Misconstrued (Mistaken)

by Pixie Unger

  ----

  We got up to find Iago sitting at the kitchen table doing something that looked suspiciously like cleaning his guns. This was surprising, because when we came in last night, there had been bunk beds in the space, not a table.

  There was some fruit waiting for us, and after we ate he walked us back to the school, where I said good-bye to Erika and he then took me back to the house.

  He politely indicated I was to sit at the table and then fussed about before bringing over a hot drink and setting it on the table. I frowned at it. I had no idea what it was, but it seemed too thick to be served warm and in a glass.

  “Do you like living here?” he asked.

  “That’s a loaded question,” I pointed out. “What happens if I say yes? What happens if I say no?”

  He got up from the table and paced the small space for a moment. “We want you to be happy here. I will arrange for us to live in a different house if you would be happier and less afraid all the time.”

  I thought about that. “How many of us are you including in that ‘different house for us’ suggestion?”

  “Whoever you want to live there.”

  “You’re getting people to leave this house, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “So you aren’t as outnumbered.”

  I snorted, trying not to laugh. “Look at you, Iago! Even in a one-on-one situation, I’m always going to be outnumbered.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Long enough that I started to fidget. “You and your friend decided to start looking for an acceptable penis while I was gone.”

  I winced. “Not my idea, but I don’t want you going after her, either.”

  “Why not ask one of us?”

  “She wanted to see me and needed something to trade to arrange it.”

  His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Someone told her she needed to trade to be able to see you?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know if they told her that, or if she just decided to get the price upfront instead of owing him a favour later on.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” I asked wearily. “Please just tell me. I’m not good at ‘hmm’ when it’s people, let alone a whole other species.”

  He tensed. I just looked at him and tried to radiate the idea that I was too tired to deal with his dicking around, read-my-mind-bullshit either.

  “I would have liked to be asked.”

  I closed my eyes and wondered how the hell to even start to address that, when I was pretty sure he had just gotten back from hunting people. I didn’t even open them to look at him when I said, “Iago, do you want to show me your dick?”

  “No!” He managed to sound so affronted that I opened my eyes to stare at him. “I want you to want to see it,” he mumbled, ducking his head.

  I shook my head. “Hopefully aspiring to sex, future tense,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Something Romeo said last night. Or used a condom to say last night. Or at least a condom-shaped object to say last night,” I added when he looked upset. That did not seem to help.

  “I don’t understand you,” he growled. “You do not react the way I expect.”

  “Welcome to the club!”

  “What club, Mina?”

  I groaned. “It means that I don’t understand you, either.”

  “Ah.”

  We sat lost in our own thoughts for a while.

  “There are things you need to know while you are hopefully anticipating sex. I don’t want to get pregnant more than I want to get—” I was going to say laid, but switched to “sex.” at the last moment.

  That was the wrong thing to say. He stiffened and was extremely tense when he replied, “You do not find me to be an acceptable father?”

  “What? No! Look! I don’t want to accidentally get pregnant, no matter who the father is. Or what the circumstances are. I liked being on birth control because then I didn’t have to worry about accidentally getting pregnant.”

  He blinked, looking stunned for a moment. Clearly that was not a statement he was prepared to process.

  “You bought me with three of your friends. I have no idea how you saw that working, but that’s a little scary all on its own.”

  “We were hoping you would find one or more of us acceptable, and be able to tolerate the rest of us,” he answered warily.

  “Acceptable for what? What are you expecting me to tolerate?”

  “Tolerate us in your living space?” He sounded hesitantly hopeful.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yes! Of course you have a choice!” He seemed offended by the very idea.

  “I’m guessing, based on your previous comment, that you want me to pop out a son for you?”

  His nervousness was back. “I would be willing to be sterilized if that was what it took to at some point have you touch me.”

  “You’re joking!”

  He looked up at me.

  “You’re not joking! Holy shit, Iago! Where did that come from?”

  “You do not want children. I do not want children more than I want you,” he explained. “It is a simple enough problem to solve.”

  I just stared at him, completely at a loss for words. Until I wasn’t. “That’s a really easy thing to lie about, Iago. I wouldn’t know if it was true until it was too late.”

  He stood up, angrily, then promptly sat down again. When he spoke, his voice was slow and even. “Your culture is different. Lying about contraception is rape in my culture. Rape is punishable by death. They told you I was hunting. That is what I was hunting. I would not lie about that. It would be beyond dishonourable.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “A cultural thing, huh?” He nodded. “So if you sat here and I called in any random orc, they would tell me the same thing?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly.

  I stood up and walked to the door. I didn’t even vaguely recognize any of the orcs walking by. “Hey! Can someone give me a hand here? I need help understanding something.”

  I immediately had three volunteers. They came into the house and froze when they saw Iago. One tried to sneak out the back.

  “I just have a question,” I explained. “What happens if you tell a woman that you are using contraception, but you aren’t?”

  Suddenly they were all talking at once. There were hardcore denials all arounds.

  “Wait!” I interrupted. “Let me try again. What happens if someone, who wasn’t you in any way, lied to a woman about contraception?”

  The one who had been trying to leave was the one who answered that. “If he is lucky, your male there goes after him. If he is caught by any of us, we all kill him slowly.”

  “But!” One of the others hastened to add, “We make sure you don’t see where we have tore him apart and we break his vocal cords first so you can’t hear him screaming.”

  I felt completely sick.

  Iago just calmly thanked them, and they nodded to him before they left.

  “I would never lie to you, Mina. About anything. You are too valuable to risk.”

  I glared at him for a moment, uncomfortable with the reminder that they had purchased me. “Alright. How many people did you kill while hunting the last couple of days?”

  “Five,” he said immediately, “but my unit rescued eleven women.”

  “Can I see these alleged women?”

  “Yes. They are being treated in a bigger facility than we have here, but you will get to meet them when they are transferred in.”

  He was answering promptly, but he was still really nervous.

  “You just admitted to killing five people.” I wanted to remember that.

  He nodded. “I am a soldier.”

  “Yeah. On the other side of the war from me.”

  He tensed for a moment, then nodded and relaxed. “You are right. I understand.”

  Something had happened in that moment, and I didn’t understand what it was. I had no idea how to ask. He watched me for a moment, the
n nodded again and got up from the table.

  “Would you be willing to spend the rest of the day with one of the others?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.“You just decided something about me. What is it?”

  “I have done nothing to earn your attention. It was Tybalt that noticed you were hungry. It was Romeo that thought to give you a blanket.”

  “Didn’t you do the room?”

  He shook his head. “I suggested the room before I left. The others did it. I haven’t even seen it yet.”

  “Huh. This has to be one of the strangest conversations I have ever had.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. We sat there for a moment. He calmly watched me while my mind raced trying to figure him out.

  “What made you want to become a soldier in the first place? See the galaxy, attack random less advanced civilization, sort of thing? I mean, this has to be some sort of colonialism, right?”

  “I didn’t come to attack your civilization. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I didn’t want to be a soldier, but I didn’t want to be in prison more.”

  Oh fuck. “Um!” I said a little too brightly. “What were you in prison for?”

  He was still watching me squirm. “I was a poacher.”

  That only raised more questions. “Are we talking about poaching deer to feed your family here? Or illegally harvesting bear gallbladders kind of thing?”

  “I don’t understand the baresgallblatter thing,” he admitted cautiously. “I didn’t have a family. I was keeping myself fed.” He shifted slightly. “I would hunt … big game? Then allow others to pass it off as their kill to try to impress their woman.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a hunting girl, so don’t go bringing home any bighorn sheep or pandas or anything.”

  His brow wrinkled. “I do not believe pandas would be a challenge to hunt. Perhaps I am not thinking of the correct animal,” he conceded.

  I did that thing again, where I had to close my eyes and remind myself that they were probably serious and even if they weren’t laughing at them would not be a diplomatic response.

  “You are upset?”

  “I just …” I trailed off, not even sure how to address this one. “I have culture shock, I guess. Why would they conscript prisoners to … Oh. I’m an idiot. Whoever sent you, didn’t expect you to make it.”

  He nodded slightly. “No one here would be happy to admit, but we are all worthless and disposable. Even all four of us working together were not worthy of a healthy female.”

  “I had a minor food allergy! That isn’t that big of a deal! Or at least it wasn’t before you got here.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Mac explained. He believed you were unfairly targeted.”

  I just shook my head. “But Tybalt was the one who started feeding me! Where does Mac come into this?”

  Iago thought about my question for a moment. “You should ask him. It isn’t my story to tell you.”

  I tried to get this conversation back on track. “So you were in prison for hunting and now—”

  “Now I continue to hunt dangerous animals,” he explained like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Before they hurt more people.”

  I thought about the fire in the orchard. The orcs hadn’t done that, it had been other people. Well, it had been humans. I’m not sure anyone who would burn a food source just as supplies dried up counted as people.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, before adding, “What do the four of you want from me?”

  His brow wrinkled for a moment before he said, “We may want your time and attention, but we are willing to work hard to earn it.”

  I frowned. I felt like we were talking in circles, and wondered what he could possibly say to make me feel better. “None of the things you are saying make sense to me.”

  He nodded. “None of the questions you are asking make sense to me. I can see you are afraid. But it is like watching someone be afraid of lightning.”

  “Lots of people are afraid of lightning,” I pointed out.

  He started to say something, then stopped. “Among my people, there are lots of people afraid of thunder. It is loud and jarring and unpredictable. They can be calm, then there is a hugely loud noise and they jump and are nervous until they are sure it is over. We don’t have many people who spend their days worrying about being struck by lightning.”

  “It isn’t the same. Lots of women have been hurt by men. More than have been struck by lightning.”

  He pulled a two-inch, clear, flat hexagon out of his pocket and set it on the table. He poked at it a few times. “It seems like the odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about one in fifteen thousand, does that seem reasonable?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “The odds of a woman being assaulted by a man are one in three, this isn’t the same thing.”

  He nodded slowly. “The odds of a human woman being sexually assaulted by an orc are one in thirty-six thousand three hundred and eighty-four. We have kept very careful records. That is still too high for us. We have killed eighty-seven percent of the orcs who have assaulted women since we arrived, and are actively hunting the other thirteen percent.”

  “The number of reported cases is always lower than the number of actual cases.”

  “In humans yes, but we aren’t going by reported cases. We are checking our soldiers for evidence of physical contact with humans, and executing deserters. Our culture treats female rape the way that your culture treats cannibalism. Scary stories, but so ingrained as taboo that it almost never happens.” He poked at the thing some more. “I can only find less than thirty-five cases of cannibalism in the last ten years in your whole world, and some of them are cases where the person being eaten agreed.”

  “I refuse to believe there have been fewer than thirty-five cases of women being sexually assaulted by an orc in the whole world since you got here.”

  “You are right. Too many. We want to make it stop. That doesn’t make it better that it happened at all.”

  I frowned and tried to figure out if he was making sense or just playing me. “You expect me to just be ok with the idea that you hunt people? My people?”

  He did the tense, then relax thing again. “I don’t expect things from you, Mina. I hope you will understand that I am hunting my people too, that I am trying to make the world safe enough that you don’t have to live under armed guards.” He sighed. “I don’t expect you to believe this, but we came to help, and your governments overreacted and shot first. At which point we had to decide if we were going to just leave as your society completely broke down or if we were going to stay and try to help you rebuild.”

  “I can’t believe I am sitting here having the conversation!” I glared at him. “You aren’t impartial, so I can’t just trust your numbers and I have no way to verify them!”

  He nodded. “Thank you for talking to me about it. Would you like me to leave?”

  “Where would you go? Because I know that if I told you to just load up your spaceship and leave, that’s not going to happen.”

  He just looked sad. “No, it won’t. When you go into someone’s territory and destabilize their government, it is never easy to leave, and you always make things worse before they get better.”

  “I need some time to think about all of this.”

  ----

  It had been an interesting day and a half. Erika and Mr. Helpful had started spending more time together. That somehow evolved into me tagging along as a chaperone. While I was wondering what to do with my new owners, she was figuring out how to kiss a guy with tusks. That got complicated when the orcs weren’t entirely sure how interspecies dating should work either.

  Plus, it wasn’t like they could go out for dinner or to the movies or anything. Erika couldn’t really be seen with him in the human camp, and the other orcs were way too interested in watching the floor show if she so much as tried to hold his hand in public.

  Which is why I was leaning against the
closed door to my room, acting as an impromptu barricade while I was sure the rest of the house was waiting in the hallway. I couldn’t even blame them since Erika was on the bed making out with Mr. Helpful, who I had mentally named Lucky. He was sitting on the bed with his hands clenched at his sides while Erika stood between his legs. With one hand on each of his cheeks she had been kissing him long enough to raise the temperature in the room.

  Or maybe that was just me.

  When she would occasionally pause for breath, the orc in question just looked stunned. He had that stupid happy expression of someone who just couldn’t believe his luck.

  Erika stopped and stood panting for a moment. “Why won’t you touch me back?” she gasped.

  Lucky’s eyes went wide in shock. “I’m allowed to touch you?” he asked disbelievingly.

  I frowned; Erika giggled. “Gently,” I suggested. Erika stuck her tongue out at me before struggling out of her shirt. I turned my head.

  “You’re all red, Mina,” she teased. “You can join us, if you want.”

  Lucky rumbled something I felt in my diaphragm more than I heard. Erika gasped, “Ooh! Do that again!”

  “I’m not sure I want to watch this part at all,” I mumbled.

  Erika laughed. “Oh, you prude!”

  Lucky just looked worried. In fact, he looked worried enough that Erika noticed. She stepped back and started to pull her coveralls back up. I shook my head. “It looks like you two were doing just fine. This might just be where I say my good-byes and leave you to it.”

  Erika nodded and looked back at Lucky. “Do you need to stop, too?”

  He looked at her, then at me, then back to her and slowly shook his head no.

  I saw myself out.

  It wasn’t the whole household waiting in the hallway, but my four were there. So were Lucky’s roommates. I squeezed past them to head towards the kitchen. Someone caught the back of my shirt, and Iago said, “They are going to have sex in your bed.”

  “I’m trying not to think about that, especially since I don’t know how to wash the sheets.”

  “I’ll wash your sheets,” Tybalt offered.

  “Is that your only concern?” Iago pressed.