He really oughtn't to have been so sure of all this, but he was. Something to do with the night, the mood and strangeness of it. Ghost moon overhead. Nearness to the spirit wood, beyond the margins of which men never went. That girl going out, for no reason that made sense, just following the Cyngael prince. There was something at work tonight. You raided and fought long enough, survived so many different ways of dying, you learned to trust your senses, and this… feeling.
Bern hadn't learned enough yet, else he'd not have been so easily taken in an alley. Thorkell grimaced, an expression creasing his features for the first time. Fool of a lad. It was a hard world they lived in. You couldn't afford to be a fool.
The boy was making a start, though, had to acknowledge that. Everyone knew how you joined the mercenaries in Jormsvik. The only way you could join them. Thorkell looked down at the brown-haired, brown-bearded figure on the grass. A different man might have acknowledged pride.
Thorkell didn't have time to linger, to ask how Bern had done any of this. Nor did he presume that his only son, awakening, would smile in delight and cry his father's name aloud, and Ingavin's in thankfulness.
Bern shouldn't be long from waking. He would have to hope that was so, that this isolated place wouldn't draw wolves or thieves in the next while. The boy had filled out across the chest, he saw. You could almost call him a big man. He still remembered carrying him, years ago. Shook his head at that. Weak thoughts, too soft. Men woke each morning, lay down each night, in a blood-soaked world. You needed to remember that. And he needed to walk back to the girl.
Jaddite now, or not, he murmured an ancient prayer, father's blessing. Habit, nothing else: "Ingavin's hammer, between you and all harm."
He turned to go. Paused, and—berating himself even as he did—took from his belt-purse something he'd removed when he surrendered to the Cyngael for the second time in twenty-five years. He carried it now, instead of wearing it. The hammer on a chain. You didn't wear the symbols of the thunder god when you took the faith of Jad.
It was an entirely ordinary, unremarkable hammer. Thousands like it. Bern wouldn't know it as anything unique, but he'd realize it was an Erling who had carried him here, and he'd go back to the ships with the warning that implied. He'd have some talking to do, to explain his survival when Stefa never came back, but Thorkell couldn't help him with that. A boy became a man, had his own stony way to make on land and sea, like everyone else—then you died where you died, and found out what happened then.
Thorkell had killed an oar-companion tonight. Hadn't meant to do that. Not truly a friend, Stefa, but they'd shared things, covered each other's back in battle, slept on cold ground, close, for warmth in wind. You did that, raiding. Then you died where you died. An alley in Esferth for Stefa, pissing in the dark. He wondered if the dead man's spirit was out here. Probably was. Blue moon shining.
He bent and looped the chain into his son's fingers and closed them over the hammer, and then he went away along the stream, not looking back, covering ground towards where he'd seen the princess walking in her own folly.
There was a snatch of verse in his head as he went. One his wife used to sing, to all three children when they were young.
He put it out of his mind. Too soft for tonight, for any night.
+
He is coming. She knows it. Is waiting within the trees, across the stream. He is mortal and can see her. They have spoken under stars (no moons) on the night she took a soul for the queen. He has watched the Ride go through their pool in the wood. Then dropped his iron blade and very nearly touched her by the trees on the slope above the farm. It has not left her, that moment, from then until now. No quietude, in wood, in mound, crossing water under stars with the music of the Ride all around.
She trembles, an aspen leaf, her hair violet, then a paler hue. She is far from home, one moon in the sky. A glowing at the wood's edge, waiting.
EIGHT
Ingavin and Thünir were many things, but they were soul-reapers before all else, and the ravens that followed them, the birds of the battlefield and the banners, were emblems of that. So was the blood-eagle: a sacrifice and a message. A vanquished king or war-leader stripped naked under the holy sky, thrown on the ground, his face to the churned earth. If he wasn't dead he would be restrained by strong warriors, or with ropes tied to pegs hammered into the earth, or both.
His back would be carved vertically with a long knife or an axe, the bloody opening pulled wide, his ribs cracked back on each side and his lungs drawn out through the opening thus made. They would be draped upon the exposed cage of his ribs: the folded wings of an eagle, blood-crimson, god offering.
It was said that Siggur Volganson, the Volgan, had been so precise and swift in performing the ritual that some of his victims remained alive for a time with their lungs exposed to the watching gods.
Ivarr had not yet been able to achieve this. In fairness, he'd had less opportunity than his grandfather had enjoyed during the years and seasons of the great raids. Times changed.
Times changed. Burgred of Denferth, viciously cursing himself for carelessness, nonetheless knew that none of the other leaders at court or of the fyrd would have taken more than seven or eight riders to investigate the rumour of a ship, or ships, seen along the coast. He'd had five men, two of them new—using the ride south to assess them.
Three of those men were dead now. Assessment rendered meaningless. But no one was raiding the Anglcyn coast these days. How could he have expected what he'd found—or what had found his small party tonight? Aeldred had burhs all along the coast, watchtowers between them, a standing army, and—as of this summer—the beginnings of a proper fleet for the first time.
The Erlings themselves were different in this generation: settlers in the eastern lands, half of them (or something like that) were Jaddite now, trimming their sails to the winds of faith. Times changed, men changed. Those still roaming the seas in dragon-ships pursuing sanctuary treasures and ransom and slaves went to Ferrieres now, or east, where Burgred had no idea (and didn't care) what they found.
The lands of King Aeldred were defended, that was what mattered. And if some Erlings remembered this king as a hunted fugitive in wintry swamplands… well, those same Erlings were humbly sending their household warriors or their sons with tribute to Esferth these days, and fearing Aeldred's reprisals if they were late.
None of which unassailable truths was of any help to Burgred now.
It was night. Summer stars, ocean breeze, a waning blue moon. They had camped on open ground, less than a day's ride from Esferth, between the burh of Drengest, where the new shipyard was, and the watchtower west of it. He could have reached either place, but he was training men, testing them. It was a mild, sweet night. Had been.
The two on guard had shouted their warnings properly. Thinking back, Burgred decided that he and his men had surprised the Erling party as much as they'd been surprised themselves. Unfortunately, there were at least twenty Erlings—almost half a longship's worth—and they were skilled fighters. Disturbingly so, in fact. Commands had been barked, registered, implemented in a night skirmish. It hadn't taken him long to realize where these men were from, and to accept what life and ill fortune had doled out tonight.