by Nunn, PL
There was the sound of footsteps in the mulch and Bloodraven came back, followed by the shape of one of the dogs. Yhalen cringed, curling a little tighter, and the dog growled low in its throat, sensing his fear. He couldn’t control it. Not now, not when the pain was so vivid and a great deal of it caused by the beast at Bloodraven’s heels. Bloodraven said something to the dog, sharply, and it flattened its ears before turning to pad off into the darkness.
“She feeds off your fear, slave,” Bloodraven said softly, lowering his own bulk to the bedroll beside Yhalen.
“You think I don’t know?” Yhalen snarled.
Tears leaked from his eyes, the power to stop them beyond his present control. Why couldn’t the halfling have just let him go? Why couldn’t the dogs have latched onto the scent of some passing animal? Had the Goddess turned her eyes from him so completely for what he’d stolen from the forest all those days ago after he’d first been captured?
“Here. Drink.” Bloodraven pulled him up by the good arm, and thrust a tin cup in front of his face.
It smelled like cold broth. It made his stomach churn, which in turn made his head spin. He gagged a little and turned his face away.
“Just water….”
Bloodraven snorted and tossed the contents of the cup aside, then reached for the skin at his side and poured a little water into the tin. Yhalen took it in one shaking hand and tentatively swallowed. It was flavored from the broth but it was clean enough not to make his stomach rebel and soothed his parched throat. He was dizzy and weak enough that by the time he finished it, his fingers hadn’t the strength to hold the cup, so he let it fall and sat slumped, with his head bowed as he tried to make the world stop spinning.
The ogr’ron grunted, ignoring him for the moment as he unbuckled his sword belt and sat the sheathed weapon between himself and the tree, well within easy reach. He leaned back against the bark-rough trunk and stretched his long legs out to either side of Yhalen.
“Come here.”
Yhalen shuddered, looking through the fall of his hair. He didn’t move. Bloodraven wrapped the slim chain around his hand and tugged. There was little fighting it. There was little enough to do but try not and fall on his face into the ogr’ron’s crotch—which was most definitely not where he wished to be.
Sadly enough, it was probably exactly where Bloodraven wished him the most.
Bloodraven caught him by the good arm and pulled him across his hips, so that Yhalen’s legs were on either side of one of the ogr’ron’s thick thighs and his belly pressed against Bloodraven’s lower stomach. It hurt his injured arm, and he tried to push himself up, but the ogr’ron simply untied the knot in the sling behind Yhalen’s neck and unfolded the limb before stretching it out alongside Yhalen’s body.
“Disobedience won’t be tolerated,” Bloodraven told him, unstopping a ceramic jar filled with some pungent stuff and dipping out a thick dollop. He laid callused fingers to Yhalen’s back and his skin stung for a moment before it numbed, which caused a good deal of the burning hurt that he’d endured since he’d awoken, to fade away.
The ogr’ron shifted Yhalen’s hair and smoothed the salve across his shoulders and around his ribs.
Down his spine to the curve of his back, where the fingers paused in their journey, circling a particularly intense spot of pain in apparent fascination. He didn’t recall the getting of that particular pain, nor the injury to his back.
“What did you do to me, beast?” he hissed, cheek pressed against the leather of Bloodraven’s vest.
The hand stilled, fingers splayed out on the swell of his buttock.
“You were punished, slave.” The fingers squeezed, painfully hard, and Yhalen shut his eyes and endured it. “But not nearly so badly as you deserved. I should have let the dogs have you.”
“You should have,” Yhalen agreed. “Better than your touch.”
“Do you think that your injury will stop further punishment?” Bloodraven asked, a hint of anger in his voice, or perhaps frustration. “You should welcome my touch, for it’s the only reason you’re alive, foolish slave.”
“I’m not a slave,” Yhalen retorted, but it was weak and muffled and he had nothing to back it up with.
“You are,” the ogr’ron growled, pushing aside the flap of Yhalen’s loincloth and prodding between his buttocks with his thick fingers. A digit slick with salve slid inside of him, jabbing forward up to the knuckle with hurtful intention. He whimpered, shuddering, trying to escape the intrusion by slithering off Bloodraven to the side, but the ogr’ron tangled his other hand in the hair at Yhalen’s nape and held him firmly in place.
“Do you doubt, little human slave, that you’re my property? To be used in whatever fashion I, as your master, see fit. When I have the leisure, I will teach you proper respect—but for now—” The finger slid out and pushed back in. “The next disrespect you show, I’ll punish by bending you over in the midst of my company and showing them to just what use I put you. Understand, slave?”
There was little response a body could make to that. Not with the sure knowledge that Bloodraven didn’t make idle threats, so Yhalen weakly nodded his head and bit his tongue to keep from crying aloud with each rough thrust of the ogr’ron’s too large finger.
Bloodraven withdrew his hand and wiped his finger on Yhalen’s loincloth. Yhalen feared he might make further use of him then and there, but the halfling simply leaned his head back against the tree and shut his eyes, leaving one hand still on Yhalen’s neck and the other near the hilt of the sword propped up next to him.
There was darkness, broken occasionally by flashes of nightmare—broken as well by the creak of leather and the crunch of leaves underfoot. Yhalen opened his eyes to more darkness, but this time it was simply the shadow of twilight. He lay, snug and relatively comfortable in the crook of Bloodraven’s arm, his knee flung over a leather-clad thigh and his splinted arm draped across the ogr’ron broad chest. Bloodraven slept, his breathing quiet and even. Chin bowed to chest, he was a warm, solid mass—at peace, for the moment.
It wasn’t any action of Bloodraven’s that had roused Yhalen. Perhaps nothing at all, save the intensity of whatever fever dream he’d been having. His skin was hot with the heat from his wounds.
His head swam with it.
But he’d thought….
Yhalen shifted his head and looked up, seeing the towering silhouette that separated itself from the cover of the trees and crept upon them. There was the glint of gold, the soft tinkle of earrings moving against each other. The shadows revealed features, unforgettable, hateful features. He knew this ogre from his nightmares. There was the glint of an axe blade over Deathclaw’s shoulder. Though he didn’t speak their language, he knew well enough that there was no love lost between Bloodraven and Deathclaw. No matter how much he might despise Bloodraven, his care was by far preferable to Deathclaw’s.
“Wake up,” he whispered, pushing at the ogr’ron’s chest. It didn’t take much. Bloodraven was reaching for his sword before he’d fully shaken the sleep from his eyes. He dislodged Yhalen effortlessly, sending him painfully sprawling on the ground, and crouched between him and Deathclaw with the sheath of the sword in one hand and the hilt gripped in the other.
He spat something in his ogrish tongue and Deathclaw grinned, looking beyond Bloodraven’s shoulder at Yhalen before answering. Bloodraven hissed and snapped something, at which Deathclaw shrugged and turned to trot off. Bloodraven cast Yhalen a look, black brows drawn, scowling darkly.
“Stay,” he finally said. “If there’s fighting—hold close to the tree.”
As if Yhalen had a choice, tethered to the tree, leashed like a dog. An injured dog, at that. Then Bloodraven was gone, trotting into the darkness, just one more large shadow among so many others.
They were not stealthy, ogres. Yhalen could hear the harshness of their very breath if he concentrated, the shifting of great bodies in the distance. But to a man not bred in the forest, not attuned to her nuance
s—such things might pass notice. If there were human men about—men from the cities on the plains—they might walk into a trap. Bloodraven had taken no precautions to ensure Yhalen’s silence.
All it might take was a yell to alert human men that danger was near. If it were human men at all. And if it were not—well, his bones ached too much to endure punishment for naught.
But the question was taken from him at the first cry of battle that drifted through the wood. The high-pitched clang of steel and the scream of someone in pain. The roar of ogres and the battle cries of men. Yhalen shut his eyes, clutching the chain attached to his collar, praying to the Goddess to grant luck to whomever his captors engaged.
Perhaps it was his fever that made the shadows more ominous, the sounds of battle more lurid, for surely the conflict was a goodly distance. His head swam when he concentrated too hard in making out the sounds. He leaned against the solid support of the tree and cursed his weaknesses.
The shadows shifted in the wood around him, but before he could question his senses, a thick, towering figure lunged out of the darkness. The dull gleam of an axe poised high overhead before it crashed down towards him. Yhalen hissed in alarm and forced his body into motion. Fear overrode pain and he narrowly avoided the edge of the axe. Wood splintered as the metal bit deep into the tree and the metal links of his chain gave way, shattered by the blow. Yhalen rolled, landing in a crouch and cradling his injured arm as he stared up into the small yellow eyes of Deathclaw.
The ogre growled in frustration and made a grab for him, just missing as Yhalen scrambled backwards. He found his feet and pelted into the darkness, the severed end of the chain trailing down his back. So Deathclaw had finally decided to finish the job he’d started so many days ago. Why he’d waited was beyond Yhalen’s comprehension. Then again, the whole of this dreadful situation was . So don’t think. Run.
The sound of Deathclaw crashing through the wood after him filled his ears. His own legs were unsteady and weak. His skin throbbed in time with the red beat of his blood and breath, as did his arm. He lost his footing and fell, rolling in the mulch and leaves. Debris pressed into his back, making the darkness of night go wavery with dancing lights of unexpected and enhanced pain. Desperation and survival instinct made him fight past the agony and stagger to his feet, barely avoiding the hulking figure that pursued him.
But he was no match for the length of an ogre’s stride, and a swiping blow from Deathclaw’s fist caught him across the shoulder to sent him sprawling face first on the ground. His bad arm hit first and he screamed as recently set bones jarred out of place. His body went limp, rolling and ending up against the gnarled trunk of a dead tree. The pain ate at him, obscuring all else. He curled into a fetal knot, clutching the broken limb to his body and taking almost no notice at all of the great shape that loomed over him.
The brute growled something at him, some curse or jeering threat, perhaps, and reached down to take hold of him— —and it was just like before, when Deathclaw and his cohorts had crowded around Yhalen’s battered, torn body and poked fun at his suffering and his frailties. Like before, when this monster had tried to rip him in two with brutal thrusts of his body—and failing that, had left him to bleed out his life onto the forest floor.
The huge fingers bit into Yhalen’s skin and he screamed—pain and fear driving his mind over the edge into hysteria, which opened the way for something else. He wanted the pain gone. He wanted to live. He wanted this beast punished for its crimes against him.
He wanted to kill.
His mind went blank. Curiously devoid of pain and thought and awareness for the space of a breath—or a thousand breaths, Yhalen didn’t know—he only knew that on the next breath, the world came back to him and it was quiet and still and he was alive. Not sheared in two by the blade of an ogre’s axe. He shuddered, pushing himself up. He expected pain at the movement and was surprised at the lack of. He lifted his splinted arm and no broken bones grated beneath the clean-knit flesh. His skin didn’t crawl with the bite of a recent whipping, nor did he exude the heat of fever. Tentatively he reached behind him and ran his fingers down the flesh of his back. It was smooth and unbroken, save for a small rough patch at the small of his back. No welts, no pain.
He’d done it again. Healed himself so completely that there were no sore spots or aches. It was beyond the capacity of the healers he knew—or at least the capacity of what they were willing to do to soothe the wounds of their patients. Goddess, had he stolen from the forest again?
It was hard to see, in the darkness, the state of the wood around him.
There was a wheezing breath that wasn’t his own. Yhalen started, looking about warily. He finally discerned the hulking shape on the ground a few feet away from him. His attacker. Deathclaw. But what had happened to the ogre? Yhalen surely had not felled him, but there was no other in the nearby wood to account for it.
He eased himself to his knees, then his feet, before he cautiously approached. The ogre was still alive, barely—his breath coming in rasping, uneven gasps. The short, spiky hair on his head was no longer black, but silver. The flesh of his broad face was shriveled and sunken, like that of an old man, or a piece of meat laid out in the hot sun that had all the moisture sucked out of it. It was the same for the arms and any other visible flesh, all sunken and dried out. A hale and hearty ogre reduced to this, in how brief a time? Too brief.
He hadn’t stolen from the forest this time. He’d stolen from Deathclaw. He’d stolen life. Yhalen took a step backwards, eyes gone wide, heart pounding in his chest. He whispered a prayer of protection to the Goddess—faltered midway through, realizing that it was his own deeds he needed protection against. He’d committed the unthinkable, the most dire and most despicable crime in the eyes of his people. He’d used the power passed down from Ydregi, generation to generation, to take a life. Not only had he stolen from the forest, but he’d taken from a living thing—to the point that death trembled on his victim’s breath. He’d heard wives’ tales and legends as a child of the unconscionable dark shaman who practiced such theft, but never in his lifetime or his mother’s lifetime or his grandfather’s lifetime had such a shaman lived.
“Forgive me. Forgive me,” he murmured to the Goddess, but as ever, she was silent. But the wood was not. The rustling of approaching bodies in the darkness broke him out of his consternation and sent him dashing away from Deathclaw’s shriveled form.
He tore at the splints as he ran, freeing his arm, still amazed that it didn’t burn with pain. He soon outdistanced the sounds behind him, swift and silent in his flight, and instead came upon a greater disturbance. Ahead was the milling clash of warring bodies in the dark, ogres and men and horses all screaming with battlecries and death. Yhalen veered away from that conflict, heading towards the silence the western forest offered. There was nothing so dominant in his mind as the need for escape.
How long he fled, he knew not. Nor how far he’d run until his endurance gave out and he was forced to a slower pace. He walked then, until darkness gave way to light, mindless of direction or goal—only needing distance from the nightmare he’d escaped. Every finely honed hunter’s instinct he possessed must have been dulled from exhaustion and shock, for he didn’t became aware of the group of horsemen until they were well upon him. Even then, he couldn’t quite summon the will to do more than stand in the midst of nervous, armored horsemen with slumped shoulders and eyes that wouldn’t focus.
They spoke to him, human men with familiar human voices, tones sharp with anger and poorly veiled fear. Most of them had drawn weapons, and the threat of violence vibrated in the air around them—but all Yhalen could do was stare back at them, stupid with exhaustion and terror and unable to comprehend the words they spoke despite the familiar tongue. A few of them dismounted and crowded threateningly around him. Despite being armored, they were hardly taller than Yhalen and he couldn’t be very frightened of such after the company of ogres.
A mounted man from behin
d him barked something and a spear jabbed in his direction. The ones who had dismounted laid hands on him, jerking him about so that they could peer at his back. They snapped more words at him, and he blinked, trying to focus, trying to force his brain into coherency again. A mail-gloved hand lashed out and struck him smartly across one cheek. It hurt. It rattled his brain and miraculously cleared it of the fog clouding it. He hissed and jerked away, lips pulled back in a snarl of sudden defiance. He wasn’t willing to be abused by men of his own kind after suffering so long at the hands of their common enemy.
“Are you deaf, boy, or just dumb?” the knight—for surely the fine armor and the coat of arms on the tunic over it proclaimed that this was a man of some standing— demanded.
“Perhaps he doesn’t comprehend our tongue—if he’s one of their slaves brought with them from the northern reaches?” theorized another mounted knight.
“I understand,” Yhalen said tightly. “And I’m not a slave.”
The knight who had struck him studied him critically, looking down his long nose at him and seeing only dirty skin, hair snarled with forest debris, and modesty barely concealed by a rag of a loincloth.
“You have the mark of one.”
“What?” Yhalen blanched, recalling the peculiar hurt at the base of his back and reaching a hand back instinctively to touch it. The welts had disappeared from his back, but the very faint roughness of what might have been a brand remained.
“I’m not from the north,” he murmured, disconcerted at the mark. “And only captured by them—only days ago….” He wasn’t really sure how many.
“Days ago, you say? That is no new mark, but one well healed. Years, maybe.”
“No.” Yhalen shook his head, helpless to refute that belief with a truth that still horrified him.
“Why lie?” another asked, adding, “unless he’s up to some mischief for them.”