“Ah!” the Mistress of Wardrobe squeaks, eyes wide. She looks around the room rapidly, as if someone else might appear; momentarily hidden behind a fluttering curtain, or fallen behind a chaise, perhaps.
Tuknaa looks at her steadily.
“An orc,” the copper-haired Mistress of Wardrobe says finally, sounding chagrined, and Tuknaa tightens her jaw and says nothing. Fucking elves and their fucking empire and their fucking gladitorial arenas; and fuck, in addition, whatever fucking sharp-ear inbred aristo has yanked her from her comfortable routine of train—fight—train—fight, constantly praying and unsure whether it’s to live through the next one or to escape, the only way anyone ever does. “Oh, love, I don’t know what to do with you.”
There’s a certain expression, or lack of it, which elves resent on orcish faces. Endurance of their high-handed bullshit, mostly; the deliberate maintenance of tooth-gritted silence. Elves make it about orcish brute animalism, because elves like to do that: invent a flaw in other peoples that, if it were real, would make them lesser than elves, and attribute everything they do to it, and therefore flawed and awful, even if it’s exactly how elves also behave. There is nothing so reviled as an orc; violent atavisms, all, throwbacks to a savage past imagined from whole cloth for the elves to have superciliously superseded. Tuknaa sits on the fine upholstery of the couch and stares for a little longer, then can’t help herself.
“Well,” she bites out, “obviously you’re not going to make me pretty.”
Pretty is what elf girls are. By definition. Tuknaa could be the hottest thing this side of the gods’ own brazier, and not being an elf, she’d be seen only as a mockery, a garish imitation of how a similarly beautiful elf would look. And Tuknaa, let’s be honest, is not that hot by anyone’s reckoning.
The Mistress of Wardrobe stills, so thoroughly it raises the fluff on Tuknaa’s nape.
“Love,” the elf says finally, “do you know where you are? Who sent for you to be here?”
“No,” Tuknaa says, curling her lip at the obviously onrushing how dare you, do you know who I serve, whelp? “Nobody said.”
The elf puts the back of one hand to her forehead and winces a little. “The Emperor,” she says. “Gladiator, you’ve been sent for by the Emperor. I’ve served three, and let me tell you, I know my job, usually. I know how to dress a girl, paint a girl, put her forward in a way to please an Emperor. It keeps me alive; it keeps the girls alive.” She pauses. “I know how to do that for an elf, love. I know how elven skin takes paint, how to make it subtle or obvious, and which will flatter. You’re a whole other colour, to begin, and you’re a different shape. It’s no reflection on you, love, that I don’t know how to work with what you’ve got.” The elf stares at Tuknaa, eyes wide and round. “Her Divinity hasn’t asked after an orc before.” She pauses again. “That’s no excuse,” she adds, softly, and suddenly she’s in motion again, prowling, eyes raking Tuknaa up and down, as if she’s an opponent and she’s scouring her weaknesses.
Tuknaa opens and closes her mouth. Does it again. “The Emperor?” she says.
“Both of us know better than to say you’re lucky,” the Mistress of Wardrobe says. “What would you use, to make yourself look nice for a lover?”
“Lady, I didn’t wind up in the arena by ever being good at being a girl,” Tuknaa snarls. “I’m a gladiator — so, soap?”
“What’s your name,” the Mistress of Wardrobe says, in an obviously patient way.
“Tuknaa,” Tuknaa says, feeling furiously obstinate about giving it up, for no real reason.
“Her Divinity can have you obliterated with no more than the merest movement of her finger,” the elf says. “Not even a word.” She’s silent a moment, distant; shudders. “I’ve seen her do it.” And then she takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. “I shan’t insult you by pointing out you can’t talk to her that way, not if you want to live. Know that I’ll do my best by you, Tuknaa.”
Tuknaa swallows, then rouses a snort. “You’ve scant to work with.”
“Seal your lips!” the Mistress of Wardrobe interrupts sternly, and points at her. “When the sculptors loose from marble the forms of wrestling gods, they show muscles such as these. When the love-poets talk of depthless eyes, they speak of yours. I’ve—” she falters, pinks a little — “never had the pleasure, but heard of the softness of orc-down against the skin. Of course we don’t put you forward as an innocent little waif; she wouldn’t have asked for you if she wanted one. You are power and prowess and glory made flesh.” She steps close enough to put fingertips to the point of Tuknaa’s shoulder, considers her face. “Angry,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That’s hard to work with, if you want to come out alive, gladiator.”
Tuknaa scowls, and then scowls harder at the irony, even as the elf’s mouth twitches.
“Are there,” the Mistress of Wardrobe says, “soaps or pomades or — something, for the care of orc-feathers?”
“Yes,” Tuknaa says. “Of course there’s soap, it’s soap, and your stuff is soap, and yours works worse. But it’s just—” and she shrugs, helpless. “I’m a gladiator, lady. Ask me to hit someone with a sword....”
“Well, since there is such a thing, someone will know,” the Mistress of Wardrobe says brightly, “and someone will sell it. I’ll send somebody to find out.” She hikes her skirts a little and heads purposefully toward the door, ankles gleaming below the hem.
Tuknaa watches her go, then lets out a huge breath. She scrubs at her face, then takes a little wander around the room, which feels more now like a cell than any she’s been in. There’s a tall, bright mirror; she halts in front of it, looks dubiously at her reflection. Sure, she’s the figure of a fighter: she is one.
The elf comes silently back while Tuknaa is squinting closely, trying to see what-all she could have meant about Tuknaa’s eyes. She steps up behind her, rests slim hands on Tuknaa’s shoulders, and then, carefully, the point of her chin on one, too; heads together, they both look. She smells like oranges and musk.
“Depthless,” the Mistress of Wardrobe says, with a touch of smugness, “you see, love?” and Tuknaa grunts, looking at the reflected sparkle of entirely the wrong eyes.
