Birds had eaten most of the ripe ones, but there were a few plump offerings near the bottom that he plucked without scratching his hand. He wished there were a bush full to quench his hunger. He would have taken them over a spit roasted leg of beast, and happily.
Bloodraven came stalking back, quieter than his full-blood brethren by far. Vorja’s presence alerted Yhalen to the approach a moment before Bloodraven strode up to him and yanked him bodily up from his crouch near the berry bramble.
“It isn’t the time for rest.”
Yhalen got a little shake for emphasis and he gasped as he tried to pry the big fingers from his arm.
Bloodraven let him go by propelling him forward up the non-existent trail the halfling had been following.
“You might have had breakfast, but I haven’t!” Yhalen stumbled a few feet and turned to accuse.
“Are you so sorry to leave so pleasant a place that your mood has soured?”
Bloodraven growled and Yhalen took a hasty step backwards, knowing full well he couldn’t outrun Bloodraven on this particular terrain, should it come to that.
Bloodraven’s golden eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry to be dragged away from a meeting of warriors like an errant child by the insistent whining of a dog. A dog sent by a—”
“Don’t say it!” Yhalen snapped, stabbing a finger at Bloodraven. “Because I’m not and it was important.”
“Yes,” said Bloodraven, advancing. “A troll, you say.”
“Yes.” Yhalen took a step backwards, courage wavering in the face of the grim suspicion on Bloodraven’s face.
“A troll, miles away, heading directly towards that clan...of all the places it could range. You had no hand in it?”
Yhalen opened his mouth. Shut it. If he lied now, it would fester inside him forever, until it would be too large and rancid a thing to safely expel.
“I had a hand.”
A growl and Bloodraven grasped his shoulders. This time, his teeth rattled when Bloodraven shook him. His back hit the old tree he’d been leaning against and with his feet barely touched the ground. He could see it in Bloodraven’s eyes—the fear, the superstition, the memory of the very wives’ tale he’d told Yhalen during the night of human sorcerers bringing the wrath of animals down upon hapless clans. And if that sorcerer had existed, perhaps he’d been a man much like Yhalen, pushed beyond his limits of control. Beyond the limits of compassion for a people who had none of their own. He didn’t want to be that man. He didn’t want to be another Elvardo.
“I didn’t plan it,” he gasped. Salty wetness trailed into his mouth. He hadn’t realized he’d leaked tears. He hated it. “I just felt it. So huge and angry—it drew me in and I called it here. I wasn’t thinking.”
“For vengeance,” Bloodraven said.
Yhalen blinked wetness from his lashes and whispered, “For vengeance. I swear, I didn’t set out to do it.... I look back now and can’t understand why....”
209
“Perhaps that snake in
Fah’nak Gol
can tell you, if we ever see the vale again. Vengeance, I can understand.” He released Yhalen, and Yhalen’s knees almost buckled when his weight hit his legs. He pressed his back against the tree and stared warily.
“You’re angry?”
Bloodraven gave him a look no less wary than his own must have been. “They weren’t the most unmerciful clan I’ve encountered, but then I’ve lived my life among the people, so I’ve seen the range of their cruelties. Take your vengeance now, while you can, where there are few enough of them to connect it to us and hunt us down for retaliation of their own.”
He picked up the pack he’d dropped and began climbing the trail.
Yhalen stared after him, stricken. “But I didn’t mean...how can you not be angry?”
“I have allied myself with the humans. I will kill more than a few dozen if need be to secure that alliance.”
He looked back the way they’d come, hours’ walk now from the clan village. He wondered how close the troll was, but dared not stretch his senses to see. Could he stop it, if he tried? Doubtful. He had done nothing more than urge its predominant impulses towards a path of his choosing—he hadn’t created the irrational rage, the hunger, or the need to destroy. He could no more stop those things than he could slow the stampede of herd beasts whose minds were filled with panic.
It was a terrible thing, this blossoming power that could turn a mundane gift that every Ydregi possessed and make it murderous.
He shouldered the small pack and began up the trail in Bloodraven’s wake.
210
In the days following, Yhalen’s sleep was not peaceful. He was plagued by nightmare visions of blood and slaughter and the screams of the dying rang in his ears when he awoke, usually to Bloodraven’s prodding, the next morning. Even during waking hours, he couldn’t shake the feeling of dread, of blood-drenched guilt that created too vivid images in his mind. He paid little heed to his surroundings, passing time in a daze as they traveled, wrapped in a miasma of culpability that he couldn’t shake. He knew it was cold. Bitterly cold during the nights, simple misery during the days as they reached higher and higher ground. Snow seemed a permanent part of the landscape now.
For several nights, Bloodraven didn’t touch him. Didn’t speak more than a few necessary words and seemed to fall progressively into a fouler and fouler mood. They lay close enough together to share blankets and warmth, but no lustful touch crossed his skin and no possessive arms pulled him into the sheltering warmth of Bloodraven’s big body.
Only Vorja seemed unconcerned about what they had left behind, very much in her element as she bounded through the snow after game, often leaving them for half a day in her hunts. She always dutifully returned with some offering or another for dinner.
Yhalen had no qualms about pulling fire out of the very air to start their nightly camp fires, nor it seemed, did Bloodraven. He found it was easier to create the fire when he was distracted than when he paid full attention to what it was he was accomplishing.
It was perhaps the fifth day of travel since the ogre clan that Bloodraven’s temper broke. They had traveled silently all the day and found that evening what appeared to be a long, abandoned hunter’s shelter in the lee of a very shallow. It was scooped outside of an incline on one side and had a slanted, lashed together wall of long dead limbs on the other. The twine was rotting and falling apart in places, but so many pine tags and vines had coated the makeshift shelter that it seemed steady enough. It was free from snow at the furthest point, at any rate, and showed signs of a fire pit long, long unused. A large section of log had been rolled in, making a rough seat. It was more shelter than they had seen for several nights, so they broke for camp early.
Yhalen automatically began searching for wood to make a fire while Bloodraven cleared out the thickest debris from the floor of their little shelter, making sure no venomous inhabitants lurked beneath the layer of leaves and mulch. Yhalen dumped his damp wood into the shallow fire pit, arranging the sticks reflexively to his liking before wishing the fire into existence. It sprang to life and greedily began consuming the fuel he’d prepared for it.
Supper would be scarce, since Vorja hadn’t had luck hunting down game larger than forest shrews and the birds had picked the various berry brambles clean of fruit. There was tea, which they used sparingly in melted snow, and mushrooms that Bloodraven found under a layer of snow at the foot of a large tree.
It was a dissatisfying supper and even in the midst of his own distractions, Yhalen noticed Bloodraven’s descent into darker brooding. Vorja lay between Bloodraven and the fire, tail thumping furtively and eyes nervous, as if she too sensed her master’s sullen mood.
When the rotting twine that bound the limbs of the shanty together gave under the sudden weight of snow dropping from the foliage above, three or four of the snow sodden limbs fell inwards, dropping upon Bloodraven’s shoulders and head.
Bloodraven roared in surprise, lurching to his feet with hand to sword, dislodging more of the tenuous shelter. Yhalen scrambled backwards, startled out of his study of the fire and Vorja yelped, scampering away as Bloodraven snatched one of the fallen limbs and flung it into the dark forest. He snarled, grabbing another that was still half attached at the bottom and upended the whole structure.
Snow fell into the fire, but didn’t quite blot it out.
He snarled something in his ogre tongue and Yhalen flinched back from him, wide-eyed and frightened at the almost frenzied rage that twisted Bloodraven’s face.
Bloodraven snarled something else, hands clenching so hard into fists that the tendons stood out, then he whirled and stalked into the night dark mountain wood, leaving Yhalen and a whining Vorja in 211
the flickering light of a half-smothered fire.
The rage was upon him. A rage so commonplace among his people, blind and terrible and oftentimes set off by nothing more than a minor irritation. It didn’t come so often to him as it did his full-blooded brethren, nor was he so prone to the berserker rages that came with it, doing damage to anything and anyone in his reach. Regardless, Bloodraven had had the presence of mind to take himself away from the things that he might, in his anger, irreparably damage. It was still some way into the shadowy wood and with some shedding of blood before his vision cleared and the rage cooled.
He’d hit a tree, a great old grandfather of the forest that accepted his violence without tremor. His knuckles bled as a result and throbbed with a pain that helped bring back sanity. He leaned against it afterwards, head bowed, and breathing harsh. In a moment of raw honesty, he admitted that frustration and fear had driven him to this.
It was no easy admission, the latter bit of that honesty. A thing no warrior liked to admit, even though it touched them all upon occasion. The trick was to plunge forward despite it. It was the unknown that got to him. The uncertainties that plagued him, down below the veneer of confidence every ogre learned to construct, eating away at his self-control. He feared he was on a fool’s errand. He feared the enormity of his task and the cooperation of the halflings whom he hoped to lead to a better life. He feared the creature he traveled with, who slept in his bedding—a creature who could create fire in snow-sodden wood and summon mountain trolls to take his vengeances.
He hated admitting that most of all. And the worst thing was—the most appalling admission on Yhalen’s part—was that it had been accidental. That he’d called death down upon a clan without truly meaning it. It would have been better had he spent time and great effort on the task. That it had been a thing of whim, so easily accomplished, was horrifying. Bloodraven had spent days in silent contemplation of what else Yhalen could do at a whim.
He hit the tree again, and twice more, the bark driving into the flesh of his knuckles as he welcomed the physical sensation.
He hated fearing what was
his
!! He would not! And yet for days he’d traveled, so wrapped up in cursed uncertainties and superstitions and dread imaginings, that he had hardly felt
male
. That part of him that daily required attention of some sort hardly rose to attention at all, only in the stupor of early morning, before sleep fully abandoned him. It was embarrassing, that lack, and infuriating. And Yhalen had walked witless of the turmoil he caused, eyes distant, face often marked with concerns of his own while Bloodraven brooded. While Bloodraven watched the mountain sun glint off his hair and smooth motion of a fit young body meeting the challenges of the trail and weighed the attractions of that against the ease of which the destruction of a clan had been brought about.
Not that he’d have hesitated bringing destruction himself, had they threatened his cause. Luring a troll among them would have been a stroke of inspired luck, had it been done mundanely. A trick to be bragged about around the fire for years to come—and Yhalen shed tears over it, silvery traces down his cheeks and would hold guilt over it forever, Bloodraven thought, where any self-respecting ogre would hold such a feat his greatest triumph.
Little fool! Little fool who was the cause of this futile frustration, who belonged to him and refused to acknowledge it. Who insulted him with word and deed and threatened the very nature of his manhood by creating fear and doubt. Even his own dog, a snarling beast that even full-blooded ogre warriors were wary of, more often than not padded at Yhalen’s side more than his own, gentle as any cowering camp cur. He could only assume that something of that same magic that had drawn a troll up the mountain on a path not its choosing, had bespelled the animal.
There was a tightness between his legs that must have come on the heels of righteous anger and the spur of physical pain. He reached a bloody hand down to adjust it, grimly satisfied at its presence.
The touch felt immeasurably good, his fingers firm against the length of it, between layers of clothing. It would have felt better buried between Yhalen’s tight buttocks, and he smiled grimly at that thought.
Expanded on the mental whim as he idly rubbed the outline of his growing erection.
Perhaps this was a sign. Perhaps the tool he needed to put his apprehensions to rest lay throbbing between his legs. He glanced back through the darkness of the wood, a different sort of rage upon him, a controlled, hungry wrath that demanded satisfaction.
He retraced steps he barely recalled taking in his fit of anger, finding the little campsite more from the faint orange glow of the fire than from any certain knowledge of where he’d left it. Yhalen had 212