Her Orc Protector: A Monster Fantasy Romance (Black Bear Clan Book 4)
Her Orc Protector: Chapter 4

The first wave hits as Korr pinches the sides of my wound together, the next when he stabs the needle through my skin. He’s gentle, but his large orc hands aren’t made for dainty work, so the first stitch takes him longer than it would take me. He ties the cord and cuts it off with his hunting knife, tugging unpleasantly at my skin.

For a long while, he pauses and stares at me with wide eyes, his throat working as if he wants to say something but can’t bring himself to do it.

Then he starts on the next one.

But he talks to me through it all, telling me in slow, halting words about how he built this hut. Perhaps he’s unused to talking much, or maybe he’s distracted. Still, his voice becomes a tether to a world before I was this badly hurt. He paints the scene for me, telling me which trees he felled for the platform, how he winched the wood up here, and how he’d had to abandon the first location he’d picked after a disgruntled bear chased him away from its den.

I flicker in and out of consciousness, my breaths coming fast around the wooden spoon until I black out. I wake up to throbbing pain in my forehead, and the process starts again, pinch, stab, thread, until I pass out once more.

I wake up, groggy and disoriented, to replace Korr returning from outside with a pot filled with fresh snow. On instinct, I try to push up, but my body won’t obey me. I bite back a pained cry, and the orc is by my side in an instant, crouching next to the bed.

“Stop,” he commands. “You will hurt yourself.”

I squint at him. “How long was I out?”

He shakes his head. “Not long. I need to wash you before I can put on the ointment. We were out of fresh water.”

I thank the gods that I’d woken up before he managed to slop some homemade healing salve on me and make matters worse. “No, that’s all right. If you could wash the wound, then just wrap it after it’s dry, that will do.”

Korr sits back on his heels and frowns at me. “I have Taris’ ointment. It will speed up the healing, and you will not get a fever and die, human.”

If I had the strength, I’d glower back at him. As it is, I only mutter, “Don’t know Taris. Don’t want to die.”

The orc blows out a breath, then walks away and returns with a small glass pot filled with a greenish salve. He unscrews the top and brings it to my nose.

I take a sniff, and some of my reluctance melts away. I smell honey and herbs, mostly wild thyme to fight infection and calendula to heal wounds. There’s lavender mixed in there, its scent potent, and perhaps rosemary?

Korr scoops up a dollop, grabs my wrist, and smears the paste over the scratched-up skin where the rope bit into my flesh.

“Hey!” I protest, trying to tug my hand away.

But he doesn’t let go. He scowls at me some more, and fear lances through me. He’s so much stronger, I can’t even get him to budge an inch, let alone free myself. He had only used his powerful body to help me, and I’d been so grateful when he carried me away from those villagers, when he’d pulled me up to the raised platform with the sheer force of his arms.

Now, he’s showing me quite clearly how feeble I am, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that most of my strength has been leached away by cold, injuries, and fear. I couldn’t hold a candle to him even on my best day.

Then the tingle on my skin registers, and I stop struggling. The salve soothes my pain, taking away its sharp edges. Where the green paste touched my wound, the redness lightens ever so slightly. It doesn’t clear the wound away completely, but because I’m so focused on it, I notice the absence of pain in that small patch of my skin.

“What—?” I ask, confused.

“That’s Taris’ balm,” he says and finally lets go of my wrist.

I stare up at him. “Is she…a witch?”

His lips quirk up at the corners, and I know an orc shouldn’t look adorable by any stretch of imagination, but with that chipped tusk and his dark eyes glimmering with humor, he is just that.

“No, she’s an orc,” he replies. “No witches in our clan. She’s kept it a secret, where she gets this stuff, but there’s a touch of magic in it.” He motions at my back. “Now will you let me put it on?”

“Y-yes,” I stammer. “As long as it’s safe?”

The orc pins me with a glare. “I would not put you in danger, little witch.”

The statement has the feel of an oath, so I flop back on the bed and let him clean the wound and smear the ointment all over it. Whatever is in it, it certainly works well. It doesn’t take the pain away completely, not that I expected it to, but the relief of erasing at least some of the throbbing is incredible.

Korr bandages me with torn-up strips from the old tunic he tore up earlier—I’m close enough now to see the sleeves being ripped into ribbons—and continues on to lesser scrapes and bruises all over my body.

When he reaches my toes, I scrunch up my eyes and ask, “How bad is it?”

To his credit, he doesn’t lie to me. “You might lose the tips of two toes,” he rumbles, his hand resting on my ankle. “But maybe not. I will wrap them tight, and we’ll know by morning.”

That’s the best I could hope for, and I don’t resist as he ties strips of linen around my feet, then puts on a pair of his woolen socks that are way too large for me.

Then, suddenly, he’s all done. He washes his hands in the pot, goes to dump it outside, and returns with more snow to be melted into water. I doze off as he putters around the hut, stowing away the sewing kit and the makeshift bandages. But he wakes me sometime later to press a hard biscuit into my hand, as well as a tin mug of herbal tea he has brewed on the stove. I dissolve the biscuit in the tea then sip the sludge because chewing seems too much of an effort when my jaw still hurts from that smack I received, even though the salve has helped soothe the pain tremendously.

The room has grown dark around us. Korr must see better in the gloom than me, or he simply knows the space better, because he moves around it without stubbing his toe or flailing into walls. I’m about to ask him for a candle when he unbuckles his weapons belt and sets it on top of the chest, then disappears outside for a minute. He returns with a flurry of snowflakes dancing in on a gust of wind.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom?” he asks, standing above me with his arms crossed over his chest.

Heat rushes to my face, and I slap my hand over my eyes, mortified. “Yes.”

I’d been wondering how to express that need, and I probably would have just held it in until morning if he hadn’t asked, hoping that I’d be strong enough to go outside, somehow, on my own.

But Korr simply hauls me upright, careful not to touch my wounds, and carries me through the door. I hadn’t noticed the latrine at the other end of the platform before, because I’d been too happy to have escaped the wolves. It’s half hidden by the branches of the massive fir tree holding up the platform. The hole opens into the air, as it has nowhere else to go, but the snow already covers everything, and I know it’ll cover after me, too. Korr even takes several steps back toward the hut and turns his back, giving me privacy.

This gesture is enough to ignite my suspicion again. No one is this helpful to a stranger. He carried me away from the wolves, saving my life. Fine, that makes sense—he didn’t want to have me on his conscience since rescuing me was obviously within his power. The same reasoning could be applied to him stitching me up and treating me with the ointment that prevented an infection, as well as feeding me.

But this? He is considering my feelings, my sensibilities, which has nothing to do with survival at all.

I know his help likely comes with a price. It always does. From exhaustion and relief, I’d started to forget that. That was wrong of me—I cannot afford to let my guard down.

When the orc turns back to me and extends his hand, I take it, even though I suspect he’s not helping me out of the goodness of his heart. But only time will tell what he’ll demand in return.