With a grimace his fingers trailed the stinging line of a cut across his forehead, a mute reminder of how close he had come to leaving his feint too late. In some regards the move had been performed to the pinnacle of perfection, suffering a minor wound without any greater ramifications meaning he had pushed it to its absolute limit, further increasing its chance of success as his baffled foe had found himself impaled upon a sharp sabre point. Still, he’d have preferred it hadn’t have worked and some other fate had befallen the Knight, rather than to have come that close to dying. He had a lot left to do, and dying wasn’t one of those things.
The siege had been short and uneventful for Grolan, he had in fact suffered his injury in the earlier skirmish where he was at his most effective, in the open field. He had hung back until the castle was almost taken, allowing the heavily armoured brutes to take centre stage, regardless of what they thought of him and his seeming cowardice. Now however he was sat upon a barrel and watching events unfold before him. Few gave him a second glance, those who did were unable even to give him the usual malicious shoves as their hands were filled with meagre loot from the castle. He sighed, shaking his head slowly, this siege had been a farce at best. There was no glory to be won fighting a rag-tag militia herded by old and arrogant Knights, and the castle had been even less of a challenge. The walls were barely manned, nor were they in any state really worthy of being defences, almost half crumbled in some spots. Grolan couldn’t help but wonder what the strategic advantage of such a place was, that Lord Arad would hire a mercenary company like Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi to take it. Ultimately he could probably have seized the place himself at a lesser cost, so why hadn’t he?
As Grolan considered the wider implications of the all too easy capture of Vendal castle, the hubbub generated around him actually filled in some of the blanks as he was reaching them. Armed ‘Bunnies’ approaching the gates, with obvious warlike intentions. His eyes narrowed.
“Well played.” He said to himself, though an Orc who had dropped his loot and was running to the gates gave him a look of stern disapproval, and leapt to kick the barrel out from underneath him. Wise to the Tusker’s plan he rolled backwards off the barrel as it flew out from under him, allowing him to regain his feet with a fair amount of acrobatic grace for a Half-Orc in chainmail.
“Bugger Off, Tusker.” Grolan spat, reverting to Orcish slang as he often did when communicating with his ‘fellows’. The Orc looked like he had more to say, but apparently mollified by his hostile response he just snorted and ran towards the walls, as many voices began shouting at once. Grolan watched Half-Face from across the courtyard, trying to marshal troops into some semblance of order. Shame the Company didn’t train for siege defence, which was an oversight on the Butcher’s part, considering his training he should know better.
Grolan had plenty of insight to give on how best to defend a Human castle against Human forces, but he kept it to himself, having found that his advice was at best, laughed at, at worst, unwelcome. He sighed in a remarkably Un-Orcish fashion, lamenting the further degradation of his good looks, and began jogging over to the frontline. At least these opponents might be worthy of his sword.
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