I might be obsessed with berserker warriors. (Might be = definitely am.) The idea that the hand of God can send you into a killing frenzy is so terrible and awesome that I’ve written entire novels about it. I have control issues that make me feel crazy in crowds and dislike airplanes, so to me, going berserk is The Worst Thing Ever. Not only aren’t you in control, but you, like, kill everything in sight. This short story happened because I was wondering about a random footnote character in one of my novels and because I’ve wondered what might make somebody choose to be a berserk. What might make it a GOOD thing? When is that loss of self and sense and control maybe the BEST possible thing?
I don’t know if there’s really an answer for that, but writing this story was a way for me to try and figure it out.
And also: trolls and motorcycles and gore. —Tessa
They say the stars spread so bright that night on the mountain that the young berserk looked to the west and saw a narrow road cutting between the tall pine trees. Fate whispered in his ears, and he chose at the last moment to steer his motorcycle along a new, twisting route through the Rock Mountains toward that new band of bear warriors awaiting him in Washington State. For he was in no hurry to arrive, to swear his allegiance to a new captain when his first band had so lately been destroyed. The threeday battle against ice giants entrenched at the edge of Lake Eerie had stripped his commit-brothers to bones until he alone stood. For the month since he’d been home with his mother in Dodge City, Kansas, to make proper sacrifices and come to terms with survival.
It was a column of silvery smoke carved against those bright stars that drew him off the road. His tires crushed the beds of pine needles to fill the air with sharp evergreen, and there appeared a clearing where a girl was busy flinging items into a burning house.
A brown box splayed torn and open next to her feet, and she kept bending to dig inside, pulling out a Stoneball cap, a trophy, an old book, and worn shoes. With a grunt she heaved them, one after the other, in a high arc toward the bonfire.
Swiftly he cut the bike’s engine and ran to her, thinking first that she was trollkin, with her bared teeth and dark skin and roaring. But she was just a girl throwing family heirlooms onto a funeral pyre.
LUTA:
Here’s what happens:
We’re watching reruns of Star Trek. My brother Horn keeps adjusting the antennas to get a better signal. Captain Kirk’s face flickers constantly until Mom throws up her hands and says, “This is ridiculous. We should play Shield instead.”
As if Fate agrees, the mountain trembles beneath us.
Dad is instantly on his feet, braids swinging as he turns toward the front of the cabin.
My sister Alecia grips my hand. I pull away and follow Dad, leaving Alecia and Mom and Horn in the den. In the entryway, Dad pushes aside his All-Warm fleece jacket to grab his battle hammer off the hook drilled into the wall. He presses his ear to our thick wooden door.
“Dad?” I whisper, hands clenching. I wish I had weapon to push all my fear into.
“Go back to your mother, Luta. Send your brother to me.”
“What is it?”
“Luta, listen—”
The earth shakes again, and this time the rumble doesn’t stop. Dad slams the bar down over the door. I’ve only ever seen it lowered once before, when I was five and the Fenris Wolf was rumored to be loose on our mountain.
Hammer in hand, Dad backs up, pushing me along with him away from the door. Guttural howls echo outside. “All the lights,” Dad snaps, and we split up. He heads around toward the kitchen, flipping off switches and shuttering windows.
Eventually I return to the den, where Mom’s already closed everything. Horn now stands in the middle of the room with his hammer in hand and Alecia with a hatchet pressing her back into his. The skin around my sister’s lips is tight and gray with fear. I run past, into the back of the house where the bedrooms are, flipping off more lights and tugging the blinds closed. If they don’t see us, they may flow past the house like a flooding river around deep-rooted trees. But I can still hear them coming, louder now—their bellowing shakes the window glass. There are screams like metal tearing into metal and the crash of pine trees ripped up and slammed into the ground. The herd rolls closer like a storm, tearing down the mountain.
I am back in the entryway, almost all the way around to my family in the den, when the front door explodes inward. A heavy silhouette crams into the doorway. I smell his rancid breath from the foot of the loft stairs. I freeze. Sometimes trolls have poor eyesight, and maybe he doesn’t see me.
His mouth smacks as he stomps in, spiked club dragging over the welcome mat. Behind him are more. One calls in their language. It sounds like rocks crunching together.
The troll before me chuckles. “Little girl,” he says as more of his fellows shove inside.
My father yells from the den, and I clamber up the stairs to the little loft where I sleep. The troll tries to follow me, but the rickety old wood gives beneath his weight and the entire staircase collapses. He crashes back to the floor. Thin blue carpeting holds the shattered steps together, and they dangle for a moment before the troll rips it all free in frustration. There is more trollish laughter—in the dark I can’t tell how many press behind him. I huddle at the top step, my knees pulled tight to my chest, desperate to remember if there are weapons in my loft.
Wood splinters as they break open the den wall into a troll-sized arch.
My sister screams.
“Alecia!” I scream back. But I’m trapped. The stairs are broken, and my troll waits at the bottom, thick hands grasping at me as though he imagines what it will be like to pull my body apart.
Dad yells something, and Horn roars. Mom cries, and a horrible crunching sound cuts her off. Trolls laugh. I stare my troll, every piece of me shaking. His thick teeth gleam in the stray moonlight spilling down from behind me.
I close my eyes, but it makes things worse because I can hear my family fighting; I can hear the crash of the entertainment center and imagine Alecia’s body crumpled and broken and sliding to the floor. I imagine their breaking bones and splatters of blood, because I’ve seen old black-and-white pictures of the Montreal Troll Wars.
There’s nothing I can do.
I hold myself in a tight ball, and I open my eyes to stare down at the troll because a face like his will be the last face my family sees before they die. I have to give them that much, to see what they see. And I tell myself over and over again: At least they are together. At least they die in action, fighting and brave. At least.
The troll wiggles his fingers at me, beckoning. I only stare through the darkness. Another troll suddenly appears from the den and punches my troll in the shoulder. Clenched in that heavy fist is Alecia’s torn sweater. A trail of blood squeezes through his fingers. My stomach rolls over.
“Little girl!” my troll coaxes, “come down, come down. I’ll catch you.” He makes his voice tender, like he’s speaking to a little lamb or a trollkin. His companions drag him out. They’re leaving.
The loft shudders as the herd of them hurtles away, making the mountain tremble.
I am left in silence.
LISTEN!
They say that Rein Konrsson had to pin her arms down and drag her away from the fire, dodging her teeth and the harsh jabs of her heels against his shins. “Calm down, kid!” he yelled into her ear.
She froze when she heard his voice, his New Asgardian tongue. Rein was just able to settle her on a boulder and step back out of her reach. In the cold starry night, she wore only jeans and a long, tattered sweater. She had no shoes, but only thick wool socks, and the rows of braids on her head ended in beads red and bright as blood. Her eyes were pink and teary—from smoke or fury or grief he had no way to know.
They say he asked what a kid like her was doing alone at a burning house, and that second time he called her a child she growled, “I am almost fourteen. Not a kid.”
And so, swallowing the wish that he’d ignored the ribbon of smoke and stuck to his lonely path, Rein gritted his own teeth to say, “I am Rein, son of Konr. I was riding past when I saw the fire beckon.”
Her chin lifted bravely as she declared, “I am Luta, and my family is dead.” Her eyes slid toward the fire, and its red glare reflected in her dark pupils.
It was then that Rein Konrsson noticed the shattered glass twinkling across the yard. The old Veedub van with its doors torn off the frame and windshield smashed. Giant footsteps through crushed herbs in a box garden. And he smelled it under the acrid smoke: the sweet, cloying smell of mud and shit that signaled trolls had passed this way.
LUTA:
I watch the older boy stand up slowly and walk toward my house. He bends down over the box I dragged from the shed. One of Alecia’s old stuffed wolves is on top, and he lifts it out. With a graceful flick of his arm, Rein tosses it into the fire.
I run back, and together we throw every memory away. It’s the middle of the night, but the burning house keeps away mountain cold and most of all the darkness. It flickers over his face, obscuring his features and making his eyes black. I hope mine are that fierce.
When the box is empty, we tear it in two and creep as close to the heat as we can. My skin tightens and my eyes burn. I step in again. And again. The fire reaches for me, and I feed it the cardboard. I keep my eyes wide open, feeling them burn, feeling tears stream out onto my cheeks and dry there.
Rein says something, and I stumble back, landing on my butt. He stands behind me and lifts my up by my armpits. “Let the Aesir welcome them. They are summoned home.”
“And fire lights the way,” I whisper.
As dawn beings to fight against the orange glow, I wrap my arms around myself and remember the troll that reached for me. I want to tear the beast into a million pieces.
“Rein,” I say, glancing up at him, to tell him I want blood-price for my family.
He looms nearer, and when he tilts his head to reply, for the first time I see the black spear tattoo slashing down his cheek.
“Berserk!” I spit it out before I think.
His grin is swift and full of teeth. “I promise not to eat you.”
The ground is spinning. He’s one of the Alfather’s—a wild, dangerous berserker warrior who can kill a dozen men in a minute, with all his braids intact. Now I notice the scuffed leather armor holding to his body like it was painted on. The steel-toed boots. The bracers. The heads of the battle-axes peeking at me from over his shoulders. But he’s young. Only as old as Horn is.
As old as Horn was.
My stomach churns. What does it mean, a berserk showing up at my family’s funeral pyre? What sign? I want it to be Fate sending me the tool of my revenge. As I stare at him, his grin fades. I plant my fists on my hips to answer, “I would be stringy and tough.”
He agrees with me. His chin jerks toward his bike. “I’ll take you someplace safe. Do you have family nearby? Which way did the trolls go, do you know?”
I suck air in through my teeth. The cold aches, but it keeps me from thinking of Alecia. “They went down the mountain, west and south.”
LISTEN!
They say the mountain watched as the motorcycle sped down the road, east and north. From the shadows between red-barked pine trees and from beneath broken boulders where the sun never reached, thin spirits focused eyes and attention onto the berserk and the girl. At a junction of two old roads, the berserk circled his bike wide to avoid passing across the face of the crossroads shrine, hoping evade to the mountain’s interest. But the girl remembered pausing there with her family, to lay down a broken telephone dressed with red ribbons and ask the ancient mountain spirits to protect them. The elves and lesser trolls loved bits of technology to shape and reform, her mother had said in a hushed voice, and maybe even just for play. Her father let her uncork the honey wine and pour libations into the dirt, let her turn the whole bottle over while the golden liquid glugged out.
Remembering, the girl pressed her face against Rein’s back, finding space for her nose between the long handles of his battle-axes. Her arms wrapped around him, fingers clutching each other across his chest as if he were the only thing holding her onto the middle world. Her braids whipping back, beads slapping together in the fierce wind as Rein drove.
They say he could feel her squeezing his ribs, and he understood that the little thing grasped onto him because if she let go she might fade into a wisp of smoke and ashes.
Clouds rolled in, and as the first misty rain descended they pulled off the road to shelter in the lee of a giant boulder.
Damp air clung to the underside of the rock, but they tucked themselves against it, shoulder to shoulder. Rein tied a clean sock around the tear on her palm until the bleeding slowed and stopped. He made her drink an entire bottle of water from under the buddy seat and fed her a granola bar. She crammed the whole thing into her mouth and chewed with it stuffed into her cheeks like a squirrel.
He did not complain, for being the only survivor had made him hungry, too.
LUTA:
I finish the food and drink, and Rein nods. He leans his head back against the rough boulder and closes his eyes.
Like him, I close my eyes.
And I am back in the loft, I am hugging my legs against my chest, waiting to die. I can smell blood. The door to the den hangs from the top hinge like a flap of skin. The starlight fills the air with a quiet glow.
Slowly I stretch my legs, wincing at the ache of blood rushing back into them. I don’t know how long I’ve been crouched, looking down the broken stairs. Wondering if they’re really gone, or if my troll waits for me outside. But I can’t hide forever. What if Mom is still gasping for breath? What if Horn is alive?
I crab-crawl down the top three stairs, the only ones left, because I can’t bear to turn my back to the front door. At the edge I hang my legs down. It’s only seven or so feet. I can drop.
So I force myself around, sliding down until my stomach presses into the jagged edge of the stairs. My arms shake from the effort of lowering my body slowly. I remind myself to keep my muscles loose when I fall, to crumple and roll. I pray to Thor Thunderer that I will land safely and not impale myself on the sharp stakes of broken stairs awaiting me.
I drop.
My bones jar and my head snaps, catching the tip of my tongue. Blood spurts down my chin. I sit, dazed for a moment, while pain burns up my left arm from a gash on my palm. Otherwise I’m all right. My ankles ache, and my butt too, but nothing bad. I struggle to my feet, and my socks slip on a plank of wood.
Scrambling up, I dash to the den and shove the broken door aside. The harsh creak makes my ears ring.
The den is destroyed.
Window glass glitters everywhere. The sofa has been gutted, and the dull white cotton fluff hangs in the air. Paralyzed in time. Unreal. Impossible.
It is worse than I imagined. Their eyes hang wide, mouths agape like desiccated roadkill. Bright shards of bone jut up where their hearts were torn free and eaten.
My heart has been eaten, too.
Everything is so cold and quiet except for the flicker of rage, of the keen building in my throat. The feeling reminds me of fire. I get kerosene from the shed and douse everything. The stink makes me puke into Mom’s herb bed, stomach acid smelling suddenly like mint and dill.
It is the smell of revenge. The only thing that can give my heart life again.
In the cold, damp shelter with the berserk, I open my eyes. Rein Konrsson radiates heat. They say the berserks don’t sleep and that they burn up the air around them like they’re made of fire. Destroying everything in their path. Waiting to unleash the Alfather’s madness on friend and enemy alike. I tilt my head and stare at his tattoo. The spear is to mark them so anyone will know to keep back. I wonder what that would be like, having that cut into my cheek. Burning there.
“What?” His eyes are closed, but somehow he knows I’ve been staring at him. Maybe my breathing changed.
“I was only thinking it would have been nice to be a berserk when the trolls came.”
His sigh is more of a grumble. “It isn’t something to wish for.”
I don’t believe him. “Do you hate it, then?”
Rein turns to face me, his leather armor scraping against the rocks behind us.
LISTEN!
They say that a thousand generations ago, when the ice giants ruled half the world, a man climbed a yew tree and hung himself there by his ankles. He took his spear and with a mighty jab, cut between his own ribs to pierce his heart. His screams were carried up through the yew branches, and his blood dripped far to the earth, sinking and pulling the man’s need down into the roots.
Odin, the Father of All, heard.
Having once sacrificed himself to himself in such a way, Odin respected the man’s courage and insanity and need. Growing to the height of a giant, Odin reached up a massive hand and lifted the hanging man out of the tree. He cradled him and asked, “Why have you done this thing, child of man?”
Through bloodstained teeth the man answered, “I give all myself to you, oh god, and ask that in return you grant me the power and strength to win my daughter back. For my family has been murdered by my enemy and my daughter snatched away.”
Odin looked with his single great eye and saw that the man’s heart was skewered by the spear. If it was removed, he would die. Placing the man between the roots of the yew tree, Odin cast about for aid. He found it in a wild bear, its eyes crazed with anger, its jaws wide and roaring. Coaxing the beast to him, Odin whispered promises of glory for the bear’s sons if it would give its heart to the god. So it did.
With magic learned from Freya, the Feather-Flying goddess of Hel, Odin poured the bear’s heart into the man.
“Go, Bear Son,” the Alfather said.
Fever coursed through the man, energy like the sun’s own heat giving him strength. With it he found the home of his enemy. And with it he tore through them. Wild bear’s rage took hold of his limbs, keeping pain and weariness away, so that all the man knew was the whirlwind of battle.
When he woke from his rage, each of his enemies was splayed upon the earth, dead in great waves around him.
And yet so was his daughter.
For to be a berserker is to have a heart that may turn against you.
LUTA:
Rein Konrsson regards me uncertainly for a moment. “No, I don’t hate what I am.”
“I wish I had a bear’s heart.” My ribs feel tight, but not because they are too full; they are hollow. There is nothing inside. I turn away from him before he can say anything about the impossibility of girls berserking. The curse only follows the bear’s sons after all. I know it. Everyone does.
Instead he only says, “The rain is letting up. We should ride on.”
My wounded hand aches, and my head pounds in time with my heartbeat. Yesterday I would have complained, would have gnashed my teeth at Mom and said I needed hot chocolate with cinnamon and toast. But yesterday I was thirteen, and today I’m a hundred years old.
LISTEN!
They say as dawn broke over the horizon, the berserker’s motorcycle roared around a hairpin curve coming down the mountain, then skidded in the loose gravel as Rein jerked it sideways to avoid slamming into the dying troll splayed across the road.
“Luta,” he called, letting the bike drop as he grabbed for her and caught the hem of her sweater. She hit the gravel with a gasp and he let go. “Wait, kid, it’s alive.”
Huffing, the girl rolled onto her back and kicked at him so that he would step away. He held his hands out in surrender until Luta grimaced at him, climbed to her feet, and stomped off into the trees. Away from the troll.
Rein Konrsson walked fearlessly forward, a hand lifting to loosen one of the battle-axes from its cross straps. The troll’s shuddering breaths sounded like wind rushing through a cave, and its dark blood snaked in a hundred tiny rivulets through the gravel, fleeing from the bulbous creature and dragging its life away. Its eyelids fluttered and it rolled green eyes at him. Crust gathered in the corners of those eyes, and bloody snot streaked across its lips. When it growled at him, Rein felt a stab of pity and wondered why the rest of the herd had left it behind.
They say it was at that moment he realized the girl had lied to him. The herd had come this way: east and north.
His gaze slid out over the valley. There were pine trees as far as he could see, broken only by the shining ribbon of a river far below. Where did the trollkin hide? Under what shadows did they settle to wait through the sunlight?
The dying troll grunted and twitched, its entire weight shifting toward him. Swift as the flick of a salmon’s tail, Rein freed his axe and held it poised to strike.
But the girl appeared from the woods with a branch as thick as the troll’s arm. She stood over the troll, teeth bared, and raised it over her head. Before he could say anything, she slammed it down into the troll’s face.
Rein did not stop her, even as she bashed it again and again, reducing the troll’s face into a sticky pulp.
LUTA:
I fling the branch away and stand, chest heaving, eyes on Rein. I’m not sorry.
“You knew,” he says quietly, so I can barely hear it over my hard breathing. “You knew they came this way.”
“I knew.” I lift my chin, daring him to make something of it. The stench of the dead thing rolls up, sticking to my face and neck, slinking through my hair. It’s plastered to my braids, and when I turn away the smell wafts around me.
LISTEN!
They say she was a monster already.
LUTA:
I can’t lift the motorcycle. The chromed steel slips from my sweaty fingers, and even when I grip the leather-wrapped handlebars it’s way too heavy.
Rein takes it from me, rights it in an easy motion, and blocks me from getting on. “There will be many of them.”
“How many?”
He shrugs. “You expect me to know?”
“Yeah.”
“A dozen, usually.”
“That’s too many for you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“They killed my whole entire family.” I want to scream it but I don’t. It’s worse to just say it, like a fact. Like something I learned from a book.
He reaches forward and wipes his thumb under my left eye. It comes away dark with troll blood. “Get on. Even little girls deserve blood-price.”
I don’t bristle, because I can tell he’s only calling me that to make himself feel better.
LISTEN!
They say it was easy to find them. They say that trolls don’t travel much by daylight because their eyes are poor, that sunlight turns them into stone.
Rein felt the rage building slowly in his chest. The battle-frenzy, the need to destroy. He thought of his band, of the Bear Son warriors he should have died beside. He thought of Luta, clinging to his back, being alone, too.
They say he thought how right it was, that he had come to find her.
LUTA:
The trolls are split in two groups: most of them asleep in a grove of silver aspens, shielded from the sun, and the two biggest down by the place the river twists into a calm pool. We’ve snuck up, rolling the motorcycle along with us. Rein showed me how to start it in case I have to get away. He doesn’t mean get away from the trolls, but from him if he loses control of his battlerage and doesn’t know me.
I am shaking behind a tree, but not from fear. I clench my hands because I want to race out screaming at them, to hammer my fists into their faces and kick in their teeth. To tear off their skin. I want to cry as I bend over them, and let my tears drop into their bleeding chests.
“Stay here,” Rein whispers in my ear. “I will take their heads for you, and then we’ll ride into Colorada Falls in triumph. You’ll have your blood-price, and we’ll both have a little glory from the kill.”
I nod. I can feel my heartbeat pounding in the tip of my tongue.
My berserker warrior steps into the aspen grove with great, double-headed battle-ax in either hand. He rolls his shoulders, plants his steel-toed boots, and then grins. He winks at me over his shoulder.
Then he tilts his head back and he roars.
LISTEN!
They say that it was a swift battle.
Rein Konrsson danced with his blades, screaming a war song as he killed. There was no sense to it, no predicting the tide of motion rising within him. Axes cleaved neck from shoulder, arm from torso, cutting away chunks of flesh, digging through heavy troll hide to find death. He did not flinch when a club cracked three of his ribs or falter when his knees slammed to the ground. His axes did not lower or pause in their brutal task. Trolls fell, roaring, one after the other even as they swarmed him.
The Bear Son was surrounded. But it did not matter. He cut through them all, laughing.
LUTA:
I tremble. Rein is terrifying. I want to be in the center with him, my back pressed to his with axes in my hands, whirling and dancing the battle-rage with him.
All the trolls fall. The ground shakes as they crash, stripping branches from the pine trees. Needles shake loose and sprinkle down.
Rein slows, spinning on one foot to see that all his enemies are dead. He laughs a high-pitched, wild laugh, and his hands tighten on the axe handles. Knuckles white. He’s hunting still.
I reveal myself. “Rein,” I call.
His laughter fades when he sees me, his face calms. He remembers, he knows me. And he’s reining back the frenzy.
My fingers flex and relax and flex, because I can’t stop them from acting out my nerves. The stench of dead and dying trolls, their low groans, their hacking coughs fill the aspen grove. No birds call, no wind blows. All the animals for miles must be huddling in fear. Even the mountain is quiet as Rein restrains himself.
Finally, he meets my gaze. He smiles the same toothy grin from when he said he’d eat me.
LISTEN!
They say the wisest old troll waited until the frenzy was over. Until it was the only survivor. Waited until the berserker’s back was turned, his axes lowered, his shoulders relaxed. Until he was laughing with the girl.
It walked into the ring of its dead family, footsteps masked by the groans and death-throes.
And it stabbed its spear through the berserker’s back.
LUTA:
I scream.
Rein tears free and springs in a single motion, axes coming together under the troll’s chin. They stand there, still, for a long moment before the troll’s head tilts off its neck and lands on the pine needles with a thud.
My breath rushes out of me.
But Rein falls to his knees. His axes hit the ground, and he delicately touches the hole in his chest where the spear exited. As if the touch were a signal, blood spills around his fingers and down the old leather armor. It wanders in red streams along the weathered tooling, making patterns blossom on his chest I hadn’t noticed before. A swirl of runes, the jaw of a snarling wolf, and the trefoil stamp of Odin just over his diaphragm, the house of spirit. Stained with his blood, the armor comes alive.
I run, tripping over a dead troll’s arm, and skid to a stop in front of Rein. His head is level with my stomach, and he sways forward. I catch him by the shoulders. His face presses into my belly, and he grips my hips. I can’t hold him up. He’s too heavy. I hear his blood dripping fast onto the ground, feel it soaking into my socks. “Rein,” I whisper.
My heart wasn’t eaten. It wasn’t torn away. I can feel it now, churning in my chest, and it isn’t fair because why should this boy’s dying hurt so much when I’ve only known him for ten hours?
We fall down together, and Rein manages to land on his shoulder instead of me. I kneel beside him. He is gasping for breath. Air whooshes out of the cavity in his chest and I’m crying. My tears drop into the tattered hole.
Rein whispers something. I pull his head onto my thigh and lean closer, my ear right at his lips. I squeeze my eyes closed as he chokes on his words. “I shall—I shall not come into—the hall...with—with words of fear upon my...lips.”
It’s the berserker’s dying prayer.
I force my eyes open. He deserves better than for me to shy away from this death I’ve caused. His eyes are wide, and I meet them without flinching. They are all the colors of the forest: green pine needles, gray bark, rusty brown earth. Colors mingling in his eyes like rain has washed it all together. I pick out the colors, memorizing them. I cannot ever, ever forget his eyes.
“Gladly shall I drink...ale in...” he sucks in a shuddering breath, “in the high seat.”
His eyes don’t move, but I can see them focus through me. I’m not with him anymore, and he’s seeing something else. Valkyrie, I hope. Riding down from the sky to take him home.
He can’t finish the prayer. His mouth stops. His blood soaks hot onto my leg.
“Rein,” I whisper again, seeing not only him but my brother and sister and Mom and Dad. I can finish it. His heart still beats, creeping slowly to a stop.
“The days of your life have ended,” I say. “And you die with a laugh.”
I kiss his lips, giving the words back into him. He is dead.
Leaning back on my heels, I wipe my hands down my thighs. Blood roars in my ears. My heart is spinning fast, and I am feverish with a burning need to destroy.
LISTEN!
They say that Luta Bearsdottir dipped her finger into the berserker’s wound and with his heart’s blood drew a spear down her cheek.
