Tarah Woodblade Read Free Page B

different. He would have told Lenui that your animals needed to be treated with kindness and respect. He wouldn’t have sold any animal to someone that would mistreat it. He wouldn’t have allowed what just happened either. But there was nothing Lenui could do about it now. Puppy was dead. If he tried to go after the scholar now, the gnome warrior would kill him and the other dwarves wouldn’t lift a finger to help.
    Scholar Abernathy lifted the scepter and Lenui noticed that it looked completely clean of blood. The gnome nodded and handed the scepter to a steward. “Remove its ears and tail and bring them back with us,” Abernathy instructed, then wiped his face and hands with the towel. “The rest can be left to rot.”
    The scholar retrieved his book from the steward and hummed to himself as he walked back to the camel. He opened the book, already reading as he climbed into its awkward saddle. If Lenui had a bow he would have shot him, consequences be damned.
    “Uh, you sure you want to just leave the rogue there?” Blayne asked the black-sashed steward, one eyebrow raised. “Wizards’d pay good money fer a whole rogue horse carcass.”
    “Would you like to buy it back from us?” asked the black-sashed steward.
    Blayne frowned and rubbed his chin as he thought about it. “Well, uh . . .”
    One of the other stewards whispered something in her ear and she shrugged. “It seems that the High Scholar may be interested in your second rogue horse. Would you tell Pa Cragstalker we will be contacting him soon in regards to the beast?”
    Blayne eyed Puppy’s corpse. “Well, I dunno. Pa’s got other buyers interested-.”
    She reached into her robes and pulled out a bulging pouch. “If Pa promises to hold it for the next six months in case High Scholar Abernathy wants it we will include a fifty gold bonus.”
    “Fifty gold, huh?” Blayne mused.
    “And you can keep this one’s corpse to do with it what you will,” she added with a roll of her eyes.
    “You got it,” Blayne said with a smile and took the pouch from her hands.
    The buyers soon left. Lenui stared hollowly as he watched the others make a litter to drag Puppy’s remains on. He was glad they didn’t tell him to help. He would have punched all of them.
    Blayne saw the look on his face and sidled his horse next to him. “Yer lucky Maggie’s my sister or I’d kill you fer the way you acted back there.”
    “I ain’t surprised,” Lenui said. “Hell, maybe you should just kill me now and deal with momma later.”
    When they got back to the camp, Blayne had Lenui stripped and bound to a tree and lashed him bloody. Lenui refused to cry out or apologize and was quiet for most of the three-week trip back to Corntown. Blayne thought him sufficiently cowed, but Lenui was spending the majority of his time trying to figure out what he was going to do when they got home. He finally made his decision the day before they arrived.
    Lenui put on a brave face when they got back. He laughed about the incident with Pa Cragstalker and his mother. He waited a few days before he snuck over to the rogue horse’s pen in the middle of the night.
    “Hey, Monkeyface!” Lenui whispered.
    “Wee!” shouted a rough voice from the darkness. Monkeyface was smarter than Puppy. It couldn’t pronounce many words, but it did remember the last part of his name.
    A few moments later, the rogue horse approached the side of the pen where Lenui stood. It had the front end of an enormous gorilla, the mid section of a horse, and the rear end of a mountain cat. Its huge face stretched unto a toothy smile. “Wee!”
    Lenui hopped over the fence and scratched behind its horse-like ears.
    “Come on, boy,” he said. “I think it’s about dag-gum time we set you free.”
     

Chapter One
     
    “You got money on ya?” asked one of the scruffy men, an evil gleam in his eye.
    Tarah fought down her nerves and breathed in the situation using all the training her papa and grampa had