Dakgu just looked skeptically at the tusker they sent to fetch arrows from him; he was in the courtyard, caring for the wargs rather than playing the tiresome game of shoot and duck with the bunnies. The good targets were long gone, and Dakgu Elf-Scalper didn't believe in staying in one place and making a target of himself. Some might call him coward -- they'd never fought a running weeks-long battle with a mad, magic-using elven ranger and come out on top. They had no idea. It was more use to make sure the warg pack the company depended on had their needs tended to, a constant process of checking fur and listening to their aches and pains and deducing what was an actual problem and what was just whining -- the wargs were smarter than horses, which meant that they required a bit more babying than sugar and apples.

To the dismay of the company, the meat went to the wargs first; tuskers could always survive on mushrooms and gruel, but the mounts required fresh kills.

Vendel was hardly the strongest of castles, but it was a strong enough position when bolstered, and that's what the Tuskers of the Company were doing; there was a lower wall that they used to storm the place, with the assistance of wargs and a ramp, but now it was a matter of trying to keep the gate, not the strongest, from being rammed, hook the ladders off and otherwise try to hold down a hasty assault that was almost contemptuous in its approach. The ladders didn't even get far and the bunnies, being bunnies, probably didn't worry much about the lives they spent in that abortion of a process -- a few dead peasants.

Then again, what the top tuskers thought about the situation was probably true -- they'd hired Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi to be disposable. It wasn't entirely a new feeling to orckind to be treated as fodder and so it wasn't surprising that some bunny lord decided that they made excellent patsies.

The bows had cut down the ladder attempt quickly enough, along with the fool leading the charge, but now a different situation prevailed where the bunnies dug in, put up pavises to fire crossbows from behind and seemed to be working out of sight from behind cover they put up into the dwindling daylight and toward the darkness. It was hard to gain an accurate count, but the bunny forces looked like they were bolstering as time went on and as they collected forces -- perhaps the bunny commander was sending out heralds to pull in reinforcements as he invested the castle once it became apparent that simply storming it wasn't an option. Too strongly held, more than a few Tuskers managed to survive that first battle to get to the castle, and perhaps that wasn't according to the bunny plan to begin with.

Ten-Braids' errand boy, or it was more likely one of Half-Face's drafted into Ten-Braids' work, was still waiting there. The Elf-Scalper was not known as an orc that liked to be trifled with, but somehow it got to the point where everyone wound up running errands for the old hag, and some were more inclined to question than others. Dakgu, with his deformity and speech impediment, was not one to speak at length or volume about it, but he did have enough words to say, "That witch better make these count. They could be killing bunnies." He had to work at it, moving his mouth oddly, pronouncing the words more nasally, but he could get it out when he had too.

It was true the witch and he shared a bit of a hobby in that they both had a history with the worst enemy the orcs had, and dared to fight the elves, but there was a difference in methodology. While he wasn't shooting the arrows at the moment, he still had an aversion to just sacrificing them because some wrinkled old hag decided that she needed his arrows. Or it was possible that the minion decided that he better get her the best arrows in Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi. Something of that nature. He had work to do.