Black Tusk Interrogation

The village is called Ashwell and it has one street, one well and forty people who all came out to stare at the red-haired woman with the broken arm being helped off a donkey.

You stood in the yard and let them unload you. Two saddlebags, a bundle of ruined mail, a shield with the boss punched out of it. Then the innkeeper's wife took the halter and put you in the paddock at the back and the last thing you saw of Dedrianna was her getting her boot off on the step and swearing at the shape of her own ankle.

That was this morning. Nobody has come to check on you since, which is fine. You are a donkey. Nobody checks on donkeys.

So when the paddock gate is too boring, you push it, because the latch has been broken since before you got here, and you go out through the gap at the back of the yard into the beech wood to eat something that isn't trodden flat.

Dusk. The light is going orange and low between the trunks and the ferns are wet and there are midges. It is quiet in the way woods go quiet before it rains.

Then it is quiet in a different way.

You lift your head with a mouthful of grass still hanging out of it.

They come out of the trees on three sides. Four of them. Green, grey, red-brown, all of them a head and a half over you and twice as wide, with tusks and rusted iron and hands like shovels. One of them, the yellow-green one, the big one with the snapped tusk, walks up and takes hold of your halter like he is picking up something he already owns.

"Hee-haw!" You plant all four feet and pull back. He doesn't even slow down.

"Evening," he says. Slow. Almost polite. "Nice bit of donkey."

The small grey one crouches down to your eye level and grins, and there is a gap in his teeth, and he does a bray back at you. "Hee-haw," he says, badly, and the others laugh.

"We're looking for somebody," the big one says. "Red-haired woman. Plate armour. Party of three, all of them hurt." He gives your halter a little shake. "Where'd you take them, donkey."

You know exactly where. It is a mile and a half back down the hill and there is a bed in it and a woman in that bed with her ankle up and a broken arm and no strength to hold a sword.

You shake your head.

The wood goes quiet. Somewhere behind you the stream is talking to itself.

The big one looks at you for a long moment. Then he sighs through his nose, and the corner of his mouth pulls up, and he lets go of your halter and steps back and starts working at the cord of his loincloth with one hand.

Behind him, so do the others. One, two, three, four. The small one is watching your face while he does it.

"Hooo," says the red-brown one, and it comes out soft and filthy, and he is looking at your back end, not your face.

They get them out.

You have seen an orc before, from a distance, over a fence. You have not seen one at four paces with the light going and nothing between you and it. They are enormous. Dark and ridged and heavy, thick as your own foreleg at the base, blunt and flared at the head, and they hang and bob when the men shift their weight, and the yellow-green one is already wet at the tip and doesn't wipe it.

"Now," he says, and takes his time about it. "We can do this easy. Or we can do it hard." He nods at the four of them, at the four cocks, and shows you his teeth. "Either way you're going to tell us. Question is how much of the evening you want to spend getting there."

The grey one does the bray again. This time it is closer, right against your ear, and the laugh goes round the trees.

"Easy or hard, donkey," says the big one. "Pick."

Four hours.

The light has gone from orange to grey-blue and the ferns are flattened in a circle where the four of them have been standing on them, and you are down on your knees in the middle of it with your chest in the dirt and your back end up, because Rakh has one arm under your belly holding it there and the other hand knotted in your tail.

You are so wet it has run down the inside of both hind legs and dried in pale streaks, and there is a white ring of it worked up round the base of Rakh's cock, and more of it in your eyelashes, and one ear is folded the wrong way and you have stopped caring. Your hind hooves have cut two grooves in the leaf litter and drag a little further with every shove.

"Squelch."

"Hnnaaaw!" It comes out of you before you can stop it and your head tosses and your ears go flat.

"Hee-haw," says Zug, badly, from somewhere by your shoulder, and puts his hand over his mouth to laugh at his own joke. Ushgar snorts through his nose and spits.

Grull crouches down at your head. He is the only one of them not touching you, and he takes his time, and he looks at your face while the others work.

"I'll ask one more time," he says. "Where's Dedrianna and her party?"

Your jaw is hanging. There is drool running off your lip into the leaves. You get your mouth round it, and you get most of it round it.

"I... I only carry their stuff, I don't..."

Zug whoops and slaps Rakh's shoulder hard enough to make him grunt. "Still playing tough, eh?" He grins round at the others, at Ushgar, at the trees. "Another round, boys!"

Rakh drags your tail up higher. Ushgar steps in over your shoulder with his cock in his fist and puts the blunt of it against your muzzle.

"No..." Your voice goes up and cracks right down the middle of it and turns into a bray you cannot stop. "Nnaaaw! Please!"

Grull doesn't move. He just waits, and looks at you, and the other three are already in position.

Do you give them the village, or do you take another round?

Three days.

You are up and walking, which is more than the arm is doing. The ankle is strapped, the ribs are strapped, and the innkeeper's wife has been feeding you barley and looking at your face like she expects you to do something about all this.

Dedrianna has not been funny since Harrow Keep. She puts her boot on this morning and gets it on, and then she stands in the yard with her good hand on her hip and looks at the empty paddock and the gate hanging open on a broken latch, and says nothing at all for a while.

"Right," she says, eventually. "Mine, that is. My fault."

"It is not your fault," says Maren from the door, grey in the face and one arm still strapped. "She is ours and we lost her and we are going to find her."

The halfling is already at the gate with her bow over her back. "She would not have gone far. She never goes far. She does not like the dark."

Dedrianna takes the track at a walk and the other two follow her and not one of them says anything the whole way down.

You find the track in the beech wood without much trouble. The ferns are flattened in a long streak and there is donkey dung and hoof-cuts and, further in, the marks of something heavy being dragged and four sets of orc prints over the top of all of it.

"Orcs," Maren says. "Four of them. Big."

"Betania," says the halfling, quietly, and then nothing else.

And then the wood opens out, and there she is.

Betania is on her side in the wet grass at the edge of the stream, in a ring of trampled mud, and she has not been able to get up. Her forelegs and her hind legs are splayed out wide and straight, all four of them, like a hide pegged out to dry, and her head is flat on the ground with her ears in the puddles and one eye open and half-lidded and looking at nothing.

She is covered in it. Drying semen in her coat in streaks and patches, in her mane, across her muzzle, in the long lashes, white and crusting where the air has got at it.

Her tail is up over her back and her cunt is open. Actually open, gaping, the lips of it swollen and pushed out and not closing, red-dark inside and still working faintly round nothing, and as you watch, a thick rope of semen slides out of her and drops into the grass with a wet sound and lies there in a lump, and the smell of it comes off her in the damp air, salt and orc and turned earth.

She is breathing. Her flank goes up and down in long shudders. Nothing is broken. Nothing is torn. She is just used, right through, and lying in the mess of it.

Her ears turn when she hears you and she gets her head up two inches, and her mouth opens, and what comes out is thin and hoarse and completely wrecked.

"Hhh... haa..."

The halfling makes a sound like she has been hit. The bow goes into the grass and she is on her knees at the edge of the mud with both hands over her mouth and she does not go any closer.

Maren stops dead. She looks at Betania, and then at the ground, and then at the four sets of orc prints, and her face goes completely blank.

Dedrianna walks into the ring of mud and crouches down in it and puts her good hand flat on Betania's neck, and she does not look up.

"Who did this," she says. It is not a question. It is the sound of a woman deciding something.

"Dedrianna " Maren starts.

"Who did this to her."

"Black Tusk. Four of them. Grull's lot, by the boots."

Dedrianna's jaw works once. Then she leans down and puts her forehead against Betania's and stays there for a moment, and when she sits back her eyes are wet and her voice is not steady at all.

"You stupid, stupid animal," she says, very quietly. "You should have run. You should have left us and run."

She sits back on her heels and looks at the halfling.

"Which way?"

"South. Into the hills."

"Then we go south. But first " she puts her hand on Betania's cheek and turns her head gently toward her, " first I want to hear it from you. All of it."

Maren crouches down on the other side of her and puts her big hand on Betania's shoulder, and the halfling comes closer at last and kneels in the grass and takes one of her ears very gently between two fingers.

Dedrianna looks into her eyes.

"Who did this to you, Betania? Say their names. Say what they did. Say every bit of it."

And Maren, quietly, from the other side:

"How long were you with them, girl? How long?"

And the halfling, barely a whisper:

"Did they hurt you? Did they hurt you badly?"

The three of them are looking at her, and waiting, and none of them are going anywhere.

Grull smells them before he sees them. Donkey, and the wet, and the fear.

The four of you come out of the treeline at the edge of the village paddock with the light going and there she is, grey-brown and stupid, head down in the grass by a broken gate. Zug is already grinning.

Then her head comes up. Her ears go straight up, then flat, and her eyes go wide enough to show the whites all the way round, and she looks at the four of you, at the cocks, at the tusks, and she does the arithmetic in about a second and a half.

"Heeeh..."

"...hawww!" She spins and bolts.

"Oi!" Zug is off after her before anyone else moves, boots skidding in the mud, laughing. Ushgar goes next, long strides, no laughing. Rakh spits and follows.

She is fast for a donkey and she is terrified, and it doesn't matter, because the wood is thick and she is heavy and there are four of you and she runs straight into a deadfall thirty paces in and has to turn, and turning costs her everything.

Ushgar gets a fistful of mane. Zug gets the halter. She skids and goes down on her foreknees in the ferns and comes up fighting, all four feet, braying fit to bring the trees down, and Rakh takes her hind legs out from under her and she goes flat.

"Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Heeeh..."

And then it stops, all at once, because Grull walks up and puts one hand flat on the back of her neck and just leans on it.

She is down in the ferns with her legs splayed and her sides heaving and her ears going every direction, and her eye rolls up to find him, and her mouth is open, and she is still trying to bray and only managing air.

Grull looks down at her for a while. Then he straightens up and looks at the three of you, and shrugs, and starts on the cord of his loincloth.

"Well," he says. "We've got all night."

They are all looking at you. She is under your hand and she is not going anywhere.

What do you do with her?

A month.

Ashwell has forgotten about it. The paddock latch got fixed. The grass came back. Dedrianna's arm came out of the sling and her ribs knitted and she has started taking contracts again, small ones, and she takes you on the short ones because you are still the pack animal and that is still the job.

It is the smell that does it. That is the thing nobody warns you about.

There is a stretch of the north road where a warband camped in the spring, and every time you go past it the wind comes off the trodden ground with that smell on it, smoke and hide and salt and orc, and your legs slow down on their own and Dedrianna has to click at you twice, and by the time you have gone a hundred paces past it your teats are aching and there is wet between your hind legs and nothing has even touched you.

At night in the stable you lie down and it all comes back in pieces. The ferns. The weight of a hand on the back of your neck. Grull's slow voice asking the question again. Zug doing the bray, badly. And it is not the pain you remember, it is the other thing, the way your own legs folded without asking you, the way you went wet and stayed wet, the way your jaw hung open by the fourth hour like a broken gate.

You have started dreaming about it and waking up with your tail lifted.

And the question sits there, every time the wind comes off the north road:

Is this a thing that happened to you, or is it a thing you are going to go and find?

Trauma, and you never want to see a green face again, and you tell yourself that every morning.

Or addiction, and the north road is right there, and nobody is holding you back.

Which is it?