Weeks passed in a blur of activity. The days were full of time spent with Davvie, or working while one of the other orcs took care of him. Eve and Bolarr were new parents, and we all took turns checking in on them and helping where we could. And the nights were full of... well, fucking. Whenever we had time to ourselves, Davor and I fucked like bunnies.
We'd already had a very active sex life, very-very-very active, but the new extra element of trying for another child added extra energy to every encounter.
We decided not to tell anyone about our plans to expand the family, not until I was pregnant. No need to get everyone's hopes up before we were ready.
Between the frequent, long, and satisfying bouts of fucking, Davor and I talked about our future. We talked about how many kids we might want (at least three, we both agreed, but if more came along that was fine), whether we would need to look at getting a bigger house (absolutely), whether we wanted to be officially married (very much so), and so on.
We were a bit disappointed when I got my next period, but not shocked. We had only just started trying, after all. And not getting the job done on the first try just meant we had more reason to keep trying.
Davor was happy to have sex on "the red days", as he called my period, but I took the opportunity to rest my poor abused vagina for the whole three weeks (the human women I'd known who complained about periods lasting a whole week had no idea how good they had it). Like a proper gentleman, my Dav didn't complain about the break - although that might have been because I was still sexually insatiable and settled for sucking him off on the regular.
As soon as my period passed, we were back at it again.
The next week found us leaving on another trip north. Not too far, just back up to Crosston and some of the nearby towns. I would have liked to go further and visit Trostis again, but there just never seemed to be enough time.
The First Fire's trading trips had changed dramatically over the last two seasons. We'd started going a bit further into Amella on our trips, usually stopping in several villages to trade for a larger variety of goods. The trips had also become less frequent, and were only done in larger groups of three or more carts, accompanied by a minimum of four armed guards.
The first change was partially because of me: as a citizen of Amella (who just happened to live south of the border in an orc's bed), I was allowed to conduct business. The fact that all of my "employees'' just happened to be orcs was irrelevant. That let us bypass some of Amella's racist trade laws. Everyone knew that it was still the orcs doing business, but on paper it was me doing the trading as a business owner. As long as trade between our settlements was profitable, the people in the southern reaches of Amella seemed happy to pretend to believe our ruse. After all, as long as the taxes got paid, who cares where the goods come from?
Well, not everyone was happy. We still got a lot of very rude looks from the humans in the backwater villages we stopped through, but as long as the bigoted villagers weren't interfering with business, their feelings were their problem.
And then there was the second change: the armed guards. Partly it was because Amella's taxes had apparently gone up recently, and the peasants might get desperate enough that a cart of food would make a tempting target, even if the occupants included an orc. But mostly, it was because of friction between nearby clans.
One of the clans to the southeast, Iron-Blood, tried to rally their neighbours into open conflict earlier this year. Some rowdy would-be warlord by the name of Zomag the bloody-something-or-other revealed himself to be the offspring of the late warchief of the Blood Beasts. The Blood Beasts was apparently a clan that the other orcs allied against and wiped off the map at the end of the last war between orcs and the northern countries.
So this prick, as Davor explained, had started talking about "the golden days" and "orc supremacy" and other nonsense, spreading idiotic ideas about war and killing in the minds of the young and gullible. Until our own Evelynne, seven months pregnant at the time, had put an arrow square between Zomag's eyes and ended things.
When I asked Davor why this Zomag's followers hadn't killed Eve right back, seeing as how she had killed the guy right in the middle of a small army, he told me that the Iron-Blood weren't allowed to raise a hand against her. "It was during the Clansmoot," he had explained. "It's forbidden for an orc to harm another orc at the Clansmoot. No orc would be stupid enough to violate that sacred law before the eyes of the clans and the gods."
"Eve isn't an orc..."
"Right," he went on. "But she was pregnant with Bolarr's child - an orc. He told everyone at the Clansmoot that, which is why she was able to be there at all. Zomag had threatened to kill her for being a human and daring to intrude on our sacred land, but Bolarr talked her out of danger. Zomag had agreed that her being pregnant with an orc meant she was safe, since hurting her would mean hurting the orc baby. But since she wasn't an orc, she didn't get to have a voice at the 'Moot."
"But she spilled orc blood," I had asked him, still puzzled.
"But she's not an orc!" He had said with a wide grin, as if this was some great reveal.
"So... she was able to attack Zomag and get away with it because she's not an orc, so the laws of the 'Moot don't apply to her?" Davor's nod told me I was on-track. "And his followers couldn't touch her because the laws forbid them from indirectly hurting her baby."
"Exactly!"
Davor and I had argued back and forth over the details for most of an evening. I told him that the laws sounded like a flimsy excuse, and he had told me I wouldn't understand because it was "an orc thing". We'd finally agreed to disagree, and put the silly argument to bed last month.
But I still felt like the fact that Zomag's followers let Eve walk away was just evidence that they hadn't really liked their new warlord all that much in the first place.
All of that was settled, with the would-be tyrant in the ground, about a month before I met Davor again in Crosston. But since then, all the orc clans were getting pretty territorial, like we were all waiting for another blow to land. And worse, everybody was sending scouts into each other's territories to keep tabs on who was training how many soldiers. The clans weren't at war, but things were tense.
So, for everybody's peace of mind, we were riding in a three cart caravan, with six guards for a total of eleven of us. That was ten orcs and one... me. No half-orcs this time, since Davvie was staying with auntie Krugga while we were away.
Ausk rode solo in the cart behind us, his usual partner Mazon off on medical leave. The big lump had startled a horse and gotten a kick to the leg for his troubles. The healer promised he would be walking again, albeit with a limp, as long as he could stay off his feet long enough to heal. Mazon being who he was, I don't know if any of us were confident he'd do what he was told.
We made it to Crosston before the end of the second day, but we were stuck sleeping out by our wagons. The inn didn't have room to sleep an extra ten orcs, and our security wasn't willing to split the group up.
Davor and I did our business in town without an escort, and I even managed time to slip away to buy a hot bath at the shitty little inn. Sure, tomorrow I was just going to get grimy with dust from the road again, but I relished the opportunity to smell nice for one night. Davor certainly wasn't going to complain about the extra expense, since I also used the time away from the group to get a nice new razor and shave myself clean again. I'd always preferred the feeling of being shaved bare, and I loved the way the sight of my shaved pussy drove my orc crazy.
