The Doom of Kings_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [111]
“Ekhaas!” Ashi writhed beneath Dagii, trying to get out from under him. He moved slowly, rolling over like a drunkard. She kicked him. He grunted and gave her the room to get up on her knees and shuffle to where Ekhaas lay.
The duur’kala, her hands tied as well, had curled up like a child. Her breathing was shallow. The hut was not well constructed, and in the firelight that fell through the many gaps in its walls, Ashi could see a massive mark across the side of Ekhaas’s head. Her yellow skin was dimpled with the imprint of the hurled club that had brought her down. She’d have a big bruise when she woke up. If the bugbears gave her a chance to wake up.
Ashi sat back and cursed again, giving vent to her rage in the guttural blasphemies of Azhani.
“How is she?” asked Dagii.
Ashi twisted around to look at him. He’d struggled upright, and it looked like he’d have a few bruises across his face as well. “The blow was hard,” Ashi said. “It doesn’t look good, but it could be worse. If I could touch her, I might be able to tell more, but …” She twitched her bound hands.
Dagii, bound as she was, pushed himself over to her and examined Ekhaas carefully. “Her color is good and her ears are up,” he said. “If they were down, it would be bad. She’ll wake when she’s ready.”
“If she doesn’t, I’ll tear this camp apart with my teeth.”
Dagii sat back and stared at her. “You fight like a wolverine.”
“I come from a clan in the Shadow Marches,” she told him. “Raiding between clans was common. If you don’t fight, you’re too weak to live.”
His ears flicked in surprise. “You weren’t born to Deneith? But you act so much like one of them, I thought—”
The assumption stung Ashi. She acted like any member of Deneith? “You thought wrong,” she said, cutting him off. She wondered what Vounn would have said.
She looked around the hut. The light that filtered through the walls revealed bundles of stiff hides, maybe intended for trading with other bugbear tribes. There was nothing that could cut her bonds or be used as an effective weapon, even if she could get them loose. The bugbears had taken her sword and all of her knives. Dagii had been stripped of weapons, too, and Ekhaas as well.
“What are they likely to do with us?” she asked.
“Slavery. Sacrifice. They probably aren’t going to kill us outright. They would have done it already.”
“Ransom?”
“Not likely.” He clenched his jaw and looked her in the eye. “We have to assume we’re on our own.”
Ashi knew what he meant. Geth, Chetiin, and Midian hadn’t been captured, but that didn’t mean they were still alive or in any situation to come to their rescue. In her mind, she saw again the two trolls that had come crashing out of the thorns in the valley. Geth wouldn’t have let them pass without trying to stop them, but then again Ekhaas had caught five trolls in her spell. Five to three—bad odds for Geth and the others to hold back all their opponents.
Bad odds to survive.
She put steel in her heart and turned her attention to the cracks in the walls of the hut. They probably could have broken through the walls, but the shadows that moved frequently against them suggested the camp beyond was busy. They wouldn’t have gotten far, especially with Ekhaas still down. Ashi crawled to the wall and squatted at one of the wider gaps, peering out.
The camp was as busy as she’d guessed. The fire in the great pit had been built up high, and torches stuck into the ground burned everywhere that she could see. Bugbear children were busy scooping pine pitch out of crude troughs made from hollowed logs, transferring it into smaller pots. Older youths were preparing the leather slings by which the burning pots could be swung and hurled. Most of the adult bugbears were standing by the barricade, watching the darkness