Bound
The three-fingered man sat on a stool by the stable door. Ylva’s axe lay across his lap. He was blowing into a bone flute, trying to make something that sounded like music, but it was spoilt by his lack of fingers.
Sitting on the stable floor, Ylva’s wrists were bound with rough hemp rope. Another length of rope ran from her wrists and was fastened around her neck. Her heart was still pounding, and emotions surged through her. Fear, hate, anger, frustration, all of them boiling together like poison in her veins. She dug the fingernails of her right hand hard into the skin on the back of her left hand, trying to clear her mind. She had to find a way out of this. The gods wanted revenge, so they would show her how; she had to be ready for their sign.
‘You like music?’ The deep, rumbling voice was familiar, but Ylva had never been this close to him. He had removed his helmet and she could see the pores on his bald head, and the shape of each rune tattooed into his skin. She could see the cracks in the black kohl that ringed his ice-blue eyes, every bristle on his chin, and every individual hair in the wolfskins he wore. She could smell the wild and filthy scent that came off him.
‘My name is Torstein Ulvemand.’ The stool creaked as he placed the flute on the floor beside him and rested both hands on the axe across his lap.
Torstein Ulvemand. The three-fingered man had a name.
‘Have you heard of me?’ he asked.
‘No.’
A flash of disappointment crossed his face before he showed her a tight-lipped smile. ‘This is Astrid.’ He gestured at the flame-haired woman without taking his eyes off Ylva’s. ‘And you are . . . ?’
‘I don’t care to tell you. I don’t intend to make a friend of you.’
‘I see. Well, I know nothing about you except that you’ve been riding with a pair of murdering thieves and –’ he nodded at Freki, now leashed to one of the stable posts – ‘a wolf pup?’
‘Definitely a wolf pup.’ Astrid was settling their horses, stabling them beside the chestnut that had brought Bron to Seatun. Freki was at her feet, but didn’t seem bothered by her. He was curled in the straw, watching her with his chin on his paws. Ylva felt betrayed by his lack of hate for the slavers.
She looked down at Bron beside her, bound in the same way she was. Instead of sitting, though, he was lying curled with his eyes closed. One side of his face was thick with congealed blood.
‘He’s not dead,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t hit him that hard.’
‘He’ll live.’ The three-fingered man put his right hand to his mouth as if he was thinking. Where the two smallest fingers should have been, there were just two stumps. ‘That woman you left up in the cave is dead though. It’s a shame. She stole something valuable from me, and I wanted to make her pay for it.’
‘The boy will have to do.’ The flame-haired woman glanced over her shoulder as she took the bags from her horse. ‘It took us a long time to find that cave you were hiding in.’ She loosened the saddle and removed it as she spoke. ‘We had to split up and ride around in circles for a day at least. The snow covered your tracks almost as soon as you laid them, but we found it in the end.’ She looked over at Ylva as she took blankets from the horse’s back and draped them over the stall fence. ‘We found the woman, and enough good signs to know you were heading in this direction. We were going to camp down for the night but—’
‘We saw your fire.’ The three-fingered man finished her sentence. ‘You made things easy for us in the end.’ He fixed Ylva with his ice-blue eyes.
Ylva ignored him and glanced around for something to use as a weapon, but there wasn’t much in the stable other than straw. The only useful things were Bron’s bow leaning against the door, and her own axe lying across the three-fingered man’s lap. But even if she were fast enough to take them – which she wasn’t – she’d never manage it while tied like an animal.
She would find a way to survive, though, she was determined. The rope would not be around her neck for long.
The three-fingered man put his hand back on the axe, and while the woman finished settling her own horse and started on his, he drummed the two fingers of his right hand on the broadest part of the axe blade. His nails tapped the iron as he studied Ylva.
Ting-ting. Ting-ting . . . He stopped. ‘Who are you? From the way you talk, I’d say you’re a Dane, but what are you doing with this boy? Are you a slave?’
‘I’m not a slave. My father is a jarl from Jorvik. He’s a berserker with an army of a hundred men, so you should let me go now or—’
‘You’re a bad liar.’ The woman came to stand beside the three-fingered man. ‘And you are a slave. Those marks on your neck are from a collar. Who do you belong to?’
‘I’m not a slave.’ Ylva stared at her, unable to hide her hatred. The last time Ylva had seen this woman, she was putting Mother’s locket around her neck. And now Ylva could see the locket again, hanging against the woman’s tunic; the same locket she had stolen from Mother’s body.
In that moment, Ylva’s need for revenge was like a fist of ice crushing her heart. She had never felt anything like it – not even when she had found Mother lying dead in the trader’s hut – and she wanted to leap at the woman like a wild animal, to tear the locket from her, and make her pay for what she had done. She wanted to—
Stay calm.
The voice echoed in her head and, just when she needed him, Geri was there, sitting by the door with his ears pricked up and his nose in her direction.
Stay calm and survive. Don’t let them know who you are.
She dug her nails harder into her skin and bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself thinking straight. Geri was right; she had to be calm. She had to survive. ‘If you do anything to hurt me, my father will find you and kill you.’ Her teeth were clamped together so tight that her mouth barely moved.
‘Like you want to kill me?’ the three-fingered man asked. ‘I heard you say that outside. Why do you want to kill me?’
The words were in her mouth, but Ylva stopped herself from saying them. If she told him about Mother and Geri, about her revenge, he might kill her right now where she sat. The three-fingered man was a Dane – a Viking – he would understand the importance of revenge. He would know what it meant to Ylva, and how far she would go to get it.
When she said nothing, the three-fingered man narrowed his eyes. ‘Tell me then – if you’re not a slave, what are you doing with this boy?’ He nodded his head at Bron.
‘He helped me. Your men in the forest were going to kill me.’
The three-fingered man leant forward. ‘You’re talking about Halvor and his brothers? You think they were going to kill you?’ He widened his eyes and tilted his head. ‘And then I suppose they were going to eat you? Arvid would have liked that. Did you see his teeth?’ He opened his mouth and ran the tip of his tongue over his own teeth. ‘He said all those sharp points were perfect for gnawing on the bones of small children.’ He snapped his jaws at Ylva, making her recoil in horror.
The three-fingered man smiled and shook his head at her. ‘Vikings don’t eat children – you’re too valuable. Selling you is much better than eating you.’
‘We might even sell him instead of just killing him.’ The flame-haired woman pointed at Bron. ‘It might make up for all the silver we’ve lost and the time we’ve wasted. We’ve been hunting them for weeks.’
‘Weeks?’ Ylva tried to make sense of that. The three-fingered man had been hunting them for weeks? She let it sink in as she realized what it meant.
You were wrong, Geri said. The half-skulls weren’t hunting you. They were hunting Cathryn and Bron. They had been hunting them long before we even arrived at the trader’s hut.
Ylva looked up at the three-fingered man. ‘You were already hunting them? Before they killed those men at the camp?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they stole from me.’ The three-fingered man spat the words at Ylva. ‘They stole my slaves.’
‘Your slaves?’ It was almost too much for Ylva to think about.
‘One last raid outside Jorvik and we would have had enough.’ The woman glared at Bron. ‘But he and that woman stole them.’
‘Your slaves?’ Ylva said again. Everything was upside down and muddled in her head, and she couldn’t quite grasp it. ‘I don’t . . . Why would they steal your slaves?’
‘To sell, of course. What else would they do with them? They’re slavers, like me. They probably planned to sell you too.’