The Slave (Free Men, #1) (Completed)

The Soldier: Chapter One

The heavy manacles binding my wrists clinked with every step I took, and it felt like I had taken a million. Around me, men trudged in silence, the jangle of their armour, the swish of leather trousers, their laboured breaths as we waded through the thick desert sand the only sounds breaking the silence of the night. We were all exhausted, ripe with sweat and blood, and I was scared as I had never been before, not even when I'd been captured and first sold into slavery.

The cart carrying the cage bogged down for the hundredth, or maybe thousandth time, and the procession stopped, muttered curses accompanying the distribution of shovels to dig it out. A man kicked the small of my back, and I landed heavily on my knees. "Dig," he ordered, so with my bare hands, I dug.

I risked a glance at the cage's occupants. The men had overrun the compound, looted everything of value, and set the place to burning. They'd dragged the limp bodies of Tamelik and Master out to the cart and locked them in the cage. Tam lay like a broken doll, an ugly gash on his forehead marking the place I had struck him with the hilt of my scimitar. He was still breathing, his chest rising and falling in brisk, shallow movements, and I offered up a prayer to the Great Overlord in the sky that I hadn't harmed him too badly.

It had never been my intention to harm him. When we'd seen Master fall, Tam had become hysterical. The attackers had advanced, and perhaps if it had been only me, I could have fought my way loose, but there was no way I was going to get Tam out as well. He hadn't know what was happening, who was attacking us or why. There I had the advantage over him. Had he not been so scared, perhaps he would have taken note of the dark hair and green eyes of the men descending upon us.  Seen how closely they resembled me and realised it was my people who had torn his comfortable life apart.

Or perhaps he had realised. He had been twelve years old when other soldiers, other Granthians, had done the same thing to his family: had stumbled across their nomad tents and slaughtered everyone. Everyone except Tam. And now my people had come again to take away everything and everybody he loved.

Master was lost to us, or so I thought. I'd had a split-second to make a decision and I'd acted. Knocking Tam out had been a kindness; even if the men intended to kill us, at least he wouldn't see the final blow coming. I'd dropped my weapon and sank to my knees, throwing myself on the mercy of my countrymen.

That's how I found myself bound and shackled, chained to the cart in which Tam's senseless body had been thrown. In that moment I almost regretted leaving him alive. Then they had carried Master out of the wreckage of his home, placing him more carefully beside Tam. I reached through the bars, felt the weak pulse fluttering in his wrist, and my legs all but gave out under me. Against all the odds, he was alive.

The soldiers—mercenaries—whatever they were, led us from the burning compound as the first sun reached its zenith. The compound was on the outskirts of Otiz, a small outpost crouched on inhospitable ground between the desert and the mountains at the extremity of the Thirskan lands, and I looked hopefully in the direction of the marketplace, where the army had recently erected a temporary base. If I'd expected help from the outpost, I was sorely disappointed. The base had been obliterated, bodies strewn in the streets, and smoke rose in black curls from buildings in every direction. If any of the residents remained, they huddled in the ruins of their houses, hiding.

How had the mercenaries accomplished such a thing without rousing the compound guards? The attack had been calculated and decisive, but I didn't understand why it had happened. Otiz was an outpost of no political significance, the army presence there small, even given the increase in troops stationed in the centre since an apparent suicide bombing a few weeks earlier, and Master was nobody in the grand scheme of things. One of a hundred other minor underlords controlling the outlier regions of the Thirskan Empire. It didn't make sense.