Chapter 10: The Shaman's Confirmation
The smoke in Gormak’s hovel clung to the back of the throat, a particulate ghost of burned mugwort and marrow-root. Elaine’s skin still tingled where his single, cold hand had pressed, a phantom brand over the new reality in her womb. The shaman’s pronouncement—A son. He will live.—hung in the air between them, heavier than the banners of the dead.
Vargath’s grip on her hand was iron, his breathing deliberately slow, as if regulating a surge of power he might otherwise shatter. “Dangerous for a human,” he repeated Gormak’s warning, his voice a low grind of stone.
“The child is orc. His blood will be thick, his bones will be dense. He will fight to be born. Her frame…” Gormak shrugged his one shoulder, a gesture of brutal physiology, not malice. “The price of a miracle is often paid in flesh.”
“Then we make her stronger. We do whatever must be done.”
“Strength is not just of the arm, One-Eye. It is of the spirit. The human women we lost… their wills frayed. The despair here ate them from the inside before any fever took them. She,” he said, his pale eye flicking to Elaine, “has a different fire. Nourish it. Do not smother it with fear.”
Elaine found her voice, though it felt thin against the dense, sacred atmosphere. “What do I need to do?”
Gormak poked at the embers in the skull-hearth with a charred stick. “Eat the liver of the great elk. Drink the tea of iron-lichen and red moss. Let your body learn the weight it must carry. And talk to him.”
“He’s not born yet.”
“He is alive,” the shaman snapped, impatience flashing. “His spirit is listening. Tell him of the world. Of his father’s strength. Of your own stubborn heart. So he knows what he is fighting toward.” He turned his back, dismissing them. “Now go. The smoke is for the dead. Too long here is bad for the living.”
Outside, the cold air was a slap, clean and stark. Vargath did not speak as they walked back toward the longhouse. His silence was a taut wire. He stopped suddenly in the lee of the forge, the din of hammers covering his words. He turned her to face him, his hands on her shoulders. In the shifting glow of the forge-fire, his face was a landscape of conflict.
“I would carve the moon from the sky if it would make this safe for you,” he said, the raw admission leaving him like a physical pain.
“I don’t need the moon,” she said, placing her palm flat against his chest, over the scar. “I need you not to look at me like I’m already broken.”
He blinked, taken aback. A rough sigh escaped him. He leaned his forehead against hers. “You are the furthest thing from broken. You are… a forge-fire. I am terrified of the heat, and in awe of what it will make.” He kissed her, softly, a seal on the confession. “No smothering. But the elk liver is non-negotiable.”
The following days settled into a new, deliberate rhythm. Her training with Harg ceased, replaced by slow walks along the inner palisade with Vargath, his pace shortened to match hers. The tribe’s demeanor toward her shifted again. The respectful nod due to the Traitor-Killer was now underscored with something deeper, a watchful, almost possessive care. A warrior would silently place the tenderest cut of roasted meat on her platter. An older female, one of the few survivors of the plague whose mind had gone quiet and gentle, would leave braided wreaths of winter-green at the longhouse entrance.
The cravings began, violent and specific. One afternoon, the smell of turned earth from the frost-heaved ground made her mouth water uncontrollably. Vargath, baffled, had a young warrior dig up a bucket of half-frozen loam and place it by her stool so she could breathe the scent while she worked.
The nausea retreated, replaced by a profound, animal hunger and a relentless thrum of energy that felt like a second heartbeat. She began to feel the child not as a concept, but as a presence. A flutter, like a moth trapped behind her navel. Then, one evening as she lay against Vargath’s side, a distinct, solid push from within.
She gasped, grabbing his hand and pressing it to the spot.
He froze. “What? Pain?”
“No. Wait.”
They waited, breath held. It came again—a slow, rolling pressure against his palm, a nudge from a dark, warm sea.
Vargath’s entire body went rigid. A choked sound escaped him. He looked from her belly to her face, his single eye wide with a primal wonder that stripped away every layer of chieftain and warrior. “He… he knows my hand,” he whispered, awe-struck.
“He’s saying hello,” she said, tears pricking her own eyes.
From that night, it became their ritual. After the fire was banked, Vargath would talk. He would tell the curve of her belly about the Hold, about the weight of an axe, about the smell of snow before a storm. He spoke of his own father, a stern shadow in his memory, and of the mothers whose names were on the banners in Gormak’s hut. “You come from survivors,” he rumbled, his voice a tactile vibration against her back. “You will be the strongest of us all.”
One morning, Harg found them at the practice yard. Elaine was seated on a log, grinding iron-lichen into a paste with a mortar and pestle as Gormak had shown her. Vargath was drilling a group of young warriors nearby, his movements almost returned to their full, terrifying grace.
Harg didn’t approach Vargath. He came to Elaine, his bulky frame blocking the weak sun. He studied her work, then grunted. “The shaman’s gruel. Tastes like despair and old boots.”
“It’s not for the taste,” she said, not looking up.
“Nothing worth having is.” He shifted his weight. “The scouts are back. From the west ridge.”
She paused her grinding. This was news, not casual talk. “And?”
“Stonefoot sign. A large hunting party. Well-armed. Not migrating. Camped.” He glanced toward Vargath, then back at her. “Grond is waiting. The ambush was a test. Now he watches to see if the wound festered.”
Elaine’s hand went instinctively to her belly. The child within stirred, as if sensing her spike of tension. “You should tell him.”
“I am telling you.” Harg’s gaze was unreadable. “The chief’s mind is here, with you, in this yard. This is good. This is necessary. But the war-band’s eyes are on the horizon. They need to see his mind there, too. You are the keeper of the longhouse. You keep his heart. So you must know when to send his mind back to war.”
He spoke not with insolence, but with the blunt practicality of a man who understood the ecosystem of power. The Traitor-Killer was not just a protected vessel; she was a pillar. The strength of one affected the strength of all.
She met his eyes and gave a slow nod. “I understand.”
That evening, after the scouts gave their formal report to the assembled war-band, the mood in the longhouse was grim. Grond’s proximity was an open challenge. Vargath paced before the high seat, strategy hardening his features back into the familiar lines of a warlord.
“He wants us to bleed ourselves against his shield-wall on ground of his choosing,” Vargath growled. “We will not.”
“We cannot let him squat at our border,” argued a grizzled captain named Korg. “It makes us look weak. The other holds will smell it.”
“Let them smell.” Vargath stopped pacing. “We answer, but not with a charge. We steal the winter from his mouth.” He laid out his plan: a series of rapid, brutal raids on Stonefoot hunting and foraging parties, far from their main camp. Not to engage warriors, but to cripple supply. To take their meat, scatter their game, poison their streams with rotten carcasses. A war of attrition, fought in shadows and screams in the dark.
It was cruel. It was cunning. It was exactly the kind of warfare a desperate, patient enemy would wage. The war-band approved, their rumbles of assent like distant thunder.
Later, as Vargath sharpened his axes, Elaine brought him a bowl of stew. “Harg told me about the scouts this morning,” she said quietly.
His sharpening stone stilled. He looked up, a question in his eye.
“He thought I should know. That you should know I know.”
Vargath set the axe down. He pulled her onto his lap, his arms encircling her, his large hands splaying over the full, hard curve of her stomach. He rested his chin on her shoulder. “He was right. This is our fight now. Yours and mine. Not just out there,” he nodded toward the door, “but in here. You are my second heart. If it beats with fear, I am weakened.”
She leaned back into him, feeling the solid reality of his chest, the eager movement within her own body. “I’m not afraid of Grond. I’m afraid of… becoming just the thing that holds the hope. Of being put on a shelf and kept safe until the important work is done.”
He turned her face toward his, his expression fierce. “You killed a traitor in my hall. You carry my heir. You hold the loyalty of warriors like Harg. There is no shelf strong enough to hold you.” He kissed her, a promise and a claim. “When the time comes, you will be at my side. Not in the shield-wall, but where you are most deadly. In the mind of the fight. This,” he pressed his hand against her belly, feeling the strong, answering kick, “is your armor. And your weapon. Grond fights for land and pride. We fight for a future. There is no stronger ground.”
The next dawn, Vargath and a picked band of raiders melted into the grey forest. Elaine stood at the gate, Harg a silent, looming presence at her shoulder. She did not wave. She placed her hand on her womb, a silent message to the life within, and to the father now gone to war.
She felt no shelf. She felt like a rooted tree, drawing strength from deep, dark places, her branches tracing the limits of the sky above the Hold. The wait began, not as a void, but as a gathering.
The wait began, not as a void, but as a gathering. Elaine found her rhythm in the hold’s dim heart, the child’s turns a constant, private conversation. She sat with several of the other volunteers, some of whom were also pregnant, in a sun-flecked corner of the main hall where the hearth’s residual heat pooled.
Marta, a blonde woman from a flooded valley, rubbed her own swollen belly with a grimace. “Mine feels like he’s digging for treasure with a pickaxe. Yours?”
“More like he’s rearranging the furniture,” Elaine said, earning a weak chuckle from the small group. The air smelled of yeast from the baking ovens and the honest sweat of their bodies.
Another, Lyss, stared into the fire, her hands still. “Mine doesn’t move much. It’s… quiet.” Her voice was flat, drained. The silence that followed was heavier than the fear.
“Gormak said they all have their own spirit,” Elaine offered, carefully. “Maybe yours is a thinker.”
“Or it’s waiting,” Lyss whispered, not looking up. The unspoken truth of the plague, of the lost orc women and the human ones who had faded, hovered in the space between them. It was a fear no amount of elk liver could defeat.
Elaine reached over, placing her hand over Lyss’s cold one. She didn’t offer hollow comfort. She simply sat, sharing the weight of the quiet. After a moment, Lyss turned her hand over and gripped Elaine’s fingers, a silent, desperate anchorage.
Harg’s shadow fell across them. “The One-Eye’s raiders have struck. A messenger-bird came.” He spoke to the air, a general announcement, but his eyes found Elaine’s. “No losses. Three Stonefoot foraging parties scattered, their winter caches spoiled.”
A collective exhale loosened the tightness in the room. This was a language they all understood: a successful first blow. It was a thin shield, but a real one.
“He’s starving them out,” Marta said, a flicker of shrewd understanding in her eyes. It was the same tactic used in the long sieges of her flooded homeland.
“Patience is a weapon,” Harg grunted, which from him was akin to a philosophical treatise. He nudged a wooden cup closer to Elaine with his boot. “Your iron-water. The shaman is watching the sun for your drinking time. Do not make his eye twitch.”
She drank the bitter, metallic tea without complaint, feeling the other women watch her. She was the standard-bearer, the one tied directly to the chief. Her strength was their signal. She finished the last gritty dregs and stood, her balance shifting with the new, forward weight she carried.
“Walk with me,” she said to Lyss. “The sun is out on the south wall. The thinker might appreciate the light.”
The days stacked, marked by small rituals. The messenger birds came sporadically, each carrying terse, carved runes on bits of leather Harg would interpret. Second stream poisoned. No engagement. Then, Ambush sprung. Lost one. Took five. The name of the lost orc—a young warrior called Grenn—was spoken once at the evening meal, his axe placed beside the chieftain’s empty seat.
Elaine found herself touching the practice axe by her sleeping furs each morning, its haft smooth under her palm. It was a reminder of the violence that had chosen her, and the violence she had met. The child kicked, a solid thump against her ribs, as if in agreement.
One afternoon, the quality of the hold’s silence changed. The normal clash of practice yards ceased. Elaine, sorting dried herbs with Lyss, looked up to see the main gates groan open. A ragged column filed in, slick with mud and something darker that streaked their green skin.
Vargath was at the point, a deep, fresh gash scoring the armor over his left shoulder. His one eye scanned the yard, bypassing the cheering warriors, seeking a single flash of red hair.
He found her. He did not smile. The journey was still on him, a hard set to his jaw, a predatory stillness in his posture. But when his gaze locked onto hers, the relentless tension in his shoulders dropped a fraction.
He strode toward her, the crowd parting. He smelled of pine, cold river, and iron-rich blood. He stopped an arm’s length away, his inspection swift and thorough—her face, her hands, the pronounced swell of her belly beneath her woolens.
“You are whole,” he said, the words not a question but a solid statement of fact, the foundation stone for everything else.
“We are,” she corrected, her voice steady.
A low rumble started in his chest. He closed the distance, his forehead pressing against hers. His breath was warm on her lips. “Grond has pulled his warriors back. The starvation bites. We bought a moon’s breath, maybe two.” He spoke quietly, for her alone.
“And your shoulder?”
“A toothache.” He pulled back, finally looking at the other women, at Lyss, at the expectant hold. “We have time. We use it.” His hand rose, calloused fingers brushing the line of her jaw. The gesture was profoundly tender, and utterly public. “The Traitor-Killer holds the fort. And she has done it well.”
That night, the longhouse feasted on the tough, lean meat of late-season deer. Vargath sat in his high seat, Elaine beside him on a stool piled with furs. His presence was a physical change in the air, a gravity that centered the entire world of the hold around their hearth.
His fingers, sticky with grease, traced the shell of her ear. “Tell me,” he commanded softly. “Not of the hold. Of him.”
She took his hand and guided it to the spot where the child was most active. A series of sharp, rolling movements answered his touch. Vargath’s breath caught. He leaned close, his voice a vibration she felt in her bones.
“I have seen the Stonefoot run. I have felt their axes break. It is nothing,” he whispered to her belly, to the life within. “Nothing compared to you.”
“Nothing compared to you.”
The feast’s noise swirled around them, a distant tide of boasting and cracking bones. Here, at the high table, was an island of quiet. His thumb, rough as bark, kept tracing the same path along her jaw. It mapped a boundary between the celebration and this.
Elaine covered his hand with hers, stopping its movement. She held it there, feeling the lethal strength in its stillness. “You need that shoulder seen to.”
“Later.”
“Now.” Her tone brooked no argument, the same one she used when organizing the herb stores. “A moon’s breath of peace starts with clean wounds.”
He watched her for a long moment, then gave a single, conceding nod. He rose, his movement causing a lull in the nearest tables. “The shaman,” he announced to no one in particular, and the noise swallowed them again.
In the quiet of their alcove, away from the hearth’s direct glare, she helped him unbuckle the leather pauldron. The metal was dented, the lining soaked through with a rust-dark stain. The gash beneath was clean but deep, the flesh parted like overripe fruit.
“A toothache,” she murmured, soaking a cloth in the hot water a thrall had brought.
“A Stonefoot axe. It bit. I bit deeper.” He didn’t flinch as she cleaned it, his gaze fixed on the wall where her practice axe hung. “You kept your hand in.”
“I look at it. That’s all.”
“That’s enough.” He caught her wrist, his grip firm but not painful. “The looking. The remembering. It matters.”
She packed the wound with a poultice of honey and crushed yarrow, her movements methodical. His skin was fever-hot under her fingers. The sheer scale of him, even seated, was a landscape. She worked in silence, aware of his eyes on the crown of her head, on the slope of her neck.
“You were afraid.” It wasn’t an accusation.
Her hands stilled. She let out a breath. “Every day. Not of Grond. Of the quiet here. Of becoming like Lyss, just… waiting to see if my spirit was enough.” She tied the bandage, her fingers deft. “Harg telling me about the scouts helped. It made me part of it, not just a thing waiting in a room.”
“Smart, that one. Crude. But smart.” He rotated his shoulder, testing the bindings. “You are part of it. The most vital part.” He stood then, a massive shadow in the confined space. He didn’t head back to the hall. Instead, he banked the small brazier, dimming the light to a deep, amber glow.
The sounds from the main hall muted, becoming a dull, comforting hum. Here, there was only the crackle of coals and the sound of their breathing. He turned to her.
“Come here.”
She went to him. He didn’t crush her to him immediately. His hands came up to frame her face, his touch so deliberate it felt like a question. His single eye searched hers, reflecting the low fire. “Tell me to stop,” he rumbled, his voice graveled with exhaustion and something else, a current running deep. “At any moment. You say it, and everything stops.”
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic counter-rhythm to the child’s slow rolls. This was not the fierce claiming of their first nights. This was different. She saw the battlefield still clinging to him, and the new, raw vulnerability beneath. She placed her palms on his chest, over the old scars and the pounding heart.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
A shudder went through him. He bent his head, his lips finding hers not with hunger, but with a devastating slowness. It was an exploration. A reconfirmation. His kiss tasted of smoke and salt and a relief so profound it felt like pain.
His hands left her face, traveling down her neck, over the thick wool of her tunic. They were careful, so careful, as if she were made of frost. He found the laces at her sides and began to undo them, each tug patient, his focus absolute.
The tunic pooled at her feet. The cool air brushed her skin, raising gooseflesh. His breath hitched. He looked at her changed body, the taut swell of her belly under her thin shift, not with predatory lust, but with a reverence that made her throat tighten.
“You are…” he began, but words failed him. He knelt. It was a gesture that shocked her, this huge warrior lowering himself before her. He pressed his ear to her stomach, his arms encircling her hips, holding her as if she were the only anchor in a swaying world.
The child kicked, hard, against his ear.
Vargath laughed, a soft, astonished puff of air against her skin. He turned his head and pressed a kiss there, where the tiny heel had landed. Then another, along the stretch-marked plane of her. His lips were surprisingly soft.
He stood, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, and carried her to the deep nest of furs. He lay her down and followed, his body a wall of heat beside her, not yet on her. He propped himself on one elbow, his hand returning to her belly, then sliding upward to cup the full heaviness of her breast through the linen.
“All of you is more,” he whispered, his thumb stroking her nipple until it pebbled tight. A sharp, sweet ache shot through her. “Everything is more.”
He peeled the shift from her, his movements fluid and measured. The air was cool, but his gaze was warm, tracing every line, every change. She reached for him, pulling at the straps of his own tunic. “You’re over-dressed.”
A ghost of his old smirk touched his lips. He sat back and stripped the garment off, revealing the map of old wars on his skin, the new bandage stark and white. The sight of him, brutal and scarred and watching her with such naked tenderness, stole her breath.
He leaned over her again, but supported his weight on his forearms, a cage of safety around her. He kissed the hollow of her throat, the freckles on her collarbone. His mouth was everywhere, a slow, worshipful migration. He took his time, learning the new sensitivities the pregnancy had written on her body.
When his mouth closed over her nipple, a low moan escaped her. He suckled gently, his tongue circling, while his hand slid down the curve of her side, over the flare of her hip, to the dizzying heat between her thighs. He touched her there, parted her, his fingers slick and knowing. His touch was an exquisite friction, a building pressure tuned precisely to her breathing, to the little sounds she couldn’t suppress.
“Vargath,” she gasped, her fingers tangling in the iron-bound ropes of his hair.
He lifted his head. His eye was dark, the pupil blown wide. “I have you.” He kissed her mouth, swallowing her gasp as his fingers found a rhythm that unraveled her. The climax built not as a sudden crash, but as a deep, rising wave, pulling from her core, spreading through her limbs until she trembled with it, a silent cry against his lips.
He held her through the tremors, his forehead against her temple. When she went boneless against the furs, he moved. He settled between her thighs, but carefully, so carefully, one massive hand cradling her hip, guiding himself to her entrance.
He pressed in with an infinite slowness that made her whimper. He was stretching her, filling her, but the usual burn was muted by the thoroughness of his preparation, by the aching sensitivity he’d already drawn to the surface. He sank deeper, a gradual, undeniable possession, until he was fully sheathed, his body a warm, heavy blanket over hers.
He stopped, buried to the hilt, trembling with the effort of his restraint. “Alright?” The word was gritted out, fraught with concern.
She nodded, wrapping her legs around his hips, pulling him closer. “Alright.”
He began to move. There was no frantic pace, no driving fury. It was a deep, rolling rhythm, a tide coming in. Each slow withdrawal was a sweet agony, each measured thrust a homecoming. His mouth was on her neck, her shoulder, whispering her name, whispering fragments of their language she didn’t know but understood in her bones—words for strength, for sacred, for mine.
She climbed again, the pleasure building from a deeper, more liquid place. It was less sharp and more vast, a slow uncoiling of light in her veins. He felt it, his rhythm faltering. He buried his face in her hair, his breath coming in ragged huffs.
“Elaine.” It was a plea, a prayer.
She dug her heels into the small of his back, urging him on, wordless. His control shattered, but gently. His thrusts lost their measured pace, becoming shorter, deeper, a final, urgent seeking. He spilled into her with a groan that seemed to rise from the earth itself, a shudder wracking his entire frame.
He collapsed beside her, instantly rolling to his side to avoid crushing her, pulling her with him so her back was tucked against his chest. His arm draped over her, his hand splayed possessively over the child. Their sweat cooled. Their breathing slowed, sheyncing together in the dark.
The noises from the hall had ceased. The hold slept. His lips brushed the notch of her spine.“The longest night of my life,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep, “was the night I waited to see if you’d pick up that axe.” His hand spread wider over her belly. “Now I know you’ll always pick it up.”