alone and go live elsewhere?” I asked.
“Erika chose,” he reminded me.
Right. I was going to have to talk to her.
- - - -
After supper, I nodded off on the couch while the guys were playing in the kitchen. Apparently they had no trouble seeing in the dark. I woke to the sound of a softly growled argument.
“Wah?” I mumbled, as I rubbed my eyes. I tried again, “What are you doing?”
“Deciding if we should wake you so you can sleep in your bed, or leave you where you are,” Iago replied.
“If we should carry you to bed,” Romeo rumbled.
That made me sit up. “No. Waking me is one thing, but I don’t like the idea of you touching me in my sleep.” It was dark in the room. There weren’t any blinds on the windows, but the only street lights that lit were the ones in the school yard for the humans. That was three or four blocks away. I shivered and rubbed my arms.
“I can’t see you in the dark,” I admitted.
“But you see colour better than we do,” Mac countered.
Tybalt assured me, “Won’t bump into you.”
“You aren’t the only things in this house for me to walk into,” I grumbled, as I tried to remember the layout of the room. I could vaguely see the shapes of them. They were huddled in the doorway between the living room and the dining room. I wondered, if I gave it a moment, if my eyes would adjust more.
“So, who won your game?” I asked.
“Me!” Mac sounded so pleased with himself. I wondered if he had won by stealing the others’ tokens again. Then I wondered if it mattered.
“Did you win anything good?” I teased.
The only response was ringing silence.
“Don’t do that,” I murmured. “It’s scary when I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I won Tybalt doing my work,” Mac admitted, sounding guilty.
“Ah,” I didn’t really know what else to say to that. My ability to see the room hadn’t gotten any better. “Maybe his first chore can be helping me get to my room without bumping into anything.” I jumped as fingers brushed mine, then I took the hand being offered. I was pulled to my feet and led down the hallway to my room. Eventually, my hand was placed on the bed, then released. “Thank you,” I whispered appreciatively.
“Welcome,” Iago murmured back, making me jump.
“I wasn’t expecting you!” I blurted out, then felt guilty for saying it like that. “I mean, it’s fine,” I tried to explain. “It was just unexpected.”
He ignored that. “Need any more help?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
I tensed as I felt him move, but a moment later the light in the bathroom flipped on. I blinked and covered my eyes.
“Sorry,” he rumbled.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’m going to need to be able to see so I can get ready for bed.”
He hadn’t left when I uncovered my eyes. I slid past him and closed the door to the bathroom behind me. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put on the shirt from Romeo that I hadn’t managed to replace yet. Iago was still in the room when I came out. I tried to think of a diplomatic way to make him leave, then realized that maybe I shouldn’t.
While I was lost in my own thoughts, he spoke. “You don’t want to live in the building because you don’t want to make trouble for people living there.”
I froze and panicked, before I remembered it was an easy truth to tell. “I haven’t been there in a year. I don’t know if there even is anyone living there.”
“You hope.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I do,” I admitted. “I don’t know what happened to them, but they aren’t here, so I hope they are okay.”
Iago nodded, “You were one of the last ... wild-caught humans. We found others in bad places, but you were alone.”
“I was alone getting food, but I wasn’t alone,” I admitted.
He nodded. “How did you get caught?”
I blinked. “It wasn’t you?”
Now he frowned at me, but he shook his head.
“Well, okay, not you, personally, but your team hunts humans. Were you with them when they caught me?”
He shook his head again. “No. I was hunting worse than you. I was hunting bad orcs until a moon cycle before Tybalt fed you.” He gave me a moment to think about that before he repeated his question. “How were you found? You weren’t in a bad place. I asked.”
I wondered about that. I was surprised that he had checked up on me. I guess I shouldn’t have been. “Why did you ask?”
He groaned and scrubbed his hand over his scalp. “You were afraid. If you were hurt, you might be too afraid to live with us.”
That gave me goosebumps as I started to imagine how bad a “bad place” must be to make people too afraid to live. Even when I didn’t want to be here, when I was offered an alternative to dying of exposure, I took it. Iago was still watching me.
“I was fishing by the river,” I explained. “I heard the orcs coming and I hid, but they found me anyway.”
“You fought.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Hell yes I fought!” I was indignant. “I didn’t know where they were taking me, or what was going to happen. Of course I fought!” There was something on his face that made me hesitate. “Why would you ask me that?”
“When you got here, you were hurt. The doctor described your bruises. Two orcs were executed for being too rough with you.”
I just stared at him in shock.
He shrugged. “Sometimes, they let the women watch. One tackled you to the ground and broke your ribs. One slammed you against a tree to tie your hands.”
I nodded silently. The doctor had glued a cut on my cheek shut. I still had a tiny scar. “They were killed for that?”
“You are small,” Iago growled. “They should have been able to catch you and not hurt you.”
Part of me wanted to object. I had fought, I wasn’t exactly helpless. On the other hand, I could clearly remember two of them laughing and the other four looking grim. I spent most of the walk to the camp trying to figure out who was more scary, the ones who laughed or the ones who didn’t. Time to change the subject.
“Is the reason there are no lights because orcs can see in the dark?”
He seemed to genuinely consider this before he nodded.
I was starting to recognize the signs, so I asked, “What aren’t you telling me?”
He bared his teeth at me for an instant then looked pained. “Humans have too many lights. Drown out the stars.”
“Lights make us feel safe,” I tried to explain. “The world is scary when you can’t see what’s coming for you.”
He shrugged, “The only things coming for you is other humans. They can’t see in the dark either.”
I bristled under the suggestion. I wanted to point out that there were areas where the city had given everyone a free LED for their porch light, and the suggestion to leave it on all night long to reduce crime. I didn’t know if it had worked, but it played into the over-policing issues we were still trying to sort out when they got here.
“Mina?” he said it so gently, that I looked at him in mild amazement. “You are safe now. Nothing bad is coming for you.”
I found myself nodding in agreement. I wasn’t sure that I believed it, but it was clear that he did. “The guys sleep on the other side of the bed so that they aren’t between me and the door or the bathroom.”
He nodded and just looked sad.
Shit. How did I offer and not make it an order? I snorted to myself realizing they probably wondered the exact same thing a hundred times a day. Then I realized he had stiffened at my dismissive laugh. Fuck. Straightforward time again. “I’m trying to figure out how to offer you that side of the bed without it sounding like you have to sleep there. I’m not any good at it. Then I realized that you probably feel that way when talking to me all the time.”
His eyes widened and he nodded like a bobble head doll for a moment before he got it together enough to stop. I flashed him a sad smile, then turned off the light, minced my way through the dark to the bed and got in under the covers.
With the socks on, I could barely hear his footsteps, but there was a soft mechanical sound and I wondered if that was his foot. When Iago climbed into bed, he got under the covers. I froze for a moment. That was new. The others hadn’t actually gotten into bed with me. Had he missed the memo? That must be it! Iago was the last one I would have guessed would push his luck. I didn’t correct him.
