Bloodraven

by Nunn, PL

  See, Elvardo directed. See what triggers them.

  They were so powerful, throbbing so vigilantly, that Yhalen wondered that he hadn’t sensed them before this, and then realized it was because they slept. Dormant and unresponsive when they distinguished no threat to the valley they warded.

  There were presences—life forces—that were not of the wood. And once he noticed them, he recognized the unique scent of ogre mixed with man. Although they activated the wards with their approach, the wards didn’t react to them. Elvardo had altered his spells then, to accept those of mixed blood, and the activation of the wards had simply attracted Elvardo’s notice.

  No, there is something more.

  Yhalen followed the dark lord’s flittering attention, waiting to see what had pricked his interest.

  Blood.

  Yhalen sensed no such thing, only the life force of the halflings—and that only because he rode the thread of Elvardo’s consciousness. He’d never been so adept at picking up on the essences of higher intellects as he did with lower.

  I sense nothing, Yhalen told him.

  I have an affinity for blood, responded Elvardo. It is there, soaking into the earth—ah, there, beyond the boundaries of my wards—ogres full. Do you feel them?

  No. Maybe. Yes. Close. Close behind. Yhalen concentrated, trying to feel what Elvardo felt…and he felt the single-minded, focused rage, the desire to drag down and kill. It was not so far removed from what he might feel from a pack of wolves. Experiencing that group rage made him shudder, envying no one that was the focus of it.

  Do something, he urged Elvardo.

  If they reach my wards the forest will take care of the matter.

  And if they reached the halflings before, there would be massacre. The distance between them was considerable—but wait, there was conflict, a battle-mad mind that was not human toiled at the edges of the ogre tide. A familiar presence, frenzied and loyal and desperate to protect what was hers. Vorja.

  Which meant Bloodraven—but he couldn’t sense him. Why not, when he could scent the others like a bad smell? Was he dead, then? No. No. That Yhalen would not believe. He stretched his senses and felt a spark of familiarity. Focused and determined. A hunter, pretending to be prey. But only one spark amidst a sea of duller specks.

  Stop them. Stop them, he demanded, panicked—helpless with so much distance between them. The greatest portion of his magicks was instinctual and unguided. Learning the skill to direct them was no easy task, and he had developed little enough it in the days under Elvardo’s tutelage to make a difference now.

  Elvardo waved a hand in his ethereal face, warning him back with a hint of irritation. Don’t distract me and don’t try it yourself. I want my mountain whole, thank you.

  Then what? cried Yhalen, his mental voice echoing with anguish.

  Let me work, impatient child. It’s not so easy to work delicately so far outside my wards. You don’t want him consumed with the rest, do you?

  Consumed? A shiver of new dread passed through Yhalen.

  The next time you feel guilty about taking from the forest—here’s an ingenious way of giving back. Watch and learn.

  Bloodraven lost ground when his trail ran into a deep, jagged gully and he had to backtrack to find a passable spot. They caught up with him, dogged in their pursuit, and he struggled to keep the upper ground and some semblance of an advantage. With every passing second, however, more of them drew closer and defeat loomed. He slashed and stabbed and dodged, the pounding of his own blood like the rush of a great river in his ears. It overcame, almost, the roars of the ogres struggling to get up the hill and at his back.

  Vorja tried to stop that tide—rushing at the ones who worked their way around, growling low in her throat as she tore into her work. She was a beast possessed.

  Then, past the throb of blood in his head, he heard a high-pitched yelp of pain and, against all good sense, turned his attention her way for a brief second. Saw the dog go down, floundering in bloody snow—and missed entirely the thrust of the blade that hit him in his side, glancing off the link mail under his leathers and sliding into the flesh below where the mail ended, into his ribs.

  He staggered, the impact of pain robbing him of breath and coordination. He went down, his feet sliding out from under him in the snow-trampled leaves. An axe swung over his head, just missing the tip of one ear, and bit into the broad trunk of the pine on his right.

  The tree quaked, as if the blow had been a mighty one indeed, and leaves and pine tags showered down from above suddenly, along with clumps of snow caught in the branches above. It was odd enough, this sudden mass shedding of winter foliage, to give a mountain-bred people pause.

  Bloodraven looked up, and from his vantage on the ground, it seemed as if the intertwining lattice of limbs had come alive, twisting and slithering like serpents in the trees.

  Then, with a great sound of creaking wood, the forest awoke.

  The ogre closest to him cried out in surprise as dozens of slithering branches reached down to wrap about his upper torso, piercing flesh as they wove their way around and into his body. They yanked him up off the ground and drew him into the snarl of limbs overhead. His comrades roared in shock, hacking away at wooden attackers as they were snared in the same fashion. And not just the branches from above, but from below, as well. Roots burst up out of the earth to encircle legs, torsos, and heads like great serpents, hauling bodies back into the earth and the tangle of old roots at the base of ancient trees as they retreated.

  A feeding frenzy the likes of which Bloodraven had never seen nor imagined possible, the forest itself nourishing itself on the blood and flesh of the living. Those at the bottom of the slope began to flee, screaming and dropping weapons in their desperation to get away. Some few of them might have made it, but the majority were snared by the rippling surge of hunger that possessed the forest further down slope.

  Bloodraven lay where he was, untouched. Afraid, quite honestly, to move and gather attention to himself.

  Of course it was magic. Magic of a dark and terrible sort. Magic of the kind that protected the vale he led his people to take shelter within. It was too late by far to change his path, but ah, he most certainly questioned the wisdom of his choices. If they’d seen what had just happened, he did not doubt that the halflings who’d struggled so valiantly to get here would have turned tail and run.

  Best, then, that they didn’t know the details of the things that protected this haven. He wished he didn’t. Not with blood dripping down from the foliage and seeping out of the contorted trunks of trees.

  The feeding seemed to have stopped. The trees appeared to have returned to stillness and tree-like behavior, but he could swear that some of the older, more twisted forest giants seemed to possess an air of satisfaction in the patterns of their gnarled bark. Of their victims, there was no sign. Not even a scrap of armor or the edge of a blade to suggest they had ever been here.

  He heard a wheezing whimper and some rustling, and recalled the dog. He turned onto his side, wincing at the biting pain. He could feel the trickle of blood rolling down and soaking his trousers. It was painful but not, he thought, a fatal wound. At least, not yet.

  He saw the dog laying a half dozen paces away on her side, her head twisted around to worry at her flank. He scrambled over and saw the knife in her back, between the spine and the fleshy part of her back leg.

  He reached for it, and she snarled and snapped at his hand, the pain making her fractious. He said something soft and soothing as he patted her shoulder, grasping the back of her thick collar with one hand to keep her jaws from his other hand as he gripped the hilt of the blade and yanked it out. She yelped and tried to lurch to her feet, wanting away, but he kept hold of her, an easy enough task when her back leg gave out. He held her then in his lap, arms tight around her while she shivered and calmed enough to let him try and stem the bleeding.

  He packed the wound with mud made from the melted snow and rich earth under
the leaves, then bound it tight around her hips with a long strip of cloth cut from his cloak. Being a dog, she lurched to her feet—but her back leg was strengthless and she floundered, half whimpering and half snarling, her flank twitching and trembling. He scowled and covered his own wound with the same mud mixture before he collected his weapons.

  Finished, he picked up the dog. She didn’t take the action well, struggling and fussing under her breath until he got a good position and the warmth of his body, combined with his repeated calming words, settled her.

  With one last look at the trampled slope—at the blood still seeping from the trunks and roots of trees—he started down it, heading in what he hoped was the direction to the pass that led into the vale.

  It took him a while to find it, but once he fixed on a landmark that was familiar, he knew his way and increased his pace. The ridge was not so snow-crusted as the territory west of the vale, and the trail left by passing ogr’ron feet was easy to follow. There had been the marks of other, larger boots, but they ended in a particularly trampled section of dense wood, along with a spattering of blood. The tracks of the halflings continued on, unmolested.

  He put Vorja down when she became restless in his arms, and she limped along behind him gamely, dragging one back leg. It gave him a moment to work the kinks out of his shoulders, for she was no light burden, heavier twice over than his human and harder to comfortably cradle. His own wounds were starting to tell as the aches began to truly make themselves known, the gashes and punctures throbbing with hot pain.

  When he reached the top of the ridge and found an outcropping of rock above the tree line where he could see the valley, a shudder of relief passed over him. The slope veered down for half a mile, thick and green with trees, and beyond that the grasses of the valley reared up to meet the forest.

  He could see the first of a line of weary halflings breaking the forest and venturing out into the grasses. He could see in the distance the budding life of the new village, the smoke of cooking fires rising thin into the sky.

  Home. Home. He tested the word in his mind, mouthed it first in the ogre tongue, then in the human to get a feel for it. Haven and protection. Things to fight for. Things to cherish.

  He looked to the other end of the vale, at the foreboding dark lines of the keep perched like a beast atop the cliffs, and thought that there was a thing there to be cherished and fought for as well.

  He grinned, the fierce, sharp-toothed grin that ogre warriors very seldom practiced with humor in mind, and started down the slope.

  It wasn’t until he passed the obscuring shelter of the forest that he saw the problem. He’d picked Vorja up half way down to make better time, but he put her down once past the trees. He stalked through the grasses the rest of the way down slope to what appeared to be a very tense standoff between his group of exhausted halflings and a troop of mounted human soldiers.

  There were weapons drawn on either side, his people scared and in an unknown place and not knowing what sort of reception to expect—the humans just being damned ignorant, considering the arrival of halflings from the western mountains was expected and was the very reason they were here.

  Bloodraven was tired enough and sore enough to want to bash heads. He didn’t quite run, but he lengthened his stride considerably. There were more riders coming from across the vale and ah—to make matters worse, he could see the distant gathering of halflings making their way from the village at the far end. He cursed under his breath, close enough now to hear the sounds of human men babbling demands to ogr’rons who couldn’t understand them.

  He reached the edges of his scattered folk and pushed his way through their ranks, pushing weapons down as he went.

  “Lower your blade,” he roared in the ogre tongue to the foremost halflings—the largest and youngest, who had the shortest tempers and bristled in the front of the group. And to the human soldiers, “Put your swords away, fools.”

  He was in no mood for politeness and they bristled back at him, human pride offended at being ordered about by the likes of an inhuman savage from the heights. He knew the look.

  “All of your weapons are to be handed over,” the young human said, the silver of his insignia glinting in the sun. “In the name of the king, you… ogres…are to disarm and submit to our authority.”

  It was the sneer in his voice that got to Bloodraven more than the audacity of the command. The fear of them he could understand, faced with forty giants, most of which were armed. But that this officious little human knight who, even mounted on his heavy charger, only stood a head above Bloodraven—that he should order them about with such disdain…it wasn’t to be tolerated.

  He was tired and he wasn’t prepared to coddle the pride of some young officer out to prove his authority.

  “You and your king are welcome to try,” Bloodraven growled.

  The young knight swung his shining and very probably virgin blade towards Bloodraven, who simply wrapped his fingers in the knight’s cuirass and yanked him out of the saddle. He held the little knight dangling with his feet above the ground, stopping the use of the blade with one hand that covered both the hilt and the human hand holding it effortlessly.

  It was hardly a rational move, with two uncertain parties tensed around him. Blows might very well have been exchanged, save for the pounding of hooves behind the human troop and a human voice desperately screaming for everyone to stand down.

  Of course, no one did—not until Alasdair shoved his way on foot into the center of things, barking at his men to back off and coming to a standstill next to Bloodraven and his dangling captive.

  “Well, it seems as if you’ve had a difficult journey and a fortuitous one. Welcome back, Bloodraven. And if you wouldn’t mind, put my lieutenant down?”

  Bloodraven took a breath. Glanced at Sir Alasdair from the corner of his eye and noted the outstretched hand of greeting. Human politeness. He took another breath, forcing calm, and let the human knight down, eyeing the naked blade in the trembling man’s hand until Alasdair waved him to sheathe it and step back. Alasdair held out his hand again—a big hand on a big man, but Bloodraven’s still enveloped it.

  “Forgive this nonsense,” Alasdair said. “New regiment just in yesterday, and not a one of them has seen any of you close up before. Nerves and fear. We’ll have them on both sides for a while, I daresay.”

  Bloodraven grunted, his anger diffused—grateful to this big-boned, scarred knight.

  “You have wounded,” the knight observed. “Let us help.”

  “No. We can see to our own.”

  Bloodraven just wanted to get his people to the end of the vale, where they could lay down their burdens and rest in a place without critical eyes, without the danger of misunderstanding that would lead to violence. They’d had enough of that lately. The only human he ached to see, he wasn’t even sure was sane enough to recall him.

  He looked towards the dark keep, every instinct he possessed urging him to march there now and demand what was his. What was his—dangerous, deadly creature that Yhalen had turned out to be. So very ironic that Deathclaw had given him something he hoped to be the death of him, and that death had simmered and waited—to strike not Bloodraven, but Deathclaw himself. Bloodraven regretted to his core not having seen the shock in Deathclaw’s eyes the moment he realized that death was the only prize he would gain from his duplicity. Magic or no, he warmed with pride at the thought that Yhalen had struck his enemy down. They each fought with the resources gifted them, after all.

  But there was the clan to think of—the new clan. And he had not come all this way to send these tired halflings into a foundling settlement filled with strangers from other clans. Half-blood or not, they were still of ogrish blood and temperament, and still possessed of the innate distrust of other clans. As well as the quick temper to initiate violence if some young male decided to attempt to assert dominance over some other hothead who hadn’t the patience to endure it.

  The last thing
Bloodraven needed was hostility among his own people.

  Alasdair wisely pulled his men back, gaining a grunted agreement from Bloodraven to meet with him later to talk, and Bloodraven motioned his scattered, wary halflings towards the end of the vale and the distant gathering of ogr’rons waiting there to meet them.

  Will you run to him like a dog to its master?

  Elvardo’s sly voice echoed in Yhalen’s head. Elvardo’s innuendo.

  Elvardo had implied other things, lightly said, that cut deep—but then, what did Elvardo ever do that was not woven through with ulterior motive?

  Yhalen was honestly not sure if it was some sort of jealousy on Elvardo’s part, or simply in his nature to spew discord. Even so, his most malicious slights always seemed to have some spark of truth to them. So Yhalen hesitated in his rush to the stable, leaving unuttered those cutting responses on the tip of his own tongue—for after all, horrendous as it had been, Elvardo had saved Bloodraven’s life, and the feat had taken effort. And the Ydregi part of him, the part that still sat at the feet of the elders, listening to their tales of tradition and duty, could not help but offer respect to his teacher.

  Perhaps that same instilled habit had even altered Elvardo’s treatment of him, for though Yhalen seriously doubted that the dark lord had ever before taken the effort to share his knowledge in magical things—if his fits of frustration and lack of patience were any indication—he’d ceased his physical advances and the worst of his flirtations. As it should be between teacher and student.

  He went instead to the nearest balcony overlooking the length of the vale and waited to see what would emerge from the wooded slopes to the west. He blunted his nails on the stone of the ledge, impatient and nervous for no reason he cared to examine.

  Eventually they appeared, so far down the vale that, from the vantage of the keep, they were nothing more than small, dark figures exiting the pines on the mountainside. It was easy enough to stand there and simply watch, for he knew Bloodraven was not among them. And if he had been, was Elvardo right? Would Yhalen rush down like a fool, eager to regain his fetters?