by Vox Day
As if by way of compensation, the meal itself was surprisingly lavish. Prince Karl had brought over a considerable quantity of wine, which was almost unknown to a generation of Dalarn warriors who had grown up spending considerably more time defending their people against the aalvarg than raiding the northern coasts of Selenoth. It was well received by Savoners and Dalarn alike, as was the spit-roasted beef, which was served in such quantities that even the lowliest kitchen drudges would be able to eat their fill tonight.
The Skullbreaker had laid in supplies intended to last his men for two years, but now that the decision to abandon the fortress was settled, there was no longer any need to ration them out. And because not all of the pigs, cows, and chickens could be transported on the ships, they would dine as if they were kings across the sea throughout the final days of Raknarborg.
“Will you stop that?” she snapped, rather too harshly, as Patrice offered for the third time to refill her cup.
“I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said, flustered.
“There be twenty other women here in the hall, why must you always talk to me? Why you not bother them, not me?”
“I had no idea I was bothering you,” he said, pulling back from her and holding himself in a stiff and unnatural position. “I do apologize, of course. In my defense, I hope you will allow me to point out that I can’t speak to any of those other women, as I don’t speak your tongue, and they don’t speak mine.”
Fjotra stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Of course the poor man hadn’t tried to speak to anyone else. He couldn’t! She shook her head then lifted her cup and held it out toward him by way of apology.
He grasped the gesture, and grinned ruefully as he poured the wine.
“I fear you must have thought that I was being rather forward in my pursuit of you.”
“Like a dog after a bitch.”
He winced. “Never fear, my lady. Prince Karl would have my head if I even thought to attempt seducing you, much less managed to succeed. I don’t know what his plans are for you, but he made it clear to all of us that if we were to offend you in any way, he’d give us to your father, which fate I am given to understand can be arguably worse than death.”
“The blood eagle,” Fjotra said, nodding. She’d seen him offer sacrifices of his enemies to the All-Father before, usually rival chieftains who had refused to submit to him peacefully. “You don’t want that.”
“No, I most certainly don’t, whatever it is.”
“You say the prince have plans for me? Why he do that? Why he always call me princess when everyone else call me lady?”
The mage glanced over at the prince, who was out of earshot in the noisy hall and engaged in an animated conversation with his admiral. “You have to understand that I don’t know what his intentions are. His Serene Highness is not in the habit of taking lowly battlemages into his confidence. But if his father seeks to add the Wolf Isles to the realm, which I can only assume is why we’re here, then it would make a good deal of sense to establish a more lasting claim to them than merely receiving homage from your father. Especially since he’s going to have to grant your father a fiefdom from the existing crown lands where your people can settle.”
“Homage? Fiefdom? I do not understand these words.”
“No, of course you don’t.” The young mage pursed his lips then reached into the bread basket and withdrew a piece of bread, which he began breaking into pieces. “Here, these four pieces are the isles, and all these other pieces belong to Savondir. Each piece is a fiefdom that belongs to one noble or another. The big pieces belong to the great lords, whereas the little ones belong to the minor nobility. So, even though everything belongs to the king, since your people can’t live on any of the four pieces anymore, they have to live on one of these other pieces. Homage is what your father must do in order to receive the land from the king. It’s a simple ritual.”
“Like he promise the king will be his chief.”
“Exactly. Now, your people don’t really have a structured system of nobility, so your father will need to be incorporated into the Savondese aristocracy. I mean, he has a certain status by virtue of his several thousand warriors, which will make him one of the most powerful men in the realm right away. Since the king won’t want your father using his warriors to take the lands he needs to settle your people on, he’ll simply give them to him. And since he’ll want to formalize your father’s status, he’ll make him a comte, or more likely a marquis, considering his following. He could even make him a duc, but I can’t imagine that happening since it would offend far too many of his lords, and perhaps more importanly, their ladies.”
“So I not to be a princess? What about Brynjolf, will he not be a prince?”
“Brynjolf won’t be, no. He’ll receive a title one level below your father. If the Skullbreaker is made a marquis, then your brother will be made a comte. Can you imagine that? What would he be called, the Marquis de Tete de Mort? Still, I doubt anyone would dare titter at him at court, for fear of getting brained by an axe. On the other hand, if your father is made a comte, your brother would likely be named a viscomte.”
Fjotra considered it. She didn’t think either her father or her brother would mind what they were called, so long as they were provided sufficient land on which to settle safely. Until nine months before the fall of Garn, when her father had begun preparing Raknarborg for the last stand of the Dalarn, he’d never held the allegiance of more than two hundred men and their families. To her kind, men, money, and power were much more important than titles. All the same, she couldn’t help asking about herself.
“I will be a comtesse?”
Patrice shrugged. “At the least. I suspect you’ll be more valuable to the king as ‘the Princess des Iles du Loup.’ Whereas your father and brother are worthless as claimants to the islands, he can declare them to be your dowry and either give you to the man who can take them back for him, or, if he prefers to keep them for the crown, marry you to Prince Karl.”
“Marry me?” It wasn’t a horrific thought, but Fjotra was alarmed at how the comtesse might react. “What if he loves someone else?”
“Kings and princes are much more interested in what a woman brings with her to the wedding than anything else, my lady. You’re a pretty girl, to be sure, but it’s not your face that will have every adventuresome noble seeking your hand in marriage. I daresay even a few peers of the realm would be interested, were it not for their wives getting in the way. And besides, from what I’ve seen, you and the prince appear to like each other well enough.”
He did? “You think he likes me?”
“I think you know perfectly well that he does.” The mage’s voice was measured, but his eyes betrayed his amusement. to laugh at her. “I merely hope that my lady will look upon me with favor should she one day find herself Queen of all Savondir.”
She snorted. “Queen of Savondir? No, I don’t believe you. But I need friends in Savonne, I think, no matter who marries me. Should we be friends?”
“Done, my lady,” Patrice declared, and they raised their cups together by way of sealing the pledge.
Fjotra was certain the young battlemage was not quite as disinterested in her as he feigned, but she was pleased to know that she would have at least one genuine friend in Savonne if a marriage to the Red Prince caused even the comtesse to turn on her. So it was with a light heart that she subsequently retired from the hall and made her way toward the bedchamber she shared with four of her friends.
Fjotra had already repacked her dress and slipped on her thick woolen nightshift when there was a knock on the door.
It was Grenjar, the young thrall who had been freed upon reaching Raknarborg and who was now serving her father as what the Savoners would call his squire. He had unusually dark hair for a Dalarn and was sometimes called Stormcrow, as the Skullbreaker seldom summoned someone because he was pleased with them. But his presence held no terrors for Fjotra. Quite the opposite, actually, as
she had seen both her father and Prince Karl looking over at her after engaging in a long and apparently intense discussion. Dared she hope that they had been speaking of her betrothal? She would find it soon, it seemed.
“Your father wants you,” the dark-haired young man told her. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and she knew that, like most former thralls, he would not see himself as a true man until he had stood with the shield wall and proven himself worthy of a warrior’s regard. “He’s in his chambers.”
She followed Grenjar up the stairs that led to the room at the top of the tower that her father had claimed once the Red Prince and his retinue had arrived. Since the self-styled King of the Wolf Isles had neither servants nor court, he simply didn’t require the space that the southerners considered an absolute necessity. Pride might have demanded otherwise, but then, it was the Skullbreaker’s fondest hope that they would soon abandon what presently passed for his entire royal demense. She also knew that he liked being able to look out over the sea to the south, toward the lands that they would soon be forced to call their home.
Grenjar had nearly reached the final landing when the sounds of a struggle could be heard coming from one of the rooms above them.
The young man glanced back at her for a moment, confusion on his face. Then he turned and leaped up the remaining stairs two at a time.
Fjotra wrinkled her nose, smelling something unpleasant but vaguely familiar. Then horror struck her heart as she realized where she had smelled it before.
“I’m coming, my lord!” Grenjar shouted.
“Father!” Fjotra gathered up her shift on one hand and ran up the stairs after Grenjar, and she screamed again when she saw the creature that had her father pinned beneath its grey-furred bulk.
It was an aalvarg, though she couldn’t see how it could possibly have entered through either of the chamber’s two small windows, much less climbed more than one hundred feet up the walls that rose from the stony shores of the White Sea.
With a battle cry that might have done credit to a veteran berserker, Grenjar drew his dagger from his belt and leaped at the monster, stabbing it once in the back of the neck and again in its right shoulder.
The half-wolf, half-man roared, releasing the Skullbreaker’s shield arm from its bloody jaws, and twisted its torso, causing Grenjar to tumble from its muscled back.
Her father took the opportunity to roll out from beneath his attacker, but Fjotra could see that he couldn’t use his arm, and there was blood covering most of his naked upper body.
“The axe!” he shouted, pointing with his sword arm as the aalvarg swiped its long claws at Grenjar, raking him across the chest.
Fjotra whirled around and saw the weapon that had given her father his name suspended on four iron rods driven into the wall. She lifted the battleaxe off its supports—it was heavy, and she could barely hold it aloft over her head. When she turned, groaning under its weight, she saw that the aalvarg was back on top of her father, snapping madly at him and lunging for his throat.
She cried out as she staggered toward the embattled pair. Then gravity came to her aid, and she brought the axe blade crashing down squarely in the middle of the aalvarg’s back. A fountain of dark blood splattered in her face.
The beast threw its head back and shrieked, scrabbling madly at the giant blade that was now embedded deeply in its flesh.
Skuli managed to push it off him, and no sooner had he done so than Grenjar dove at the aalvarg, driving his knife into its throat, ripping it back and forth with murderously unrestrained violence, and sending the unnatural monster back to the Hell from whence it must originally have come.
Fjotra rushed to her father’s side and kneeled down beside him, heedless of the blood that was staining her white shift.
“Let me see, Father. Let me see you!” She gasped at the sight of his shield arm, which was badly mangled all around its circumference, torn from his wrist to his elbow by the long, wolfish fangs. A pair of claw marks ran from his left cheek down to his breast, and three more, much deeper wounds marked his side where the beast had very nearly slashed open his belly. “Grenjar, run and find one of the troldkvinde! Wait, first take the blankets from his bed there and throw them to me!”
The young man was bleeding from his face and favoring his left leg, which was slashed below the knee. But he quickly stripped the woolen bedding from the Skullbreaker’s bed and tossed it to her. Then he bent over, pulled his knife from the dead aalvarg’s throat where he had left it, and handed it to her.
“You’ll need this in case there are more of them about,” he said. “I’ll send some men up while I look for a witch woman.”
Fjotra nodded. It was a good thought. She wiped off the blade as he departed, then used it to cut long strips from the thinnest blanket. Her father had lost a good deal of blood, but judging by the astonishing number of scars on his body, from the long-healed and barely visible white lines to the newer ones that looked like fat pink worms, he had seen worse in the past.
“Tighter,” he hissed as she wrapped a makeshift bandage around his torso. “I think he may have broken a rib or two. It hurts when I breathe too deeply. Reminds me of the time Gunnlaug Sigurdsson caught me with the edge of his shield. Took me a month before I could breathe properly again and cost me a ship to ransom myself. He was a clever one. We could surely use that old bastard now.”
She dabbed lightly at the wounds on his cheek, which turned out to be little more than scratches, then carefully reached out and began to examine his arm. It was a horrific sight, and she didn’t really know where to begin bandaging it, so she decided to concentrate on getting the bleeding to stop, especially near his wrist.
“At least it wasn’t your sword arm,” she commented.
He nodded, his eyes tightly closed. His breathing was irregular and forceful in her ear. She had just finished bandaging his arm when she felt him push her away from him. “The Savoner prince,” he said. “Go and make sure he has guards in his chamber. If they found me here, they might have attacked him too.”
“I can’t leave you here alone! We don’t know how many of them there are inside the walls! And surely someone will alert the Savoners once Grenjar sounds the alarm.”
“None of them speak the bloody southern tongue, girl! I’ll be fine. You take the blade. I’ve got the axe in case I need it. Now go, he’s our guest and our liege lord—we have a duty to him.”
She looked dubiously from him lying in a pool of his enemy’s blood to the heavy axe that she had barely been able to lift with two good arms. How could he ever lift that with one arm, wounded as he was? But then, he was not only right, he was her father. And they did have a duty to the Red Prince.
“I’ll warn him and come right back,” she said, kissing him on the forehead and pushing herself to her feet. “Don’t die before then.”
“It will take more than one damned wolf to kill the Skullbreaker, my girl. Go, then, go!”
She ran from the room, reversing the knife in her hand as she did so. She knew she was on edge, and the last thing she wanted was to stab people instinctively if they startled her.
She was barely out of the room when she saw a group of half-dressed but fully armed Dalarn warriors with Steinthor Strongbow at their head charging up the stairs toward her. Relieved that her father would at least be safe from another attack, she quickly told Steinthor where she was headed. After ordering most of the men to go and assist the Skullbreaker, the captain insisted on accompanying her to the prince’s chambers, along with three of his men.
The Red Prince had been given the great chamber, which was in the central tower, so it took some time to descend the stairs of the South Tower, run through the courtyard, then ascend another set of stairs.
There were no signs of any alarm, however, which was a relief to Fjotra, since she was getting out of breath before they reached the landing upon which the prince’s room was located. But her relief quickly faded as they turned a corner in the corridor and saw an unfamili
ar man staggering toward them holding a bloody shoulder.
“Dammit!” swore Steinthor, and he drew his sword, racing past the man into the room.
His men followed, but even as Fjotra tightened her grip on her knife and steeled herself for what they would find there, a familiar scent caught her attention. She frowned and sniffed the air to see where it was coming from, then turned around and realized that it was the wounded man, who was neither Dalarn nor Savoner, but what looked like a strange blend of the two peoples. It was the eyes that were the wrong color, they were black like some of the dark-eyed Savoners, but the skin and hair were fair.
“Sigskifting!” she screamed.
The false man growled and bared teeth that were much too long, thin, and curved to be human.
Terror filled her, but she didn’t hesitate to throw the knife in her hand. The aalvarg was only steps away, and at that range, she did not miss.
The man howled like the wolf he truly was as the blade sank hilt-deep into his left shoulder.
Fjotra ran toward the room into which Steinthor and his men had disappeared. She was almost to the door when a heavy weight struck her in the back and smashed her to the floor.
The force of it stunned her, leaving her more conscious of the beast growling and snarling on top of her than of any pain from its attack. And then, almost as soon as it had come, the heavy weight was gone.
A high-pitched shriek resounded throughout the stone corridor, and when she rolled over onto her side and looked behind her, she saw Steinthor Strongbow standing over the dying figure of the aalvarg, now shifted back into its terrible half-form, holding it up by the sword that ran all the way through its throat and out the back of its neck. Two of his men stood behind him, already sheathing their swords.
Twitching and thrashing, but unable to escape from the iron blade that held it as firmly as a kitchen spit, the dreadful beast finally slumped to the ground, apparently dead.
Steinthor lifted his hilt toward the ceiling, then placed his boot on the lupine face and withdrew his sword.