The Orc's Queen
Chapter 1 of a new series and a cover poll. Please help me choose!
Hello, everyone! I need your opinion. I’ve got four versions of the cover for the first book in my new series, Beastly Hearts, which is basically My Monster Girlfriend for the fantasy genre. I have a poll at the end of this post so you can vote for your favorite cover!
If you need some context, here’s the first chapter:
The Orc’s Queen - Chapter 1
Steel screams through the dense red fog.
"We’re losing, General." Erik tugs his hatchet free from a man’s skull with a squelch.
Zalara grits her teeth. She didn’t come all this way to lose now, when they’d fought so well. Her soldiers had been divided neatly into troops when they’d marched through Hyacinth’s Pass, but as the battle wore on, they scattered to the winds. The Red battalion, she heard, still holds the Pass. No word on the others for far too long.
If she calls for a surrender, there will be no chance of peace. They die in battle or they die on a foreigner’s gallows.
"Then we lose. But we won’t give it to them," Zalara grunts, wiping the last bit of blood off the blade of her axe. She lets the cloth hang around her belt and waits, playing with the sun’s glint on double-headed steel.
She and Erik are all that’s left of the General’s Battalion. They’re backed into a cliff side, tucking themselves against the rocks. Below is the Hyacinth river, where the fighting’s raged since midday. And not in the orcs’ favor.
The treeline shivers with enemy soldiers.
She grips her axe in one hand. A line of ten men tightens into formation.
An arrow whistles.
Erik shouts.
Zalara turns, horrified, as Erik crumples. Dead—she knows it before she catches his unblinking stare. The arrow hit him right between the eyes.
Men pour from the trees in droves. She ducks behind a rock, facing the edge of the cliff. It’s a long drop, but she might survive it.
She tosses her axe into the valley so she won’t injure herself on it. Orcish steel won’t crack under a bit of stone. It sings on its way and clatters the dirt.
"Find the General!" A human man bellows. He sounds like a boy.
Footsteps gallop faster. Zalara wastes no time to allow for fear.
By the time the humans have swarmed her hiding spot, she’s halfway down the cliff.
She slides, mostly—rocks crumble underneath her boots and jut into her when she tries to get a foothold. Her heart hangs in her throat. She tries to quiet it and listen for the enemy, but every time she loses her footing, it leaps again. It’s half-falling, half-climbing, and mostly struggling not to go head over heels into the river.
Halfway down, a rock strikes her knee. Her arms splay and for a long, painful moment, her body soars.
Her hip catches stone, and pain explodes on the left side of her body. Zalara doesn’t even notice she’s landed on solid ground for a moment.
Her vision clears long enough to see an ugly wound jutting her pelvis. When she tilts her body, the muscle spasms. Her tusks cut her upper lip with how hard she’s biting, struggling to keep herself quiet. The wind whines between the mountains like it’s mocking her.
Swallow. Breathe. If they find her, she’s dead.
The enemy is quiet in the valley. No one peers over the cliff to see her.
The darkening clouds rumble. The wind picks up, tugging at the cloth on Zalara’s waist. All at once, rain pours hard, turning the dirt to mud.
Zalara rolls onto her side to get the pelting rain off her wound. When she looks up, she has to squint to make out anything at all. Her axe. Where was her axe?
She crawls the cliff side with clumsy hands, straining to keep her head up. Wind tosses rocks across the river. She tenses when they pass her face, tries to anticipate them before they can hit her.
But she can’t see in this rain, and even if she could, she can’t move fast enough.
A rock slams into her waist, toppling her over.
"Motherfucker." Zalara’s face twists. She weighs twice as much as most human women, and she’s finding it difficult to keep on her hands and knees. She curls onto her side, staring up at the rain, trying desperately to see what’s behind it.
Rock. But it’s dark—it’s not raining behind the sheet.
She’s found a cave.
Zalara drags her body from the torrent, panting in the dry space. The wind stops buffeting her.
"Motherfucker," Zalara repeats. The humans will be taking shelter. She hopes the soldiers she has left have the sense to make a retreat while they’ve got the chance.
Erik. She grimaces. She doesn’t want to think about his body, motionless on foreign rock, so she tries to stand. It’s hard work, and she curses the entire time, but if she moves carefully, she can stand. And if she moves even more carefully, she can walk. She spits mud on the cave floor.
Every time her legs move, the bones themselves beg her to stop. She wants to go back into the rain and search for her axe. Retrieve Erik’s body. Pain flutters behind the wound when she steps, beating in time with her heart. Leaving the cave isn’t an option. As much as she doesn’t want to acknowledge it, this is a North Wind. Nothing else would have picked up rocks like that.
North Winds take days to clear, sometimes weeks. If she tries to push through it, she’s as likely to die in it as she is to find her axe and make her way home. She grinds her tusks against her top row of teeth in agitation.
Humans are made of weaker stuff. They’ve probably tucked tail and hidden.
It doesn’t take long before the light at the mouth of the cave vanishes. Zalara has a torch in her pack, which is gone, and she has a handful of firestarter in her pocket, but it dissolved the moment the rain touched it.
Her plan hinged on Erik getting out alive with her. If one of them was injured, fine—the other could get them to shelter and call for help. Orcs fight better in groups, and Zalara’s battalion is a force. Was a force.
She tries not to imagine his body tossed from the cliff, floating the Hyacinth river. Instead, she lets herself get angry. She tries to conjure the face of every man who came out of the treeline and thinks of how she will split each of them apart when she finds them.
The next human she sees is dead.
Zalara drifts to the wall, shuffling quietly. Or trying to—orcs are rarely trained for stealth, and she can’t see a godsdamned thing. Every other step she takes rattles echoing rock for ages.
Her thigh strikes a stalagmite. Her vision dances, clouds spinning in the dark, and her knees buckle underneath her. She plants her back to the wall to keep her upright, trying to breathe through the pain, and slides to a seat on a thick slab of rock.
When she touches her side, it comes away wet. It’s still bleeding—she doesn’t know how long ago she was injured, but it should have stopped by now.
She’s considering a bandage from her own clothing when she feels eyes on her. Her head jerks. She quiets her breathing.
As part of her training, she learned to hunt in the dark. Orcs make their homes in caves back home. She spent years crouched in the dark, watching for the glint of an eyeball, the flash of a knife.
Nothing comes. Zalara is unarmed, but she tenses her muscles anyway. She doesn’t know who might be lurkinghere, who might have found shelter first. If one soldier found this place, several probably followed. She’ll gut them with her bare hands.
A handful of pebbles scatter the quiet. Zalara grits her teeth, balls her hands into fists, and hauls to her feet.
Aveline breathes steadily through her nostrils. Finding this cave when she did was a wild stroke of luck, and she supposes she should have known there would be a catch. When has fortune ever been in her favor for longer than the space of a blink?
The orc is decorated in the armor of a general. If they were meeting on the field right now, Aveline’s sword would have already sliced the orc’s head off. But on the field, Aveline has an army. Stranded in a cave during one of the worst electric storms she’s ever seen, armed with only the dagger strapped to her thigh? Different story.
At present, her best option is to stay as silent as possible. Surely she can’t hide until the storm passes in such cramped quarters, but the orc is injured. There’s a chance they’ll die, or at least grow considerably weaker, before she has to worry about them at all.
When she heard them grunting and moaning on their way inside, Aveline scurried up the tallest rock she could reach. She’s far above their head, but if they spot her, they could certainly climb up themself. Or throw something at her head and kill her. Orcs are stronger than they are big, and they’re…not small.
If she were to fight them, now would be the time to do so. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness. The orc is probably feeling their way around blind right now. But Aveline knows their sense of hearing is so acute it’s nearly as good as sight.
She eyes the dark silhouette warily. The orc stumbles to a seat against the cave wall across from her hiding perch. Even sitting down, the orc is huge. Their head would probably reach Aveline’s shoulders if she were standing next to them.
Aveline’s foot tingles. She’s been sitting on it for several minutes. She shifts slightly to relieve the pressure, sending an unseen cascade of tiny pebbles skittering onto the cave floor.
"Fuck," she whispers.
The orc is on their feet, fists raised to their chin. They lean hard onto one leg, clearly favoring their other hip. That’s Aveline’s target. But she waits. The orc still can’t see her, and if she’s quiet, their adrenaline and the fact that they’re standing will drain blood from the wound quicker. The longer she hides, the weaker they’ll be.
She silently slips the dagger into her hand and waits.
"Who’s there?" The orc’s voice is as deep as a growl, but there’s a distinct femininity to it. Is her orc invader a woman? "I’m not looking for a fight here," the orc says. "The storm has made allies of us."
Aveline wouldn’t want to fight with blood gushing from her and spilling onto the floor, either. There’s so much of it now that she can smell it from her perch. Coppery, heavy on her tongue.
"Speak!" the orc bellows.
Aveline can’t spot a weapon. But her stance and voice are strong, making Aveline worry that the orc is not as close to death as she’d like her to be. She can’t stay hidden through this entire storm.
She sighs, but keeps her blade in her hand.
"I’ll come down if you won’t eat me," Aveline says, half-joking, half not. She doesn’t know if orcs actually eat humans, but she’s, of course, heard enough tales in her childhood to hesitate.
The orc huffs roughly. She sinks back to a seat against the wall, clearly reluctant to do so. "A human. Of course. My fortune abounds."
Aveline eyes the cave opening. The rain is so heavy she can’t see even a foot past the white sheet. "Truce through the storm?" she asks.
The orc nods, trusting Aveline can see her in the dark.
Aveline shuffles to the back of the rock to brace against it and the wall, shuffling down the same way she climbed up. Her feet slap onto the stone floor.
"You sound small," the orc says. "And female?"
"Guilty on both counts." Aveline approaches cautiously, taking a seat next to her discarded rucksack, several paces away from the orc. "Ave."
"Hi, Ave," the orc says through gritted teeth with a tight hand on her hip. "It’s frankly awful to meet you. I’m Zalara."
Aveline eyes her. "Quite a wound you have there."
"It’s fine," Zalara snaps.
"Looks fine," Aveline says with an eye roll.
She pulls a wrapped torch from her bag, unwinding the length of fabric that kept the head dry. She holds it to the cave wall and wraps her dagger blade against it, catching sparks on the torch until it finally catches. It blazes the cave to light.
She didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to her hiding spot before, but the storm is an impenetrable wall. Her troops have either found shelter or died in it. Aveline swallows hard. Thinking about that now isn’t going to help anyone.
At least she can get a lay of her temporary home. She lifts the torch to explore the depth of the cave. It’s big enough, she supposes. A little bigger than her bedchambers, which are, to be fair, quite massive. It should be easy to keep warm. The chill of the storm pushes deeper into her bones every minute. She shivers.
Zalara watches her sideways. Her hand is resting casually against her hip, but Aveline can see the white of her knuckles gripping the wound. She’s trying to play it off, but she’s hurt. Bad.
Aveline’s also surprised to see that the insignia on her left shoulder, which identifies Zalara as a general, is gone. Not only did she remove it, but she did so quickly and without Aveline seeing. If Zalara wants to hide her identity, that’s fine by Ave.
She stands to explore the hidden shadows of the cave, and nearly moans with pleasure when she finds a stack of dry firewood. Someone very kind and considerate, or more likely, someone who died before they could use their stores, has left a whole mound of supplies. She’ll dig through the wooden crate and cloth bag after she’s gotten a fire going. The cold is making it hard to think.
She hauls an armload of wood and kindling to the middle of the cave and lights it with her torch. Aveline crouches low to blow softly on the baby flames until they're an adolescent fire.
Aveline smiles and warms her hands. She peeks at Zalara in the brighter light.
Zalara’s skin, which should be a light purple, is grayed from blood loss. Her dark hair is tightly braided along her scalp in battle style, tied behind her head with a rough swath of leather. The breastplate covering her from neck to midsection heaves and rattles with labored breath.
Cold, deep golden eyes glare openly at Aveline now.
"What are you staring at?" Zalara growls.
"You’re badly wounded," Aveline says simply. "Do you want help, or shall I leave you to die?"
Zalara frowns and turns her head to the rain.
"It makes no difference to me. Suit your own tastes." Aveline stands and crosses back to the supply stack to take inventory.
In the box, she finds a store of rotting roots. She wrinkles her nose. They were edible a few months ago, probably. She sets them aside. There’s a small knife, which she tucks into her belt, just to keep it out of Zalara’s hands. A corked glass bottle of topical medication, she decides after a quick sniff, and several rolls of clean bandages. There’s also a cooking pot, which will be perfect for collecting water. Dehydration is the only real threat of staying in a cave for a few days, besides the massive enemy slumped against the wall behind her.
The bag is full of clothes. She pulls a huge tunic over her head. It smells musty, but she’s grateful for the extra layer.
A soft, heavy thump turns Aveline’s head back to Zalara. She’s fallen over, unconscious on the cave floor. Aveline rolls her eyes again.
She grabs the ointment bottle, a roll of bandages, the pot, and the bag of clothes.
When she nudges Zalara with her foot, there’s no movement. She holds her blade under her nostrils and watches it fog up. Not dead.
Aveline’s conscience won’t let her leave a nonviolent being to die. "Nonviolent" right now, at least. Nations at war seem far away from this secluded cave, but she can't let her guard down.
She pokes the pot from the entrance, and it fills with water in just a few seconds. It takes her a moment to fashion nails pried from the wooden crate with other pieces of firewood to hang the pot over the flames. She feeds the fire to keep it hot for sterilizing water.
Then she sets about disrobing Zalara. She needs to strip her to evaluate her wounds, and heavy armor will just press blood out of her faster.
The breastplate is attached to the back armor with leather straps beneath her arms. Aveline unlashes them, slipping the heavy metal plates onto the floor. All Zalara wears beneath is a thick, sleeveless red shirt. Aveline leaves that on her, then moves to removing the metal plates from the fronts of her thighs, then her heavy boots and the thick leather trousers.
When she’s finished, Zalara wears the sleeveless red top and brown fabric pants. She looks pretty nonthreatening without her armor. And passed out, of course.
The leather trousers were holding the wound on her hip closed, and the blood flows freely again.
Aveline moves quickly, sitting on her rump with her back braced against the cave wall, then rolls Zalara onto her uninjured side with a strained grunt. She pants from the exertion. Zalara is a heavy woman.
Aveline clamps one hand over the wound while she reaches with her other arm to take the now-boiling water from the flames. She settles the pot beside her, draping the cloth she used over the side. There were some cleaner scraps of fabric that she dips into the hot water before holding it aloft to cool.
The bleeding has slowed significantly, with the pressure of her hand, the force of gravity, and Zalara’s weakening heartbeat.
She wrings the excess water from her cloth, then dabs Zalara’s wound. That process repeats until the gash is clean. A bone protrudes, which she expected. It doesn’t look broken, but the slice of flesh is significant.
Aveline dribbles ointment into the wound, hoping it was created by a competent healer, then tugs the wound together as tightly as she can, wrapping it with the clean roll of bandage. Wrapping the bandage around her hips would use too much of it, so Aveline wraps it around her thigh instead. It's a tough chore, pushing hard enough to get between the thick logs of meat, but she does it well enough and fastens it with a knot.
It holds, and blood isn’t seeping through it yet. That could be a good sign, but is likely a bad one instead. She feels the pulse at Zalara’s wrist. Weak, but steady. She might pull through.
Satisfied that she’s done what she can, Aveline sits back and drops her head to the ceiling. What a day. What a year.
Another battle with no clear winner, and no progress made for either side. Carnage, and useless carnage at that.
Firelight flicks shadows across Zalara’s face. She’s not bad to look at. Strong jaw, thick eyebrows. Aveline can’t see her eyes now, but she thinks the golden color is pleasant. Some orcs have a bright, intense yellow to their eyes. Zalara’s were softer, like sunshine through a stream of honey. Her mouth is wide, with full lips and two small white tusks protruding from each corner. Her eyelashes are thick too, the same dark as her eyebrows and hair.
Aveline can see now that she has thick streaks of red in her black hair. Her braids are mussed and tangled, and dirt and blood smudge her face. Whether from battle or whatever injured her hip, Zalara looks rough.
Well, nothing else to do. Aveline rises to her knees and finds a fresh cloth. She dips it in the still-warm water, wrings it thoroughly, then sets to carefully wiping Zalara’s face clean.
Zalara looks peaceful while she sleeps. Or while she slips into death.
Aveline pets the corner of her cloth through Zalara's eyebrows, dislodging caked and dried muck. When her face is clean, she unbraids her hair and brushes the knots out with her finger. It becomes necessary to rest Zalara’s head on something, so she slips her thighs beneath it and holds her in her lap while she brushes.
She's never been this close to orc hair. It's as soft as a baby's.
After removing twigs and rat nests of hair, she squeezes water into it and does a half-assed wash job. Then she realizes she doesn’t know how to execute the complicated, tight braids orcs use. She settles on a loose one. A few strands around her face are too short, so they hang loose and frame her features.
Aveline watches her soft face, then blinks hard. What the fuck is she doing? She slips her thighs from under Zalara’s head, replacing herself with the bunched-up fabric bag as a pillow.
She washes Zalara’s arms, then her hands. The hands take longer, as they’re huge and difficult to wield. She scrubs between her fingers, thoroughly cleaning all of the skin of her hands. Dark semicircles of dirt are lodged under her nails.
Aveline uses her own thumbnail to scrape beneath Zalara’s pinky nail clean.
"That tickles," Zalara murmurs with her eyes closed.
Aveline jumps hard. "You’re awake!"
"Mm." She keeps her eyes shut.
"How long have you been awake?"
"Since you started yanking at my hair," she mutters.
Aveline opens and closes her mouth, feeling the flush creep across her cheeks. Zalara’s been awake for the past half hour of her carefully grooming her.
Aveline clears her throat. "Well, you won’t heal if you’re disgusting."
Zalara peeks one eye at her. "Yeah, I don’t know what I’d do without a little braid to sustain me."
Aveline snorts, then realizes she’s still holding Zalara’s hand in both of hers. She drops it.
"So you’re a healer." Zalara’s voice is weak, and her eyes are half-lidded and foggy. "Glad I didn’t kill you after all."
"Yep," Aveline says. If Zalara wants to invent a disguise for her, all the better. "And you didn’t kill me because you couldn’t walk. But!" She pushes to her feet to add wood to the fire. "If you’re awake, you’ll probably be fine. My congratulations to you. I’m sure your general will be happy to have you return alive." She watches Zalara in the corner of her eye.
Zalara doesn’t move. "I’m sure they will."
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