Bloodraven by P. L. Nunn Read Free Book Online

more than he was willing to tolerate.
    “Let go!” he demanded, jerking his arm away, glaring at this collared man in frustration.
    He got a backhanded slap for his burst of anger that sent him spinning onto his belly on the pallet.
    Goddess, he was so weak that he couldn’t even take a man’s casual slap without making a fool of himself. He got yanked up again, this time gripped by the shoulders and hauled close to the bearded face.
    “Do what you’re told, slave.”
    “I’m not a slave,” he hissed between clenched teeth.
    “You are.” The hands shook him once and hard. “You belong to Kavarr Bloodraven and you’ll be obedient or you’ll be punished.”
    “Punished?” Yhalen couldn’t hold back the disbelieving laugh. “What more?”
    “Much more, foolish boy. Much more.”
    Yhalen swallowed at that. At the look of utter, solemn dread in the man’s eyes. This man had seen things, he thought, that no sane man ought to see. The blonde slave transferred his grip from Yhalen’s shoulder to his upper arm and hauled him towards the tent flap.
    “Wait—at least give me something to wear.” He was painfully conscious of his nudity and although the Ydregi were not a people that held taboos against the showing of flesh—here and under these circumstances, it wasn’t a thing to be desired. His first instinct was to resist, for there was privacy and safety to a degree in this tent and outside it, a camp full of ogres. But he hadn’t the strength in his legs to compete with this burly human and he was dragged into the morning light.
    “If he wants you clothed, he’ll clothe you.”
    Yhalen glowered red-faced at that short statement, and covered his modesty as best he could with the hand that the blonde slave didn’t have in his grip.
    The camp was not bristling with activity. It seemed, in fact, rather subdued. There were only a few lumbering ogres about, but for the most part the majority of them seemed to be absent. Not in their tents asleep, Yhalen thought, for he got no sense of the subtle flow of life energy from within. He feared that they were out doing some mischief and wondered how close they were to the Nakhanor town
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    where his grandfather had gone to parlay.
    There were other human slaves about, performing the daily tasks that any war camp needed doing.
    Their eyes followed Yhalen and his escort as they walked along the trampled grass towards the brook.
    Once, a pair of animals that might have been dogs, but were much, much larger, lunged at them from the length of chain that held them secure to a spike in the ground. The brutes’ heads came above Yhalen’s shoulders, broad-chested, shorthaired things that bristled with teeth and dripping saliva.
    Short, cropped ears were flattened to broad skulls and tattoos had been burned into the hides, denoting what, Yhalen had no notion. But he did notice that his escort had a similar tattoo on his shoulder, a twined circle with a smaller symbol inside. Marks of ownership perhaps. His escort flinched at the snarling animals, shying away, emanating a fear that drove the creatures into a greater frenzy. Yhalen looked over his shoulder once, at the lunging dog-things and wondered what other savage, giant creatures the cold mountains of the north had spawned.
    At the brook, the blonde slave told Yhalen to wash, after giving him a shove into the edge of the water. He had no protest, other than the fact that the man stood there with eyes fixed upon him the whole time. It was a pleasure to rid himself of the dried blood and semen and the smell of this Kavarr Bloodraven who was supposedly his master.
    “Hair, too,” the slave directed and Yhalen, hip deep in water, cast a glare back up at the shore.
    “For what? It doesn’t look as if you’ve seen a bath in weeks. Why bother?” He was being obstinate for the sheer reason that with this human man, he felt he could.
    The slave stared at him shrewdly. “He won’t be laying me on his own bed furs, so it