Chapter 8

Cragnorr

I roar and fight as the wagon is dragged away, leaving Mia behind. The metal rings holding me down squeak, but don’t budge. She tries to run after me, until the lecherous little man next to her snatches her arm to hold her still.

“Don’t take him!” she begs, fighting him, but nobody’s listening. I try to flail my arms and legs to get back to Mia, but all it does is cause the ropes to bite into my flesh.

It doesn’t matter. I will find her. Wherever they take me, I will escape and I will find her.

I can’t see where we’re going as the wagon is led away. Then the ropes around me are untied, and I sit up suddenly, trying to get my legs under me so I can make a break for it.

“No, you don’t,” someone says, and a massive, heavy object slams into my chest. I crumple as pain rips through my ribcage. When I can look up again, a short, stocky woman stands above me with a giant metal bar in her hands.

“Try to get away again,” she says. “I dare you. ”

A group of large men set upon me, fastening metal clamps to my wrists and ankles, and binding my arms together behind my back. I thrash against them. I must get back to Mia. I can’t let her fall into these horrible people’s hands, all alone.

Then comes the cold bite of a metal collar snapping shut around my neck. It’s too tight and too heavy, and I sag under it. The stout woman yanks on a chain attached to my throat, and I’m forced to stumble towards her. With a pleased grunt, she pulls me along, my prison guards following.

I have no choice but to go with her, or they might just snap my neck. Then what good would I be to Mia?

Reluctantly I follow along as I’m led down, down into the ground by a set of stairs. When my eyes finally adjust, I see where we’re headed: a dark, damp room filled with metal cages, and almost half of them are occupied. I can’t help staring as I pass by. There’s a monster of a man inside the first cage, chained to the bars by his ankles. He’s missing one eye and there’s a massive scar down his face. Across from him... is an orc.

When I was still a whelp, my family traveled all over, looking for others of our kind. They intended to find more ogres like us, but more often than not we came across trollkin, who regarded us with irritation, but never aggression.

We ogres don’t fight in their wars. We don’t participate in their endless campaign against the humans, but we are still one of them. Orcs, ogres, trolls—we are all enemies of the humans, and that binds us together.

“An ogre?” the orc says, rising to his feet as I’m led past. I don’t know much Trollkin anymore, as I haven’t spoken it since my parents died, but I recognize enough to understand him.

There’s also a troll woman down here, and another human man who appears to be nothing but bone and muscle. The trolless approaches the edge of her cage as I’m led to the one next to her .

“Just great,” she says in Trollkin, leaning back against the bars. “He’s fucking huge.”

The stout woman leading me by my chain raps on the bars of the trolless’s cage with her huge metal baton, filling the room with a terrible metallic ring. “Silence!” she shouts. Then she unlocks the door of the empty cage in front of us and points into it. “Get in,” she says to me, raising her weapon. The other men still stand behind her, ready to pounce should I try to escape.

No, I can’t make my move now, not while I’m surrounded. But they’ll have to take me out of this cage eventually, and perhaps if I’ve shown compliance, they’ll let their guard down enough for me to escape.

Obediently I step inside the cage, and the chain linked to my neck is snapped into a metal ring on the floor just beyond the bars.

They’re afraid of me, I realize. None of the others here are chained down the way I am, restricted from hardly any movement at all.

The cage door is slammed closed and the key turned in the lock. I’m trapped.

Mia

As Gru drags me along behind him through the small town, I observe what I can, because it’s all information I can use later.

A main thoroughfare leads away from the front gates, into a scattered mess of tents and rickety wooden structures, all slapped together at odd angles. We pass two men locked in a drunken brawl, and I cringe as one of them smashes a fist into the other’s jaw. It cracks, and some onlookers cheer. Other people gather around fire pits, sharing bowls of soup along with their mugs of mead or beer. Many of them have gold piercings, scars in obvious places, and bedraggled clothes just as filthy as the king’s.

Where have we found ourselves?

Deeper in the camp, Gru leads me to an immense tent held up by massive wooden posts, with half a dozen huge tables. The tables are already half-full of people, and the noise inside the tent is almost deafening. At the head of the center table, my captor pulls out a chair and shoves me into it. Then he ties my hands around the back of the chair so I can’t even consider moving.

“There,” he says with a nod of approval, then takes his own seat farther down. All I can do now is wait.

More people stream into the tent, taking seats with mugs in their hands and throwing their feet up on the tables. It’s like not a single one of them has a sense of decorum. Someone eats a big turkey leg a few seats down from me and spits out the gristle, right on the table. A beer is knocked over when two people start arm wrestling.

When the King enters, a wild cheer goes up from the assembled crowd. The revelers bang their mugs on the wooden tables and hoot like wild animals as he passes, until he reaches me. He pauses for a long moment, surveying me, before a terrible smile creeps across his face.

“Rather beautiful for a village girl,” he says, leaning down to get a closer look. He grabs my chin in his hand, forcing me to look right and then left as he studies me. I yank my head away and he chuckles. It’s a hollow sound deep in his throat that reminds me of a dog’s growl. “And feisty. Even more fun to break.”

I swallow at this last word, but endeavor to keep the fear off my face as the king circles around behind me, taking a seat in the big, elaborate chair at the head of the table.

“You don’t have to break me,” I say, waving my hands. “Really, no breaking necessary. ”

But he ignores me. When he holds up his arms, the room falls quiet.

“Look who we found tromping through our woods!” he calls out, gesturing widely at me. “And do we tolerate trespassers?”

“No!” the assembled people call out, banging their mugs on the tables.

“I didn’t know I was trespassing!” I struggle in my chair, but the ropes bite into my wrists. “I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near your crazy town if there had been a sign , at least?—”

“And such a mouth on her!” he roars. Boos rise up from the crowd. “Normally I would call for her death...” I blanch. Death just for trespassing? “But given that I am without a queen, I might keep her.”

Peals of laughter rise up from the crowd. “A queen?” someone barks. “This stranger?”

I can’t hide my disgust. I would bite and claw him before I’d let him get his hands on me and make me his queen .

The king holds up a hand to stop the objections. “You misunderstand me. She’s a toy to tide me over until my queen arrives.” He hooks his foot around my chair and drags me closer, until he can sling an arm over my shoulders. My whole body shivers with repulsion. “Every king needs a plaything, doesn’t he?”

Nods of agreement ripple down the tables. I try to pull away, but his arm is like iron.

“Let me go,” I hiss. “I’ll rip off your balls.”

He ignores me. “In two days’ time...” He raises his mug into the air. “We will have another fight!”

The crowd whoops and crows. “A fight! A fight!” they roar.

I wonder what kind of fight he means.

“Until then,” the king calls out over the din, “drink, fuck, make merry, and prepare for our next raid!”

Applause fills the tent, and I sink lower into my chair. All my muscles tense, and I glance at the king from the corner of my eye .

I can only hope fucking isn’t what he has planned for me. I couldn’t do it, not after what I shared with Cragnorr. He’s the only one who can touch me that way.

I hope he’s safe, wherever he is, and that they haven’t decided to hurt or torture him. What do they want with my ogre?

What will they do to him?

Cragnorr

Once I was brought in and caged, silence fell among the other captives. But now that the stout woman with the baton is gone, though, they try to talk to me.

“How’d you get caught, ogre?” It’s the big orc asking in Trollkin.

I shrug. It would take far too long to explain. I would have to tell him what Mia means to me, why I came down the mountain when I shouldn’t have, how I set off the series of events that’s landed both of us here.

I detest myself for what I’ve done.

“Don’t bother,” the trolless in the cage next to mine says. She has a stripe of short purple hair along the top of her head, and her skin is pale blue, like the sky. She has a huge round earring in one ear. “If he hasn’t talked yet, he’s not gonna.”

The orc grunts. “He will eventually,” he says. “Whether it’s down here or in the arena, the king will make him talk. Or scream. Whichever comes first.”

I wonder what this arena is that they’re talking about. It must be why we’re being kept here like exotic animals.

The two humans are having their own conversation, too, in Freysian. “Another trollkin, huh?” The big, muscled man with one eye, who sits in a cage near the entrance to our prison, chuckles darkly. “Guess I’ll just have to chop off his head, too.”

He assumes I can’t understand him, being an ogre. There’s no reason to rob him of that assumption, so I stay quiet.

“Good luck with that,” says the older man, his body criss-crossed with scars. “That big oaf could probably kill any one of us with his bare hands. Look at the size of him.”

“You’re wrong, Fex. All you have to do with a guy like that is slash him behind the ankles. Once his legs give out... boom. He’s helpless. Then you give him a knife through the throat.”

I think I’m starting to understand. Whatever this arena is, we will likely have to fight each other in it. At least now I know how this big man will try to take me down.

But I can’t take a knife to the throat while Mia still lives—while she’s still waiting for me to find her and free her.

I shiver with rage at the thought of what that “king” might do with her. Where is she now? Is she safe? The not-knowing ties my stomach into painful knots. I examine the chain locking me down to the ground, wondering how difficult it might be to break.

The trolless chuckles as I weigh it in my hand. “Good fucking luck,” she says, flopping down on the floor in her own cage. “Even if you broke that thing, how do you get out? There’s nowhere to go, ogre.”

Soon, everyone falls quiet again. There’s an air of resignation in the room, as if the others have all given up any dream of escaping.

I will not fall to hopelessness, though. Perhaps if I can get out into this arena, without these chains holding me down, I have a chance at finding my Mia and getting out with her. I just have to survive long enough to do it.