Bloodraven by P. L. Nunn Read Free Book Online Page B

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
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    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