It was strange to experience such tenderness from an orc, a creature Sylvana was taught to see as little more than a snarling beast.
But Valkar was not that beast. Not with her.
He held her until her trembling subsided, a silent, solid anchor she could not bring herself to push away.
The silence in the small chamber was no longer awkward, but charged with a different kind of energy—the quiet hum of two souls waiting for a storm.
Valkar slowly brought his palm up to cup her cheek.
His hand was large enough to cradle half her face, the calluses rough against her skin, yet the touch itself was careful, almost hesitant. His thumb brushed the high curve of her cheekbone, tracing the faint line of an old scar she had earned in training years ago.
Sylvana's breath caught. She had expected heat. Urgency. The crude demand of a cursed body racing against the moon.
Instead, she found this: patience.
"You are still shaking," he murmured.
"I am not—" She stopped. The lie died on her tongue. "It is only… cold."
"The place is warm."
"Then I am a liar." The corner of her mouth twitched. "And you are… surprisingly gentle."
Sylvana leaned instinctively into the pressure of his hand, her eyes fluttering shut for a heartbeat. A strange, terrifying warmth bloomed in her chest, a feeling she had no name for. It wasn't desire. Not yet. It was something simpler, more primal. Acknowledgment. The quiet comfort of being seen, truly seen, not as a shield, not as a title, but as a woman, trembling and terrified.
"Mother always said be gentle with women," he said. "Or they will hit you with a club."
This unexpected flicker of humor, so out of place, so absurdly orcish, broke something open inside her.
"Hehe~..." A shaky, genuine laugh escaped her lips, the sound foreign in the damp, mossy chamber. It was a weak, watery thing, but it was hers.
Valkar noticed. He lowered his head slowly, giving her every chance to turn away, and she realized with some alarm that she had no intention of doing so. She just stared, her violet eyes wide and unblinking, as the space between them vanished.
The first kiss was barely a kiss at all.
His lips brushed hers, warm and dry, and pulled back an inch to see her face. She had not moved. Her eyes were still open, fixed on him, her fingers curled into the front of his bare chest as if they had decided something without her.
'Mother Tree, his skin is so hot.'
"Again," she whispered, and hated how it sounded.
The second kiss was longer. The third was deeper. By the fourth, Sylvana had stopped counting and had gone up on her toes to meet him, one hand sliding up the thick cord of his neck, the other still fisted against his chest. He tasted faintly of smoke and the bitter herbs from dinner. It should have been unpleasant. It was not.
Hell, she even forgot about his tusks. She had imagined they would be in the way, that they would scratch or cut, but he turned his head just so, and they were just a part of him, another texture to learn.
The last vestiges of her elven composure crumbled, not with a roar but with a quiet, inexorable sigh.
Valkar's arm wrapped around her waist and lifted her the last few inches off the ground as if she weighed nothing, and she made a muffled noise of protest against his mouth.
"Put me down, you oaf!"
"You were struggling to reach."
"I was not struggling!"
"You were."
"I was elegantly stretching."
A low rumble shook his chest. She felt it more than heard it, and it took her a moment to understand that this big green brute was laughing at her. Quietly, helplessly, his forehead dropped to rest against hers.
Strangely, she did not mind. She had been laughed at before, at court, behind fans and goblets. It had never felt like this. This was not mockery. It was… shared.
He set her down gently on the bed of dry moss, which he had, she now noticed, covered with the softest of the bear hides.
'When had he done that?'
While she was panicking about the ritual, he had been quietly making a bed.
'The idiot,' she thought, and her chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
"You prepared this."
"Yes."
"For me."
"For you." He said it plainly, kneeling in front of her, huge and patient in the silver light. "My mate should not lie on stone."
The word again. Mate. It struck her with less force this time, landing somewhere softer. He wasn't claiming a prize. He was acknowledging her as an equal, a partner.
Sylvana looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and undid the first lacing of her tunic herself. Her fingers fumbled, clumsy and stiff, betraying the tremor she tried so hard to hide.
Valkar watched. He did not move to help. He did not surge forward. He simply watched, his amber eyes burning in the dim light, waiting.
Ishtar did more than just give Valkar knowledge; she had given him a fundamental understanding of desire. He didn't understand most of it, but he knew that this moment needed to belong to Sylvana.
One by one, the laces gave way.
Sylvana paused after the last one, her fingers resting against the fabric.
'Mother Tree, why am I so nervous?'
She had faced armed men, monsters, and creatures that would make even seasoned warriors flee in terror. Yet here she was, struggling to remove a simple piece of clothing in front of a man who had done nothing but treat her gently.
"Are you uncomfortable?" Valkar tilted his head.
"A little."
"Then we can wait."
She looked at him.
He meant it.
There was no frustration in his voice, no impatience, not even a hint of disappointment.
Just an offer.
Sylvana smiled faintly and started to pull the last of the laces undone.
The tunic slid from her shoulders and pooled around her waist, and the cool, damp air kissed her skin. Every lesson of her upbringing rose at once, telling her to cover herself, to keep her chin high and her face blank. She had been taught to wear composure like armor, and she had never felt so... unarmored.
But Valkar did not look at her the way the court elves looked at a body, measuring and pricing and judging. His gaze moved from her collarbones to the faint scars on her arms, souvenirs of a life lived with a sword in hand. It was a look of assessment, not of appetite. Not yet.
"You are beautiful," he said. The words came out rough and clumsy, like a language he had only just learned.
"Orcs do not say such things," she found herself teasing. She didn't know where the impulse came from, this strange, sudden playfulness.
"This one does." He pointed at his own chest, flashing a proud smile. "I am a smart orc."
"Hehe~..." Sylvana couldn't help but let out a small, genuine laugh. "I guess you are."
The tension in her shoulders eased, if only by a fraction. She had entered this chamber expecting to be claimed, conquered. She had not expected to be... appreciated.
The last of her resolve broke.
"Come here, Valkar. Before I lose my nerve." Sylvana's voice was barely a whisper, a thread of sound in the warm, moss-scented darkness.
Valkar moved, not with the force she braced for, but with a slow, deliberate grace that defied his size. He knelt on the soft bearskin, the moss crackling softly beneath his weight.
The first touch of his palm against her bare waist made her inhale sharply. He froze at once.
"Too much?" he asked with a hint of concern in his tone.
"No." She swallowed. "Do it again."
He did, slower this time, his broad hand sliding up her side with a care that bordered on worship. Ishtar's gift had given him knowledge of how to touch a woman, but it had not given him the quiet attentiveness with which he watched her face for every flicker of reaction.
That part was his own. When her lashes fluttered, he lingered. When her breath hitched, he returned to the same spot, patient as a craftsman learning the grain of a rare wood.
'He is memorizing me,' she realized, dazed. 'Like a map he intends to read for the rest of his life.'
For some reason, she didn't hate it.
His mouth followed his hands. He kissed the pulse at her throat, the sharp line of her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, and Sylvana tipped her head back against the hides with a sound she had never made in her life. She buried her fingers in his coarse black hair, intending to push him away, and found herself pulling him closer.
"Valkar…" It was not a plea. It was not a protest. It was simply his name, spoken like a prayer she was only just learning.
"Mm?" He raised his head only to be met with an impatient elf pulling him into a hungry kiss.
Sylvana had no idea what she was doing. She was a shield maiden, her life sworn to the sword and the princess. The art of love had been a distant, theoretical subject, less important than the proper way to hold a parrying dagger.
Her experience was zero.
But in that moment, guided by instincts older than elven kingdoms and more primal than the courtly dances of her youth, she was not a shield maiden. She was just a woman. And she wanted him.
'O Great Mother Tree, what is this feeling?'