‘Swear to me...’ Kai’s voice faltered, but his hand gripped like a vice. ‘Swear you’ll be revenged on Saldas. For Bara’s sake... And for mine.’
‘I swear it.’
Kai released his grip and let his head fall back. Under the streaks of mud his face was very pale now, but his lips wore a wide and peaceful smile. ‘That’s an end then...’ Erlan could feel the pool of blood spreading wet against his knees. ‘Go, Hakan. You’re free now. Go!’ Erlan’s tears were falling freely onto Kai’s face. ‘Don’t weep for me, Hakan... I can see it all clear now. I did what I was here to do.’ He smiled, his ice-blue eye twinkling one last time. ‘You must do the same...’
His head went limp in Erlan’s hands and his bright eye now dimmed with the final shadow of death, leaving only a frozen smile that cut through the dried blood that had welled from his broken eye. Gently, Erlan closed the other for the last time.
He sat like that a long while, his heart so heavy he thought he might never rise from that spot again. But he had sworn an oath. To see it done, he must live.
At last he shuffled backwards and laid Kai’s head on the ground. Then, with every bone aching, every inch of skin stinging, he climbed to his feet. The chain still hung from his bloody wrists.
He looked around and his eye fell on the iron rod that had been left against the wall. He recognized it with disgust: remembered it, red with heat, branding Rorik’s ravaged body. Swallowing the pain, he wedged it between his knees and jammed the end under one of the cuffs. His wrists screamed in protest, but he pushed on, twisting the shackle against the black iron. Twisting and twisting, growling in agony and effort, till every sinew in his arm was about to snap. But there was a sudden crack, the rivet-heads popped and the shackle flew off.
He gasped in relief, not daring to look at his ruined flesh. Instead, he jammed the rod into the second shackle and strained again. Moments later, there was a merciful popping sound and the rivets spat like apple-pips against the wall. The cuffs fell to the ground.
For a few seconds he waited, rocking back and forth until the worst of the pain had ebbed away. Then he looked down. Black and purple bruises circled his wrists. The skin was a mangle of red and pink and grimy white shreds of flesh, running with pus. They throbbed. But they would heal.
He gazed on the ruin of Vargalf’s face: his wounds would not.
Erlan grimaced. He was free. He looked around and saw Wrathling, discarded to one side. He hobbled over and picked it up. Vargalf’s possession of it had been short-lived.
What did the son of a bitch expect? The runes on its hilt cursed the hand of anyone but its rightful owner. Vargalf should have known this.
He peered into one of the murky corners. The miserable heap of clothing was still there where they’d tossed it when they stripped him. He went and picked them up. Damp, rotting, ragged. But they would serve. As he dressed, he found under them his belt, cut from the Witch King’s tail. Gnarled leather, crudely worked – no man would envy him this. But he was sure it carried with it some dark strength. Fastening it, he then gathered up the other weapons and cast a final look around the scene of so much torment.
Better that it burns. All of it.
He snatched the torch from the sconce and held it to the wall till the flame took and began to creep up towards the thatch. Then he tossed the remnant of the torch into the fire.
Kai lay beside it, still as stone... peaceful. As though only sleeping next to a warm hearth.
‘Let the fire carry you home, little brother. Wherever that may be.’ That said, he went to the door and slipped outside into the darkness.
After the smokehouse, the air smelled sharp and clean.
He was about to move off into the shadows, but he hesitated. A solitary, glinting eye was peering at him out of the gloom. He saw movement and a shape detached itself from the darkness. Long limbs loped towards him, then stopped.
A dog. A wolfhound, its long pink tongue hanging low, tasting the air. One eye gazed at him, cold and questioning. Its twin was nothing more than an empty shadow.
For a moment, man and beast stood motionless, watching each other.
Inside the smokehouse, the flames crackled, taking hold of the timber and thatch. The noise distracted the hound. It turned to the door, lifting its nose at the smell of smoke and blood and death.
When it looked back, Erlan was gone.
PART FOUR
THE PLAINS OF BRAVIK
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Gellir the White had found it at last.
Dannerborg. Seat of his enemies.
He pulled his hood low over his brow. The gods had given him a face that folk remembered. Now, more than ever, he needed to be invisible.
He had approached from the west, abandoning the horse he’d stolen, flitting from cover to cover like a fox, closing in, till he reached the woods carpeting the hill above Dannerborg. There he stopped and waited and watched – the gate, the guards, the palisade – watching folk coming and going.
The place was awash with men of war. Most were idling or practising strokes or wrestling or drinking. He quickly saw there were far too many for anyone to note an unfamiliar figure moving among them, especially not in the dusk-light.
It was simple enough to slip through the gates on the tail of a hay-cart without even a blink from the guards. And now he sat in a gloomy corner of the hall-yard, whittling a piece of wood. Waiting. Watching under the brim of his hood, his pink eyes bathed in shadow, thinking of the great Lord Ringast.
The excrement who had flayed his twin brother.
The Wartooth’s son would pay for what he had done. They all would.
Gellir rolled his shoulder to test the wound from the arrow. The muscle was stiff as bark. He squeezed it, feeling the ache as the blood rushed into it.
After his escape from Ulvar’s Crossing, he had crawled out of the river a quarter league downstream. He had managed to stem the worst of the bleeding but the fever must have been in him by then. He walked for leagues, avoiding all villages and hamlets, until the throbbing in his shoulder and his head had reduced him to a stumble. At last, he came across a lonely homestead, far from any other place – the dwelling of an old woodcutter and his young wife. He collapsed on their doorstep.
She hadn’t been scared of his face. They had taken him in, tended him, though the fever gripped him for weeks. All the while his mind drifted through strange visions. Faces mainly, dozens of them. People he had killed, their pitiful, pathetic pleas frozen in the instant of death. Faces that might have tormented another man but he found them only ridiculous.
Eventually the woodsman’s wife’s poultices and brews began to tell and he became strong again. The time came to leave. They had a horse. He needed it. Things got a little ugly when the old man objected. And then that business with his wife...
Well, what did they expect? There were only two types of people in this world: hunters and their prey.
And now he had found this place.
His older brothers were dead. His twin, dead. His father, dead. There was nothing in him now but revenge. Blood called for blood.
He settled down under his cloak and waited for the dead of night, nursing one thought and one only:
The Wartooth, his sons, their seed... All of them must die.
Erlan Aurvandil slipped his feet into the water and sucked in sharply. The skin wouldn’t heal for days, maybe weeks, but salt water seemed to ease the pain a little. Bubbles chuckled between his toes as the boat cut through the firth waters.
Shapes slipped by in the pre-dawn gloom: ragged islets blanketed with spruce, ringed with rocks, bloated and smooth, tumbling into the dark water. By his reckoning, the mouth of the Great Bay must be close. After that, the open sea, and Sveäland would glide, along with everything else, into his past.
A north-easterly wind sighed. He tasted salt and breathed a little easier. In three days he’d come many leagues and hardly a moment had he felt safe. Every jar of his bones, every chafe of
his legs, every needle-prick of pain, he’d expected the shout of pursuit. But it never came.
He had hobbled away from the nightmare, fleeing on the first horse he found before the hall-folk had even awoken to the flames devouring the smokehouse and its horrors. Once clear of the halls, he flung himself into the first stream he came to, washing weeks of filth and blood off his wasted body, soothing his fire-raw limbs. But the water couldn’t wash away what he had seen. Or what he had done.
Are you a man or a monster, my son?
His mother’s question.
He knew not the answer. Something monstrous had possessed him by the end, some ancient rage. Was that him or something else?
He found the boat where Kai had said it would be, hidden half a league east of Sigtuna in a craggy inlet, under brushwood and bracken. A sturdy little knarr of the kind merchant-men used to come and go across the East Sea. He made her ready, then pushed off into the fjord, leaving the horse grazing near the shoreline.
He was heading east through the Throat and out of the mouth of the Great Bay. Yet long after pursuit by land was impossible, he still found himself looking over his shoulder, half-expecting riders to break from the treeline and cry his name.
But the only sounds in the night had been the breeze trembling against the sail and the trickle of the clinker-hull over the surface of the moonlit water. Darkness gave way to morning. Only with the first taste of salt air did he allow himself to believe he had escaped. Only then did he ask himself where he was headed.
Kai was dead. His best friend. His last friend. As for the others... they were dead or scattered.
So where should he go?
He felt the sea surge under the tiller. The salt-spray flecked his wrists, stinging his wounds. A good pain, he thought. It means I’m alive.
Aye, he was alive. But Kai was dead.
A pang of sorrow rose like bile in his throat. Kai could have lived. Instead he had come back. Yet hadn’t the Norns woven him that fate long ago? Hadn’t he seen it in the burning flames and bloody rain of his dream?
Erlan wondered what those dark sisters were weaving now, for him. His urðr. He could almost hear the click-clack of the Norns’ needles. But so far as he could read their pattern, they wanted only to strip him: of fealty, of friendship, of love. Of anything of light or goodness that touched his life, sucking it all down into their black well of tears and giving him nothing in return.
So where should he go?
He knew little of the lands beyond any horizon. The white lands of winter to the north were a mystery. He knew the great market-harbour of Rerik lay somewhere to the south. He might find service there among the lords of Wendland, or even further south in Frankia. Or he could go east, to Estland and beyond, to the great rivers of which Sviggar had spoken. Behind him lay only darkness. Yet the roads that lay ahead seemed just as obscure.
He was free to choose.
Maybe freedom is darkness. The future, an emptiness, vague and shifting as a mist. But looking inside himself, he found only one thing of any substance. His oath to Kai. No, it was more than an oath. It was a debt. He owed Kai his life, owed him his revenge.
He thought of Sigurd and Saldas, of their foul betrayals – betrayals not only of him. What evil they had wrought on Sviggar, his oath-lord? Didn’t he owe him vengeance as much as his friend?
And Lilla?
He tried to imagine sailing on, leaving the whole pack of them to devour each other like rabid wolves until there was none left standing. But the realization came to him stark and certain: he would have no peace until Sigurd and his queen were destroyed.
The clouds of Odin’s storm were gathering, the Valkyries readying their steeds. The great slaughter that was Vargalf’s dream seemed inexorable now, unstoppable as time or tide.
So where should he go?
The first ray of morning broke the horizon, stabbing his eyes. Dawn was come, pouring out its golden fire over the glistening water like the mead of the gods. He spat sour phlegm over the gunwale and suddenly the image of Kai’s ruined face came tripping over the waves, calling him, demanding his answer.
He sighed, deep and long, then pulled the tiller towards him, letting the wind fill out the sail.
The bows swung to the south.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Lilla rolled over. Her head was pounding. She had gone deeper than she meant to, and for longer too. Night had now fallen.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, shapes began to materialize: the gnarled old rowan tree, the glade of oaks corralling the stars above. The air was heavy with the smell of silverweed and sorrel, and above that the lingering whisps of Urtha’s Weed, still smoking in the little pan.
Ringast would be angry that she was late. But she didn’t care. She had needed to be alone, needed the solace of her mother’s world for a while.
The circle remained where she had drawn it in the earth, the four runes marked in its centre.
Fehu – Freyja’s mark – for luck. For the change that was coming. A shifting of the world when things would reveal their true nature, including her. Then eihwaz – the yew-tree – the mark of Heimdall, the whitest of the gods. A mark for strength and steadfastness. She would need both before the leaves of autumn fell. Above these, she had drawn laguz – the mark of water. A mark for purity of thought and sight. To help her see the way ahead and what she must do. And last of all, dagaz – the dawn-mark. A mark to summon the light to break through the darkness of confusion and dispel the evil that seemed to be closing in on her and all she loved.
But the runes had done nothing. Urtha’s Weed had led nowhere. All she had seen was a chaos of faces, all she had heard a tumult of voices crying out in fear and anger – and closer to her whisperings that seemed to portend much, yet were too soft to discern.
She cursed in frustration. Half-wise, her mother had called her. Half-wise she was, unable to grasp fully the gifts her mother had bestowed on her.
Her throat was dry. The taste on her tongue was smoky and bitter. Her senses were still unsteady, still caught in that twilight place between this world and the eight others that adorned Yggdrasil, the Tree of Worlds. She had hoped to see her father. Hoped that the grief in her heart might call him to her while his spirit was not long departed. When he didn’t come, she had let herself believe it was because he was still alive. But then she found even that too much to dare. And of all the rest, only one face stayed with her, etched in her mind like runes on a barrow-stone.
To think of it turned her blood to ice.
It was a child – an infant really, no more, with its back to her. She had reached out and touched its shoulder, not knowing whether it was a boy or girl. The child turned and she had recoiled in horror. Its face was half-formed, warped and bloody, its mouth a shapeless maw.
She tried to wipe the image from her mind. When she couldn’t, she tried to explain it away instead. This was fear, nothing more.
A mother’s fear...
She had told no one that she had missed her moon-blood, not even Gerutha. She had hardly dared admit it to herself. But the quickening of life inside her was undeniable.
The mother of kings.
So she was destined to be. It seemed her destiny had wasted no time reaching out to her. Already it had been several weeks since her marriage-night. That first strange, loveless coupling. She had taken Ringast’s seed, nonetheless. And if the goddess Frigg meant to bless that marriage bed, then she was carrying a Danish child.
But if not...
She refused to name the alternative, even to herself.
She got shakily to her feet and tried to expel the dizziness from her head in one long breath. Her keys jangled. She touched them and suddenly felt irresponsible to have hidden herself away in this wood when she might have been needed. Gathering her things, she stumbled through the trees along the worn old path back towards the hall.
She could smell the campfires burning before she left the wood, could see their dancing orange flames.
The tents of five thousand warriors were spread along the lakeshore. Idle men, with only one object. War. That was why they had come. To slake their thirst for fame, to sate their hunger for a glorious death.
She had sacrificed love in order to save them from this madness. But now that sacrifice looked ever more futile. If her father was dead, then her brother must now hold the crown. She knew only too well what he would do with it. The Wide-Realm had been his long-cherished dream. But in the mind of a king, even a dream that vain could become a reality. And many would die in its pursuit.
She looked about her – faces looming and disappearing in the darkness. Walking among them, she felt their eyes on her. The bolder ones called out a greeting – their words a good deal more respectful than their gaze, which was sure to follow her long after she had passed.
She pulled her cloak tight about her shoulders. She had been careless tonight. The effects of the smoke were still heavy on her senses. She had inhaled too much and now she was late and having to return before they had worn off.
Once inside the gate, the yard was quiet. A few forges were still glowing but the hammers had long fallen silent for the night. Folk had already retreated to their hearths, or even to their beds.
She wasn’t hungry. She wanted only to lie down in darkness so that her whirling mind could settle. She could change nothing tonight, anyway.
Half-stumbling her way along the dim corridor, her heart fell to see Sletti gliding towards her.
‘Might I get you anything, my lady?’
Only my bed. And a night untroubled by irksome thralls, she thought unkindly. ‘Nothing... Although you can send Gerutha to me.’ Her handmaid was discreet and, unlike Sletti, didn’t peer at her with that false obsequiousness. These were welcome qualities, given her state.
‘I shall go and find her, my lady.’
‘I’ll be in my chamber.’ She pushed past him before he could see her bloodshot eyes.
The oil lamps were already burning low. The shadows seemed to close in on her, making her feel giddy, so that she had to palm the walls to keep her balance.
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