He was bold, considering. But then, he’d been bold when he was chained in Bloodraven’s tent with no hint of allies about.
“I didn’t offer myself up to capture,” Yhalen went on, just as softly, but with a hint of ire in his voice. “Nor did I have control over what path you chose to take, so don’t blame me for your calamity.
You invade lands not your own and slaughter the people who dwell here and you think the Goddess wouldn’t turn her face from you?”
“Your Goddess holds no sway over me. The gods of the high reaches gift us with their good will—or ill—if they’re pleased with our actions.”
Yhalen snorted in derision and Bloodraven was so shocked at the scorn that he nearly reached out and shook the human by his thin shoulders. Nearly. He growled instead, leaning close enough that his hair brushed Yhalen’s shoulders.
“You make light of our gods? Do you wish to join this goddess of yours so badly?”
“She won’t have me.” It was a softly made admission, his tone weary. “Not after what I’ve done with her gift.”
It was easy enough to let go his irritation, Bloodraven’s piety a weak thing to begin with. Curiosity was a greater draw.
“And what have you done?”
“You know. You saw. The Goddess didn’t grant my people with her gift only to have them use it as a weapon or at the cost of other life.”
“This gift. Many humans have it?” Bloodraven asked with a small shudder of his own.
“No. I’m not of these people—my people live in the forests of the west, separate from the peoples under the rule of the king and his lords.”
Ah, so it became less of a peculiarity that they would sacrifice an outsider over one of their own.
“But you didn’t take his life,” Bloodraven reminded him and Yhalen flinched, looking up guiltily from under the fall of his hair.
“I did worse, the first time. I killed the forest...the trees which give freely of their own—yet I drew all they had to give without mercy....”
“When?” Bloodraven asked.
Yhalen blinked up at him, as if coming out of a daze, and his eyes became shadowed and wary. “It doesn’t matter.”
81
“When? Did Deathclaw see this thing you did?”
Slowly Yhalen nodded and Bloodraven’s suspicions were confirmed. Deathclaw had recognized a human shaman and thought to send that threat into Bloodraven’s tent. How frustrating for Deathclaw for his plot to come to no fruition, save his own eventual ruin.
“He gave you to me then, hoping you would work your dark magic upon me.”
He wasn’t particularly speaking to Yhalen, more voicing his own inner musings, but Yhalen answered regardless. “You didn’t do to me...the things that he did.”
“What things?”
But Yhalen shook his head, drawing his knees up close to his chest and wrapping his slender arms about them. Drawn in a knot as he was, he seemed so much smaller than he really was. A fragile, narrow-boned thing that could be so easily crushed. Bloodraven didn’t need to press the issue. He could well imagine the things that Deathclaw and his small scouting party might do to a pretty human captive. Things that no human would reasonably survive...unless magic were involved. He felt more the fool for not guessing.
“Tell me,” Bloodraven said finally, “About the lords of this place. The hawk-faced one expects obedience from the others, but the large one with the red hair walks with more of a presence of power.”
“Dunval is lord of this keep,” Yhalen said dully. “Lord Tangery is prince and protector of the Northern provinces.”
“Ah. This name I’ve heard. He commands vast armies, yet I didn’t see them here.”
“And I should tell you where the armies of men gather?” Yhalen asked with no small bit of acerbity.
He amused Bloodraven enough that he laid his head back against the stone wall and grinned wolfishly.
“They told
you
these things, Yhalen?”
“No,” Yhalen admitted, and then asked suddenly, “What do they want of you? What do they think you can give them that they’re willing to negotiate?”
“What would you wish of me, were you in their position?”
Yhalen looked up at him through the shadows, brows furrowed in contemplation. “You would betray your own people?” he asked finally, voice a small whisper.
Bloodraven stared at the black rock of the ceiling, his good mood dwindling. The answer to that question depended solely on just which people he considered his own and what benefit an alliance with humankind would hold for them.
82
Somewhere, in the midst of fear and apprehension, exhaustion welled up to overcome all else and Yhalen slept. It was a deep, dreamless slumber and he was loath to rouse from it, even at the stirring of the warmth that he rested against. He was shifted effortlessly, distanced from his pillow and set against the cold stone of a wall. It took more than a moment to collect his dazed wits enough to realize that it had been his enemy he’d been pressed against, and his enemy that had carefully moved him aside so that he might stretch long, chained limbs.
Yhalen was abashed that he’d allowed himself to fall so easily into repose, the captive of a captive and his fate so uncertain a thing.
“They come,” Bloodraven said softly, rotating broad shoulders and grunting shortly at the effort, the left one no doubt stiff and sore and oozing infection as well, from the smell of it.
Yhalen had no notion of how long he’d slept, there being no sun to hint at the time of day. Yhalen wondered if Bloodraven had slept at all, or if his hearing was just that keen that the sound of booted feet on stone steps had brought him to wakefulness. Yhalen, forest-born and bred that he was, had certainly not let the sound disturb his slumber.
The light left them, had guttered down to a mere fraction of what it had been since Yhalen had been brought here, so he gauged that some hours had passed, at the very least. The brighter light of lanterns burning at the height of their luminance made the narrow tunnel leading to this deepest of pits glow with orange brilliance. It preceded the appearance of men only by a little bit, and soon a handful of guards stomped into the chamber outside the cell. Among them were the familiar faces of Lords Tangery and Dunval.
The guards carried foldable canvas field chairs, which they set up for their lords, with one more behind them for a thin, wary scribe who settled down, parchment and ink at hand.
“Well, I see he hasn’t killed the boy yet. Surprising.” Dunval stalked up to the bars of the cell, squinting into the shadows of the corner at Bloodraven and Yhalen. “I expected to see his gnawed bones strewn about the cell. Or at the very least his ravished carcass, torn in two by the beast.”
“Ogres don’t
eat
humans, little human lordling,” Bloodraven said very softly, golden eyes narrow, ears twitching just enough to make a few of the lower rings jangle against each other. “Hardly enough meat on you to make it worth our while.”
Dunval’s mouth tightened, face darkening a little in annoyance. Tangery moved up beside him before he could utter a word of retaliation, laying a big hand on Dunval’s shoulder as he peered into the cell himself, a faint twist of amusement on his thick lips.
“That’s a good thing to know, lord ogre. A thing to put a man’s mind at ease, knowing that if he’s killed in honest battle his corpse won’t roast over the cooking fires of those that killed him. Now, we’ve given you what you asked for. It’s time for you to give us what we want.”
Tangery stepped back, settling himself in the field chair and a moment later, not to seem less at ease, Dunval sat down in his own.
“What do you wish to know?” Bloodraven asked simply, tilting his head in curiosity, but otherwise not shifting his relaxed position against the wall.
“Are the ogre armies of the north massing to attack southern lands?” Dunval asked tersely.
Tangery sighed, but kept his silence, waiting to see what Bloodraven might say.
Bloodraven considered a moment. “There are no ‘armies’ of the north. Not like your human armies.
There are clans, and each clan has warriors that do the bidding of the clan chieftain. There’s no chief that rules all the clans and their purposes are often at odds. It would take a great event for the clan chieftains to unite in purpose.”
“That wasn’t an answer to my question,” Dunval hissed. “That was a lesson in the primitive politics of your brethren.”
Tangery lifted a hand thoughtfully, contemplating words that Dunval dismissed as useless. Yhalen thought it was more of an answer than the hawk-faced lord understood. If it was true, the candor of it
was alarming, to speak in the presence of an enemy.
“Is it then only the work of one clan that has had the southern lands of my people raided so many times this season?” Tangery asked.
Bloodraven’s mouth twitched in a faint, rueful grin that only Yhalen perceived, draped as he was in the same shadows as the half ogre.
“No. Not one clan’s work. Though they don’t work in unity, the need that all in the northern highlands perceive, drives individual chieftains to seek relief. With each passing year, the mountains grow colder, the snows deeper, and the ice thicker. Game is scarcer and the crops tended by slaves thinner and thinner. Our slaves are dying out, as well—yet all the things that dwindle in the north are plentiful in your southern lands. Meat, crops...slaves. Necessity often breeds unity even in the most quarrelsome environment, does it not? And with great resistance, rivals will eventually see the benefit of combining forces.”
He trailed off after this last dire prediction, letting his human audience make what they would of it, his big body calm and still and letting no hint of the unease he had to feel, betray him. How he’d developed such reserve while growing up in the company of full ogres, Yhalen had no notion, for, from what he’d observed of Bloodraven’s company, conversations—much less arguments between rivals—were not held with such aplomb.
Yhalen shrank closer against the wall of his corner, willing the shadows and Bloodraven’s bulk to make him invisible, wishing very much that he were not here and not privy to this conversation.
Seething with indignation inside that they had come down here fully expecting to find him murdered. It was only Bloodraven’s curiosity that saw him alive, certainly not the generosity of these men. Little wonder that his own people had seen fit to separate themselves from the lands of ‘civilized’ men many generations ago, if this was the way they treated their allies. If he ever returned home in anything other than abject shame, he’d make his thoughts on the subject of the southern lords and their practices very clear.
“If this happened,” Tangery asked slowly, “this combining of forces among the clans, how bold would it make them in their forays into the south?”
Bloodraven didn’t answer directly, tilting his head back against the wall as if in contemplation.
Yhalen thought it was simply a display of power, making them await his pleasure. Dunval didn’t take the wait well, his face reddening and his knuckles whitening with stress on the arms of his field chair.
But Tangery motioned him to silence when he’d have voiced complaint, and Dunval snapped his mouth shut, giving Yhalen some small bit of satisfaction at the man’s frustration.
“It would make them very bold,” Bloodraven finally said. “As will the oncoming winter.”
“How many?” Dunval could keep quiet no longer. “How many warriors combined in these clans?”
“Enough, I think, to make your lives very difficult—if not short.”
Dunval rose, growling. “Your life will be shorter still, if you don’t answer my questions, beast.”
Bloodraven stared levelly at Dunval, unflinching. “And what gain to you then?”
“What gain? Your spilled blood will be gain enough.”
Dunval beckoned for the guard standing against the back wall to come forward, perhaps with the intent of sending them into the cell to work mischief upon their chained captive, but Tangery again stalled reckless action with a motion of his hand.
“Sit down, Lord Dunval,” he commanded and there was little Dunval could do but follow the order of the brother of his king.
“What gain to
you
, master Bloodraven?” Tangery leaned forward, eyes bright with contemplation. It was a fair enough question and one that Yhalen himself wondered at, considering all that he’d seen and heard among the ogres. Despite Bloodraven’s rivalry with Deathclaw, he doubted the halfling would so easily betray his fellows.
“Not all those who live in the north think the same way as the war chieftains,” Bloodraven said, his voice a quiet rumble. “There are those that don’t necessarily look upon humankind as victims to be slaughtered or slaves to be collared.”
“The halflings,” Tangery guessed, stroking his beard. “Like yourself?”
Bloodraven shrugged. “My father was a human slave. I never knew him, dead before my mother pushed me from her womb. Because of his blood, though, it was a struggle to live past my first decade.
As it’s a struggle for all those with human blood in their veins. Many don’t survive, killed by their larger
brethren. Others are...treated little better than slaves themselves. It is the way, that the strongest survive and the weak perish.”
“Why should we care if you beasts kill off your own number?” Dunval snorted in contempt.
Bloodraven fixed the man with a silent, narrow stare until Lord Dunval blanched, unnerved by either the halfling’s golden eyes or his calmness, and turned his own eyes away.
It was victory enough that Bloodraven shrugged and answered, “Who among your company could kill an ogre of full blood? What five among them?”