Wifed By The Orc Chieftain

Chapter 1

Clara

I have three grain barrels left, half a case of glass vials, and one condenser held together with copper wire and a promise I made myself last winter never to run this low again, and none of it will be enough for what this season wants from me. I tap the pressure gauge on the main condenser with one knuckle, watching the needle hold its thin black line at 15 pounds while the generator growls against the wall outside like something that resents being useful. Steam hisses along a seam I patched last month, a soft, wet exhale that tells me the gasket is failing again, and I make a mental note to add it to the list of things I cannot fix with what I have on hand. 

The distillery is the one place in this whole ruined station where the air fights back, thick and mineral and faintly sweet with fermenting mash, and I have stopped noticing the smell the way I have stopped noticing most things that used to bother me. I noticed the cold, once. I noticed the way the orcs looked through me as if I were another piece of salvaged pipe. Four years at Ashfall Station rendered most of its distinctiveness into something less noticeable and more functional. I am elbow-deep in the collection trough, fishing out a curl of copper shaving that has no business being in my filtration line, when the door groans open on its ruined hinge and lets in a wedge of gray daylight and a gust of air cold enough to hurt.

"Clara Jensen." Thane fills the doorway the way he fills most doorways, his bulk wrapped in three mismatched coats scavenged from three different decades of the old world, and even after four years, it still strikes me as strange to hear my whole name said in that low, rolling orc cadence, like he is testing the shape of it in his mouth before he commits to the rest of the sentence. "I have something for you."

"You always have something for me." I straighten up, wiping my hands on the rag tucked into my belt, and I do not bother softening my voice, because he has never once been offended by directness and I have never once had the energy to pretend otherwise. "What is it this time?" 

He sets the crate down on my workbench with a showman's care, like he is unveiling something precious instead of a box of dead electronics, and pulls back the burlap to reveal a tangle of circuit boards, green and corroded, salvaged from some office building that stopped mattering to anyone 40 years ago. 

"Motherboards. Copper traces, gold contacts. A man in Haven says he can strip the gold if I bring him enough of it."

"I don't need gold, Thane." I nudge the crate an inch away from my workbench, which is as close as I come to actual rudeness with him, because I like him too much to be truly rude, and he knows it. "I need sterile glass — vials, specifically, the kind that don't shatter the second a warrior's hand shakes while he's holding one. I've got maybe 40 left, and Ghorak goes through a dozen a week just on the standard kits."

"Vials are hard." He says it the way he says most inconvenient truths, flat and unhurried, settling his weight against the frame of the door like the conversation has already gone on longer than he intended. "Glass that survives the winter roads is harder still. The Chieftain has asked for a larger tithe of your antiseptic before the solstice, Clara. He did not ask for my opinion on how you achieve it."

"Then the Chieftain can ask his warriors to bring me glass instead of promises." I cross my arms and hold his gaze, because if there is one thing four years among the Ironhides has taught me, it is that backing down from a demand only ever invites a bigger one. "I'm not conjuring antiseptic out of good intentions, Thane. I need raw materials. Spoiled grain, methanol, functioning glass. I have less than half of what I had this time last year, and I am not going to lie to Brask Ironhide's face about what my still can and cannot do just because it's easier than telling the truth to yours." Something that might be respect flickers behind Thane's dark eyes, there and gone so fast I could have imagined it, and he huffs a breath that stirs the frost clinging to his single remaining tusk. 

"You are not an easy woman to trade with."

"I'm not trying to be easy; I'm trying to still be alive in February." I turn back to my trough, giving him my shoulder, which is the closest thing to a dismissal I am willing to offer a man who has never once cheated me on a deal. "Bring me vials, or bring me nothing. I mean it."

"And if I cannot find vials? What then, Clara Jensen? Do I tell the Chieftain his own merchant failed him, or do I tell him his distiller refused a fair request?"

"Tell him whichever one lets you sleep easier." I glance back at him, softening the words with something closer to a smile than I usually spare for negotiations. "I'm not trying to make your life harder, Thane. I'm trying to keep this station's antiseptic from running out in January instead of March. You know as well as I do which one of those outcomes gets more people killed." He is quiet for a long moment, long enough that I hear the wind pick up outside, scraping grit and old snow against the tin roof, and when he finally speaks again, his voice has lost its bartering edge entirely. 

"I will speak to the scavenging parties. There is a pharmacy two miles south we have not fully stripped." A pause, and then, almost gently, in the way orcs are gentle when they think no one is watching for it — "The Chieftain values what you make here, Clara Jensen. Even if he does not always say it kindly."

"He's never said it at all," I say, and I mean it lightly, but it comes out harsher, an old bruise I did not realize I was still pressing on. "Tell him I said that too, if you want." Thane huffs something that might be a laugh, hefts his crate of useless motherboards back onto his shoulder, and pauses at the threshold with one hand braced against the frame. 

"You could simply tell him yourself, you know. He walks past this building every morning."

"He walks past a lot of things every morning. I'm not sure that means what you want it to mean." I wave him toward the door before he can answer, because I have work to do and no patience left this morning for whatever theory Thane is quietly building about his chieftain's habits. He ducks out into the white glare of the yard without speaking, leaving the door to bang once against its frame before the wind wrestles it shut behind him. I stand there a moment in the sudden quiet, listening to the still hiss and mutter behind me, and I let myself feel the small, familiar ache of having won an argument that changes nothing. 

I will still be short on vials next week. I will still be standing in this heat while men decide, in tents I am never invited into, exactly how much of what I make belongs to them by right and how much I am allowed to keep for the settlements south of here that trade me grain for finished product. It is a bargain I struck with myself a long time ago, the year I buried what was left of my family in a shallow grave outside a gas station and decided that surviving meant becoming something too valuable to be discarded. I built this still with my own hands out of a wrecked delivery truck and a chemistry textbook I half-remembered from high school, and I have never once let myself forget that it is the only leverage I have in a world that otherwise sees a woman like me as something to be protected, used, or ignored.

I reach into the small pouch at my belt and close my fingers briefly around the tarnished brass key I keep there, a habit I have never quite managed to break, though the door it once belonged to burned down years ago along with everything else that used to make it a home. It is not useful anymore. It has not been useful in a long time. I keep it anyway, because some part of me still needs a small, private reminder that I once had a life that belonged only to me, before this station and this still and this whole broken world decided what use I was going to be to it instead. I turn back to my trough and fish out the last curl of copper, turning it over in the lamplight before I toss it into my scrap bin with the rest of the things this station has no more use for. The condenser hisses on, steady and complaining, filling the small cold building with the one sound I trust completely, and for now, that has to be enough.