Bloodraven (3 page)

Yhalen moaned and pressed his face into the mulch, having no strength left to even flinch. With no resistance met and no cry of pain evicted, the ogre drew its finger out and added a second. It was no new tactic. They had already invaded him that way, eager to see how far his flesh would stretch before it split. It was split now. He shut his eyes and tried to find escape in blackness, but unexpectedly the ogre pulled out of him and leaned over, jerking his head back by his hair.

Yhalen’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself no more than a hand’s span from the malicious, calculating eyes of the ogre leader. It forced his face down, making him look down the length of his body to the throbbing erection the ogre had freed from its pants. It was huge and unforgiving and glistening with clear fluid. The ogre jutted it hard against his belly like a fist in his gut, knocking the air from his lungs. It said something to him, low and soft and promising. One word that Yhalen thought with detached horror might have meant
death
. Then the ogre eased backwards, clutching his bloodied thighs in its meaty hands, thumbs stretching the cheeks of his buttocks wide as it pressed the blunt tip of itself against him. The other’s paused in their reverie to watch, wide eyed and expectant—breathless over the final execution of their captive.

With great hands clutched tight around Yhalen’s thighs and buttocks, it slowly, methodically worked itself inside, slowly deliberately split him asunder, and oh, he screamed then. Opened his mouth and soundlessly cried out in shock and profound, mind-altering agony. He could not even twist his body in the animal desperate need to escape the torture, so filled—so cruelly skewered was he. All he could do was convulse and twitch and reflexively try to keep breath in his lungs. Soon he didn’t even have the stamina left to do even that and breath came short and unevenly. No stamina left to protest, no cognizance left to beg with anything resembling coherency.

All he could do was lie there, body jerking with the motion of his assailant, oozing blood. So much blood that it soaked the mulch on which he lay. The ogre fucked him methodically, not able to completely immerse itself, even though it tore through his insides in the effort—again, until his hands and great hairy balls were smeared with Yhalen’s blood and Yhalen was fading again, lightheaded and distant, the pain receding in favor of something else.

He was dying. They were making it as slow a process as they could, but he was finally being drawn down the dark path of death. He was barely aware when the ogre pulled out, spewing a great splash of hot liquid across Yhalen’s body, licking his fingers clean of Yhalen’s blood
Ancestors—please don’t reject me.
He was afraid they might. Afraid that he’d disgraced himself—afraid that these beasts would consume his body after they killed it and that he might never return to the ground. He had to be buried in the ground at the roots of a mother tree in order for the forest to lift his soul to the place where the ancestors dwelled. Still, even the eternal nothingness that would come if he were not lifted up by the forest, was better than enduring more of their torment. Even being cold and alone forever was preferable to waking up tomorrow and living through this again.

The darkness came down, like a blanket tossed up and gently floated down over his head. The pain was still there—still present in the background—but the rest was quiet and still. He strove to reach the darkness—the peace. He could just see it. Could feel the overwhelming call of it.

Even the pain went away—there was nothing.

Nothing.

And then a faint gentle presence that pushed him away with a force than made the ogres seem fragile, weak things.

No singular essence—no perceptible identity—more an overwhelming awareness of...life. Of bursting vitality and deep rooted, undulating vigor. He didn’t want it. He wanted endings. He sobbed and railed at the loss of the darkness and the pain came back with so brutal a stab that it drove him grasping after that ethereal power—the essence of the forest that had always protected the Ydregi and given them strength and life and energy. And surprisingly enough, it responded, like it did to his mother when she set bones or healed wounds. It swept over him and enveloped him in warmth and chased away the pain.

And then, there was darkness again and this time, nothing interrupted it. No dreams, no voices, no essence of power.

Yhalen woke up. It was such a profound shock to do so that he didn’t quite believe it at first. He’d expected to die. Had expected to never know anything but that dark nothingness again. It was baffling to open his eyes to filtered daylight. Even more so to open them to anything other than blinding pain.

Oh, he hurt. He was sore and miserable, and his muscles were cramped from the awkward position he’d spent the night in. But it didn’t feel as if he’d been so cruelly and methodically tortured—impaled, torn, and left to bleed out his life on the forest floor. He twisted his head a little to try and look down his body. He was covered in dirt and blood, but his flesh seemed oddly free of the deep cuts and gashes he’d received during his time in the ogres’ care.

How? How had this happened, this miraculous healing? Even his mother, an experienced healer, could not have regenerated such grievous wounds. Not so completely. She could only have aided.

Panicked, he looked for sign of his captors and saw them—four huge, sprawled shapes deeply asleep around the burnt out fire. They were snoring to wake the dead, and there were no animal sounds to break the morning solitude—all the birds chased away by the clamor, or perhaps merely by the ogres’

corrupt presence. But—there was something else.

Yhalen hadn’t noticed in the dark, but the trees, the bushes, the brush, the vines—even the weeds struggling up through the pine mulch—everything surrounding the campsite was dead. Brown, shriveled and lifeless. Likewise, the tree he was anchored to was brittle and dead, though it was apparent from the dried leaves still on their branches that it had not been dead long.

How? He’d not felt this, this profound lack of life before. All the essence, all the life force had been sucked out of this small area of wood—a cruel twist on the gentle borrowing that the healers and druids of his people practiced.

Had he done this? Had he, in his desperation to stop the pain—had he pulled the life force from the surrounding wood and used it to heal himself? That was the way of it, according to his mother. To borrow from the forest—from the Goddess—to heal their hurts. But Mother never killed the forest in her little thefts of power. She never left dried husks in her wake.

Yhalen began to tremble, terrified at the audacity of what he’d done. Terrified that any remote chance he’d had at redemption in the eyes of the ancestors was now banished. Terrified that he hadn’t died. That he’d done nothing more than heal his body so they could do it all over again. That they would wake up and see him....

He couldn’t stop the shaking. The fear ate its way through him, chasing away all other rational thought, all senses, all emotion until all he could do was lay there and stare at those snoring hulks in frozen anticipation. He jerked mindlessly at the rope binding him. He was bound in the same manner as he’d been last night when they’d finished with him, one leg up, the other folded tight and both so cramped that new pain lanced up his back as he twisted. The dead tree rustled and dried gray leaves floated to the ground.

One of the ogres snorted, disturbed in its slumber and Yhalen froze—wanting it back asleep—wanting a few precious more moments of safety before they rose. But it turned onto its back, lifting a muscled arm and wiping the back of a broad hand across its face. His face. Most definitely male. All of them. Gold eyes turned his way, an absent sweep of the campsite, passed him over in his stillness, then swung back, narrowing as the ogre realized with some surprise that Yhalen was alive.

An unexpected thing, to be certain.

Gold earrings chimed as the ogre climbed to his feet, padding over to tower above Yhalen, glaring down with something akin to accusation in his small eyes.

Krebakle ouvbre ne sekhre?
he hissed. How are you still alive, Yhalen imagined the words to mean.

He’d asked the same of himself.

The ogre bent down, and ran his fingertips tentatively down Yhalen’s trembling body, between his legs, the rough pad of one finger prodding behind Yhalen’s shrunken balls at whole, untorn flesh. Then he pulled back, muttering a word, eyes wary, fingers touching a rune-like tattoo on the inside of one arm. A rune against evil, or magic perhaps. For a while, with those hands on him, Yhalen grayed out.

Just ceased to see in his panic and his terror and only came back to himself an indeterminate amount of time later when all his captors were up and warily clustered together, across the clearing. They seemed to be conferring amongst themselves, occasionally casting dark, uncomfortable looks his way.

Eventually some decision was made, for one of the lesser ones, one without an abundance of rings in his ears or gold on his person, ambled over and roughly released Yhalen from his bonds. Or the majority of them. His released legs sent blood rushing to numb extremities and the ogre was unreasonable in his refusal to understand why Yhalen couldn’t stand on his feet when it yanked him up. His legs wouldn’t hold him, though the sprain in his ankle seemed to have fled with the rest of last night’s injury. All he could do was lie there, with his arms still tightly bound behind his back, and try not to sob as the needles of returning blood flow attacked his legs.

He was kicked and harassed until he desperately tried to gain his knees to avoid the punishment.

He was promptly snatched then and a noose looped around his neck, which was jerked tight as the ogre at the other end of it, pulled at it like a child urging a reluctant dog to follow its lead. It was either find his feet or choke as the slipknot tightened. The tatters of his pants hindered him, hanging off his knees as they did, tripping him and making him stagger until one of the ogres hissed and hauled him back against its hips and tore the rags and the one remaining boot from his body, leaving him completely naked in their midst. Shriveled and pitiful and scared and jerked ruthlessly behind them, bare feet catching every thorn and every sharp bristle and burr that he passed.

He was bleeding again in short order, body lashed by whipcord branches pulled back by the passage of the giants ahead of him. His feet were torn and bruised, knees scraped bloody from too many falls to count, blood trickling down his neck from the abrasion of the rough cord looped about it.

They spoke very little when they moved, the passage of their bodies noise enough through trees that were not always spaced wide enough to accommodate them.

Once, they were alerted to something that he was too numb to notice and one pulled him up into its arms, hand covering his face in a smothering embrace while the others slipped into the wood. Yhalen blacked out from lack of breath and came to ass up over a broad shoulder, the others back from whatever had caught their attention.

Easier to lie there, carted about like slain game, fading in and out of consciousness, then stumble along in their wake, so he kept his body limp and let the afternoon pass in a haze of disorientation. It only lasted so long. The brute carrying him tired of it soon enough and tossed Yhalen to the earth, barking at him in irritation and prodding at him with a huge booted foot. Yhalen rolled away as best he could, clambering gracelessly to his feet and standing there with his head spinning from being carried so long with it hanging. His leash was snatched up and again he was yanked along in their wake.

Helpless. Hopeless. Fearing the onslaught of dusk when his massive captors might stop and renew their play from the night before. But night and a cessation of travel proved agonizingly far away.

Yhalen was no stranger to vigorous exertion—the rites a youth had to pass to be called a warrior were strenuous and harsh—but the pace these creatures set with their long legs and their boundless strength was relentless. He had to jog more often than not to keep from being jerked off his feet and dragged along the ground behind them.

He became numb to the pain of torn feet—numb to the scream of protesting muscles, to the constant abrasion of rope about his neck, to the bite of the insects that were drawn to the stench of the ogres and found his naked skin irresistible—numb to everything but the need to keep his feet and stumble along at the end of his leash. The world narrowed to that simple goal. He forgot Yherji and Yhakinor, forgot shame and dishonor and the censure of the ancestors. When he’d been cognizant enough to desire it, death had seemed a precious thing—now, with cognizance numbed and hazy, instinct took over and all his body sought was survival.

When they did stop, with night sounds breaking the stillness of the forest—Yhalen stood trembling on rubbery legs, head down and breathing harsh, like a beast driven too far, too long. His bladder

ached, full and hard from a day forced to hold it in, but the ogres had no care for tending him in such matters or releasing him to let him tend himself, so, able to contain it no more, his body forced release and the urine dribbled down his legs, hot and stinging the scratches on his skin.

He hadn’t even the presence of mind to feel mortification. Just stood there and shook until the ogre into whose care he’d been given loomed over him and without warning knocked him from his feet.