Bloodraven (6 page)

“Come,” the blonde slave said gruffly, having waited with apparent patience while Yhalen cleaned himself.

“Where?” Yhalen asked warily, not moving to follow, though he knew the man would force the issue should he balk too much.

“There are things that need doing. You’d best learn not to ask when you’re told a thing, but do it.”

A hand reached for his arm and Yhalen avoided it, glaring and walked on his own in the direction the slave indicated.

“Do you have a name?” he asked finally, needing some point of reference to ground himself in this place. Anything to keep him from drifting in complete confusion.

The man hesitated, frowning, apparently not willing to easily give up that thing that was still his and his alone. A name. But finally he shrugged and said, “Vorjd.”

“I’m Yhalen,” he said, thinking that perhaps with the exchange some sort of alliance might be built upon. Vorjd shrugged, making no further comment. They had made their way back into the camp,

where the ogres remaining were beginning to stir. Yhalen shied from the brutes that they passed, memory still painfully vivid of the night in the forest. He saw one with a few gold rings in his ears and for a moment went numb with fear until he realized that it wasn’t the one who had led the party he was captured by. Vorjd’s hand was on his arm, pulling him along when he came back to himself enough to realize that his mind had blanked at the prospect of being in that particular ogre’s care again.

“He’s not here,” Vorjd said simply, as if Yhalen had asked out loud. “Kragnor Deathclaw left with the others this morning.”

The one with all the gold. Yhalen wanted to ask. Wanted to be sure of the monster’s name—but couldn’t make his mouth work.

“He’s no friend of Kavarr Bloodraven—no small wonder that he gifted him with you.”

Yhalen got no chance to inquire of the intricacies of ogre politics, for the sound of the hammer and anvil grew louder and Vorjd led him into the trampled domain of the blacksmith. Yhalen balked at the sight of the towering, thick-bodied ogre smith with his huge hammer. There was a piece of oversized armor on the anvil that was still red from the fire that the huge smith was beating a crack out of. He paused eventually, aware of the two humans that stood at the periphery of his smithy and barked a gruff, annoyed question at Vorjd, to which Vorjd answered in the same tongue. Yhalen thought he heard the name Kavarr, but that was the extent of his comprehension.

The smith put his hammer down and shuffled to the back of his tent, digging through a chest and coming back with a ring of metal between his large fingers. Vorjd pulled Yhalen forward and when the huge ogre smith reached for him, Yhalen panicked, twisting from Vorjd’s grip and trying to dart away.

But Vorjd caught him with fingers tangled in his hair and an arm around his throat and hauled him half off his feet in his attempts to get Yhalen back within the smith’s reach. The smith simply growled at him, snatching him from Vorjd’s grip and flinging him none too gently face first down upon a flat slab of stone, pressing one huge hand down upon his back to keep him in place while Vorjd pulled his damp hair out of the way and slipped the open end of the metal collar around Yhalen’s neck.

“Don’t move,” Vorjd suggested, hands on Yhalen’s shoulders as the smith took a very small hammer and a rod of hot metal from the fire and very delicately sealed the collar shut. It was no pleasant experience, and Yhalen’s neck stung from a few spatters of hot metal, as well as the impact of the collar as the smithy pounded the latch shut.

But when the ogre was finished, Yhalen was collared like the rest of the slaves, only his was a smooth circle of bronze instead of iron, with a metal ring attached for the purpose, he assumed—his face heating at the realization—of leashing him if necessary.

It was a humiliation greater than his forced nudity. Casually collared like a dog by an ogre smithy who couldn’t have cared less and a human slave who was in much the same predicament as Yhalen. He cast Vorjd a dark look of betrayal, which the man ignored in favor of herding Yhalen away from the temper of the towering smithy and back towards the tent of Kavarr Bloodraven. Inside, Vorjd took a chain and locked it to the loop in Yhalen’s collar, then turned without a word to leave.

“Wait—what now?” As much as the man frustrated him, he was human and his presence was something of a comfort.

“Nothing. You wait until he comes back.”

“Can I at least have something to eat?” It had been two days since he’d eaten, although he’d drunk his fill at the brook.

“You’re his pet—he’ll feed you as he sees fit.”

Yhalen said something crude and nasty under his breath, standing with the chain pulling at his collar in the middle of the tent.

The end of the chain was attached to a spike driven into the hard ground and try as he might, Yhalen couldn’t budge it. There was enough length to allow him some small bit of freedom in the tent.

He could lie upon the pallet or relieve himself in a hammered bronze pot in the corner. The ogre’s armor rack was empty and there were no stray weapons lying about.

There was nothing to do but sit upon the fur-covered pallet and feel sorry for himself. To feel guilt and shame for not only what had been done to his body, but also for the pain his incompetence—his bad luck in being captured—would cause his family. He did not ever, ever want his mother to know what he’d suffered at the hands of the ogres. He shivered miserably merely thinking about it, and wrapped his arms about his knees.

He was sore still, but not unbearably so. Nothing that had been done to him last night would cause

more than fleeting discomfort, unlike what the others—this Kragnor Deathclaw—had done. He clenched his fists, trying to block out the memory, trying to block out the ghostly after-images of sensation that made his skin twitch and his eyes tear. Injuries that he’d somehow healed by sucking the life force from the surrounding wood.

Oh, and hadn’t that been a revelation. He’d never shown talent for healing before—even though it was in his blood. Never shown more than passing sensitivity for the underlying essence of the great forest and all she encompassed. At least no more than any other young Ydregi warrior who was more interested in proving himself a man than searching for the secrets the Goddess had hidden in nature.

And he’d been satisfied with no simple harmless magic, but had accomplished the forbidden, and not only borrowed from the forest, but withered and killed it in his desperation.

Wary and nervous, he pulled at the still damp length of his hair. The bulk of it was still too wet to properly braid, but the shorter strands by his face were dry enough to work with, so he sat about separating hair for the small ritual braid. He unraveled a thread from the bedding and tied it off, feeling better for that small dignity.

Eventually, with nothing else to occupy his time, he relented and lay back on the soft furs of the pallet, drawing his knees up to his body and facing the door, determined not to sleep and be caught unawares, but merely to rest his body.

He slept anyway. Drifted off into peaceful darkness for he knew not how long, and awoke to the sound of loud voices outside and the jangle of armor and weaponry and the barking of dogs. He chased the sleep away with a frustrated curse and sat up, legs folded beneath him, hands covering that most sensitive part of him, back straight and head high. He wouldn’t cower again. He promised himself that. They would force no further acts of cowardice from him, no matter what they did.

He flinched a little, regardless, when the tent flap was pulled back and the broad-shouldered figure of the ogre he’d been given to, entered. A step into the tent and Bloodraven paused, eyes drawn to Yhalen in what might have been a casual assessment of his newly collared slave. He stood for a moment, staring, armor spattered with bits of dirt and mud and what might have been blood, hair sweat damped and clinging in places to the ochre skin of his face. Then he said something, short and soft, before ambling over to the armor rack and shedding the leather and metal, piece by piece, until he stood shirtless, clad only in boots and trousers. Yhalen heard an audible sigh of relief from him, to have the weight of so much armor gone.

Bloodraven moved finally towards the pallet, gold eyes fixed speculatively on Yhalen.

Don’t flinch away,
Yhalen told himself. Don’t cower before him. He lifted his head and met those glittering eyes. Black rimmed, with long slitted irises and filled with intense intelligence and pride.

Arrogance. He was smaller than his brethren by far, but this one—this one, Yhalen thought, considered himself superior.

Bloodraven said a word. A sharp command that Yhalen could only blink at, not comprehending.

Then one large hand reached out and caught the chain, sliding up its length until there was only a hand span of it between the collar and the ogre’s fingers. He pulled up and Yhalen had little choice but to scramble to his feet on his own or be hauled there by the metal encircling his neck.

Standing, his feet on the pallet which gave him an extra hand’s width of height, the top of Yhalen’s head still barely reached Bloodraven’s shoulders. Flatfooted on the floor he’d be staring at the lower portion of the ogre’s chest.

Another ogre word and Bloodraven reached out and touched the locks of Yhalen’s loose hair that trailed over his shoulder. Clean, it glinted very much the color of the beaten bronze collar around his neck, liberally streaked with dark strands of auburn and brown. In the midst of high summer it would lighten, but it held the colors of fall now.

Yhalen shivered, losing his battle to keep his eyes on the ogre’s face and instead finding them drawn to the large hand that brushed his shoulder as Bloodraven touched his hair. He wanted to step back, away from the touch, away from the closeness of the large body in front of him, but Bloodraven’s other hand still gripped the chain, holding him fast. The hand in his hair shifted to grip his shoulder, forcing him to turn, so that his back was unwillingly to his captor. Bloodraven pulled the chain so that the collar slipped around and let it drape down Yhalen’s back. The weight of it rested against his back, against his buttocks, forgotten momentarily by Bloodraven as the ogre lifted the mass of Yhalen’s hair with both hands, letting it spill between his fingers.

Then Bloodraven said a sharp word and accompanied it by a knee to the back of Yhalen’s leg,

making the limb give way and spilling him to the furs of the pallet. He tried to twist around, instinctively wanting a more advantageous position, but the ogre had wrapped his hand in Yhalen’s hair and used it now instead of the chain to keep him in place, pressing his shoulders down to the furs as he crouched down behind the trembling human.

Yhalen shut his eyes, digging his fingers into the furs, trying to find a place in his mind to escape to—his favorite glade in the ancestral forest, the place he’d always escaped to as a child in physicality—beautiful and ethereal and rife with the gentle essence of the Goddess. If he could find that place in his mind now—if he could drift there amidst the soft grass and the small tinkling spring and the peaceful gnarled trees, he could endure this.

But it was hard to concentrate on such peace with the ogre’s thigh shifting between his legs and the sound of rustling cloth as the ogre unlaced his trousers, exposing himself. Yhalen couldn’t see, but he felt the weight of the erection as it was released and allowed to rest on the small of his back, felt the soft hair on Bloodraven’s balls as they pressed against the top of his thighs. Heard Bloodraven unstop the jar with the scented grease and felt the ogre coat his length before leaning back and unceremoniously prodding between Yhalen’s clenched buttocks with it. There was no gentle coaxing this time. No exploratory finger liberally greased to ease the way. The thick head simply pressed insistently against Yhalen’s opening and forced its way past resisting muscle with inevitable success.

The overheated girth of it sliding inside his unwelcoming body was agonizing. He was filled to capacity in the span of a few breaths, his body stretched so wide it felt as if he’d split in two—but he didn’t. He bled well enough—felt it trickling warm and wet down the inside of his thighs, but his body adjusted and accepted the huge organ that had burrowed within it.

Bloodraven grunted in satisfaction, shifting so that his knees on the floor pressed against the edge of the pallet, so that Yhalen’s feet, hanging over the edge were spread on either side of Bloodraven’s thighs, giving him no room to squirm away. As if the hand pressing his shoulders and face into the furs allowed any chance at escape. As if the chain and collar around his neck did.

The only consolation he had was that he uttered not one plea, nor did he scream or cry out. No sound at all escaped him save for involuntary grunts as the ogre began to pound into him in earnest, and the fur he turned his face into, muffled those.

This time Bloodraven finished quickly, taking his pleasure and spilling his hot seed within Yhalen’s bowels before pulling out and rising, tucking himself back within his trousers and relacing them shut.

Released, Yhalen collapsed onto his belly, legs spread wide, various wetness oozing.

“
Gersha ne kurat
,” Bloodraven said, repeating it when Yhalen didn’t move. The chain was caught again and pulled and Yhalen reluctantly dragged to the edge of the pallet before he could make his watery limbs work and get his feet under him. Walking was intolerable. It hurt bad enough to make his eyes tear and with that excuse to justify it, he let the wetness trail freely down his cheeks. He stumbled in Bloodraven’s wake, pulled along like a unwilling dog to the half filled basin.