Bloodraven Read Online Free PDF

and slightly swollen and he prayed to the Goddess that he’d not lost the use of any fingers. He wouldn’t know until the feeling came back and that in itself was a dreaded thing, for even now, as the first blood rushed back, the pain was horrible. It hardly gave him time to regain sense in his limbs though, before it snatched his hands again and retied them in front of his body, leaving a long stretch of rope as a lead, which it then grasped and used to haul him to his feet.
    Yhalen managed to stagger along in the ogre’s wake, his vision swimming in and out of focus, his hair dripping wet down his shoulders and the sodden tail of his braid lying heavy against his spine. It took him a moment to make sense of the sounds. Of voices, loud and gruff and foreign. And numerous.
    Of the sound of animals and the constant clang of what might have been a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. In dull surprise, he made himself look beyond the ground at his feet, and found himself at the edge of the wood, where a great grassy vale spread out.
    And within that vale sat a camp. A collection of huge tents and cooking fires, around which milled a great many hulking ogre forms. Dozens of them. More than his overtaxed mind could account for. And here and there, he thought he saw the smaller forms of human men. Men in ragged scraps of clothing,
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    with pale blonde hair and beards, who squatted over cooking fires or carted buckets of water, or wood.
    Men who walked with their heads down, bare backs more often than not decorated with bold tattoos and necks adorned with crude iron collars.
    Some of their eyes flickered at him in passing. Dull, emotionless stares that held no pity for his nudity or bondage, or the cruel way he was jerked along the ogre’s wake.
    The four who had captured him, he thought numbly, had been scouts. And this was a war camp. It could be nothing else with the armor and the weapons that were so apparent. And one that had already seen battle—or slaughter, if the rancid, decaying human heads that hung from a rope outside one tent were any indication.
    Yhalen gagged, shutting his eyes on the atrocity, at the casual display of death—and came up short against the back of his guide, when the ogre stopped to converse with the familiar one with the gold hoops. Yhalen’s leash was transferred to that hated hand and without a look in his direction, he was led further into the camp until finally they reached a tent more ornate than the others. A set of tall, thick spears sat on either side of the door flap and from between them was strung a line that supported dangling trinkets. Gold-tipped bones, cast iron adornments that might have been rune signs, the curved claws and teeth of some animal that must have been monstrous even in comparison to the ogres themselves.
    Gold earrings shoved Yhalen to the trampled grass, hard enough to take his breath away, and he leaned over his knees, forehead pressed to the ground to stop the world from spinning. His captor called out and was answered. Yhalen was aware, distantly of the gathering of many large bodies, of their heavy shadows on his small, cowering person—of feet crunching the grass by his head and of conversation exchanged. Finally a hand reached down and snagged the rope trailing from his wrists, pulling it and him up to his knees and holding him suspended there, with his arms over his head, his face bowed, aware—oh, so very painfully aware of the gathered eyes that skimmed his body. A hand reached down and grasped his jaw, tipping his head back.
    Through the damp tangle of his hair, Yhalen focused on a face that didn’t tower quite so far over his own as the other ogres. A face that didn’t have the broad, blockish bone structure of the others. A face that might have looked human, save for the sharp, protruding points of the canines and the gold eyes and the long pointed ears crowded with dangling gold rings and the greenish ochre cast to his skin. A frightening face all the