Chapter 280

Queen Draudillon knelt beside the woman on the grass within the Elf King's tent, only two days, that's all it took. The woman who lay there was catatonic, her eyes stared upward at nothing, her mouth open, her breathing labored. Her ribs were bruised, her thighs had large hand prints on them, and blood trickled down them. The Queen did her best however, soaking the cloth in the bucket, she began to gently pat the woman down. "It'll be okay." The Queen whispered the lie to her maid.

This one, like the others, had kept utterly quiet about Draudillon's true identity, though whether they did so out of loyalty or simply not believing it would matter, she no longer knew. The water splashed into the other empty bucket when the small form of the disguised Queen wrang it out in her hands. The water thudded and thumped within, and in a way, Draudillon felt a spike of envy for the woman. 'She's utterly unaware of what's happening anymore…'

Not so for the handmaiden that lay grunting and crying under the King not far away. Draudillon did not look over her shoulder to see how the maid was doing, she knew already. The pleading stopped at least, as did the resistance. It meant marginally less pain if they didn't fight back. The Queen reached down when she saw the catatonic maid begin to twitch as the cries of her comrade went a little higher and the sound of slapping flesh grew louder with it as the monster of a monarch reached closer to the end.

"I'm so sorry, this is… this is all I can do for you." The Queen whispered and shut her own eyes, but then set the cloth down and covered the broken woman's ears, it kept the sound out well enough that the twitching seemed to stop.

"Gwahhhhh…" The Elf King grunted, stood, and then using his foot, he shoved the human away so that she rolled like tumbleweed toward the fabric wall of his tent. Slender arms and legs flailed about as if they were part of a mere corpse, until the woman stopped and rolled back onto her belly again.

"Clean that one up too, Seedling." The Elf King grunted out to Draudillon, who found the will to glare at him with hate filled eyes that he chose to ignore, or didn't even bother to notice.

But the name wasn't lost on Draudillon, she got up and went to the used up husk of a woman and crouched down at the shoulder, despite having a child's body at the present, Draudillon retained her greater than average strength. So she put the woman's arm over her shoulder and one arm under the woman's chest, and hefted her up, then dragged her around, drooling into the grass, until she could lay the woman beside the one the Queen had just been tending to.

'Damn him… damn me… damn the elves… damn whomever spawned this monster… at least the beastmen only eat us…' The Queen cursed in her heart as she took up the wet cloth and began to clean the woman off with the herb filled water. The foul odor of sex and blood was somewhat diminished by the pungeant concoction, a 'gift' of an elf in the King's party.

'Use this, the healers will run out of mana, and if you don't want them to die while waiting for the healers to recover, you will need it…' The memory of his words were not lost on her, and whether he said them and acted out of pity, or whether he was just hoping to keep the King away from other elves, Draudillon was no longer sure.

She no longer wrinkled her nose at any smell, no matter how foul, she simply went about her routine, kneeling between the two maids and wiping down their wounds with the foul water tonic in the hopes of keeping them alive. 'I can't protect you… I'm useless, I'm a useless Queen… I've failed my every duty…' She hung her head and wiped away the foul leaking fluids, struggling to suppress her own tears of rage and the shaking in her hands that would only make her more useless if she gave into it.

"My Lord, we're ready to go." An elven warrior said, rushing into the tent, "We will cross into the Kingdom of Carne soon, and taking the roundabout route if we hurry, we will reach Arwintar in around one month."

Draudillon's heart leapt into her throat, 'Arwintar… the Kingdom of Carne? I was supposed to meet the others there, if I can somehow get word to the others…?" The Draconic Queen allowed the warmth and light of hope to fill her breast, then it burst like a soap bubble against a spearpoint. 'No, none of them would bother. The Allfather has never met me, he wouldn't know my face unless he saw a coin from my country, and even if he did, why should I expect he'll do anything? Why would any of them? There is no hope… the gods are dead, and there's no chance now…' The Draconic Queen thought, and quietly listened while she resumed her almost hopeless attempt at caring for her broken servants.

"Useless trash… Why so long?" The Elf King asked, and the guard, despite being a behemoth in his own right, could only hang his head before his king.

"Your Majesty's orders were that we stop daily so you can… ah, take liberties, with the captured human women, and your majesty refuses to use any of his power to drive us faster…" The guard replied, he cast his eyes pityingly toward Draudillon, but before he could utter a single word, the Elf King snarled and 'stepped'.

Or that was how the Queen thought of it, one moment he was moving one foot forward, the next he was in front of the warrior, and the warrior's head exploded in a spray of blood, brain, and skull fragments which spattered over the Elf King's naked body, parts of the tent walls, and over Draudillon and her charges both catatonic and unconscious alike.

She shook with a start and suppressed a scream when she felt and saw the spray of a life destroyed in a single blow, and the Elf King lowered his fist. "Useless trash, daring to tell me it's anyone's fault but his own, their own, weakness…"

The Elf King snarled, "You, Seedling," the golden haired brute snapped his bloody hand down toward Draudillon and pointing a finger out at her, "drag the meat outside, then tell the others to get this tent together, I'll use my power to make up for their incompetence this time."

The name sent a shiver down Draudillon's spine, 'I know what he intends for me when I 'grow', if he knew what I really was…' She nodded with mute submission and scurried to the corpse that fell with a thud, landing in a seated position with its back against the tent. She grabbed his wrists and began to drag him away, backing out to the light of day that at least one elf would never see again.