Seeing Korg’s desperate appearance, the Shaman remained unmoved.
She adjusted her crow-feather necklace and stated matter-of-factly, "That was the charge before the winter deepened. The deep-root moss is buried under three spans of ice now. Fetching it requires risk. Doing it for twenty strips won’t even feed my fire-tenders for a day. I am not a warm cave for you to huddle in."
"No! Please, Elder, do not say that!" Korg wailed.
"Get out of my lodge if you don’t have the meat. Or else, I’ll have the elite guards throw you to the wolves."
Listening to the refusal, Korg’s mind shattered. He lunged forward and hugged the Shaman’s hide-boots, crying and pressing his filthy forehead against the dirt floor, trying everything in his power to convince the old woman to save his dying child.
The Shaman, however, looked down at him with disgust. She raised her staff and smacked Korg hard across the cheek.
Korg’s face turned bright red, a fresh welt splitting his skin, but he still did not let go of her boots.
He held on to the leather as if his very life depended on it, his tears soaking into the furs.
Unfortunately, the Shaman, annoyed by the starving pest clinging to her legs, raised her boot and kicked him in the chest.
"You weak, mud-born scum! Get off me!" she hissed, spitting on the floor. "You’ve sullied my ceremonial furs with your filthy hands. A broken river-rat like you is better off freezing to death with your wretched offspring!"
With the kick, the pouch clutched in Korg’s hands flew open. The twenty strips of premium, dried venison spilled across the dirt floor.
Seeing the meat, the Shaman’s eyes widened slightly.
Without hesitating, she called out to the entrance, "Guards! Throw this filthy bone-scraper and his dying brat out into the snow! Never allow him near my lodge again." This chapter is updated first at NovelPing.
With that said, the Shaman quickly dropped to her knees and began snatching up the spilled strips of meat, her twisted fingers moving with terrifying speed.
"No! Please, Elder, no!" Korg screamed, his voice tearing his throat. "That is my blood! That is my life!"
"My only daughter... please!"
He wailed bitterly, scooping Elin into his arms as two warriors pushed into the tent.
Korg banged his fist against his own chest, hitting himself so hard that his skin began to bruise purple.
But the Shaman and the guards had had enough of his noise.
"Did you not hear the Shaman? Out!" one of the elites growled.
The warrior shoved Korg violently in the back with the flat side of his axe. Korg stumbled out of the suffocating heat of the lodge and crashed directly into the slush of the central camp.
Korg wanted to retaliate. He wanted to rip the warrior’s throat out with his bare teeth. But seeing the firelight glint off the copper axes, he accepted his fate.
He knew that if he lunged at them, both he and Elin would be cleaved in half, and Kael wouldn’t even question the guards for killing a slave...
He sobbed into the wind, wrapping Elin tighter against his bare chest, and began the walk back to the bone-pits.
When he finally reached his dirt hole, he placed his shivering daughter onto the deer hide.
Korg backed into the corner of the pit and sat down in the mud, silently weeping like a wounded beast.
As the minutes dragged on, his sorrowful sobs gradually stopped.
Korg let out a growl. He turned and began punching the frozen earth wall of the pit, hitting the permafrost over and over again until the skin on his knuckles shredded and his hands bled freely into the dirt.
He was furious at himself for being weak... He was furious at the river clans for falling to Kael’s forces.
But most of all, he harbored a burning hatred for the Shaman and the elite warriors who had condemned his daughter to death for the sake of twenty strips of meat.
As Elin’s breathing grew incredibly shallow on the furs, Korg’s eyes turned a terrifying shade of crimson.
Tears that looked like blood flowed down his dirty cheeks. He made a final decision. He would wait until the darkest part of the night... Then, he would take a piece of flint, sneak into the Shaman’s lodge, and butcher the old crone and the fat overseer, even if the elite guards chopped him to pieces a second later.
He dug into the dirt and retrieved a flint shard. He tightened his bleeding grip around the stone.
Suddenly, there was the faint sound of boots compressing the snow at the edge of the pit.