Free Bloodraven by P. L. Nunn Page A

morning gruel and a flask of clean, cool water. These he sat down at the end of the pallet, within Yhalen’s reach.
    “I thought only he fed me?” Yhalen asked, sitting with the furs covering the lower part of his body, his back against one of the poles that supported the tent.
    Vorjd gave him a dark look, not answering.
    “Are you his slave, too?”
    “Not like you,” the man said gruffly, hefting the dirty chamber pot and padding out of the tent with it.
    Yhalen frowned, listening to the sound of receding footsteps without. To the gentle whisper of the wind as it rustled the canvas. He closed his eyes, imagining the flow of it outside, free to go as it wished, unfettered. He felt the faint essence of it, and followed the trail to the greater essence of the forest at the edge of the vale where this camp sat. He sought after the presences of forest dwellers, seeking the warmer, more vibrant essences of flesh and blood things—but there were none close by.
    Everything had fled from the anomaly of the ogres and the foul seed they brought with them.
    He withdrew slowly, unwilling to shatter this moment of inspired awareness—it was a thing he’d so seldom paused to initiate when he’d been free in his own ancestral forest. He’d not cared for the ways of the elders—rather preferring to delve into the way of the warrior and the hunter, as most of the younger ones were wont to do. He’d had all the time in the world, he’d thought, to make his peace with the Goddess and the learning of her ways as the decades passed.
    The tent flap opened and Yhalen blinked, losing his connection with the forest, jarred back to the dim, leathery smell of the tent. Vorjd was back, with the cleaned chamber pot.
    “I’m his slave,” the man said, not looking at Yhalen. “For three years.”
    “Three years? How have you survived with them?” Yhalen leaned forward, disbelieving. If he survived the month, he’d be surprised.
    “He’s not as bad as some. He’s fair, if you do what you’re told. Most ogr’rons are—the ones that have enough rank to hold slaves, at any rate.”
    “Ogr’ron? Not an ogre?”
    Vorjd looked at him as if he were daft. “Of course not an ogre, you fool. You think you’d have survived the first night, if he were? He’s a halfling. Father was a human, mother an ogre who dallied a little too frequently with her slave. Not uncommon. They’ve a fascination for us.”
    “Oh. Oh, I didn’t know. They can...breed with us?”
    “The females can. The males play at it sometimes, but there’s nothing left but bloody mess afterwards—not that a human woman could birth something the size of an ogr’ron and survive it anyway. Bloodraven’s not that large for a halfling. Some of them are almost the size of full-blooded ogres.”
    Yhalen shivered, sickness rising in the back of his throat as he recalled first-hand how badly a body could be torn when the male ogres played with their human victims.
    “What’s wrong with you, boy?”
    Vorjd was standing over him. Yhalen had to blink to refocus his vision. For a moment, the world had grayed, jerking him back into horrible memory.
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    “Nothing,” he whispered, not willing to admit it. To ever speak it out loud.
    Vorjd didn’t press it, having more pressing tasks, such as the cleaning of Bloodraven’s tent. Yhalen sat, half watching, half dwelling on the things that Vorjd had told him. Foolish of him not to have realized that Bloodraven wasn’t of the same ilk as the others. The size alone was hardly the major difference, but the rather crafting of the bone and the muscle that made up features more human than ogre, when you got past the sharp teeth and the golden eyes and the tapered, pointed ears. Yhalen supposed the fear and the frustration and the abuse at all of their hands had blinded him to such details.
    He mulled over it all the long afternoon, until the racket of armor and the loud press of deep-throated ogre voices announced the return of the