A metalsmith arrived to pound the locking pins from the iron leggings and wrists of the dead slave. Iron and copper are expensive and not to be wasted. Free of the chains, he rolled the inert body aside with a callous kick as if it was a bundle of worthless straw.
Beyond the metalsmith stood a familiar figure, shoulders slumped, fists balled, and our eyes locked. My friend was called Flier, a former cripple who had been captured at the mountain pass with me. Before that, he’d been a messenger in his King’s Army. When we first met days ago, an arrowhead embedded in his knee had made walking almost impossible. It was an old wound, but an operation and my intervention with small-magic had removed it, and he now moved almost as well as when he was young and served the King of Vin, a minor province in Kondor.
Being newly captured at the Vin Pass only last night, Flier and I still wore ropes on our wrists and ankles instead of irons. Our captivity had lasted from the middle of the night until this morning, all of it spent marching to catch up and join the caravan of other slaves. Despite the short time we’d been with them, I’d had about enough of being a slave.
My sister, Kendra, and the two orphan girls, Emma and Anna, that we traveled with had escaped capture because the dragon Kendra freed in Mercia had managed to get between them and the slavers. It protected them, and not even slavers wanted to fight a legendary dragon. The slavers had settled for taking Flier and me. They had lost several of their people in the battle to capture us and didn’t want to lose more in a fight they couldn’t win.
With the flick of a mental touch to Anna, I confirmed the women of our group were safe, thanks to the intervention of the dragon, and it was almost time to return to them. The Slave-Master before me would disagree, but we had different agendas. He wished to sell me for profit. I wished to learn all I could about this new land we found ourselves in, and he was to be my teacher.
The Slave-Master turned his full attention back to me and said, “Convince me you are trustworthy.”
He kept pushing me for the truth—or to tell him a lie and provide him an excuse to punish or kill me. He was testing me. Probing. My problem was that I didn’t know which he wanted of me, a lie or the truth. No, he was smarter than that. He expected me to lie, as the other slaves would. But he seemed to want the other. That settled my approach, risky as it might be. “I am sorry to inform you that I’m not trustworthy. Not in the least. If you remove my ropes, or if I manage to free them, you’ll never catch me again.”
The guard at his side reached for his sword again. He didn’t appreciate my repeated impertinence. The Slave-Master laid a hand on his wrist to restrain him. “If our situations were reversed I would do the same, but I’d lie about it, so I didn’t piss off my new master. Are you very smart or stupid?” He turned back to the guard, who now attempted to harm me with his fierce stare after being rebuked by his boss, no matter how gently.
The Slave-Master saw the flush of anger in the look the Kaon warrior sent my way and said to him, “This one may be worth a dozen others at the auction block, maybe more. Hell, I might keep him for myself. Guard him with your life—for if he dies or is harmed in any manner, the same fate will befall you.”
The guard didn’t seem thrilled by the task assigned to him. His scowl deepened. I decided to cheer him up with a friendly little wink, just between him and I. The Slave-Master saw me do it and laughed again as he stood and sauntered towards a huge tent where three beautiful young women dressed in sheer, revealing, clothing anxiously waited with false smiles that were on their lips but did not reach their eyes. Another guard walked a single step behind the Slave-Master, his hand on the hilt of his sword. I suspected his hand was never far from it.
At the touch of my mental urging, the guard tripped over his own feet and lunged ahead, his shoulder striking the back of the Slave-Master, who spun and growled, “Clumsy oaf” for all to hear.
That action meant my small-magic was working, which further meant the last dragon alive was somewhere nearby. Without the Essence provided by the last dragon, or to a lesser degree by the Wyvern, magic wouldn’t work. If the dragon was near here, Kendra and the girls were with it, all of them probably situated high in the wooded foothills where they could watch Flier and me without fear of discovery. I resisted the urge to wave at them and turned my attention to the other slaves at my sides. They wore only enough filthy rags for minimum modesty and scant protection from the sun.
All were dark-skinned like me, adapted to the Brownlands. Our black hair was worn long and thick. Our features were thin, our eyes dark. We were people of Kondor, as any could plainly see.
Of course, my sister Kendra and I were raised in luxury in the Kingdom of Dire and considered it our home, where we served Elizabeth as her servants. We hadn’t even known of Kondor a lunar month ago, so didn’t consider ourselves one of them, despite the obvious connections. The guards and the Slave-Master were even darker-skinned than those of Kondor, their bodies heavier and more muscular than our thin and willowy frames, although we tended to be a little taller. Also, since my capture at the Vin Mountain Pass the night before, we traveled with Kondor at our backs, the opposite way we wished to go.
With my small-magic intact, that would present few problems if I chose to leave. I was no mage but convincing a guard at night to fall into a deep sleep presented few obstacles to one with my abilities. Concentrating on using my magic while untying the knots on my wrists would be easy. The leg irons would be hardly more difficult.
Not that I didn’t want to escape, but the problem was that I had no plan for staying free. Escaping and being caught again was far worse than not escaping at all. The guards carried whips and swords for a good reason. The time would come to leave but on my terms.
I’d demonstrated my skill with the knots last night to Flier during a rare break in our forced march. When the guards were not looking, I’d loosened the ropes and scratched my head with my free hand, an act of telling my friend not to worry, and also one of extreme stupidity. The guard might have turned at the sound of an insect or reacted at a bat flying too close and seen me. To satisfy both of us that I could communicate with Anna at any time, I’d mentally asked her to have my sister fly the dragon in a few circles above our camp. It had.
I could have *spoken* to her, but seeing the dragon raised my spirits. Kendra controlled her dragon, and I had my small-magic. Life was good. All but the part about being a slave in a foreign land.
We were ordered to sit in the dirt and when I didn’t move fast enough, the Keon warrior elbowed me in the stomach. I sat with a thud and determined to move faster next time. The metalsmith returned with the unique clanking of prisoner chains tossed over his shoulder. He knelt in front of me, chose a set of leg-cuffs the approximate right size and snapped them in place. A few strikes of his hammer set the brass or copper pins. A short length of chain between them prevented me from running. He then placed smaller cuffs on my wrists, all without saying a single word or so much as grunting in my direction.
A single chain dangled from my left arm, and the metalsmith used a soft-link to attach me to the last slave in line. It was my friend, Flier. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. We were the last two in line, and when we departed, perhaps the man in front of me would be sleeping so soundly he wouldn’t notice our departure.
I gave Flier a confident nod of my head. Two guards were watching us closely, the one that normally guarded those prisoners last in line, and the one recently assigned to keep me from having ‘accidents.’ There were ten emaciated and filthy slaves in the line in front of me, and through the underbrush, I’d caught sight of another ‘chain’ of slaves. There might be more chains and more slaves.