

### Viking Hunter

### War of Outlaws

### By Wulf Anson

### Volume II

### Kill Them Twice

### Text and Cover Copyright Wulf Anson and Wulf Publish 2016

### Rights reserved

### Distributed by Smashwords

### Also Available

### Viking Hunter Volume 1 Grab The Wolf

### Viking Hunter Volume 3 The Valkyr's Kiss

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Viking Hunter is a work of fiction set in the 13th Century. It is not meant to disparage today's Catholics, Jews, Gays, Native Americans, Savage Mastiffs or any other current sub-groupings. The prejudices of its characters are historically accurate.

When Leif Erickson sailed home to Greenland from his trip to Markland and its mammoth forests his news was snatched up as if it was free silver. The few trees in Greenland grew no taller than man height. Fortunes had been made importing wood from Norway to Iceland and Greenland. Land, forests, fish and game waited just over the horizon. The news shot back to Iceland and from there to Norway and Denmark and the rush was on. The Swedes were too busy taking over Gardariki (Russia) to notice, much less care.

First stop was the island of Hellulandia (today's Newfoundland), across the icy seaway from Markland (today's New Brunswick).

Markland to Hellulandia's west then became a dumping ground for Outlaws exiled from Hellulandia by its Courts.

These following events occurred in that part of Markland known as Skoggangurstrond, (Outlaws Strand) in the years 1278 and 1279.

Note on names:

Before you dislocate your tongue trying to pronounce the Viking names in it, the Icelandic J is retained in them.

Pronounce it as either a Y, or a long E.

Jarnulf becomes Yarnulf.

Anja becomes Anya.

Kjartan becomes Kee-yartan.

### Table of Contents

LXIII Get Lost

LXIV Goood Kitty

LXV To Live Through This

LXVI About The Sharp End

LXVII Fellow Castaways

LXVIII A Dragon's Puzzle

LXIX Waiting To Make Dinner

LXX A Ghost Couldn't Slip Him

LXXI Right At Home

LXXII That Was Uncalled For

LXXIII Morrow's Troll Wife

LXXIV Well Now Ain't That A Bitch?

LXXV Loving Nothing More

LXXVI You Sure This Is A Good Idea?

LXXVII They Got Dead And Fell Down

LXXVIII To Kill

LXXIX Two Dogs

LXXX An Emissary

LXXXI I'd Throw Some Water On That

LXXXII The Murder Of Danny MacTanner

LXXXIII The Riches Within

LXXXIV Hero Of The Battle

LXXXV A Religion

LXXXVI That Evil Bastard

LXXXVII Of Quarries Bagged, And Quarries At Large

LXXXVIII No Place For Us

LIXC Shovels And Swords, Rabbits And Rain

LXC Respect And Friends

XCI Aud Hallfreddottir

XCII Saddlebags Full

XCIII The Prince Of Summer

XCIV Damned Ingrate

XCV I Never Liked You Anyway

XCVI Borrowed Swagger

XCVII Tore Hears About A Lot

XCVIII Deaf, Dumb, And Blind

XCIX More Than A Quarter Share

C Thor's Goats

CI The Dragon's Kiss

CII But I Can't Swim!

CIII Welcome To Thingi Hrafn

CIV Point Me To The Pantry

CV Spider And Pussycat

CVI The Malefic Of Its Opiate

CVII Scorned

CVIII Field Of Stars

CIX Just Be Yourself

CX When You've Got The Wolf By The Ears

CXI This Isn't Before

CXII Strife Inciters

CXIII The Spirit Of The Thing

CXIV Kveldalf Senna

CXV Come Get Them

CXVI Gone

CXVII Cwithan Orcneas

CXVIII The Troll Means Business

CXIX A Mistake

CXX The Dream Gift

CXXI Broken Necklaces

CXXII Hell Must Be Filled

CXXIII Our Wounds Should Not Be In Our Backs

CXXIV Hey! You!

CXXV Your Turn To Buy Tonight

CXXVI The Devil's Engineers

CXXVII Father, Wait!

CXXVIII Fire Jotuns

CXXIX Darksome Laughter

CXXX You Should Have Thought Of That Earlier

CXXXI They're Coming

CXXXII Apostasy

CXXXIII The Devil

Viking Hunter Continues In Volume 3, Sample Chapters

LXIII Get Lost

Leif and Knut finished their four block sprint doubled over, hands on knees and gasping. In the stars and moon's sliver they felt as if they'd been surprised by some girl's father. They scampered up the alley and cloaked themselves into the shadows hugging a building.

"We'll get the log if we're not back soon with a damn good story." Leif whispered.

"What's your rush?" Knut said. "Hauling a log on your shoulder all day beats getting shot in the eye."

"Someone's coming." Leif hissed.

A buckskinned urchin with charcoaled features ghosted through the intersection they'd quit. Once safely out of the light the urchin meowed and five more flitted through the open after him. Knut was tempted. If they bagged one of the two brats toting bows he'd have a shot at a double share. Leif reminded him that for every rat you see there's twenty you don't.

After giving the kids time to get out of earshot the deserters clinked and clanked westward up the alley paralleling their band's line of march, inventing heroics for their cover fantasy. They started with every other step at creaks and groans from cooling buildings, wind sighs and imaginary lurkers. Within two blocks there wasn't an un-frayed nerve between them.

Knut's crossbow flew to his shoulder to spit its bolt into a patch of shadow ahead. An arthritic mongrel hobbled out into the cold, colorless light, looked back over its shoulder, growled halfheartedly, and limped away on three legs.

From the next corner as the mutt disappeared around it, a man's voice called out.

"Gol?"

"Not me." another replied, behind them.

"Shut up and find them." a third said.

The deserters pressed themselves into the wall's only doorway as the slumbering dark around them yawned in a scattering of stealthy footfalls and phantoms stretching through the shadows. Leif tried the door. It was barred within.

"That's it. We're going to die." he said.

Knut forced his knife point between the frame and the door. A pimp's knife was what Karl called it, he remembered as its hilt of polished walrus ivory kept slipping about in his sweat slick palms. With the heel of his hand he hammered it into the frame and with an apocalyptic 'Crrack', split out a long strip of wood.

His point found the bar within. He leaned on it and lifted. The door swung back and they slipped inside. Knut thanked his maker that somebody had oiled the hinges. He closed and rebarred the door.

In the still, sarcophagal black they held their breath as the door strained inward against the bar and then relaxed.

Night blind they listened to their sanctuary depict itself. The pounding in their ears gradually subsided unmasking ever more distant and subtle accumulations of reverberant, complaining wood. The building was cavernous and choked with that glorious smell of money.

Fresh cut timber, turpentine and oils vied with musty grains, cheeses, and a chimeric taint of the devil's nerve queller. After hugging their chiming mail into silence they discovered patches of an even darker hue in the void before them. The starlight trickling down between the roof planks fell upon lofts to either side, and an aisle between stretching away into the black.

Whatever was beneath those lofts, be it riches or murder, remained hidden. If they went back out into the alley however, getting ambushed was a dead man's bet.

Leif's nose, panting in the murk, caught another whiff of mischief and the issue for him was settled. He revealed his objective to Knut.

"Are you mad?" Knut said. "We disappear for half the night, come back with a shit song about chasing snipers and sing it drunk?"

"Fat chance." Leif whispered. "With the trouble we just saved him finding this place we'll get fat bonuses. We've had a busy night you know, getting pinned down on that rooftop and killing four of them before we lost the other three in here at daybreak. I'm getting thirsty just thinking about it."

"What about the bodies outside?" Knut said. "The four we killed?"

"Their friends hauled them off after we left." Leif said.

Through the mob of jostling smells tiny atomies of potable courage pitched their wares like hawkers at a brothel's door and dragged the pair by their noses to the mead casks. They groped them one by one. Knut found the one with a spigot, removed his helmet and quarter filled it. He gave it a sniff, a sip, and a choked back whistle. It was the burnt stuff, potent as a snake bite. Most of the water had been cooked out of it.

They felt their way twenty yards back to the wall and settled in to expand their saga. Three fingers of mead later and drenched in sweat Knut knew his woolen surcoat had to go. He crawled out of his mail and its scratchy insulator, and rebuckled his sword belt determined on a refill.

As he poured his helmet almost full, there was no telling how hard that barrel might be to find again as the night wore on, a muffled voice filtered through the black from across and above the aisle. Knut scrunched down between the barrels, sipping, listening, and peering up into the dark. The voice spoke again but he couldn't make out any words. It was a girl's voice.

The level in his helmet dropped as she tittered away unanswered.

From the jet of the building's far end a barn owl's scream slashed and gutted his surrogate womb. It thundered and bounced about in the dark above a sibilant rush of tiny vermin feet.

Knut spilled half the mead into his lap. He left off his whispered cursing and winced as a door opened and a shaft of yellow candle light flooded the loft and ceiling. The girl's petulant whine, nasal but now distinct, called out.

"Tyto be quiet! Do you want them to find us?" she said.

The closing door swept the arc of feeble light back into the room. Intrigued, Knut rose, set his helmet atop the cask and drew steel. He tip toed across the aisle drawn by her singsong teasing away from up in the dark. Halting at each second step, he strained for any reply to her as he felt his way along more casks and pallets of lumber.

He found the back of a stair tread with his forehead, felt his way round the staircase and began his halting ascent, avoiding the creaking center and hugging the rail. Her converse from behind the door grew intelligible as he gained the landing. It was that gibberish people spoke to pets when they were alone with them.

He lurked at the threshold through an eternity of "Aren't you a gooood kittys" and "I love you too Spots" before trying the door. This door too was barred.

Somewhere back in his mind an inhibition kept sputtering that Spots wasn't a kitty cat's name, but it was too thoroughly mead logged to keep its mouth above the roiling surface of that sea for more than a half thought or two. He lifted the bar with his knife point and swaggered in.

A tiny field mouse of a brunette fresh to her teens turned and stared at him in wide eyed horror.

LXIV Goooood Kitty

Leif had killed his drink and was weaving up and down the aisle looking for Knut, noisily crashing into things and wondering where that idiot had got off to. Perhaps he'd run into someone in here and bolted back for the column.

Knowing Knut, there was a chance he'd improvise on their cover story and earn them both a lashing. But that was unlikely as Knut had left his chain behind and they both reeked of mead. It would be after daybreak before the smell wore off and they'd both been on thin ice with Dalla and Tore for some time.

Knut dropped the bar back into its lintel, and moving to block the door, surveyed his prize. The clanking of chain links whipped his stare sidelong into two marsh gas green eyes rising towards him. Knut sprang back from the claws coming for his neck. The chain snapped taut and the leopard at the end of it, now raising vocal murder, dropped out of the air raking Knut's left thigh in its descent.

Leif, after traversing the building's length unknowingly found himself back where he'd started when the leopard cut loose. His sworn brother be damned whatever awaited him with Dalla and Tore beat all hell out of remaining blind in this menagerie. Owls, giant demon cats, what was next?

Knut staggered back from the clawed and fanged, shrieking horror to grab the girl by her hair and hurl her into a corner. Taking his own quaking stand between her and escape, he dropped his woolen breeks.

The three, ragged, finger length tears in his thigh weren't deep but they were enough to kill him. The film of rotting meat under a leopard's claws would have his leg looking like a ripening corpse in a few days as the mottled purple, green, orange and red spread.

Screaming delirium and joint racking convulsions would follow.

He snatched the candle from the desk and thrust it at the screaming leopard. It was a lot cleaner and better fed than the only other one he'd seen, the dead one, but that was no guarantee. A jug on the desk snared his eye.

He traded the candle for it. He set his teeth and pulled its cork. A quick sniff confirmed its contents.

A sotted old biddy at Thing had once confided that the stuff was a good bet against cuts from rusted blades and such. Remembering his experiment the time he'd slipped with a whetstone he wondered if she'd made her discovery after a sword stroke through her own brain.

Between watching the cat and menacing the girl he managed a vicious pull at the jug before setting it down among stacks of ledgers on the desk.

Beside the leopard's mattress squatted a three foot cube of browned iron strongbox, its padlock and lid open.

Beneath opened cabinet doors against the opposite wall all the way back to the room's other door lay stacks of oddments.

Spots very essence had been transmuted to rage with a thoroughness to turn an alchemist green. With cocked ears and baited breath he'd heard every tiny noise the pair had made since their forced entry.

Spots little friend had tried to distract him with conversation and banging around in cabinets the whole time. Even through all that mead Knut was wearing his cat nose caught something ugly about him from the foot of the stairs. It got stronger as the anger smell lingered in the still air beyond the door. But when the door opened and that stench of hatred, fear and aggression swept into the room before him Spots coiled and tensed.

After his ambush failed the hate stink shoved fire in his face to taunt and humiliate him.

He vented his frustration in a bloodcurdling racket, shooting back and forth at the end of his chain while making damn sure the smelly bastard got a good look at all of his teeth.

Knut dropped the idea of killing the cat to shut it up, as even chained, a full grown leopard was more than he was ready for. The girl cowering before him wasn't.

"You and me are going to have us a party and kitty can watch." he said, yanking her to her feet. Grinning as she pled for mercy, he slammed her face down over the desk, still brandishing a sword while assaulting a girl half his size as if he might need it to protect himself from her. Between relishing her struggles, and the leopard's fury, he missed the heavy boot falls in the hallway beyond the far door.

The door crashed inward and Knut glanced up. A man in chain bearing a heavy axe was headed his way. Knut pinned the girl to the desk with his left hand and pointed the sword in his right at the intruder.

"Get lost." he snarled. "She's mine."

"Viking Bitch." the intruder grunted, cocking his axe for a swing as he charged.

"Garth!" the girl screamed.

Pants about his ankles, Knut's rearward leap landed him flat on his back as the axe whistled through the air above him. From the floor he aimed a frantic slash at his attacker's knee. Garth kicked Knut's wrist, sending the sword clanking out of reach as he raised his axe to cleave Knut's chest.

The axe poised at the top of its arc and Knut, unable to see beyond the next heartbeat, rolled left into the center of the room. He didn't feel a thing as the leopard's canines drove through his left arm. He did, however, feel its claws in his back and gut as it wrapped both forelegs around his neck, anchored them, began biting him, and then wind milled a trench into his belly with its hind legs.

The girl covered her eyes as the cat spattered flying entrails and crimson splotches onto the walls, floor, strongbox, and its mattress. Garth on the other hand, after leaping clear, lustily cheered the cat on while enjoying every bit of the affair with a scribe's eye for detail.

Shaking and crying, the girl stammered gibberish as Garth found her a blanket and wrapped her in it.

"Sinead, we're leaving, there's sure to be more of them." he said.

Sinead's leopard was still savaging the corpse as Garth steered her toward the door grateful that the cat had waked him. He hadn't meant to drift off but she'd taken forever collecting things she just couldn't live without after gathering father's ledgers.

Spots turned his Viking drenched face up to eye quiz him with that single, universal cat question that begs ten in return because no man has ever figured out what that cat brain is asking, as he and Sinead slipped past just out of reach.

"Gooood kitty." Garth purred down to him.

Starlight blinded Leif as he shot out the building's far end. Shielding his eyes he dashed down the empty alley. He stopped at a corner trash heap and buried all but three of his bolts in it. He'd get skinned for certain showing up with a full quiver and a tale about a long shootout.

No sooner had he finished than it came to him that the column wouldn't be where he'd left it. Those bolts might be sore needed. He dropped to his knees and began rooting through the garbage. Thoroughly engrossed in his search he wondered why his slice of luck always seemed so rotten.

His remaining moment of consciousness was filled with a whorl of colors beyond the natural spectrum and a feeling like being dropped on the back of his head from a high roof as the blunt back of a hand axe dented in the rear of his helmet.

"You're holding it backwards. Use the sharp edge." the axe wielder's girlfriend urged.

Sixteen wintered Caoimhe had never killed anyone before and putting an axe through a man's brain was more than she was ready for on her first try.

LXV To Live Through This

Garth in mail with a satchel of ledgers and little Sinead in a blanket stepped out into the night, turned right, and paralleling the main street headed for the heart of town.

"I told you to be quick. I knew those bastards would show up." Garth said.

"But what about Spots?" Sinead said. "He's why we went there. He won't stand a chance when the rest of those pirates find him."

"Just because he lets you pet him and play with him doesn't make him a dog. Or have you already forgot what he did to that Viking?" Garth said, greatly annoyed at the way his father's request for his ledgers had turned out.

What use could the damn things be to him anyway? There wouldn't be any shop and most of the folk who owed him money would be dead if they weren't already when this was over.

"He'll be fine." Garth said. "His water bucket's full and I doubt he'll need to be fed for a few days."

After watching Spots finally earn his keep Garth was beyond certain that he didn't want the cat anywhere near him now that its blood was up. With all the excitement Spots had probably forgot he was part of the family. He'd been pampered and fussed over since Garth brought him home as an orphaned cub but he was still a leopard.

"Can't we please go back and get him? " Sinead whined.

Garth said no again.

"Garth?" Sinead's tone said she was not about to stand by and let her kitty be murdered.

"All right already." he barked. "I'll go get him but not till you're indoors with the others."

Sinead said that would do as they marched stepped east towards the old blockhouse where the others were massed.

"I'm going to get through this. I'm going to get through this." Garth swore repeatedly, as he donned the chain coif and steel gauntlets he'd retrieved in his father's warehouse.

"Because if I don't, I can't get even with her." he said. "I'm going to live through this."

He cinched the fasteners of the black steel greaves tight behind his calves and then traded helmets until one of them fit over the coif. Thrice tonight counter sniper fire had near shaved his chin as it whistled by on rooftops. He'd got half way to the warehouse on his father's idiot errand when his baby sister caught up to him all worried about the damn cat. Then he'd been scared motherless the cat would maul him instead when he chased the rolling pervert into its reach.

Spots had been hand fed his whole life. He'd never killed anything before. Now, Garth thought, I'm going to pull a full grown, tom leopard off its first kill. He damned the little witch again. There was no way she realized what she'd got him into.

LXVI About The Sharp End

The candle on the desk still flickered as he pushed open the door. His unctuous pleadings were answered by a guttural, rattling hiss from the floor by the strongbox. Carefully skirting the chain's limit Garth gained the rear of the desk and eyeballed kitty. Spots was hard at work on a thighbone as he lay partly across the Viking's remains.

Garth waved the hunk of venison he'd hoped to bribe Spots with. Spots laid his ears back, lowered his head, and curled his lips open. The cat's whole face and forepaws were bloodied and festooned with little chunks and strings of Viking. Garth waited a long, nervous year as Spots ate his fill, returned to his mattress, and cleaned himself.

Garth reached behind himself and retrieved a shaft of oak ten feet long and the thickness of a girl's arm. It bore a padded loop at one end and a smaller one to draw it tight at the other. Repeatedly telling Spots that he was a good kitty between asking him if he were going to behave himself and cursing Sinead, Garth gave the kill a wide berth and inched closer. The big meal Spots just had might make him more tractable, or not.

Spots lifted a foreleg and snarled as the loop approached.

"Come on boy," Garth pleaded. "let's go for a nice walk."

Walk seemed the magic word. Spots dropped the idea that he was being challenged for his kill and submitted as the loop snugged around his neck and Garth unlocked the chain from the wall. Garth steered Spots around the corpse and led him through the door.

The poor bastard Sinead married someday would soon wish she hadn't, if she could hector her own brother into this. He hadn't put anything on underneath that chain coif. The damn thing was pulling a hundred hairs out of his head at every step, and chewing the hide off the back of his neck. He'd be in a fine mood after delivering and stowing her cat.

Spots dragged him out into the alley and almost off his feet, and eagerly tugged him half a block in the wrong direction, towards home. A hat full of whoas later Garth got him stopped and turned around. Now that blood was no longer in his nostrils Spots capered about like a big, fawning puppy again.

On his rooftop Diarmud swallowed his heart, pushing his stomach down beneath it. His heart was blacker even than his hair. All thoughts of flight and life had left him.

"That's it. They're all dead." he whisper moaned.

The chimney soot on his forehead came off on the back of his hand. He backed away from the edge and put his head in his hands. His kin, friends, and neighbors all lie in the field before town, strewn like the hell leavings of some devil sized leopard. Some had still been moaning, unable to crawl from the field when he awoke earlier this evening. They'd quit now. A handful of real leopards had seen to that. He damned the devil.

He spared an awful, tear choked gaze up into the stars, and promised them all he'd be along shortly, as shortly as his luck held and it wouldn't hold long because he was about to push it past breaking, taking a red wave of Viking blood in return for theirs.

And now there were the kids he'd just lost. One was his nephew and two more his cousins. The others he saw daily. How he was going to tell their folks he'd no idea. This ambush had been his idiot plan. Watching, as he directed it from up here, had been somehow worse than standing shoulder to shoulder with his friends, though they were being hacked to bits. This bunch were just little boys and two lame old men. Again he damned the devil, for stealing even his glorious suicide.

He snatched up his bow and bounded down the back stairs. At the foot of the stairs his heart leapt back into his throat as he almost tripped over a dead Viking in chain, face down on the stairs with an arrow through his neck. Two more sprawled beyond the first, also neck shot. He hadn't heard a thing. Whichever kids pulled this off were a lot braver or crazier than he'd credited them with.

Slinking, he peered around corners and then cupped his hands to howl through them like a love sick tabby. His call returned from a couple of blocks towards the main gate. He headed for it.

He paused at the intersection and signaled again. His whispered name carried back and he dashed across through the starlight and back into the shadows. The kid at the corner joined him as he made his way to the four clustering around a garbage heap. Two boys and two girls, all about sixteen, were standing over someone in mail and helmet, face down in the garbage. The girls were arguing.

"If you'd done it right the first time." one girl said.

"Oh God, he's not dead." the second squealed as she wound up with the same wrong end of her hand axe to bat the Viking's head clean through the garbage and into the street beneath it. Diarmud snatched the axe from Caoimhe as it came back over her shoulder. He clamped his free hand over her mouth.

Leif struggled awake wondering what hit him. Hangovers always started in the middle, not the back of his head. And what's that awful smell? He blanked back out as Diarmud gave him a gentler tap with Caoimhe's axe than the one she'd wound up for.

"Get that chain off him." Diarmud said. "Get his bow, blades and anything hid in his clothes."

Diarmud tucked his crossbow beneath his arm and turned to watch their backs. When they'd finished he heaved Leif over his shoulder and led them back toward the center of town and its rundown, sprawling blockhouse. A century earlier it had served as forest citadel housing the seed stock of the town they eventually built around it.

At the back door of the darkened building he rapped out the coded knock. It opened. Caoimhe dropped Leif's mail into a corner with a hearty sigh. It weighed only thirty pounds but it bit her at every step wriggling about like a viper in her arms. Serena dumped Leif's helmet and sword, clanking, atop it. Serena apologized for giving her a hard time over not killing him. Caoimhe examined her bruised and bleeding forearms and explored her breasts. She bit back a yelp as gingerly, she encountered her left nipple.

"You were right. I should have used the sharp end." she said.

LXVII Fellow Castaways

One of the boys offered to poultice her injury with a kiss. Caoimhe snatched her axe from Serena and warned Jimmy. Jimmy leapt back laughing. His offer was good any time.

Women crowded Diarmud for news. Moments earlier a lad had come flying in hysterical. Three dozen of their kin were being butchered. Diarmud sidestepped his worried sick sister, as he explained it had been nine, not three dozen, who'd been captured, not killed. He recited their names. The wailing grew louder as women of all ages joined the mourners upon hearing names from their families. Mary, a brunette in her early thirties, shouldered her way to the fore.

"Are you daft? Bringing that, that, thing, in here?" she said. She whipped out a knife and plunged it into Leif's butt. Diarmud spun sideways but still an inch drove home. Leif shot awake screaming through his gag.

Mary flailed possessed as Diarmud held her off, and Leif landed on his head, cutting his howl short as he was knocked senseless a third time. Diarmud felt his head exploding as he spun his women his yarn about how important this louse was if they wanted their kids back.

Calming them sufficient to turn his back proved no small beer. And then his own spirits landed in a heap on the floor beside Leif in his sweat grimed surcoat. If he didn't dredge up something more than this scrawny pimple popper, who seemed no more menacing or valuable than a half empty oak sack, and in short order, the kids would all turn up throat slashed by sun rise.

Diarmud shouldered Leif and a tattoo of knocks rattled the door. The kids looked back for the nod. Getting it, they opened the door. A helmeted enemy in Viking chain loomed without, in the night. The crowd panicked. The kids slammed the door and rebarred it. A bone tired, exasperated voice carried through.

"Will you please, let, me, in?"

Diarmud grimaced. Shifting Leif higher onto his shoulder he gestured the kids to reopen it. Viking Garth leaned sideways into the torchlight with a chain in his left hand, tugging something in after him.

"Come along you! I've had enough tug of war." he said.

Well, there's one, Diarmud thought, perhaps two from the trouble they were giving Garth.

"Haven't you sniffed enough dried turds yet?" Garth demanded of his captive.

Leaning heavily aside he pulled his chain and stick within, shouldering into Diarmud, who was near asleep on his feet. Silence swept the few women remaining as the leopard's head and shoulders appeared, squatting half in and half out, blocking the door.

Diarmud backed to join the wide eyed gapers. Their furor at Leif was as naught to seeing Spots invited in.

Garth pleaded kitty's case as he retreated to the door to grab Spots collar. Kitty wasn't any danger to them. He might come in handy. As Garth wound the chain around his wrist Sinead shot forward to give both her guys a big hug. Garth's eyes gaped like he'd been shot. He leapt between her and Spots.

Diarmud snatched Sinead's collar wondering what might be amiss. Sinead was always fawning over her kitty cat. He'd even sit when told to, though she was still having trouble with roll over and play dead. Nobody'd ever told Spots he was a leopard. He thought he was a retriever.

Leif wrestled awake knowing things had gone terribly awry. Two unspeakably evil green eyes in an amber and white rosetted face peered up at him as he opened his eyes. The jaw beneath those eyes dropped open and a throaty, rattling hiss accompanied by a charnel house stink sprayed him with cat spittle. A forearm sized pink tongue licked turgid, snowy whiskers, as it slithered past a pair of finger long ivories.

Leif missed the browned steel, chain wrapped gauntlet clutching the cat's bronze collar as he blacked out for the fourth time.

Garth leaned in close, leering and twitching his way through a blow by blow, curling back his lips and grunting as his free hand mimed frenetic clawings.

"And you brought him in here?" Diarmud said, voice and brows rising.

"She wouldn't leave without him." Garth said, eying Sinead who, still solidly tethered in Diarmud's grip, was blowing Spots kisses.

"Maybe we should put her in charge." Diarmud said.

His barb prodded Garth's gripe with his sister forward, and he brusquely shooed her off, more for his own benefit than hers, to their parents. Grumbling, she tottered off, but only after extorting hardened assurances she could pet Spots come morning.

Garth waxed horrified as Diarmud appraised him of the kidnapped kids.

Together they dragged the cat and Leif into what were originally Chieftain's quarters, but had since served as office, storeroom, kid's playhouse, and now storeroom again. They locked Spots to a heavy, blackened desk. In the desk's storeroom posting as junk furniture, no one bothered with a plate beneath their candle. Its top was slick with spilled wax.

Leif they dumped to the floor beyond the chain's limit. Lining the far wall stood a dozen oaken barrels filled with emergency water stocks. Diarmud hoped aloud the chain would keep kitty from eating the son of a bitch long enough for them to collect another half dozen. Barring that, Leif's life lay in convincing his mates that they actually had another five or six live ones.

Garth asked Diarmud how he planned on snatching six more that stupid after learning how Leif had been bagged. They hoisted a half full barrel atop the desk to keep Spots from dragging it across the room for a bite of Leif for dessert. They left, closing the door behind them.

Leif was shocked awake in the black as the barrel slammed to the floor. He hadn't a clue where he was except that he was getting soaked. Struggling to gain his feet he found his arms and legs weren't working, or feeling. His thumped skull ached with each panicked breath.

Squirming from his port to starboard beam alerted him to his wounded butt. Choking on his gag, he feared he'd drown but the torrent quickly subsided and a raspy, shallow breathing bore in through the dark.

His empty, but for that helmet of booze, stomach, writhed like a nest of venom dripping vipers. He moaned through his gag and the leopard, bored and lonely, vouchsafed a friendly, if tentative, hello.

After Garth and Diarmud departed Spots had instinctively taken the high ground atop the table. To him the dark was but as twilight, and rubbing against the barrel he worried it off the wax slick edge.

Perhaps this fellow castaway would chat it up with him, or maybe even pet him. He smelled like that lout at the warehouse, booze, salt, wood smoke, rust and oiled steel, sweat drenched leather, and lots of fear but the lust and aggression weren't there. Fear was a smell he was quite familiar with. It usually accompanied the booze. He'd studied both in detail while lounging about the office chained to the wall.

Visitors would occasionally argue with Father. The thicker the booze, the louder the argument. Spots enjoyed the arguments. Father would approach his mattress cooing and offering venison and pet him whilst gently rattling the keys at his belt.

At the repeated agglomeration of K's, H's, and other cat consonants Leif's bladder let go. Spots pinned his ears back and told Leif that among gentleman marking one's turf was unacceptable.

Leif gushed out a different, aromatic torrent as his bowels failed him.

LXVIII A Dragon's Puzzle

Mirha shook Jarnulf awake. Someone was pounding the door. He'd just closed his eyes. He stepped down off the platform holding his pants up in one hand and threw back the bar. The red eye leering over the horizon, pine spice and icy air reached in.

A short brunette in her mid-thirties, in hip boots and greasy mackinaw peered in, her mousy brown eyes brimming with the shock of an apprehended poacher.

"I just, we found Sigrid. She's dead." Brenn said.

He asked her in. She gave no sign she'd heard him. She stood trembling in a snared rabbit rigor, every muscle straining so hard against each other to escape, that they couldn't pick a common direction. He took her cold little wrists and tugged her inside, half expecting her to start squealing. A cup of disputant calmer was in order. He had to hold it to her quivering lips to get her started.

Still shirtless he struggled into his boots cursing his luck, and washed down a cold chunk of venison with his own glass of nerve tonic before sheathing Sigrid's knife between his belt and buckskins.

At the ship sheds gray woolen dresses flocked their way toward him, the thin, white lips in the pallid faces all stomping on each other's questions. Even Astrid was there. Sigrid's mother Steinunn stood by the shed's wall quaking, her hands over her mouth.

An august ancient towered beside her in green and white linen, his arm cupping her up beneath his shoulder. He looked parched as a year dead lizard yet behind his clouded eyes still lurked a bear unsure whether the object of its gaze merited a casual disposal or a snuffling dismissal.

Eirika held Stienunn's other arm.

By the near shed's front doors Aethle and Adis were restraining Aud. Aud was blubbering that she had to go back inside.

At the shed's rear corner sat Rakel atop his pack horse. But then she'd never balked at using his things in the past, even the last of the moss. She was wearing her black leathers and white, wolf cape. Her entire face was clenched, glaring hate at Mirha.

Beside her Kveldalf wore dun breeks. Even odder was the huge knife hilt showing from under her cloak. She'd never worn any but a little work knife for her hives before. She was running a bone hair pin, orange with age, under her nails.

The shed's cracked, gray wall behind them was draped with thirty foot squares of close tied bait netting, Mirha and Elsa's handiwork. Before them a pile of thirty, oblong buoys with yard long handles at one end and banded in Sigrid's colors lay stacked beside her traps. Four smaller piles in different colors lay scattered with their traps beneath pines scattered about the sandy yard.

Jarnulf pushed past Astrid and made for Sigrid's mother. He'd never been fond of her, but then he'd never much noticed her either.

His knees went weak.

Seagulls cartwheeled through the rotting kelp and dead barnacle, salt breeze, shrieking liar, hang him.

He settled his gaze as he approached upon Eirika.

Eirika, making great show of comforting Stienunn ignored him while darting glances at everyone else and always returning to Astrid. Astrid seemed peculiarly alone, and almost as frantic as Brenn.

Beyond Stienunn Aud kept jerking and twisting her head back over her shoulder toward the shed's barn doors as Aethle and Adis led her towards him.

"Stienunn, I'm sorry. She was already gone when I got there." he said.

"How? Why?" Stienunn said.

"There's been bad blood between Sigrid and Mirha for a while. She surprised Mirha on the path last night. Someone shot her from behind. I don't know who." he said.

Stienunn let out a horrible wail.

"Liar! My Sigrid would never, how dare you." she shrieked. Aud shot confused looks first at Mirha, then him, and back to Mirha.

"When?" Aud said.

"Late, after Astrid closed up." he said.

"Isn't that convenient." Kveldalf said, pointing her hair pin at him.

"A week ago you promised to gut us all and now Sigrid's dead, in the night, on your doorstep."

The aged specter at Stienunn's side released her. He crossed his arms and got up in Jarnulf's face, glowering vengeance.

He'd a high, broad forehead, white hair shoulder long and fine, and shovel jaw clean shaven in the Norman way. In his prime and long after he'd stood six four with broad, heavy shoulders, and narrow waist and hips. He squared his shoulders. Time had clawed away much of his bulk but it couldn't reach his spirit.

People expected daily to hear he'd fallen into his sickbed. Fifty winters was acknowledged a full and fair span. He'd just weathered his eighty third.

He'd axed his first man seventy years ago clearing a Frankish ship in the revolt. The Vicars of turn the other cheek had sent armies to exterminate him because they'd failed to extort him.

As that was the truth of their beliefs Odinn reclaimed him. Forgiveness was for the dead in their graves, or an insanity to put a man in his own.

Men blenched, thoughtful men at least, before his clouded blue eyes etched with reflections of all they'd mirrored, ships ablaze on the night sea, Gaelic towns consumed by flame and black billows, armored men hacked into gushing ruin, maids kidnapped shrieking, some murdered while others prayed to be. He'd never bothered himself unduly with the law, preferring instead to void any actions brought against him with his axe.

His name was Aesolf. He was Sigrid's great grandfather.

LXIX Waiting To Make Dinner

"Sigrid may have had some bad blood in her," Aesolf said. "but she was my bad blood. I'd better not find you lying to us."

"I'd be disappointed at less from you." Jarnulf said, nodding gravely, and presented Aesolf her knife. Though the only thing that had to fear Aesolf anymore was a bowl of chowder Tore still regularly went out of his way to pay deference to the old butcher.

Aud hooked a finger into his shirt pocket. A tiny, curved, silver wing tip hung out, caught on the pocket's lip.

"Sigrid had this with her." he said pulling the necklace out. "I thought you'd want it back."

Aud clutched her necklace to her lips, closed her eyes, and trembled. It was the most valuable possession she owned. Adis had given it to her.

Yesterday, she'd deluged him with questions like a kid abandoned and desperate for a grown up to fill the void till her mother reclaimed her. Questions like how cold it must be, out in these woods, alone. Wasn't it lonely, out here all day and night. Wasn't he even the tiniest bit afraid, of the poachers, and Skraelings and bears. Of course she apologized profusely for the last. She'd never meant, and how did it feel, how could he just keep killing those beautiful, innocent deer, day in and day out.

At first he'd been annoyed. It seemed so out of place, conversing about anything in the forest. The village and the Hall were gossip's home. Many were the days he and Gudrod, or the others had passed out here without a word. One looked for dinner here, or something waiting to make dinner of you.

In the end he said he was more concerned with her soul and everyone else's than those of the bounty God had stocked the woods with to keep them from starving, before leaning from his saddle to plant his finger in her ear and twirl it. At which, her final stone toppled from her insular parapets and secure at last in the protection of her new foster brother, uncle, or whatever, she giggled madly.

Now she had to wake up to this. To hell with what everyone including Mirha thought, he wanted to spirit her off and invest his day drying her tears. He turned his frustration on Eirika.

LXX A Ghost Couldn't Slip Him

"Logmadur," he said. "last night,"

"This is not the time Jarnulf." she said.

She hadn't called him Jarnulf since his seventh summer. It wasn't possible. She seemed distracted.

Ref's yell ripped through Jarnulf's thoughts.

"Go! All of you, out of there."

Jarnulf turned to discover women crowded in a knot on the path, some kneeling around the spot of Sigrid's blood, and five more in the wood's edge with hands on their knees, peering awkwardly up at Ref bearing down on them waving his arms as if he was shooing chickens off the porch.

Aesolf stared at Aud's necklace.

"And you've no idea who murdered her?" Aesolf said.

"Not yet." Jarnulf said.

He could name at least a dozen suspects, but here before Aud and her mother wasn't the place. Sigrid's greatest talent had been infuriating her neighbors.

He raised his voice.

"Since I don't need you trampling whatever tracks you haven't already, will you please all just go home."

"Try looking under your nose." Rakel said, looking down her own at Mirha. "Where's the arrow? That hole in her back looked like a knife to me."

"I should have left you at Hrorik's." Jarnulf said. "We've all seen Sigrid haul and set fifty traps by midday. The last time Mirha moved that many across the yard she couldn't get out of bed the next morning."

"Maybe someone helped her." Kveldalf said.

Jarnulf clenched his fists. His neck swelled. Kveldalf took a step back though there were already twenty feet between them.

Adis eyes darted side to side and she began fumbling with her cloak's pin. In the corner of Jarnulf's eye Ref peeled Kveldalf away from Rakel to lead her off across the yard.

"Uh, Mirha and I played a board game at Mordach's, after Sigrid and Kveldalf left, and then I went home." Adis said.

Jarnulf gleeked incredulous at Mirha wondering what else had turned upside down in the last two days. Mirha nodded a yes up to him.

"Did Sigrid say anything yesterday? Was she having trouble with anyone, was she mad at anyone?" Jarnulf said.

Adis stared at his belt buckle, and began chewing on the tip of her ponytail. He asked again.

"She was mad and scared silly all day at you and Olaf. She kept saying you two killed Aud and Rakel and we were all next." she said.

He gritted his teeth and turned away. No, it couldn't be. The world had gone mad.

He couldn't hear Ref's words but he was holding hands with Kveldalf, the top of his head even with her nose as she smiled down on him.

On his other side stood a cart with Sigrid in it, shrouded in the tarp and tied, waiting while Astrid and Tjorni went back into the shed for harness and tack.

"Do you think it might have been a poacher?" Adis said.

"Why would he leave Aud's necklace?" Jarnulf said. "Nahri Thingi across the river is fifteen miles south of here. And the mouth's too wide to swim across with a deer. There's a narrows four miles inland where they usually sneak in and out."

Kveldalf swept past him to join the mourners. Ref caught his elbow and pulled him away from Adis.

"What did you find out?" he said.

"That Sigrid was possessed, like I told her three days ago." Jarnulf sighed. You?"

"From Kveldalf?" Ref said. "If you're sure you want it, . . ."

"Sigrid was having a rough time running the store without Rakel. Kolfinna wouldn't get out of her hair and she couldn't find the ledgers to pay her for your hides and she was certain Elsa nicked a pair of earrings while she was looking for them and Mordach was all over her about last night was her turn and where was his two bushels of crab and lobster and how Maeve had a lot of nerve what with Aud and Rakel missing telling her to get her ass out here and get the rest of her traps in the water or out of the way and Aethle making free with her oar pins, and then Anja was the nail in the coffin, blowing the whole afternoon to go bird shooting like nothing happened or more likely just to rub it in because she knew they got away with it.

Sigrid drove her and Adis to distraction from the moment you two left. Started out it was you dragged them off in the woods one at a time. By yesterday afternoon Olaf and you tortured them and beat them both to a bloody pulp, and then took the horses to bury them twenty miles out so we wouldn't find the bodies. Bror laughed in her face when she told him to go after you. Hroald told her if you two wanted any help you'd had Gudrod and Thorarin fetch them. She's still mad at Adis for getting her up in the middle of the night looking for Sigrid and then taking off again."

Then he pointed out the crowd surrounding Sigrid's hearse.

"We need to break them up before they all start remembering what each other saw last night." he said.

The cart had been fixed to his pack horse and Hlif was helping Aud mount behind Rakel. Stienunn's legs hung over the open end of the cart, as she sat beside her daughter's head.

Ref was now talking to Aesolf. Aesolf looked furious.

"I never said there was anything wrong with your legs, I just asked you to do Sigrid the honor of riding with her." Ref said.

Aesolf glared about the company for a moment, and then allowed them to help him aboard. Jarnulf watched Rakel shift about uneasily atop Ulf's roan.

Tiny, mirthless crescents whitened the corners of his lips. Rakel didn't ride every day like he did. She had put on fifty miles yesterday. It had to hurt being back on a horse today.

Ref pointed a thumb toward the shed.

"Got Sigrid's shoes before I wrapped her up." he said.

They chased the rest of the women out of the yard and set to looking through the jumble of prints.

"No sense making it worse." Jarnulf said, as if that were possible.

"Let Olaf deal with it." Ref said. "A ghost couldn't slip him."

"Name of the Devil." Jarnulf said.

LXXI Right At Home

Olaf showed shaken. Sigrid had provided any number of blue, and rough amusements but none meriting her murder. True, she'd been a pain in the ass alive, but she was going to be far more of a one now, dead.

"Kveldalf's bear tore Ref's steading up last night." Olaf said. "I don't know how Anja missed stepping on him on her way home."

Ref's porch sat right on the trail.

"Oh, that's why he's not at work." Jarnulf said. "Didn't say a word to me."

"He will." Olaf said. "Says he's going to have to burn his place now."

"What?" Jarnulf said.

"Get it from him." Olaf said. "I can't do it justice. And dear God try not to laugh."

Olaf's eyes lit on Aud, and the mess this had made of her.

"We should have jumped Hrorik in the woods." Olaf said.

"Don't." Jarnulf said. "If we'd chased them out of the stream, Hrorik stole them to use, not murder. My skin crawled too, waiting for night, knowing. We're all still alive."

Both men's guts churned as their eyes echoed the rejoinder. And now Sigrid's not.

Olaf walked a quick circuit of the shed peering at the ground and then the path where Sigrid's body had lain. He stooped on one knee to take the measure of a shoe print. Combing through the barnacled splinters from rotted traps, blackened curls of oak shavings in brown grass and bits of rotted cordage Olaf quickly discovered the desired shoe prints.

He crossed various fingers left over right, and then lay them in line till he'd found and fixed the print's every measure. He back trailed the prints to the beach path, and then meandered roundabout back to Jarnulf.

"It was a woman." he said.

"And not a big one. Probably well off. Almost new boots."

"You sure it wasn't one of our lads?" Jarnulf asked, "Looking after Mirha for me, then lost his nerve afterwards?"

"No." Olaf said. "Only one that small's Draeng. He'd have been home in bed, or his mother'd skin him. I doubt he's ever had brand new boots. Sigrid and whoever shot her both came up the beach trail last night. I'll have a look on my way in."

Mirha asked what he expected to find there. There wouldn't be any tracks to look at. It was all rocks.

"If I knew," Olaf said. "I wouldn't bother looking."

Jarnulf went after Astrid who still seemed as lost and frantic as Aud.

Astrid swore that she'd nothing to do with it.

"Just tell me the truth," Jarnulf said. "cousin."

Jarnulf returned to his steading for his strongbox under the floor, before he trudged off for Marnee's and Kolfinna.

She was seated at her table with Gudrod. Her mother's runes, a heathen pastime, were between them spread in an eastern cross. Marnee was passed out in his grandmother's chair before the fire. She looked clean and didn't have that smell about her. A brown glass jug sat the floor beside her. Aside from the jug, the steading was spotless. Kolfinna had been busy.

Gudrod tossed him a nervous good morning.

"Is anyone working today?" Jarnulf groaned.

"Heard about Sigrid so I knew you wouldn't be needing me." Gudrod said.

Kolfinna waved to shush them both. Beneath her workbench at the far wall sat the pile of deer hides he'd left two weeks earlier, now diminished by two thirds. Awls, shears and rawhide thongs lay stacked at the bench's end. Wooden patterns hung from pegs above the bench. Perhaps he'd been hasty with her last week. She'd been busy.

Then he wanted to kick himself. The shears he'd borrowed from her were forgot, lying at home on his workbench. Aud would be needing friends and she and Tjorni were still unreconciled over a lousy pair of shears.

He dropped his small pouch on the table beside Kolfinna, who was lost pointing at runes and their import with Gudrod. Jarnulf said that the nead rune was reversed. She weaseled into her own reversal and Gudrod rolled his eyes.

He played twenty questions with her and learned nothing as she continued obsessed with her runes. He grew angrier and angrier still that he couldn't give voice to it. He'd depended on her to get Mirha to behave and she'd failed him miserably. He made for the door. Gudrod followed him.

On the porch Gudrod cornered him, taking a deep, nervous, breath. Olaf leaned against the building's corner staring down at his thumbnails, playing with them.

Within, Kolfinna dumped out the silver from Jarnulf and guilt chilled her. He'd supported her and her mother for years and she'd failed him.

"Jarnulf," Gudrod said. "as head of Kolfinna's household, I'd like to ask you to arrange a marriage between her and myself.

"You want to marry Kolfinna?" Jarnulf said. "This is hardly the time. Can't it wait?"

Gudrod stared level into Jarnulf's blank stare. Gudrod's normally ruddy hue beneath his long, well preened blonde locks paled into the gray of a burnt down hearth.

"Yes, I want to," Gudrod said. "and no, it can't."

There was a widening of Jarnulf's nostrils, and a perceptible, bird wing raising of his brows, but it was the hardening set of Jarnulf's jaw which extolled the most menace.

Gudrod had sidestepped Eirika his entire life. How many times had he scurried off, deserting Jarnulf to her withering chastisements? And now his dreadful admission glared back at him from her eyes in Jarnulf's face.

"Welcome to the family." Jarnulf said. "You ought to feel right at home with us idiots."

He groaned. There went his savings. When a woman got married and passed from one man's household to another a dowry accompanied her. Her husband was charged with managing, and increasing it for her. Should they divorce, the dowry departed with the woman.

Jarnulf ordered him off to give her the news.

Olaf approached, diving a hand within his cloak to withdraw a hand sized flat of old bone intricately carven with tight knotted dragons.

"Mirha's new friend?" Jarnulf said.

"I'm going to look at tracks around steadings," Olaf said. "before I ask anyone anything. And I hope it's a boy."

"Either way's fine." Jarnulf said.

LXXII That Was Uncalled For

Kolfinna was going to have a child at some point anyway. Now she'd have a husband, and a good one, to go with it.

Jarnulf headed for the church relieved that she was off his plate, but more displeased that his aunt now lolled, slobbering, in the middle of it.

The church was the largest and most elaborate building in town. It doubled as the seat of governance. It had once been painted a bright red but was now streaked black and russet by rains and snows.

Immediately its dragon's eye speared him with condemnation. Those it had entrusted to his care were one fewer this morning. Sigrid hadn't been inherently evil, even if she had turned feral like a cat who refused to come in or be petted, but still stuck around the yard. Mirha couldn't keep her mouth shut and this had come of it and was all somehow his fault.

He skipped hurriedly up the steps and beneath the porch roof relieved to finally quit the dragon's view. He ran smack into Arnor. Arnor shook one of his father's bows in salute. He'd also filched Gunnarr's fighting knife.

"Good Morning." Arnor said.

"Like hell it is." Jarnulf said. "Give me that."

He snatched Gunnarr's bow and knife away from the boy.

"But aren't we going to Nahristadir to get Sigrid's murderer?" Arnor said.

"No." Jarnulf said. "And you're not going anywhere, even if I do."

Jarnulf barged through the door and Aerin arrested him, blocking his path. In her eyes also burned the dragon's scorn.

"That was uncalled for." she said.

For the first time there was real anger in her voice.

"The instant he heard about Sigrid he dashed off to take up weapons." Aerin said. "He's been hopping on one foot waiting for you ever since and singing your praises."

"Go mind your damn turnips." Jarnulf said, shouldering her aside.

It was all some horrid conspiracy. These women were going to be the death of him yet.

It was colder within. The ceiling peaked fifty feet above him. The benches in rows stretched away on either side of the aisle fifty yards back toward the elevated desk. The final ten yards before the bench was an open rectangle.

Two large desks flanked the aisle's mouth at its near end. Prosecutors and the accused's lawyer used them to display evidence of their claims. Two more, perpendicular to the desks, also elevated, sat away beneath the windows. Witnesses were displayed there where everyone could get a good look at them and decide just how much of what they were spreading was manure.

Sigrid was at a neighbor's home to be bathed and wrapped in linen. She would arrive soon to sleep atop one of those desks for one last night among her people before her journey. Her friends, family and their steaming breath surrounded the desk awaiting her.

Five feet beyond the last of the windows the floor was a cubit higher. Centered atop the huge desk at its lip two fake but lifelike ravens stooped, roosting on wooden perches. On the back wall ten feet above the ends of the desk perched two Great Horned Owls. They were all wooden carvings Rakel's mother had glued feathers onto and inset jeweled eyes in.

Mounted above the entry doorway two more owls faced back at them.

After asking the questions expected of him he left more knotted up than when he'd entered from their silences, sidelong glares and veiled accusations, and ran smack into Ansvarr outside.

LXXIII Morrow's Troll Wife

Adam's bloodshot eyes sparked in his ancient, forty wintered face, with relief. His fo'c'sulman had just broke the third of a grandfather's fingers. He and Hraerek had started with the grandson, who hadn't made more noise than a stone when Hraerek threatened him with a knife, but when they went to work on the old man, . .

Starri was always somewhere else when this came up and a woman or child was involved. Years of it had Adam convinced that Starri's I am the Devil routine was as worm eaten as his daughter Kadlin's virginity. That human whirlwind whose myopia for bloodshed set an impossible standard for the rest of them was nonetheless possessed of some imaginary line he couldn't cross. He'd have someone else do it for him.

The sailors had been busy at the east end of the square for some time ransacking buildings, as the piles of booty and weapons Tore demanded, or anything else, had yet to show up. A few wagons, but mostly tables and benches, manned by sentries, bulwarked their position. Tore found a moment to hear Badger out.

"Ill luck, about Halldor." Badger said. "Dalla could use a hand. Think you could spare me?"

Tore never batted an eye.

"Sure." Tore said. "For a tenth. If they come back, and if you collect. And see if you can keep Dalla from getting lost again."

Badger strutted off with his gut turning somersaults, greatly relieved he wasn't on the old man's short list. Tore watched him leave, half wishing he could trade Dalla for Halldor. Dalla didn't need a hand. He needed a boot up his ass.

Halldor, at least, had known that keeping a ship afloat needed more than just bailing her. And those other two pimpled pricks, if he couldn't train them with a log, after this sailing if they reached deep enough through the holes Badger was going to drill in their purses they might just find something resembling their manhood.

Later, when Badger told Karl, his older friend replied that Tore surely favored him. He usually charged a half. When Starri heard about it he wanted to know why the discount. Tore said Badger showed promise, and while he'd doubts about throwing him into that just yet, sending Asgrim was out of the question.

Throwing Asgrim and Dalla together, and the bloody bites they'd inflict on each other with fo'c'sulman bullying fo'c'sulman would give any man pause, and his brother Valthjof who'd already run two wives off wasn't a bit longer on backing off than Asgrim was.

Starri ordered two squads of Nacarr's best to verify Adam's report. The first eight blustered off toward the warehouse Leif and Knut had hidden in while the second made for the hiding place of the women and kids. Tore put Skjalg in charge of the second group, not that he expected anything from it but it beat keeping an eye on him.

Skjalg had spent most of tonight looking back over shoulder while whispering to his under bosses. Tore assigned them their own personal liaisons. Tore broached the subject to Starri who confirmed that Humach had been a twitch with the same malady.

Valthjof bulled himself between Starri and Tore to point across the flagstones to the far side of the deserted courtyard. Starri stole a glance out beyond Valthjof's finger. Beyond the four wooden benches in the square's midst the starlight gave away more than a score of crossbows threatening from dark doorways and windows. Starri turned his stubble crusted grin back to Valthjof, wrapped in an ecstasy of malevolence.

"Get me Morrow's troll wife." Starri said. "That sheep stuffer's dying to show someone he's still in charge of anything but shit."

Starri had four hostages brought forward and their blindfolds removed so their friends could recognize them. Humach shouldered his way through the throng, and Starri, like a big cat on a fawn sprang at him to lock his fire poker digits round Humach's knobby shoulders and yank him skyward. He drew Humach in till there was scarce a hands breadth between them.

His single eye seared through flesh and bone like a hot sword tempering itself in whatever noxious oil passed for a soul in his prey.

"Listen, roach dung." Starri said. "If you think I don't know what eggs you and that used moss Skjalg have been laying I've got a surprise for you."

Humach's defense disintegrated into stammering the word I.

Starri had expected some sort of reaction like this from Humach but not to this extent. The double cross had been a given but it beggared belief that Morrow had entrusted it to this insect. Starri had been certain he'd cut the head off Morrow's plot when he cut the head off Quiniquesh. Digging his thumbs ever deeper into Humach's scrawny pectorals Starri instructed him.

"If you want to keep that useless skin riveted to your treacherous ass you'll do exactly what I tell you and nothing else. Understood?"

"We'll never get away with this." Garth told Diarmud.

The roof they were standing on was flat and level. Knee high above it the building's front rose in a facade of twining deer and serpents.

"Got something better?" Diarmud said from behind him as Garth and four cart horse sized women in mail and visored helmets stepped to the edge. Diarmud and another four with their hair tied back and faces blacked stood behind the pretenders.

Diarmud had insisted on using only the scavenged, too well known mail with the heads painted on it. Nacarr and his Nahri were a by word for hell at every small town along the coast of New Tara. They'd been the first response team every time the Vikings were sniped at. Their commander down in the street would want them back.

Grandfathers, kids and women of all ages behind bows in windows, doorways and on rooftops covered the square from three sides. Getting them there hadn't been easy. Diarmud talked himself blue explaining there wasn't any place to hide where they wouldn't be rooted out and subjected to their darkest terrors. Numbering better than two hundred made escape to the woods impossible. The Vikings would run down most of them before they even made it to the gate. Cutting their way through the stockade wall would end just as badly if even one sentry discovered them.

His logic hadn't budged them an inch from their despairing and hand wringing. Revenge, however, had. Their men had been butchered and their children were about to be.

At that hatred darkened their mood like a squid gushing ink in a tide pool. They left off their woe is me-ing to shoulder each other aside in a stampede for weapons.

The five hostages behind the facade kept their arms behind them. Their captors behind them held knives at their throats. Diarmud, from behind Garth, called down and across the square to the Vikings.

LXXIV Well Now Ain't That A Bitch?

"You! We've got five more hidden away. You will release our folk and leave. Or else."

His threat echoing through the night summoned another two score bows from behind chimneys and window sills. Diarmud waved his foot long knife high like a battle ensign, and then drew it in a line before Garth's throat.

"We should have dragged that snotbag along." Garth said. "Those guys are going to want to talk to one of their friends up here. We don't even have names to give them."

"I couldn't keep him awake." Diarmud said.

"I must have dropped him on his head too many times. I'd hit him with a bucket of water, he'd look up at me, then he'd look at Spots and clunk, right back out again."

"You didn't just leave Spots there did you?" Garth said.

"He'll be fine. I unchained him." Diarmud said.

Humach's teeth chattered as he slunk out into the square behind the two old men, the two boys, and his four holding a knife at each of their backs. If the Gaels didn't get him, Starri's men would. He was about to die and it didn't matter who shot him.

"Go on! Tell 'em!" Starri barked from the shadows.

Humach launched his delivery in a squeaky falsetto.

It occurred to Starri that the wretch even looked like a cornered rat dodging a poker.

"You're free to go with your lives. But we're not leaving. Empty handed, that is." he said.

The familiarity of ordering inferiors about and threatening them quickly returned at least a veneer of self-control to Humach as he lowered his voice an octave and belted out, "We have five more of these brats and we'll kill them all at the first sign of trouble from you."

"Hel's crack." Starri growled. "He's supposed to threaten to kill them one at a time. Where's the promise of no woman stealing or raping? And what about throwing down their weapons?"

As Starri mouthed the word weapons he noted there were an alarming number of them pointing in his men's direction. First sign of trouble? Bows kept popping up like birds on a field of fresh corpses. His scuttling of Humach was veering sharply off toward an all-out arrow storm.

"Shut up!" Starri yelled, grabbing another terrified Skraeling. As he insistently repeated his script for Humach a voice called out from the rooftop maskers across the square.

"If you kill any of ours we'll cut throats up here." Diarmud yelled.

Starri spared a quick glance at the speaker. His eye fixed on five rooftop, chain shirts. Except for Leif and Knut he knew where all of his own were.

"Well now ain't that a bitch?" Starri replied, and immediately thought better of it.

"My men aren't afraid to die." Tore bellowed from the wagon's far end, shooting Starri a very annoyed glare. That, Starri thought, could have been phrased better, as he shoved the Skraeling out towards the guards and hostages.

At the sound of his approach Humach turned to his man who, in a panic, blurted out yet another garbled version of Starri's script.

"Rape? Kill them all? One at a time?" Humach yelled back at the messenger while searching desperate over his shoulder for anything bigger than that little bench twenty yards away to hide under when the shooting started.

"Told you as much." Garth said to Diarmud as they and the women dropped in place and snatched up the weapons lying at their feet.

Guard number one knew he'd but a single breath left if he disobeyed his instructions. Starri or Humach would get him for sure if the Gaels didn't kill him first. He whipped the knife from behind the lad's back to let the Gaels get a good look at his throat being cut, and clutched the boy tight before him as a shield.

Then he looked at all those broadheads he could see in his mind's eye that were perched on all those bows he could see with his real eyes. There were an awful lot of them and more kept appearing from across and on both sides of the square.

"Humach!" Starri bellowed. "Stop him!"

Dalla shouldered his bow and took his steady rest against a building's wall. His shot leg hurt like hell. He pushed his sweaty black hair from his forehead and wiped the stinging salt from his eyes. They'd treat him with a sight more respect after he'd pulled their asses out of this one. The ten in the starlight blurred as he struggled to single the middle image from the three he was seeing. Breath, relax, and squeeze he kept telling himself. His leg kept telling him to get the hell off it. When the trigger finally broke it came as a surprise, as it should.

"Yes." he grunted as the Skraeling's head was slammed by his bolt.

Humach screamed and dove beneath the bench even before Dalla's bolt rattled onto the flags across the square. The guard slumped into a heap and the kid dashed off screaming.

Confusion engulfed the Viking position and shifting about ran rampant as many believed their rear was being overrun. They launched a hail of return fire towards the Gaels and in every other direction though the Gael's hadn't fired a shot.

With all that birch shrieking less than a forearm above their heads the three remaining Skraeling guards lost all interest in their charges. They and Humach's tutor turned and sped back towards cover. Their three hostages sprinted away across the square beneath an avalanche of suppressing fire as the Gaels finally cut loose at the Vikings.

"Isn't this just grand?" Badger begged of Karl and Asgrim as bolts and arrows, most of them way high of the mark, thunked into everything but men all round them.

Starri roared out curses, snatched up his crossbow and drew down on Humach cowering beneath the bench. As he squeezed, one of the Skraeling guards got between them and caught the bolt in his ribs. By the time Starri's eye was sighting over a reloaded weapon Humach was nowhere to be seen.

The nausea within Caoimhe pulsed, cracking through her crust of savage exultation as she stood above the dead Viking at her feet. Stooped forward, her face and hands hidden in blackest shadows as the stars limned her back, shoulders, and the haft of her woods axe, she gulped great draughts of chilly air, trembling at the enormity of her deed, unable to look away and deaf to the laughter and praise her young confederates showered upon her.

Though Jimmy'd stood out in plain view in the side street as Skjalg's bullies raced through the intersection, he'd still had to throw a rock at the straggler to get his attention. Skjalg's tail man took the bait and raced round the corner where Caoimhe buried her axe in his throat.

Serena planted the point of her grandfather's huge, two hander between her toes and draped her wrists over its crossguard. She leaned forward around the hilt, smirking, to drape her chin over a wrist.

"What did I tell you?" she said.

"You were right." Caoimhe said, tossing her head back and squaring her shoulders. "The sharp edge is the way to go."

Amidst the ensuing handshaking and backslapping Jimmy noted a facial tick afflicting Caoimhe every time she moved her left arm too far or fast. He was seized by an impulse to restate his earlier injury kissing offer but reconsidered as the starlight showed smoking rubies dripping from the axe and a fey and primitive look of bestial satisfaction twisted itself across her grim, silvered ice and shadow black portrait.

LXXV Loving Nothing More

Their ruckus went unnoticed by Skjalg, now his own unwitting rear guard. Tore had sent him on this errand hoping the Gaels would kill him. Nacarr, who'd dumped him into this pot might find his recompense due as well once he'd seen to these Hrafns.

Starri and Tore and Adam and Dalla. The names had circled into a chant as welcome as the sweat salt burning his armpits. Do this. Do that. I need your men. I need a lot of your men.

In hindsight the bastards had done him a favor. They'd weeded his slackers out. Furious at being saddled with this mission he'd ordered seven of his best to get it over with at a run. He and that Skraeling forest rat had things to do.

Looking back he noted Skidi was missing again. They'd only gone two blocks. And what was with all these cats? The screeching vermin were all over the place.

Two blocks later he and his group sprinted into a shower of feathered tidings from Hel. The second man into the intersection took one in the neck. The fourth took one in his calf. Dragging their leg shot comrade along they clung to the shadows and slowed to a snail's pace.

Skjalg squeezed between his rearmost man and the wall with his eyes glued to the rooftops. His cover man stuck his left foot in front of Skjalg's right as they crept up on yet another heap of garbage and sewage.

"Sorry." Geirolf said, as Skjalg picked himself out of the mire. He ought to feel right at home back there by himself Geirolf thought as he limped past in the dark, leading from the rear as usual.

Skjalg couldn't decide who he was madder at. Geirolf or those cats. With the noise they were making he'd never hear anyone till they stepped on them. Their point man raised his arm and spread his fingers. In Skjalg's preoccupation with rooftops he ran into Geirolf's back, wrenching a grunt from him. Skjalg told him to shut up. Geirolf bit his tongue. This one perfect night had been years in coming.

Skjalg had forgotten his delight seven winters ago in slowly cutting the throat of Olvir Bjarnarson, and the rape of Olvir's wife Gudruth. Geirolf hadn't forgot. Olvir had been his third cousin.

There beyond the point man sprawled the blockhouse the brat told Adam about.

"Come on Herteit." Geirolf moaned from across the intersection. Herteit was an Odinn name. It meant Glad in Battle. Skjalg flared at Geirolf's slander, but as he'd noted his own enforcers all nosing each other behind his back already tonight, he contented himself with a promise to arrange a wrestling match with the trolls for Geirolf once they got home.

Skjalg scurried into the intersection. Four rooftop bows twanged. Three arrows thudded into the dirt around him as his shield stopped the fourth, slamming its iron rim into his belly. Skjalg bent double hugging himself, firing back curses and threats as he staggered sideways back into the dark.

His men rushed the door and buried axes in it. It swung inward, unbarred. Skjalg scurried in after them hoping the place was as deserted as it looked. Geirolf, behind Skjalg in the dark, wished there were a bit more light. He couldn't quite make out the back of Skjalg's neck.

Two men in the lead knelt and shouldered crossbows as a third rekindled a wall torch. With two more torches lit the party eeked its way from room to room.

Geirolf's knife crested in its striking arc when from two doors ahead on their left a low, tortured moan slithered out into the torch flickerings. Skjalg got behind Geirolf, pointing toward the moan.

Swords and torches at the ready, two men bolted into the room to find a solitary figure bound and lying on its side facing the far wall. A dozen oak barrels stood against that wall. One lay broken on the wet floor in front of a battered desk.

They rolled the youth over and removed his gag and blindfold. He wasn't one of theirs. They cut him free and dragged him out into the hallway. Leif's retrievers had to hold him upright as his legs and arms were asleep. Diarmud overdid it cinching the ties.

"Says he's one of Tore's." the Nahri clenching Leif's left arm said.

"If he's Tore's how come he's not dead?" Skjalg said.

"Hostage trade." Leif said. "Me and my mate were chasing snipers earlier. We killed three of them before a squad of their neighbors showed up. Knut and I hightailed it back for the column but ran smack into another squad coming the other way. We got separated in the press and they grabbed me."

Skjalg cocked a brow and folded his arms.

"Let's see." he said. "You killed three of them. And then it took another sixteen of them to run you down? Then they dragged you back here, tied you up, and just left you behind when they all went out for a stroll? I think you're one of them and they're saving you to hang for a coward later. We ought to cut your lying throat here and now."

"Now hold on you." Leif shrieked. "Every word of it's truth. Just take me to Tore. If I'm not what I say, he'll do far worse than just kill me. But if he finds you murdered one of his men you'll wish you'd cut your own throat before he's done with you."

"Even if I believed you," Skjalg said. "how do you suppose he'd find out?"

Skjalg motioned to his men holding Leif with a finger drawn across his own throat. Leif launched into a tale concerning the Gael's plans for a huge, complicated ambush which would get everyone killed. If he didn't personally relay all the intricate details to Tore they'd walk right into it.

"Hold him." Skjalg said, circling his sword point, viper like, in the air before Leif's throat.

Leif's screaming protest was stifled by a brawny hand clamped over his mouth.

'Atta boy Skjalg.' Geirolf mused. 'There goes your witness and lifeline.'

Geirolf's night had another kink thrown in it as his leg shot neighbor, remembering his earlier stare down with Starri on their way to the square, chimed in.

"Gaels got a way of talking that he don't." he said. "And if Tore or Starri ever wind this, . . ."

"Are you going to tell them?" Skjalg bellowed, whipping his sword about toward his own man.

"Here we go again." his man groaned. "Suppose Tore gets his hands on one of the Gaels who tied him up and left him here. Then what?"

Skjalg thought it over and shoved a torch in front of Leif's face. He peered at Leif from a half dozen different angles. Then feigning chagrin he ordered Leif released. They did. Leif hit the floor in a heap.

"I could have sworn." Skjalg sighed, "Geirolf, get him up."

Geirolf was more than tempted to gut Skjalg on the spot despite five witnesses but Skjalg's drawn sword won out.

Geirolf helped Leif stagger down the hallway. At Leif's third try to thank him Geirolf told him that unless he wanted to be gagged again he'd best shut up. The rest made a beeline for the door, oblivious to Geirolf and his burden. Skjalg reappeared brandishing torch and sword.

"Get rid of this and there's a bonus in it." Skjalg whispered.

Leif again felt a muscular hand clamped over his mouth as he started another scream.

"Sure, but what about Tore?" Geirolf said, wishing Skjalg would put the sword away.

"By morning Tore won't matter." Skjalg said.

Geirolf knew they'd been sold out when Nacarr backed out and put Skjalg in charge. When it came to initiative it was a wonder Skjalg could wipe his own ass. And true to form Skjalg had sucked up to the only other authority in the neighborhood, an unwashed savage who ate grubs.

There was no way he could let Skjalg walk out of here now. Tore's men would go through his remaining neighbors like shit through a goose.

Leif's limbs were coming to life and he was putting up a struggle. Skjalg turned to leave.

"Skipper, I could use a hand." Geirolf said.

Skjalg, loving nothing more than a good murder, reconsidered. Geirolf nodded at a black doorway to their right.

"We'll drag him in here in case he makes any noise." Geirolf said, sheathing his knife. Skjalg sheathed his sword and grabbed Leif's left arm. Together they dragged him inside.

LXXVI You Sure This Is A Good Idea?

Geirolf pinioned Leif against the wall.

"You hold him. I'll stick him. Give me the torch." Geirolf said.

Skjalg leaned into Leif and slapped a hand over his mouth as Geirolf let go and reached for his knife.

In the dark not ten feet behind them lay a hundred and forty pound leopard imitating a rug and watching the strange tableaux. Stinky, his new friend, reeked of terror. Nothing new there thought the cat. Spots sat up dog like on his forelegs and cocked his head aside to peer around Skjalg's back.

Geirolf whipped his knife out. Leif thrust his bony knee squarely into Skjalg's groin. Skjalg's beady brown eyes crossed, his cheeks puffed out and a sound like the word hurrah, but without the h at either end, escaped his lips.

"What's going on?" the cat said.

Skjalg dropped Leif and his hair snapped upright.

Geirolf's vision of Skjalg as the loveliest corpse he'd ever see popped out of his mind as he also turned to lock eyes with the cat. Skjalg grabbed the torch from Geirolf and pointed it lance like at the leopard.

"Kill that goddamn thing!" he yelled.

He got no reply. Geirolf was already out the door.

Leif on his wobbly legs still overtook and crashed into him in the hallway. Disentangling themselves in the dark they shot off in opposite directions. Groping along the walls they both found doors to put between themselves and the leopard. They barred their doors, leaned against them, held their breaths and listened.

Having fire shoved in his face was not high on Spots list and he told Skjalg as much in a series of short, hissing coughs as he flattened his ears against his skull, displayed his fangs and raked out at him with a paw full of knives. Skjalg repeatedly screamed for help as he edged towards the doorway with the torch thrust out between himself and the cat. Spots' memories of that last fiend who'd tormented him with fire enveloped this new one. Spots backed Skjalg out into the hallway.

Geirolf's four neighbors, almost at the door, were arguing in whispers. Two wanted to ambush Skjalg right there and try for a separate peace with Tore. Skjalg as usual had waited on his betters and Tore's men stole the upper hand. It was sell out their neighbors or die here in New Tara with them. The other two kept saying they could expect no peace from Tore. Skjalg's screams echoed down the hallway to them.

"What do you think? Should we?" one ambusher said.

"From the sound of it he'll be first out the door." his friend said.

"That would buy us time to run as they reload, after he catches the first volley waiting out there." the first one said.

The four slackened their already leisurely pace as their commander's silhouetted backside came into view, obscuring the object of his distress. Skjalg stepped to one side to reveal the now silent but visibly agitated leopard.

"Shoot it!" he said.

In the torchlight's flicker four bolts whistled past the cat as they frantically snapshot in its direction. Spots stood his ground demanding to know what their problem was. They compounded their mistake by bellowing back as they charged with swords.

Nahri number one saw the cat's head twist almost sideways as it flew toward him in slow motion behind those yard long, orange ivory fangs.

Spots claws kept slipping off his man's back as his teeth anchored themselves in his throat. That chain was slippery. Spots gave him a second bite in the neck and hurled himself at number two, the leg shot one, who had moved in too close.

The cat, in a blur was immediately past his sword point. Spots bit one side of his face off while clawing the other to ribbons before dropping him and high tailing it into another dark doorway.

Skjalg's retreating voice could be heard from down the hall exhorting them with bribes and threats to finish the job. The remaining pair of his best poked their torches in and out of the doorway.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" one said.

"No." his neighbor said. "But do you want it behind us, running for the door?"

Enough with the fire already, Spots thought, crouching on the shelf above the door. A man's head followed the torch in through the doorway. Spots leaned over and claw swatted him. Blinded by his scalp hanging over his eyes the man screamed and flailed about in circles as the cat flattened back on its perch.

Another man charged into the middle of the room frantically casting about trying to locate the cat. The first, and only glimpse he got of it was stretched full length, in the air, fangs and claws coming at him like an eagle. He swung the torch and blind luck lined it up with the cat's chest at the moment of arrival.

Spots bit him in the throat for the sixth time and clawed his left leg to the bone where the mail hadn't covered it. Someone's going to pay for this, Spots determined as he raced back into the hallway. The faceless man in the hall got a final dose of cat in his neck as he staggered about moaning and bleeding. Spots shot down the hallway after the last of them who'd shouted at him and started the whole affair.

Skjalg's bowlegged gait carried him out the door into the ally with both hands cupping his latest injury. The leopard landed on him from behind and bit into the back of his neck. Skjalg's legs collapsed with the cat standing on his hips and its forelegs around his neck.

Spots felt cheated. His prey showed less life than a sack of flour. His vengeance had been a thorough anticlimax. He cuffed Skjalg's head once, and then again while cursing him in a series of 'kha'aks, hisses, and deep, throaty uhhnhs.

Whispers floated down to him from the surrounding rooftops. Some sounded familiar but he couldn't be certain of their intentions and there were a goodly number of them. He arrowed himself into the nearest hidey hole to watch, sniff, and plot.

His audience from their sniping posts had thrilled to his impromptu cameo. They'd heard the screams from inside the building but when he nailed Skjalg at the door they'd been hard put not to give him a standing ovation. After a few moments of arguing as to whether he was working for them or had just gone on an indiscriminate spree, they departed in tight knots for the square with many a back trail, over the shoulder peering.

Leif staggered out into the alley praying the leopard had kept going when it cleared the door. The indignities he'd suffered combined with the stark blue glints off the alley's moonscape shuddered him in a nightmare panic. He cast around, half blinded even by the stars, searching desperate for further threats.

A moan of hideous despair wafted up from his feet. He kicked up a cloud of dirt and pebbles racing down the alley and back into the shadows. The voice moaned out for help again.

It was that bitch Skjalg.

Skjalg first threatened his men, then promised them bribes, then offered bribes to the Gaels, then called on Odinn with promise of sacrifices, and Thor and finally to Jesus, vowing to start up all manner of charitable endeavors for his own disowned bastards and the widows and orphans of others.

With no little time passed and no one answering him, Leif strutted back to stand over him and gloat.

Blood pooled under Skjalg's neck as he lay on his back and whined that he couldn't get up. His legs wouldn't work. Leif squatted over him and spit in Skjalg's face. Then he ripped Skjalg's sword from its scabbard.

"So you and Humach have it all worked out, eh, old friend?" he said.

Skjalg offered Leif everything up to and including a ship and his own crew to boss if he'd just keep his mouth shut. He'd personally see to Leif's every need.

LXXVII They Got Dead And Fell Down

"You dickless slug." Leif said.

Leif stood, still straddling Skjalg, and readied the sword. Skjalg, cupping tight his freshly kneed crotch, let go a gurgling scream.

Leif centered the point in Skjalg's windpipe, and Skjalg's scream shot silently up into his wide, brown eyes.

"I can be bought, you know." Leif said. "You wouldn't have a bed trael or two to toss in, would you? A couple of little redheads, maybe?"

Skjalg promised he'd get Leif whatever he wanted.

"I don't know," Leif said. "but I do know the double share I'll get from Tore once he winds a blow from your fart squall will spend better, . . ."

Skjalg screamed again as Leif curled his thin, dog lips back.

"than your knife in my back will."

Leif leaned forward throwing his weight against the pommel. Silence fell. Leif helped himself to Skjalg's knife and scabbards.

Confusion was again Spots portion as he watched Stinky slink off with a sword in one hand and part of their kill in the other. That part didn't have much meat on it.

Leif carefully skirted the square to come in from behind his neighbors. Someone's bolt near nicked his ear even though he'd loudly called out his affiliation. The fire fight had cooled to a simmer with both sides nervously peeking from behind continually shifting locations in their attempts to find a target without becoming one.

Hjortgren Bjorgilson, as Leif stumped wide legged past him, quietly cursed. The night was still young. Perhaps he'd win his wager with Asbjorn yet. Tore had warned him that if either of Skjalg's remaining fo'c'sulmen offered a target to make sure he didn't get caught. How could he have known it wasn't one of them?

Leif had to ask more than once where he could find either Tore or Starri. That was odd. Their nonstop roarings of orders and cursings usually made them easier to spot than a bonfire on a beach.

Hraerek's nineteen wintered son Aslak pointed out a hay wagon. Tore and Starri were kneeling, looking out from under it for someone to shoot when Leif hove up.

"What the? By God, look at this." Starri said. "The man's got more fire in him than either of us."

Starri appeared thunderstruck, pointing out Leif's grisly trophy. Leif barreled over Starri's congratulations as he reeled off his tale about Skjalg, snipers and the warehouse while repeatedly interrupting himself to ask about Knut's safety.

Crouching alongside them Tore's brow furrowed and his eyes widened. Starri beamed back at Leif like some gargoyle fresh to fatherhood. Starri slapped Leif's back, telling him he wished more of his men were made of the same stuff Leif was.

"I smell a rat." Tore said as Leif spread his legs and hobbled off.

"Through the pant load that crumb thief handed us?" Starri laughed as he swung Skjalg's head, with a clunk, down into the ordure of the wagon.

"Two days ago they had us two to one." Tore said. "They're half that now. You'd think they were expecting reinforcements."

"So?" Starri said. "Seventy or seven hundred of them would still add up to shit."

Tore planted the cocking stirrup of his crossbow atop the toe of his boot and folded his hands over the buttstock.

"Did you see what happened to those Nahri on the roof after Humach queered the deal and started the shooting?" he said.

"They got dead and fell down. So what?" Starri said.

"That's what I thought." Tore said. "But looking back, it seems to me nobody got cut. And I'll be damned if two of them weren't wearing a pair of big, fat, tits. Does it seem odd that with all the shooting they did those other two woodpeckers in the open made it back?"

Starri stretched prone behind a wagon wheel, shoving his bow out ahead of him. Tore spun round and peered beyond the wagon's traces.

"How many did you lose when you sent them off chasing snipers?" Starri said.

"A dozen, maybe more." Tore said. "I figured I'd run out soon enough if I just kept at it."

"There!" Starri barked, pointing to a darkened window across the square.

A figure in chain, in the window, fired his crossbow at them and plummeted from view. An encore followed immediately from a window above and to the right of the first.

"I'll be the devil's one eyed poker." Starri growled as the second bolt ricocheted off the pavement inches from his right elbow.

LXXVIII To Kill

"Anything?" Ansvarr said.

"Thought you were working." Jarnulf said.

"So did I last night." Ansvarr said. "Watched my roof instead, all damn night. I was less than nothing by sunup."

Ansvarr's tongue was working slow. Jarnulf leaned in for a sniff. His uncle had been drinking.

"Hope no one runs into anything." Jarnulf said.

"Aerin told me about Sigrid." Ansvarr said. "She was seeing to Aud's cow. Bror told me to go back to bed or back to the jug. Then he went out with Hroald.

"Awful thin out there." Jarnulf said.

"Morrow's dog eaters are too full of themselves," Ansvarr said. "to get organized into real trouble. Take them at least a week. Nacarr's crowd has pulled back."

"Lull before the storm." Jarnulf said.

"Yes." Ansvarr said. "Our killing off his fresh dregs has him down to his old hands and they're not having it. They need blood for blood. Hope we got them trained into expecting us on their own border and not Eikinn's."

Ansvarr spotted Aud coming down the street toward them. Her fists were clenched.

He and Jarnulf fell silent.

"I can't take this. Can I do something to help?" she said.

Ansvarr combed his fingers through the widow's peak of his shaggy, walnut hair, raked them down his cheek and clamped them over the stubble on his jaw.

"What would you like to do?" Jarnulf said.

"Kill something." she said, startling both men. To Sigrid's unending annoyance Aud was always dragging sick lambs home to nurse them hearthside.

"That's not a bad idea." Jarnulf said.

She returned him a look as if he'd spoke Greek to her. She'd be doing everyone a great service, and for what she'd just been through, vengeance even against a bear was in order. Aud said that her killing words were more lethal than her killing abilities. But today she could probably murder a whole jug of Sigrid's mead.

"That bear's been to town once and got away with it." Jarnulf said.

"Heard it got into Ref's steading and for some reason it went berserk, destroyed everything. So it's angry at us too. It will be back. How do you think any little kid would come off stumbling into it at night on their way to the outhouse?"

Aud paled.

"It's got to be shot." Jarnulf said. "It might as well be by someone who might feel better after shooting it."

She departed with her mind's eye sifting through the faces of every child in town.

Ansvarr hauled Jarnulf up short.

"Really?" he said.

"She shoots, spits, and curses like a man." Jarnulf said, amused with himself.

"Who's going to baby sit her?" Ansvarr said.

Jarnulf's grin evaporated.

"On top of Sigrid," Jarnulf said. "Hrorik used her and beat her."

Ansvarr's eyes smoldered like hot coals about to jump the flash point.

Jarnulf nodded with a faraway look.

"Tell her I'll pick her up around sunset." Ansvarr said.

Throughout the afternoon women and kids scurried back and forth to the blinds with anxious glances into the woods, and armfuls of bread, honey and venisons.

Many a groan accompanied cheeses and hard churned casks of butter. Thorarin made quick work of four fresh deer carcasses, slashing them open to ripen in the sun and send out their fragrant beacons.

When the dumping was finally finished the piles seemed pitifully small considering the wealth comprising them.

Gunnarr figured it was time to cure Arnor's wanderlust with a night of hiding in a blind. Arnor raced through town all afternoon telling anyone who'd listen that he was going hunting too.

LXXIX Two Dogs

In the forest's gathering purple crickets and cicadas advertised their amorous intentions.

Jarnulf laid stretched out on his belly atop a hillside boulder, leaning into a huge split in it as he handed down bows, packs and covered firepots into the lightless, earth roofed rear entrance of a bear blind.

In his grandfather's day there had been five bunker blinds to deal with the bears and wolves which had been more numerous and bolder. The blind between Jarnulf's steading and town, and another father west still in the woods, had had their roofs collapse over the years. Out in the middle of the field stood a third, almost as far gone, where Gunnarr had taken Arnor.

Ref knelt in the musty, close dark retrieving the gear Jarnulf passed him and stacking it beside four rolled up bear hides. The site had been chosen for the night wind which blew down the draw into its front wall. The bait, being fresh, probably wouldn't draw much tonight. But then the wind wouldn't be choked with rotting garbage either.

Jarnulf remembered one sweaty night he'd spent here with his father when he was Arnor's age. It was late summer and the moose they'd started the bait with was two and a half weeks old. The hot breeze was fresh and steady. The memory alone triggered his gag reflex.

From Jarnulf's vantage there was nothing to suggest man made but the bait pile. Under this forested burp in the hillside was a hole three feet deep and ten square roofed over with huge logs, mortised at their corners eighty years ago. A doubling of oak planks had been nailed over the roof logs before they'd been covered with earth.

He dropped into the crack and squeezed sideways through into the dark within. He unrolled a water soaked tarp, opened a water sack, mixed some mud, smeared it on the tarp, and hung it over the entryway to mask their scent. Ref pulled the lid off a firepot foot warmer and jabbed a torch into it.

"Whoa." Jarnulf shouted. "It's too close in here for that."

"To hell with it." Ref muttered. "I'd rather burn to death than get eaten alive. I had Gudrod and Thorarin burn the other two out this afternoon."

Ref then set about hunting down and burning or squashing all manner of creepy crawlies in the roof, walls, and dirt floor.

"Peculiar bear." Jarnulf said, watching him. "Never known one come to the smell of burnt wood before."

"Now you sound like Olaf." Ref said, swatting out a smoldering roof timber where he'd spied a particularly bloodthirsty looking spider.

"How many times have those bastards come right up to the fire to steal your dinner?"

"The things we do for pennies." he said later, shaking his head as they unrolled the last of the hides before the leg trench at the blind's front.

"Funny, thought this was all about justice this morning." Jarnulf said.

Ref shrugged him off.

He dropped his legs into the trench, sat back and cocked his bow. Peering out through the three inch slot cut through the logs he stuck four bolts into the dirt beside him. He licked the fletching on a fifth and nocked it into its track atop his bow.

"We'll see about justice and who it gets done to." Ref said. "Just killing this son of a bitch is too good for him. I'm going to murder him and I have to get worked up proper."

Shouldering his bow, Ref sighted over it at the bait.

"Heard a rumor you were going to burn your steading." Jarnulf said.

"Not fit to live in." Ref said. "Can't clean the stink out of it."

Jarnulf waited, and waited some more.

"Stink?" Jarnulf said.

"Oh I could fix everything he broke." Ref blurted out. "My bed, cupboards, trunks, buy new glassware. But that God awful stink."

"Couldn't just open the doors and shutters," Jarnulf said. "for a few days?"

"Son of a bitch broke in for dinner." Ref said. "Helped himself to my hams from the rafters. I could have lived with that, but it was that goddamn sack of dried beans. Ate the whole thing. If he'd have left then it'd still have been all right, but no, he had to lay down in the middle of my rug and take a nap."

Jarnulf found himself waiting again.

"Come on, it can't smell that bad." Jarnulf said.

Ref growled through his teeth.

"What do dried beans do, when you soak them?" Ref said.

"They uh, expand?" Jarnulf said.

"Yes, they do." Ref said. "And it hurt so bad when they squirted out his other end, by the bucketful with everything else he poached that he just had to get even with me for it. Smeared and slung great big globs of it all over everything. Even got it up onto the roof twenty feet up. I could plane every plank in the place for a year and never get it all."

"I'm sorry?" Jarnulf said.

"Nowhere near sorry as he's going to be." Ref said.

Within Mordach's Gudrod and Kolfinna excused themselves with a tale of heading for Marnee's. Mirha insisted on coming with them. Thorarin made his excuses to Kadlin who sank into a petulant sulk. 'Whatever could there be at the tanning shieling to compare with her company?' Thorarin was not only broke, but in debt from courting her. Her birthday was three months off, and she'd expect something expensive which meant finishing a few extra hides tonight.

Jarnulf of all people, after his initial shock, had lent him money to lavish trinkets on her with the warning that any fool who falls in love had best get used to being broke, especially with Kadlin.

"Hold on." Galinn called to Gudrod, snatching a cresset down from the wall. Gudrod refused it, scoffing. He'd had more than enough fire and smoke for one day. His scattering of frizzled, head top, hair curlicues were still reeking vilely.

"There's going to be at least two dozen women on rooftops all night." Galinn said.

"They'll be shooting at shadows and kitty cats till dawn. You remember the last time this happened? That short tailed greyhound of Hlidareth's? He was whining on the porch to come in and Geirrid and Maeve scared him so bad he wouldn't come home for three weeks. Damned fools put two bolts clean through Hlidareth's door. They just missed the baby while they were bobbing three inches off his tail. Poor dog almost starved to death. And talk it up. Or better yet, can any of you sing?"

"I can." Mirha said. Kolfinna rolled her eyes. Gudrod let go the forend of his bow and took the cresset gritting his teeth and squinting.

"I guess we'll go out through the field." Gudrod said.

"You will if you've got any sense." Galinn said.

Mirha quickly found herself dumped on Elsa's porch, and Kolfinna and Gudrod departed for something cozier at Gudrod's steading. In the dark, deserted streets and even darker hours following, five porch parked water butts were shot dead by rooftop bear hunters, and three dogs and a cat called a truce in the Hall's outhouse after being narrowly and repeatedly missed.

Arnor, in his blackened blind peered anxious out through the slot, and over his father's crossbow. That damn dog slinking around the bait, whose ever it was, was ruining his chance. Arnor wished his father would wake up and tell him what to do, or at least quit snoring so loud. But his father had had a long, and hard day, helping Chieftain Jarnulf and Olaf with Sigrid's murder. His father had been insistent. His bow was to stay where it was, the stock rested in the crotch of a shooting stick and the forend out through the slot. That mutt out there looked as drunk as Throttolf's dog.

Arnor thought about firing a shot to warn it off, but then he couldn't recock the bow by himself. Arnor scrabbled around in the dark blind for a rock and came up with three. He pitched them sideways, out through the slot and they all fell short. And that staggering mutt was almost on the tiny bait of stale bread and a single, scrawny, rancid doe. Arnor grabbed up a few more stones and crept quietly out through the back of the blind.

He stalked in silence around the blind's rear, so as not to wake his father, and approached the bait. He hurled a stone at the dog, and missed it. He hurled his second, and some bad language, and hit it.

It shivered, moaned, and went back to devouring his only hope of ever bagging a toy wolf. Arnor nailed it again, hard, in the shoulder and it glared up at him, bared its teeth, and hunching low, came slinking toward him. Arnor's hair stood on end. It wasn't a dog after all, and it didn't look drunk anymore. Arnor sprinted off in deathly, determined silence back for the blind's entrance. Nobody would ever take him hunting again if his father awoke and discovered how stupid he was.

The moon had ducked behind the only cloud in the sky when a great, shaggy, snuffling shape crashed its way through the woods across the draw, paused for a moment in the inky black under the tree's edge, and then came straight on to the bait to begin noisily gorging itself.

"Pick your head up, you." Ref whispered.

Jarnulf wondered how Ref could tell what part of what he was looking at. All he could see was a vague splotch of deeper darkness in the shadows. Ref pursed his lips and sucked in a squeaking, mock kiss at it. What must have been its head whipped up and Ref tickled his trigger. The meaty twang of his bowstring was greeted with a hideous squeal, leaping upward in pitch, like a giant dog with its tail slammed in a door.

"Ah, hehe, gasp, Oh God, ..." Jarnulf wheezed, clutching at himself as the porcine leviathan crashed back into the woods.

"Shut up you." Ref snarled. But Jarnulf was gone, choking in uncontrollable laughter and slapping his knees.

"Oh God, ..." he started in again, tears welling in his eyes. "You murdered him all right. Eh hee hee, .. A great, big, goddamn, ..."

"Knock it off." Ref barked at him before his composure too disintegrated into throaty guffaws. When their hysterics finally subsided Ref spit into the trench and recocked his bow.

"My bacon was the first thing that shit slinger cleaned me out of." he muttered.

"Even Mordach wouldn't serve something that old and tough." Jarnulf said.

LXXX An Emissary

Sigrid's death had caught Aud. She'd stumbled into the blind with Ansvarr, deep buried in the bitterest of tender essays. Sifting her heart shreds in the silent obscurity of the bunker, buried in the forest as Sigrid would be buried tomorrow, she felt herself a ghost, traveling about town all these years like some dirty whisper, and now friendless but for Adis, and Jarnulf, Olaf, and little Arnor.

She wanted to wake Ansvarr in desperation for a voice, any voice, even an angry voice would be the greatest of comforts. And why Ansvarr? To him too she had been a ghost, never even a look from him. Jarnulf regularly changed course at just a glance from Ansvarr. Jarnulf deferred to all the older hunters in kind, as a man would his own father. With them it was always 'Would you please.' Jarnulf certainly hadn't ordered Ansvarr to come get her. Ansvarr seemed shy and withdrawn when he came for her, embarrassed even to be seen with her.

As the moon arced from behind her, faint limning the tree wall across the draw in cerement silvers, her anger mounted, and mounted. She could truly kill something, tonight.

The moon now hung halfway down to the western trees across the draw. Ansvarr had long since fallen asleep with instructions to shake him, quietly, if anything showed. Aud realized that her cheeks were stinging with tears and she was looking up into the stars and whispering to Sigrid, up in those stars, of all that people say to lost loved ones. She wondered which of those secret stars had shed its baleful and wretched influence down on both of them.

She spoke not of fears for that state of mind admits none. Despite her feud with God, she knew that the Bible was wrong, and he'd not forget Sigrid. It mattered not if there was nothing beyond the grave for herself, but the thought of Sigrid somehow gone as if she'd never been, she couldn't bear. She polished and reworked her message, repeating it endlessly with variations manifold and subtle, clinging desperately to her rock, her anchor, pulling and straining against the terrifying finality of her goodbye until at length, the light of the stars flaring like crosses through her tears filled her with a resolve she could not name and a certainty indomitable as Sigrid spoke within her heart, and told her that it was all right.

Floating on that same spectral, silvery wash blanketing the sacred offering of her people's larder, a single barking yip, immeasurably liquid and plaintive carried through the night to her over the warm, bittersweet echoes of Sigrid's voice. There on that precious little mound of hard won life sat a single toy wolf. Its coat rippled in the gentle breeze like waves of shimmering silver, sleeker and more beautiful than any she'd ever imagined could be. It lowered its head and cocked it to one side, looking straight into her as she wiped at her tears with the backs of her hands. When she'd finished, as if it had waited for her, it threw back its head and raised its limpid, angel voice to the diamonds burning beyond number in the crown of the creator.

Aud stared with eyes locked open, afraid to blink lest her wondrous dream escape as first one, and then another and another new pup snuck from under the shadow's curtain to join the singer. The pups sniffed tentatively at first one course and then another, one jerking its nose back and shaking its head, to fling off the butter it had delved too deeply into. Mama turned and faced into the wind, and ate daintily, her gaze darting constantly between the night and her brood. When they'd finished she rounded them up and trotted back into the shadows with them at her heels. As they left the stage Aud wondered what the next act might be that this magical night had in store for her. And then a thing strange and inexplicable happened. The little silver wolf came back into the light, mounded the pile, warmed her with another look right into her soul and spoke one last liquid word to her before again departing.

That settled it. It had to mean something. She was torn with a desire to awaken Ansvarr, who'd been awake from the first bark and silently watched her through the whole scene, and ask him what it was but in the end decided against it, fearing the magic would be tainted or the memory taken from her if she did. Of all the acts under heaven this one had been for her and her alone. Had she asked Ansvarr might have told her that sometimes they're like that. They know. Galinn would have agreed, but told her not to trust them, as everyone knew toy wolves were all great liars. Gunnarr knew that too, but believing himself wiser than Galinn, would have said it spoke truth to her as it knew she needed it.

LXXXI I'd Throw Some Water On That

Starri lay flat on the icy flagstones staring out between the mud caked spokes of his wagon's wheel. The wagon's vile aroma, as a collection trough for outhouses, was the least of his concerns. He propped himself on his ring mailed elbows, helmetless, sighting over his crossbow to a rooftop across the star blued square. At least fifteen heads and bows peered back at him from atop the rooftop's serpentine facade. At its edge stood the Gael's spokesman, wrestling with Humach to keep the wretch before him as a shield.

Back at Starri's wagon's traces, behind another wheel knelt Tore awaiting the Gael's demands. The Gael kept snarling and pummeling Humach side to side.

"Stop knocking our man around." Starri yelled, as he kept making minute adjustments to keep his broadhead bisecting the Skraeling. The Gael continued cursing Humach in heavily accented Aenglisc and arguing with some kids behind him. From what Tore could hear of it two young girls had bagged the rat and were deriding him without mercy.

Humach had more than enough trouble with the Norrona tongue but Aenglisc, with a thick Gaelic accent, was giving him fits. Each time he lapsed into Skraeling the coal haired Gael fed him a fist. Humach was eating knuckles by the bushel and flopping about like a speared fish, hence Starri's dilemma. Should he shoot the Gael by mistake, he'd certainly not get another shot at Humach. Humach feared his captor would beat him to death. Suddenly Tore and Starri looked pretty good again.

"Tore," Humach shrieked. "It was Skjalg and Morrow, I didn't,"

Diarmud rapped Humach in the ear as Starri began his trigger squeeze, and Humach staggered back dragging Diarmud directly before Starri's broadhead. Something about that Gael had been eating Starri since Starri's first glimpse of him yesterday. Son of a bitch! It was Jarnulf the Lecher, or his twin. Starri began his squeeze anew, and to hell with Humach. Tore grabbed his forearm, spoiling his aim.

"We need that shitbird alive." Tore said. "We've got to make at least a show of trying to ransom him. Look at all those bows. Do you think they're going to give us a time out while we put down a mutiny?"

Tore pitched his rumble out across the square. It echoed back off the buildings.

"Do you want these brats back or not?" he demanded.

At Tore's bellow, Humach crumbled.

"Skjalg and Morrow and Nacarr set it up with Lalghar," he howled. "I didn't have anything to do with it."

Starri wondered what that had to do with anything.

Skjalg and Humach squirted whenever Nacarr and Morrow said squat. That wasn't going to get him off the hook. Starri's blue eye and empty socket shot wide. His bow quivered and his palms went damp, and clammy.

"Lucifer's balls." Starri gasped.

"You up there!" Tore yelled. "We'll trade you two of yours for him."

"Like hell." Diarmud said. "You'll give us all of them and clear out now. You get him back after you're aboard your ships and not before."

"He's not worth half that much." Tore said. "We'll give you three now and the others after we've loaded up."

"You have our terms." Diarmud said.

Tore summoned Asgrim and told him to make sure their remaining allies knew that deserters would be shot. Asgrim said the seven they'd backshot so far hadn't made much of an impression.

"You guys want him pretty bad." Diarmud said. "How about we send him back one piece at a time?"

"What about the kids?" Garth said.

"They shot their own to keep him from killing Doubghal." Diarmud said. "They're not about to hurt any of them."

Diarmud poked the tip of his knife into Humach's ear and began a tickling probing with it.

"If you don't get them to give us those kids and clear out this instant," Diarmud said. "I'm going to start here and work my way south, cutting off lots of pieces along the way. Or better yet, I'll start down there and work my way up."

Humach screamed as Diarmud's point began probing, well beneath Humach's waist.

"To hell with the hostages." Starri said to Tore. "Give them the brats. To hell with this place and everything in it. Look around."

Starri pointed to the holes in their line which had recently been manned by Nahri and Skraelings.

"We've got to leave, now. And it still might be too late." Starri said.

"What's biting you?" Tore said.

"Lalghar." Starri said, pointing at Humach.

After thirty years of masterminding triple and quadruple crosses Tore's chagrin at stepping into this one flashed across his face like a blue white bolt in the midnight sky.

"Can't leave yet. The smokehouse at home's empty as our strongbox." Tore said, staring round at his remaining Nahri and Skraelings.

He motioned again to Asgrim, who'd returned to crouching with Badger and Karl behind their wagon twenty feet further right. He ordered a fire kindled back in the alley. The trio dashed into a building, and quickly returned with a bench and demolished it with axes. Two more of their mates dropped a small keg of turpentine and bundles of tarred rags onto the pave. Tinder and flint struck shavings from the bench alight and Tore soon had his crackling fire. He pierced a rag onto a bolt, doused it with turpentine, lit it, and shot it into a bench in the square. Two bolts coming back at him whistled harmlessly past.

"You got your lives and your town." Tore bellowed. "How would you like to put out a hundred of those while you're getting shot at? I'd better see at least one wagonload of gold, jewels, and silver out here damn quick. And send our friend out with it."

"We got you three to one." Diarmud called out. "Burn us out, and we've nothing to live for. You'll never get out of here either."

Diarmud waited for his answer, and waited. He pricked a few more terrified screams out of Humach. Another flaming bolt thunked into the building just beneath him.

"I'd throw some water on that if I were you." Tore yelled.

At the beach in Skjalg's prow stood Hring keeping his nervous eye on the shattered stockade gate a mile inland. He upended his final keg of turpentine over the decking. Three more Skraelings scurried out through the gate headed his way.

Tore had sent himself, and Asbjorn and two more with Halldor's body to reinforce the detail guarding the ships. Hring ducked down behind the rail, peering past its stem, and whistling amazed at Tore's prescience. The old man had been most insistent they steer way clear of the dead on the field. Tore had predicted this whole queer business to the letter.

The Skraelings broke into a run straight through the battlefield between himself and them. Halfway through the corpse thick field they were hammered off their feet clutching at bolts as they fell, just as the last six knots of them had. From the way they were slammed side to side there had to be at least eight shooters, maybe more, faking dead among the truly dead.

At the beginning of his watch four Skraelings made it through unmolested. When he and his mates surprised them taking axes to the turpentine casks aboard Adam's ship they killed two and wrung the plot from the others who now lay bound and gagged in Skjalg's bilge, soaked in the fiery liquid. Tore's allies were about to desert, set fire to the Hrafn ships, and maroon them here.

Asbjorn gave the field a wide berth on his way to the rear gate. But even at two hundred yards, a rain of bolts angled down around him at swatting distance.

The stars had westered somewhat. Gaelic women and kids sent sporadic showers of arrows at their attackers who were in the main ignoring them. Tore's allies had stopped deserting. Someone much closer, and far better shots than those across the square, was dropping them neat each time they ran for it. His own Thingmen had settled into a routine of nose pickings and blue, graveyard jokes. Tore sent the Gael's more flaming reminders at ever decreasing intervals. They weren't taking his hint. Starri, never long on patience, poked them with a sharper prod.

"We ain't got all night." he bellowed. "Let's kill one of those little bastards."

LXXXII The Murder Of Danny Mac Tanner

Tore, signing Asgrim to follow, trudged back into the dark alley. He picked out the biggest of the boys. He and Asgrim dragged the lad to the near corner of the building out of sight but within earshot of everyone.

"What's your name?" Tore yelled at the kid.

"Danny Mac Tanner, you pile of pig guts!" the boy yelled back. Across the square Humach and Danny's mother started a screaming contest with the woman convinced she was about to lose her reason for living, and Humach, as the knife prodded his crotch certain of the same. Diarmud roared out another round of threats above them both.

Tore bent forward, laughing soft and leaden into young Danny's pallid face.

"Scream your lungs out, if you want to live." Tore whispered.

"You'll get nothing from me." Danny yelled. Tore spread his great arms wide. Asgrim clamped his hand over the kid's mouth. Tore slapped his palms together hard and loud. Danny's mother eighty yards away had to be physically restrained from shoving Diarmud and Garth off the roof.

The lad continued glaring badger eyed up at Tore.

"All right." Tore said, his every syllable dripping with sarcasm. "You can scream like, you're being murdered, or as, you're being murdered."

Asgrim handed Tore his knife. Danny's widening eyes traced the star sprites dancing up and down the arm long blade seesawing under his nose. He nodded, and screamed.

Tore pointed the knife hilt toward Asgrim.

"That big, evil bastard behind you, is my son." he said. "Would you like to live long enough to become big enough and evil enough to get even with us?"

Danny tried again.

Tore dug his thumbnail deep into Danny's earlobe.

Across the square Danny's mother fainted and Diarmud began begging for time to collect the ransom.

Humach and Diarmud disappeared from the rooftop. Humach soon reappeared at street level. He was gagged and his wrists were lashed to the handles of a two wheeled pull cart. Starri coughed out a laugh. Away off in the dim light Humach's breeches showed darkly stained, but he was trotting breakneck toward them, towing his cart with all too much vigor for the Gaels to have gelded him.

The cart's iron rimmed wheels clattered past Tore's end of the wagon at a surprising clip and on into the alley. Asgrim clothes lined Humach and slammed him back into the cart as it ground to a halt. He cut Humach free but left him gagged and delivered him to Tore. Asgrim stomped back to the cart and swatted through the pile of jewelry and coin in it. He rejoined Tore and the witless Skraeling.

"The good stuff, about a quarter of it, 'sworth maybe three hundreds of gold." he said.

"Have Thorodd separate it and bag it when we get to the warehouse, and have him keep an eye on ours." Tore said.

He ordered Danny to sing out.

"I should have killed your brat." Tore roared to Diarmud. "I might yet, between here and the beach, if you give us any more shit."

The Viking's side of the square was quickly deserted.

Leif led the retreat, pressed into guide service as Skjalg's warehouse squad hadn't returned. Tore silently thanked the Gael's hunters who'd stemmed his tide of deserters.

Diarmud's nerve snapped turgid. They hadn't the guts to kill Danny after all and they'd taken a wagon with them. His lady archers were better shots than he'd thought. The wagon must be loaded with wounded. Garth knew better, but there was no talking Diarmud and the women out of it. They chased after the Vikings hell bent on vengeance.

LXXXIII The Riches Within

The warehouse, which filled the whole block, was set back from the north side of the street. The sickle moon behind it hid the building's face in blackest shadow. Hrafns, Nahri, Skraelings, and the wagon load of extortion they'd squeezed out of the Gaels, crowded into those shadows, and those of the buildings and side streets flanking it. Starri hailed the unseen women and kids surrounding them, reminding them not to shoot, as he was sending the hostages out into the light to show they were all still alive. Ten heartbeats later they were reeled back into the shadows by the trailers on their nooses.

Starri ordered the kids to nod if they were good swimmers. He got four yesses and a vehement no from the youngest. Starri removed young Airt's blindfold and gag and walked him out of earshot for a whispered word. Then he bellowed across the way again for them not to shoot. As a show of good faith he was releasing one of their kids. The boy limped across the street, ginger atop the rocks in his boots and disappeared into the blackened alley.
"Are you sure that's what he said?" Diarmud said to him.

"The one eyed guy made me say it back it three times." Airt said. "He said the back door's not part of the deal. And if you say anything but yes, anything at all, he's going cut Righ's throat. And we've got but two blinks to save ourselves a whole pile of trouble."

Diarmud scratched his head.

Starri's bellow interrupted him in mid scratch.

"Did you get your boy back?" he said, while grinding his teeth at the mental image of that Gael hiding from him in the shadows with all those women.

"Yes?" Diarmud called out.

"Good." Starri bellowed. "You keep your end of the deal and we'll keep ours. You get the others back at the beach. Got it?"

"Yes?" Diarmud called out again, with a growing certainty he wasn't going to like whatever it was he was about to get.

In the dark before the warehouse door, Asgrim cocked his gull gray axe back over his shoulder. Its gleaming edge, cross hatched with fresh file scars and nibbled with old notches, whistled down through the soft, black iron chain with a booming clank that echoed back through the side streets. The chain parted and the ends swung free with a titter of jangling chimes. The broad, double barn doors groaned inward on their iron hinges. Dalla gimped up on his splinted leg.

"Give me two of the kids and I'll have Hjortgren seal the back." he said.

Tore turned away from the doorway's black to pitch his voice across the street. Tore thought about giving Dalla his answer in Gaelic and caught himself just in time.

"To hell with that little back door." Tore said in a voice loud enough to carry. "If they're half as smart as I think they are they'll have fifty bows on it already."

Tore motioned with his eyes to the building across the street. Except for the shadowed vee beneath the roof pole and overhung eaves, every detail from the keyhole in the bronze door lock to the ordered rows of rusty tears beneath the building's iron nails showed plain as day, but washed all silver and dreamy dim in the night's celestial rays.

"The back wall of this place is lit up like the other side of the street." Tore said. "They'd shoot us like dogs."

In the alley across the street Garth tapped Diarmud's shoulder from behind.

"I don't think I like this." he said.

"I know I don't." Diarmud said. "Take two dozen more with you, just in case."

Garth rounded up his reinforcements and jogged off circling two blocks wide of the warehouse. Tore ordered the firepots uncovered and eight of the Skraelings issued torches.

Just within the doors, flanking the aisle, were two tunnel dark and deep foyers before the racks and stacks of wares. Against the wall in one leaned a fresh sharpened harrow, aside other farm tools and drayage tack. Fo'c'sulman Hraerek took up station before the harrow, and Bardi across the aisle from him, both beckoning Tore's allies to get a move on, enticing them along to the riches within.

The Skraelings with torch in one hand and hand axe in the other, tucked their bows under their arms. Tore's crew rushed in and dropped to one knee ten yards ahead of the torch bearers. Dalla's crew formed the third wave, ready to shoot the Skraelings at a word. Dalla's men prodded the torch bearers through Tore's line and on into the black beneath the lofts. Tore's crew advanced another ten yards and took station again.

Behind Tore Humach followed in after him with the kids, and shrieked as a barn owl flew out past him into the night. The three lines leap frogged their way through the building as Starri issued torches to twelve more Skraelings and shoved them in ahead of the remainder of Dalla's men. The warehouse was soon declared empty but for its wares. Tore ordered Karl and five more up the stairs into the room above. They returned and clustered around Tore.

"Strongbox up there's empty." Karl said. "There's another room off to the back but it's empty too. No way out of there. Found Knut. He's dead. Something ate half of him. Smelled like a cat."

"Damn shame." Tore said.

Karl could have sworn the old man choked back a chuckle as he turned away.

At the building's far end cries of delight erupted from a half dozen Skraelings. They'd discovered seven shirts of chain and sundry pieces of armor. To them it was a fortune. Humach rushed up demanding it all for his men as they'd discovered it. Tore told him to help himself and keep looking. There was probably more of it.

Asgrim made sure Skjalg's Nahri discovered the mead. He made sure they sampled it. They'd had a rough night. They deserved it. Asgrim strode to the back wall and stove in the tops of four more casks, ostensibly to see if there might be better.

At the far wall across the aisle from Tore six more of his men opened, and knocked over four barrels of turpentine before spiriting two outside while the Nahri were busy comparing Asgrim's far wall mead casks to the aisle vintage. Anywhere or anytime else, the turpentine smell alone would have set off a dozen alarms, but here amidst the aromatic cacophony of woods, cheeses, grains, and ship's stores, and the hellish urgency to rape the richest of it and be gone, it went mostly unnoticed. Asgrim strode back into the aisle, signed to Tore, and then moved on toward the door where he informed the remaining Skraelings that Skjalg's men were laying claim to all the booze. He pointed out the location.

Karl and his five mates crowded the open mead cask on the aisle, jostling each other in loud and high spirits. In the press as the Skraelings muscled past them, Karl and Badger knocked over the cask, spilling forty gallons of it into the aisle to mask the smell of the spreading turpentine. Three of Humach's savages caught that smell, and headed for the door in no small rush, and right into fo'c'sulman Hraerek.

Hraerek took the first Skraeling's shoulders, and grinning shoved him backward, impaling him on a dozen of the harrow's dagger teeth. The Skraeling's two neighbors leapt upon Hraerek's back, cocking their hand axes. Hraerek slammed another, skewered sideways into the harrow beside the first and threw the third of them back further into the dark. The Skraeling returned at the run, right onto the pitchfork fo'c'sulman Bardi had waiting for him.

Immediately after, in the argument between their neighbors and Skjalg's men, crowded back under the loft, the remaining Skraelings noted there weren't any Hrafns laying claim to anything. In fact there weren't any Hrafns to be seen.

Three Nahri who'd witnessed their stealthy exodus and followed after them were lying in the blackened foyer across the aisle from Hraerek and Bardi's Skraelings, by the door. They had run into Starri and Throttolf, the last folk they would ever run into.

LXXXIV Hero Of The Battle

The alleys across from the back of the warehouse were still and deserted when Garth and his blood mad women arrived, and the building's rear was as the Viking had offered, silvered by the moon.

Garth motioned them deep into the shadows, dreading ambush. The Viking had set them up. A finger tapped him between his shoulders.

"Where's the other hundred of you?" Conor said. "You brought enough noise for a whole company."

Doors creaked open and another five hunters with fifty women more slunk into the alley.

"Well," Garth declared. "Nice of you to finally come to the party."

"And just who," Conor said. "do you think was stacking them up in the dark every time you and Sargeant Cuchulain kept missing them from the rooftops? If I'd a pence for every one of them we killed skulking around back doors waiting on you, ..."

Conor took Garth's elbow to steer him into the blackened building and on up the stairs.

At the warehouse's front door, Humach's teeth were chattering as he ordered six of his nine remaining inside to help with the booty. Tore smiled, hugging Humach up under his shoulder as Asgrim, at Humach's other side, prodded his very pointed knife into Humach's kidney. Humach's six no sooner vanished within than the remaining three guarding the ransom were shot as one. Four firepots were uncovered again and six bolts wrapped with pitch soaked rags blazed alight.

Tore signaled. His men rushed the open doorway and fired into the warehouse. The turpentine exploded into a wall of flames. Screams and howls erupted within, and Hrafns swung the doors closed and rechained them. The wagon was rolled up before the doors unloaded and overturned, blocking them. The bags of real gold and silver were snatched up and the junk left lying. The two barrels of turpentine by the door were axed and fired, engulfing the front of the warehouse in a blinding fireball and the Hrafns dashed off through the shadows, sweeping Humach and the four kids along with them, towards the main street and the smashed stockade gate.

Behind Garth in the inky black on the stairs, Conor let go a laugh.

"Liam and the four Mac Finns will be happy to see the hero of the battle of the unpaid mead bill hasn't got you killed." Conor said.

As Garth groped his way up the stairs an all too familiar voice let go a howling oath on the rooftop above. It was Murtaugh, his fat little father. Garth and Conor shoved open the roof door to find Morn Mac Finn's hand clamped over Murtagh's mouth as the eastern horizon, the front of his warehouse, blazed alight in a curtain of flame. Liam, the three remaining Mac Finns, and six women lay out flat at their roof's edge, squinting down into the street over crossbows. Garth and Conor dropped onto their bellies flanking Liam.

"Kill anything out that door." Garth said. "And they release our kids."

"They want us to kill them?" Liam begged.

"That," Garth said. "or they kill ours."

"Stark raving mad." Liam said. "All of them. They sank the Pope's tax fleet. Fine. But then they had to loose those damn leopards in our forests."

"Oh no, couldn't have been us." Garth said. "We're far too smart for that. Have another look out the front gate."

"Says the man who brought one home for his baby sister." Liam said.

"You know," Garth said. "I'm sure you've at least a dozen absolutely brilliant ideas here, like you have on everything else, but could you save it till after they're dead?"

"You can't trust them man, they're only business Christians." Liam said.

"Speaking of," Garth said. "Diarmud would like to know when you're going to pay up what you owe him."

"That's nothing whatsoever to do with this." Liam said.

The warehouse door beneath them swung inward and two men in mail ran out firing into the shadows. Six bolts from the rooftop knocked the Vikings down. Five more burst from the warehouse door and were pin cushioned in a crossfire from the Gaels at street level, flanking the building. The exodus from the warehouse stopped but the screaming inside didn't.

The smoke claimed all but a half dozen who chopped their way out through a wall fifty feet back along its side. In the alley the six discovered themselves trapped between two score of Diarmud's women and almost as many of Conor's.

LXXXV A Religion

Badger backed down main covering the retreat.

Something, he'd never figured out what it was but he had learned to never ignore it, yanked his glance back over his left shoulder.

A girl was running at him from the dark with an axe cocked above her head. She was almost on him. He leaned back away from her. The sword in his left hand swept up and out, and Caoimhe's axe went flying as his edge cut her haft well above her fingers. She froze like a garden pilfering deer in the light from an open door.

While he wasn't about to murder her there were the deserters he and Tore had double crossed who might. He roared at her to get lost. She wouldn't leave. He wanted to slap her but that would mean dropping his bow. Perhaps if he pointed it at her she'd run away.

Caoimhe stared back breathless, knowing she was about to die but it didn't matter. The man before her in that gorgeous, blue steel mail and cap, with that great shining sword, pointing his bow at her, his blue green eyes burning into her from that sooty, square face with those hollowed cheeks and that proud, high, bony brow, and those gorgeous, flowing red blond locks, was a god. Perhaps a bit short for a god, but a god nonetheless. Her sixteen wintered soul quivered in that perfect, star lit moment.

Back in the side alley Badger picked out four more of the brats, two of them pointing drawn warbows at him, afraid to shoot and get her killed. He wrapped his sword arm around her neck and dragged her backwards as a shield down the street, putting a corner between himself and her rescuers. They followed. The stockade was only twenty yards further. Behind his shoulder Karl retreated grinning, covering the young bowmen. The kids were so fixed on saving their friend they didn't even see himself.

Badger yelled that if they wanted her back alive they'd better get lost right now. He'd turn her loose once they were through the gate. They wouldn't hear of it. He dragged her backwards through the bodies and splintered timbers, and then round the corner into the moonlit open. Two bolts from the field slammed into the stockade next to him. Karl dropped to one knee and fired at a shadow in the grass. Badger spun the girl in front of him and demanded her name.

"I've got Caoimhe." he yelled. "Keep shooting if you want to kill her."

Two more bolts whistled past him and thunked into the wall. A noisy argument broke out between the shadowy shooters, their friends who hadn't fired, and Caoimhe who told someone named Domnal in the most shocking terms what she thought of him.

"Now see here." Karl yelled into the dark. "We all know arguing's a religion to you folk but don't you think this is pushing it?"

The three way caterwauling continued but the shooting stopped. Badger sheathed his sword and taking Caoimhe's arm he and Karl hustled her off along the wall into the dark, giving the field a wide berth. She was the last thing he wanted but the ships were a mile away and there was no telling how many Gaels were between here and there. Caoimhe and her warders soon caught up with the others. The others were overjoyed at having another hostage.

At the beach a thick, knee high fog boiled above the ground for a hundred yards inland. Between the light of Hring's torches and the moon it took on a dead fish glow.

"Burn them!" Tore yelled.

Six torches arced up and then down into six Nahri ships. The turpentined wood flashed alight with a cavernous woof. Eighty Hrafns shielded their eyes as the fireballs belched blinding light. More explosions followed from ships stores Hring's detail had dragged topside from the bilges.

Blue edged snakes of orange yellow writhed up the masts and rigging, then raced out through the greased sails. Mailed men scurried through the surf in the brilliant light with hundreds of women in pursuit a hundred yards behind them.

Half of the Viking force turned, dropped, and took aim. Their pursuers hauled up short, staring at forty armored and determined men commanding that bright stage, who were probably a lot better shots than themselves. The remaining Hrafns heaved their mail, shields, gear and the dozens of cheeses and hams looted from Murtagh's warehouse into the ships. Pushing them off the beach, they grunted and swore. Badger ordered his hostage aboard and she scampered into the surf with arms held high. Two men hauled her up over the rail. Funny, Badger thought, she hadn't seemed at all reluctant.

Tore waited till three quarters of his crews were aboard before he asked the kids if they were good swimmers. Three said yes. The pinched one, Danny, who'd since thought it over, recanted and was kicked loose. The women again rushed the beach, howling and screaming at the sight of their kids being dragged off.

Badger and the few remaining dashed into the surf with arrows descending around them and were yanked up and aboard as the sea swirled about their shoulders.

Sailors dashed oars through the locks and pulled away, leaving the ladies barrage unanswered. The burning ships yards crashed down into their rails as the halyards parted.

At a hundred yards from shore the Viking commander's voice roared back at the Gaels. Half the women on the beach turned back towards town expecting a second wave of Vikings to rush down on them.

"Stop shooting, we're kicking your boys out." Tore yelled.

He again asked the three youngsters cowering beneath him in the bow if they were sure they could swim. Answering yes, they were heaved over the side. Tore cupped a hand to his ear. From beneath the cottony mist the splashings of three hearty young swimmers returned. He yelled back at the beach.

"Sing out unless you want them to get lost and drown."

The women added their wails to the roar of the burning ships.

In Dalla's bow Badger yanked Caoimhe upright.

"Good luck." he said, sweeping her up in his arms. She begged him not to drown her. She couldn't swim. He groaned out one of Da'hal's favorite Frankish blasphemies.

Diarmud, Garth, and his twenty hunters watched the ships row out of range, raise sail, and depart, while solemnly pledging each to the others that someday, somehow. It was beginning to dawn on them how thoroughly they'd been taken. If they hadn't shot so many of the Viking Chieftain's deserters for him the bastards might have finished each other off.

Aboard Tore's ship Asgrim and Karl had words with Tore about a helmet full of booze and some chain mail and a full quiver they'd discovered in the warehouse.

Behind them at the beach many regarded the stars with prayers of thanks for their own deliverance as the ships before them, and their homes behind them, burned.

Spots flattened himself against his tree limb. In spite of the warm, drowsy, midmorning sun, the riot of bird and animal noises out here in the woods was new and thoroughly unnerving, but it had the insanity in town beat. He peered wide eyed at a starling perched fifteen feet further out upon the same branch, wondering how he might procure it, and if it might be tasty. The starling peered back at him, mocking him, way out there on that thin little limb. Even if he managed to catch this one, how would he come up with another hundred?

Spots head jerked back toward town. Whatever was coming was making an awful racket.

Geirolf soon appeared, headed north in a big hurry, and looking back over his shoulder. Spots belly gave up a growl. It appeared that no one was going to come get him and feed him. If he wanted to eat he'd have to fetch it himself. He'd only done it once before but it had been surprisingly easy, though nowhere near as tasty as what Father and Sinead brought him. It would just have to do till he could discover where the good stuff was to be got.

He flowed off the limb and out of the tree like poured quicksilver and making no more noise than a whore's conscience he oozed through the tangled undergrowth stalking Geirolf.

LXXXVI That Evil Bastard

Dawn's waking gilded the pine tops across the draw in the gentle breeze.

A laughing, congratulatory gaggle of women surrounded Aud and her six hundred pounds of dead black bear, lying on its side atop the bait pile.

Arnor bounded up the draw ahead of his father, beaming with a shock of limitless, disbelieving bliss. The shoulders of Gunnarr's buckskins were a wet red brown and it was harder to tell whether he or his son looked prouder. It couldn't have been a little toy wolf. Gunnarr had field dressed whatever it was and carried it in over his shoulders. Arnor headed for Ansvarr and Bror.

"I killed a wolf." Arnor said, and shared out every detail, all but his sneaking out of the blind to stone it and being chased back inside by it.

His wolf was at the tanners waiting to be skinned. They had to come see it first. Bror and Ansvarr made a huge deal of him and said they'd be along but they had something else to skin first and it was too big to drag to the tanners.

Bror pointed to the women surrounding Aud.

Arnor burrowed his way between them and the sight of Aud's magnificent bear stole his breath. He offered Aud his congratulations and praises before mumbling that all he'd got was a wolf. Then he set to gaping at her bear.

Aud hadn't even heard him, but Thyre, spindly, grayed and seventy, had. She bubbled away with the enthusiasm of a wide eyed, devoted grandmother. Despite her aches she tucked up her skirts, and kneeling, took Arnor's shoulders. She told him, loud enough to embarrass another half dozen women into coming along with them, that she'd be honored to be the first to see his wolf.

Kjartan lumbered up crestfallen at the sight of his bonus bear, now Aud's. He congratulated her and asked what she was going to make of the hide.

Aud wasn't certain she wanted an animal she'd murdered. She told him he and Andar deserved it for those miserable nights they'd spent waiting for it on Kveldalf's roof. Kjartan stumbled off for a private patch of woods. His palate wasn't the only part of him that found his vat of cranberry cat liquor hard to deal with.

Ansvarr gave Gunnarr a critical once over and plucked a few brittle white hairs from Gunnarr's shirt.

"Loopy old wolf," Gunnarr said. "all ribs and mange. Arnor did him a favor. The goose he came looking for could have finished him off. Arnor said he was stumbling around like he was smashed out of his skull."

"We'll give him the speech." Bror said. "A hungry wolf is bound to wage a hard battle."

"He's a grim little stager," Gunnarr said. "surprised even me last night. Not a peep. I was near out when the shot and the yelp brought me around. I looked and there's this pathetic wretch at the bait, biting himself, and my first thought's Oh God, he's killed some poor girl's darling tooth gift."

Babies were given a gift upon cutting their first tooth.

"He half moaned," Gunnarr said. "and half howled a couple times. I recocked my bow and told Arnor to finish him. He didn't rush it. Low and behind the foreleg."

"Whenever you think he's ready," Ansvarr said. "I'll train him."

Bror nudged Ansvarr.

"I suppose that was your bolt," he said. "the second one, giving him a bellyache?"

"Hush you." Gunnar said, elbowing Bror's ribs. "The poor thing's been short of friends her whole life. Right now she's everyone's hero."

"Not surprising, with her odd ways, cussing like a drunk sailor and making herself unattractive." Bror said.

"If you were a girl with a father like hers you'd have had no use for men either." Gunnarr said.

Bror froze and the color drained from him.

"You don't mean," he said, his mouth and eyes agape, unable or unwilling, to digest Gunnarr's shocker.

"That evil bastard didn't die half hard enough." Gunnarr said.

"How would you know?" Bror said. "That was nine years ago and you weren't there. Never did find out who was."

"Go make a nice fuss over her." Gunnarr said, grinning smug as he folded his arms. Bror looked about to be sure they weren't overheard.

"Truth?" Bror begged in a tinny squeak.

"Go dig him up and ask him." Gunnarr said.

Galinn was bent over atop a rear corner of the blind. He left off his peering at the dirt around it, and skipping off the front of the blind, trotted over to join them.

"He must have got a good whiff of you. He spent enough time looking for you before he went to eat." Galinn said.

"Didn't need a whiff." Ansvarr said. "Why is it everyone with no use for their maker has to chat him up when he takes someone from them?"

"Anyway," Galinn said, not wanting to veer off to where Aud had almost ruined the hunt.

"He told me he was the one," Ansvarr said, "at the back door, when he got mad and left after he couldn't squeeze in."

"She didn't know? And you didn't tell her?" Galinn said. "What if he had got in? Listening to her, lost in prayers? He'd have gone straight for her."

"You think I couldn't have stopped him?" Ansvarr said.

Galinn moved in on him.

"With just one shot, in there?" he said.

Ansvarr slapped the axes at each of his hips.

"You may not have heard," he said. "that I'm quite a dancer too."

"On your knees, with no light at all in there?" Galinn said.

"How do you get anything done," Ansvarr said. "with all the worrying you do?"

"Anyway," Galinn said. "a good night in town. Just that big snowy gander of Maeve's. Geirrid shot it but between you and me, it's hard to mistake a white goose for a black bear."

"Yeah." Gunnar said. "You watch them walk. It's the gait. Gives them away every time. Completely different."

Bror said he'd buy Geirrid a drink sometime when Maeve wasn't there.

The crowd around Aud and her bear was breaking up and heading back to town. Gunnarr called to her.

"Daymeal, with us?" he said.

"Sure, after I go put a hot rock under my ass. Feels like everything down there's frostbit." she said.

Bror arched both brows high, clasped his hands behind his back, stared off into the treetops across the draw and began humming an old sea chantey frantically chasing a key signature. Gunnarr forced a bland smile.

"See you." she said and skipped off towards the departing crowd.

"A perfect young lady, you were saying?" Bror said.

"I said fine, not perfect, you nose picker." Gunnarr said, idly digging weeds with his toe. Aud hadn't gotten ten yards before she raced back to wrap her arms around Ansvarr and kiss his cheek.

"Thank you, thank you so much." she choked out staring off over his shoulder. She glanced at Bror and then Gunnarr. Gunnarr, usually flush with rejoinders, found the perfect one wanting when she suddenly let Ansvarr go and zipped away back down the trail.

"I was saying," Gunnarr fixed Bror with an icy glare. "that I have high hopes for that young lady yet."

Although she hadn't looked him in the eye he was certain he'd glimpsed a big tear in hers.

LXXXVII Of Quarries Bagged, And Quarries At Large

Astrid wove her hips in a comic dance to keep them from Ref's reach as she darted plates between the revelers. She deposited two before Olaf and Anja. Olaf pushed three silver pennies at her. Gunnarr's eyes went wide.

"That's for Geirrid's too." Olaf said.

"One of us has just gone mad." Gunnarr said. "I've never seen you part with a penny for less than two in return."

"Just a bet I had with Bror." Olaf said.

Astrid pocketed it and disappeared for another load of plates.

"And there's moments you can't put a price on." Olaf mumbled through his mouthful of boiled egg.

Jarnulf and Ref barged through the door and onto the landing with buckskins red and gore spattered from dressing out Ref's ancient boar.

Through the women's hubbub over Aud of all folks actually killing anything, Mordach's croak ordered them off and cleaned up before they got served. Ref saluted him with a grin and the back of a clenched fist. He grabbed the fist's forearm, and stroked its length in an unmistakable gesture. He and Jarnulf descended the steps making for Olaf and Gunnarr, and ran smack into two mischievous cherubs, one brunette, the other a redhead.

"Finally," Hlif said. "You're out of excuses and all mine."

"You're going to survey our furrows as soon as you've eaten." Aerin said.

"No." Jarnulf said. "We'll survey again after harvest. And whoever's right wins the turnips, after you, Hlif, have planted, watered, weeded and dug them up."

Hlif howled. That would never do. He was to do it today, first thing. She was not going listen to a whole summer of that silly Aerin's nonsense. Aerin agreed with her. They had a dispute. It was his job to resolve it. He told them to go to hell. They'd see about that when Tore returned. They'd have him removed as Marshal.

"Please, God." Jarnulf moaned. "Please."

Behind him the door slammed shut behind Da'hal.

Hlif and Aerin grabbed Da'hal at the foot of the steps and giggled him off him to their table, their surveying dispute stowed and forgot till the next instant Jarnulf and their boredom again collided.

Gunnarr felt Olaf's elbow and turned to see Olaf point with a subtle nod at Astrid standing off at the end of Maeve and Geirrid's table.

"Hel's legs!" Maeve said.

"When did anything ever come from him without a pot of mischief tied to its tail?" Geirrid said.

Maeve jumped up and threw her knife into the table top where it stuck, quivering.

"Accident my ass!" she said and turning on her heel strode for the door. She stopped at Bror's table and pointed a calloused, bony finger at him.

"And you!" she shrieked before sweeping his tankard into his lap.

Bror watched Maeve tromp up the stairs past Jarnulf and Ref, and out. Bror slammed his palms on the table staring across it at Ansvarr, bewildered, for a heartbeat, before turning his scowl on Olaf, the scar on his jaw twitching and jumping.

"Is there never an end of it with you?" Bror said.

"End of what?" Olaf asked, chewing his way down the six inch strip of bacon toward the thumb and forefinger it was clamped between.

Later that morning ten wintered Raud and Hall had uncomplimentary things to say about Arnor's wolf. Arnor told them that they were just jealous, and he wanted to know where their wolves were, and lost another fight.

Ansvarr heard of it first and promptly straightened out Raud, leaving Raud with a severe smarting but seemingly no smarter as Raud promised Ansvarr that he'd get even with him someday.

Ansvarr said that was fine, he'd wait till Raud was good and ready, though he was certain old age would get him long before Raud worked up to it.

LXXVIII No Place For Us

Aud placed an owl feather between Sigrid's fingers, wrapped around her knife hilt between her breasts, should she become lost and return to the starting point of her journey, to guard her soul from being poached by those interlopers from the void.

She bent forward and gave Sigrid one final kiss, not on her forehead but on her cold, blue lips.

Hroald's face remained unreadable, granite ignoring her trembling right fist, its heel against the coffin's edge between them, the box's side screening her obscene suggestion from all others.

In the yard behind the church the crowd's somber mien stood stark against their yellow, pale blue, wine and emerald colored great coats as Sigrid's coffin was lowered into the ground. Best brooches, cloak pins, and necklaces of glass beads were all on display. Dresses and twill blouses were banded with arabesques, runes and an occasional dragon.

Even the men's hilts, which went everywhere but court, had suffered a special polishing.

The men's formal trousers were brilliant as the women's outfits, bloused double wide at the knee and tucked into tall boots colored to shout down an acre of poppies. Sleeves of red and white or black and white herringbone snuck from under cloaks to wrap blue shoulders here and green ones there.

Jarnulf stood off alone by the gate after what he'd got at the shipyard from Sigrid's kin.

Aud stood with Stienunn and Aesolf beside the grave and the stones for Sigrid's cairn with her right hand jammed into a pocket of her dark green greatcoat, her left clutching a handful of its winter wolf, fur trim. Her auburn locks, no two the same length, mutinied out from beneath a cap of gray wolf with her ears half hid under its band of fur.

Rakel, across the hole from Aud, had joined their rainbow in midnight blue with gold necklace and bracelets under her gilt stitched coat. But even the more than extra purple kohl around her eyes failed to hide the blackening Mirha had given them, making of her a disquieting presence at an open grave.

Hroald spoke the words and as Thorarin and Draeng began shoveling in the dirt Aesolf let out a great oath and shot his bony face and blue veined fists to the heavens.

"This is what comes of you and your false God." he railed at Hroald. He lowered his hands and gaze and shot them stabbing across the grave toward Hroald.

"May you and your cursed book burn in the bottom of the ninth hell." he shouted.

Hroald lowered his head and backed away wordless into the crowd.

Two of Aesolf's old seafaring mates hobbled forward to lead him away lest he collapse on the spot. He shook them off.

"I'll see my Sigrid buried or meet my fathers with a rage to shake their table." he said.

Thorarin's eyes fixed on the sword rising from its sheath in Aesolf's hand, fearing Aesolf was going to take after Hroald with it but instead, the ancient stabbed it into the ground and leaned forward on it. Staring at their shovels, Aesolf motioned with a jerk of his head to the box containing all the light left his few, final days, already slipped into the dark, down in the hole.

"Do it." he croaked to Thorarin and Draeng.

When they'd finished Aud fetched a piece of purple gray slate from the pile and placed it on the fresh earth above Sigrid's heart. She drew back as the crowd drew in and each added another. First a dozen, and then six more and she realized the salty taste in her mouth was her own blood from the tiny cut she'd made jamming her fists against her teeth.

Aesolf's brown nails bit into his palms, clawing the quillions of his sword as he stared down at the growing pile of stones, seeing only his Sigrid in a golden byrnie and helmet, all aglow with a light so pure, so brilliant, so white hot, there in the Great Hall, laughing and drinking with those whose blood tied them and had arrived before her, there where the meanest tapestries on the walls surrounding them were woven with the living light of the stars, welcoming her with hearty embraces and brimming goblets blown of pure celestial fire, their slightest sigh a hurricane, their laughter, should Heimdall at the rainbow bridge ever sleep and let it escape, enough to hurl all creation into the void. And his Sigrid's heart, in that Hall, now burning beyond time and back again with a joy and abandon so wild and reckless, so beyond human ken, that it dwarfed and blinded even those doings there.

Between Aud's breasts the tiny eagle's silver wing tips bobbed about, her breath hard and shallow, and sweat sheeted cold under her collar as she searched faces she'd known her whole life, but now seemed she didn't know any of them.

Bror straightened from the cairn, all solemn in his black and blades against the crowd's rainbow riot and her mind turned to Ansvarr but she couldn't find him. Instead, she tried to console Aesolf.

"If it weren't for you, pervert, my daughter would still be alive." Aesolf said, pushing her away. Aud stumbled back shooting her hands to her cheeks, turning crimson.

Bror, all reasonableness and conciliation, told Aesolf there was no need to be so cold to Aud.

"Mind your own business." Aesolf barked.

"You're in no position to call anyone a pervert, Viking." Bror returned, his smile still warm and open, grinding salt into the bloody wound he'd wrent in Aesolf's pride. Aesolf's eyes, and his knuckles around his hilt, tightened, white with rage.

"I've killed better men than you." Aesolf said.

"It broke my heart to dig Sigrid's grave yesterday." Bror said. "But after this yours may be a different story."

LIXC Shovels And Swords, Rabbits And Rain

Aesolf leaned back yanking his sword up to attack Bror. Draeng staggered forward as Bror snatched the shovel from him to knock Aesolf's weapon from his hands. A collective gasp went up. Many there considered it a huge, and humiliating setback for the old man.

"In my day." Aesolf began, shaking in his fury and embarrassment.

"In your day," Bror snapped back. "you caused the graves of many innocents to be dug, you disgusting murderer."

"That was worth your life." Aesolf shouted.

Bror handed the shovel back to Draeng, and then drawing both of his swords he handed them to Thorarin.

"Hand the murdering pervert his sword back." Bror said. "That should make it almost fair."

Ansvarr, Gunnarr and Galinn got between them and escorted Bror away.

Jarnulf edged sideways toward the fence opening, hoping to escape unobserved. Aud ran to him and to the amazement of most, wrapped her arms around him and clung, the wolf fur on her cap creeping into his nose as he hugged her back and she wept.

After the confusion swept the crowd and moved beyond them, along with most of her tears, she begged him to take her away from the horrible scene, anywhere but there. It was custom for whoever'd placed the first stone to also place the last, but he knew she'd return to add another and another, later, when no one but the stars was watching, as he and others would do at least once, and pour forth their memories and hopes to Sigrid, and Sigrid alone.

Jarnulf hugged Aud up close on their way off toward the street. She drew a rag from her coat and buried her nose in it.

At the church landing's edge Jarnulf uprooted a handful of weeds and tossed them before they sat almost at street level, with elbows on knees. Aud dragged her cap off sideways and her shock of chestnut hair, steamed clean out of any semblance of discipline earlier, staggered free.

She dropped the hat in her lap and weaving her fingers together, bent forward hugging her shins. She stared into the vee at the bottom of his neck.

"Where do you think Sigrid is?" she said. "With the old gods or the new one?"

His heart skipped a beat as he looked into her red rimmed eyes. He was having his own troubles with God and the gods. The lot of them seemed a petty, capricious and stingy batch. To the old ones his father's death had probably been a minor prank and the new one offered no explanation beyond his reticence to give any explanation at all.

"Do you think she's in the Great Hall, spending the rest of forever trying to get drunk just one last time?" Aud said, an irrepressible spark of mischief in her wet green eyes. "Or maybe with the new one, glowing and floating around all happy like, with nothing to do but sing?"

"Whichever it is, I'll bet there aren't any barnacles to cut her fingers on or stinky bait bags there." Jarnulf said.

"She wasn't much of a singer." Aud said and fell silent for a long moment, staring vacantly away out between steadings toward the sea, absently plucking hairs from the fur on her hat.

"I hope she's somewhere, somewhere nice, and she's happy." Aud said. "She's got to be somewhere, doesn't she?"

The last thing he wanted was tell her he wasn't absolutely certain. He put his arm around her shoulders and pointed in a broad sweeping motion with his other arm.

"You don't think all this just happened, do you?" he said. "The sky, the sea, the forest and all the animals in it, all these people? Someone had to make all this."

She searched his eyes hopeful but unconvinced.

"The Bible says there's no place in heaven for people like Sigrid and me." she said, her smile under siege, both flanks taken and her center crumbling.

"Hroald says those are the real God's words."

Jarnulf felt a warming high in the back of his lungs and his shoulders felt broader, his arms bigger. She'd given him something to work with. He cupped her cheeks in his hands so she couldn't look anywhere but into his eyes.

"Whoever wrote those words down didn't understand them, or wasn't paying attention." he said.

Deep behind her eyes the tiny warrior of her belief, on its knees, was swinging blind and furious at the dark horde of doubts hemming it in. She dropped her gaze to his chest and started crying again, kneading and tugging at the hat in her lap.

"That god damn Hroald. I hate him." she said.

"Don't be so hard on him." Jarnulf said. "By his own lights he's done a lot to make up for. He's just trying the best way he knows."

"By saying Sigrid can't go to heaven?" she said.

"That is not what he said and you know it." Jarnulf said.

Galinn tapped his shoulder from behind as he walked round them to sit at Aud's far side. She turned her tear stained, bag of hope turned inside out and shaken to the four winds end of the world face to him.

"Want to know what I think?" Galinn said.

Her eyes answered that he couldn't possibly help, no one could, her belief warrior was down, the doubt enemy poising to deliver a hundred final blows, but she'd hear him out anyway.

"Sigrid's wherever she wants to be the most," Galinn said. "doing whatever she wants the most. And all that about the old gods and the new one doesn't make any difference because they're all the same God.

He made all this. He's been around forever. He knows everything. And we, are all just his words. He'd no more throw his Sigrid away than his right arm.

Because she's part of him just like you are. But I'd think that knowing everything, he must get a little bored with it now and then, so he reminds himself what it's like to not know, and parts himself out into separate little pieces so they can have the fun of figuring it out and putting themselves back together."

Galinn touched the tip of her nose.

"And those little pieces, are the old gods, and us, and the rabbits and the rain. Now get yourself dried up or you'll miss her wake. There's going to be a lot of nice folks wanting to see you. You don't want to miss them, do you?"

"Sigrid had her wake last night." Aud said. "It was in the forest. All the animals came to it. I wish you could have seen it. Oh, but, you do, all the time."

Galinn hiked his cheeks up.

"Quit tugging at that thing before you have a bald hat." he said, putting it back on her head and fussing with it until it looked just right to him. He pulled her upright and shooed her off to the Hall.

"You think that all up yourself?" Jarnulf said.

"I think about a lot of things." Galinn said, staring off at nothing in particular.

"How come you never told me any of that?" Jarnulf said.

"Thought you'd had more fun figuring it out for yourself over the years." Galinn said.

"Besides," he said with a nod at Aud's back as she caught up with and was adopted by one of the knots of departing mourners. "she couldn't wait."

LXC Respect And Friends

Within Mordach's Da'hal hulked at his table in a mood somber and black despite Mirha and Hlif's efforts to cheer him. Kadlin, Kolfinna, Thorarin and Gudrod were with them. As many will at a wake Da'hal was seeking solace in the bottom of a tankard. He'd found Sigrid's rude humor fine entertainment, and if not for her attachment to Aud he'd happily have offered her some far finer entertainments in return.

Kadlin was being snippy with Thorarin who spent all too much time at the tanner's shieling instead of with herself in the evenings. Hlif thought the subject needed changing. When was Da'hal going to weld those cracked plows? They'd never get her turnips planted at this rate. Da'hal told her she'd had all damn winter to tell him about them.

Aerin followed Aud through the door feeling cheated. If only she'd had a moment more her punch line might have got a laugh out of Aud, but once within Aud went deaf and stiff as a post on her. Mordach's was thronged with folk bejeweled in their finest, people in whom she'd invested a decade's worth of rude remarks, and brusque put offs to. A hundred eyes gazed up at her on the landing as the door closed behind her, all seemingly devoid of grievances past and filled only with compassion.

Aud's will to descend the stairs into their welcome faltered. She felt more shamed than ever before, violated more cruelly by their forgiveness than even Hrorik or her father's assaults. She couldn't retreat behind her shield of hatred from all of them as she had with the others who'd pierced her soul uninvited. She grabbed at her hat and again began mangling it as Aerin prodded her down the stairs. Hunters and Eirika crowded her. Ref stole her hat.

"We've something for you." Ref said.

God's enforcer shouldered his way forward between Olaf and Ansvarr.

She'd never seen him look so stolid and menacing. If this were to be a contest of wills she'd give him back all she had, hating and thanking him for it in the same instant.

Hroald extended his gnarled hands. In them were four, yellowed ivory, bear canines. A leather thong was threaded through holes drilled in them.

"It's hard and often as not dangerous to earn these." he said. "You deserve the respect and with it friends that wearing them will get you."

Ansvarr passed him a flagon. He half drained it and raised it high. He turned back to the crowd.

"To Aud." he roared.

Cups and voices were raised in a rafter shaking din before her. Flagons, most of them empty, and fists slammed repeatedly on tables and the walls in salute.

Every vestige of self was stripped from her as hunters crowded her with hugs, kisses and pats on her back.

Da'hal, at the forth table on the right, howled black sacrilege as an antler caught his shoulder in its crashing descent. Astrid hurried over to ask him how many times she had to tell him not to bang on the wall. He should be thankful it was the antlers and not the axe hanging beside them.

Hroald tied the bracelet around Aud's wrist. She vocally thanked and silently cursed them all, wondering when the mockery of their affection would again be replaced with snubs and cold shoulders.

Behind her Galinn ordered everyone surrounding her to spread out. It yanked her about and most of her insecurities boiled off into the roaring crowd behind her. Galinn and Jarnulf were smiling their way down the stairs like they hadn't seen her in years.

Mirha, on the table helping Da'hal rehang the antlers, turned her gaze and made her way forward to reclaim Jarnulf. Jarnulf dumped congratulations on Aud as Galinn swept by behind Olaf's back.

Eirika stepped back from him, and Olaf, laughing, was half minded to take her hand and clap it firmly around 'That Damned Things' pommel but didn't. Galinn caught Ansvarr's and Bror's elbows and dragged them along to work on the rest of the room shoving folks at Aud's back.

Bror leaned over Da'hal's table with a grin, browbeating Gudrod to come tell Aud how proud he was of her.

"I never know whether to throw a rock or a piece of meat at her." Gudrod said.

Kolfinna tugged his arm.

"So we've traded knuckles, who hasn't?" Kolfinna said.

"She's like a stray dog." Gudrod said. "Those big green eyes darting back and forth, nervous and hungry. You get close enough to make friends and she backs up and starts barking."

Bror leaned closer.

"She ever bite you?" he said.

"No." Gudrod said. "At least not yet."

Kolfinna's whisper filled his ear and her hand his lap. Gudrod got to his feet.

He shook Aud's hand and congratulated her as Jarnulf hugged her up under his shoulder in case she made a run for it. Mirha clutched at his other arm nuzzling him like a new foal.

"That's no mean feat." Gudrod said, holding Aud's wrist between them and examining her bracelet. "They're a lot bigger than mine."

He held his own bracelet up under her nose. She hugged him and kissed him. Gudrod grabbed Ansvarr's sleeve in passing.

"What did you do to her?" he said.

Two older women behind Gudrod missed their chance, both having a tankard raised as he and Kolfinna departed. Mirha's jealousy jumped between Aud and the line.

"Aww Gee," she said, wrinkling her nose and standing in front of Jarnulf as if he were her mother, expecting him to step between them.

"I was having such fun milking the cows till I ran out of them. Can I milk the neighbor's?"

Aud clenched her fists.

Jarnulf dragged Mirha almost off her feet to the foot of the stairs.

"You little Morrigan." he said. "You've forgot the lesson already. You've been shoving people to impress them with how special you are since you got here."

He pointed up to the door.

"Go spend the day with Sigrid so you can truly remember what that shit costs." he said.

He bounded up the steps headed for anywhere Mirha wasn't.

Behind them Mordach sourly returned to those clamoring for service. Mordach had never been known as an especially liberal fellow. Them that had dared to slander Sigrid before him had always been welcome to try, but abusing Aud, for some unknown reason had earned them his gruff and salty rebuke.

XCI Aud Hallfreddottir

Rakel, at the fireplace on the left, grinned sly over her wine cup. Kveldalf told her this was hardly a time for petty amusements. Beside Kveldalf stood a dirty blonde in purple. The girls were the same age and both bore thin, wispy brows above startlingly similar, delicate features. Cousin Gundfrieda was almost Kveldalf tall but affected to appear shorter. She stooped. Unlike Kveldalf she was amply endowed and amply self-conscious.

Gundfrieda seemed to scowl at Rakel but it was hard to tell if she was actually upset. She scowled at everyone. Her father Bjorgil had taught her that all men were great lechers and their leers were to be discouraged. Gundfrieda had worked hard to please father.

Kveldalf regularly shared the thought with her cousin that she'd have less reason to stoop and scowl if she'd just stop stooping and scowling. She'd be married.

Sitting at the far side of a table beside the girls, a fortyish woman with a thin, sallow face, and dressed in black, darted her snake brown eyes in a triangle between Mirha and Kolfinna, Rakel, and her niece Kveldalf and daughter Gundfrieda. Mother Ranveig propped her elbows up on the table and resting chisel chin on thumbs, drum rolled her fingertips together, as a sly grin stole her smile.

Stienunn, Sigrid's mother, was next in the line of Aud's well-wishers. In the set of her blue eyes was the steel of the shovels which had filled in her daughter's grave.

"That steading will surely drive you crazy," Stienunn said. "with all those odd memories. I'm sure you'll want to be finding another household attachment. There's no rush. Two days will be fine."

Aud dashed past Stienunn for the stairs. Adis went after Aud and Kveldalf went after Stienunn.

"You heartless bitch." Kveldalf said, slow, deadly, and making sure everyone heard her.

Jarnulf halted on the landing. Aud and Adis turned, on the stairs beneath him.

Stienunn told Kveldalf to mind her own business.

Kveldalf landed a windmill slap on Stienunn's cheek, knocking her almost off her feet. Stienunn shrank back with murder boiling in her slitted eyes. Kveldalf was a daunting sight, towering above Stienunn now with her bony fists clenched, daring the older woman to open her mouth again.

Eight hunters and as many more apprentices stood, folding their arms, smirking, and making bets with each other. Frakki alone took a step toward Kveldalf and Stienunn. Da'hal collared him.

Stienunn demanded Jarnulf come back this instant, and do his duty and drag this she Jotun off of her. Even Hroald seemed minded to let Kveldalf have at Stienunn.

"Hroald?" Jarnulf whined, exasperated.

"You're the Marshal." Hroald said, before demanding that someone refill his tankard.

"Just who, do you think you are?" Stienunn demanded of Kveldalf, and a loud crack filled the room as Kveldalf's knuckles collided with Stienunn's forehead.

"She Jotun?" Jarnulf called to Steinunn. "Sounds like criminal slander to me."

He bent forward and kissed Aud's cheek.

Mordach's door swung in slamming hard into Jarnulf's hip, and a very brown, bearded man apologized to him. It was Olaf's friend Ivar. Two sets of saddle bags were slung over his shoulders. Two more trim, well-muscled and armed Ottarrs crowded in after Ivar, Ulfkel and Kolgrim, who had met them on the hillside the other night. Ivar smiled down into Aud's upturned, tear streaked face.

"Nice to see you again." Ivar said. "But it looks like I've come at a bad time."

"We just buried a dear friend of hers." Jarnulf said.

Ivar offered heartfelt apologies.

"Well, Aud Hallfreddottir," Ivar began anew.

Aud cursed and shoved her way past him through the door. Jarnulf said that mentioning Aud's father to her was worse than striking her.

"Aww Christ." Ivar groaned, "Her father too? I've seen it before damnit, and she is a very pretty woman."

Ivar called first to Rakel, and then Olaf before showing his men back outside. Jarnulf followed, and dashed after Aud to drag her back.

Inside, Hroald cast about behind himself and spied the fresh tankard Astrid had plunked down onto Da'hal's table. Hroald filched it. Hlif thanked him, and told him to keep stealing them before Da'hal got too drunk. She traded winks with Aerin and they started after Jarnulf, Aud, Olaf and the Ottarrs.

Hroald caught them up with a brusque "Hold it!"

"None of your turnip foolishness." Hroald ordered. "He's Aud's today."

Hlif moaned, and trudged off to the back counter to get both Hroald and Da'hal another drink.

Hroald followed the others up the stairs and out.

"It's best," Ivar said. "that we've a bit of privacy out here. Chieftain Eikinn wants to reconcile with you. He has thrown Hrorik in chains and has him under guard. He's greatly embarrassed by his son and this time, he'd have sent Hrorik himself to right things."

Ivar smiled away from the girls to Olaf and pointed sternly at him.

"But he wants your oath that you will not take vengeance against Hrorik."

Olaf rolled his amber, lion eyes back up into his head, disgusted.

"And he needed you, of all people," Olaf groaned, "to fetch it?"

"He knows your word," Ivar said. "no matter who brings it."

Ivar unslung his right saddlebag and held it out to Aud.

"I've done a bit of sniffing around." Ivar said to her. "You were unspeakably wronged. Chieftain Eikinn hopes this might set it right."

Aud undid the bag's ties, and peered within. Gold caught the sun, glowing lustrous and gentle back to her with the promise of life's struggle for her daily bread done, and gone, lifted from her back by Chieftain Eikinn. Ivar gave his remaining saddlebag to Rakel.

"Eikinn will reconcile with Starri this fall." Ivar said. "Until then."

Rakel's bag was filled with silver.

XCII Saddlebags Full

He addressed Aud.

"Are you the lawful head of your household?" he said.

"I don't," she said. "have a household at the moment."

"I'll take that as a yes." he said. "Since you are the principle in this matter judgment is yours. Eikinn hopes you will accept compensation for his son, any amount, but he will also convene a kvidur to outlaw Hrorik if you wish to come back and testify."

Hroald, who had been standing silent to one side, swallowed hard.

"Oh yes," she said. "I will testify."

Ivar darted a nervous glance to Olaf, who knew what had to come next and wished it didn't, and remained silent.

"It might be better," Hroald said. "if we waited until Thing, and tempers cooled."

Aud turned on him in a disbelieving fury.

"After what that son of a bitch did to me?" she said. "Till tempers cool?"

"I have to ask you to trust me on this." Hroald said, strangled by the impossibility of telling her why.

"Till tempers cool and we'll all forget about it." she said.

She tore the bracelet he'd presented her from her wrist and threw it in the dirt at his feet.

"Respect, and friends," she said. "like this."

Stung by what he'd had to provoke and speechless from it Hroald returned inside the Hall where it appeared that Kveldalf was nowhere near finished with Steinunn.

"She suffered the worst of it." Ivar said, nodding to Aud. "There's a hundred in each."

Rakel thanked him and handed over her compensation to Adis as Aud steadfastly refused it from her.

"But what will I do with all of this?" Aud said. "It's not fair."

Ivar cut her off with a rough laugh.

"Oh yes it is fair." Ivar said. "That's Hrorik's money. He's cleaned out."

"You'll buy a few more cows," Adis said. "and a lot more sheep after you move in with me."

Olaf edged Jarnulf across the street and out of earshot.

"We got ourselves a saddlebag full of shit." Olaf said. "Mirha had the arrow right, and I matched the shoe prints, and we even have a witness who saw those shoes chase after Sigrid. But we can't use any of it."

"Why not?" Jarnulf said.

"For starters," Olaf said. "there's her elves. But it gets worse."

Within Mordach's Hroald put an end to Kveldalf's justice as Aesolf approached with drawn sword, howling that Kveldalf had forfeited her immunity by slandering and attacking his kinswoman. Bror laughed up into the old Viking's face.

"How can the truth be slander?" Bror said.

Again Ansvarr and Gunnarr marched Bror off in one direction, and Galinn and Ref dragged Aesolf away in the other. Hroald turned Da'hal around toward the back stairs to see Hlif descending them behind a tray laden with tankards, heading their way.

"She's past due for a good husband." Hroald said.

Da'hal said that the last thing he needed was some giggling young wife tying him down.

"If you don't," Hroald said. "someone will snatch your little sunbeam away, and you'll regret it."

Da'hal protested that she was a child. She was an innocent, a silly little baby. And he was off to Jerusalem Land anyway, someday, to win renown and riches.

"Renown and riches are the devil's fish hooks." Hroald whispered as Hlif drew near.

Da'hal fell silent. He'd caught Hroald staring at Eirika's back all too many times.

Jarnulf and Olaf and his former neighbors reconciled themselves to cups throughout the afternoon, with Jarnulf dragging Aud back into Mordach's and her new friends each time she made a run for it. Ref went off to round up the twins. If they hadn't the decency to come support Aud and drink a cup to Sigrid, they could at least come thank her for their bonus bear. He discovered them both already stinking drunk and just plain stinking at the tanners.

Sigrid's wake finally wound down, and with it went the sun behind a leaden sky, leaking a fine drizzle.

XCIII The Prince Of Summer

With muddied boots Jarnulf and Olaf slogged across the field toward Eirika's steading at the north end of the field, a quarter mile back from the trail.

Eirika didn't encourage visitors. As Logmadur she'd be drowned beneath a sea of disputants if she did. Unbidden visitors arrived to a dark room, the reek of snubbed candles, and the elfin stager's slim, six foot back. They departed with her thinly veiled hints of impending and unavoidable disaster no matter what course they steered. Olaf's take on it was that the whole town would be dead a dozen times if a tenth of her poisonous plants ever cropped up.

Olaf sat the edge of her porch, head back and hands out palms up, smiling up into the drizzle, and straining for any hint of the lovely music real rain made on porch roofs. Jarnulf knocked thrice. Her voice came through her door with her usual exaggerated, strained clarity, asking if he were going to use the latch or batter her door in. There was another woman's high, thin squeal in there with her, chanting behind the door.

"I summon you Chieftain so and so, to empanel a Kvidur."

Jarnulf lifted the latch feeling less gloomy than usual, here. She was being more polite, than usual. Still, this was make or break, something like chasing a wounded bear into its cave. He stepped inside.

The chanter, a great dark bulk at the table with her back to him, was Luta, the most tireless of Eirika's few students. Her over ample figure was wrapped tight in black wool. She was cruelly lampooned as 'Lufa', a word meaning unkempt. Luta turned back to leer blankly at him through eyes flat and glazed. She minded him of a breaching rorqual. He drew his habitual comb and straightened his hair.

Luta's lesson concerned summonsing a Chieftain to form a Kvidur of twelve neighbors who would act as judges in a suit. Should said Chieftain fail in his duty to uphold his Thingmen's rights, he'd find himself in a world of hurt with the Law Council. Luta didn't see how that would be of any use to her. She wasn't planning on blackmailing Tore into marriage, and blackmail remained the shiniest star in the dark closet of her marriage hopes.

Of furnishings there were few, as if someone had just started moving in. Formerly Eirika had lived in town, and sumptuously. But after Grimkel's death she sold her steading claiming that it was more work than it was worth to keep up, and moved out here to stew in her privacy and bile. Then too, a single glance from Grimkel had been all the doorkeeper she'd ever needed.

To Jarnulf's left up on her platform sat her unmade bed, and at the wall beside it a low, solitary chest without drawers, just a hinged lid. Above it was a rack with four dresses on it. In the middle of the room squatted her bare but for a law book, candlelit table, and Luta. On the wall beyond her right platform her sideboard stood naked but for the barest of household essentials, Bible, and a few more legal tomes.

The slender witch herself had her back to him, bent over in a crouch at the far end of her steading busying herself at her hearth, a dark silhouette against the shimmering orange and blue coals hissing before her knees. In the gloom above her mantle hung her husband's sword, bow and quiver.

Luta's presence revealed Luta's perhaps sole, and Jarnulf's previously undreamt, utility. Eirika's donjon was more brightly lit than usual. Paying students merited the price of the two candles burning on her table. He suffered her free hair splittings and disdain by firelight.

Luta smirked. The Prince, who'd never even disdained her with a look, was here. The Prince of summer, beardless, dressed in animal hides and toting that frilly fish knife in lieu of a sword while he pranced about through the woods like some Skraeling. A fine excuse for a Marshal, that one. Still, she sighed inwardly at her fantasies of what those hides concealed. Logmadur Eirika would take a strip off of his over preened vanity, as usual. Jarnulf bent forward, smiling, into Luta's fat, candle lit face and spoke his first words in years to her.

"Its been nice seeing you again, goodbye." he said, sweeping his arm back toward the door.

"Sit." Eirika commanded her fire.

"Have it your way." Jarnulf said. "But you won't, like it."

Eirika, with her back still to him, bridled upright like an enraged peacock and informed him that that was the understatement of the last ten years. He scorned her with silence, and returned to his murk peerings.

The shadows coiling about the place seemed her real library, wherein swarmed the spirits kids and dimwits claimed she read. It was a backdrop whittled on the cheap for her jaundiced cantrips. In the end he decided it wasn't the sighing embers summoning those shadows. It was the old spider herself, at her hearth. She lifted something to her lips. She pointed to her chest beside her bed with her free hand.

"They're in there." she said. "Maeve's lobsters. It took a moment to gather the scuttling little devils all up for you. I shall miss them so. We were having such fun."

Then a tiny shudder shivered her.

"Why did you bring that filthy thing into my steading again?" she said.

Even through the back of her head Jarnulf could see the tip of her tongue flicking the word 'thing' off the bottom of her perfect ivoried teeth.

"Sorry, I forgot." he said.

"You did not forget." she said. "As usual you're too busy thinking about what you want to remember that other folk have needs too."

He stepped back out, and leaned sword and scabbard against her wall. Her voice chased him out the door.

"Tell Olaf to come in. Or do you want him to drown out there?" she said. How she managed to pick up on those things like forgetting his sword, and she never missed, but that Olaf was with him unseen and unheard, he didn't ask. Luta's thin, rote shrilling continued, at his back.

"New suits may be brought forward, and published, at Assembly only until the Courts have gone out from their booths to be seated."

As Olaf clomped back in after him Eirika had turned to face them. Not a strand of her pearled hair was out of place, and she bore herself like a woman of forty. The burgundy gown with cuffs of silver broidery she received them in blended disquietingly into the place's underworld. Even with the fire at her back, Jarnulf thought he could see little bolts of lightning circling her.

She'd been a heartbreaker back in his grandfather's day, but now, she was all ball breaker. Considering the spot between her brows and the total lack of any furrow in it, that was it, she was an older, more cunning version of Rakel.

Olaf beamed back at her like a kid at his third birthday party as he stood by the door, hair plastered down, little rivulets running from his cuffs and cloak onto her floor. Jarnulf was thankful she'd ordered Olaf in, even though he'd goad her and drag it out forever.

She glanced at their boots and rolled her eyes at them over her cup. Jarnulf shed his cloak and tossed it onto her bed. She glared at it as if it was a pet bull frog at the dinner table. He marched smartly over and scooped it up.

He sidled shoulder to shoulder with her at her hearth, and slipped an arrow from her husband's quiver. He pointed its nock at Luta.

"You presumptuous lout," Eirika said. "what do you think you're doing?"

"Luta," Jarnulf said. "the Logmadur and I are going to have an argument, a very loud argument."

Luta lumbered quaking from her bench and snatched up her cloak. She could smell the ozone. Lightning was imminent, blue white sheets of it. The Marshal hadn't a prayer of winning an argument with Logmadur Eirika short of murdering her. Olaf, dripping mud from his boots, made to join Eirika and Jarnulf at the hearth. Luta plowed smack into him. Eirika glared Outlawry at Olaf and each of his defiling mud prints.

Jarnulf took down Grimkel's bow and unstrung it saying she'd ruin it like that. He scratched his jaw's stubble with the arrow's two goose feathers, and then tapped his front teeth with its nock, showing her its green nocking fletch. The scrawny elf shot aglow with outrage.

"You fatuous ass." she said.

He ignored her, sneering about her steading instead.

"If you'd been doing your job, Sigrid would still be alive." she said.

"Jarnulf is doing his job Miss Eirika." Olaf said, leaning back against her mantle's corner. Her back was now between, and a foot forward of himself and Jarnulf.

Being ambushed like a deer between wolves yet further displeased her. Olaf pulled his cloak open and hooked his thumbs into his belt.

"You see, he's Tore's Marshal," Olaf said. "and folks are expecting him to find out who did it. And I'm helping him."

Her sneer swept slowly back over his trail of mud prints from the door, counting them, to his boots and on up to his vacant, amber eyes. He smiled broadly back at her, now hard at work picking his nose.

XCIV Damned Ingrate

"It's Logmadur, not Miss." she said.

His smile grew even broader, as if immensely grateful for her reminder.

"Sorry, Miss Logmadur." he said.

Her open hand shot out palm forward. She held it out, raising the cup in her other hand for another sip. She'd been subjected to this before by Olaf, many times. She turned her hauteur back to Jarnulf.

"If you'd been looking, you'd have seen this coming. They've been fighting for the last year and a half, the dead girl and your, Concubine." she said. Her inflection purple, oozing with the inference that he was worse than a pimp, forcing Mirha, using her, grinding her lower than the cheapest whore. A prostitute could choose the men she serviced.

"What's a, Con, Cue, Bine, Miss Logmadur?" Olaf said.

Jarnulf caught the furies in her eyes, one for himself and one for Olaf, and the third twice their size arresting and wrestling the first two off.

"I'm sure your friend Jarnulf knows all about what a concubine is Olaf. Ask him later." Eirika said, her unblinking stare now locked into Jarnulf's.

Jarnulf returned it making no attempt to hide what was in his, and missed the wink Olaf lobbed him over the top of her head.

"We know who killed Sigrid." Jarnulf said, and Eirika paled. Her stance remained rigid as ever, but her poise stumbled as if she'd taken the arrow in the back rather than Sigrid.

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry, I heard about Astrid."

"Just, . . . don't." Jarnulf said. "The question is what we're going to do about it."

"God no." she said, looking paler by the moment, "Not Bror?"

Jarnulf scorned her with a look blacker than a ship's keel.

"Do you mean that strange little man," he said. "who killed thirteen murderers on Hellulandia? The lamb who strong armed Sigrid out through Mordach's door? The man who could probably best any other five of us with a sword, let alone a drunk girl with a knife?"

"Don't you take that tone with me." she said.

"The one who's killed more of Nacarr's rats than Olaf and I together?" Jarnulf said. "He must have been so scared at what he'd done, that he just dashed off witless, without a thought for that expensive necklace that any starving poacher would have stolen."

"Well if you'd lost it, somewhere in the night, we could have shoved it off onto them." Eirika said.

"Now it's my fault?" Jarnulf said, and then grimaced, embarrassed.

"Idiot." she said under her breath.

"Ware the old saying," Eirika said. "It's not wise to make a trael your best friend," and stopped speaking but her eyes shot it in anyway 'or your bed partner.'

With all but traels who were idiots, the axiom cut irremediably as an axe. Deprive anyone of their freedom and they'd find ways to sharpen it behind your back if not in your back.

"The necklace belonged to Aud," Olaf said. "not the night."

Eirika thought about hurling her cup at him.

"Press your luck hard enough," she said. "and I swear you'll break it. Especially with me."

Olaf filched a table candle. He held it up to Grimkel's green and gray fletchings for an intent peering, before slowly drawing another arrow from the quiver. He set the candle on the hearth and twirled the arrow between his palms.

"It's not my luck that's going to get Outlawed." Olaf said.

He laid the arrow on the mantle behind her and made for her bedside trunk to pull the lid open as she gaped, speechless. He fished out one of her shoes and made a show of measuring it against his fingers.

"What, do you think you're doing?" she said.

"The job Chieftain Tore pays me to do." Olaf said.

"Someone's got to straighten this out." Jarnulf said. "And you had best figure out how, because I haven't a clue."

"Well then you," she said. "had best let me in on whatever else you've actually got."

Jarnulf drew a jewelers' bone trial piece from his pouch, and tossed it to her. Three dragons were carved on it.

"It was on the beach trail." he said. "It's useless, its Adis. Even if I was bastard enough to dump it on her nobody'd buy it. It's too bad Knut's not here. We could hang him for almost anything."

"Oh that will do us a world of good," Eirika said. "grasping at phantoms."

"Personally, I like phantoms," Olaf said, dropping her shoe back into her trunk. "They beat being killed as an Outlaw. We chase tracks and phantoms all day. How could you think we wouldn't track an amateur like this one?"

Eirika bit her lip, looking away.

"I don't know what you expect even me to do with just this." she said.

"Same as you did with Jarnulf's swords." Olaf said. "You're the expert. Bury it in bullshit."

She slapped him.

"Like I said." he said, with a grin that said he could take it all day and keep grinning.

"Well," Jarnulf said. "I might have to track down that it wasn't a phantom after all, if I don't start getting some expert help."

Hefting his cloak he tossed it about his shoulders and motioned to Olaf that he'd had all he could stomach. Olaf was out the door and Jarnulf halfway through it before she spoke again.

"You're right, about my being the expert," she said. "as everyone knows that phantoms are always too rich to be bothered with mere jeweled necklaces."

Jarnulf stopped, tensing, and biting his tongue. Olaf reached behind himself and grabbed Jarnulf's shirt, then turned and tried to push past him, back inside.

"Shouldn't we get Maeve's lobsters while we're here?" Olaf said.

Eirika stared at her closing door with Jarnulf's ingratitude tearing her. One would think he'd be grateful rather than blackmailing her. But Mirha was no bowl of skyr. Perhaps he truly would have been happier if Sigrid had got rid of her. Then too, Tore might have been wrong about him all along.

XCV I Never Liked You Anyway

Aboard Dalla's ship the dawn was bright and clear, but to an old salt like Badger at twenty and five a taste of the air promised it wouldn't stay that way.

He wormed out of Knut's black leather bag and into Knut's brown leather sea cassock. It was tight in the shoulders but the sleeves were still roomy and its hem hung down past his knees. Most of Dalla's flotsam loafing about the gray rails were dressed in the same. Their faces hid deep within gray, wool coifs that spread over their chests and backs. Seen side on, only their beards drooped out into view.

Badger rummaged through Knut's locker, up in the bows at Caoimhe's feet where he'd dragged it last night, searching for Knut's woolen coif.

Dalla hadn't known more about this rush home than anyone else. Everyone's gut was aroil. Tore had overlooked something, not that anyone would dare to ask him. This fiasco had to be the biggest open secret short of wondering if the bailing aboard this particular ship would ever be finished.

At Badger's feet sat fo'c'sulman Halldor's locker, and Halldor's rolled and tied sleeping bag beside it, with Halldor's bones in it. Badger fingered his cross and hammer. It could as easily have been his own bones, and he prayed this rush wouldn't arrive home to nothing but more bones.

He spared a wistful glance past the beam to Tore's ship, rolling gentle against the clear blue, and gold white sun. Behind that rail were Karl, Asgrim, and eighteen more professionals, his friends. Badger sighed at its man sized, green gold dragon stems, their bone teeth jutting in their gaping crimson maws, and its fifty by thirty striped sail, red and white, sporting a black raven rampant upon a tiny corpse.

He pulled Knut's wool headgear on and turned away unable to bear it longer. Starri's ship off three hundred yards to Tore's stern, and Adam's three hundred to Dalla's own, showed the same but it just wasn't the same. They weren't his.

They were all undermanned, but four, rather than putting everyone aboard three, was bluff insurance against being jumped, and extra room for wood to Greenland. The dragon heads too were a bluff as they only belonged on a Chieftain's ship. The ships of four Chieftains on a far horizon might run off the Norwegians patrolling Iceland, as those four Chieftains could have forty more ships behind them.

This formation had to be Tore's doing. Dalla was up front so they wouldn't lose him in the night again. This was only Dalla's second season as Skipper and it often seemed there was no one in charge. Skipper Grimkel, Tore's sworn brother and a most capable ass kicker, never had such troubles.

But when Grimkel died and Starri promoted Dalla, Grimkel's fo'c'sulman and Rakel's new suitor, to replace Grimkel, Tore was slammed into a silent fury at having it done behind his back.

Grimkel's wife Eirika hadn't a word to say about her new Skipper, or anything else for two whole weeks. She refused to come out of her steading. It was initially believed that her fury had strangled her in there until someone on the third day pointed out the smoke coming from her chimney. And throughout those two weeks nobody dared knock to ask if she needed anything.

In the center of the deck lay the klofton, a giant, wooden slug, swallowing the fifty foot mast. The mast was guided foot first into a track atop the kloften from the stern end and then muscled erect by the forestay. Four feet beneath the kloften lurked the keelson, where the mast foot came to rest. The kloften, along with the fore and aft stays blocks, were fixed to the deck's crossbeams. The deck planks of pine sat loose atop them.

Ships were built to flex and bend on the sea, not crash through it. Their oak planks were lap straked and through fastened with thousands of iron rivets. Caulking of tarred woolen hemp stuffed mating grooves between the planks. The bottom eight planks were tied, not riveted, to the keel and each other with the roots of maple trees. The ribs and deck beams were also riveted to each other but like the lower planks, tied to the hull through projections left proud on the planks when they were carved with axes and planes. The ships were gently flattened to their rounded chines and drew only three feet of water. Sixteen tons of rocks in the bilge kept them upright under sail.

Most of the rigging crisscrossed over the sail like a huge board game's squares, through rope loops in its belly to set and reef it from the deck without having to lower the yard.

The sail's rigging was rope made of horsetails, and the standing stays were of plaited strips of walrus hide.

At the kloften's leading edge knelt Hring, bent over a black iron kettle on a blanket of bricks and to Badger's horror, a black smoke of burning whale oil streamed off to the side of it. That idiot had lit a fire aboard ship.

Still gagging on the shock of it, Badger discovered Leif on hands and knees at the starboard beam with a bucket and brush, tarring a seam.

Badger blinked, and noticed three more of Dalla's crew sharing their sniggering grins with himself.

Leif on his knees tarring seams was still wearing Skjalg's gold hilted sword and dagger, as much tar as the seams, and cursing Halldor. He'd prayed for Halldor's death countless times for the countless times Halldor had hauled him up with blows behind the ear.

He, Leif Skelderson, had done something right and Starri sentenced him to death for it. In town on the way to the warehouse Starri paid him the substantial reward he'd promised for Skjalg's head. Oh, not immediately, but at some point they'd run into a fight at sea, and sure as an axe cleft head, die he would. Starri had appointed him to replace Halldor as Dalla's fo'c'sulman.

Badger made show of examining the seam tarring fo'c'sulman before winking back at Leif's audience. At this point it was just make work.

At least they'd be finished before it snowed, emptying out ballast stones and replacing three hundred more, rusted, broken rivets in this hulk and another three or four planks before the real tarring, and then roping and rolling it on logs up into the shed.

After a word in the stern with Dalla, who seemed less surprised that he hadn't thought of it first than that someone had volunteered, Badger busied himself shortening and camming tight the tarred mast stays as Leif scurried about out of quiet earshot on his knees with his bucket of tar.

Hring pulled up a second kettle from the bilge to hang it above the first and then a sack of cabbages. With cabbage in hand he snuck up behind Leif and snatched Leif's gold hilted knife from its sheath. Over Leif's furied squawkings Hring deftly pared a quarter of the cabbage down into Leif's pot of tar.

"Seems sharp enough." he said. "And as we're not sinking just yet the seams can wait."

He grabbed Leif's collar and dragged him back toward his kettles and dropped the knife onto the sack of cabbages. Leif snatched his knife and stormed off towards Dalla at the tiller in the stern clutching both of Skjalg's gold worked hilts. To his mates it appeared that he'd borrowed a real swagger from them, his very first.

To Hring any excuse was fit to light a fire. Pine tar soaked in best when hot. At Hring's prodding last winter, Dalla had reluctantly consented to laying a brick floor into the deck just before the kloften to sit a cook stove on. Prodding was a misnomer. It had been blackmail.

Dalla's mates were used to having their way, and Dalla's locker was brimming with skeletons they'd all borne witness to. Leading the ghastly parade were the scorn poles he and Asbjorn carved of Dalla's ex love Sigrid and her odd friend Aud. If that ever got out half of Adam's crew, Sigrid's kin, would skin them alive.

When Tore discovered Hring's bricks he Outlawed them and ordered them expelled, reminding the crew that anyone harboring such Outlaws would join them outside the law with a bounty on their head. Lighting a fire aboard a wooden ship covered in pine tar, with tarred hair and hide rigging and a woolen sail made airtight with animal fat was a lunacy only a firebug could contemplate. Hring removed his bricks, hiding them among the ballast stones.

Today, emboldened by his success at lighting undetected a forbidden fire for the edification of their new fo'c'sulman, and a half skin of mead, Hring had celebrated by offering his mates a hot meal. They greeted his threat with noises like a pest house full of the dying.

XCVI Borrowed Swagger

"Fo'c'sulmen don't chop cabbages!" Leif raged up to Dalla above him on the raised steering deck.

Dalla's face was a sickly gray. Taking a bodkin through the thigh would discolor any man's next few weeks. He grimaced onto his good leg in a half hop and leaned against the rail, fighting a smirk.

Starri had been furious with him for starting that arrow storm in the square, but Starri's revenge had been a Godsend. They'd be off to Greenland again, maybe even this summer, and with luck, Norwegian ships. Fo'c'sulmen were first into the fray and Leif's mates would see to it that he was first if they had to seize him up and hurl him. Knut was finally out of his hair, and Leif was only months, or please, Dear God, weeks away.

"You will address me as Skipper and that only when you're spoken to." Dalla told Leif.

"When did we get so formal, Skipper?" Leif said, wincing as he picked at a streak of tar in his wispy blonde beard.

"Starri made you fo'c'sulman. It's up to you to set the example." Dalla said, staring toward the fo'c'sul over Leif's head. Fortunately Dalla was minding the tiller as nobody else was minding anything but the show. Badger grabbed a mast stay and stepped up onto a locker to savor its every nuance.

"What example does women's work set, Skipper?" Leif said.

Asbjorn and Hjortgren sat facing each other astride a locker. They left off their aimless needlings of a torn awning to both shoot bemused glances at Hring, glowering murder at Leif and then back at each other. Awnings kept rain and snow off the crew.

Asbjorn's hand length blonde mustachios were still matted with the same last night's mead that stained his cassock. Asbjorn was the scion of notable and capable men, but as their luck had failed to land on him early on, he'd sunk ever deeper into broodings and his cups over the last half dozen years till now even the most desperate of Hrafnstadir's lovelies shunned him as hopeless and dead.

Hjortgren might have been Gunnarr's younger twin, wiry slender with his long hooked nose and curly brown beard. It used to be easier to tell them apart. Hjortgren had always been quiet and reserved, while Gunnarr couldn't stop telling jokes, and was so good at it that even his worst had folks howling. But Gunnarr had quit telling jokes after Bror's steading burned down and when Da'hal finally told him why, Jarnulf wouldn't speak of it, Badger wished he'd minded his own business.

Hring left off playing with his stew, folded his arms, and cocked a loaded brow at Leif's back.

"Women's work?" Dalla said.

His voice carried clear to the fo'c'sul.

"You've got to show them you can do every dirty job on board better than they can, if you expect them to pay any heed to you."

"Dalla." Hring growled.

Dalla ordered Leif back to his duty. Leif puffed out his chest, spun on his heel, and strutted back to his cabbages. Muffled guffaws assailed him from all corners.

"You waiting for an invitation Stafunbui?" (Stem Neighbor/Fo'c'sulman) Hring said. "Show these pups what a real man's made of."

Leif grumbled back down onto his sutured butt and drew Skjalg's golden seax. Muttering obscene imprecations on all foreign women with knives he viciously hacked up a cabbage.

"Slow down there, rations'll be interesting enough without you donating a finger to them." Asbjorn said.

"The way you're dogging that awning together you won't be hungry enough to care." Leif said.

"Aye, Stafunbui!" Asbjorn roared, before returning to the day long job he'd made of the tiny tear in the awning lying across his lap. Dalla summonsed him aft to spell him at the tiller. Asbjorn dropped the awning atop his neighbor snoozing on the deck and ambled to the stern.

Dalla leaned back for the rail as he relinquished the tiller, but losing his balance landed hard on his tailbone and slid off of the sharp corner of his locker. Elbows propped on the locker, he tried, grunted, and failed to raise himself.

Dalla's face was drenched in a sweat that plastered his black locks to his skull. A fist sized splotch of fresh blood decorated the thigh of his tarred, gray wool breeks.

"You've looked better." Asbjorn said before yelling to Hring that needle and drink were in order.

Hring rummaged in his locker for them, gave Leif a road apple on my steading's floor glare, and headed aft. Hring tossed the mead into Dalla's lap and growled at him to get busy with it. Dalla tossed it back protesting he couldn't get drunk, he'd a ship to run.

Hring knifed the splint from Dalla's leg, pulled Dalla's trousers down, and then carefully separated the old dressing, welded to the skin with dried blood, from it.

"Told you to keep off it." Hring said.

Hring wiped away the fresh blood and examined the torn stitches. From his bulldog mug came the voice of a little girl asking Dalla if he'd rather have his wound burned shut. Dalla's protest caught in his throat. Closing his wound with the flat of a hot blade would leave him weaker than he already was.

Hring needled six stitches in as Dalla gulped the mead. Hring pointed out the bright side of his convalescence. Now he could devote himself full time to breaking in his new fo'c'sulman. Dalla confided laughing, as leaning on Hring's shoulder they made their way midships, that he'd never liked him anyway.

XCVII Tore Hears About A Lot

Above the yard, quartering to port, and the sail's ruffling belly full of purple shadow snakes the constellations burned bright in their nightly twirl through the heavens. Their radiance, as the new moon's, was like a woman's used to an army of suitors, beautiful beyond measure and with as little warmth.

Hring wrestled the iron cover up and atop his stove pot, smothering the burning oil in it, before stumping off.

Leif dinged his elbow on the lip of the cookpot he was sand scrubbing and slipped his dozenth curse in the twenty breaths since Badger had plunked down against a locker beside him.

The only other sounds, aside from the usual grumblings over a mere single ration of mead to murder the taste of dinner, were the creakings of old wood, cordage and the prow split sea spilling back to itself.

Badger set his wooden plate on the silvered deck with half of its brackish morass swept to one side, congealed into a cold clot. At least he was upwind of the pot. That salt breeze might clean the stink of it out of his nose if he breathed deep enough for a bit. Hring's cooking, usually referred to behind his back as 'Glahhk', took some getting used to.

Leif tossed his rag into the pot, spit, and wiped his palms together.

"Wait till Starri gets a load of this." Leif said.

"Don't bother with Starri." Badger said leaning in close.

"I'll speak to Tore. Fo'c'sulmen don't chop cabbages on his ship. Especially fo'c'sulmen who saved everybody's lives. Took off chasing snipers and such. He'll straighten this out the moment he hears of it."

"Why d'you think he'd want to hear about it?" Leif said. "He looked half berserk when Starri promoted me."

"He wants to hear about everything." Badger said.

"I'll bet he hears lots of interesting things." Leif said, looking up to gauge the intent in Badger's eye.

Badger leered back through eyes big and agleam with subdued insolence. Leif thought he caught starlight twinkling off those perfect, square white teeth.

Badger's smirk was over Starri's jibe to Tore, after newly promoted Stafnbui Skelderson hobbled off in terror. 'If that puke can bluff like that to us, meaning Leif's tale of Skjalg's end, with a straight face, he'll make a grand fo'c'sulman.' The fo'c'sulman was the ship's spokesman.

Badger leaned in to whispering distance.

"Yes, Tore hears about a lot." he said. "But once in a while something slips by him. Like two guys running south when all the sniper fire was coming from east and west. And one of them turns up dead, eaten by something, upstairs with his helmet downstairs half brimmed with drink. And his mail, bow and full quiver back along the wall. You think Tore might want to hear about that too?"

"Quarter share says he don't." Leif said bending back to his sand scrubbing with a vengeance.

"Won't, is double a don't." Badger said.

Badger leaned back against the locker relishing his mead and thinking Karl had been right. He should have demanded it all. The way Leif surrendered said he was no stranger to paying.

Badger started to his feet wondering what to make of his evening, now that he'd set his hook in Leif. Beyond Leif, slumped against the port beam was Dalla, snoring with his mouth open, drooling on himself, utterly drunk. Someone had covered him with his sleeping bag. Lucky him. He'd missed the nightmeal.

In the stern at the tiller crouched Hring, Asbjorn and two more helping themselves to another mead cask. It was no wonder they got lost from time to time. Badger cast his wary eye over the rest of Dalla's flotsam. There had to be someone other than this lace bearded pot scrubber to chat with.

Caoimhe in the bow hunkered back into her tiny, windswept garret, wondering if she'd been a bit hasty in pinning her hopes on that dashing rascal. He hadn't given her a half dozen looks in the last two days. He seemed far more interested in every move that strutting weasel she'd brained with her hand axe made, always trying, without success, to catch him alone.

The leg shot Skipper kept inventing dirty jobs for fo'c'sulman pimple faster than he could finish them. Oh Gawd, she wondered, was her Badger one of those? At least the weasel responsible for her bitten nipple hadn't seemed to recognize her and connect her with the aching knot on his head.

To Badger, Hjortgren Bjorgilson seemed the sole likely prospect. At least Hjortgren wouldn't bore him to tears, but Hjortgren was already closeted with Harald and Odd Mordson, and there'd been friction between himself and Odd for years. Harald at seventeen wasn't a bad sort but his older brother Odd was still steamed at Jarnulf of all people over Jarnulf's father laughing at his own father a decade ago at Mordach's. And being Jarnulf's sworn brother had put himself, Badger, on hotheaded young Odd's short list.

Odd was like to end up like his old man Mord Svenson if he didn't calm down, dead five years now from a spear through his neck when he showed up drunk on another man's wife's doorstep.

Badger dreaded heading for Knut's locker in the bows. That silly Caoimhe would end up in his lap with her arms around his neck the instant he plunked down within reach. Not that the prospect was entirely unpleasant, short rations beat none, but what such a scene might provoke amongst this lot, ...

He headed forward wide awake with worries of home, to retrieve Knut's sleeping bag and turn in on station between his hostage and the crew, wondering if half of Leif's share of almost nothing was worth the next ten days. Caoimhe fluttered her eyelids at him and barraged him with questions about what he'd been doing and what it was like where they were going and what the future held and what did he think of one trifle after another.

He stretched out with his back to her and yanked the top of the bag over his head. Caoimhe settled back against her stem post, hugging her blanketed self as she gazed out at the lonely, far off stars, sulking and greatly insulted that he hadn't forced her, kicking and screaming, into the bag with him.

Badger too was denied his heart's desire, sleep, as he started violently, thrice, at each of the three rivets the ship popped, the ones holding its hull together, and he held his breath awaiting rapid fire explosions of dozens more.

XCVIII Deaf, Dumb, And Blind

He awoke before dawn. The wind was fresh and frigid. The southeast horizon lowed gray as a long lost axe. Hring's cook stove was still set up. The crew was asleep but for the steersman, two lookouts, and Asbjorn at the daela in the waist and Hjortgren's head and shoulders at deck height beside him, bailing.

The daela was two planks nailed into a vee. One man heaved up buckets from the bilge. The second poured them into the daela to drain overboard. On this ship bailing went on day and night.

Badger rose and tucked Knut's sleeping bag over Caoimhe's blue lips. He picked his way past another five black bags on his way midships. He pulled up a plank beside the cook pot and pilfered a daymeal of cheese and dried beef for himself and his hostage. A second glance at the pot returned him to the larder for their later nightmeal.

On his knees in the bows he shook Caoimhe awake, shoving the uncindered food into her face. She was so overjoyed at his attentions she wasn't hungry. He threatened her with a repeat of last night's meal if she didn't eat up and hide her remainder. She found her appetite.

He retreated to the waist to spell the bailers before she rediscovered her babblings. He sneered the lanky six footers yet another snap of desultory appraisal.

Asbjorn's mustachios were rimed stiff beneath his sunken cheeks, and the ice in his eyes looked about to shatter under the hammerings of his hangover. Hjortgren, blue faced, stood knee deep in the bilge passing up the bucket.

Badger snorted. He had them both where it counted, in rough and tumble and pretty girls.

Hjortgren, shivering barefoot atop the ballast stones in two feet of water, regarded his offer with the disbelief of one receiving a huge inheritance from an unknown relative.

Hjortgren sat on the deck beside the bailing hole hugging his blue shins. He draped the long beard of his thin face over his knees and chafed the feeling back into his legs and feet as Badger worked himself awake heaving bucket after bucket to Asbjorn, who poured them into the daela.

Badger found nothing strange in Hjortgren's distance from him, considering how Dalla ran his ship. He'd doubtless been sent as Tore's spy to put them all under punishments. The trio rotated bailing, dumping and chafing for half the morning until Asbjorn collared their replacements who'd gathered around Hring's twenty gallon outlaw to warm themselves.

The storm clouds to the south east weren't away off on the horizon any more. They were dropping in on them like he and Tore had dropped in on the Gaels.

Hring and Leif were preparing another sacrifice of foodstuffs in Hring's kettle above the firepot. Harald and Odd, behind Hring darted knowing glances at each other. Odd began haranguing Hring about the seasonings. Hring shoved him away with a foul chastisement. Harald snatched at a chunk of dried venison and Leif aimed his gold knife at Harald's hand. If Leif had to suffer through it, so did they. Asbjorn dropped to his knees before them toting a mead skin and dice cup.

Badger headed forward, nudging Leif with his boot as a reminder of their arrangement. Gambling aboard ship was forbidden. When Tore found out about it, and he would, Badger didn't want to find himself stuck covering for them, especially not to Tore.

XCIX More Than A Quarter Share

Leif hit Asbjorn up for half a mark at heavy interest, should it show their luck was running hotter than his today. He was a bit short at the moment, but his new blades would stand surety for the loan. Asbjorn wouldn't hear of it until Hring shook his fist beneath Asbjorn's nose declaiming a fo'c'sulman's word was his bond.

Leif, relieved that his new rank was finally worth something, clamped the spoon and a few hairs of his wispy moustache between his teeth, and ouched. Bent over sweeping up the dice he missed the winks Hring and Asbjorn traded. Hjortgren joined them on his knees beside Leif.

Four eighth marks clunked onto the deck and Harald sauntered off knowing that neither Hring nor Asbjorn would return his losses after they'd finished with Leif. Odd, not as bright as his younger brother, anteed up.

The storm clouds axe gray had darkened considerably, only a mile or two behind them now. They were black, as if the axe had been forgotten for decades in the muck beneath an outhouse.

"Can't wait to see to Thurid." Hring said. "And put my favorite dirk to work."

Leif slammed the cup down, withdrew it, let out a joyous whoop, and raked in the pot.

"Home or Hel," Hjortgren sighed. "It's all one since brother Ketil got himself killed. Mother and Gundfrieda won't stop piling the ice on. It's enough to freeze any man's manhood." He pitched his voice into a sneering falsetto.

"If you were a man, you'd avenge your brother's murder, 'stead of shaming your poor old mother with a coward for a son."

Leif doubled his bet. His mates matched it. Leif threw again, lost, and passed the cup to Asbjorn.

"So kill him." Hring snorted. "He's got one uncle, a drunk aunt and two little girls."

"Bror's best?" Hjortgren said.

"It's no wonder Starri made him," Hjortgren flipped a desultory thumb at Leif. "Fo'c'sulman, instead of you."

"Then shoot the bastard when he ain't looking." Hring said.

"From what I've heard," Asbjorn said. "you'd never see his uncle's knife either soon as no one else was looking."

Asbjorn threw, and handed the cup to Odd, as Hjortgren scooped up the money. Leif hit Asbjorn for another half mark. Asbjorn didn't think that would be in his best interests until Hring again went through his Fo'c'sulman's honor routine.

"Right." Hjortgren spit, and rubbed his hands over his tarry breeks. "And have that big dunce pal of his, and his sworn brother Da'hal, and Ref to deal with?"

"Ref?" Hring spit. "What's he going to do? And the others? That's what you got us for."

Hring rubbed his hands, leering a manic glee to Asbjorn.

Hjortgren wondered how any man could remain that stupid and remain breathing. But telling Hring what Ref had already done, with Thurid, Hring's wife, while tempting, would be even stupider.

"Huh!" Hjortgren snorted. "And then what are you going do with Bror and Hroald?"

Leif bet Hjortgren he'd dump snake eyes.

At the leeward rail Harald Mordson was telling Dalla that reefing the sail would be a grand idea, as that weather closing over their heads looked like a hammer closing on an anvil. Dalla stuck a drunken finger up into the twenty knot breeze, then took a look off at Tore's unreefed sail, and told him to just do whatever Tore did.

"Them too?" Hring said.

Hjortgren slammed the cup down. Hring ignored it. Hjortgren lifted the cup. Leif had called it and won the toss.

"Yup." Hjortgren said to Hring. "And Tore's fo'c'sulman and Lord knows how many of his crew. The Marshal's not just some forest walker, he's connected, I tell you. Mind your own damn business before you start a war with all of them, and Starri. He's paid half of Hroghar's retirement already, always buying his best and breaking them. Whose side d'you think he'd take?"

There was a wry indifference in Hring's leer that Hjortgren found hair raising, one that said Hring still didn't care how far out of hand things might slip. Leif snickered, reaching for the coins. Hring showed Leif his teeth. Asbjorn snatched up the dice in his left and the lip of the leather cup in his right, dropping the loaded pair inside, before passing it to Hring.

"Thanks." Hjortgren said. "But we'd all be dead before we knew what hit us."

Leif toyed with the silver nestled on the deck between his knees.

"For a regi little snot, you're having one hell of a string of luck." Hring laughed.

Ignoring the fact that he was actually down almost a half mark, Leif shoved the pile back, determined to front Hring for uttering the unforgivable insult. Calling another man queer usually got you a broken nose, if not a knife in your guts, but in Leif's case Hring knew he'd nothing to worry about.

Hring, Asbjorn and Hjortgren saw Leif's wager. Odd, finally coming to his senses at the sight of over a pound of silver mounded on the deck, sat out. Nobody carried that much around in their pouches, especially at sea. Hring slammed the cup down.

C Thor's Goats

"Ahh, you couldn't cut it as a shield maid," Leif sneered. "So Odinn booted you back down here to try it again."

To Hring, Leif was someone else's ill-behaved pup, Starri's, nipping at his ankles. He deserved a sound cuffing. But striking Starri's pup meant correction from its owner, and it was a jibe any ten year old could counter in a dozen ways.

"Aye." Hring said, lifting the cup and pretending surprise at the three and four he'd thrown.

"Those were golden days," he said. "me and my sisters, choosing the slain. I'd still be there had I a decent mare instead of you."

Asbjorn punched Hring's arm telling him he had Leif there.

"Always running off to get studded." Hring sighed, "And how we all laughed when you shot off after Sleipnir to get ridden." Sleipnir was Odinn's stallion. Asbjorn and Hjortgren groaned as Hring gathered up the coins, protesting that that was all they could afford to lose.

Leif bent back over the stew pot, the marshaling point of the endless parade of lye fish and other atrocities he and the crew were always being poisoned with, knotting his brows as he sniffed and stirred, wracking his mind for a comeback. It was bad enough having been set up and cheated again. Someone always threw a seven when he was betting big, but time at sea spelled a respite from Hring's vile cooking and a welcome return to stale bread and parchment jerky.

Being punished with it yet again, on top of this last indignity had him bent for vengeance.

The dregs in Hring's mead skin discovered themselves and Hring got up to open his locker for a second skin. He dropped his winnings within.

"Oh it wasn't your mare." Leif snarled. "Odinn gave his virgin daughter the boot over the stink from her nether hairs, being Loki's bitch."

"'Twas shame and loneliness drove me to the Trickster's bed," Hring said, hefting his axe from his locker, searching for the mead below. "Even my sisters wouldn't speak to me after you squatted in front of them and father to let Thor's goats mount you."

"More like he was worried you and the Trickster were going to start Ragnarok." Leif replied.

"Watch it you." Hring growled.

"by setting fire to the Hall." Leif said.

Hring cocked his axe.

Dalla, slumped at his windward beam, who'd been cross eyed watching the rigged game bellowed at both of them to shut up and sit down.

Leif ducked behind the mast, glowing crimson in Hring's eyes. Hring lowered his axe, the head to his right, as he leapt after Leif over the kloften's wooden slug. The murderous will firing his heavy, fighter's frame however, liquor impaired as it was, gained him nothing over the skinny punk prancing about taunting him and even slapping his back twice.

Badger in the bow sat atop Knut's locker, staring out past the dragon stem, ignoring Caoimhe and peeved at her advances. He was almost ready to go aft and shake some sense into Dalla and to hell with what he witnessed at the dicing. It was darker than a mother in law's spleen in every direction, and real wind was coming, wind that would knock the sail and the mast with it overboard if they didn't triple reef it right quick.

Dalla kept bellowing at Hring and Leif to stop and finally struggled to his feet to disarm Hring. Dalla was drunker than Hring and wounded to boot. On Hring's third circuit of the mast his knee caught Dalla's wounded leg. Dalla howled, Hring stumbled over the kloften and his axe sliced through all three yard halyards.

At the crack of the halyards shooting skyward, Badger jerked about, gritting his teeth and closing his eyes to the horror of the yard and sail plummeting from the masthead. Every muscle in him snapped taut, those in his butt jerking him higher, as he quivered, awaiting the awful impact.

CI The Dragon's Kiss

Three hundred yards to starboard, Tore stood idly slapping a long pair of smith's tongs into his palm while asking Humach whether he wanted to start with a finger, a toe or another appendage. Two rapid, thudding, thunder cracks yanked his head around as Dalla's fifty foot yard slammed into his rails, splintering them.

Shouts and curses carried across the water, and Tore spun about for a furied look. Humach howled as the tongs forgotten in Tore's fist walloped his ear.

Tore slapped his left palm over his eye, his fingers splayed above it digging at his forehead. He wiped his hand slowly down his face and brought its heel to rest above his jaw.

Both ends of Dalla's sail were dragging in the sea.

The gray moons between Tore's spread fingers grew wider still, as to his unspeakable horror, between Dalla's curled back dragon stems fore and aft, a tiny flame flickered up before the mast and quickly spread, partitioning the ship with a wall of writhing orange.

Starri, three hundred yards behind Tore's stern, prayed this would be the incident to finally end his nightmares of Dalla as his in law. If the idiot couldn't keep from burning his ship he'd never rise to the towering challenge of Rakel.

God knew what she'd have waiting at home for him. He'd given her everything, and every year she grew more reckless. He'd put her in charge of his store as a distraction and compensation for the nipping that hound Ulfson gave her. She was still mooning after him. Rakel remained his own brightest, and sole hope for his old age, and that horizon loomed impenetrably dark.

Ulfson had given her the one thing she desperately needed, the only thing he had never been able to give her. She hadn't breathed a word of it. She hadn't had too. She and Ulfson glared ice at each other and she took to wearing very loose dresses and not sitting down for three days. It would have been so much easier, if Ulfson had just swallowed his pride and married her. Then she'd get what she needed, all those spankings he bitterly regretted not having given her himself years ago.

Adam, three hundred yards off Starri's port beam, leaned wearily forward on his tiller.

"God's knees." Adam groaned. "I'm surprised it took him this long."

Dalla's ship foundered, rolling on the swell as one of its two starboard stays pulled free. It wasn't much of a swell but it didn't have to be with the damage the rails and planks beneath them had suffered. Sixteen of the crew clustered at the leeward rail, to form a bucket brigade.

In Asbjorn and Hjortgren's rush to pull their howling Skipper from beneath the heavy, burning sail, they upended the stew pot, and the pot under it containing the flaming cooking oil, which snaked out like a conjurer's dragon over the pine decking to leeward.

The black clouds above were now writhing with jags of their own blue fire. Dalla's muffled screams as he writhed beneath the flaming sail could be heard above all. Asbjorn and Hjortgren, before the yard, and Hring behind it, singed themselves trying and failing to pull the sail off of Dalla. Badger, still forward, left off his gaping and kicked open Knut's locker. He unsheathed his sword.

Tore, as his ship bore in, watched Badger run toward the flames in the waist with the sword cocked high above his head. Badger yelled 'Hold still damn you' and delivered a mighty downward swing into the fire. If Tore had just seen what he thought he'd seen, he'd forget he'd seen it.

Another heart rending crack issued as the remaining starboard stay parted, taking its arm long wooden cam along to clobber Hring as it flew past and the mast swayed to port. The hull shuddered as the yard, dragged by its collar about the mast, jerked after it in a trio of tortured grunts before the mast swayed drunkenly to rest, leaning halfway between up and down to port.

Tore, heading forward kept his mortified gaze glued to Badger who, it appeared, wasn't done with Dalla yet. Badger lanced the sword back into the flames and tugged it one side to the other. Then he bent forward into the fire and was lost from view. Dalla's ship listed beneath the mast and bailers.

Tore's crew payed out the sheets and his square, striped sail dumped its wind. His steersman gave Dalla's fiery yard a cautious berth as he came alongside Dalla's steerboard quarter and grappling hooks made them fast. Asgrim axed away Dalla's steerboard.

Badger, beyond the sail's flames and black clouds of burning grease, raised his blade and chopped down again. He bent forward once more. He rose and Tore's hand shot into the air beside his cheek. Tore shook his head and snapped his fingers as Dalla's smoldering visage appeared. Dalla's face was bright red and his black hair smoked like a fire of green wood.

Dalla's mast uttered a final, apocalyptic crack as it shattered at the yard collar and gave way overboard. His bow slewed leeward, what remained of his sail now a sea anchor off his beam as his steerboard quarter gnashed Tore's bow. Grappling hooks split the black brown planks of Dalla's ship, dragging Tore's bow along. Dalla's lee hull beneath his yard was now ablaze.

Tore ordered men and lockers taken aboard. Badger pitched his sword through the fire yelling to take it take along. Dalla's crew scrambled for their own lockers and a deadly hail of Hroghar's swords winged through the flames to clank down onto the deck. Luckily for Hring they were still sheathed as one bounced off his unconscious back. Frantic men in Dalla's stern heaved lockers into Tore's ship.

From Adam's beam Trand Sigrelfson with a line tied around his waist leapt through the air toward Dalla's prow dragon. Sigrid's brother Trand was a big man of thirty, blonde, broad of chest and shoulder, and with more than his share of vinegar.

Trand landed hard but clung harder. He scrambled around into the ship where he made his line fast to the bow stem. Adam had sheets let go and his square, red and white striped sail bellied free in the breeze.

Three more hooks arced over the black between the rolling ships, and gouged white scars in the oak. Trand caught up another thrown, weighted line and dashed aft to cleat it before the mast. Its far end was fast at Adam's stern.

Dalla's ship lay to wind. Even with twenty men working the lines it seemed forever to close the few feet between them. Pulling a ship beam on through a twenty knot quarter wind was a nigh impossible task. Dalla's forward crew dragged their gear into Adam's ship.

Tore noted Badger staying to the last and swearing lustily as he heaved spears, sheaves of bolts, and even a forgotten crossbow after them. The mooring lines squealed and both relief vessels began listing heavily toward Dalla's ship which was now taking on the sea at an alarming rate.

Caoimhe grabbed at Badger's arm, begging him to hurry. He ordered her off to where the rails were grinding each other to leap aboard the other ship. She shrugged, took a running start at a locker where she was, slipped, barked her shin on the rail and plunged head first between the ships and sank like a stone. Horrified, he leapt in after her.

CII But I Can't Swim!

She surfaced shrieking, spitting and dog paddling. He surfaced to witness the soles of her shoes disappear over Adam's rail as men hauled her in after near drowning himself beneath the hulls searching for her.

The black clouds above ruptured as he was yanked skyward from the brine and Asgrim heaved Hring over the rail into Tore's bows. An icy cataract poured down upon the inferno. Asgrim, now the only man aboard the burning ship, leapt after Hring. He landed on his fo'c'sul's tiny, raised deck and clung to the dragon. Valthjof and two more had followed Tore forward. The rest of the crew had better sense.

Tore glared like a poisonous toad down at Hring, still unconscious at Asgrim's feet, before his own knees on the fo'c'sul deck. He still gripped his long, smith's tongs. Hand, arm and tongs were quivering, and he was emitting a low, bearish rumble. Valthjof herded his mates back midships lest the berserk in his father engulf them too after he'd finished Hring.

Tore turned his baleful gaze up upon Asgrim and shoved the tongs up toward him.

"What?" Asgrim barked.

"Just take the god damn things will you, you helmet fart?" he croaked, and tilting his head back to stare up into the downpour, his lips writhed.

"Thank you." he growled low to the heavens, as his and Adam's crews axed the grappling lines, and with a hiss like the death of Satan, the sixteen tons of ballast rocks in Eirika's ship dragged it beneath the surface of the cold, black sea.

CIII Welcome To Thingi Hrafn

A spring breeze pawed through the pine tops in gentle sighs, combing openings down through the forest canopy, scattering spangles of hazy sapphire through the dark down onto the black loam. A narrow stream and its muddy wallow snaked through the trees.

Two buckskinned men with crossbows broke from under the trees into the wallow. Their horses they'd left behind in an oak grove on the hilltop at their backs.

Two sets of tracks beside the stream arrested their progress. Olaf took Thorarin's elbow. Then pointing left, back into the trees, he made rapid scurrying motions with two fingers.

Twenty yards back into the pine forest they squatted beside a downblow, breaking their outlines. Pitch, sticky, dark orange boles of it decorated black limbs groping out at right angles through the shafts of cold light. It looked like the devil's crematorium choked with the endless remains of giant spiders. The floor was spongy with nettles and curled, brown leaves from the oaks on the hill behind them.

"It's about time." Olaf whispered, sneering. "That moose sign's four days dead and the men a half day."

Olaf pointed his thumb back over his shoulder, north along the stream.

"And don't get fancy." he said. "Just put it in his heart."

Olaf wriggled out of his pack and covered Thorarin with brush and dead leaves. He smeared moist black earth over his own face and hands, and then wiped more over his buckskins. He dropped his crossbow and bolts beside Thorarin, covered them, and untied his warbow from his pack and strung it.

He hauled his pack to the trees edge and set it out in view at the base of a tree, and then showed himself for a moment just beyond the trees. He ducked back under them crouching low and in a broken, halting gait moved up the hill into the forest behind Thorarin for fifty yards before turning south to parallel the wallow.

Two hundred yards further the canopy opened up. Mist smoked up from the forest floor in wraith tendrils where the sunlight burned off the damp. The two squirrels he encountered paid him no notice.

A quarter mile later he descended back to the wallow. In it a crippled starling stood on its single foot at a tiny puddle, cocked its head and gazed at him with that detached, omnivorous evil only a bird can muster, waiting for him to shrink to an edible size.

The moose tracks were there but the man prints weren't. He suppressed a shiver, peering up into the trees on both sides of the wallow. They'd already doubled back.

Timing his steps to the wind's gusts, he glued himself to tree after tree, settling into the nerve wracking finding of the men waiting to murder Thorarin and himself. Every few yards wrought a change of perspective calling for a thorough second look through every tree all over again.

When Olaf finally found his man it was anticlimactic. The fool stood out like a crow on a snow bank, sitting twenty feet up in the corrugated, grey crotch of a huge elm and staring out towards the streamlet. This Skraeling was thirty miles from his border and three times that from his home.

Olaf settled back and watched. Two eternities crawled by. And in those eternities the tree Skraeling craned his neck at every rustle of squirrels and birds on the forest floor, picked his nose, swatted at flies, and glanced thirty times at one spot high in the trees across the stream. Olaf marked that spot.

The breeze was cold, had been all day, but still he wiped the sweat from his eyes before raising his bow. He drew. A hundred and forty pounds stood anchored without tremor against his cheek as he timed the gusts. The third gust died, and the string slid from his calloused fingertips. His arrow slammed into the man's chest with a muffled thump. The man slumped forward and began to slide out of the tree but one of his ankles stuck in the crotch. He dangled head down, and his bow dropped to earth.

Olaf emptied his mind with a dozen deep, slow breaths and listened through a hundred heartbeats before turning slowly around and stalking back the way he'd just come, south, away from Thorarin. A hundred yards further the wallow narrowed and ran beneath the forest cover. He waited for wind, and slipped across to send the first man his companion, in hell.

Thorarin's mosquitoes were eating him alive but there was no remedy for it. There might be more men waiting in ambush for him. His dead Skraeling lay almost at the wood's edge thirty feet north of Olaf's pack. He'd snuck up almost on Olaf's heels. Thorarin shot him just as the savage's eyes froze right on him.

The Skraeling wasn't the first man he'd killed but still he'd felt that overpowering thrill to get up and run, laughing, to kick the man's teeth out. That fly speck out there had tried to kill him, and now he was dead. Thorarin silently wished that fly speck's family and all his neighbors the same.

An oriole warbled thirty yards off in the direction Olaf had taken. It soon sang out again behind him. Thorarin answered its call and crawled from under the brush to swipe the hoarded little bloodsuckers from his face, hands and neck.

Olaf grinned from the far side of the huge, downed pine. Olaf pointed to the corpse.

"Good." he said, and squatting to coil the strength in his legs, he then vaulted on hands sideways over the tree. He strode to the corpse, pausing to pick up a flat stone twice the size of his fist along the way. He rolled the corpse onto its back and gave it a quick look.

"Oh, this is better than good." Olaf chuckled. "This is Long Arrow. Morrow will not be pleased. He's short one son."

Olaf grabbed one of Long Arrow's arms. Thorarin took the other. Together they stood him against a tree. Olaf snatched Long Arrow's knife. By the time Olaf had finished Thorarin's desire to kick Long Arrow had wandered off somewhere.

"Good thing the other two had axes." Olaf said, wiping his palms against each other and looking as if he wished someone would pat him on the back.

"That's at least a three handed job."

"That looks more like something Da'hal would amuse himself with." Thorarin said, inclining his frown away from Olaf, and back toward the corpse.

"Just three of them wouldn't come a hundred miles from their lodges." Olaf said, patting the corpse's shoulder.

"They're all here, finally. Right now they're convincing each other they're the most-manly bastards alive. That mead needs being turned into a nasty hangover. I have to go find them and you have to get back. No, if I get dead you'll be the only warning they get."

Thorarin shot him a wistful look hoping Olaf might reconsider and take him along.

"Nyeh heh heh hehh," Olaf laughed. "I promise I won't kill them all, I'll leave you a few."

Thorarin gave him an embarrassed grin and gathered his bow and pack. Olaf laid his hand on Thorarin's nape.

"Stay away from the trails, way away." he said.

Behind them Thorarin's man stood, back to tree, waiting mute to tell his friends just how good. His companions' severed heads served similar postings, off to the south, both secured by their own knives nailed through their right eyes, into the trees.

Olaf slipped an arrow from the dead Skraeling's quiver, and driving it through the corpse's left wrist, he then nailed the arm above its head, its fingers pointing limply back toward Hrafnstadir. Then he snatched up his gear as Thorarin vanished into the oaks at the hilltop.

CIV Point Me To The Pantry

Olaf sniffed up the track of the corpses. A mile further it veered out of the wallow and west into the woods along a well-used game trail. He kept fifty yards north of it holding his stallion to a quiet walk over last years' mast. He dismounted and checked the trail every few hundred yards to assure himself their prints were still there.

The afternoon's shadows lengthened and darkened as did his mood. Every clump of white flowered, purple dogwood and outcrop of grey black granite oozed menace. Open fields he avoided for stands of crinkly, slime green tamarack, golden aspen and peeling, white birch wherein formerly deer or better had teased, but now pulsed, and echoed behind his eyes with the threat of unseen, fletched murder.

The first three miles were easy. They'd stuck to the trails not bothering to even skirt the muddy spots.

But the broken shale jumbled down to the freshet before him offered three choices. At the far edge of the open, mile wide field beyond the freshet, turkeys gobbled and clucked to each other, settling in to roost for the night.

The Skraelings might have slunk off across the field, but that was unlikely as the Ottarr border was only a mile further. They could have followed the stream and come from either direction along it, south from Nahri land or more likely north from their own border. Too little light remained to check each possibility without showing himself.

South, to his left, a raven's skrunk sawed through the bullfrog and peeper riot. The blue black bird winged its way north following the stream and past him, disappearing into the purple above the trees.

"Fair enough." he said. "Point me to the pantry and I'll get it down for you."

He led his stallion two hundred yards back from the stream, considered hobbling it and rejected the idea. There were wolves and bears out here. Then on foot he set off north along the stream.

The sun flared up and plummeted behind the trees. What little warmth the day had held chased after it. The purple gloaming grudgingly sprinkled out a scant seed stock of tiny stars. Though they multiplied quickly they hung back, too aloof and distant to spare any light.

The shale had disappeared two miles back and the bank here was choked with pussy willows beneath overarching spruces and alders. Three birds singing themselves to sleep quit abruptly in mid chorus as an owl warned them to knock it off. It was early in the year and most of the trees were bare, but it still looked like a cave between midnight and morn.

Olaf did a deal more listening than sneaking. There was plenty to strain through, the stream's insomniac muttering, the hoot of an occasional owl, and branches all around him clacking together in the light, chill breeze. Ghosting the stream was a sword that cut on both edges. While it masked his movements it also masked his quarry's.

The crescent moon was fawning at his shoulders when he heard Skraelings griping a score of yards ahead. The gist of it was that Long Arrow and his friends had already killed anyone who'd find them and there wasn't any reason to be out here freezing. He listened till they ran out of gripes and had repeated them all thrice before clumping and cracking their way off to his right, away from the stream and into the dark.

The aspens now showed naked, stripped of bark almost to his shoulders. Many were chewed off, sharpened stumps. The lake the beaver had dammed was close.

Firelight showed ahead, yellow orange, cold and witchy, flaring around the black silhouettes of the crabbed, twisted oaks between himself and it.

CV Spider And Pussycat

Hroald sat propped on his shoulders in a pile of pillows and blankets on his bed, his ankles crossed in their thick gray socks atop another pillow. With eyes shut he chewed the nib of a quill pen as Aerin at the table slowly reread two lines of Proverbs to him from his bible.

At sixty, Hroald was having trouble reading even the half a thumb high ornate script in the huge forty pound Bible he'd stolen twenty years ago. Every week he'd deliver the same message in different words, trying to reach the sinners before him in the church, and save their souls. Tomorrow's sermon would be the one if it took him all night.

And even if it didn't, it wouldn't be many more seasons before he'd have all week to devote to it. Perhaps he should concentrate more on the Old Testament, it seemed to get his flock's attention, or certain passages of it their knowing grins, better than the New.

Hroald decided he liked the lines and opening his eyes, pointed his quill at Aerin telling her to note them down. Between his feet and the flames in his hearth beyond her a tiny dark blur caught him up. He squinted to focus his eyes on a spider, hung from a rafter above his feet.

He considered crushing it and paused, fascinated with the image of it dangling by an invisibly thin thread, just above the flames, waiting there for him to sleep, and descend to give him a nasty bite that wouldn't heal for weeks, spreading its poison in perverted glee.

He motioned Aerin to silence, lost in spider thoughts, as she asked if she should continue. A frantic knocking at his door preceded Thorarin's anxious call. Hroald flipped a thumb toward the door. Aerin let Thorarin in. Thorarin panted out that he'd just come from Mordach's where he'd told the crowd what he and Olaf had run into and what Olaf was up to. Hroald swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and bent for his boots.

"Get the women to the church." he said, soft and measured.

"Tell them to bring bows, every arrow they own, blankets and food. The few that can use a sword, bring them. The rest, an axe."

Aerin and Thorarin departed to raise the alarum.

Hroald retrieved a long oilskin package from the shadows of a far corner and untied it. A polished, double edged bastard with a three foot blade beneath a foot of wire wrapped hilt shot little sparks back at the fire. He fished its sheath and belt from a trunk and strapped it upright behind his shoulders. Behind the trunk was another oilskin. This one contained his axe.

He cut a ham down from the rafter and tossed it and two wineskins into his pack. Before snuffing out the second candle he walked to the bed and slapped the spider into a smear between his palms.

He tossed a bucket of water into the fireplace and grabbed his bow thinking about the sinning spider hanging above the flames, its thread unbroken only by the grace of God, and knowing he'd save his people yet even if the sermon had to wait a bit to get written down.

Galinn skipped backwards up the church steps clucking at Anja and clutching her arm. Galinn's sword stood strapped upright between his shoulders, his quiver slung over it and his bow tucked under his arm. Across Anja's shoulder lay Olaf's sheathed sword. Anja's bow hung over it and a woodsman's axe filled her other hand.

"Well of course he wouldn't tell you." Galinn said.

"He's Ottarr. Their back yard is always boiling with Skraelings."

"He's out there by himself." Anja said.

Da'hal caught up to them at the door, packing enough steel to conquer a small town. A heavy leather satchel was slung over his shoulder. He paid its sixty pounds no more mind than a game bird.

"He's right," Da'hal said. "I've hunted poachers with him, and I wouldn't want him to come looking for me like that. They're going to be shitting blue lightning before Olaf's half through with them."

Anja'd already had an earful of Galinn's patronizing. She glared up at Da'hal ready to tell him to go to hell, she wasn't some idiot child. Ref appeared behind her as if he'd stepped out of some unseen cloud and tapped her shoulder. She jerked about for a 'who are you?' glance and then tilted it back up to the giant.

Da'hal's leer, beneath his black stubble shown pure, mirthless murder. His deep water, blue eyes boiled with that predacious lust she'd seen before, but the usual, mocking jest in them was utterly absent. His square white teeth between his smirking lips looked hungry for a neck. He was obviously contemplating any number of grisly murders with that great axe in his left hand, and savoring the prospect like a starved beggar at Christmas feast.

"I've watched him run across a ship's length of loose shale." Ref said. "His shadow made more noise than he did."

Galinn wrapped his arm around her waist.

"He's just being careful. Probably isn't anyone out there." he said.

Anja's dumbfounded gaze darted scared about the three of them. Thorarin said Olaf was going to go have a look, not take on the lot of whoever. These last seven years she'd been married to an honest, God fearing hunter, and one of the funniest men she'd ever met, not some throat tearing wolf.

She'd known full well what he did off in the woods with Jarnulf hunting poachers. And needful as it might be, somehow, it seemed anything but Christian. Olaf had always been her big pussycat who left his murdered songbirds, chipmunks, and poachers behind in the woods, and never brought so much as a boast of them home to her.

There without the doorway in the flickering shadows and orange light from within, Astrid joined them and all found her continued recounting of the bolts in Ref's quiver and her fussing inspection of all his gear in perfect accord with her never ending put offs to him.

Women, mostly older, kept streaming past them into the torch lit church, some bearing clinking, wicker baskets and others with their precious, well cared for chain folded atop woolen surcoats in their arms, inherited from menfolk dead and gone. Others dragged in swords, spears, axes and shields. Maeve sent teens to the barn for a cart and horse before she blocked the doorway, forbidding others to return home scrounging for more.

In the square at the church's far end a dozen torches weaved, sputtering blue and orange just above a roiling sea of women's heads. The ladies were raising an horrific din. Shocked as they were with the tenor of Hroald's summons none had thought to light the church's cressets.

Hroald towered up out of the dark behind the desk like some fiery prophet beleaguered in the pit, his wild gray hair, beard, and huge, deep lined features glowing orange in the flickering light. Beneath him heads bobbed up and down as women stood on tip toes all yelling the same question, the one he'd already answered twenty times.

His face was pruned and his palms kept swatting the air before him trying to bat back their shouts. In frustration he took up his axe in both hands and rammed its butt down hard onto the desk again and again.

"Damnit!" he roared. "I can't tell you what I don't know."

They'd heard him raise his voice before, many times, but not like this. To the younger girls it was quite a shock to have him actually yell at them. The older ones however remembered the rages of Hroald before he took the cross, and what followed. It got quiet in a hurry. Anja and her three hunters stopped just inside the door.

"We don't even know if there is anyone out there yet." Hroald said. "Olaf and Thorarin shot three poachers today and Olaf is looking to see if there's more. So we are going to go get settled in tonight behind some big dirt walls we put up in the hills before the stream. If Olaf is right and those Skraelings have lost their minds, sometime tomorrow we are going to have us a little archery practice and not much more. Most of their bucks are off with Tore somewhere. There can't be more than forty of them left."

"There's a lot of forest out there." Brenn said. "How can you be sure they'll come that way?"

"Because it's on the stream," he said. "where the game is."

"And how come we've never heard about this ambush you built, before?" Aethle said.

He waved them down again.

"If you don't know about it, do you think anyone else does?" he said. "We'll probably just take a walk in the woods tonight and then you'll all give me dirty looks till winter."

Hroald sought out Aesolf. Aesolf refused, demanding to be taken along if only to be cut down at the first to slow the enemy. Hroald asked him who it was taught himself and Tore the stars. The little ones and the old had to be taken to sea, until Thidrandri heard of this and sent ships.

The women had never left sight of land. With Aesolf piloting the fishing fleet the worst of it would be a lot of snuffy noses. If there were more Skraelings than those Olaf was after and they fell on Hrafnstadir, . Aesolf leaned close.

"These old eyes don't work anymore." he said and fixed them up on the ceiling. "Why didn't you let me die twenty winters ago when I was still a man?" he asked.

"Because he needed you for this." Hroald said. "Use Helga's. They work fine."

CVI The Malefic Of Its Opiate

Olaf snuck a shaft over his shoulder. In the dark forty yards ahead a beaver tail cracked onto the surface of the lake. Someone had crowded them. Two nervous laughs carried through the black to him. He fell to the frigid ground and crawled on his belly toward them. Crawling beat breaking twigs.

Slurred grunts and laughter floated through the night to him. They were drunk. Olaf stopped ten yards behind them and watched. There were only two sitting silhouetted at the lake's edge. One stood, relieved himself, cursed and tossed an empty skin away and promised his friend he'd return.

Olaf waited till the crunchings of his stumbling faded and then launched himself at the other's back. The Skraeling turned.

Olaf's right hand clamped its mouth and his left grabbed its hair. One violent twist broke the man's neck. Olaf slipped the corpse's hand axe from its belt and dragged him off into the dark. He crept back and with the axe crouched behind a huge oak.

Presently number two returned, calling out. As the Skraeling weaved past the tree the axe leapt from the shadow and into his brain. Olaf stood on the man's neck and wrenched the axe free. Then Olaf stripped naked before dragging them both into the frigid lake and pushing down on their chests until their bubbles quit rippling the surface. He leapt back into his clothes shivering. Wet buckskins on a night like this would kill him.

Jarnulf brushed past Maeve on his way out the church door with his guts knotted, worried sick over Olaf. Nacarr's Nahri would be along, unless he'd double crossed the Skraelings too. Together they were maybe a hundred. What if they were already waiting somewhere along the way? There were a million what ifs and all of them fatal.

And how he was going to order Kolfinna and Mirha to go along with Aesolf and the kids had him stumped. Most of the girls would be part of the ambush. Kolfinna couldn't shoot at all and Mirha had never held a bow. Jarnulf headed for the barn.

Again and again he fought the urge to run. It would add to the panic around him. If Olaf was in over his head he couldn't even find him in the night. It wasn't that Olaf couldn't take care of himself. It was that he'd bite off ten times what any other man would.

Jarnulf reached the barn and damned if his girls weren't coming over the bridge pulling a cart from the shipshed. Mirha, all ninety pounds of her, even if the buckskins she wore were soaking wet, was hiding beneath a huge, dented, rusted helmet. She had to lift and tip it back to see out from under it. God knew where she'd found it.

The cart was loaded with every blade he owned, Ulf's mail, and all of his bows. His longsword topped the pile. He confronted them with his orders. He might as well have told a dog to quit scratching itself. They snatched bows they'd already strung from the cart and nocked arrows. Before he could stop them they loosed into a door across the street. Mirha's aim, even with the helmet, was considerably better than Kolfinna's.

"What's wrong with you two?" he said. "If Bera'd opened the door just then you'd have killed her."

He turned on Mirha.

"There's a lot of men out there," he said. "and they're here to kill all of us. This is no affair for little girls."

"You're going to need all the help you can get." she said.

"How did you learn to shoot like that?" he said.

"We have hay bales in the back yard, you know." she said.

Snickers erupted behind him as four women, Kveldalf and Gundfrieda among them, swept past on their way to gather weapons and food. Galinn caught up to him from behind.

"Might's well." Galinn said. "It's in the fire now. If anyone raises a stink it'll be Long Shanks."

At the moment Jarnulf was ready to go down swinging. The prospect of gleefully butchering the whole gang of them was almost worth his hide. But he wasn't ready to let his girls get carved up. He sneered, picking through half of his life savings, in arms, lying in the cart while again asking Mirha just what she thought she was doing. Her hand shot out for his fanciest, and largest, sword. It was almost the right size for Da'hal.

"That will get you killed." Jarnulf said. "Pass them out to someone who knows how to use them or put them in the barn. I don't have time to take you home and tie you up. Since you're so determined to get involved in this, carry an axe or a spear. And for once, do as the other women tell you."

He bent back into the cart for his long dragon, and it seemed to reach out for him, leaping up to hand. But once grasped, like a coy lover it refused him. It had never before felt so unyielding, stolid and weighty, as if testing him with its doubts. He promised himself, and through his grip, It, that he wanted this enough to die for it.

It shook itself, once, and then serpentined its wriggle through his every nerve like a bolt of black lightning.

He swaggered off into the darkened barn reeling with its opiate, more malefic this time, and chilling, than a yawning, predawn grave.

Ansvarr and Gunnarr came in through the door pulling another cart. Gunnarr bore a torch and the pair were snickering. They dropped the cart's traces and Ansvarr fetched his pack horse out. Jarnulf carried his saddle bags over to their light for a final check.

In the cart lay a familiar wooden carving almost six feet long of a ram siring a ewe on Leif. A Skraeling breastplate of bones and feathers lay beside it.

CVII Scorned

"I thought Tore told Asgrim to get rid of this thing." he said.

"You know how artists are," Gunnarr said. "about their masterpieces."

"This," Ansvarr said. "will have those grub eaters so pissed they'll choke to death on the spot."

Arnor rushed in to join them with one of his father's bows, quiver, woods axe and dagger. He was steely eyed with grim determination. He was not going to be sent off for a cowardly boat ride with the children.

"This isn't trolls and bears my son." Gunnarr said. "The children will be frightened. They need you to set a brave example, so it will not seem so terrible to them."

"You will not send me away. I am not a baby." Arnor said.

"No, you're not." Gunnarr said. "You're a very brave young man, and a big part of being brave, is being wise, and knowing what you can do, for others, and doing it the best you can, especially when your heart is bursting to do something else."

Arnor beseeched Jarnulf.

"Chieftain Jarnulf?" he said.

"Your father's word is law Arnor." Jarnulf said. "I'm not your Chieftain, he is."

Arnor blinked at Jarnulf's words.

"I'm tired of this silly job. Can I quit?" Gunnarr said, and grinned. "Going to work at this God awful hour."

He knelt and hugged his son.

"You will make me proud, and not disobey me?" he said.

Arnor grumbled his assent and slumped away staring at his feet to join Aesolf and the children.

"They'll go for a ride." Jarnulf said, as Gunnarr stared after his crestfallen son. "Then sail back here frozen and soaked, after an adventure beyond their wildest dreams. It will fire them with pride for years because they shared it. Now let's go shove our swords up these savage's asses."

"Morrow's oldest son didn't come this far in to steal dinner." Ansvarr said. "They're all here. No getting surprised. No getting caught."

Gunnarr fished his packed quiver from the cart and swatted Jarnulf's shoulder with it.

Hroald had chased the last of the women out of the church, and was closing the doors when he spied Aud in the street searching for Adis. Aud had returned to Sigrid's steading and filched Sigrid's father's sword.

"Come along girl, and get yourself an axe. You'll get killed with that." Hroald said.

"I'm not your girl." Aud said.

Hroald laughed at her.

"No." he said, and rolling his eyes upward, he pointed to the stars.

"You're His." he said.

"Like Sigrid?" she said.

"Yes, like Sigrid." Hroald said.

Aud scorned him with her back and hurried off toward Adis steading.

The women with carts, weapons and mail followed after the mounted hunters, approaching the witch black trees at the field's end, and had thirty third thoughts about it. It wasn't the Skraelings that had them thinking. The fox barks and toy wolf yowls retreated far aside from their advance but the owls, within the forest, persisted in their sporadic, eerie, interrogatories.

Are you sure, you want to smother yourselves in our frigid, damp, and lightless realm, beneath our all seeing yellow gaze and talons?

CVIII Field Of Stars

Rakel yawned through her iced blue teeth, peering across the star lit field over her crossbow, lying in the dirt atop the berm. She'd been out in the forest before, with Jarnulf, but never in this frozen season at night. Its elves and dwarves had dogged them, pressing down on them, laying in wait as they passed, all the way from town.

This was Jarnulf's playground as the streets of Hrafnstadir were hers, and the children's. He played at Tag, you're dead, with poaching trolls in this damp, frozen, lightless closet.

This was what was inside him.

Hroald had plunked her down here at the south end of the line with his whispered confidence that a strapping young swordswoman like herself would be the perfect remedy for villains sneaking a march on their flank. Her father's sword had felt so much bigger and more menacing when she snatched it down earlier, at home.

The ambushing force was split into two parties. They were faced off toward the field in a vee on the facing slopes of two forested hillsides. The ground between them was an open and level stretch forty yards at its widest by three times as long.

Across the field's far side the stream crossed it south by southeast and on for another quarter mile before crossing back under the trees toward town. Most of the stream was hidden eight feet down behind its near bank. The dim silvered tips of willows and fire cherries poked up here and there behind the bank on the stream's marshy far flats. Forty yards further the forest rose again.

Lying here with her teeth clacking brought a stunning immediacy to Jarnulf's passion for ambushing poachers. It didn't seem any pursuit for the faint of heart. Perhaps she'd been a bit rough on him. Which brought Mirha to mind, also frozen blue only six women to the north of her. Despite Mirha's grumblings Jarnulf had forced an axe into the little idiot's hands. Rakel found herself jealous on more than usual matters. The sword was an expert's or a corpse's weapon. She was no expert. And while Hroghar's swords were near unbreakable one swing with an axe, sword in its way or not, rarely needed a follow up.

Knowing that Ref and Da'hal were off skulking through the oaks forty yards further south was a bonfire's more comfort than the sword beside her. They, at least, knew what they were doing. Hroald had been most insistent that she not go shooting her crossbow in any direction but the open field no matter what she heard.

Even the frozen earth she lay on wasn't keeping her awake. The field out through the trees before her so silver sleepy and the stream's far off babbling were kidnapping her into dreamland. Every so often Galinn would sneak up from behind to check on her. He was most unnerving. A hand landed between her shoulders, and her heart caught in her throat for the ninetieth time.

"Damnit. Stop that." she whispered. "At least say something?"

"And get myself shot?" Olaf said.

She whipped her head up at him and propped herself on an elbow.

"How the hell did you?" she began.

He leaned in and put his lips to her ear.

"Yes, I saw Da'hal." Olaf said. "He's looking so hard for someone to kill. Didn't want to spook him."

She launched into a flurry of who's, what's, when's, and where's. Olaf shushed her to ask where Hroald and Jarnulf were. She told him and started over.

"Nothing to worry about till noon, if at all." he said. "Take a nap. I'm going to."

She rolled over onto her hip. Perhaps he'd answer her if she stared him down. She got a look at his back and within three heartbeats that disappeared. She'd just settled back in with one eye closed when twenty yards behind her an owl shrieked, jolting her almost straight up into the air. To her north another answered it.

If she could take a nap, she could damn well abandon her post and see what was up. Though she owed Olaf, still, he was Olaf. She stalked off after him."

"It's the Skraelings," Olaf was saying to Hroald, Jarnulf, and the half dozen other hunters. "All of them, about six dozen. We kill them now. Skeggi, Skjalg's brother, was parading around Morrow's tent. Nacarr and his crowd will show up sometime tomorrow."

Rakel and Aud stuck their noses into the hunter's conclave, demanding to come along. Jarnulf stomped his foot down. This business belonged to the experts, his hunters. It was no affair for women. Just what did they think they were going to do?

Hroald laughed at him.

"Shoot." Rakel said. They were both fair shots. Gunnarr let out a three weeks unwashed chuckle.

"Do you want their sentries calling for help before they chase after us?" Gunnarr said. "Or would you rather offer them something they won't want to share?"

"Right." Jarnulf spat. "They're going to believe that two girls are just out for a walk in the woods, forty miles from town."

"Olaf says they been out there for three days." Gunnarr said. "They're so bored they're drinking. One glimpse of these two and they won't stop to think about anything but them."

Rakel's gorge rose. She'd planned on shooting the bastards, not strutting around like some mare in heat for them. What would Uncle Starri think if she stayed behind hiding?

To Aud it was set in stone. The hunters had adopted her and bent over backwards fussing over her. They weren't about to all just ride off and get killed without her.

Adis and Kveldalf started an argument with her. She'd lost her mind. There was no sense in trying to talk Rakel out of anything once she'd lost hers. Mirha burrowed her way between Galinn and Gunnarr to insist that she too was coming.

"No you're not." Jarnulf said. "Rakel knows what she's doing." though he sorely doubted she'd be able to kill any of the mob they were going against without getting herself killed.

Jarnulf wished Sigrid were still alive. Sigrid had been one tough bitch. It was a good thing for Mirha, stomping her tiny foot and pouting, that Sigrid had been backshot.

If he was stuck with taking women along, at least Rakel wouldn't, no, this whole idea was madness. Mirha started in again. He shook his head, turned and took two steps away from her. He whipped about and sprang at her to slap her ribs.

"That's how much warning you'll get but it'll be an axe." he said before turning his back on her to quiz Olaf again. Hroald grabbed young Will's collar.

"I need you here." Hroald said. Fourteen wintered Will gave him a hangdog look. The other apprentices were going. The shame of being forbidden, as if he were still a baby, would surely kill him. Hroald just shrugged when the hunters told him he wasn't coming either. They were going to do a lot more running than fighting. Hroald's days as a sprinter were long gone. Hoskuld and Mordach needed help keeping this mob organized and quiet.

Ansvarr and Galinn rounded up a half dozen apprentices and marched them to the rear to gather the horses.

The dark beneath the trees soon filled with the smell, soft complaints, and hot, steamy breath of the sleepy animals.

Aud wished Kveldalf and Adis would quit pestering her with reasons why going along was a bad idea. They all made perfect sense and were scaring her witless.

Ref had already told them to be quiet three times. He was sorting out details with Da'hal not ten feet away when Hlif popped up to ask Da'hal if she could ride with him. Kveldalf jumped so fast Adis felt a breeze.

"There isn't room for three on one horse." Kveldalf hissed, elbowing her aside.

Da'hal glared twenty copperhead's worth of venom down to Hlif, hoping to scare her into staying sweet, safe, and alive. She dug a toe into her other heel, and stared down at it as Kveldalf was helped up behind her smith. Then she snuck a ride with Gunnarr, lying that Da'hal had said yes to it. Gunnarr warned her that she'd be better advised staying out of what they were going off to get into, but Hlif was going to have her way.

Jarnulf swung up into Liv's saddle and another redhead grabbed his knee.

CIX Just Be Yourself

"Isn't anyone going to help me up?" Aerin said.

Jarnulf groaned. Of every woman here Aerin was the last to pose any threat to an armed enemy. And she'd certainly not take part in Gunnarr's harebrained scheme. Aerin demanded of someone, anyone, to help her up. She too was going to help slay the dragon.

"Dragons bite." Jarnulf moaned down to her. "And they especially like little girls."

As if to say that she found the thought of herself as a little girl funny, Aerin giggled, back up at him. Kveldalf thought she was about to expire from happiness sitting behind Da'hal on his horse and hugging him tight.

Da'hal pried her hands free, and greatly annoyed, moved them up around his waist. She was stealing all the dignity out of his battle bluster. He brandished his axe high, and grunted out a verse.

Ministers of Satan cower in our night.

Bane and doom upon you.

Steel serpents bristling feathers,

Will! return you to Hel.

Before tomorrow's wane.

Black blood of villainous men

Will! Paint my axe's lips,

To be a match to the anguish

of the hearts of your women.

"What the hell was that?" Bror groaned. "It doesn't even rhyme."

Rakel sought out Olaf and gave him hell for lying to her. Olaf told her that she was too smart by half for her own good. Olaf mounted his stallion. Eirika caught up Rakel and took her aside.

"You should learn your lesson from Olaf." Eirika said, nodding toward Jarnulf and Aerin's backs.

"A truly shrewd girl gets what she wants by knowing how to play the fool." she continued, and then went after Jarnulf.

"You be careful." she said, eying one of his hilt dragons.

He sucked at his teeth, grimacing.

"How about you come with us?" he said, pointing west. "To tell that dark out there what the law says and summons it to Court this summer?"

A handful of snickers erupted behind Erika.

"No?" he said. "Then keep these women dead still and dead quiet no matter how frozen and miserable they get. No moving. No talking, no whispering. No wool gathering, which might become whispering."

"You could be more respectful in asking me to get your bidding done." she said.

He motioned her closer, leaned in and lowered his voice.

"Half of them are afraid to step on your shadow as it is. And now they'll all know you're in an especially vile taking thanks to my unbended knee. Just, be, yourself."

He straightened upright and raised his voice.

"No one gives away this position. No one."

Then he kneed his mare off toward the field. Eirika bit her lip watching Aerin's departing back behind him. None of this was supposed to be happening.

Mirha hurled mind spears at Rakel's butt as it swung up onto the horse behind Ansvarr. She was frozen blue, mad enough to jump down her own throat, and scared almost to death. Memories of her man and that bitch staring at each other's backs for the last year and a half kept her blood at a boil. He'd barely spoken to her all night.

What if he didn't come back? What if none of them did? Or worst of all, what if he made up with her? She'd been struggling with her fury at being dragged into the midst of these throwbacks all night. All they lived for was killing. They couldn't get along with anyone. Of course she'd never known Skraelings at home. The leopards had run them all off.

Hunters, Hroghar, apprentices, and eight girls rode off across the silvered field. Thorarin lagged behind. Kolfinna and Kadlin had him cornered. Kolfinna was demanding his ironclad assurances that her Gudrod would return alive and well. Kadlin was all ashiver with fright begging him not to leave her here alone. Someone had to stay behind and help Hroald and Hoskuld and Mordach.

Bror's wife Brenn joined them clutching tightly her wood chopper. Brenn shooed the teens away with assurances that all would be well and they shouldn't worry. Thorarin, embarrassed, thanked Brenn and charged her with seeing to Kadlin and not letting her scare the other girls.

"We're good at this." Thorarin said. "You won't even see a Skraeling. You'll just have to suffer through Jarnulf's and Ref's and Da'hal's braggings come noon tomorrow."

"And Bror's evasions." Brenn said.

"And Ansvarr, and Galinn, and Gunnarr's too." Thorarin said.

He caught up his saddle's pommel and stepped into a stirrup.

Brenn seized his elbow.

"Don't let him play the hero, please." she said. "I want him back."

Thorarin laughed.

"For a year now," he said. "I'm saying I'm sorry every time he hits me with a stave so hard I hurt for days. And he says then why did you let me hit you? He's the last man who needs my telling."

Thorarin mounted and rode out after the others. Brenn hugged herself and snapped out a head shake. Christ, but those owls were hair raising on top of everything else.

Across the field all but two of the horses disappeared down behind the lip of the stream's deep cut at the wood's edge, with Thorarin galloping hell bent toward them. Da'hal and Hroghar were busy distributing the contents of their sixty pound satchels before the cut's lip.

They were four legged iron stars the size of a man's knee. Each leg was pointed sharp and all arrayed so that no matter how they landed three legs formed a tripod and the forth stuck straight up. They were called caltrops and had been the ruin of many a cavalry charge.

Narrow lanes for their own retreat they left un-mined, landmarked by certain features in the stream's bank.

CX When You've Got The Wolf By The Ears

As anxious as Aud had been to exit the field's moonlight the instant they rode back beneath the trees it was worse, expecting to get nailed by a low branch. Aud was not a horsewoman. Riding one in this midnight forest would have been bad enough but perched here behind Galinn's saddle was beyond awkward.

The horse's warmth between her legs made the black air even colder as she shifted precariously about on its hips, clutching Galinn's belt and occasionally whacking her nose on his sword's hilt. At least she hadn't put her eye out on one of the bolts sticking out of his quiver beside it, so far.

Their train of twenty four sounded like a hundred, their hooves dull thuds, the sticks breaking beneath them, and the leather creaks of saddles and stirrup ties calling out, announcing them for miles like a horn blast. She hadn't the faintest idea how they knew where they were going. At odd intervals they'd all veer off deeper into the woods away from the trail and then back to it. Galinn was being singularly uncommunicative.

As uncertain and frightening as this affair should have been, she found herself strangely at peace here with her hunters, like the peace she'd known living with her aunt after her father died. Her hunters, like herself were outcasts. The sailors, at least behind their backs, derided them as Skraelings. They dressed in buckskins and on Sunsdays the younger ones went beardless as savages. But they seemed happily reconciled to their station, unlike herself.

How she'd cowered that final night, all night, when he didn't come home, fearing him more and more as the night grew longer, and dreading he'd beat her too when he finally did get in. And when the sun's first rays crept under her door and she opened it to find Gunnarr there, his face set like the world had ended, and he wrapped his arms around her without a word, before choking out that 'He' was dead, before he took her to her aunt's.

Gunnarr and Galinn would show up there at odd times of the evening for the next five years with food, clothes, and she suspected, silver for old Aunt Unn. Galinn always came with a handful of bad jokes and warm smiles but Gunnarr usually looked uncomfortable and stayed just long enough to ask how she was doing. They rarely came together.

She suspected something sore between them, but she'd never been able to finger it. It seemed to have passed when her aunt took sick and died just after her own eighteenth birthday. They'd taken many pains on her behalf and she'd taken them for granted.

It was still long before dawn when they stopped and dismounted. On their right gloomed a seemingly impenetrable thicket of brambles and laurel briars. In the hush following, Aud heard that the Skraeling camp was a quarter mile ahead. It was actually two miles but Jarnulf thought that might keep them quieter.

He and Olaf snuck off on foot to have another look.

She was soon worried sick over them and stayed so till their return.

The hunters called a conference.

Da'hal snuck off to retrieve his father, who was standing guard with his axe twenty yards to their west. Hroghar seemed pleased that they wanted his, an outsider's, input. The Skraelings had horses. Stealing them called for a distraction, one which would infuriate them no end. Hroghar said that sounded like tons of fun.

"We have a new strategy." Olaf said. "There's an old bay tethered with the Skraeling's crow bait, one that my friend Mar the Smith won't shoe."

"So our skunk hunt has become a wolf hunt." Bror said, and Olaf agreed with him that this might well take the fun right out of tonight.

"Well," Ansvarr sighed, "there's only one thing to do when you've got the wolf by the ears."

Aud was more than half unhinged by now. Mind trolls had been calling to her from every corner of the dark forest.

She begged Gunnarr for an explanation as the men made ready.

"You eat the wolf up," Gunnarr sniggered. "one bite at a time, starting with his nose."

CXI This Isn't Before

Olaf polled the girls for volunteers.

Rakel toyed endlessly with the hilt of her sword as she continuously interrupted him. She was coming along no matter what they were up to, short of talking to the bastards instead of killing them. She stumbled off groping her way through the horses to retrieve her bow and quiver before she'd heard just what it was she'd volunteered for.

Olaf spun out the details. An uneasy silence ensued. Hlif broke it with a giggle but Aerin gasped, mortified.

"I could keep my hat on." Aud said. Olaf laughed, called her a sweetheart and said that her haircut wouldn't matter.

Upon learning the number three posting was with Da'hal and well out of bow range Kveldalf and Hlif both snapped at it like hungry trout. Hlif took her crestfallen second prize as Olaf decided Kveldalf could probably out yell her.

Kveldalf didn't know if she liked that.

Olaf told her not to worry. It would be great fun.

Given what Kveldalf knew of Olaf, and his idea of fun, she wondered if the job entailed drooling on herself.

Olaf went to work propping up Hlif, explaining that her role was the most important. Jarnulf grabbed Aud's wrist and told Bror that Rakel was all his when she returned. Jarnulf whisked off to retrieve the contents of his mare's saddle bags, dragging Aud behind him as if he feared they might steal her.

Ansvarr nudged Bror.

"He'll marry Rakel yet." he said.

"At least twice." Bror whispered.

Ref painted two fingers of a light tan into Jarnulf's eye sockets and under his lower lip, then an olive green over his right brow and left cheek and on to black on his chin and nose. The idea was to bring the hollows forward with lighter hues and make the prominent features recede with darker ones presenting a flat, forest blur when glimpsed head on. Then they set about smearing mud and green and black grease on their buckskins.

Da'hal had his left foot in his stirrup when Olaf caught his sleeve.

"Take Stigandi." Olaf said. "If you get jumped, hang on and see to your flanks. Don't worry about what's in front of you. He'll kill it."

The giant flushed, thankful for the concealing dark.

"You never let anyone ride him before." Da'hal said.

"This isn't before." Olaf said. "And I wouldn't trust him to pay any mind to anyone smaller than you. Ivar sold him to me because he couldn't finish training him. I did. And don't you let him forget it or he'll break your neck."

Olaf leaned close, and whispered words into Da'hal's ear. Two of them were archaic Saxon.

"And don't speak them unless you mean it." Olaf said.

Da'hal sought out Jarnulf, as he made for Stigandi.

"I want her back." he said, nodding at Hlif's back. There was nothing of the request in it.

Once again in the still, frigid black the noise Kveldalf and the giants' party on their sixteen horses made was deafening, and terrifying as they departed south. The noise of breaking debris soon faded.

Aud shivered in its wake, expecting it to draw hundreds of howling savages down around their ears. The hunters seemed deaf to it, scurrying around emptying saddle bags and checking quivers.

Gudrod and Thorarin kept scuttling in and out of the thicket, dragging saddled horses into its black depths.

"All right, who wants to get dirty?" Olaf said. "No volunteers?"

So saying he grabbed Hlif and began smearing her face with brown and green bacon grease. Jarnulf caught Aerin and ordered her into the brambles to tend their mounts. Perhaps her shock would wear off before they returned.

Aerin's people departed, and surrounded by horses in the thicket's black she felt her knees quivering and ice growing all over her. Never had she been so alone and terrified. Every rustle in the forest night sounded like a hundred Skraelings.

Jarnulf's mare sought her out to comfort her with a slobbering kiss. Aerin had tied on Liv's feed bucket many a morning before Jarnulf arrived late.

The Skraeling camp now truly lay a half mile ahead. Olaf pointed Hlif's nose up into the tops of two elms towering seventy feet above them. Black before the stars loomed another trunk, hung horizontal between them, at least two and a half feet thick by thirty long. Two ropes were barely visible stretching out across the trail, against the stars, through the higher branches.

Aud, Rakel, and the eight remaining men swept past them headed west at the near edge of the wide spot in the trail before her. The trail turned hard north around the little hill she and Olaf stood on.

"It took all of us to haul that log up there." Olaf said.

He marched Hlif around to the rear of one of the elms. Another rope stretched taut up into the treetop, tied off at the tree's base.

"Use your axe." Olaf said. "The last of us through will tell you when, then run like hell and don't look back."

Jarnulf's voice behind him interrupted Hlif's whispered assent, asking him to get a move on. Then the pair of them disappeared like cats out the front door chasing a midnight mouse.

CXII Strife Inciters

Jarnulf lay out flat in the dirt peering past a large elm's bole, sucking at his teeth, his eyes tracking the sleepy Skraeling like a cat, hungry, pensive, his muscles tensed to spring or run.

Before him in a small clearing at the stream's edge stood twenty horses and six Skraeling youths. The guards were utterly drained from starting and staring into the dark at every rustle.

Thirty yards before Jarnulf one youth leaned back against a maple, toying with the beer skin in his lap, sleepily secure here at the near end of the main camp. Forty yards north two more were warming their hands before a fire and Bror's unseen crew. Between the fire and a few scattered clumps of willows at the stream's edge were three more, the oldest perhaps seventeen, and the animals spread tethered along a taut line.

Ansvarr inched forward on his belly almost to the bush's edge. Most of the trees for the forty yards to the stream were mere chewed off stumps. The concealing dark was running away at a breakneck pace. He propped his jaw on his hands and studied the pair by the fire.

Damn poser, he thought, painted white like some graveyard relic from his top lip to his top knot. All decked out in their raiding party finest miles from any fight, hoping to scare each other into an attack of guts.

Bone head and the other boy were wearing chaps and loose, deer hide shirts cinched at their waists with rope as they stood chafing their arms and whining about the cold.

The yellow firelight turned a harsh bronze on their beardless faces before cutting off into angular, brown blacks behind their ears, shoulders and backs. They were carrying short, two and a half foot bows. Hand axes hung through their shirts waist ties.

Beyond them their horses were exhaling vapor trails of breath into the coming dawn. A third boy, this one's face was painted red with black stripes, weaved his way forward between two horses, stooped under the picket line, and headed for a small wooden keg.

Ansvarr backed away on his belly. He rose and crouch crept forty yards back to the brambles to where Bror and the others waited. This had to be gotten on and over with before the rising sun made it any more dangerous.

Rakel suppressed her second thoughts about this harebrained business and started off in the lead, just as Uncle Starri would do. Galinn caught her elbow. He demanded her knife and sword. Her role was that of the helpless wanton. She surrendered them, but drew the sword and planted its point in the earth behind an elm, just in case. These men were not Uncle Starri and his wrecking crew. They were just hunters even if they were all her foster uncles.

They stopped ten yards shy of Ansvarr's previous post. Ansvarr pointed out the pair at the fire to her.

"Pull out those strife inciters of yours and go give them a look." Ansvarr whispered.

"Like hell." she said. Galinn pressed his lips to her ear.

"If we don't kill these lice," he said. "they're going to do a whole lot worse to your tits than just gape at them."

Rakel caught up the hem of her shirt and froze, returning them each a long, dirty look.

Galinn asked what she was waiting for.

She pulled away from him and turned her back with an exasperated, contemptuous sigh. She strode onstage weak in the knees and looking like she'd got lost.

"Damnit Honey." she whined. "I don't want to play hide and seek anymore."

Both Skraelings near broke their necks whipping heads in her direction as she stood twenty yards from them, gazing away, shirtless, pouting and stomping her foot.

"Where are you?" she called out again, and then jiggled back off into the woods.

CXIII The Spirit Of The Thing

Aud whipped off her shirt. Sigrid had never balked at outraging anyone. Aud kicked her shoes away intending to shed her trousers.

Jarnulf stopped her.

"It's nice to see you catch the spirit of the thing," he whispered, pointing to her shoes. "but you'll need those to run in."

She thanked him as she stepped out of her trousers to retrieve her shoes. Muted snickers in the gray green coaxed her back into her trousers with orders to just give her mark a glimpse.

Jarnulf walked her off into the dark out of earshot.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Jarnulf said. "after what you've just been through? If they catch you they'll use you far worse than Hrorik did."

"I didn't add up how much I owed all of you," she said. "until you and Olaf came to get me and Rakel at Hrorik's."

"Old Aunt Unn who took me in when I was little didn't have any money at all." she said. "and Galinn or Gunnar came by every week. I never went hungry or without decent clothes and shoes because they gave her silver behind my back."

"My sewing kit has five of the best needles I've ever seen because Bror spent a lot of time making them for me."

"Sigrid's funeral scared me sick. I couldn't believe God would let her into heaven. Then Ansvarr took me out into the forest to give me a night so wonderful and filled with magic as all the animals came to tell me things, it would take a year to share it all out to you.

"You and Olaf risked your lives to come get me. Olaf was ready to kill kin for me."

"All right." he said, suppressing a laugh. "So long as you follow our first rule."

"What's that?" she said.

"Don't, get, caught." he said. "No second tries if they don't chase you. And you probably won't hear them if they do. Short glimpse, no more and come right back."

Despite her instructions she hurled herself into her role with all the enthusiasm of the true artist. Her men wanted that Skraeling. She strode off determined to get him.

His double take at her appearance was predictable but overwrought. He licked his lips. Aud stopped, bent forward to blow him a kiss and began fondling herself while offering a streak of very blue invitations, as his would be assassins cringed in hiding, before turning around and again dropping her trousers to entice him with yet more.

He was drooling, drunk and half asleep but her finale was too obvious even for him.

He called out once and Olaf nailed him to the tree with a bolt through his neck.

No crowd came running or raised an alarm. All five of his neighbors were busy running in the opposite direction after Rakel and straight into Galinn, Gunnarr, Ansvarr, and Bror.

There was no denying Rakel's charms. Bone head, the eldest, found them so distracting he hadn't even considered drawing his hand axe as he bounded after her leading the charge. The other four showed more sense but it availed them naught as Bror and his crew knocked them down with crossbows.

Ansvarr cut their throats as Galinn dashed after her most ardent admirer.

Rakel snatched her hilt on the fly from behind the elm and spun right dropping onto her knee back towards the camp. Her point arced out like a flail. Three inches of it clove her pursuer's ribs.

As full of murderous intent as she was at the sight of his eyes begging her to undo what she'd just done as he slammed against her and sank shuddering to his knees, clutching at her shivering breasts with his life frothing down in dark pink bubbles over his guts, she leapt back, clenched her knees and retched.

It wasn't that she felt any pity for him. He'd wanted to rape her and in a way he had, thrusting his grotesque and horrid demise deep within her. In his death throes he was more obscene than even Aud's rape had been, as forced to watch, she struggled, tied up in Hrorik's steading.

The shock that she'd make such a judgment jolted her. Aud shouldn't have even been there. She'd been an accidental victim of Hrorik's barbarism. If Aud hadn't been taking care of her that night she'd never have been kidnapped. And Sigrid would still be alive.

Why couldn't that thing gurgling out its life behind her be Hrorik?

Behind her sounded a heavy butcher's chunk and she whipped back around raising her sword, lost her balance, and landed on her butt. Behind the kneeling, headless corpse toppling onto its side stood Galinn like some ghastly woods demon, a swirl of bark, leaf and earth tones from head to toe against a grayed backdrop of the same.

The Skraeling's white painted head rolled once and stopped with his terror stricken eyes fixed on her, and lips quivering.

Galinn's bloody sword was already cocked again high and close on his left, just in case. Galinn's blue eyes glowed down at her like the embers of a late night's fire. For all the warning he'd given her he might have floated up through the forest floor.

She struggled to her feet. He dragged her almost back off her feet into the brambles. Then he dashed off to hide the corpse.

She wriggled back into her shirt cursing Jarnulf's little snot who'd started it all. Her face and scalp pricked as it came to her that if she hadn't taken the snot's bait that morning, . . . As repugnant as Hrorik was she wished it had been herself he'd raped and not Aud.

Afire with the icy vanity of her own nobility she peered out through the briars searching for Galinn, anxious for him to come tell her what to do next.

She'd come along not really knowing what to expect. Some vague vision of at least shouted challenges between men before combat and then the terror and the horror of those murder images slammed back into her with all the subtlety of a right cross to the nose.

Galinn returned.

"But, they didn't have a chance." she said.

"Sure they did. They could have stayed home." Galinn whispered.

"It just seemed so, so, . . ." she said, mind blinded by what had just happened.

"Get that out of your head." Galinn said. "There'll be more of them, older, smarter, and sober. Maybe all of them together. You want to give them a chance?"

CXIV Kveldalf Senna

Across the field beyond the stream and lake at the southern end of the Skraeling camp the trees shivered behind a blanket of silver mist. Six horses walked out through that mist into the open, gray gold edge of dawn.

Hroghar and Da'hal rode through the dew soaked grass to either side of Kveldalf. Kjartan and Andar flanked them. The sixth horse behind Hroghar packed a wooden carving of a ram and its ewe, Leif. A dozen more horses carrying apprentices and two women followed them, spread out in a line behind them.

They stopped a hundred yards short of the stream, just out of Skraeling bow range.

Weighting Kveldalf's left arm was a green shield with a black raven emblazoned. She shook the twelve foot spear in her right hand in challenge. Cumbered with spear and shield, it had taken Da'hal a bit of doing to keep her from falling off her horse as they rode out across the field.

Hroghar and Da'hal boasted axes slung from their belts. Hilts poked up from behind their shoulders. They and the boys behind them showed warbows angled across their backs. The Skraeling's shorter bows hadn't the range of a Norse warbow.

Da'hal had called this measured halt at this distance from the stream, and the beaver's pond beyond it, the same distance as the furthest targets at Hrafnstadir's archery range.

The Skraelings had seen the Hrafn archery champions at Thing and while they suspected this lot weren't all that good they weren't anxious to find out as they waded through the pond and then the stream.

Kveldalf stood her spear upright, steadied herself against it, and rose in her stirrups. Hroghar had told her that their Skraeling egos would turn somersaults if they had to be insulted by a woman.

Hroghar dismounted.

She thought the few lines Da'hal and his father had scripted for her were a bit tame. Her closets were overflowing with hosts of bitten back perfect rejoinders after playing the winsome, perspective bride for years.

"Morrow?" she called out. "You effeminate wormling. Is that you, hiding in there? Come out and show yourself, you eater of skunks."

A chorus of howls and threats rang out from behind the willows. A voice, not Morrow's, called back.

"Chieftain Morrow spits on your words." it bellowed. "He will not argue with a woman."

Hroghar set the carving of Leif and his ram upright in the field before Kveldalf.

"Our men don't want to frighten you further." Kveldalf said. "We can smell your field leavings from here. If one of them spoke to you, your pathetic manhoods would shrivel up and fall off, before we can nail them to our church door."

One buck, muscular and twenty something looking, strode out through the willows to bluster, standing knee deep in the stream. He wore buckskin chaps and was brandishing a hand axe. The top half of his face and shaven skull were painted a chalk white beneath his foot long, black, top knot. Red, and black, diagonal stripes ran down his cheeks.

"What are you? You sound like a woman." he yelled. "Do Hrafns send their lodge pole to speak for them?"

The Skraeling shook his hand axe at her and shrieked out what he thought was a blood curdling war cry.

"Senna (insults) is a fine game," Kveldalf called out. "for children, Norse children. Will you bore us to death with it? Or maybe kill us with your wind of farts?"

"I will make a new pole, for my lodge, of your bones, freak." he shouted.

Da'hal told her to buck up, the fool was just blowing smoke, but Kveldalf needed no encouragement.

"Come out and fight, your champion against ours." she said.

"And be shot by your bows?" the buck said, stalling for time, until his friends could mount and ride after them. "We are not fools."

"We wouldn't waste arrows on such as you." she said. "We club rabbits. Come out and fight you stinking garbage eaters."

"Bitch." he shouted. "You stole this land from us. You take all the deer and bear and expect us to eat wolf? We will eat you instead."

"You'd starve to death," she said. "if it weren't for the rotting carrion they leave behind."

Morrow's mouthpiece leap and twirled in a rabid fit, splashing about in the stream as he champed his jaws. It took him a while to find his voice.

"You will all be carrion soon enough." he bellowed. "And your horse face will hang before my lodge on a pole.

"Enough with your empty threats." she yelled. "Send Queen Morrow out. And let her show how," she paused to spit, "brave, she is."

"Morrow is a Chieftain." the buck shouted. "He has taken many heads. He will not lower himself killing your makers of cook pots."

"You mean an Outlaw's head, don't you?" Kveldalf snapped back. "Many times?"

Howls and bellows of raucous laughter erupted from her escort and the buck stood puzzled for a moment before turning around to ask the willows what she'd meant.

Da'hal told her she'd make a hell of a lawyer. She ventured a sideways glance. He was beaming with pride at her.

Perhaps she'd been on the wrong tack with her doe eyed pursuit of the big guy.

"Is Morrow afraid?" she begged, leaning forward. "Of makers of cook pots? There isn't one of you brave enough to milk my cows. You squat and pee in our woods painted like drunken old women. Isn't there even one man among you? Or is it true that Skraeling brats are all sired by owls?"

The buck tried another war whoop. It had as little effect on her as his first had. She was having trouble hearing it through the rude guffaws from the giants flanking her.

CXV Come Get Them

Two hundred yards to her north, and across the stream, Gudrod and Thorarin cut both ends of the Skraeling picket line and hurried the two dozen horses off. Jarnulf, Olaf, and Ref crouched between them and the main camp, pointing their bows into it.

Bror recocked his weapon to cover them, looked down as he nocked a bolt, and when he looked back they were gone and in their place came three Skraelings, running hard.

Bror dumped one with a heart shot.

The other two threw themselves flat as Bror melted back into the trees.

"If you leave now," Kveldalf shouted. "we will only take the head of Nacarr's bitch, the mare who cowers behind you. The she goat who will be your death if you stay."

Cries of alarm erupted at the northern end of the Skraeling's camp.

"Give her to us, and walk away." Kveldalf said. "We will keep your horses as tribute."

"Come get them." the Skraeling in the stream snorted.

"We just did." Kveldalf said.

She goaded her horse a few steps forward, leaned out of her saddle, and draped a Skraeling breastplate of bones and feathers around the neck of Leif's caricature.

"With this pole we scorn you as unmanly, you hideous, creeping, hag worms." she howled, shaking her spear at them.

Then she and her escort turned their horses, showing their backs.

Hroghar lifted his horse's tail high and held it up, pointing to what he thought of them, before he remounted, and then together they rode at a walk with their reinforcements back towards the wood's edge.

At the tail end of the train of stolen horses Thorarin yelled those horses into a trot as eight howling savages chased after them. Thorarin glared white eyed back over his shoulder in the idiot hope he might see the first arrow and twist out of its way.

Thirty yards behind him a Skraeling in chaps leapt forward and planted himself in the dirt like an arrow come to earth. He raised his bow. He was almost at full draw when he staggered sideways as if slammed by a hammer.

Ansvarr's bolt sped on through him to ricochet off a willow at the stream's lip. More bolts zipped into the Skraelings behind the first and those not hit doubled their pace charging back toward camp.

Thorarin and Gudrod galloped the stolen horses into a heavy lather with both feeling strangely cheated that they weren't creeping through the bushes with their friends looking for the same crowd they now prayed they wouldn't run into. They were to get rid of the horses, shoot them or run them over a cliff, and rejoin the others at the fall back point where their own horses waited.

A mile east of the Skraeling camp Aud and her men hauled up panting and sweating. Aud tucked her thorn scratched treasures back inside her shirt.

Ref kissed her cheek and asked if she'd rather have sprinted through the briars in only her boots. Rakel and her four joined them, also scratched and out of breath. Everyone took a quick head count.

Jarnulf hooked a finger under Aud's chin. She gazed up at him like a dog expecting a pat on the head.

"Yuck." she said as he swiped two bacon greased, green fingers over her lips and then smeared the rest of her with browns and blacks, with Jarnulf agreeing that the Skraelings had already seen more than too much of her.

Rakel balked, pulling away as Ansvarr tried to paint her.

Gunnarr laid his hand on her shoulder and pointed east.

"Go," he said. "wait with Aerin and the horses."

She started an apology and he cut her off saying it didn't matter. She was welcome to do as she pleased and no one would think the less of her for it, anywhere but here and now where she'd do exactly as she was told. If she wanted to be a spoiled little child and get herself gang raped and slowly carved to pieces, well that was her right too. But she had no business getting the rest of them killed along with her.

Jarnulf finished painting Aud, still not looking at Rakel. Gunnarr had done a much better job of it than he could have. Gunnarr's delivery was flat, colorless, and matter of fact. But then Gunnarr was older, and he hadn't spent a year fighting with her, in and out of bed.

Rakel again apologized and humbly agreed to his terms.

"Exactly, as you are told." Gunnarr said.

Hlif hugged the back of her elm. The Skraeling murder howls grew ever more deafening, and terrifying as they drew nearer. Five of her men, and Aud and Rakel flew past her puffing and grunting in a flat out sprint. Then Olaf flashed into view loping along looking back over his shoulder. He passed her and stopped twenty feet beyond, turned and dropped onto one knee, and shouldered his bow in the middle of the trail.

CXVI Gone

Three Skraelings dashed into view with hand axes and black, pitted falchions held high. Hlif was mightily tempted as they drew abreast her. In the excitement Olaf had forgotten to give the order.

A mob of their neighbors, perhaps twenty and five, rounded the bend in the trail all gibbering and grinning like Lucifer's cooks beneath their war paint. Olaf dropped his middle man with a chest shot and more bolts screamed out of the woods behind him. Those Skraelings who weren't slammed grunting off their feet faltered a moment.

Olaf bellowed to her.

She swung, the rope whipped skyward with a loud snap and ten of the Skraelings looked up as the log swooped down.

One fool squatted on his hams, thrusting his hand axe out before him in the insanity of his terror. The log did every damage to his skull but to take it clean off, and dashed his neighbors aside with a fusillade of thuds, breaking ribs, backs, legs and more screams.

Olaf reloaded his bow as she darted past him and then he too melted into the woods after her.

The eastern sliver of pale, blue gold was growing.

To Jarnulf's straining eyes it showed cracked and fissured by brown black elms, and birches in black slashed grays. An infinite broidery of diamonds still twinkled in the cobalt west, and in the zenith, as if God had wrapped the world in his finest cloak.

Jarnulf snickered, amused to think that God was lifting its edge and peering beneath to witness His hunters approaching, doing His work as they paused here to amputate fingers and toes, and then there, hands, feet, arms, legs, and finally the very head from the devil, who was stupidly pursuing them beyond the safe bounds of his own realm, the realm of owls, the night.

Their mounts and Aerin waited a mere hundred yards ahead. There he would put the girls on horseback, slap them away them east, and finally have them out from underfoot.

"Damn you." Rakel panted. "This whole damn place is lousy with your murder traps."

"Isn't it lovely?" Olaf laughed.

"Now it is." Rakel said. "Aud and I could have fallen into one when that worm kidnapped us."

"You were safe enough with Hrorik covering his trail in the stream." Olaf said. "Why do you think we didn't come charging up behind you?"

Rakel pondered his import a moment, and then her despite of him, and Jarnulf too, trebled. They could have stopped it earlier before Aud was so brutalized, and they hadn't.

Jarnulf burst into the silent thicket ahead of Ansvarr and Bror, and the light within him was sucked out into Satan's black cauldron.

Aerin and their horses were gone.

Olaf darted in after Ansvarr and Bror. Olaf cast quickly through the tracks and sorrowfully agreed with Ansvarr that the prints, four Skraelings among them, were too old.

"We have to go get her." Jarnulf said.

"Aerin's gone." Ansvarr said. "We have no time for this."

Ansvarr's voice hit him like a wall of lead, as it had seven summers ago when Ansvarr loomed over the table before him and Da'hal within Mordach's, and Ansvarr told him that Ulf was gone, and that he and Galinn had told his mother, and that he should go home to her.

"This is my fault. I should never have left her here alone." Jarnulf said.

"It's not your fault," Ansvarr said. "but it will be if more of our folk get killed because we're off chasing after her."

Jarnulf spared a single, haunted, mortified gaze of farewell at the horse tracks leading off north into the trees. Bror said that he was sorry, and Olaf looked away.

"I'm beyond sorry." Jarnulf said. "I'm taking vengeance, one bloody, red wave of it."

Ansvarr grabbed Jarnulf's shoulders.

"When it's over." Ansvarr said. "There'll be time, with whatever's left of this filth. Right now they have to chase us into that hillside. Anything else and all our people are going to die or wish they had."

The men pushed their way out through the briars to rejoin the others.

"I'm sorry." Jarnulf said. "Our horses, Aerin, they're gone."

Rakel caught his arm. He angrily shook her off.

"We have to go." he said.

"But we can't just leave her." Rakel said.

He pointed north.

"Aerin's lying out there somewhere, dead. We can't help her." he said.

Hlif trembled, and said nothing but of all she plainly took it the hardest. Jarnulf turned east, back toward Hroald and the women waiting at the ambush.

"We're on foot." he said. "Run."

Kveldalf's party set south in haste to rejoin the hunters. Da'hal rode point. Kjartan rode next with Kveldalf behind him. Then trailed the apprentices with Tjorni at their midpoint and Hroghar and Andar watching their back trail.

Two miles they covered with Da'hal continually turning to motion Kveldalf to silence. She kept giggling. Had he been alone he'd joyfully have snuck back to the Skraeling camp and had a merry, and bloody time tweaking their hairless chins, but Nahri were expected soon.

It might have been safer to head north before turning east but the country there was broken and open. His women and kids could be spotted by Morrow's rabble chasing after their stolen horses. The Nahri would be coming from the south. He hoped they'd miss each other in the thick forest.

Twenty yards ahead was an open clearing.

Da'hal raised his hand and signaling them to follow he turned east to cross the stream. Olaf's huge black stallion entered the willows along its bank and catlike, it gingerly picked its way through the frigid water and over the stream bed's loose shale, intuiting its rider's desire for stealth.

Da'hal tightened his grip on his axe. He'd have to break down and buy himself such an intelligent and sensitive mount. This horse might even be able to sneak up on a moose. Moose were extremely wary.

They climbed the far bank and Kjartan joined him with his bow nocked and ready. There in the cold, black shades beneath the spruces they lurked, unseen as the fears of trolls in a stranger's dreams till finally Hroghar joined them and they then set off east again, in order.

A quarter mile further Kveldalf giggled again and Da'hal turned, ready to throttle her. Stigandi stopped short and snorted. Da'hal whipped about and boomed out the cry he'd dreaded raising.

"Nahri!"

CXVII Cwithan Orcneas

Two half breeds in hides and a Norseman in homespun rushed at him from the light glaring between the black pines, two with drawn swords. The third raised his bow and Kjartan's arrow ruined his throat. Thirty yards behind them came at least six more, and the yells of even more further east.

Da'hal bethought himself of Olaf's earlier whisper.

"Cwithan," he started.

Stigandi exploded beneath him, rearing and striking with his hooves at the first breed, hurling the man back with a broken shoulder.

Da'hal wasn't half the horseman he thought was. He leaned flat against Stigandi's neck, his left arm wrapped under it clutching desperate at the useless reins. As Stigandi descended kicking and biting Da'hal leaned sideways from the saddle, his huge, iron legs vised around the stallion's barrel as he caved in a second breed's face with a thrust of his axe.

The Norseman darted in to grab at the reins.

Stigandi bit his cheek off and then head butted him to earth before stomping the screaming man's guts in as all round them whistled a deadly flock of Hrafn arrows.

Behind Da'hal a chorus of savage young voices shattered the still in promises of murder. The little fools were supposed to shoot and run but they'd forgotten all about that and were determined to fight to the death beside him.

Stigandi ignored him as if he'd forgotten he had a rider, jerking and twisting about to attack Nahri after Nahri with devastating effect. They hadn't expected the archer's barrage and as they dashed behind trees the horse had a field day. It struck with hoof, head, and teeth, the Nahri's blades availing them naught. At its sixth victory Da'hal found himself flying through the air, and listening to Kveldalf screaming clean over Kjartan's lusty cursing.

His new warbow across his back clubbed him hard as he landed sideways atop it. He shot to his feet to glimpse Kveldalf being muscled off southward into the open by three half breeds. Kjartan had kept his head. He was loosing shaft after shaft at them. All around him the enemy backed cringing from Stigandi.

It was most encouraging. Nacarr's Thingmen had been routed by a horse.

Da'hal on foot pounded out into the clearing after that silly Kveldalf and her captors, yelling at them to stand and fight like men.

Fifteen turned and came for him. Cocking his cleaver Da'hal ran at them. Three more hastily aimed arrows whizzed out of the trees behind him to no effect.

It proved little different from slaughtering the steers before winter, the same look in their eyes as he advanced, the same faltering back from him. None really wanted to fight. It was too easy, a cheat.

Where was the thrill, the fire fable spoke of as Richard's? It was getting too close for arrows, but still none would close with him. He had to chase the filth to cleave them. They turned. Behind him his father's voice boomed out.

"Stop! Shoot them!" Hroghar commanded.

A handful of shafts sped from the trees behind him. Only one found its mark. But of this Da'hal knew nothing. Five of his Nahri broke and fled west howling.

Their screams were answered thinly by a boy's defiant challenge to battle. Frakki, all hundred and twenty pounds of him, standing in his stirrups atop Galinn's ancient pack horse cantered into the open toward them with a woods axe swaying above him.

Da'hal's longed for fury found him.

It was a black, and blood drinking, ruthless rage, divorced utterly from those qualities accounted decent in men, exactly the one Couer de Lion had been so in thrall to. Da'hal's remaining nine Nahri, ringing him like starved wolves, advancing to feint, and then retreat, designing to hobble him from behind, gave ground as one before his awful rage, and he dashed toward Frakki.

Galinn's horse panicked, rearing and throwing Frakki. Three men rushed Frakki. A golden yearling filly burst from the dark trees into the early light. Little blonde Tjorni, swaying in her saddle, wrestled her wood chopper up and to the ready. She swung at one of Frakki's attackers and missed. The Nahri swung his blade out toward her ribs as her mount walked past carrying her scarcely out of reach.

Da'hal's roar shook the glade as he flew at the man. Da'hal's axe shore away sword, arm, and shoulder.

He kicked the second Nahri's leg and the man went down onto his knee screaming. The leg was bent out sideways, the knee demolished. At Da'hal's second axe swing the third Nahri's face fell to earth. The man's remainder swayed drunkenly for a moment, then toppled to join his face in the dirt.

Andar's arrow found the knee broke cripple's heart. Da'hal leapt back among the remaining nine like a cat among pigeons. And like pigeons seven scattered, leaving him to Kveldalf and the two he promptly felled with his haft's steel butt cap.

This, Da'hal thought, Richard knew this feeling on the sands before Jaffa after leaping from his ship's bow into the surf. Hundreds of Saracens had stared thunderstruck at him as he rose, alone, from that surf with his axe to relieve the beleaguered city or fulfill his vow to die with them. The Infidels, upon tasting his mettle and edge, recoiled.

Da'hal was sorely tempted to chase the fleeing Nahri but Hroghar's voice behind him, ordering the women and apprentices again to stay put, arrested his design. The fellow he'd clubbed with his haft groaned feebly and Da'hal leisurely buried his axe in the man's neck on his way to rejoin his father. Hroghar, still mounted and clutching his bow glared angrily down at him.

Da'hal cursed his luck. If only his father had stayed in Normandy, if only he'd been born a noble, he would have taken up where Richard left off. He could indeed have returned the entire Kingdom of Christ to its rightful heirs if not for cruel fate.

"Do you feel better now?" Hroghar demanded. "Idiot."

"Didn't you see them run?" Da'hal said. "They're Nacarr's dregs. His real fighters went off with Tore."

Hroghar swept his arm around them at the boys sorrowfully re sheathing their unblooded swords. Mixed in their eyes burned rapt adoration for their Da'hal, and mountains of jealousy. Kveldalf seemed about to melt with worship for her rescuer. Tjorni, in her saddle, was bent forward clutching her knees and breathing hard.

"You've got them," Hroghar growled. "thinking they're you. You even think you're you."

The question of Olaf's horse remained. Da'hal was beyond fearing anything at the moment, but still that black fiend Olaf had lent him couldn't be a horse. It was down on its fore knees biting at one of its victims, just to make certain. Its ears were still back, eyes wide, nostrils flared, and it was grunting as if chanting a galdrar, offering the soul of its victim to its true master, in hell.

Devil it doubtless was, but it was his friend Olaf's devil, and Olaf would want it back. What would Richard have done? Da'hal clenched his fists, choking his axe haft, and strode toward it.

He called its name, once. The brute stood erect and quit its troll wise tirade, and came to him. After a quick sniff it closed its lips and relaxed its ears. It nuzzled him.

It was plainly not of this world.

But it would have been nice, if, No, the infernal thing had actually warned him before it went berserk. This was a horse for a King, or a Norman war Lord. Olaf would understand, gold, every ounce he owned. Olaf wanted riches. He was always scheming after them. Sure, Olaf would sell him Stigandi, about as soon as Mordach would part with Ragi's axe.

Da'hal gathered the reins. He called his people close for a hushed conference. The Nahri had been a scouting party. They would be back quickly, lots of them.

"Kjartan, you and Andar, with me." he said.

He asked Frakki if he and Draeng were sure they could find the walls from here. They were sure. He ordered his father to go with them. Fathers are rarely pleased with being ordered to do anything by their sons. Hroghar loudly proved the rule.

Ignoring him Da'hal unslung his bow and drew it to test. It had not cracked in his fall from Stigandi. His sworn brother had carved well.

Da'hal told his father that if he thought tweaking Morrow's chin had been fun, the walls were going to delight him no end. Hroghar remained unassuaged. Da'hal tossed in the sweetener that the lads would have great need of his strength and axe. Da'hal ordered them all off, and quickly, and reminded the boys to watch the damn trail.

Then he and his reddened axe remounted, and Hroghar and his troop rode off.

Hroghar ground his teeth and knit his brows, muttering through his long, orange beard over just where he'd gone wrong in raising such a damn fool. Hroghar wanted to tell his son to be careful, but knew it would be useless. To his son these woods were familiar as his bed closet.

"His strength?" Kjartan asked Da'hal. "Tjorni and Kveldalf could handle that."

"He's better at pounding things than sneaking through the woods." Da'hal said.

"After that troll storm you just raised?" Andar said.

They trotted their horses to the eastern end of the glade where they lurked in the treeline with warbows at the ready. The last thud of his folk's hooves had hardly faded when similar sounds carried across the glade from westward. But there were a lot more of them and coming hard.

The three rose in their stirrups and drew.

The Nahri swept north and then east through the trees, avoiding the open. Da'hal roared out impossible suggestions to them and then he and the twins loosed blind into the woods many yards distant. Then they galloped off north across the enemy's front to draw them away from Hroghar and the rest. The Nahri gave chase.

Da'hal's initial relief that Stigandi was behaving himself, he hadn't thrown him in the last few hundred yards, quickly soured. Three times already the horse had disobeyed his kneed commands, avoiding low branches he hadn't seen. Olaf's damned horse was wet nursing him.

A dozen shafts, in as many heartbeats, zipped by at shaving distance.

"We got them." Da'hal yelled. "Run."

A half mile further their pursuers fell off and turned north to make for their rendezvous with the Skraelings.

The Hrafns reined in and galloped after the Nahri. They caught up to them. The Nahri were at least a hundred, more than twice the strength they should be. Their column was strung out in the disorder of overconfidence. Da'hal slung his bow again across his back.

He ordered the twins not to follow him but to stay within the trees and clear a path for him with their bows.

Da'hal kicked Stigandi's flanks, hard. Stigandi did not ignore him this time, and near dumped him again as they hurtled toward the Nahri's rear. Da'hal stood, calling on God, Thor and Odinn in a single breath as he readied his axe. Stigandi leapt a fallen tree with three feet to spare, and Da'hal, clinging for dear life, invoked Jesus, for once in true penitence.

CXVIII The Troll Means Business

Mounted in the Nahri van rode Chieftain Nacarr.

He hadn't slept well. Nightmares of those huge snapping tortoises had kept him up through the night again. And he was in a vile taking with seven of his Thingmen, useless cowards who'd scuttled back at the run, terrified, with a tale of some nightmare Jotun killing six of their neighbors.

It was unstoppable. Its ferocity knew no bounds. Its rage was beyond all sufferance. It was this that and the other, all bigger than life and burst up out of Hell. Nacarr knew what it was. It was one, goddamn blacksmith who thought he was King Richard.

He'd marked Da'hal from an early age at Thing. They'd even spoken a few times there, in Frankish. The ass had indeed been beyond sufferance, as if he were nobility. A man with his brawn and talent for trampling on whatever got in his way might get himself Outlawed someday, and become a useful tool, his own Nahri tool.

But Da'hal Hrogharson hadn't got himself Outlawed, and after this nonsense, oh well.

His dead Thingmen were nothing, more Outlaws were always coming from Hellulandia, but those God awful screams the Jotun wrenched from his fiddle, those alone were enough to want him dead.

And then that crap about the horse from Hel killing three more. One smith and a horse? There'd be lashings by nightfall for those cowards who'd left his other cowards to the wolves and crows after he'd dealt with Tore's puffed up twat of a Marshal, and his hunters, and those idiot Skraelings. His Thingmen had been biting his ass to take this vengeance for years. Tore's hunters had been killing their useless, poaching, kinsmen for decades.

It would be nice if Skjalg and his hundred finished off Tore's eighty, but if not, Skjalg was become a pain in the ass anyway, waxing louder by the day about his rights. None of his Thingmen had any rights save those he granted them. They all lay outside the law. He and Lalghar would straighten out what remained of the winners, if any of Tore's Thingmen or his own ever straggled back.

And then there was Bergthora, his bed witch. Though her sacrificings appalled most of his dregs into towing the line it was probably best to just cut her throat too. She'd pulled that evil eye on him once, in the beginning. He'd slapped her silly. She knew better than to bullshit him with it again though he'd not put a knife in the dark past her.

He was about to trade up and she'd raise all manner of hell over his new bed toy.

The Nahri footmen straggling along in the rear were noisily bolstering each other, and deriding their neighbors who'd fled from the Jotun and Hel horse. The Hrafns were nothing in numbers and less in courage.

Only five of their mounted neighbors rode among them. Nacarr and the other four dozen horse walked well ahead, combing the woods on both flanks. And so, those in the rear yacking away missed the muffled thunder careering toward them through the elms.

The blue black Hel fiend burst from the trees twenty yards off their left flank. The furied pounding of its hooves rolled in on them like the spades of the gods, slamming down the earth on their own graves.

The first man to glance near died of fright shrieking his alarm. A huge, ravenous seeming troll with black hair and stubbled beard leant forward atop the thundering fiend. The troll's ice blue eyes shot bolts of murder lightning bright as the sparkings of early sun, silver and gold, from its huge axe, high, back, and away in its right hand.

The troll meant business.

The axe was already blooded.

Da'hal again bethought himself of Olaf's whisper, and this time, warning. He locked his legs tight and strangled the saddle's pommel.

"Cwithan Orcneas." Da'hal roared. (Bewail and lament, Evil spirits of the dead.)

Stigandi accelerated even further as if shot from a bow.

Three Nahri, in their terror, had trouble even finding their hilts. The buckskinned nightmare was summonsing them to Hel in a tongue from the grave, the West Saxon of centuries now dead, and buried. The draugar of some eldritch Jotun had marked their souls for its breakfast.

Dozens more Nahri turned drawing steel and bowstring, and the awful apparition stayed their hearts and hands as they prayed that another forty just like them weren't coming hard, from the forest, behind.

Da'hal found Stigandi's attack command ringing with a most apt, and emboldening sonority. He bellowed it out again. It seemed to prison the Nahri in shackles of irresolution and terror.

A mounted Nahri bowman drew down on Da'hal. Andar's arrow hammered the bowman sideways from his horse.

Kjartan's shaft tore clean through another horse's ribs and on into the one behind it. The first horse dropped to its knees screaming and collapsed onto its side still screaming, directly in Stigandi's path. The rider scrambled erect, clutching his hilt and gaping stupidly at the impending horrors. Stigandi hurdled the dying horse.

Stigandi's chest slammed square into the panic frozen Nahri's face, hurling him flat with a broken neck as Jotun and Hel horse descended, crashing onward through the whirling mob.

Da'hal clung hard, lashing out with axe into faces and muzzles streaking by. Men and mounts shrieked as Da'hal ruined them and Stigandi slammed others aside.

Now in the press's midst one man threw himself at Da'hal's left side and clung, swept along with them. Da'hal dared not axe the man. He might injure Stigandi.

Da'hal grabbed the man's hair and ripped out a large, bloody turve of it, and another scream sounded above the tumult as the fool dropped away.

Ten yards further Da'hal and Stigandi were through them and speeding off into the sanctuary of the morning forest. They had wreaked a most bloody impression upon the Nahri.

It took the greatly relieved Nahri a moment or two to realize that it had only been one horse, and one demon, or perhaps two demons. The sole remaining horseman galloped off chasing Da'hal. The footmen's confusion persisted as they milled frantic, gaping back to where the first horseman had appeared, awaiting more of them.

Andar and Kjartan allowed the mounted Nahri a moment, and those on foot time to turn to each other, before sending their whistling, feathered ferrymen to Hel to five of those remaining.

Da'hal leaned forward hugging Stigandi's neck. Possessing this horse would be worth even murder and Outlawry. Both he and Jarnulf, and Badger had offered sworn brotherhood to Olaf. Olaf laughed at them, saying that there was no need for such ceremony, as his weapons and his life always came with his friendship.

Da'hal softly cursed Olaf, the friend he could never betray, even for this horse. Da'hal's nape chilled. He might have got Stigandi injured.

There had been an awful lot of them, too many for just the Nahri. And then it struck him, that horseman just beyond his edge in the fray, the one Stigandi was even now pulling away from. It was Orlyg Lalgharson.

Jarnulf's crew dashed headlong through the half-light, their brows and backs pouring hot sweat, and each breath came as ice in their lungs. On their right dim red gray fire cherries and black willows began subsuming the thinning elms and maples, and soon they were pounding past a swamp thick with brambles and ice choked, still water. Two hundred yards farther the trees opened up, and the trail retreated north from the swamp.

To their left, and north, the ground rose choked with old elms and white birches. Before them the trail became an obstacle park of fresh cut stumps. It measured twenty yards by forty. At its east limit, the direction of their retreat, the forest loomed again, solid as a steading's wall. High above the stumps hung another huge log, a second deadfall. It stood out like a longship.

You can't expect them to fall for that again." Rakel panted.

CXIX A Mistake

"Counting on it." Olaf said.

That did it for Rakel. Olaf was not as simple as she'd suspected. He was far worse. There were at least a hundred murderers biting their heels, and Jarnulf's idiot friend wasn't worried in the least but clutched instead in some dark, moronic humor.

Olaf congratulated Hlif on her rope chopping and stationed her with her axe in the brush blind surrounding this deadfall's release line, facing across the stump park into the swamp. No one would willingly mire themselves in the swamp at any time, but especially not now when up to their waists in the frigid muck they'd be perfect targets for archers.

Olaf and the three girls squatted behind their brush as Jarnulf, Bror and the hunters sprinted up the rise into the wood behind them.

"This is going to get close, and personal, isn't it?" Rakel said.

Olaf grinned back at her, mirthlessly, and waved his stolen, Skraeling hand axe up under her nose.

"All too personal for them." Olaf said.

Rakel wondered if perhaps she'd sold Olaf short. He might be simple but he wasn't short on courage. Aside from the hand axe, Olaf bore his crossbow, quiver, sword, and tiny skinning knife. In Anja's hurry, she'd forgot his fighting knife.

Rakel undid her belt and slipped her own huge knife and sheath from it. She handed them to Olaf. Olaf kissed her forehead and thrust them into his belt.

The rise behind them, barely man height, fell quickly again to the level and flat copse beyond. Thirty yards north the clearing presented an idyllic glade, as if manicured for a picnic. Ten yards into the open beyond the hunters was a hedge of mountain laurel two yards wide by twenty long.

Jarnulf, Bror, Ansvarr and Galinn lay flat, hidden in the elms beneath the rise's crest, sighting over their bows and the hedge, across the glade. At a right angle off to their right were Gunnarr and Ref likewise skulking and sighting. They didn't wait long.

Bird song peppered the early light flitting dreamy through the elms and birches. A swath of the glade's floor behind the hedgerow, two yards wide, dipped slightly. A keen eye searching carefully might discern stringers of taut, tarred rope perpendicular to the depression every couple of feet, but the stakes tying the lines were still buried, and out of view.

Across the glade the trees were choked with violet shadows. Within them one blue jay, and then two more, gave something a raucous scolding.

A Skraeling slunk cautiously out, and the hunters held their fire. Three more crouched warily into the open bearing short, knocked, hunting bows. Six breaths later almost thirty rushed out in war paint brandishing long handled hand axes and short, iron falchions, intent on taking the deadfall crew unawares from behind.

Jarnulf lay out flat atop the frozen compost beneath the trees vised in the black iron depths of his rage. Bror lay to his right and Galinn his left, with Ansvarr to Galinn's left, all spying with the intensity of poisonous, death still spiders at their holes, awaiting the approach of their unwary prey who were now speeding silent across the glade toward them.

Those things, those spawn of Cain, those Godless trolls, had stolen his Aerin. Though he'd never possessed her in that way, she'd been more his than Mirha or even Rakel. The laughs and smiles they'd shared were beyond counting. Never had they a cross word, aside from her running jibe over the turnips, never the pettiness, the jealousies, hurt feelings, and barbed words that came with owning each other, and now she lay dead a mile or two away, somewhere on this same, frozen bed of leaves and nettles, naked, and alone. It was his fault.

He'd known damn well better than to let her ship along on this tide of blood. He could have said no, but he hadn't. He'd hew and hurl them all into hell for his Aerin.

The trolls were halfway across the open when Gunnarr and Ref shot two of their right flank. The others dashed headlong for the hedgerow.

A second salvo from Gunnarr and Ref spurred them into and through the brambles.

Under their weight the depression behind it collapsed and seven plummeted, screaming, from view.

Jarnulf and his crew shot four more milling at the trench's edge.

The blood mad survivors raced west around the trap to close with their assassins. They sprinted through the elms flat out and howling. Their hideous, painted, brown faces were slashed deep with hate shadows.

To Rakel, hiding with Olaf, they seemed an army, huge, all of them, coming on at that terrible, inexorable rush, leaping and bounding toward them shrieking and clanging their long hand axes against their iron falchions.

Terror swept ahead of them in a dark and tangible aurora through the elms and birches, as it had when the trolls came for her as a little girl in her nightmares. Panicked, she looked up into the trees as if more might drop down from above. Rats scurried, gnawing at the ice in her veins. This couldn't be happening. Jarnulf and her men had made an awful mistake, and they were all going to die horribly.

The odds were four to one now, and the time for bows past. The enemy were fifteen yards away. Ansvarr and Galinn moved south to take their right flank.

"Godless dog eaters." Galinn spat, drawing sword and knife. "Deny them even your contempt."

Bror, ordering Jarnulf with him, backed away toward their attacker's left flank, and the trench in the glade. Most of the enemy seized their intent upon the two likeliest victims, the small black haired man and the other with his long, ridiculous, fragile looking knives.

Four bolts from the deadfall claimed three more attackers as the girls and Olaf fired, and then Olaf sprang leaping to join Galinn and Ansvarr, hammering into the enemy, collapsing their weakened flank in on itself toward Jarnulf and Bror.

Three attacked Olaf, and Rakel discovered that the mistake had been made by the Skraelings.

The howler to Olaf's left ran in, wide open, with hand axe high and knife low, trusting the hideousness of his war face to do his killing for him.

Olaf hurled his stolen hand axe into the man's cheek, burying it deep. The center Skraeling's falchion descended rushing, seeking Olaf's heart. Olaf whirled right, clanking the falchion aside with Hroghar's Norman steel which continued its arc clean through the third man's shoulder. The third Skraeling's iron falchion, locked in his fingers, fell to earth.

The man in the middle renewed himself hurtling bodily at Olaf, designing to knock him back, off balance, and then chop his axe into Olaf's face.

The Skraeling thought he'd slammed into a boulder.

Olaf's empty hand vised the savage's manhood and ripped him, screaming, up onto his toes. Olaf round-housed his pommel into the man's ear. Olaf felt the skull break. Olaf discarded him.

The odds were now three to one and Rakel's world changed.

Da'hal, galloping hard before the pack of Nahri riders, was more furious than frightened despite the occasional arrow from the older bowman behind him, out ahead of the others. For years he'd slept with aching dreams of catching Nacarr on his side of the river. And now Nacarr was here behind him, and he was running away.

The woods ahead were fairly open. A sharp, rising bend bulged into the trail ahead. Stigandi figured he knew where they were going, and the urgency demanded. He ignored Da'hal's tug at the bit in his mouth. Da'hal yanked his right ear rearward, and he veered back into the trail. He and Da'hal had come to an understanding. Da'hal had finally got it and taken charge.

Behind them Thorfinn Pallson spurred his stallion hard. That stinking big, black haired Hrafn was only forty yards ahead. He was running broadside, at spitting range, that giant pervert who'd just scalped his son Jon. The Hrafn's mount swept hard left ahead of him, following the trail. Thorfinn galloped into the elbow of woods to cut the Hrafn's lead. Thorfinn raised his bow.

CXX The Dream Gift

The Hrafn troll gaped back wide eyed and with his reins whipped his black horse. Thorfinn again dug his spurs deep, praying as he drew that this arrow would also find the slanderer and murderer of his other son Sumarlidi. Before him in the wood, twenty feet ahead, the ground dipped as though dished by a giant spoon.

Thorfinn hurled his bow aside scrabbling for his reins and bellowing to his horse to stop. Thorfinn yanked his reins back hard. His horse slewed sideways, and stepped a rear hoof, and its weight into the depression and the ground gave beneath them.

Thorfinn screamed as they toppled sideways. A stringer of tarred rope ripped the flesh from his cheek and then the bite of five lance points seared through him.

His mount's screams in the confines of the pit as it bucked in its death throes burst his ear drums, rocking the stakes that pierced him back and forth, tearing him apart. Those who have never before heard a horse being ripped apart by bear or wolves, in the night, sometimes mistake it for an infant, a ten foot tall infant.

Hroghar peered anxious down through the scrub and saplings scattered over the hill before him. Frakki and Draeng had led them straight up the gentle incline with many cautions not to stray to one side or the other.

Hroghar's axe leaned ready against the retaining wall, double thick, of great elm trunks. Behind that man high wall was piled ton upon ton of felled timber and granite boulders. Hroghar leaned forward against the butt of his twenty pound mallet, one of three Da'hal and his hunters had left here last summer when they erected this murder engine.

Hroghar was not often given to melancholy but straining for the sounds of approaching Nahri pursuing his son and the twins, he floundered deep in its unmanly depths filled with the dread that that pursuit wouldn't come, that his son had been taken and killed.

No man wishes to depart this world without heirs. He had lived almost his full fifty winters. But his son, his magnificent, damn fool son, the hero, might not live to see his own sons.

Hroghar damned himself for an old woman at having tried to send the girls back to Hroald and the others. Little Frakki had patiently, and most respectfully, explained to him that they'd be in more danger off by themselves than they were right here.

Hroghar shot another worried glance at the squared beam angled between the retaining wall and the ground before it. It seemed a miracle that it and the one at the wall's far end forty feet distant hadn't given way in the last year.

The view on the way up had disclosed only a rocky hilltop with thick scrub growing before it. The retaining wall was as well-hidden as the pits along both sides of the approach. It was no wonder now, that Da'hal hadn't wanted to work with him at the forge on his days off, last summer.

Draeng said they'd thrown up all manner of nightmares out here at Hroald's instigation, just in case. That was one hell of a lot of work for just in case. And not Da'hal nor a single hunter, nor any of the lads had breathed a word of it.

Hroghar promised himself many, very pointed questions with his friend Hroald when this was over, and then those same questions with Tore. Hroald had seemed strangely at ease last night as they all rode off without him into the teeth of this blood storm. Just in case. My ass.

Hroghar fell to musing over Hroald and Eikinn, and Tore and Starri and Thidrandri's queer courtship of Nacarr and Morrow these years past at Thing, but before he'd got to the bottom of that tangled wool basket Draeng's whistle, from the wall's far end, needled him.

The noise of angry, mounted men coming their way in a hurry swelled, pounding down the early bird song.

Draeng winked at him, hefting his mallet, and Hroghar prayed, as behind them Kveldalf, Tjorni, Frakki and the youngsters raised their bows. Draeng showed more foresight than Hroghar did, softly reminding all not to shoot as the first men coming would be Da'hal and Andar and Kjartan.

Hroghar determined himself to charge down the hill, through the wreckage, and die butchering their enemies if Da'hal were not ahead of them. It would hurt less than telling his wife Genevieve.

Draeng smiled to himself. Old Priest Hroald was getting smarter and smarter. He and Frakki had bitched bucketsful when Hroald started them digging. They'd been thirteen. They wanted to hunt. Any idiot could dig boulders out of the ground. Hroald said only that life was full of disappointments. Get used to them.

And why out here facing west? Was he afraid of Eikinn's Ottarrs? The Nahri'd be a problem if anyone was. Nahristadir was due south.

Bror straightened them out. Had they ever known a wolf to come in at the front door? Thirteen wolves on Hellulandia, instead of himself, were rotting in their graves because they hadn't minded their back doors.

These men, Rakel thought, Ansvarr and Galinn, these slow spoken, and near impossible to truly anger, near penniless foster uncles who continually teased and poked at her, and that big fool Olaf and Jarnulf along with them before her very eyes, were no more. In their place raged savage, bloodthirsty big cats with an undreamt, and red ferocity through the trolls.

But Bror had her worried. Considering his reputation she'd expected more from him. And there were still a lot of trolls.

She stood, drawing her sword.

CXXI Broken Necklaces

Aud grabbed her.

"I told you they knew what they were doing." Aud said. "Load your bow."

Jarnulf cut down, clean and straight. He thrilled, feeling his blade drink the living bone and brain. His short sword set aside another hand axe, and turning, drove up into his second foe's armpit, as he booted the first away, freeing his long sword.

Elation seized him quickening his already fired blood, and recognizing it he embraced it as his long lost, and till now unborn, brother. His first steps, feints and entrappings had been rigid and mechanical, by the numbers, but at each bite of his edge into their wills growing ever more sure, more daring in their strength, his heart's desire tumbling cataract like into his swords, an entity outside himself unmarried to doubts or misgivings, guided, drawn, unerringly foeward by his dragons.

Each breath drowned him drunker in an ever more startling clarity, a dimly remembered part of his true self. He was hard put not to howl like some beast as it fired his every sense, consuming him. It was power, its ultimate manifestation, a mastery few dared dream existed.

Those who did, and drank of it, stayed drunk on it for life. No matter that it often turned, and drank them. This, was what a Viking lived for, Odinn's promise of Vallhol, days without number of feasting on glorious, never ending butchery, healed of death or red wounds in the sun's red dying to drink and carouse the night through with the other Einheirjar, to slay and conquer afresh at each crimson dawn.

And he knew the inescapable allure which held Asgrim, and Bardi, and Hraerek, and Starri more than any, in thrall. In that instant all the animosity he'd so cherished for Starri vanished, swept aside and suffocated beneath his envy. Starri lived in and sustained that intensity, that hurricane vortex, that godlike maelstrom of self, with his every breath.

Wills strove with his, their hunger for mastery and his own hot life burning sulfurous in their desperate, darting gazes, and Tore's magnificent gifts whistling the litany of Bror's gospel, feint, deceit, treachery, and murder, unerring, unconquerable, ever past and inside their guard, His will manifest in their terror, his lying eyes, his moves, his desires, the master of their every twitch and feint, a puppeteer jerking them hither and yon to points of his choosing, his advantage, and at each climacteric their life luck flying away in a broken necklace of wet rubies.

He'd killed men before, but only with knife and bow.

The knife was ugly, a trael's vengeance. You had to really hate a man. It was subhuman, so close, so desperate.

The bow from ambush was icy and impersonal, mere murder.

Nobility lived in the long blade alone as it licked and flickered among the smorgasbord of eager, grunting, sweat greasy, shouting challengers, the ultimate art, the ballet of intent, endless in its permutations and recombinant perfections, weaving an infinite tapestry of life triumphant, his Aerin's avenging dragon, called out from its lair by evil fools, always in motion, bending its point now to taste a wrist, and returning its edge to lick a face, and back again, point deep through torso, gut, or groin, whipped away and hovering, hungry yet undecided, as it picked through its harriers like entrees at a feast.

Lessons bought without cost were worth what you'd paid, nothing. He'd paid plenty for Bror's but Starri lay revealed as his ultimate mentor, the master philosopher.

In Starri's savage animus raged the wisdom and ultimate law of the universe, its single theme stripped bare, all-encompassing and devouring like a naked woman on her back, legs spread, begging. Thrust your soul deep, or wander lost and alone through the halls of eternity, bent beneath the shaming yoke of frustrated ambition with soul shriveled and mortified.

The elms, oaks, purple briars and black loam of that tiny glade receded into a tenuous immateriality surrounding the writhing, champing knot of foemen before him, untieable save by cutting it, repeatedly and swiftly, golden light fractured by thin lines of flying, dispersing, crimson droplets.

His skin pricked at the antipodes of fire and ice.

Naught temperate lived between.

And each time his blade drank, the sweet salt of their life fired him hotter, tasting it on his soul's lips and tongue.

In the deeps of his eyes glowed the fire of a thousand red suns, the confident menace of some world destroying sky god.

His being was become a single, golden word, glory.

Bror suffered no such grandiose delusions. These vermin were lethal. They needed disposing of and quickly.

In his black eyes shown naught but a dull apathy, a timidity, his sidesteps and retreats clumsy seeming, as if the smaller man were out of his depth.

Twice even Ansvarr shouted warnings as foe after foe rushed in with hand axe and falchion smelling an easy kill like wolves to a winded doe. And always at the very end they twisted drunkenly, awkwardly overreaching, seeming to trip over their own feet, embarrassed, right onto the small man's point or edge.

Jarnulf was very full of himself and too busy to watch else he'd have learned much. He'd only painfully felt Bror's teachings. He'd never witnessed the awesome spectacle of Bror fighting for blood. Bror drew men like flies to honey. And like honey, he trapped them.

Bror was a consummate liar, treachery incarnate.

Swordsmen like Starri beat and crushed their opponents with sheer might, raining a furious whirlwind of blows. Others lived the art of it, reveling in technique, stitching the flawless coupling of basic and long practiced strokes into a seamless whole. Bror was beyond all that.

Bror lived the cut. Here a temple, a jugular, his point tracing finger like the breadth of a chest to open both breast muscles, and there a calf or thigh, always to disable.

Skraelings writhed screaming in the devil's refuse heap around him, their souls gushing out red to be drunk by the forest floor. Let others spend their strength hacking limbs or heads away. Once eliminated as a threat, enemies were of no interest to Bror. Their cousins and brothers would be coming. Let their kin finish them. The agonies of their maimed and dying would fire the discoverers to mindless fury and its lady in waiting, mistakes.

Now between the wood and trench Bror and Jarnulf had backed almost to the trench's edge.

Olaf, Galinn and Ansvarr battered the Skraeling rear, rolling it up like the first deadfall had.

One savage swung his falchion club like at Galinn's shoulder. Galinn's Norman steel checked the iron junk in his counter swing. Galinn leapt in, cross armed, and slashed the Skraeling's nose off close with his knife. Galinn's sword returned, back hand and low, cutting his man's thigh to the bone. Galinn felt his edge scrape, dragging across the bone.

Ref, beside them had his arm locked around another's neck as the savage struggled his hand axe up. Ref's knife made a eunuch of the man.

Jarnulf snapped glances through the eight remaining.

Gunnarr was in the midst of it, wrestling toe to toe with a Skraeling, their hilts locked, bound at the crossguards. The Skraeling threw his shoulders forward gripping his hilt tight in both hands to break the bind. Gunnarr's left let go his hilt, grabbed his foe's elbow and spun him away. Gunnarr thrust his point, from behind, a full foot through his man's neck.

Jarnulf's will danced outside him as he danced in this magnificent, ethereal, battle shine bleeding across from the east into God's dream gift, this glade, in its tranquil other worldliness, bearing heart wrenching witness to his own becoming. His short sword shore across a foeman's face cleaving the bridge of his nose and both eyes.

Laughter sounded golden and rich above his man's scream, but as from far away. His long blade's spine clanged a second falchion up, and away, and his point drove deep into the wielder's open armpit.

He realized, with a start, that that faraway laughter was his own.

Twenty and five winters he had warred merely to survive, and those brutal troll winters fled, inconsequential, before this glorious slaughter eternity, this focal point, this mountain peak of vengeance will.

Around and through the arena birds were still rising, flapping noisily away from the disturbance which had begun but thirty, eon long breaths earlier. But of the birds and his friends he knew naught. Tyr, the sky god of war and victory who was before even Odinn, was pouring, rushing, careering like a mountain torrent into him until surely the awful strength of that divinity must burst him, and hurl him, torn into pieces, limb from limb.

No man could know such unstoppable victory will as was his, and remain mortal, and yet still the fire blazed hotter, his arms, legs, eyes, his every twitch as annihilating as streams of molten iron flung from a smith's bucket, devouring everything they touched in a brief puff of black, Hel destined life smoke, and shrieking chunks of red, flopping meat.

CXXII Hell Must Be Filled

Hroghar's heart near burst with joy. A single, huge black horse raced into view fifty yards down the slope, and his son atop it was leaning forward, almost flat beside the horse's neck as arrows flew past them.

Hroghar readied his mallet, and forty yards behind Da'hal the Nahri erupted into view, an ugly, blood mad ulcer in hot pursuit. Yes, that was his son. Da'hal owned much talent for angering people, especially his father. It was almost equal with Sigrid's. And like Sigrid few dared do much about it.

He must have danced Hel's own jig atop their heads. But the twins were not with him. Hroghar's fury to avenge those noble young hellions had him quite distracted when Da'hal and Stigandi almost bowled him over, and Da'hal bellowed "Now!"

Hroghar and Draeng swung, leaping clear. The wall lurched forward, and tons of granite and rolling logs crushed flat the brush before them, gaining speed, avalanching toward the two score mounted men in their path. Those in the lead spurred their mounts left and right.

Hroald's rugs of woven rope, suspending the earth and brush above them, gave way, and seven of Da'hal's pursuers dropped from sight with screams of horror and agony which remained fresh in their killers' minds unto their dying days.

The Hrafn youths and girls held their fire, remaining hidden from those below who milled about, debating a second attempt.

Hroghar soundly cussed out his son. Appearances must be maintained. Where were Andar and Kjartan. Had Da'hal lost them?

Da'hal winced upwards, into the pine tops above.

"They'll be along, Father." he groaned.

From the foot of the hillside a familiar voice roared above the confusion, ordering the others to reform and charge again. There was a lot of fury in the early morning air. Nacarr wasn't lacking his share of it.

"That damned Hrafn had shot his bolt. He was dead meat."

Hroghar joined his son in a rumble of sly laughter as Da'hal dismounted to lead Stigandi, scrambling away after the others up through the hillside's thick brush. Twenty yards further, before the second camouflaged wall, Hroghar and Draeng gleefully readied their mallets.

The Nahri came back up the hill at the gallop.

Da'hal unslung his bow and drew down on that one, fiftyish Norseman in shiny bright chain, charging, bent low, in the midst of the pack. The man's black hair was half grayed, and his big, Norman snoot was ugly and twisted.

At thirty yards the mallets thudded, the wall fell, and Da'hal released, and roared out a vile curse as another horse flashed between his target and the descending, rolling horror, and his arrow somersaulted its rider backwards through the air.

Da'hal nocked his second arrow and Nacarr loomed in a rushing blur upon him.

Nacarr's sword swept toward Da'hal's face and shattered, hurled from his hand, against Hroghar's axe. Da'hal threw himself with knocked but undrawn arrow first toward Nacarr's thigh, and his bodkin drove deep between the horse's short ribs, his arrow shattering, as Nacarr swept past and his horse drown his curses beneath its shriek. They disappeared into the brush above, with Frakki and Tjorni's arrows in pursuit.

The Nahri milled a moment, leaderless and dreading a third avalanche, before fleeing back the way they'd come. Da'hal, Hroghar and their youngsters sped them along with fine parting gifts, two volleys of arrows and bolts, before they too departed in haste.

Da'hal softly praised Jarnulf. It was immensely satisfying to shoot a hundred and seventy pound bow at near spitting distance. His arrows hurled man and horse alike, backwards, almost as the boulders and logs had.

A mile further east Da'hal's heart plummeted. Andar and Kjartan had not come along.

"Jarnulf Stop!" Olaf yelled, and Jarnulf did, tottering on the very lip of the trench.

His foe, a scrawny youth, seeing Jarnulf's vacant eyes, closed with a windmill hand axe swing. Jarnulf ducked left, beneath the axe, and whirling on his toes dealt the Skraeling a shaming cut across the buttocks. The Skraeling leaped, birdlike from the horrible blow, and into the trench, shrieking.

To Jarnulf's right, Bror's point found another enemy's groin, and the man staggered back toward Olaf, who beheaded him.

One Skraeling remained standing. He coiled to leap the trench. Bror spun, cutting the back of the foe's leg deep, above the knee. The man launched from his remaining leg, landed hard against the far side, and scrabbling frantically, slid within. A very satisfying "Uaghh" carried up and out to the hunters.

Rakel, pinioned in the claws of her giddy nausea, picked her way through their butchered foes toward her men.

Half of the Skraelings still lived, writhing, horridly maimed.

Cumbered with crossbows and quivers she handed Jarnulf his. He slung it by its strap over his back. Moans and feeble cries wafted up from before the briars. Rakel winced up to the trench's edge and peered down into it. She covered her mouth.

Skraelings lay in its depths ten feet below her squirming, pinned. A forest of long, sharpened stakes transfixed ten men through chests, bellies, legs and arms. Most still lived, but barely.

One was obviously dead having landed on his back. He had exchanged his nose for another of red streaked, pointed pine. The last youth Jarnulf cut was upright, spitted through his thighs, writhing and whimpering. He was dying, but it would take perhaps all day. Rakel cocked and loaded her bow.

She took aim to end his suffering.

Jarnulf shoved her bow aside.

She quailed beneath his eyes. Even on their last night together, after he'd shamed, humiliated, and abused her as she stood naked, cupping her burning backside on his porch, with him glaring through his doorway, hurling her clothes and fouls words at her, she'd never seen such sheer, demonic hatred.

"For God's sake, is there no mercy in you?" she said.

"Aerin." he said, and she whipped her gaze aside as his gaze wrent that final veil from her memories.

Just before he'd slammed his door, it was back, filling his eyes, that glowing, horrifying, not of this world, red. And there was something else about his brow that riveted her stare only at her own shoes, frantically tearing those mind curtains shut again. It was like staring into a pile of writhing, black, snakes.

Ansvarr, leaning hands on knees beside Rakel, smiled broadly down into the trench.

Staring sideways, or back up at him brown Skraeling eyes begged, white with terror and agony, for an end. Ref and Gunnarr at the run snatched up weapons from the maimed and dead to hurl them into the trench's depths.

"Da'hal's going to be angered." Ansvarr said.

"He certainly cursed enough, digging it." Galinn said, also peering gleefully within, "We'll bring him back later so he can count the recompense his sweat earned."

"Indeed." Ansvarr said. "Hell must be filled with boulders. He cursed them most creatively, each and every one."

"Especially that fifty pounder that dropped back in on his foot." Galinn said.

"Swearing by Christ's manhood." Ansvarr said. "Hroald liked to kill him."

"And how Da'hal kept saying that if it was good enough for Richard." Galinn said.

"Come along, children," Bror said. "We've gifts yet to open for our new friends."

Behind them a thunderous whip crack intruded on their gallows maunderings. It was immediately answered by chorusing scores of alarmed cries, and then, a hail storm of thousand pound blows.

Shrieking, Hlif and Aud sprinted toward them. No one had ever seen little Hlif run like that before.

"How many?" Olaf said.

"Every one of them, I think." Hlif gasped.

He caught her arm and they dashed east slipping through the violet fingers stalking the morning forest.

Jarnulf leisurely spread his arms and with one quick snap of his wrists he flung the gore from his blades.

Then he ran after Galinn, his feet spurning the earth, flying on wings of crimson vengeance ecstasy through the dream shadows. In his ears hammered his pounding blood, each beat a note in Mjollnir's victory symphony, crushing his enemies against Hel's anvil.

Eirika was right. His swords were possessed. Rid himself of them? Never.

Rakel pounded along aside Olaf, who grunted one encouragement after another to her to run faster. She gulped in breath after deep breath of the frigid air. Her tailbone felt like ice. Her teeth were numb.

Suddenly these men showed wiser than Uncle Starri always bitching about the pain of his battle scars. The hunters were no fools, and they were certainly not cowards. A fist in the nose for honor was one thing, but being butchered like an autumn steer was entirely another. She wished they'd stop running. She was dying to duck behind a tree, or something, and shoot a few more in the back.

For Jarnulf, the dream had ended. His foes had died and despite the furious mob at their heels, a face blinded his mind, the face of an angel haloed by loose, flying, long, dark red hair. That face flooded him with tears. Her laughter deafened him, as she booted another clod at him in the barn, and then shattered, slashing his heart into bleeding, icy shreds.

He steeled his focus back to his task. Thirty trolls had just knocked at Nagrind, Hel's gate. He, and his men, had condemned them to wade the icy waters of the river Slith, choked with knives and swords, throughout eternity.

His own swords, which Tore had given him in compensation for his father, deserved names.

They thrummed, announcing themselves in his mind. Troll biter, the short, and Nagrind's key, the long, vibrating, bespoke their pride at being recognized.

Again, focus. He couldn't afford to get killed, or those remaining might escape their brother's spiteful embrace in Hel's river of knives.

His Aerin had been raped and murdered. He longed to hold her, and wish her a good Christian husband and children. She was gone, dead. A hundred, or a thousand more could never bring Aerin back.

He clutched his hilts tighter. Dragons of yellowed ivory sang to his soul pleased beyond measure with him. He'd fed them and they wanted more, rivers more. They'd done all he'd asked, and then some. They and his Aerin, raped away to Christ's knee, would have more.

From that point on things became a grim and desperate running rear guard action, a flying dance along the razor's edge. The men goaded the women on ahead of them pausing only to drop and bolt the nearest of their pursuers.

Bror and Ansvarr killed two who'd somehow got ahead of them. Two more jumped Gunnarr with their hand axes mistakenly cocked back for a killing blow. Gunnarr swiped them away with his knife as if they were may flies, and left them screaming and staggering, one with his guts hanging out in ropey festoons, and the other gaping in terror down at his manhood hanging by a thread against his thigh.

CXXIII Our Wounds Should Not Be In Our Backs

Noon found Andar and Kjartan on foot and running hard over dank, black soil and mossy stones. Here and there they leapt over the fallen, moldering trunks of black pines, spruces and tamaracks. Those still standing weren't all that close together, but they were old, and huge enough to choke most of the sun and any competing breath of life out from under them.

The brothers didn't know exactly where they were, nobody would bother hunting or exploring in this tomb, just that they were being driven, like deer, east toward their final fall back in a big hurry.

Their quivers were empty.

Their horses had been shot from under them half the morning ago.

They were two miles from the final ambush sight.

What remained of the footmen Da'hal left them to still numbered almost thirty. They'd lost all but ten of the fleetest. The mouths of their scabbards were red with the lives of three who'd caught up to them moments earlier ahead of the others.
From the west behind the Nahri came the thunder of horses, many horses, in full charge. The brothers traded a worried look. There were too many horses for Jarnulf's crew. And they'd be up to their ears in Skraelings anyway. Nacarr must have killed Da'hal, and Hroghar, and all their friends. The remaining seven of their foes were almost upon them.

"I'm tired of running." Kjartan said.

"Yes," Andar said. "Our wounds should not be in our backs, when our people find us."

They stopped and turned round, drawing their swords.

They crossed themselves, and commended their young souls to God.

Their sweat drenched, furious pursuers bounded forward over the greened stones and black muck with howls of glee. One yelled at the others to stop.

Kjartan knew the man. His name was Halflidi. He was one of Skjalg's brothers. Andar and Kjartan cursed them as cowards and perverts, challenging them to come in and fight. Halflidi said that they'd murdered too many of his neighbors already.

Behind Halflidi and his men the horse sounds swelled, filling the tomb forest.

Halflidi spit and turned back to the noise, saying that it was about damn time as his six ringed the brothers, and they crouched with sword and knife, back to back.

Forty mounted men burst from under the tamaracks and black spruces, and reined in. Their mounts were magnificent, muscular, savage animals. They were lathered and breathing hard. Many stamped and chafed as if annoyed at this halt.

Half of the men carried fifteen foot lances. They were not Nahri. They were Ottarrs and none were smiling.

One dark tanned with neat trimmed brown beard and hair walked his huge, sweat steaming bay forward from the rest toward Halflidi. He brandished a lance. The cocking stirrup of a crossbow jiggled behind his shoulder, slung across his buckskinned back. His knuckles were covered with white scars. Kjartan thought he'd seen the Ottarr before at Thing, but couldn't recall his name.

"Where the hell have you been?" Halflidi demanded of the man.

The Ottarr lowered his lance point to the ground.

Andar and Kjartan's hearts plummeted with it. Neither had killed a poacher before today. Both had been most anxious to prove themselves. Emboldened by Da'hal's berserk charge through the Nahri they had disobeyed him and ridden rings around the footmen, darting out from cover to shoot men at the gallop. They had shown great bravery and distinction.

And with each kill their boldness grew more rash, confusing skill and luck with invincibility. With fourteen dead between them the Nahri finally guessed correctly where they would next appear, and shot their horses. Running away from their suffering, dying friends, their horses, had been an ultimate betrayal. The horror of it still loomed leaden and unremitting, paling everything before their eyes.

There had been much courage shown today by all the hunters and apprentices. But Andar and Kjartan knew only of their own and Da'hal's. Now no Hrafn would count each brother's arrows in the dead, afterwards. No Hrafn would speak of their courage. No Hrafn would give them Christian burial. The Ottarrs were leagued with the Nahri, and the brother's kine, their Hrafns, would all lie outside, unremembered, food for wolves.

"Where's Hrorik?" the Ottarr said.

"Not with us." Halflidi said. "He's probably off somewhere with Morrow's Skraelings."

Halflidi sheathed his sword and demanded a warbow from one of his men.

"Where's Nacarr?" the Ottarr said.

"Don't know." Halflidi said. "He took our horse off after the dozen of these scum that have been, "

"Coward." Kjartan yelled. "You were attacked only by us, and one more and he's killed most of your perverts already."

The Ottarr asked how many horse. Halflidi said Nacarr had half a hundred. Then Halflidi knocked an arrow and took aim on Kjartan. The Ottarr nudged the bow aside with his lance head and sighed, disgusted.

He tossed Kjartan a sour nod with his chin.

"The man, is right." he said. "We found five, smashed by a log that dropped from the trees. We'll need these two to show us where the other deadfalls are."

The Ottarr did not however tell of the seventeen they'd found on a hillside crushed by boulders and skewered in bear pits.

Halflidi said that one of them would suffice.

The Ottarr said that from the looks of them the only way either would speak was if the other still lived and was being tortured.

Halflidi lowered the bow.

"Nacarr's probably in Hrafnstadir by now," Halflidi said. "enjoying Starri's, some whore.

Halflidi's guts shriveled. He'd let the cat out of the bag.

"Rakel, huh?" the Ottarr said, still stone faced. "Hrorik won't like that."

Then he shoved his lance through Halflidi's heart.

Morrow the Skraeling Chieftain quivered, unable to speak through his drooling lips. He motioned with his bow to his son nailed with a knife through his eye to the tree before him and three of his bucks took the corpse down. And while Olaf's message had his desired effect upon Morrow's younger bucks, scaring a good deal of the manliness out of them, it withered every shred of humanity Morrow had ever possessed right out of him.

"Their brats first." he gasped. "When you're done with the women, skin them too."

Behind Rakel, from the forest, came the sound of hooves.

"Didn't we steal all their horses?" she asked Olaf. He listened, a moment. There is a world of difference between the sound of an iron shod hoof striking a rock, and an unshod one.

"They're not Skraelings." Olaf said.

"Maybe it's Da'hal?" she said.

"Wrong place to find out, run faster." Olaf said, looking truly worried, for once.

CXXIV Hey! You!

A quarter mile further Rakel got her wish. They'd finally stopped running and she lay flat peering over her crossbow past an elm's knotted bole. The hoof beats drew nearer, but they seemed minded to pass by her off to their left.

Her friends lie concealed all around her, awaiting the fitful, overheld breath of the forest to again exhale, and carry forth upon it the cries of murderers exulting in their chase. Her eyes were all whites, as if they might add to the power of her ears, and she might hear through them too. Her life pounded, deafening, in her ears.

Beside her Ref's brown glare searched the wood, terribly alive. The crafter of rude verses was composing yet another and it would be the worst slander imaginable to its targets.

A quiet smirk lit his swirling, woods colored leer, and then to her horror he struggled wearily to his feet, and paraded out into view, and jogged back into the western trees chasing after those hoof sounds. A moment later his cocky shouts carried back to her.

"Hey, you." Ref yelled. "Yes you, you brood mare."

A moment's silence ensued, and then whoops of delight, and then the flat, glaring blat of a blown ox horn summonsing their compatriots, and Ref's bellow again.

"Oh, Shit."

There was nothing cocky in it this time.

The crunching hooves galloped straight toward her.

Ref streaked past her in a blur of knees and elbows with two arrows whistling past him. Then three horsemen with bows pounded into view. They were Nahri, and it sounded like a lot more were right behind them. Immediately, the lot more were.

Galinn waited till the first three were almost in his lap before shouting his order. To either side of the trail Aud and Hlif backed, pulling hard at their ropes. A wide lattice of sharpened birch saplings, each a dozen feet long, tilted up from beneath its camouflaging debris.

The lead horse ran full onto it and the screams of a salvo of bolts competed with the screams of the horse as those bolts flew from both sides of the trail into the riders reining in behind the stake lattice. One rider who hadn't been bolted ordered a charge on the instant before the bastards could reload their weapons.

Olaf's hand axe winged spinning out from between the trees. It turned a full circle in the air before shooting the shouter's eyes and mouth wide, chopping itself deep into his back. And then Rakel's hunters burst from cover in a rushing, dizzying frenzy, hurling their knives into backs and bellies, and then with swords drawn they were leaping upwards toward other mounted men to tackle or hew them from their saddles.

Before her Gunnarr twirled, rising, spiraling upward swinging his sword in a great all or nothing roundhouse up toward a frantic youth slashing down at him. Gunnarr's edge took the boy's wrists, and then his mouth, and he pitched backwards trailing tiny, crimson streamers.

Rakel obeyed Gunnarr's earlier command, and did exactly as she had been told, reloading her bow. She took aim on a large, blonde Norseman with an axe charging in on Galinn who was aloft clinging hard to a red bearded swordsman. Galinn's sword, right above the guard, was devouring his man's nose and cheek.

Rakel's bolt took her blonde rider in his brow just above the right eye, crushing in his forehead and red and pink brains jetted out behind him. She cocked and loaded her bow again, but none of the Nahri seemed to pose a threat any longer. Her hunters had been devastatingly efficient at their work.

One Nahri, on hands and knees, he was dressed in finest, dark blue linen, groped awkwardly behind himself toward Ansvarr's knife, buried in his back. Ansvarr yanked his knife free, and without another thought for the gurgling, drowning man, he went after Gunnarr's knife stuck into another man's belly, twenty yards away.

The second man threatened fight. Ansvarr never slackened his long, loose, grim stride as he cast, and then again yanked his own knife free, from the second man's heart, before withdrawing Gunnarr's. Ansvarr seemed utterly blind to the futile wretchings and graspings of his victims toward him, his will riveted solely on the tools of their destruction.

Hlif had never imagined such ice could beat in any man's breast, but these men least of all. Starri and the fo'c'sulmen Asgrim, Hraerek, Bardi and Halldor, perhaps, and a few of the other sailors, but not these men. They were Da'hal's friends.

Rakel dropped her bow to cover her ears, gaping, unable to look away.

The shrieks of the damned in hell could not have been more terrible or deafening. There were twenty men, and four dying horses. In the thunder and confusion of the fight, the other horses had bolted off away into the woods.

More than half the men were still alive, staggering, and stumbling drunkenly about, most with their temples, faces and necks gashed into bloody ruin. One man fell backwards, tripping over his dying comrade. The horses were rending the air with screams which must tear even God's heart as they lay on their sides, struggling to stand again with legs and heads flailing and horror beyond measure in their huge soft eyes. Ref stooped with his knife to end one animal's suffering and Ansvarr grabbed Ref's collar, and yanked him to his feet.

"We haven't time." Ansvarr growled.

He shoved Ref off ahead of him, eastward, and even through Ansvarr's angry snarl Rakel could see the hurt in his eyes for those horses. Ref, who was not a man to take a shove from anyone, took Ansvarr's without complaint.

Their own lives outweighed the horses' sufferings.

Olaf paused a moment to splinter the ox horn bugle beneath his boot.

It had all happened in an eye blink.

And none of her people had taken even a scratch.

Galinn's voice snapped her out of it angrily commanding her to get moving.

She took up her bow and dashed after Ref thinking that this was nothing like the tales her uncle had boasted of to her as a little girl. At least she'd have something to boast of herself to Uncle Starri, having just shot a man from his saddle, anything other than her mortifying masque as a harlot horse thief.

She hadn't got twenty yards when two boots crashed up through the brush behind her. They were gaining. She stole a fumble for her sword and a panicked glance back. It was Olaf.

His lion eyes blazing back at her from his mask of brown and green were brimmed with that same demonic fury she'd found in Jarnulf's back at the trench in the glade.

"Run, Damn you!" he gasped. And then he was gone, yelling at her to hurry up as he crashed noisily off and away from her and the others, heading north.

Another blur of forest colored hunter leapt into her path to yank her back into the undergrowth. It was Galinn. Gunnarr crouched beside him, aiming his bow to where Olaf was supposed to appear. A tall man in buckskins, with a hand axe, dashed into view and Gunnarr's bowstring twonged.

Rakel cried out and Galinn's hand covered her mouth as Gunnarr reloaded.

Olaf dashed through the forest swiping the stinging sweat and grease from his eyes. The bird song, lovely as it usually was, was torture. It blocked out everything from forty yards around him. There was that rotted, fallen sycamore ahead. Jarnulf and the others were only eighty yards beyond it, and twenty more to his right, waiting for him and whoever he'd decoyed into chasing him.

His boot landed atop the foot thick trunk and he propelled himself through the air beyond it. A bolt screamed past his shoulder, missing him by inches. He gritted his teeth in flight, expecting the next, which would tear through his chest. Six leaps further he hugged the trunk of a terrifyingly small maple looking for at least one man to take to hell with him.

No more bolts arrived, but he spotted his buckskinned target, a brown bearded, six foot Norseman, well built and in his mid-thirties, a score of steps before him, bent forward in plain view cocking his crossbow. It was Hrorik.

"Pervert." Olaf beckoned, taking a bead on him. Hrorik glanced and dropped his bow. Olaf had him cold. Hrorik lathered Olaf with vile invective, and capped it with a challenge to drop the bow. Hrorik reached for his hilt saying that they'd had a disagreement for years which needed settling, like men.

"Asshole." Olaf groaned, and shot Hrorik.

Olaf reloaded his bow and then sprinted past as Hrorik lay squirming and clutching at his chest. The pain in Olaf's heart was almost as searing as that in Hrorik's. He had killed kin. He had broken his oath to his kinsman, Chieftain Eikinn, but still he wished that Aud had been there to see it.

CXXV Your Turn To Buy Tonight

At the southern berm Adis held her Hrafn's flank, while hugging tight the north face of a large elm. She dropped to one knee with her heart in her mouth and devils pounding drums in her ears. Horses were coming, from the south, sneaking toward her through the trees. She raised her crossbow and squinted over it.

A huge black horse gingerly picked its way into view, ghostlike in its silence. She drew down, trembling, on its equally huge, buckskinned rider. Shrieking, she jerked her bow aside as its trigger broke sending its bolt rattling away through the trees, ten yards off to Da'hal's right.

Da'hal, without waiting for another, set Stigandi to the charge and almost ran her over before recognizing her.

He grunted down a furious earful to her. It was mostly a listing of the genitalia of saints and the Trinity. Adis gibbered out apologies, not to Da'hal but to his axe, hovering above her head. The lions of gold she'd graven into it could barely be seen beneath that crusting of red black.

No sooner had Hroghar's youngsters trailed their mounts off into the wood behind the berm and he sent Draeng off roundabout to Hroald, with Tjorni and her axe in hot pursuit to keep an eye on the little fellow, than across the field above the trees at the woods edge, crows and starlings rocketed skyward.

Da'hal threw his huge arms high, motioning all his hillside women to silence, and down flat, ready to shoot. He hurried in a crouch down their line, repeating his orders again and again.

"They're coming, don't set the birds off or they'll know we're here. And by God's eyes don't shoot the mob, hold low and shoot one man, then shoot another."

In the middle of the line lay Eirika. A full sheath of her husband Grimkel's fletchings poked forward toward Da'hal from over her shoulder.

"Where the hell did they all come from?" she begged.

"Lalghar." Da'hal said, and Eirika panicked, fumbling an arrow from her quiver and whacking herself in the nose with a green fletch.

Da'hal felt his heart breaking as first Ansvarr, and then Bror, and then the others broke from under the trees fleeing headlong into the open. They were on foot. He should be there with them but dashing out into view might bring all down in ruin.

There was Hlif in the open, the seven men, and Aud and Rakel, and Da'hal shot out his hands and desperate eyes, as if they might somehow pull the eleventh out of those woods, though he knew it useless. Aerin had been left behind with their horses.

Da'hal crossed himself, and begging his maker's forgiveness for all his vain and unholy cursings he prayed for Aerin, and Kjartan and Andar, and all his folk.

Hroghar's huge hand vised his shoulder as across the field only a hundred yards south from the Skraelings another flight of birds began rising above the trees, and Nacarr and his Outlaws rode out to join the Skraelings. Da'hal prayed again, that the twenty of Nacarr's missing horse weren't sneaking round behind his women.

This day would be glorious indeed should they triumph over that sewage belching from the woods, chasing his friends and shrieking like devils. And should victory be theirs instead, his name would long be remembered either way.

Whatever remained of his enemies would enshrine him with another kind of glory, filthy revilings, shudders, and a nightsweat dread just like Richard, whose name, though he had been dead for eighty years, was still a potent threat from Saracen mothers to disobedient children.

'Behave, or Da'hal will come for you.'

Da'hal winced dreading his father's coming cautions. Instead, Hroghar bared his square white teeth and growled darkly, deep in his throat.

"If memory serves me," Hroghar said, with razors glinting in his terribly alive, serpent green eyes. "it's about your turn to buy tonight, at Mordach's, isn't it?"

CXXVI The Devil's Engineers

Jarnulf's hunters and women scrambled up over the stream's bank. Beneath the bright noon his straining gaze combed the open field. Two hundred yards ahead lay another tiny rise, the knee high berm they'd piled up last summer. It was vacant. Where were Da'hal, and Hroghar? No, no, that was not possible. Wherever his sworn brother was, he was standing.

That had been settled many summers ago, that summer when the bringer of awful bane unto all the races of trolls, the hurler of his hammer, the gatherer of black clouds whose very brow when furrowed was the lightning, had reached down into that field, down from Asgard, for his cherished mortal man had reached down and marked Da'hal as his favored with his lightning's kiss. Da'hal would win, or was even now, winning glory. Aesir Thor had long ago ordained to Hel Da'hal's enemies.

The hunters dashed through their safe lane and turning at their berm threw themselves flat, shooing the girls off across the field behind them. And for all of a hundred breaths seven men with crossbows held well more than a long hundred to bay.

The Outlaws and Skraelings mounted two charges, and left behind them twelve men and seven horses as the hunters shot them back down behind the bank. A bloodcurdling howl burst from the cut and murderers swarmed over its top in a wave around their dozen dead and dying. And it showed clear that this time there'd be no holding them.

Five riders cleared the top of the cut and within three heartbeats were at full gallop, bearing straight at Aud, Hlif, and Rakel's fleeing backs. Three horses found Hroghar and Da'hal's caltrops and stumbled, shrieking with the iron horrors impaling their hooves.

The remaining two charged through the hunter's line and Ref raised onto one knee slamming another bolt into his bow. Leading the first horse by a yard, he squeezed. The sorrel shuddered and tumbled, Ref's bolt ripping clean through her ribs. The Outlaw riding her hauled viciously at the reins as she slammed onto her side, crushing his hip beneath her.

Ansvarr and Galinn sent their bolts through the second horse's lungs and it pitched forward onto its nose, hurling its rider headlong. The man struggled to his feet with warbow almost at full draw. Ref's next bolt took him in his guts, slamming him back, astonished, onto his butt. Another single bay crested the cut, and Gunnarr shot it in its heart.

The black eyed bay slammed onto its nose as if its fore legs had been sworded. The rider atop it in silvered mail hurled his arms wide as he sailed forward through the air. Nacarr had lost his second mount.

Six more horses crested, and fell as the hunters loosed their final bolts and Jarnulf roared the word go. The seven hunters broke left and right in retreat. Their enemies cast caution to the winds and sprinted after the fleeing hunters. In the pre-planned, seeming rout, Rakel made for the southern hill, Jarnulf's destination. Aud and Hlif, shrieking loudly, dashed into the northern hillside's forest. Hroald ordered them to be quiet, or they'd set the birds aflight. Aud and Hlif almost ran down Kadlin, Gyda, Brenn and Tjorni as they leapt over the berm.

The mob was fifty yards behind them as the hunters raced into the forest, and Jarnulf forgot they existed in his ecstasy at finding Da'hal and Hroghar. He did not however see the grim gray dwarf, lurking just to Hroghar's north behind an elm with his spear and hand axe.

Jarnulf shot a glance up the hillside, nocking his final bolt. Nothing was to be seen but the earthen rise of the berm, twenty feet further. An arrow screamed past his shoulder, burying itself in the hillside. Two more zipped into the hillside, snaking up tiny divots all well below the berm. Jarnulf turned and shot the single man in mail before him. Chain was no protection from a crossbow.

The hunters cast their bows, drew blades and fell flat. The Hel mob was ten yards from the trees when Nacarr's voice rang out ordering them to stop, it's a trap. Nine Outlaws in the lead rushed in glaring toward the five Hrafns lying prone as Mordach's cracked shriek rang out.

"Now, shoot the bowmen."

Two score arrows and bolts shredded the air above the hunters, winnowing their foes with thunks like the onset of so many axe men.

Jarnulf glanced right, and chilled, seeing nightmare. There were a hundred rushing Hroald and Bror in the hill across the open.

Standing, he shut out that horror. He could do nothing to change it until these men before him were cut into hog slop.

The enemy remaining, about half of them, redoubled their furied charge. Retreat was impossible from all those women with bows on the hill. Retreat would get them backshot. Women shot crop bandits, not men in mail. They'd be shooting broadheads, not bodkins. Any hit would bleed out their lives as surely as a sword. Life lay only in getting past those few men and swarming the berm.

Ten feet to Jarnulf's right stood Olaf behind an elm with his back hard against it, staring intently up the hill with both hands gripping the hilt of his sword raised high above his head. Rakel's knife was bitten hard between his teeth.

A bolt from the hill zipped past Olaf's shoulder and a man behind him cried out. Olaf nodded up to a woman behind the berm. He turned right and swung his sword down in a great arc, stealing an arm from a Skraeling and shearing almost clean through the man's chest.

Detached, from outside himself, Jarnulf watched three men run at him. His swords felt so light, the short in his left hand and the long sheathed on his hip beneath it, after those staves and all their bruises Bror had taught him with.

His foemen were but phantoms. It was plain they planned to live through this. Upon such plans lives stumbled. Jarnulf had no such plans. Guarding one's life kept a man too busy to steal his opponent's. Life lived in victory, which lived in audacity. And his audacity would make of them autumn steers to his butcher.

Mirha'd suffered all she could. Jarnulf was going to die. He couldn't possibly fend off all those men. Clutching her axe she scrambled over the berm to save him or die with him. Ten feet down the hill she body slammed onto her face as another woman tackled her.

"You'll get him killed." Rakel hissed into her ear. "You can't help him."

Behind them a wailing moan and hushed cries of come back filled the air. Mirha started her protest and Rakel clamped it silent behind her hand, ordering her to shut up, watch, and remember unto her dying day.

On the far hillside Hroald glared disbelief at the horde chasing Ansvarr and the others toward him.

"Shit." Hroald groaned. He turned back to the women above him.

"Shoot till they're all dead and then kill them again." he said.

Hroald turned back to the wave crashing toward them.

CXXVII Father, Wait!

"Damn you Eikinn." he muttered.

Bror set his teeth and steeled his black eyes. He grimly shook any stiffness from his arms with two quick shakes. He drew his swords. There was no need to play the coward this time. There were too many. They would come. He leapt from behind his oak snarling, and the front of the throng, horrified, discovered him in their laps like babes who'd mistaken a wolf for the family mutt.

Another ten feet and Jarnulf would be within the bite of their blades. He laughed at them. It hit them like a wall of ice and the first two, center and left, slowed. He stepped in, beginning his draw and feinting a jab with Troll Biter at the man on his left. The man stepped back. Nagrind's Key cleared its sheath and arced across Jarnulf's front through the center man's gut. Jarnulf took its flying point up as the third rushed in from the right with his blade readied high above his head. Jarnulf's sword cut away the right man's arm above his elbow. Jarnulf whipped back to face the first foe.

At the foot of the far hill Gunnarr flapped his steel high and out, scarecrow like, daring them in. Galinn shouted. Gunnarr stepped back turning, and his pommel took an Outlaw's teeth, and then his edge, the eyes, as Galinn's sword robbed a leg from Gunnarr's sucker.

In Jarnulf's mind a thunder head called. His foe lunged, point first. Jarnulf spun left attacking the blade on Troll Biter's spine, out past his ribs. His wolf eyes swept left and hillward with his short sword, a quarter turn ahead of Nagrind's Key shearing unseen through and spilling the man's guts. He continued his turn back past the hillside and strode purposefully, but not in any seeming rush, as if he were approaching an empaneled Kvidur in Court, toward Olaf to his right.

Olaf stood grim before the savage he'd slaughtered, stuck between two more busily taunting him with feints and slanders. Nagrind's Key came full cocked over Jarnulf's left shoulder at his forth step. At Jarnulf's fifth step the Skraeling glanced back over his shoulder. A hillside bolt whizzed past his face.

Jarnulf slashed the Skraeling's shoulder blades through and then shoved his short sword through the man's kidney, yelling at Olaf to go. Olaf raised his sword feinting at his remaining man's eyes. His opponent lunged. Olaf went left and his sword went right, setting aside the Skraeling's point. Olaf stepped in and punched him under the sternum thrice with Rakel's knife. Olaf heaved him off the blade and he and Jarnulf went for Ref.

Ref lay on his back between them and Da'hal. Ref knew he was about to die. He needed both hands to keep the Outlaw atop him from the knife in his belt. The other coming at his right with the sword was but two feet away.

With a thump and a howl the Outlaw with the sword went sailing into and over the man atop Ref, propelled by Da'hal's boot. The man clutched at his fractured tail bone, starting up onto an elbow. Olaf's sword skewered him and was quickly withdrawn. Ref and his first Outlaw lay sideways, each seeking the other's eyes with one hand and Ref's knife with their other. Olaf's boot landed with a crack upon the Outlaw's neck, breaking it as he leapt over Ref.

Rakel felt Mirha's lips part in her palm and she realized that her mouth too was hanging open. In a dozen heartbeats Jarnulf and Olaf had killed eight men.

Da'hal was being encircled by seven. In his left hand was his red crusted axe. In his right his three foot, four pound bastard danced about like a kitchen knife as he feinted and jabbed at them.

Ref rolled right to snatch his hilt left handed and upside down.

The last man on Da'hal's left whirled quarter right, facing the hill, and leaned back from the roundhouse sword Olaf swung at his neck. He screamed as Olaf's point sheared his shoulder. Olaf's backhand return clanged bell clear off a second man's sword. The cut man clutched at his bloody, twitching arm and backed away into Da'hal's axe.

Behind the berm Anja held her draw tight to her cheek, cursing. That demon who looked like her husband left her no shot. He kept leaping centered into her aim, attacking her targets first.

Three Outlaws to Da'hal's right shouted a warning and with a roar Da'hal sprang at them, sweeping his sword backhand, and level, and pitching his axe underhand. An eighth enemy ran behind Da'hal, his eyes seized on Olaf's open right. Ref dove forward from his knee and sheared backhand through the man's thigh, toppling him as from beyond Da'hal sounded two horrified shrieks and meaty thwocks.

Two Outlaws between Da'hal and the wood's edge went for Jarnulf. He came on, points raised, seeking an opening. The head to his right snapped left, crashing into the other man and driving them both staggering into an oak. In their place showed the hilt of Rakel's dripping knife in Olaf's fist. It zipped back out of sight as the Outlaw on the right collapsed, his temple crushed.

Beyond the man remaining and across the plain was a sight that almost got Jarnulf killed. Twenty horses were charging across the open from the field's far edge, and more were boiling out of the woods behind them. Men brandishing bows, swords and axes lay forward, flat atop them.

Jarnulf caught a glint from a cocked sword and leaping back shoved his blades out blind. The Outlaw's blade clanged into the spine of his long sword and skirled off it. The man's eyes said he knew he'd over reached. Jarnulf's right point tore into the man's groin. Then his short blade girdled the man's neck.

Jarnulf's eyes whipped right. Before him, side on, a Skraeling was backing from Olaf, who was pressing him hard. The Skraeling never saw it coming as Troll Biter cut his wrists. The Skraeling howled and dropped his blade. Olaf sheathed Rakel's knife completely in the Skraeling's open mouth and out the back of his skull. Olaf sprinted off, clamping the knife again between his own teeth.

Beyond them lay the harvest of Da'hal's sweeping cut. A Outlaw twitched on the ground chopped almost in two and another to his right, on his knees, struggled to stuff his guts back into the cut Da'hal's sword had stopped in. He looked up as Da'hal raced by.

A round, steel pommel beneath the white knuckles of a huge fist streaked toward him and hurled him flat with a broken skull. Da'hal's left hand plucked the haft of his axe from the air as Olaf, who'd yanked it from the chest of Da'hal's third man, tossed it back to him.

Olaf drew his hand axe from his belt.

At Hroghar's feet lay five Outlaws, dead or dying from his axe and sword. One, as Hroghar's axe chopped off his leg, had shit himself. The seven still on their feet were each waiting on the others to lead the charge.

The pale, gray dwarf scuttled from behind his elm beside the red giant. Crouching and snarling he charged forward with his huge spear. It sported an ell long head. Mordach's Outlaw sidestepped his groin thrust and grabbed the spear behind its head.

Mordach, undaunted, buried his hand axe deep in the foeman's hip. The man went down howling and Mordach chopped his forehead off like so much red kindling. Mordach clubbed another with his spear's heavy, bronze butt full in the mouth. Shards of bloody teeth sprinkled to the forest floor. Mordach clubbed him again, in the eye, killing him.

Hroghar was roaring out a vocabulary few suspected he owned, beckoning and cursing all comers by the teeth, nose, ears and less mentionable appendages of the Divinity.

Mordach, in dead silence, slashed his spear deep into the side of one's neck, felling him, and then thrust it clean through another's bowels. The three remaining backed, their eyes all whites at the four hunters rushing in. Three of those Hrafn troll faces were all brown and green.

The black haired Jotun to their left with the blood fouled axe and that great, dripping sword, the younger version of the one before them holding them off like toy wolves, was terrifying enough but the one on their right frostbit their balls. With the amber eyes of a great mountain cat blazing in his woods demon face he rushed in great bounding leaps toward them. His brown green mouth and cheeks as well as his sword and hand axe were bloodied. His teeth clamping the huge knife between them dripped red. The nightmare had eaten one of their neighbor's throats. The Outlaws fled. Hroghar dashed after them.

"Father, wait!" Da'hal shouted. Hroghar stopped and before their enemies reached the open they fell, one with an arrow in his thigh, and two knocked forward with bolts through their backs.

Behind them, on the forest floor where four Hrafns had triumphed moments earlier, arrows thunked into anything that quivered. Jarnulf shoved his short sword out toward the forty horsemen now halfway across the field. He opened his mouth.

Olaf's yell to come on cut him off, carrying back through the trees. Olaf was almost across the open, sprinting flat out. Jarnulf, Ref, the giants and Mordach bolted after him. Their young helpers fled down the hillside after them like scared wolves, desperate not to be overtaken and trampled by the women coming hot behind them.

From the other hillside a dozen men ran forth, got a look at the hunters, and then the mob behind, and turned east fleeing from them. Arrows and bolts arced down into them from behind the hunters. Jarnulf thought his heart would burst as he chased Olaf, while watching the riders flying toward the trees, only three hundred yards away.

They came at the breakneck, the sun's fire glinting on the tips of their lances and swords, voiceless but for their thundering hooves. With lungs and legs on fire Jarnulf ran as in nightmare and will it as he might, could not outrun it. Olaf, forty yards before him, let go a great, golden cry. That cry was a name. That name was Ivar. On the riders near flank two men rode one sorrel stallion.

The rear rider was either Andar or Kjartan.

CXXVIII Fire Jotuns

On they came, silent, dark specters laid forward over the brown black necks of chargers glistening with sweat and foam in the bright noon. Those in the van came with lances laid between their horse's ears. Side on the lances were plain as day, but seen head on, nigh invisible.

Though Jarnulf could not see them, he knew the others held nocked bows out behind their far sides, to keep the arrowheads from nicking the horse's flying hooves and forelegs. At a hundred yards from the trees, the riders roared back, as one. Their cry was Hrafns.

At thirty yards they shot erect, as one, standing in their long stirrups to brace against the terrible impact, reins in their teeth, the lancers snapping pikes out to one side and lowering them, the others sweeping bows forward from behind them to draw.

Ansvarr regained his feet in the midst of the arrow storm and wrenched his sword free from the shield of pine he had buried it in. Fletched birch screamed past him in both directions, from the women and from the field. The shield's wielder staggered back, clutching at Maeve's fletchings in his breast.

With the furor of fable, Ansvarr charged the enemy, and a Skraeling arrow landed in his chest. He slowed, staggered, with sword upraised, and another arrow landed almost in his heart. He fell backwards and Gunnarr sprang before him, roaring at the filth to come in and die. Hel didn't have all day to wait for them. Gunnarr's sword arced through a patch of sun, and a Outlaw's neck, and Gunnarr's knife ripped open another's face.

Da'hal with his bounding giant stride outstripped even Olaf to surge battling ahead of him. Five foes with no idea what they were courting rushed the black giant. Two Da'hal felled with a single axe blow and a third with his sword. A forth backed from him as the fifth, a huge Outlaw, rushed his blind back. The man before Da'hal backed, raising his axe, to guard from Da'hal's axe. Da'hal's blow wrenched it flying from his grasp, and his sword's point dove through his foe's face, and out his head from behind.

Olaf hacked down his man with a broad, right sweep and glimpsed sidelong the Outlaw rushing Da'hal's back. His hand axe was chancy. That big son of a bitch wanted stopping, lots of it, immediately. Olaf cocked his sword behind his shoulder and cast it. And the big son of a bitch behind Da'hal threw his arms wide and pitched forward grunting, his heart cloven and life drunk down by Olaf's thirsty steel.

In the woods atop the berm stood Astrid, icy and aloof as marble, and completely exposed as she loosed shaft after shaft down the hillside, never breaking form, a master text in fluid lethality snatching arrow after arrow from the clump of green and gray fletchings at her knee, where she'd planted them as the enemy charged across the field. At her every release another man cried out above the battle din.

Twenty yards to her north, Aud struggled with her crossbow's cocking lever as women beside her shot nonstop into the mass of screaming Skraelings and Outlaws swarming toward them around her hunters. At her left a man shrieked as Brenn's axe cut his leg. Somewhere off to her right Maeve was yelling don't shoot the horsemen. Snatching a bolt from the ground beside her Aud looked out over her bow for a horse but she couldn't see one. An army of hate filled faces, some painted blue or red glared back, rushing toward her.

On Hroald's end of the hunters' line an Outlaw bigger even than Hroghar, aimed a clumsy slash at Hroald's head and missing him, strode past, up the hill and towards her. The fat giant's eyes locked on her and he doubled his pace. It was the Outlaw who had wrestled with Da'hal, and then Starri, at Thing two summers ago.

There was something wrong with her hands. Twice she tried and failed to nock her bolt. The ground beneath her began to thrum, but she remained deaf to the approaching hooves. The Outlaws and Skraelings heard them, stopped, and turned to look. The fat giant, between her and Hroald seemed deaf to them. His whole body shuddered, slammed from behind and his pig eyes shot wide. His knees trembled and buckled. He pitched forward onto his face. In his back stood Hroald's axe. Hroald was roaring a storm and laying about with his sword. Two men went down to his right with cloven skulls and then ten more rushed in and bore him to earth.

Aud screamed Hroald's name and tossed her bow away, racing down the hillside toward him. She planted her foot in the giant's still quivering back and wrenched Hroald's axe free. None of the Skraelings or Outlaws around her seemed to notice her. She wrested the axe head back over her right shoulder and ran at the men who were hacking and thrusting at Hroald, and Galinn, five feet to Hroald's left and back.

Bror, twenty feet further left, still stood. Between them Gunnarr and Ansvarr were down, somewhere beneath that hideous mob of their enemies. An arrow slammed into Galinn's chest, spinning him right. It was mortal and Galinn knew it. Before him came a Skraeling cocking his falchion for a beheading swing at someone. Aud flashed into view and the Skraeling swung.

Galinn's point sheared down and deep cleaving ribs from spine, and spoiling the Skraeling's aim. Aud took the flat of the falchion across her temple, hurling her senseless to the ground. At Aud's heels Tjorni fared worse. Galinn swung left and cut another Skraeling's forward thigh, inside through the artery, sealing his fate, as Galinn was in turn knocked down.

At the earthworks on the hillside Brenn's crippled Skraeling lurched forward hurling his sword spearlike at Hlif.

Kadlin, lying beside Brenn, dropped her bow at the awful, mind blasting sight, and sound, and Kadlin's senses fled. Old Gyda would later tell her what she'd done next, and praise her courage while hugging her close, drying her tears, and wiping the gore from her young face.

Kadlin seized up a huge rock, one she could never lift again, and raising it high above her, she brought it down upon the savage's head, as he set upon little Brenn with his knife. Again and again Kadlin raised her rock, and crushed all the bones of the Skraeling's skull in as his brains splashed her, Brenn, and the earth.

Then the riders were into the woods. Those enemy swarming the hill faltered. Some raced back to face them, headed for their fellows at that terrible press around the hunters. Others hid behind trees, nocking bows. Bolts and arrows from the women nailed them to trees.

Ottarr arrows whistled to their marks and two breaths later sixteen darting lances whistled, swords thrummed and axes chunked as Ivar and his mounted Ottarrs slammed into the press. Ten Ottarr archers dropped their bows and drew swords, holding them well out, aside and away from their mounts as they scythed their way up the hill at the gallop, and leaping over the women, thunderstruck, behind the berm.

Yelling their deep cry 'Hrafns' over and over they wheeled, regrouped and shot back above the women's heads as if their mounts were winged to thunder back down the hill churning the air behind them into a froth of flying blood, clods of earth and chunks of heads, arms and shattered enemy swords.

The enemy who threw themselves flat fared no better. Beneath the reach of blades, they were trampled by the horses. In spite of Maeve's, and now dozens more women's injunctions against shooting the horsemen, one Ottarr caught an arrow in his calf, and three horses were shot. One rider still at the gallop was thrown back almost off his horse. His lance survived. The Outlaw nailed to the elm on it didn't.

Three Skraelings rushed in, two clutching at the rider's right leg and one catching the reins. The leg man on Hroghar's left fell as Hroghar's axe shore away his head, shoulder and half of his ribs. The point of Hroghar's sword exploded out through the second man's belly, driving free beneath the horse. The Skraeling grabbing for the reins leapt back clutching his face where Da'hal's point had cut his jaw free.

Ref kicked his man's ribs, freeing his sword. The second Outlaw grunted, throwing himself at Ref, but the Outlaw's sword stuck, frozen, above his head. He slammed into Ref knocking him back and down, his arms over Ref's shoulders. Ref grabbed his foe's groin and pulled hard but his foe seemed not to notice. Ref, on his back, scrambled from under him.

At his feet quivered a bloody sword point. Ref snatched at his empty sheath. His knife stood still in a Skraeling's chest where he'd just thrown it. His eyes snaked up the sword, wanting to see the face of the man who would kill him. The hands round the hilt were a woman's, as were that magnificent pair, there between the arms holding that sword as the chest behind those breasts heaved them in and out at him.

His angel peered back equally startled, all green brown in her long, blue black tresses she seemed some goddess queen of the forest elves. In Ref's confused blink amid battle's uproar all round them, Rakel was difficult to recognize under her grease paint.

CXXIX Darksome Laughter

Before Anja in the battle din a shriek sounded.

"Die, Troll."

A blonde youth barely sixteen atop a mountain of gray stallion charged straight toward her. His right hand thrust an arm long sword straight up, a lightning rod drinking down rage from the Thunderer. His young face writhed with murder hatred, as did his fearsome mount's.

At the gallop he leaned right and low from out his saddle. His sword descended to sweep the head from a Skraeling's shoulders and in a graceful, continuing arc it returned high back over his mount's ears, as the boy stood, and leaning left, dropped it to shear an Outlaw's arm off.

He reined in hard, rearing his stallion, and Anja shrank from its shadow as its iron shoes pashed the air mere feet from her face. The boy laughed out her name before wheeling to pursue fresh meat. Though he was Olaf's cousin, at the moment she didn't know him from Cain. She had not even seen either of the murderers rushing towards her, so fixed she was on her husband's back, and the death he so wantonly courted.

He and Jarnulf and Da'hal hurtled forward, before her, into knot after knot of their enemies. Olaf had lost his sword somewhere. He was fighting on with knife and hand axe. He threw himself onto the nearest, chest to chest and thigh to thigh, to fillet kidneys with knife and chop skull with hand axe. At Olaf's first telling blow he shoved his catch away and whirling he leapt upon another, now hand axe eating heart and knife eyes, and another, knife to groin and hand axe, collar bone. In the blinding speed and savagery of his attack he looked, and his snarls, and bloodcurdling screams sounded, like those of some freakish, bear huge cat.

To Olaf's right Da'hal rampaged across the hillside roaring out his terrible, booming, giant laughter, plying his axe and sword with all the fury and devastation of one only God might defeat, a very angel cast down from heaven, and then risen up from hell. Dying enemies he hurled away like threshed chaff to the four winds. He roared again. It couldn't be laughter. It was too deep, and dark, even for him. And it rolled across the entire hillside, shaking it, like thunder. Red ruin flew all round him in great gouts as once it had flown from bowls in the human sacrifices their ancient forefathers offered to Frey.

At Olaf's left, Jarnulf warred ever forward gripped in the dark transport of his dragons ravening, insatiate thirst. His voice was the silence of the grave, and it swelled out before him, engulfing all in its cloud of rolling night with his dripping, blue white swords flashing through and out from it in all directions, and like the lightning, at those blue white bolts each unpredictable jag, men convulsed, jerking, and fell screaming. His brain was filled with flames. They had devoured to ashes his desire for speech, for any endeavor save one, to master through ruin his foemen exactly as his master, Bror, had taught him.

The trolls burned red, gold, and blue green to his eyes, and the land and trees behind them were all awrith in blazing orange gold, and among the trolls, slaughtering that awful mass of soulless flesh, burned white the mounted Einheirjar, souls warring forever, rising in the flames of the funeral pyre to that conflagration ever and never consuming the heavens above, the fires of Vallhol, Carrion Hall, whose aurorial corpse hues of alien and infinite brilliance may never be described by the living, as he and his brothers stormed forth from Bilrost, the quaking bridge of funeral fire, the Rainbow bridge into Asgard, to rescue their brother gods besieged by the fire Jotuns of Ragnarok.

Despite Anja's faith in the promise of Christ, her heart flew out through her eyes, soaring eagle like up through the pine tops above her men, beseeching Aesir Thor to hold them in his mighty hand. And as if in reply Da'hal's darksome laughter again shook the arena. Anja swore, though she'd later explain it to herself as the horses, that through her feet she'd felt the very world shudder at that laughter's dark, and awesome assurance, as her men butchered and bulled their way toward that awful press of enemies and mounted Ottarrs within the black trees edge where the other hunters should be.

And there was Ref high in the air soaring toward Jarnulf. He had killed his second man in flight, scoring his neck and jumping, bounding from another's back as it were a springboard. A huge, bald bowman beyond Ref drew. Anja snapshot him and Ref still in flight hid her arrow. Ref came down swinging, and another Outlaw lost his head above his ears. Beyond Ref's back stood the huge bald Outlaw, clutching dumbly at her green and gray fletchings protruding from his right eye.

She gaped, open mouthed, past him. She could not see the other hunters, anywhere. Her heart became ice. The armless Outlaw still stood before her, in shock, his red life squirting from the stump where his arm had been. She ran at him thrusting the tip of her bow through his lung. She wrested his sword away, and sprinted, screaming obscenities, toward that hell blind to all else, even Olaf and his friends, and Ref and Hroghar on their right and the awful, charnel fields which they too were sowing in the blue shades beneath those dark, cold trees.

Her brain was deafened with the clashings of the hungry steel, and the voices of her men and her Olaf's Ottarrs slaughtering their road to glory, and of the trolls dragged screaming back down into Hel. The steel's voice came upon her in buffeting, hurricane waves and its echoes rumbled through that blue, black and red floor of Satan's hall with all the brash, shimmering thunder of some titanic gong in the court of God's Divine judgment.

And then before Anja's eyes her men crashed upon the densest knot of those trolls, that awful, writhing horror, like maggots feasting upon the very body of God's sweet, brown earth, and her men were lost within it but for Olaf's lion screams, and Da'hal's reckless laughter. And again behind them trained staggering, falling trolls clutching at their gushing red wounds.

All round her was red, the bodies, the earth, trees, and the stones, vivid and dark like a storehouse of costliest scarlet, but beyond the wealth even of the treasuries of the gods, ruined and sacked by her devils. She wretched at its foulness, acrid with the rancor of spilled bowels.

Jarnulf's mind was the lightless void, too filled with negating all before him for even the flames, as hand axe, sword, and knife longed for him like a lover's caress. Close as his bed partner they came, each upon the next in their ecstasy of dark seducings. And he drowned in their black approach, adoring and worshiping their challenge, and ever fending them off at the last heartbeat from his inmost core, his very manhood, all that he was and might ever hope to be, free, the master, the conqueror.

They darted eager toward his face, his chest and legs, his groin, begging, and ever he teased them on and in before repulsing them and slashing their hearts and souls. No one would ever bring him to heel. They would bow before his awful manhood with their hopes broken, and ruled by him.

Nagrind's key unlocked another's life, through its throat to his right as Troll Biter clanged aside its falchion and before him loomed a red and blue face with hand axe descending, hungering for his shoulder.

A wall of russet stallion crashed into the savage, upsetting it, and a sword in the hand of the very brown, buckskinned, bearded Ottarr atop the stallion opened the Skraeling's back exposing the shuddering tips of its severed ribs. Jarnulf thrilled to the rich, heavy horse sweat and the stallion plunged forward, and away toward Olaf's front.

Before Da'hal a burly Outlaw locked eyes with him, and the Outlaw's sword slipped from his nerveless hand. The Outlaw opened his mouth to scream.

About that Hrafn Jotun's great furied brow writhed a plague of black lightnings, as if the devil was clawing fissures into this world, breaking in to steal the slaughter for himself. Beneath that brow's chaos horror, incinerating sanity, glowered two red windows. Thick beams and shafts the hue of corrupted blood shot smoking through them from the sun rising in hell behind them.

CXXX You Should Have Thought Of That Earlier

High above the fray arced Da'hal's blood streaming, gold lioned axe in his giant, blood streaming fist and the scream ahead of it drowned beneath another thunderclap of black laughter as his lions continued, forward and down, cleaving the scream from its echoes.

Before Olaf in that churning Hel reek of terror sweat, blood and spilled guts four Outlaws vanished behind three brown stallions and furiously chopping riders. One rider twisted in his saddle toward Olaf, showing much white in his eyes as he threw up his fearsome lance.

"On your right!" Ulfkel Thormodson shouted, and hurled his lance so close past Olaf's face that Olaf could have kissed it.

Ulfkel did not miss, and Olaf was granted yet another deep life breath.

Two Skraelings between them, in the desperation of their certain doom, hurled themselves at the now lanceless Ulfkel. One's white painted face Ulfkel's sword destroyed as the other rolled beneath the horse fighting his falchion up to spill its guts. Olaf's fury propelled him diving between the legs of the plunging, bucking stallion, and atop the savage. And Olaf spilled the savage's bowels with Rakel's knife and ate his neck and face all up with the hand axe, as the stallion's iron shoes churned the black earth around them.

Within the heart of that press lived only blurred impressions and desperate action. Thought had no time or place, a forest of frantic arms and legs buckskinned, linened and bare, horse legs, tails, sweat lathered flanks and necks, and sun glints from flying sword, falchion, and hand axe, and those blessed, holy, dripping lances. The grunts and death moans, the thunder of the hooves, and beneath them the creaks of saddle and tack, and the angelic chimings of snaffle and bit, and the cries of 'Hrafns' sounded over the hideous cursings of the Hel bound.

Suddenly the cries and curses dimmed, and Jarnulf found himself in a sea of tight packed horses, as if they had been squeezed into a small corral. The Ottarrs kept savagely lancing away, but now thrusting down, into men already fallen.

One man buckskinned lay face down at his feet, stunned and struggling to right himself with the sword in his right hand. Jarnulf readied his long sword to run him through.

"Jarnulf Stop!" Olaf bellowed, and Jarnulf did, and the man rolled over on his hip to lock eyes with him, and Jarnulf shrank back in horror. The man was Hoskuld One hand.

And then the horses parted, and there was but one, short, black haired man standing in their midst. He was bent forward, leaning cane like on his swords. Two Ottarrs leapt from their saddles to take his arms. They helped him stand. There was an arrow in his belly.

None dared approach the twins. Both were glare eyed and roaring. Kjartan was foaming at the mouth. One girl called to Andar and he attacked the tree beside her with sword and knife, as if it might spring to life and harm her.

Seven Outlaws threw down their steel, begging peace from the Ottarr lance men.

"You should have thought of that earlier." Ulfkel roared at them, and then a dozen lances screamed through the air.

CXXXI They're Coming

The Ottarrs dismounted and speedily dragged the dead and wounded aside to find the hunters beneath them as other Ottarrs still mounted rode through the perimeter, methodically lancing their fallen enemies. One had tried to hide himself beneath Ansvarr. Three teens leapt from their saddles upon him stabbing him repeatedly with their knives.

Ivar's men carried Ansvarr and Gunnarr and Galinn reverently from the sprawling pile of twisted, gashed corpses. They laid the dead hunters down, gently, amid the gasps, wails and hair tearing of women who had come at the run. And Rakel's world changed again.

Seven Ottarrs dragged and hurled the dead from atop Hroald, running each through the heart again to be certain.

"Hey, she's alive." one called, and three of his neighbors came running with water bags as the caller dragged Aud unconscious up from under the dead. She sputtered awake beneath their deluge, groggy, lost, and screaming Hroald's name again, fighting with her revivers.

"This, is Hroald?" a youth asked. Ivar nodded his sorrow to the huge, gray man laying dead on his back with dozens of red wounds in his sides and face.

"Yes." he said. "This was Hroald."

The Ottarrs had a great deal of trouble prying Hroald's jaws free from the throat of the Skraeling atop him.

Anja's sword fell from her fingers as she ran toward Olaf screaming his name, her knuckles balling hard against her cheekbones. Olaf turned to stare, and quickly looked back over both shoulders. When he turned back, she was quivering five feet from him with her hands over her mouth and ghost pale. She took two timid steps forward, peering wide eyed, and gently stroked two fingers down his cheek, beside his mouth, through his blood mask.

"Oh, it's not mine." Olaf said.

With her fingers she sealed his lips.

"I don't want to know." she said, still shuddering, remembering that grisly Ottarr humor some of them still encouraged, lying about their cannibal grandfathers.

Jarnulf dropped his swords, dismissed to earth, drowned in the coveted blood of his enemies, bought with such unholy coin. He prayed to awake and the devil release him from his nightmare purchase. Jarnulf whipped about from that awful sight searching frantic through the throng. He gave thanks to God that his Rakel had not been hurt. He let out a yell and Olaf turned, and sprinted toward him without another word to Anja.

The dead lay piled in grotesque contortions all round, three and four deep in places. Ivar and his were picking through them looking for survivors, and finishing them off. Maeve and Eirika strode with them, busying themselves with spears.

Bror's minders got him seated with his back against a birch. He was soaked in sweat and holding the arrow in his belly. At the hunters approach the Ottarrs backed away. Bror's breath came rapid and shallow. Olaf and Ref knelt down at either side of him. Bror seemed more worried about them than himself. They assured him that Ansvarr had told them all about his plans for Hjalti, but that he needn't worry. It was a long way off in the future. Bror's eyes opened wide in amaze and he pointed up and out into the clear, empty, blue sky before him.

"Oh." he said in a voice full of wonder, with tears welling in his eyes.

Olaf swiped a hand across Bror's brow to push back the rain of burning sweat streaming down it.

"No. Look." Bror said. "They're coming."

Jarnulf and the hunters beside him turned to search the empty, infinite sky. Bror dug the heels of his hands into the dirt to sit higher. Olaf and Ref helped him. Bror smiled and pointed again. Blood trickled down his chin from the left corner of his lip. Ref put Bror's hand back into his lap telling him if he didn't stop that he'd bleed to death. Bror turned his drenched, jade face to Ref, still smiling, the blood still trickling off his chin.

"Can't you even hear them?" he said.

"Hear who?" Olaf said, his voice thin and shaky.

"Such horses, and byrnies, the wings, they're so beautiful, I never dreamt." Bror whispered, the tears now streaming freely down his cheeks.

Jarnulf dropped to his knees and took Bror's hand.

"Bror?" he begged.

Bror tried to lean forward to look around Ref. Ref leaned aside and helped him. Bror stared, fascinated, like a kid at his first new puppy, at Ansvarr, dead, on his back with two arrows in his chest. His gaze lifted slowly, about five feet into the space above his friend.

Shivering, Bror coughed up more blood and turned his smiling inspection to the spaces above Galinn and Gunnarr's corpses. His smile fled when his eyes lit on Aud, sobbing as she knelt bent forward on the encrimsoned sward cradling Hroald's head in her lap. Bror turned back and stared anxiously off into space where he'd first pointed.

"But, yes." he whispered and a moment later, closed his eyes.

"Bror?" Jarnulf asked again. His eyes still clamped shut Bror pulled at Jarnulf's hand. Jarnulf drew in close. He could barely hear Bror's voice.

"Hroald's got, someone else coming, she said we'd, all meet again but, I shouldn't look." he whispered.

Bror opened his eyes again and smiling, stared up and off past Jarnulf. He offered up a tiny nod.

"Yes Brenn." he said, and then collapsed back into Ref and Olaf's arms. Ref closed Bror's eyes. Jarnulf looked up, in shock, past Ref's head to Kveldalf, looming somber, teary eyed, and shivering.

Kveldalf only shook her head. Little Brenn wasn't late. Brenn would not be coming to them, ever again. Twenty yards east behind Kveldalf, above them at the berm was Da'hal, carrying Hlif in his arms, his head bowed, her departed young soul showing red upon her breast, toward Ansvarr's pack roan which someone had brought. Jarnulf whipped back toward the field, frantic, searching, as if for his own escaping, fleeing soul through the empty crystal blue, above.

Olaf pulled Bror's head up against his shoulder and hugged him murmuring curses of endearment as his tears mingled with those on Bror's cheeks.

Jarnulf gained his feet and turned away. He threw his head back and let go a howl of despair and fury drowning out the keening of the women. It seemed to last forever. A handful of the teens among the Ottarrs turned and stared. Their elders quickly spun them away and went about their business.

Mirha took two steps toward him and Adis grabbed her.

"Not yet." Adis said.

Mirha tried to shake her off.

Ref too gained his feet. His poet seized him so mightily it strangled his speech. He gave vent in a convulsive dance, hopping up and down. When his words returned they were the worst sort, and their garbled import was that their targets freshly down in hell should feel his stompings on their skulls.

"I've known him forever," Adis said to Mirha, "and right now I wouldn't."

Jarnulf snatched the hilt of one of Bror's swords and like a demon he set about the eleven corpses piled around Bror, hacking at them, hewing off legs and arms and heads while cursing them by every god he'd ever heard of and screaming the vilest obscenities he could imagine.

Olaf remained on his knees hugging Bror closer and staring blind off over Bror's head, away from Jarnulf, remembering how it had happened to him after a fight with the Skraelings when he was seventeen.

A good portion of the women fell silent and stared slack jawed at the lone madman as his screams echoed through the forest, continuing his war with the corpses, kicking and tearing the limbless torsos away to get at the ones beneath as if they were still alive and the battle still raging.

An eternity later he fell silent, and quivering, weak in every joint, he turned back to Bror and Olaf with a confused, empty look as if he could not remember where he was. He plunged Bror's blood soaked sword into the earth upright at Bror's feet, and then sinking to his knees he sat on his heels behind the sword and buried his face in his hands.

CXXXII Apostasy

Aud, on her knees, held her Priest's lifeless head in her lap and wept to him over and again how sorry she was and begged his forgiveness. Adis beside her, hugged her with one arm while hanging onto Mirha with her free hand.

Most of the bloodshot whites of Aud's eyes were showing but it was obvious she wasn't seeing what was in front of her. Hroald might still be alive if she wasn't, he and Galinn, and Gunnarr, and Ansvarr and Bror. Was this their price for ignoring her sins and adopting her, as one of their own only days ago? It had all happened in mere moments, but she knew she'd be seeing it again and again for the rest of her life, witnessing all the horror as those moments dragged into months, behind her eyes, every time.

Olaf was still on his knees holding Bror, staring blind into the trees and rocking near imperceptibly from side to side in silence.

Eirika approached, grimed head to toe in her borrowed buckskins. Wraith like she loomed, glassy eyed, ashen and lead blue behind the knot surrounding Hroald. A night out in this northern forest, nipping winter's tail, was brutal on a fit and hardy young man, but for a frail, bloodless woman in her sixties, awaiting this through it.

Utterly still she was too spent even to shiver. Her empty quiver behind her shoulder had held a full sheaf of arrows in it last night. Her husband's fletchings now nested securely in Outlaw and Skraeling breasts. Her thin, blue fingers curled about her spear. Dripping red it bore advert to what harvest she'd just reaped.

Anja made for Mirha, knowing that if she didn't talk to someone right now she'd go mad, like Jarnulf. Anja's new shoes and her dress hem of her were all red. There was no dry path through the blood on the hillside. She joined Mirha, Adis and Aud. She told them that Brenn and Hlif and Tjorni were dead, and Hlidareth was dying, higher up the hill. Anja thanked God they were alive and unhurt. Aud turned her head slightly, eyes still empty and unfocused.

"How can you believe he exists after this?" Aud begged.

"I stopped believing years ago." Anja said. "Believing leaves the door open to doubt. I don't believe, I know."

The sound of her voice seemed to pull Aud at least partly up from the depths of the well of terrible visions she was reliving.

"His existence doesn't need my belief Aud." Anja said. "It's the other way around. Without His belief that I exist, I wouldn't, and neither would you. So long as He chooses to believe all of His creation into existence, it remains. If He ever stops, it won't. And personally, I'm grateful for all the trouble He's always going to for us."

"But do you really think Hroald, and the others, and, are with him right now?" Aud said.

"Well of course they are. Where else would they be?" Anja said, tearing up herself, her voice catching in her throat, trying to smile as if Aud were a five year old who'd asked a silly question she already knew the answer to, out of sheer impishness, just to have her mother's attention.

"What about the Nahri and the Skraelings?" Aud said. "Are they with him too?"

Anja began a laugh at the innocent inanity of her question and quickly cut it off. Aud was dead serious. Telling Aud she very much doubted it as He forbid murder and took a dim view of those who practiced it would lead to some very convoluted answers about Sigrid.

"He, looks after His own Aud." she said. "And I doubt the Skraelings and Nahri were even His to begin with."

Aud was not to be brushed off so lightly.

"You mean because they tried to murder all of us?" she said.

"Yes, that's a part of it, along with a lot of other things." Anja said, straining against the tug of Aud's verbal leash.

"Like Sigrid tried to murder Mirha?" Aud said. A quaver was creeping into her voice.

"And us, we murdered all of them."

Anja planted both fists, forcefully, on her hips, offended that Aud had set her up.

"Now you're being silly." Anja said. "We didn't murder them, we killed them."

Aud started in about Sigrid again and Anja stopped her with an outstretched palm.

"It's ten years since you've come to church. If you'd come, and often, you wouldn't have so many questions."

Aud looked back as if Anja had just slapped her and she'd no idea why. Anja, embarrassed, joined them on their knees.

"And Sigrid didn't murder Mirha. We don't know that she was even going to." she said softly, as bending forward over Hroald, she cupped the back of Aud's head and patted her shoulder.

Out in the open it was a bright, almost warm, spring day but here in the shade under the trees the slightest hint of wind felt like winter. Mirha, chilled and sickened to her empty guts, for once kept her mouth shut and stared at her toes.

"You should pray for Sigrid," Anja said. "like I do, and many others do. He'll listen. It'll help both you and her."

Aud, who'd been guiltily sneaking prayers on Sigrid's behalf at every chance, wasn't ready to confess to her apostasy from her apostasy just yet, at least not to Anja. Jarnulf and Ref maybe, but Anja was as tight with the Bible and its stone chiseled injunctions as Hroald.

Though Anja's attempts to comfort and reassure her had been in earnest they left her feeling more trapped and heartsick than ever. Now she'd have to pray, as one He'd turned his back on and didn't want, on behalf of ten, instead of one dreading the while He'd answer her like He always did, except that He'd tell her all their deaths were a punishment for her own sins. She hugged Hroald tighter.

Mirha's senses reeled. Her terrified gaze shot about the forest floor through the trees. Even now, the noise was deafening. Dead men lay everywhere, some bristling arrows, others missing limbs or heads. Some still writhed, groaning and screaming. Women were busy quieting them with swords, axes, scythes and pitchforks. It was impossible to walk through the carnage without painting even your shins red. The slop and spilled bowels looked and stank like a hog pen after a butchering, but some of these hogs were still alive.

Mindless of his own life Jarnulf had plunged headlong, laughing, into the slaughter, reveling in it, with devastating effect. Truly was he named, a wolf's son, a blood drinking, throat tearing wolf among dogs. Fierce and awful savages in whelming numbers had swept in upon the hunters like an ocean wave. The tiny handful of hunters stood their ground. They fought. Half of them died. Tears flooded her, tears of pride and incomprehensible gratitude for those attributes among them which had only filled her with loathing before.

The hunter's courage, their iron determination, their sacrifice, were all that had stood between herself and hell. Even their lowly slave could burst with pride just to be one of them, these magnificent, demonic barbarians, her Hrafns. She hugged Adis, and then Aud, and then Anja before dashing away to drop to her knees beside Bror, hugging his lifeless body, begging his forgiveness, and crying with her friend Olaf. It was Bror who had laughed away her rebuffs time and again, and extended to her true friendship, time and again.

Presently, Jarnulf regained his feet and dusted himself off. Twenty yards to his north behind Aud kneeling with Hroald, Da'hal, somber and subdued with his train of horses, was laying Tjorni atop another. Jarnulf turned toward the field, breaking the thong with his talismans from his belt, and damning their patrons to hell he hurled their silver cross and hammer out among the dying. Then he made off to retrieve his own blood drenched dragons.

Ivar approached him with a weary, worldly grin as if it were just the end of another day at work and they were headed for a drink.

"We found Morrow." Ivar said pointing north, beyond Da'hal, through the treeline

"Three arrows in him." he said. "He left his sword arm here somewhere, under the dead."

Ivar pointed to the dead hunter in the middle.

"Your man," he said. "there, killed him. The man lying beside him was down. He stood above his friend, guarding him. Gods what a fight he made of it. I saw him slay another four before he was shot, all in a heartbeat. I'm sorry. There were too many between us. I could not reach them in time."

"His name was Gunnarr." Jarnulf said. "His friend was my father's brother, Ansvarr."

"We're still looking for Nacarr." Ivar said, averting his eyes.

"He ran away." Jarnulf said. "When he realized how many of us there were."

A surly looking Ottarr standing at the treeline a dozen feet to Ivar's left and resting his bloody sword on his shoulder, turned his head. His lips alone smiled, bespeaking a grim amusement.

Ivar whistled to him, snapped his fingers and pointed south.

"Find him and bring him back." Ivar said.

Kolgrim stuck his fingers between his teeth and let out a piercing whistle. Eight men led their horses toward him. Olaf's brother in law Rani was among them. He was Kolgrim's brother.

"Take another dozen in case he's got reserves he didn't commit." Ivar said.

CXXXIII The Devil

Mirha wrapped herself around Jarnulf.

Rakel kept darting glances at them as she stood teary eyed with the rest over the dead hunters, men who'd continually teased and prodded her, from her first steps, men who'd been there year round whenever she had a problem needing fixing.

There was Galinn, who'd taken her fishing and taught her to shoot, Gunnarr, who'd taught her to ride a horse, Hroald, who'd counseled her through one broken heart after another, Ansvarr, who against Starri's wishes and behind Starri's back, had taught her the knife and Bror, dear, sweet, snide little Bror, who'd laughed at her till he saw she was serious and taught her to defend herself.

Now, those men who would be there waiting until she'd made her mark and earned their respect, wouldn't.

Numb, she knelt to close Galinn's dead eyes, and horror slammed her hand short. She shot to her feet and dashed stumbling off through the trees, picking her way around their dead enemies out into the field and the light, crying, but it wasn't all for her uncles as she struggled to remember who Dalla was and what his face looked like. Those blue, lifeless eyes in Galinn's face had not been Galinn's. They had been Jarnulf's.

Behind her many women were passing wineskins and draining them.

Kolfinna's father Lars found her, and she put away her pride to hug him and thank him for coming. Lars said he was sorry he hadn't come years sooner. Marnee wouldn't speak to him, and couldn't wait for him to leave. She didn't want him to see her take that drink she was dying for, and the others that first one would take for itself.

Olaf took Jarnulf's elbow. Olaf nodded west, across the corpse strewn field. A herd of horses made its way toward them with Thorarin riding circles about them. On the lead roan came Gudrod, with his arm about Aerin, sidesaddle before him. Aerin's hair was full of dirt and her face bloodied and bruised. Jarnulf sprinted off to meet them. Olaf followed.

"I'm sorry." Jarnulf said.

Aerin did not lower her gaze to him. Thorarin swung wearily down out of his father's old, sweat stained saddle. Thorarin seemed bent beneath more years than Odinn. Aud and Rakel helped Aerin down.

"She hasn't spoken." Thorarin said. "We had to dress her. I don't think she knows her own name. They were four. We gut shot three. Gudrod beat me to the one who was using her and sworded his arms at the elbows."

Jarnulf watched Aud hug Aerin. His sun, and the stars hiding behind it, went out, swallowed in the lightless void. Aud knew.

"Are you, all right?" Aud said.

"No." Jarnulf shouted. "I'm not. I want Aerin, and you, and everyone back."

He threw his arms around Aud and hugged her and Aerin for all he was worth. Aud gasped. Jarnulf was a strong man.

"This is my fault." Jarnulf said. "I should have killed that scum."

"You did everything you could." Aud shouted, "How many of us are still alive, because of you?"

He begged Aud's forgiveness. Aud hugged him back.

Olaf handed Rakel her knife thanking her and saying that he was sorry, he should have cleaned it. She took it from him, black, red, and sticky, and pressed its hilt to her lips, tasting his salt.

"I'm glad you didn't." she said.

She locked eyes with him for a long moment, and her knife slipped from her fingers, unnoticed to earth. She threw herself into her friend Olaf's arms, and thanked him over and again through her tears.

Kolgrim and his men returned. They dismounted and dropped their reins to the ground before wandering off to join their neighbors.

Stumbling behind the lead horse of the remaining three was a powerful man in his mid-fifties wearing a knee length hauberk of polished chain. His arms were tied behind him and a noose was cinched around his neck. The far end of the rope was tied to Kolgrim's pommel.

Beneath the man's lightly grayed bottom of the ear black hair his rugged bronze face was frozen in a snarl. Beneath his prominent, misshapen nose, and the livid white scar running across it and his cheek, was a fist sized splotch of fresh blood. Nacarr had got his nose broken again. The women swarmed into an angry mob surrounding him. Aud shoved her way through the crowd. Hroald's axe rose from her shoulder. Ref caught her.

"That's too good for him." Ref said.

"Tell your men to take what they want." Jarnulf sighed to Ivar, gazing out across the dead.

"We want Hrorik. We've found his supporters." Ivar said.

Olaf pointed across the field.

"He's back in the woods with my bolt through him." Olaf said.

Ivar grinned, calling Olaf a selfish bastard.

Ivar wanted to hang Hrorik himself. Eikinn was dead. He'd kept Hrorik in chains but Hrorik's supporters had killed his guards and freed him, and he'd murdered his father and disappeared.

Da'hal broke through the throng. The giant's eyes were again spitting fire.

His melancholy would come later, bitter and inconsolable. It would pass through him tempering his wolfish hunger for additional vengeance to an even quicker, and hotter flame. God help the remnants of the Nahri when Da'hal had done with his grieving. He handed his bloodied axe off to the nearest girl.

"He's mine." Da'hal grunted, cracking his knuckles. "I'll start with his arms, and then twist his legs off, nice and slow."

Ivar commanded Jarnulf's eyes with a broad sweep of his arm out across the rippled wave of hacked and arrowed corpses to the thinning sea of them in the field where his Ottarrs were turning, inspecting, and stripping them of weapons, jewelry and moneys. The Hrafn's feathered, oily, black namesakes were gathering in scattered squads about the field's edge. A few of the bolder birds were already dining. The wolves would slink in after sunset.

Ivar said he was sorry this long overdue business had cost even one Hrafn life, but all the same it was a beautiful business. Twenty yards out into the field was a small, but growing, pile of the valuables.

Ivar walked Jarnulf toward it, saying they'd bring the rest in to Hrafnstadir later. Jarnulf refused. If Ivar had not come, his people would all be dead.

"Your fallen have kin, grieving and needy. Give it to them." Ivar said.

A young corpse lay crumpled beside the pile. Its face and chest were slashed open. Ivar booted it.

"Recognize him?" he said. Jarnulf stared hard, and said he didn't.

"Orlyg Lalgharspawn, Storm Thingi." Ivar said. "And there's more. Almost thirty so far. I doubt there will be more coming, but we'll stick around."

Jarnulf thanked him and assured him of Hrafn support, if they ever wanted it. Just ask and they'd come running. Ivar laughed softly.

"You have dead and wounded to see to." Ivar said. "I'll send Kolgrim and his men back with you. Four barrels of turpentine from your ship's stores ought to do it. We'll stack up this garbage and burn them after we hunt down the rest. Do you want any alive?"

"One from Storm." Jarnulf said.

Ref swiped the back of his hand beneath his nose and spit.

"To hell with burning them." Ref said.

Ivar and Jarnulf gave him a let's hear it look.

When Ref had finished Ivar grinned and clapped Ref's shoulders.

"Now why didn't I think of that?" Ivar grunted, his voice hoarse with grim delight.

Andar and Kjartan, who'd been listening attentively behind Ref, strode forward expressing their agreement, and again thanking Ivar. They were both ashiver with exhaustion and so blood spattered they seemed two eldritch young priests of Frey after a sacrifice, clutching their red swords and knives. Their gazes too were full of blood and murder, and a great, shared sorrow.

Both had gone berserk and owned no first hand memory of their prowess. Many girls had recounted it to them, and led them from one enemy they had ruined to the next, after they finally quit bellowing and swinging. They were both astonished at the sheer volume of their handiwork.

Ivar thundered out a great laugh into their faces. He turned to Olaf.

"I wish you could have seen them." Ivar said. "All they wanted was my name so they could curse me to Hel before I had them killed, after we spitted Halflidi and his scum. Swore they wouldn't tell me a thing. And then I told them that my sworn brother Olaf Asmundarson would be most displeased with them if they didn't."

"I don't remember any such swearing, or ceremony." Olaf laughed.

Jarnulf and Da'hal, and later, Badger would be insulted to learn of his and Ivar's brotherhood after he had sloughed off their offer. Ivar seized his cue.

"It worked. We found you, didn't we?" Ivar said.

"How did you know who was who, in all that?" Aud said.

"These berserks," Ivar said, pointing out the twins "told us yours were painted in brown and green."

He swiped a finger through Olaf's grease mask.

"The Skraelings were trying to stand out in their paint, not hide in the bushes."

The horses were all skittish. They knew blood, they were hunter's horses, but not this blood.

Liv knew it from those others He'd put atop her, as they went cold and stiff on her shoulders and hips. Her other friend, from across the aisle and her stall, her friend who so often fed and fussed over her, and the awful screams she made as the others hurt her. And then their screams, and stink, as her friends came and made them lie down and be still. All around her here were countless more like them, still, and reeking.

Jarnulf called her, and she shank from him. Her world was upside down. She'd known his dark moods but never this black fury. He was damaged, reeking of that same terrifying lie down and never move again smell, and enveloped in a world obscuring, roiling black cloud.

She backed, squealing and whickering, away in terror of or for him, she wasn't sure.

He yelled anger at her, and tugged her reins. In her frenzied struggles she nicked herself with a shoe, and fell back onto her haunches. Another horse would have lashed out or bit, but she couldn't, not to him, not even if he beat her to death. He dragged her to her feet and tied Nacarr's trailer around her saddle's pommel.

Looking off to the nine horses, with his nine friends draped belly down over them like sacks of grain it was with the greatest reluctance that he restrained his urge to mount her and turn back toward the plain, kicking her into a gallop, and listening to the women cheering behind him.

Nobody asked if they should get Nacarr out of his thirty pound mail shirt before they marched him the seven miles back to Hrafnstadir.

The huge, redheaded blacksmith's eyes finally found Aud and Adis. Hroghar sent Genevieve off to those consoling Gunnarr's wife Aethle. Still clutching his reddened axe Hroghar wrapped his massive arms around the girls. Aud seemed about cried out, but Adis buried her face in his chest, and wailed away.

"Astrid told me," Hroghar said to Aud, "of your courage. You made Hroald, and all of us, very proud of you."

"How can I tell him I'm sorry, now?" Aud said. "He was my Priest, and he tried so hard to save me."

"Forget it." Hroghar said. "Right now he's drunk as a sailor just got home, laughing and wishing you well, as he always has."

Aud again crumbled into wails and sobs.

"Hold your head up." Hroghar ordered, "Don't spoil his day with your tears." as he fought back his own.

Liv stumbled along toward home shivering with the dread that at any moment He'd sway, and topple from her back, still, like the others. She tripped on a stone. He dismounted to lead her. Her eyes burned as afraid to blink she held him upright with them all the way home.

END

Volume II

If you enjoyed this book the author would appreciate a positive review at the retailer you purchased it from.

Viking Hunter Continues in Volume 3.

Here's the opening/set up of Volume 3.

The Valkyr's Kiss

CXXXIV What's This Nonsense?

Hrafnstadir's women, a furied, jostling mob, were raising a brown cloud into the graveyard oak's branches. Even the sun looked angry through that cloud glaring down into the mob's open, twenty foot eye. In its midst struggled Nacarr as Olaf and Da'hal gripped him beneath his shoulders. He was glaring murder at Jarnulf and Hroghar and behind them their horses, more mob, and the grave dragon atop the church's back wall.

The tortured lowings of a hundred cows from the barn next door were adding to the women's shrieks for Nacarr's death. It was mid- afternoon and the cows had not been milked. No one rushed off to relieve them. They'd live longer than Nacarr and no one wanted to miss his end.

Jarnulf stared west over Nacarr's head but in his eye, the rat swung plain as day, suffocating as suspended from the rope around his neck he jerked, twirled, and gagged on his tongue. Nacarr had just collected a few more bruises as the hunters wrestled him to the ground and removed his mail. Without its added weight he'd strangle just that much slower.

Mirha, with Kolfinna in pursuit, struggled through the throng toward Jarnulf desperate to prove her worth in any way she might, and shove Rakel's truth back into her mind's darkest storeroom, the truth that she'd almost got Jarnulf killed. She had not landed a single blow or fired a shot through all of it.

Ref caught her from behind. She shared her fears with him. Ref pointed out the backs of three women heading into the shadows beyond the church, and on toward main. They were Aethle and Rakel, escorting Aerin.

"Aethle's lost her husband," Ref said. "and Aerin her best friends and herself. If you really want to make Jarnulf proud of you."

Mirha shot both fists to her cheeks. She ran off after them.

"I demand Holmganga." Nacarr bellowed at Hroghar. He was invoking the ancient right of trial by combat. Dueling had been Outlawed in old world Iceland back at the millennium, but this was not the old world.

"Found your spine worm?" Hroghar demanded, butting his axe's butt cap into Nacarr's chest.

"Not surprised," he added with a hasty nod up to the limb above them and then a second to Jarnulf, who was staring straight down at his feet and shaking his head laughing.

"Einvigi not good enough for you?" Jarnulf said. "You arrogant son of a bitch?"

Einvigi was two men just going at it till one granted the other peace or killed him. Nacarr had called for Holmgang, an affair of rules, seconds, and honor.

A cloak five ells square was to be staked at its corners to the ground. Three staked out spaces a foot wide surrounded it. Ropes were tied between the stakes. Each dueler took turns whacking the other's shield apart as his second guarded him with it. Combatants were allowed two replacement shields. At any point the worse wounded could admit guilt and release himself by paying a duel ransom of three marks, or in Nacarr's case a rope.

Stepping outside the line with one foot was retreating, with both feet, running. When the shields were used up the duelers were to fight on over the cloak with weapons only. The first whose blood fell onto the cloak lost. The man challenged had to strike the first blow.

"And," Jarnulf said. "you'll want me to hold your shield for you against Hroghar's axe, right?"

He caught up the trailer of Nacarr's noose and followed it back to Liv's saddle. She shied away from him as he untied it.

Nacarr fixed his cornered wolf glare back on Hroghar.

"I'll face any man here." Nacarr blustered. "Even you, you stinking Thurs."

There were three races of giants, and one common slander. 'Tall as a Risi, strong as a Jotun, and stupid as a Thurs.'

Jarnulf returned, holding out his coiled rope to Hroghar.

Hroghar swatted it away growling low, his gaze down upon Nacarr sharpening itself with a fine whetstone. The gentle humor his huge, hard lined, orange bearded face usually wore was as faded a memory as last week's mead. In its place thundered the granite sheared, battle grimed visage of some harbinger of the apocalypse. His broad set green eyes burned with a visible red. How much of it was lack of sleep and how much hellfire was anything but hard to say.

Nacarr wasn't a pretty sight either, even in his hammer burnished, rust free shirt of chain. Someone had spent a lot of time keeping it up, undoubtedly someone other than himself. His scarred and beaten face bore testament to how he'd achieved and held his position as Chieftain for thirty years. The blood from his fresh broken nose hadn't made his snaggled left incisor or his two broken off front teeth any more attractive either, coupled with the blue white scar running across his nose and off the side of his stubble under the bags beneath his eyes.

"It's my right." Nacarr said. "The law says."

Hroghar butted Nacarr's chest with his axe haft again.

"I'm aware of the law." Hroghar said.

Nacarr spit at him.

Hroghar spit back, rolled his shoulders and began clenching and unclenching his free hand.

A disheveled and spent but freshly haughty Eirika strode forth in her earth stained, borrowed buckskins. In one hand was her bow. In the other, the hilt of Hroald's hard worked sword, its bloody length laying back over her shoulder. From the look of her Jarnulf half thought she was minded to cheat the hangman herself.

Da'hal let go Nacarr's shoulder and grabbed Nacarr's hair. He leaned forward into Nacarr's face. Da'hal's eyes were still sulfur and brimstone as they'd been since Kolgrim handed Nacarr over at the field, and all the way back to town.

"There. Look." Da'hal commanded, wrenching Nacarr's face toward the train of nine horses with nine dead men and women draped over them, filing past the graveyard fence toward the church.

Hlif lay belly down over Ansvarr's roan. Da'hal had forbidden anyone else to move her, or touch her. Her long, loose brown hair hanging past her slender white wrists and hands rocked side to side in time with the horse's somber, knowing gait.

"There's the booty you took from us," Da'hal said. "and now you're going to recompense us."

"He has a point, you know." Eirika began, her enunciation exact and exaggerative as ever.

"We can't just hang him, now that we've left the scene of the action. We'll have to convene a Kvidur, and Outlaw him first."

Jarnulf started violently. His coiled rope slipped unknown from his hand. Eirika shushed him like an errant child. Hroghar licked the sweat and dust from his lips, tilted his head aside and spat it out.

"Oh, he's dead, I'll guarantee it, and damn soon." he said.

Mordach approached to poke Nacarr in the ribs with his bloody spear.

"Ever the problem, eh Nacarr?" Eirika said. "Since Hroald's murdered and Tore absent, I suppose I'll have to convene the Kvidur. We'll just make the best of this and muddle through, won't we."

She favored Jarnulf with a smile that drove daggers of ice through his scalp.

"I think we've twelve men left," she said. "whom you haven't murdered."

Hroghar turned on her.

"What's this nonsense, you old bird?" he laughed, corralling her under his tree trunk of an arm. He wasn't especially fond of her, but her observation that it really was all over, and the realization that he really did still have his son, had stuck him like a lightning bolt, a very giddy lightning bolt.

"It's called the law." she snipped, and rapped his knuckles with her bow.

"Can't go taking what isn't ours into our own hands now, can we?" she said.

He laughed it off and reached for her shoulder again, and she gave him a second rap.

"Can we?" she said, but with a lot more salt and bark in it this time.

"Perhaps not." he mumbled, sucking at his stinging knuckles.

She cast about, pointing and calling her Kvidur by name, Ref, Da'hal and Olaf, her Marshal, Hoskuld, Mordach, Gudrod, Thorarin, Andar, Kjartan, Hroghar, and finally little Frakki.

"Let's see." she said. "I suppose the Marshal owns the clearest claim against you in this suit, as you murdered his uncle."

"Fine." Jarnulf said. "Let's get it done."

"Can't just rush into this." she said. "Nacarr's a very well versed expert at law, having broken every one there is. He might win his defense if it's you prosecuting him."

Jarnulf regarded her narrowly. This morning had broken her mind.

"You'd best assign your case to me." she said.

"Women can't bring suits, you kerlinga skruka." Nacarr said.

Kerling meant hag, and skruka meant shrimp. Together they implied a hag as old and dried out as a shrimp's shell.

Her icy smile remained uncracked.

CXXXV I'm Afraid You're Wrong

"As I am the head of my household, I'm afraid your wrong, dead wrong." she said.

"I promise you," she told Jarnulf. "that he's not half the old law hag I am. No one is."

And for the first time in Jarnulf's life, and with all the warmth of an eagle on a corpse, she winked at him. Jarnulf thought it best to humor her. If she'd really lost her mind he could still take matters into his own hands and explain it to Tore later.

"Logmadur Eirika," Jarnulf said, warily. "I lawfully assign the prosecution of my suit against Nacarr to you."

Hroghar patted the top of Nacarr's head.

Nacarr spit at him again.

Again, Hroghar wiped it off and closely inspected Nacarr as if he couldn't decide whether to eat him whole or just take the hams and back straps. Hroghar's throbbing knuckles, the only wound he'd taken, had sobered the giddiness right out of him.

"Gawd, Hroghar." Eirika moaned. "Let's get this done."

That didn't sound like her either Jarnulf thought. She reveled in arguing minutia for days. She wasted one quick, and very annoyed frown up at Hroghar. She was still put out with his bizarre familiarity.

Nacarr's eyes darted from hunter to hunter. Bonfires blazed back at him from their eyes in those swirling green, brown and tanned faces. And those two young blood spattered bulls, the twins, were showing him their teeth, grunting and heaving their chests in and out gulping great breaths, as if readying themselves to charge. They all seemed furied enough already to award him his duel, each hoping for the honor despite the old hag's overweening confidence.

He fixed his glare back on Hroghar. That idiot pride and honor he cloaked himself in whenever he gazed at his son, the other giant crushing his arm, said he'd never let himself be hanged. He'd laugh in the face of a thousand and drown in their mingled blood first. The greatest legacy he could leave his son would be his own reputation.

"If," Nacarr said, glaring up at Hroghar as if he were a rat on a high pantry shelf. "you're not regi, like sonny boy here," with a sideways nod at Jarnulf, "I'll meet your challenge after."

Hroghar turned his sneer to Eirika.

"A very well versed expert?" he said, before fixing it back on Nacarr.

"You challenged me, meaning I get the first and only swing."

Eirika glared up at him as if they were married and she couldn't pry him out of the Mead Hall.

She started, wondering if she'd overreached. Jarnulf was livid, the knuckles of his hands white, strangling his hilts. And there wasn't a face among the others not icily demanding the vengeance honor for themselves.

She ordered Nacarr hauled inside and handed Hroald's sword off to Draeng, instructing him to open the church's shutters for their guests the Ottarrs. Da'hal yanked the rope tying Nacarr's elbows viciously upward, and he and Olaf frog marched the Nahri Chieftain toward the graveyard fence.

In the press crowding past the fence for the church door Eirika singled out Aud. She was still bearing Hroald's axe in both hands as if more Skraelings and Nahri might come swooping in on them at any moment.

"Are you all right?" Eirika said.

"No." Aud moaned. "Priest Hroald, and Tjorni, and what if wins his case and kills Hroghar too?

Eirika side stepped the axe and gathered Aud beneath her shoulder, just as Hroghar had earlier.

"I want to kill him myself." Aud shrieked.

Eirika drew her in closer.

CXXXVI A Trick Of The Light

The Hrafn's church hadn't changed since his last visit, Nacarr saw as he sat at the left claimant's bench feeling little pricks and pins in his tight tied hands, marooned here on this bench as his enemies dark, and bloody converse flooded past him.

Ref and Gudrod laid Ansvarr into the shroud of ruby and purple light from the stained glass windows draping the desk before him. The four dead women on the desk to their right were curtained briefly by Maeve and the fifth horse clomping out past him. The tread of its iron shoes boomed about the cavernous dim, and against his head, like the Thunderer's hammer.

Thirty feet before him rose the black, nine paneled desk. Langlif's two raven gavels perched atop its midst, stooping, their wings spread. Ten feet above the desk's ends roosted dead, Great Horned Owls glaring back at him with their dead, watery eyes as if he were a tidbit for their dead hatchlings.

In the open square's jumble of garish hues between him and the desk twirled Kolgrim and his two brothers, who'd broken his nose running him to ground, spinning about waving their arms before them and calling to each other as their arms changed colors. Empty sheaths were strapped to their backs. Weapons had all been shed on the porch before the door. The old witch's Marshal however, appeared exempt, still sporting his.

The Ottarrs had seen windows before, but not these shimmering sails of dream glass. Ref envied them dancing there in the corner of his eye, deigning the while to even glance at them. They'd feel it as he and any hunter, or their quarry, would. Odds were they'd pay it no heed, but he wasn't about to chance making them self conscious and spoiling the wonder of it for them.

Adis led Ansvarr's roan up the aisle with Hlif's body across it. Adis mien and bearing were twain, warring with each other. Her stern prosecutor ravening for vengeance commanded her eyes as the tearful, terrified babe trembled her lips, and then her demons would trade places on her face, over and again.

Da'hal stopped her. He beckoned Kjartan to take hold of Nacarr. Then the giant, gore drenched smith tenderly lifted the dead girl from the saddle and laid her in state, and reclosed her eyes. He unfastened his silver cross and hammer from his belt, and lifting her head, draped its thong round her neck, and gave her his first kiss.

As he returned no one but Nacarr dared meet his gaze. Da'hal lightly laid the stone knuckles of his huge fist against Nacarr's temple.

"If you look at me again," Da'hal said, quietly. "no one, will be able to stop me."

Nacarr looked away convinced it was some trick of the light. In the giant's eyes had flared the red of his smithy's kilns.

Eirika swept past them toward the desk, blinking first purple, and then blood and on through the splinters of a junk heap of shattered rainbows. Her Marshal and the massive red haired smith followed after her as the last of the dead men, Bror, was laid in state to his left. The Kvidur mounted the dais and seated themselves behind the desk with Jarnulf on her center right, Mordach her left, and Hroghar as Foreman, towering above Mordach's left. Ref sat the far right and Hoskuld the far left.

Olaf and Da'hal remained standing behind Nacarr's shoulders.

Kolgrim gave him a wry sneer as he strutted cock like by to join his Ottarrs in the church's rear. Kolgrim's brothers Rani and Raknar danced by on tiptoes clasping their hands behind their backs as they smiled at him, whistling a tuneless funeral dirge.

The bony backs of Eirika's white claws swept the oily, night blue ravens out to either side of her and she called the Court to order. The pained bellowings of a hundred cows in the barn next door swelled into the silence.

"I, Eirika Starkaddottir," she began. "name everyone in this church to witness that you, Gerard Beauvais, not only engaged in an illegal conspiracy to murder all of them, but that you actually did cause the deaths of these nine before us. I demand Full Outlawry, without ring payment, as the legal penalty."

Ring payment was a metaphor, an anachronism. Centuries ago the convicted Outlaw had paid a gold ring to the court for their sparing his life until his Outlawry began, no ring, no grace period. His immunity was forfeit the instant he left court. Jarnulf found himself not liking this a bit. She'd skipped all manner of prefatory legal rantings and recitings. Definitely not the Eirika he knew.

"You can't demand Outlawry without the grace period." Nacarr droned. "It's illegal."

"Take it, or the rope now, Gerard." she said. Nacarr winced like she'd slapped him with a hot poker.

"Untie me." he growled. "Chieftain Nacarr will not stand trussed like a trael before women."

"Then sit before them." Eirika said. "We've seen all too much of your back already today."

Nacarr winced again.

Da'hal and Olaf muscled him down onto the bench, and he glared acid back at Eirika over Galinn, dead on the desk before him.

"Did you not sign a pact and swear an oath of fealty with Tore?" she said.

"When he broke it I was unbound." Nacarr said.

She took a pinch of earlobe between her thumb and forefinger and pointed her face down at the knuckles of her free hand, nails drumming on the desk, before shooting him an up from under look.

"This should be rich." she said.

"We came for hostages against Tore's treachery." he said.

Eirika waited it out rather than compete with the outrage roaring through the church.

"I suppose you've had dreams, or auguries divined of whatever he and Skjalg are embroiled in. Or perhaps Tore's, treachery, revealed itself to you somewhere in the entrails of a chicken?" she said.

"Got it all from Hrorik, four days ago." Nacarr said.

Twenty Ottarrs in the church's rear shot to their feet as one. Most cupped hands to their ears.

"That's unfortunate." she said. "As Hrorik's dead. And hearsay is not admissible before this Kvidur."

"And you needed sixty of Lalghar's stinking fugumadur to kidnap little girls?" Hroghar said. Fugumadur were Outlaws so excessively perverse that no one would harbor them except as hired killers.

Hroghar owned no voice at this point in the proceedings, but Eirika let it go. She was feeling somewhat guilty over rapping him the first time, though he'd had the second one coming.

"Had to." Nacarr said. "Thidrandri and Eikinn were going to murder my Thingmen and Morrow's while Tore's double crossing Skjalg and Humach."

Kolgrim's bellow railed above the din ordering his men to stand down off the benches and shut up. They were guests here. They were not at home.

CXXXVII A Bit Short Handed Today?

"And your evidence of this is?" Eirika said.

"I told you I got it from," Nacarr started.

Eirika snatched a desktop raven and gaveled the base of its perch down hard onto the desk.

"Unless there are at least four others in this Court," she said. "at this moment, who will swear an oath to God before confirming your words, they are deception at law."

"So that's how it is." Nacarr said. "I'll kill any of your woods rats in a stand up fight and you know it. You're just itching to bury the truth along with me."

Nacarr noted with satisfaction that Hroghar was not looking at all pleased as he sat there stretching his arms, limbering up. The snotbag on her other side was positively fuming. Nacarr fixed his sneer on first Jarnulf and then Hroghar.

"I don't seem to remember," Hroghar said, combing his fingers through the bottom of his orange beard. "any of your scum offering us terms if we laid down our weapons. At least not the, oh God, I can't remember how many I cut down. Or maybe it just slipped their minds in their hurry to get past us and onto our women with all those swords and axes."

"Don't any of you fools have the guts to put a stop to this?" Nacarr said.

Hroghar drilled him with a stare that made the crow's feet beside his eyes a foot deep. Eirika turned her hand back and studied a fingernail.

"You've put us to considerable trouble already today, Gerard." she said. "If you've anything even approaching exonerative you'd best fart it out before your judges vote."

"How much did it cost you?" Nacarr said, sneering up at her over Galinn's boots.

"Are you blind?" she said.

"How much did you pay Eikinn to back out on us and join you?" Nacarr said.

Kolgrim let his Ottarrs go at it in full voice this time.

"While that doesn't explain Morrow and his Skraelings," Eirika said. "It does you. The memories of your fifty years of murderings and perversions have finally driven you mad."

She gaveled her raven again and asked her Kvidur if they were ready to vote.

"So none of you mewling pukes dare face me?" Nacarr said. "You're going to just hang me like a dog?"

"We shoot dogs that foam at the mouth." Hroghar said. "But in your case, . ."

"And here I was thinking you were some great warrior." Nacarr said, the white scar across his nose and cheek wrinkling in disdain.

"What the hell did you think you were going to do," Hroghar said. "even with your sheep shit hostages, when the rest of our men got back?"

"We'd have given them a dozen of ours and kept the peace." Nacarr said.

Eirika pressed the tips of her fingers and thumbs together forming an open cage of them before her mouth. She propped her chin on her thumbs and her elbows on the desk.

"I suspect you'd have found them far more trouble than they were worth." she said.

"Ninety of our little ladies," Hroghar said. "a dozen hunters, and one smith killed a hundred of your great warriors even before the Ottarrs got there. Every time you open your mouth my nose tells me you're straining and groaning across from me in the outhouse."

Jarnulf stabbed his finger out at Nacarr.

"You've been stealing off our table and laying to murder my men and their fathers since before I was born." Jarnulf said.

"You're brave enough with forty bows at your back." Nacarr said. "Can you fight without your women?"

Eirika gaveled her raven thrice and demanded the issue put to a vote if all Nacarr had left were slanders. Jarnulf quickly scribbled his down and handed it over to Hroghar.

"Hmmm." Hroghar said as the others passed theirs along toward him. Ref stepped down to ask Olaf and Da'hal for theirs.

"Tie it in the tree and let it rot." Olaf said.

Ref smiled up at Da'hal.

Da'hal yanked Nacarr's head back eye to eye. Da'hal showed Nacarr his teeth, and again the light from the windows flared red in his eyes.

"I'd chew your face off if it were half as pretty as Baldwin's." Da'hal said.

Baldwin had been King of Jerusalem. He had been eaten up and killed by leprosy.

Foreman Hroghar unfolded the votes and read them in silence. He rose to his full and awesome height behind the desk.

"Ten for Outlawry." Hroghar said. "And mine makes it eleven."

Eirika buried her face in her hands.

"You unmanly bitch." Nacarr yelled, wrestling and squirming in Da'hal's grip.

"I'm no happier about it than you." Hroghar said. "Your blood might soften the Nahri filth that's already dried on my steel. I'll just have to work a bit harder to clean it off."

"Then why?" Nacarr shouted.

Hroghar bent forward and slammed a fist onto the desk. The raven gavel gave a tiny hop forward. The fist of Hroghar's other huge, corded arm snapped out its middle finger at Nacarr.

"You swore an oath with Tore," he said, his deep basso building as it rolled through the church.

"And through him to every Hrafn. Every Hrafn." he bellowed, sweeping the finger across those lying on their backs to either side of Nacarr. "Holmganga belongs to all free men. An oath breaker is no man, and the law speaks not for Wurms."

"You spineless ass Vikings." Nacarr snarled. "Isn't there one of you man enough to try steel with me before you all prance off to take turns being the woman for each other?"

At this there were rutchings of benches behind the desk and hands clapped to its edge as men readied themselves to rise.

Eirika threw her arms wide, high, and then down, ordering them to remain seated.

"She order all of you around like that in bed too?" Nacarr said.

"There's no bottom to your bag of parting gifts." she said, fighting her grin as fifteen wintered Frakki spit clean over the desk toward Nacarr.

"I'll be honored to skull you with my axe." Frakki said.

"What you get is nothing, kid." Nacarr said. "Unless you get better than this shit verdict out of the Fifth Court this summer."

"Hroghar?" Eirika said.

"Yes?" he said.

"I'm sorry about rapping you so hard with my bow earlier." she said.

"That should be the worst I ever get." he said.

"If," she said. "I give you your asking price later today, to weld the nicks in my dear friend Hroald's sword," and paused to point at Hroald, dead on his back, "you'd still be able to count up the pennies correctly, despite your hellish, and distracting pain from my raps, right?"

"Yes?" Hroghar said.

"Then why the hell can't you count votes?" she said.

She got up from her bench and swooped in on him for a private conference.

Hroghar made a show of rereading the votes and decided he was having trouble reading Frakki's vote. He asked the youth to come read it to him. Frakki said his vote was plain as day.

"Get your ass over here." Hroghar said.

"Look," he told the boy in undertones. "we're in for a hot time with the Law Council as it is over this no grace period crap. It will be on everyone's lips. We can't reject every forth man of those judges until we're in open Court. We'd have to bribe all forty eight of them. You know how dangerous and expensive that would be?"

"Why yes." Frakki said, quite loudly. "See, it's right here. It says Outlawry. It must be the extra words I added, here, saying, and I hope the Devil likes his new bitch, that makes it hard to read."

"Now I see it." Hroghar said, holding Frakki's vote out at arm's length and squinting at it.

Then he smiled sweetly to Eirika.

"Can't go taking the law into our own hands now, can we?" he said.

"I dare say not." she said.

"I speak a verdict of Outlawry, and it is a lawful verdict, I think." he said.

"You think?" Nacarr said. "You don't even know? You think?"

Eirika tilted her head to one side, raised her palms up as if supplicating the Divine, and smiled past her shoulder back to Jarnulf.

"See what I mean?" she said. "He'll have everything hanged up quibbling over votes not going through a scriptorium when it goes his way, and then ignore the requirement that members of the Kvidur are not to be held liable for their good faith belief that they think their verdict is what the law requires."

"You've already read your goddamn verdict and it's unlawful as it's divided." Nacarr yelled at her.

"Then I suppose," she said. "you're welcome to assemble your own twenty witnesses and serve summons on me for it. What's that Gerard? I can't seem to hear you. You're a bit short handed today?"

Then she favored Jarnulf with that same hair freezing smile she'd had for him under the oak.

"Marshal?" she said.

CXXXVIII Consider It Settled

Jarnulf rose from behind the desk and walked slowly to the dead woman at the far end of the nine lying on the desks. Hlidareth was all aglow, her head pillowed on her long golden hair as she lay still, bathed in the muted amber from a panel of the stained glass above the head of its Saint, cradling a lamb.

Jarnulf placed his right hand on her forehead and calling her by name, told her he'd miss her and wished her well. Reverently he placed his hand on her breast, covering one of her ghastly wounds, and drew it back red, and sticky. He moved to Brenn, dead beside her, repeated his acts, and then to each of his friends in turn. He told Hroald, lying beside Bror, that he would try to remember everything Hroald had taught him. He asked Hroald to look after them all.

The sun slanting across the room onto Bror through the window fell white and cold through the silver byrnie of St. Michael, a great blonde warrior with wings, helmetless, transfixing with his lance the rearing, scaled, blue green dragon. There was little blood around the arrow stump in Bror's shirt. Jarnulf put his hand inside the shirt and felt around the arrow before he bent forward and kissed Bror's forehead.

He straightened and stalked back throttling his hilts to glare into Nacarr's face. In the blue green light of Saint Michael's dragon Nacarr's face showed purple and earthen. Jarnulf thrust his left palm out, red fingers spread wide and trembling. His right hand drew his sheathed longsword from between his belt and buckskins.

"Marshal, we're in Court." Eirika said, warning him.

Jarnulf's thumb clamped the guard of his sword into its sheath as he held up its foot long, ivory, dragon hilt between his face and Nacarr's.

Back between his hilt and outstretched, red hand Jarnulf's bronzed grimace showed square, his bones sharp in wry fury. To the roots of his matted, brown hair his furied troll visage was a swirl of black and green. Beneath his murder brow, sockets deep shadowed in umber showed. Set in those sockets were circles of blue gray ice ringing black voids wherein comets promised, hurtling as yet unseen from their depths.

"As a murderer you deserve the rope," Jarnulf said. "as a liar the point, a poacher, the edge. As a coward who sent his men to war on women and then ran away from them, the pommel."

"I should have killed your father thirty years ago," Nacarr said. "before he whelped you, instead of waiting, and leaving him for that bear."

Nacarr's back and shoulders again knew searing pain as Da'hal yanked him skyward almost off the floor by the rope tying his elbows. The ivory hilt before Nacarr's eyes, its pommel the dragon's head with nostrils flaring, and rows of bas relief daggers in its open maw, began to quiver.

Eons later Jarnulf's eye found Olaf jerking and convulsing beside Nacarr. Olaf's head leaned sideways onto his shoulder and his tongue stuck out clamped hard between his teeth. His amber eyes bugged out and he was grunting and snuffling like a pig. Jarnulf's inner eye snapped back to again see Nacarr slowly strangling at the end of the rope, kicking and turning blue.

"You?" Jarnulf asked. "Killing a real man? Where would you find the time, busy raping those little,"

Eirika cut him off.

"I wasn't aware there were witnesses to his littles." she said. "And unless they're here, . . ."

"I could have been your father," Nacarr said to Jarnulf. "that night at Thing, but I wouldn't have the sloppy night gamer after Skjalg and his brothers finished with her."

Jarnulf wrapped his blood stained left hand around his hilt's yellowed ivory.

"Jarnulf!" Eirika screamed.

"Liar." Jarnulf yelled at Nacarr.

"Thyre was pure as her golden hair when she married Ulf."

Three benches behind Nacarr and at the aisle end, gray, grandmother Thyre, a brunette in her youth, leaned out into the aisle and craned forward.

"I was there when she dropped for drink." Nacarr said.

Eirika shot to her feet.

"Da'hal, Stop him!" she shrieked.

Jarnulf slid his hand down his hilt, smearing the blood of his friends into the cracks in its age yellowed, terrible dragon.

And the dragon writhed in his soul, ravenous, shrieking to him, Hurry, his kin, his friends, cut down that blue green horror and reach them before it's too late. Another tiny voice within him cried out against its pleas. Not here, not now, not in Court.

It writhed in his hands and he thrust them together hard, caging its bite. He nodded to Olaf and Da'hal. Da'hal did not see him. Da'hal's blue eyes were elsewhere, ablaze, locked down onto Jarnulf's hands gripping his hilt.

"Hold his head." Jarnulf said.

Olaf spared one hand for Nacarr's hair, but kept tight rein on the Outlaw with his other. Da'hal kept his own right fist, now clenched tight at his side to himself and released Nacarr to snatch at his head. Nacarr twisted forward toward Jarnulf. Da'hal near broke Nacarr's neck yanking his head back.

Jarnulf thrust his dragon forward and swiped it down both of Nacarr's cheeks. Nacarr spit in his face. Jarnulf shoved his dragon still sheathed, back between his belt and buckskins and wiped the spittle off on his sleeve.

Eirika collapsed back onto her bench.

"Drag him out." she said.

"Consider it settled." Jarnulf growled into Nacarr's face. "We'll speak no more on it, son."

Jarnulf jerked Nacarr's head toward the open door. Above that door Langlif's Great Horned Owls stared down through their glass eyes, welcoming Nacarr to hell as Olaf and Da'hal dragged him toward it.

Eirika hung back, still seated, pinching the bridge of her nose and gazing shut eyed up into the rafters.

"Consider it settled, son." Eirika whispered, and shuddered, as the lowing of the cows from the barn next door swelled into the quiet the crowd was leaving behind it.

CXL He's Mine

Nacarr and his retainers headed the parade out past the graveyard fence with Nacarr gushing necrotic curses on one and all, struggling, spitting, and accusing Thyre of every imaginable perversion.

Da'hal offered to gag him. Thyre shouldn't have to listen to another word. Ref pitched the rope up over a stout limb of the oak.

Thyre took a stand beside Jarnulf. The eyes in her seventy wintered face were those of a mischievous five year old. Nacarr damned her for a witch and commanded her be gone before asking her who the hell she was.

"Eh, heh, heh." Thyre laughed before planting a kiss on Jarnulf's cheek and saying she wished she'd had a quarter that much fun."

Eirika rolled her eyes and turned away.

Thyre drew close to Nacarr and blew him a kiss. Nacarr wrinkled his nose and winced. Even at seventy Thyre spent a lot of time working in the tanning shieling and no amount of steaming and scrubbing could completely erase its stink.

"And to think I could have had a Chieftain." Thyre said. "I'd no idea you thought so much of me, in that way."

Eirika retrained her needle glare on Nacarr.

"Since you're so set on trying your luck with Odinn, death by steel and all that offal," she said. "I'm going to give it to you."

Jarnulf, Olaf and Hroghar stared dumbstruck. Every other man but Mordach raised their voices shouting for the duel honor.

"You can't be serious." Jarnulf howled.

"We owe him nothing." Hroghar yelled.

"Aud." Eirika said, extending her thin, brown spattered, buckskinned arm. Aud approached and handed her Hroald's axe.

"He's mine." Eirika said.

Nacarr was seized by a fit of laughter.

"Just loose me." Nacarr said. "I won't need a sword for this."

Eirika shook her head violently from side to side, commanding Olaf and Da'hal to do no such thing. She stared Nacarr down, wringing the axe's haft in her hands.

Jarnulf leapt between them.

"This madness has gone far enough." he said. "It's my suit and I'm hanging him."

"Young man," she said. "do not cross me."

"Give me the axe, Logmadur." Jarnulf said, slowly, "There'll be no dueling today."

"Christ." she groaned. "When are you going to start paying attention? I said nothing about any goddamn duel. Now stand aside."

Jarnulf refused to budge. The Eirika he knew would choke and drop dead before taking the Lord's name in vain. Da'hal, with his blasphemous oathings, had heard oceans more about them than he wanted to many times.

She side stepped Jarnulf to address Nacarr.

"I began my study of the law," she began, again flat, frigid, and at least feigning sanity, "thirty years ago Gerard, just after you murdered your way to the bottom of that Nahri cesspool."

"And you still don't know shit about it." Nacarr growled.

"I had a son named Ari, then." she continued, unperturbed, "He was eleven. Ari was an apprentice woods rat. My cousin Thjostolf was the woods rat Ari was apprenticed to. It hadn't been a good season for the woods rats. We were all off at Thing. Thjostolf and Ari stayed behind, hunting to fill the smokehouse. The other woods rats found my kinsman Thjostolf. He'd been murdered, hacked to bits. They never found Ari, but,"

"People disappear in the woods all the time," Nacarr yelled. "They're lousy with Skraelings, and bears, and wolves."

"They never found Ari," she said. "but they followed his tracks, and those of three men, back to your border."

"You're insane!" Nacarr bellowed.

"This my fault?" she said. "The law has been cold comfort in lieu of my son and cousin. For years I'd dreamed I'd actually get to prosecute you, someday. But eventually, time just dragged on. Funny how things work out, isn't it?"

CXLI Rista Orn

"For you," she continued. "the Rista Orn." and kept smiling sweetly as Nacarr's eyes became abysses of lunacy, gaping into hers and finding in them only the owls above the church door.

She skirted Da'hal and planted herself facing Nacarr's back. She extended the axe, measuring the perfect distance.

"You can't kill a man without his grace period." Nacarr yelled. "The Law Council will eat you alive."

"You and I, Gerard," she said. "are still at the place of action."

"What?" he said.

"You accused me," she said. "in Court, of bedding all your judges. Your immunity is forfeit for that here and now."

"In the name of God." Nacarr said.

"But his delight is in the law of the Lord," she said. "and in his law doth he meditate day and night. The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. Thou hast given him his heart's desire."

Nacarr begged his retainers to loose him or run him through.

Eirika's eyes flared an unholy blue green as if Vallhol had filled her with its supernatural corpse light. Her perpetually unwrinkled face was now a mask of deep furrowed hell fury. Still mired beneath the grime of battle, her long silver hair hung like a hanged witch's, tangled and matted.

Ref grinned most approvingly. Hroghar, after naming her ogress and troll woman departed claiming he'd not be a party to this.

The blood spattered young bulls, the twins, rushed in and added their iron grips to Da'hal's and Olaf's on his wrists, and Olaf sliced the bindings from him. The four pulled away to either side, readying his back, and cursing, he spit at Olaf, the demon with those yellow green eyes, hissing through those white teeth from that morbific, demon painted maw still brown with the blood of his Thingmen.

Now, now he understood them, those nightmares, decades filled with those awful yellow green ghost eyes floating ever closer through the black brambles in that moonlit marsh, those hideous tortoise faces black, green and brown, craning their necks and slavering jaws toward him, those giant snapping turtle jaws tearing great gobbets of the flesh from his bones as he struggled mired to his knees in the rotten fish mists of that stinking, choking, midnight Hel bog.

Behind him, the baleful old witch, who weighed little more than Mirha, wrestled the huge axe up over her head.

Jarnulf gaped, adrift, at the depths of Eirika's depravity.

In her eyes boiled all the acid and venom of the void distilled and concentrated into universes of negation, elysiums of scalding annihilation. She was neither ogress nor troll woman. She was the truth behind the myth, not a wondrous deliverer of the fallen, wrapped in youth's bloom, but the withered and fell chooser of the slain, cold death and night eternal, hatred, ancient, millennia old. She was the Valkyr.

Hroald's axe descended, and Nacarr shuddered forward, shrieking.

The Valkyr raised up the axe again. Bright droplets fell from it onto her white brow and tangled hair. Again the axe fell. Nacarr's gurgling shrieks cut through the pained lowings from the barn.

This could not be what Bror had met. Angels of God had come for Bror and the others. No one could depart so willingly, so eagerly, with such. Bror had told of beauty so wondrous it brought tears to his eyes.

She was nightmare, humanity's dark mirror, dried and shriven, an elf, a hell sprite, a fen stalker who rode her wolf with bridle and reins of living snakes beneath the moon, ancient beyond any law rememberanced save one, the slaughter law that was before even the vengeance law, a birth daughter of the Valfoder avenging herself blindly against all for his rape of her mother.

Eirika cut down again, and Nacarr, limp in his captor's grips, shuddered in silence. Bright red bubbles frothed between his broken, white teeth and down over his chin. He still lived, but barely.

"Damnit." she said. "I seem to be all done in from this last night's exertions."

Mordach shot forward bearing his hand axe.

"Allow me, Logmadur." he said, and leaning close, delivered two deft strokes with the hand axe before casting it aside to take a more hands on approach. A slurry of red vomit gushed from Nacarr's mouth and his dying eyes shot open. In them burned the agonies of the pit which Hroald had tried so hard to save his beloved from, and they understood, those few who had not averted their eyes.

When Mordach had finished, Eirika commanded Jarnulf to put the noose around the Outlaw's neck, and quickly. She shot her bony, trembling hand out to Ref, Gudrod, and Thorarin signing them to pull hard before all life had fled from Nacarr, and they hoisted him up into the oak.

Nacarr gave up a final, feeble convulsion, and twisting slightly, died on the gallows. Mordach's face, chest, and arms were drowned in blood, right up to the little fellow's shoulders.

Nacarr's ribs had been hacked through. Mordach had completed the Rista Orn, the Carved Eagle, by delving his hands deep to pull Nacarr's lungs out through the openings. If Nacarr somehow wound up in Vallhol he'd arrived as a trael, not one of the Einheirjar, having been ritually sacrificed to Odinn.

The Valkyr beckoned to Aud, who came forward shielding her horrified gaze from Nacarr.

"Feeling any better, now?" she asked Aud in a voice that was curiously Eirika's but soft with concern and compassion.

"I don't think I know." Aud said.

"Well, we've both taken at least a step in that direction." The Valkyr said, handing her the axe. The Valkyr raised up her gaze to heaven, and pressed her thin, shaking blue hands flat together, upright before her chin.

"Finally," she said. "it's settled, my son."

Aud retreated two paces, waiting for Eirika to finish her now silent prayers. Aud darted dumb, mute looks at the instrument of Hroald's vengeance in her hands. Eirika's finger caught her up beneath her chin.

"We've both been robbed of a very dear friend." Eirika said. "He'd want you to have it."

Aud wasn't sure she wanted it. It would haunt her with the awful sacrifice he'd made for her.

"Hang it above your hearth," Eirika insisted. "as his sword will hang above mine beside my husband's."

"I'd rather read his Bible, if Anja will teach me." Aud said.

"He said he'd save us all yet," Eirika said. "and he'll be inexpressibly proud to see you Marshaling our little parade. I'll teach you to read it, at your table where it will stay."

Aud excused herself, and handing the axe back to Eirika she made off for the barn, chasing the crowd off to milk their cows.

Jarnulf returned inside the church minded to talk one last time with his friends but there were dozens there ahead of him, sitting silent in the church's rear, waiting their turn as the red haired blacksmith leaned heavily against the table, cradling Hroald's cheek in his palm. Jarnulf pulled the last bench back against the wall, sat down and leaned back to wait.

Thank You for reading.

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