by A. E. Rayne
Eadmund shook his head, eyes on Thorgils who looked on from across the hall with his mouth hung open, as though he was trying to read their lips. ‘A walk?’ He didn’t know if he could walk anywhere. He’d drunk far too much of that Kalmeran wine his father rarely let out of his sight, but Orla sat back and grinned at him, and Eadmund could see her freckles sparkling in the glow of the torchlight.
So he nodded.
Jael stood outside the door of her cottage, taking a long breath, trying to calm herself down. She didn’t want to worry Biddy. She’d never hear the end of it if Biddy even got a hint that something was wrong. As far as she knew, Aleksander had gone hunting. There was nothing unusual about that. Jael hated hunting, and since Aleksander didn’t mind it, she had always been happy to let him go on his own. So there was nothing Biddy needed to be suspicious about at all, as long as Jael didn’t give her any reason to.
Closing her eyes, she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and spinning around, Jael sensed that feeling again, certain now that something was wrong. She shivered, slipping one hand inside her cloak as she reached for the door handle with the other, disturbed by how dark the cottage was as she stepped inside. And as the door swung shut behind her, her right hand was quickly on the pommel of her father’s sword.
‘If you want your nursemaid to live, you’ll leave that sword right where it is,’ growled the voice in warning.
Jael stood with her back to the door, listening. The darkness was almost complete, but she didn’t need any light to know who was there.
Boots scuffed across the dirt floor, and she could hear a faint whimpering.
Biddy.
Jael kept her sword in its scabbard, hands by her side now, heart hammering in her chest, fears for Aleksander bright like a newly-sharpened blade. If Gudrum was here, what had he done with Aleksander and Tig?
Where were they?
‘So you wanted to kill me after all?’ Jael said, trying to think. And then a flame in the fire pit burst into life, and she saw a glimpse of a smirking Gudrum hunched over on the opposite side of the cottage, knife pressed across a terrified Biddy’s throat.
The cottage was tiny. A shack with two beds. Biddy’s at the back, Jael and Aleksander’s on the left side. A small fire pit in the middle. Shelves and an old barrel on the right. Three tree stumps surrounding the stone-ringed fire.
Narrow. Dark.
Not a place to swing a sword, even if she could unsheath it in time.
‘Kill you?’ Gudrum hissed, anger coating his voice with unvarnished malevolence for the first time. ‘Kill you? Ha! I’m going to gut you, you smug bitch. Gut you and bleed you so you can feel yourself die. If only Aleksander was here to watch, but he’s been taken care of by my men. And now there’s just one problem left for me to attend to before I meet up with my new horse.’
Jael had to keep him talking.
Keep him talking so she could stitch together a plan.
Quickly.
She couldn’t think about Aleksander or Tig.
Not now.
She had to find a way to save Biddy.
The cold air helped to sober Eadmund up; that and the discomfort of being completely alone with Orla as they headed across the square. He didn’t know where he was taking her. It was a wild, moonless night, and any braziers burning around the square had lost their flames long ago.
Eadmund tried to think of something to say as they headed down an alley. He tried not to walk too close to Orla. He didn’t want to make her feel awkward, but most of him just felt awkward himself.
It had been too long.
Far too long.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ Orla said, slipping her hand through his arm all of a sudden, sensing Eadmund freeze. She smiled, carrying on, edging even closer as the alley narrowed. ‘Our fathers are busy planning our marriage, yet we haven’t even spoken about it with each other.’ Now she felt awkward. ‘I... I don’t want you to feel forced into something you don’t want, Eadmund. That is no path to happiness, is it?’
The alley was dark with flittering shadows, and Orla didn’t even know where they were, but she stopped, trying to see Eadmund’s eyes. They remained hidden from her, though, as he swayed before her, head down.
‘I...’ Eadmund swallowed, looking up. Part of him was working hard to convince the rest of him to take the opportunity to escape before it was too late.
The other part...
‘I’m not. You don’t need to worry, I’m not.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Orla assured him. ‘I just want you to be happy. To think that we could make each other happy. There’s no point to it otherwise, is there?’
‘Happy?’ It didn’t feel possible anymore, but Eadmund realised that he would never know if he didn’t try to find out. He looked down at her, wishing he could stand still for just one moment. ‘It would be nice to be happy,’ he admitted. ‘I was once.’
‘But not now?’
Eadmund could sense Orla’s body urging him to move closer, to touch her, to kiss her, but his boots wouldn’t budge.
That didn’t stop Orla, who leaned forward, placing a hand on his cheek.
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled, surprised when she pushed herself up onto her toes, her lips seeking his. He lowered his head, closing his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
And then Orla stumbled to one side with a gasp.
Eadmund’s eyes sprung open, and he grabbed her arm, feeling her go limp. ‘Are you alright?’
She shook her head, overcome with nausea, dizzy, ears ringing. ‘No, no, I think you’d better take me back to the hall.’ She started shaking. ‘I need to lie down.’
‘Come this way,’ Eadmund urged, an arm around Orla’s shoulder, turning down another alley. ‘It leads around the back of the hall. Much quicker than the way we came. I’ll get you back to your chamber through there.’
The small flame was going out, and Gudrum and Biddy sank back into the shadows. Jael tried to hold on to everything she had seen, wanting to remember precisely how he was holding Biddy; where his knife was. ‘You think killing me will make you feel better? After all these years? You think you’ll miss your son any less because I’m ash?’
‘Ash?’ Gudrum was growling again, increasing the pressure of the blade against Biddy’s pulsing throat. She yelped, trying to stop herself shaking, desperate to keep perfectly still. ‘You think I’ll leave enough of you to waste a flame on? It’s been a long time since you’ve seen what I can do with a knife, Jael Furyck.’ He spat her name, standing taller now, one arm still around Biddy’s throat as he grabbed a lamp from a small table beside her bed.
Jael could smell fish, and she knew the lamp had been burning recently. Biddy struggled to see clearly, and she would have lit that lamp as soon as dusk had signalled its approach.
Gudrum threw the fish oil into the fire pit, and that lone flame sparked brightly, more flames quickly joining in. ‘But first, you can watch me rip out this old bitch’s eyes.’
Now a fire burned between them, and they could see each other clearly.
‘Don’t move!’ Gudrum ordered, sensing Jael twitch.
Biddy whimpered, trying not to move at all, feeling the sharp edge of the blade lift away from her throat, up, over her face.
‘Biddy?’
Jael could hear Edela’s voice outside the door, and so could Gudrum. His eyes darted towards it, and Jael lifted her left hand, flinging it towards his head as he turned back to her.
Biddy shrieked in terror as the tiny throwing knife whipped through the air towards her, over her, landing in Gudrum’s raised hand. He roared, jerking his hand away from Biddy’s throat, fingers splayed in pain, knife dropping to the dirt floor. Biddy stumbled down to the ground, crawling quickly, desperate to escape Gudrum, who suddenly needed a weapon more than a prisoner. Caught between picking up his knife and drawing his sword, Gudrum scooped up the knife with his left hand, teeth gleaming as Jael lunged around the flames towards him, drawing h
er own knife from its scabbard.
‘Biddy?’
Biddy was on her hands and knees, crawling away from Gudrum towards the door, but he skipped around the fire, out of Jael’s path, blocking it.
None of them wanted Edela coming inside.
‘Go away, Grandmother!’ Jael cried. ‘We’ll see you in the morning!’ She didn’t need another target for Gudrum. ‘Go away! We’re sleeping!’
There was no sound as Gudrum and Jael stalked around the fire, moving from side to side, trying to avoid tripping over the stools, waiting to see who would be the first to pounce. Blood poured from Gudrum’s hand, his lips peeled back, the pain of his wound revealing itself. His yellow-tinged eyes glowed with anger, though, as he tried to focus. He had to work quickly before that nosey old dreamer alerted anyone to trouble. ‘Got any more baby knives?’ he spat, jerking his knife at Jael. ‘You want to prick me to death? That’s how your fuck of a father taught you to fight? Baby knives?’
Jael’s temper spiked, and she dipped away from him, leaning her weight onto her left leg, kicking Gudrum with her right. He stumbled towards the fire, quickly righting himself before the flames could do much more than singe his cloak. Jumping back, he avoided Jael’s next blow, pushing his boots against the dirt, firming up his grip on his knife, knowing that he’d never been particularly strong with his left hand.
Trying not to let it unsettle him.
‘He did. Showed me how to hurt people with them. Big knives too.’ And Jael flicked her right wrist, flinging her knife at Gudrum’s throat.
He dropped his head as the blade whipped through the smoke, just past his ear, falling to the ground.
Jael’s breath was pumping fast as she stumbled after him, drawing another knife from her swordbelt. She wasn’t cold now. The heat from the fire beckoned as they danced around it, one knife each; flames threatening the tips of fingers, licking the hems of their flapping cloaks.
‘And when you lose that knife, little girl?’ Gudrum taunted, cocky smile firmly back in place now, ignoring the pain in his hand. ‘What will you do to me then?’
‘Well, there’s always my teeth,’ Jael panted. ‘I’ve still got all of them.’ And she swapped her remaining knife into her right hand, trying to remember if Gudrum was strong with his left, but it was too many years since they’d last fought, and she couldn’t.
Biddy watched them both, crouching by her bed, trying to think. She needed to help Jael. And she couldn’t do that if she got herself captured by that revolting man again.
The fire was blazing in the cottage now, and her eyes drifted back to the door, hoping she could find a way to escape and get some help.
Aleksander grabbed the hand Isaak held out. He shook so much that he wasn’t sure he could even drag himself out of the river, but getting out of the water was imperative now. They all had to find a way to get warm quickly. Tig too.
Isaak jumped down into the freezing river, grabbing hold of Tig’s bridle as Aleksander and Jonas crawled up the bank, collapsing onto the slippery mud.
Isaak was the strongest of the three, not having an arrow leaking blood like the other two, and he dragged a weak Tig up after them, past the mud and onto the grass where Tig shook himself, flinging cold water all over them.
Then promptly fell to the ground.
‘Tig! Shit!’ Aleksander was up on his feet, slipping and sliding his way in the dark, trying to find the horse who was now just a big lump hidden in the shadows.
Isaak’s horse had made it across the river with him, and she stood nearby, shaking in front of a tree.
‘We need a f-fire!’ Aleksander called, teeth chattering as he squatted down next to Tig. ‘We need to see!’
Jonas fell onto his back, panting. ‘We need to see to find anything to light a fire with in the first place!’
‘I’ll go,’ Isaak sighed, too cold to argue. ‘Hopefully, Gudrum’s men aren’t looking for us.’
‘Doubt they followed us in that storm,’ Aleksander muttered, feeling around Tig’s frozen rump, finding a broken arrow sticking out of it. ‘Not down the river, at least.’
Isaak didn’t answer. He’d already disappeared into the trees, looking for anything that wasn’t wet, which was unlikely after such a furious downpour.
Jonas sat up, shaking his long wet hair. ‘How is he?’ he wondered, thinking about his own horse, lost in the river. He’d appeared to be a good swimmer, though, so there was still a chance of finding him. ‘Tig? How is he?’
Aleksander placed his hand on Tig’s head. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, worry gripping him like an iron hand. He thought of Gudrum, hoping he hadn’t gone after Jael.
Fearing the answer.
‘I don’t know.’
Jael had lost her last knife, though Gudrum had a gaping wound to show for it, part of his cheek flapping open, blood sheeting down his hairy face, soaking his beard.
She tore off her cloak, the silver brooch ripping through the woven cloth as she threw it at her bed, hoping that Biddy would stay crouching where she was.
She didn’t need to worry about her now.
Jael’s eyes remained on Gudrum who still had his cloak on, mail shirt gleaming beneath it. He kept jerking from side to side in the cramped space between the fire and her bed, not giving her an easy target to aim for; smart enough to sense what she was trying to do.
But now Jael had no cloak. Nothing in her hands at all.
And she leaped over the flames towards Gudrum, aiming low.
Gudrum’s mouth fell open in surprise, dropping his knife as Jael knocked him back onto the bed. He reacted quickly, though, using his weight to flip her over. He was a powerful man, arms like rocks, pressing his weight down on Jael as she tried to wriggle away from him, up the bed. Gudrum punched her cheek, smacking her head back onto the pillow. He pulled back his fist, ready to hit her again, but Jael jerked away, releasing a hand to jab him in the throat.
‘You bitch!’ Gudrum rasped, spitting in Jael’s face as she punched him in the eye. He slapped her, knocking her back onto the pillow again, leaning all his weight down on one arm as he scooped up his knife from the floor, blinking, trying to see.
‘No!’ Biddy shrieked as Gudrum brought the blade up to Jael’s throat.
Jael tried to move, but Gudrum was leaning more and more of his weight on her, and she was struggling to lift an arm or a leg. The bed was creaking and groaning as she thrashed about, desperate to pull her head away from that knife.
Gudrum grinned, sensing her panic as she fought to move him. ‘Good with a sword, good with a knife, but how about wrestling, Furia’s daughter? With the weight of a real man on top of you?’ He pushed himself down onto her, shunting his body against hers, grunting. ‘How good are you at that?’
Jael roared, slamming her head forward, aiming for Gudrum’s bleeding cheek. He ducked to the side, laughing, enjoying the feel of her squirming beneath him. His body throbbed with both pleasure and pain as he lifted the tip of his blade to Jael’s chin. ‘Hold steady now, princess, or you’ll end up dead before we’ve had any fun.’
‘Grrrr!’ Biddy threw herself at Gudrum’s back, trying to grab a handful of his cloak, hoping to pull him off Jael before he could hurt her.
Irritated, Gudrum swung a fist at Biddy, knocking her into the flames.
‘Biddy!’ Jael screamed, quickly reaching under the pillow, and as Gudrum turned his attention back to her, she stabbed the knife she’d retrieved into his shoulder, pushing it straight through his cloak, through the iron links in his mail. She could feel his body jerk, lifting up, his back arching in pain. And pushing him off her, Jael fell off the bed, crawling to Biddy, dragging her out of the fire.
Flames were licking Biddy’s apron; her hair was smoking.
‘Jael? Jael!’ Edela was outside the door again.
With warriors. Voices Jael thought she recognised.
Gudrum was roaring and cursing behind her, and Biddy was on fire before her. Jael ignored Gudrum and threw Bid
dy to the ground, rolling her like a rug, trying to douse the flames, turning back as Gudrum lunged at her again, bloody teeth bared, knife sweeping towards her face.
Then the cottage door swung open with a bang.
‘No!’ Jael yelled as Gudrum blinked at her, panic in his eyes. ‘No! Don’t let him go!’ But seeing the two warriors Edela had quickly found to help her, Gudrum ran for the door, realising that his hopes of killing Jael Furyck and disappearing without being discovered were diminishing by the moment. Jael tried to grab his cloak as he flew past, knocking the two men into each other, sending them tumbling.
Edela screamed, stumbling away as Gudrum drew his sword, stabbing one man through the chest, swinging around, slashing his bloody blade across the throat of the other.
His eyes met Jael’s before he turned and ran.
Jael glanced down at Biddy who was no longer on fire.
‘Go!’ Biddy panted, pain contorting her face. ‘Go!’
And Jael scrambled to her feet, eyes on her grandmother who didn’t know which of Gudrum’s victims to help first. ‘Stay with Biddy!’ she cried, running out of the cottage into the pitch-black night, seeing the flap of Gudrum’s cloak ahead of her, sensing that he was running for the main gates.
She was faster than that old man, she was sure. And with both gates locked at sundown every night, he would have no way out.
Eadmund fell down onto his creaking bed.
It was cold, he realised, momentarily lost.
Wasn’t it supposed to be summer?
Thoughts of summer and warmth led him to thoughts of Orla, and flopping back onto the pillow, his mind whirled with confusion. Orla had not looked well when he’d left her chamber, but her servant had been there to assure him that likely the three days of feasting had finally taken their toll.
Orla had smiled weakly as he’d closed the door, apologising, looking forward to seeing him in the morning.