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 56
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 behind 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.”
“No!” The sharp cry brought their attention back to Yhalen as he protested, “They captured me—near Nakhanor. A small band of them—but there are more—forty or so.” He thought there might have been that many. Surely no less.
57
“Less now, the gods be willing,” one of the armored men said angrily. “They overestimate themselves, the brutes—thinking well-trained warriors as easy a prey as hapless women and children.”
Yhalen looked at that man with sudden hope. “Are you from the castle to the east?” He couldn’t recall the name of the village for the life of him. “Did a girl come with a woman and children to warn your lord of the ogres?”
They exchanged glances among themselves. The knight on the ground grunted finally and beckoned a man on horseback closer.
“Take him up behind you, Fritz, we’ve no time to dally here.”
They gave him little choice, hustling him towards a horse and an armored man who held out an armored hand for Yhalen to grasp. But it was succor, of a sort, that they offered. Protection, too, so he grasped the hand and pulled himself up onto the broad backside of a sturdy war-horse. Yhalen grasped the belt of the man before him and the troop started off down the trail.
They came soon enough to a scene of great disarray. Of bodies strewn across the shadow-kissed forest floor, of the smell of blood and the aura of death. There were men’s bodies and horses—and surprisingly enough the hulking forms of ogres as well, though the number of men and horse was greater.
There were still more men milling about the area, guarding the bodies of their dead and wounded comrades. They snapped to attention when the company Yhalen rode with, trotted in.
“My lord,” they cried, and the knight who’d struck Yhalen demanded a report of them.
“Captain Therry’s and Captain Gumley’s troops both went after the beasts, milord, when they took to the woods. They weren’t expecting us and we routed them good, the bastards.”
Yhalen doubted that, rather thinking it some clever deception of Bloodraven’s and hating being here in the open when some dire ambush might soon be sprung. No ambush came, however, and the party split, with half staying to guard the aftermath of the battle and the other half taking off through the wood towards a well-traveled path. He did ask where they were going, thankful at the moment to be forgotten as anything other than baggage.
It gave him time to gather his wits. The impact of the mark on his back had staggered him. He longed to twist about and see it—though he thought that it most probably resembled the ones marking Bloodraven’s dogs. It was bitter gall that, though he’d done a blasphemous thing in perpetuating his healing, the dark magic had not banished the mark along with the rest of his ills. They would ask about that mark again, he was sure. They would demand to know how a well-healed brand might come to be on the back of a man who claimed to be a recent captive.
And what would he tell them? That he was Ydregi and an untrained healer of some dubious talent?
They might believe it, his grandfather being recently at Nakhanor village to parlay with the local lords.
His grandfather would have spread word of his disappearance—along with word of his companion’s deaths.
But there was also the stigma of his sins—oh, he couldn’t forget that. He’d stolen life from another to benefit himself, and even though that other had been an enemy about to kill him, it was still unpardonable by the standards of his people. They might begrudgingly take the life of an enemy by physical means if the cause was great enough, but never, never would the Ydregi countenance the misuse of that magic that the Goddess had graced them with. He’d be condemned, he was certain. And it would by necessity be a condemnation from the mouths of his mother and his grandfather, who were chief among the healers and shamans of his people. He couldn’t face that. He wouldn’t inflict such pain upon those he loved best of all.
So he needed to find another excuse, another plausible explanation that would sit well with this human lord.
58
There were too many of them, these humans, and they were well armed and well prepared. There was only slight gratification to be taken, having his own words proved true, having the braggarts that followed Deathclaw see firsthand that all humans were not helpless victims, to be slaughtered and captured. Not enough to make this night anything more than a disaster, though. Not enough to save what was left of his reputation as a war leader once word got back that so much ogre blood had been shed, with so little to show for it. And without it—without the favor of Dagfari Wartooth—then Bloodraven lost what leverage he had in the northern tribes They would be reminded of just what he was—no true ogre, but the half-breed get of some long dead human slave. No matter how skilled he might be with a sword, or how much more agile his mind compared to the majority of full-blooded ogres—he stood no chance against the united bad opinion of the tribes.