A few things to consider:
If the two links are not in a port channel, only one of them is actively being used due to spanning tree, depending on your setup.
If the switches are also layer 3 devices, load balancing may prefer only one of the links, even if they are in a port channel. There are a number of ways to mitigate this.
Was the interface reenabled to verify if discards continued?
Was the discards verified on the switch or through Orion? There is a bug on some Cisco switches where they occasionally report the wrong number via snmp.
Two links will in most cases be configured so both will handle the traffic. Unless one of the links go down, both links will continue to receive the same amount of traffic, even if one of them is discarding some packets.