Dísa woke with the stirring of the earth. She imagined the thing from the Raven Stone looming over her, its limbs made of blood and bowel, its eyes alight with the fires of hate. The young woman started, half drew her seax.
But the shadow was merely that—a shadow, cast by the crackling fire burning on the hearth. It was the shadow of a Raven-Geat who sat near it, tending the fire in silence. Dísa knew it was the cold gloom before sunrise; she sat up, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and surveyed the grim reality of Gautheimr. Women and children slept, or tried to; men with blood-splotched bandages coughed and groaned. She heard a soft mewling coming from a small form near her. She recognized Bryngerðr, the youngest of the Daughters of the Raven. The girl lay wrapped in a fur, her face pale and sweating. Dísa knew she was deep in the grips of a nightmare.
Suddenly, the child bolted upright, eyes wide and glassy with terror. A scream formed on Bryngerðr’s lips, but Dísa caught it ere she could give it a voice. “It’s all right,” Dísa whispered.
Bryngerðr gasped for breath and swallowed. Her eyes found Dísa’s; the younger girl had seen too many deaths. Her father had died in the retreat to the postern gate; her mother, a day ago—slain by a splinter of wood that pierced her like a thrown javelin. Bryngerðr had no one left to hide behind, no one left to protect her. No one but Dísa.
“It’s all right,” she said again, stroking the younger girl’s heavy, sweat-matted hair.
“I … I couldn’t run,” Bryngerðr whispered. “I couldn’t g-get away from it. The thing in the water … it kept tearing pieces of me off and swallowing them. It wanted b-blood.” She raised her eyes and met Dísa’s concerned gaze. “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?”
“Not today,” Dísa replied. “Go back to sleep.”
“All I see are fire and death,” the girl mumbled. Her eyes were heavy. She’d remember this as part of her dream, Dísa reckoned. “Fire and death.” Bryngerðr’s voice trailed off. Soon, she was sleeping again—more soundly than before.
“You’re not going to die here,” Dísa said. Rising, she first sought out Grimnir. Him, she found sprawled across the high seat of Gautheimr, snores ripping from his open mouth. The witch-work the night before had drained him. It forced him to seek sleep. And sleep, as she understood it, was an enemy of his people. Something about their blood. She left him undisturbed.
I will do this on my own.
Dísa looked around once more, seeking a familiar face. She knelt beside the man by the fire and asked a quick question. The fellow motioned outside. Dísa nodded; rising, she crossed Gautheimr and slipped out the door.
Dawn was not far off. Overnight, a mist had rolled in from the lake, lending the ruins of Hrafnhaugr an unreal quality, pearlescent and damp. She found the man she sought under the eaves of Gautheimr. Old Hygge sat by himself, his son’s cloak draped over his thin shoulders. He looked like an effigy of a man carved from sacred ash wood: long-bearded, knotty; his wrinkled brown skin showed scars and tattoos in equal number. The only sign that he was himself alive was the plume of smoke he exhaled around the stem of his pipe. Dísa smelled a familiar blend of herbs, a scent that reminded her of home. Her own father had learned to smoke at Old Hygge’s knee.
He glanced up at her, his ancient eyes a watery blue.
Dísa nodded to him. She made no preamble, offered no small talk: “I want to send the children, the women, and the worst of the wounded off, someplace safe. Can you take them across Skærvík and show them the way to the Hooded One’s longhouse?”
Old Hygge made no reply. He looked at her a moment longer before his eyes wandered away from her face and fixed on the empty, mist-bound air over her shoulder. She wondered, then if this had not been a mistake, if the death of his son had not left his mind in tatters. Finally, though, the old sailor nodded.
Dísa mirrored the gesture. “Within the hour. I’ll get them up and ready.” She made to turn, but stopped when Old Hygge’s hand snaked out to take hers. It was papery and thin, his grip; his skin as coarse as sand.
Around the stem of his pipe, he spoke in a voice gone soft with age: “Your mother would be proud of you, girl.”
Dísa smiled. “I’ve known you all my life,” she said, gripping his hand all the more tightly, “and I’ve never heard you speak.”
“I’ve never had anything to say.”
“Until now?”
“Until it was something you needed to hear,” he replied. “My boy will tell her, when he sees her at the doors to Sessrúmnir, Lady Freyja’s hall, or in the fields of Fólkvangr. He will tell her what you’ve become. And she will be filled with pride.”
Dísa felt Grief’s fist clench around her heart. A sob caught in her throat. She nodded again, and wiped at her eyes with the heel of one hand. “I miss her.”
“We will see them, soon.” Old Hygge gave her hand one last squeeze, and then he released her. He sank back into himself, his hoary head wreathed in pipe smoke as he recalled glories long past …
GRIMNIR WOKE TO THE CLAMOR of women and children. He pried his good eye open and glared at the folk jamming the doors to the longhouse. They’d packed their lives into baskets and bundles, into their mothers’ keepsake chests and their fathers’ trade-panniers. Everything they salvaged from the lower terrace and brought here for safekeeping they now carried out the doors of Gautheimr and into the misty morning.
“Where the devil are you lot going?” Grimnir croaked. He pushed himself upright on the Jarl’s seat, stretched the kinks from his shoulders, and stood. “I said where are you swine going?”
It was Dísa who answered. “I’m sending them someplace safe,” she said, coming up on his blind side. She bore a goblet of wine and a joint of roasted goat. He swiveled his head and fixed her with a milk-curdling stare. She continued unshaken. “The children, the older folk, the women who do not fight, and the wounded. Old Hygge is lashing three boats together to get them across Skærvík.”
“What’s safe yonder?” he asked as Dísa handed him the goblet of wine. He tossed it back and accepted the joint of goat, attacking it with unfeigned gusto. “More wine,” he said around a mouthful of goat meat. “What’s safe across Skærvík, I said?”
“Your longhouse,” Dísa replied. She refilled his goblet from a clay jug of wine.
A curse stood poised on Grimnir’s lips. He glared at her in silence; after a moment, he merely shrugged. “Aye,” he said. “Safe a place as any. All this was your doing?”
It was Dísa’s turn to shrug. She saw Bryngerðr struggling with a bale of supplies she’d gathered from the larders of Gautheimr. Dísa helped the girl hoist it onto her shoulders, and then watched as she staggered out the door under her burden. Grimnir gnawed the last strings of meat from the goat haunch. Finally, Dísa said: “We who fight are eager to die, or at least we’ve made peace with it. It’s not fair to judge others by our standard. Those who wish to stay are welcome, but why force the women and children to die alongside their fathers, sons, and brothers? If we can get them somewhere safe, then that is our duty.”
Grimnir tossed the naked bone into the fire; he licked grease from his fingers. “You surprise me, little bird.” He hitched at his weapons’ belt. “Come, then, let’s see these louts to safety.”
It took the better part of an hour to wrangle the women, children, elderly, and wounded out the postern gate and down to the dock, to where Old Hygge waited. There were tearful farewells partially glimpsed in the mist, between wives and husbands, mothers and sons; fathers embraced their daughters for the last time, while trembling-lipped sons tried to present a brave face. Dísa envied them. If she died, who would mourn her?
She turned away and saw Berkano embracing Laufeya. The Otter-Geat sisters had rarely been apart since arriving at Hrafnhaugr. When Dísa had told them one of the sisters needed to go with the boats, to tend the wounded, she’d expected a fiery standoff. But with infinite patience, Berkano—eldest by ten years, at least—took her sister by the hands and ordered her away.
“I can’t leave you alone,” Laufeya had said, wiping away tears. But Berkano was resolute.
“I won’t be alone,” she’d said. “I will have my family—my brothers and my uncles, my sisters of the Raven. The Hooded One will watch over me, just as he has these past three years. But our mothers and daughters need you, Feya. They need you to help soothe their hurts, just as you’ve soothed mine.” Berkano fought back tears. She smiled at her younger sister, who seemed to crumple in on herself, broken and grief-stricken. Berkano caught her up by the shoulders. “Here, now. We’re Otter-Geats, sister. The last of our people. What did Mama always say? We’re always to help a neighbor in need, for one day that neighbor might be us. Well, our neighbors need help, Feya. We needed them, three years gone. Now they need us.”
There, in the mist, Laufeya bit back a sob as she broke their embrace. She squared her thin shoulders and nodded; Dísa saw her take something from inside her tunic and press it into Berkano’s hand. The older Otter-Geat’s face lit up. It was a scalp—the chestnut-colored scalp of Örm of the Axe. “For luck,” Laufeya said, then turned and clambered aboard the nearest boat.
Berkano held the scalp like an eerie pet as Old Hygge shoved off. He waved to Dísa. Men blinded by splinters of wood or boiling pine resin, their women beside them, did the rowing while Old Hygge grasped the tiller. Once he wrapped his gnarled hands around the worn spruce, the decades sloughed away. He was young again. And as the boats slowly disappeared in the lake mist, Dísa decided that was how she wanted to remember him.
Dísa’s reverie was broken when Grimnir clapped her on the shoulder; he gave her a light shove back up the trail.
“Let’s go, little bird.”
Úlfrún met them halfway back to the postern gate. “That was a canny trick, last night,” she said. “What other sorceries do you have up your sleeve?”
Grimnir grunted, looking sour. “A bit of luck, was what that was. And it took every scrap of it, at that. From here out, we’re on our own. Tally up who’s left, and what we have as far as food. Figure we might as well have a feast while those hymn-singers are busy praying and licking their wounds.”
“We should hit them again. In force, this time,” said Úlfrún. She wanted blood, especially the Norseman who’d killed Forne. “Kill the lot of them while they’re praying.”
“No time left,” Grimnir replied as they came abreast of the postern gate. “You felt that, last night? The roots of Miðgarðr are starting to crack. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow, the barrow will rise from Vänern’s embrace, yonder.” He inclined his head back the way they’d come, toward the still waters of Skærvík.
Úlfrún followed his gaze. For a moment, she looked weary—an old woman stretched nigh to breaking by the weight of her geas. “A last day of rest, then…”
“What’s that noise?” Dísa said. Frowning, she cocked her head to one side. Úlfrún bawled up to the guard walking the parapet above the postern.
“On the gate! Do you see anything?”
“Mist’s too thick, still,” the Raven-Geat answered.
“Sounds like … ropes creaking,” Dísa said. Faintly, she heard the voices of men, calling in unison as though they were pulling the oars of a longship. “Ymir! Did that white-skinned bastard send for his fleet?”
Grimnir scowled. “Those aren’t ships, little bird,” he said. “Get inside.” He led them into the village through the postern. “Close it up! Drop the bar and call the dogs to war, damn your hides!”
“What is it? What does the noise mean?”
Úlfrún chuckled. “It means there will be no rest.”
“And it means they didn’t pass the night praying and singing their cursed hymns,” Grimnir added. “They’re raising the bridge. Or got it raised, more like. Hel take this blasted mist! Sound the alarm, I said!”
And as the low spring sun broke over the eastern rim of the world, the Crusaders began their assault …
NO DEFENDING FORCE MET THE Crusaders as they streamed over the dangerously creaking bridge. For a moment, it seemed like Grimnir might lead the berserkir out himself, but he finally thought better of it. Úlfrún was loath to commit the backbone of her war-band merely to refuse the allied bank of the ravine. “Let them have it,” she said. “One way or another, it’s time we came to grips with this rabble.”
Grimnir agreed. Instead, he ordered the gates shut and barred. Dísa and a mixed band of wolf-brothers and Raven-Geats would defend the postern. “They’ll be coming for it, little bird,” Grimnir told her. “They’ll be looking to avenge that wretched Dane you killed, there.”
“Let them come,” she snarled.
Grimnir himself, with Úlfrún and her skin-clad berserkir, would defend the main gate. The two Bjorns, Hvítr and Svarti, with Sigrún and the remnants of the Daughters of the Raven, would range the parapets between the two, defending against any attempt the Crusaders might make to force their way onto the walls.
Nor did Grimnir make any grand speech as they dispersed to their positions. He merely looked each man and woman in the eye and growled, “Kill those whoreson dogs ere they kill you, and you might live to see the sun set! But if it’s your lot to die, then take as many of those wretches with you as you can! Go!”
As the defenders broke ranks and made for their stations, Dísa motioned Grimnir aside. “What about the prophecy?”
“What about it?” His eyes narrowed.
“When the barrow rises … what part will I play?”
“How the devil should I know?”
Dísa frowned. “I am the Day that gives way to Night—”
Grimnir cut her off with a sharp motion. “Who knows what that doggerel means,” he said. “I doubt even that one-eyed fool who first spake it knew what he was yammering on about! All that matters to me is getting into the barrow and cutting that wretched wyrm’s head off. Everything else? The maunderings of a madman, for all I know.”
“So, what do I do?”
At this, Grimnir shrugged and walked away, but over his shoulder, he said: “Stay alive and keep those blasted hymn-singers busy until the deed is done.”
By the time he reached the main gate, the mist had thinned enough to reveal the extent of the enemy. His sharp eyes picked out Danes, Norsemen, and Swedes, all united by the black cross sewn to the front of their surcoats, or carried as battle standards; they streamed across the bridge, forming serried ranks in anticipation of being given the order to take the gates.
Grimnir saw no sign of the albino lord of Skara.
“That red-haired bastard?” Úlfrún said, joining him as he surveyed the faces of the enemy. He picked out the man she spoke of—a tall Norseman with a plaited beard, directing troops with a war-spear as though he were some tin-pot Allfather. “That’s the one who killed Forne.”
Grimnir spat over the parapet. “So that’s Thorwald, eh.”
“Aye.” Úlfrún glanced to one side. “Herroðr…”
THORWALD MOVED LIKE A MAN in his element. War was in his blood; the son of a chief of the Trøndelag, as a lad he’d joined a band of vikingr who hired themselves out as mercenaries in the wars of their neighbors. He’d killed his first man at ten, earned his first oath-ring at thirteen; by the time he’d reached his twenties, Thorwald had won wars for half a dozen kings, from Dubhlinn to Miklagarðr. This pigsty? He’d have the gate by the afternoon and the village itself by nightfall.
“Pride is a sin,” Father Nikulas had warned him as he boasted of his prowess, reciting the litany of his many victories. “Pride in killing and rapine doubly so. Tread carefully, friend Thorwald.”
But Thorwald the Red was not a careful man. He was loud, a braggart who could shore up his boasts with iron fists and a jaw like carved granite. And if his foes took umbrage, they could face Hrænðr, his Corpse-adder.
Above the din, Thorwald heard his name. Someone bellowed it from the enemy walls. A smile split his grim visage as he recognized the wolf-bitch’s voice.
“Thorwald the Red!”
He stepped out from the ranks of his Norsemen and raised Hrænðr aloft. “I am here, bitch of the North!” he roared. Men around him laughed. “There is still the small matter of an oath between us! Did you not swear by your heathen gods that you’d kill me?”
“I did,” he heard Úlfrún reply.
The Norseman laughed. “Come out from behind your walls, then! I am right he—”
With sudden fury, Thorwald the Red’s head snapped back. His body went rigid, and as his men watched, the giant chief of the Norse toppled backward to crash full length upon the earth.
A crossbow bolt stood out from his eye socket.
ATOP THE WALL, ÚLFRÚN STRAIGHTENED and handed her crossbow, Skaðmaðr, back to Herroðr. She caught Grimnir glaring at her from the corner of her eye; across the field, a sudden clamor arose from the close-ranked Norse—it was the tumult of vengeance.
Úlfrún shrugged. “What? I never said how I planned to kill him!”
“Well, that stirred them up,” Grimnir said. “Here they come.”
And across the Scar, the lone mangonel bucked and thumped, lifting a smoking incendiary into the bright morning sky and over the heads of the charging line of Crusaders …
FATHER NIKULAS OF LUND WAS no battle priest, not like the Archbishop, Anders Sunesen; he did his best work behind the lines, tending to the wounded and raising a litany of prayer to stiffen the spines of the men toiling in the blood and dust of the front. He was a strategist, not a tactician. And while he was no coward, neither was he possessed of some vast reserve of martial courage. Seeing the wounded—their skulls crushed, bones snapped, faces lacerated, and blood-leaking bodies riven—only confirmed a truth he long suspected: while he could goad a man to war, he wanted no part of it, himself.
He stepped from the tent where a lone surgeon worked to save the injured and poured a bowl of blood into the grass. His cassock was damp with the myriad fluids that spurted from bodies torn by steel and stone. The fighting was fierce; word had trickled back of poor Thorwald, taken by a crossbow bolt even before coming to grips with the pagans. Horsten led the assault on the main gate; Starkad, as the priest understood it, had fired the docks and was even now trying to force the postern gate.
And the mangonel to his left thumped out a slow and steady tocsin—its last crew spirited in the manner by which they worked the ropes. Stones flew like a devilish hail over the palisade, the words “For Pétr” scrawled on each one. Nikulas blessed the stones, and prayed they reaped a red harvest among the wretched heathens.
“You look a bit worse for wear, priest,” Konraðr said, emerging from the tent where the injured awaited succor. Mailed and girded for war, the lord of Skara, himself, looked … rested, Nikulas thought.
“I am flush with health and good humor, my lord,” the priest replied. “The hour is near.”
Konraðr inclined his head to where the other priests tended the injured. “Your brothers tell me you brought Thorwald to heel and cleaved to my plan.”
“It was a good plan, my lord,” Nikulas said, shrugging. “And poor Thorwald ultimately paid the price for his sins, overweening pride not the least of them. Though, I fear we will miss his prowess once we take the gates.” The priest turned and studied Konraðr with a healer’s eye. “How do you feel, my lord? That was the worst fit you’ve suffered since I’ve known you.”
“And the last.”
Nikulas raised an eyebrow. “How so?”
Konraðr laid a hand on the priest’s shoulder, oblivious to the reek of blood and bowel coming from his black cassock. “They are gone, priest. Where once a multitude of voices thronged inside my skull, now I hear only one—and it is my own. This was the skrælingr’s doing. It sent something against me, yestereve. Something…”
“A devil?”
“Yes,” Konraðr replied, a frown knitting his pale brows. “And no. I think it was a thing of the Elder World, some sending from an age when men knew not the light of Christ. It did something to me, Nikulas. Something for its own ends, to be sure, but now … the wind is merely the wind, and—for good or ill—I hear no secrets in the clamor of insects.”
“Give praise to God, then, for the mystery of His ways.”
Konraðr said nothing. The frown etching his brow deepened as he remembered the blood staining the walls of the Hagia Sophia. “I want the skrælingr taken alive.”
Nikulas nodded. “That blasphemous thing will be in our grasp by nightfall,” he said. Konraðr knelt.
“Then bless me, Father, for I have sinned—and I will sin a thousand times more ere the sun sets. I am bound for the gate.”
On the albino’s brow, the grim-faced priest drew the sign of the Cross in blood. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” Nikulas said. “Fetch the sword of Saint Teodor and end this, my son.”
“If God wills it,” Konraðr said, rising and drawing his sword, “I will see it done.”
And the earth trembled as the Ghost-Wolf of Skara set upon the path to war.
BY MIDDAY, A CRACK APPEARED in the wood of the postern gate. It was a small thing, a warping of planks between iron reinforcements, caused by the incessant thudding of a makeshift ram. Outside, Crusaders with shields held high protected a four-man crew armed with a pine trunk as thick as a man. From lack of space, they could not come at the gate at a full run. They could only shuffle forward, grunting as they smashed the now-splintered end of the trunk against the aged oak planks of the gate.
Dísa had a handful of archers, wolf-brothers armed with crossbows for the most part. These kept up a suppressing barrage, but it wasn’t enough to discourage the Crusaders. Others hurled rocks from the parapet, though their archers made this a risky prospect.
Three times, the Crusaders came at the gate, ramming it till their men collapsed from exhaustion. Men with axes and hammers, too, tried their hand. The seasoned oak and thick iron resisted them; Dísa’s boys broke skulls and sent pierced bodies back to the enemy lines. But by early afternoon, the crack had widened enough to alarm even the most optimistic of the defenders. Dísa sent for Herroðr, who brought a roof beam scavenged from a destroyed home on the first terrace, oak planks, and the last of their nails.
“How’s the main gate holding?” Dísa asked him.
Herroðr shrugged and waggled his hand. “It’s touch-and-go. Bastards have no lack of fire in their bellies.” With a muttered curse, he gestured at the gate. Dísa turned. A Crusader had wedged his arm up to the shoulder in the crack. She could hear the hymns he sang as he clawed for the bar.
Dísa sprang at him. Her seax smashed point-first through his wrist, nailing him to the boards of the gate. The man writhed, howling like a wasp-stung dog. Her mouth set in a grim slash, Dísa drew her Frankish axe. She hacked at the bastard’s arm at the shoulder, bone crunching with each blow. Blood sprayed over her face and hands. A spear tried to weasel past the dying man, who hung from the crack in the door by shreds of gristle and bloodied mail. Dísa caught the spear by the shaft and hauled it forward. She could hear men shouting: “Clear the gate!”
And she smelled pine resin.
“Back!” she hollered, barely snatching her seax and stumbling away before a gout of hot pitch splashed through the crack. From the parapet, she heard one of the wolf-brothers yell a warning: “That one! Kill that one!”
Crossbows bucked and sang; she heard a Crusader grunt …
… And a heartbeat later, a thrown torch ignited the pine resin. The sticky semi-liquid exploded, a wave of heat and flame driving before it. Black smoke guttered from the burning gate. Women with buckets of dirt rushed forward. They could extinguish the interior, but the outer face of the door would continue to burn. Given enough time, it would eat through the rock-hard oak planks and warp the iron fittings. The postern would be lost, then the wall, then the second terrace, and finally, Hrafnhaugr itself. Dísa cursed.
Through the wrack, she heard someone calling her name. Turning, she saw Berkano. The Otter-Geat looked like an apparition made of blood. “Dísa!”
“What is it?” Dísa snapped. “Spit it out, damn you! I’m neck deep in these dung-bearded pot-licking whoreson dogs!”
Berkano caught Dísa by the arm. “It’s your grandmother. You’d best come. Hurry!”
Dísa Dagrúnsdottir snarled. She glanced at Herroðr, who nodded. “Go, I’ll handle this,” he said. Cursing, Dísa allowed Berkano to drag her away.
She led her to the third terrace, to Gautheimr. Heavy fighting at the main gate had produced a raft of casualties, and repeated attempts by the Crusaders to force their way over the walls meant a good many of the dead were Dísa’s Raven-sisters. She saw Thyra, Old Hygge’s eldest daughter, dead from an arrow to her breast; Káta, her Raven tattoo still fresh, lay with Isgerdr and Perthro. All three had died from spear-blows.
“Is she dead?” Dísa asked. Berkano looked back at her, her dark eyes filled with pity.
“Not yet.”
Berkano led her inside, where Sigrún lay among those injured still fighting for life. Dísa bit back a curse. Rigid with agony, Sigrún’s body bore a hideous patchwork of burns. Both legs were twisted and broken, likely her hips, as well. Her right hand, her blade hand, was a mass of blood-sodden bandages, and the right side of her face looked like someone had gone after her with a skinning knife. Dísa could see the bones of her skull peeking through the torn flesh of her scalp.
“What happened?”
“The jötunn-machine,” Berkano said, and Dísa knew she meant the Crusaders’ mangonel. “It hurled its fire-log, and she was caught by it. The impact threw her off the wall. She was asking after you.”
Dísa knelt. “Sigrún?” she whispered. “G-Grandmother?”
Sigrún’s eyes fluttered open. Her breathing was ragged, and it whistled through clenched teeth. With effort, she fixed her gaze on Dísa’s face. Sigrún’s left hand clawed for her.
“D-Dísa?”
“I’m here.”
“Forgive … me,” Sigrún whispered.
Dísa shook her head. “All is past. Auða used to tell me the world was an anvil, and I was but virgin steel. ‘Your grandmother,’ she would say, ‘your grandmother is the hammer, sent by the Gods to mold me.’ And she was right. It takes a strong arm to forge a sword.”
Sigrún, though, writhed; she caught the neck of Dísa’s armor and pulled at her, drawing her closer. “No! F-Forgive … me! I … I have l-lied to you!”
Dísa frowned. “About what?”
“D-Dagrún. She … She didn’t d-die at … at Skagerrak.”
“What?” Dísa stiffened. She caught Sigrún’s hand and grasped it tight, her bones near to breaking. “What do you mean? Where did she die?”
“Here,” Sigrún said. She closed her eyes. “D-Down by the b-boats.”
“How?”
In a small, grief-filled voice, Sigrún said: “By my hand.”
Those three words pierced Dísa to the heart, as straight and sure as if her grandmother had wielded a lance. “You?” Without thinking, Dísa’s grip tightened. She splintered the bones of Sigrún’s left hand, but the old woman was too far gone to feel it. “You killed my mother? Your own daughter? Why?”
“To p-protect him.”
Rage coursed through Dísa’s veins. Her fingers knotted in the old woman’s hair, and she hauled her halfway off the floor. “What do you mean protect him? Why … Why did you need to protect him? From who? My mother?”
“She f-found out about him,” Sigrún said. In a weak and halting voice, she told the tale—how Kolgríma had betrayed the ancient compact by revealing Grimnir’s nature, and how Dagrún, eager to make a name for herself, had decided to kill the monster who’d been preying on Hrafnhaugr for generations. “F-Foolish girl! She listened to … to too many s-skalds. Wanted to k-kill a monster … the last … the l-last monster.”
“So, you killed her, instead.” A dangerous edge crept into Dísa’s voice. “Killed her and made up a story to hide your crime. And now you want my forgiveness?”
Sigrún blinked. “I … I was p-protecting—”
“Shut that wretched hole in your face,” Dísa snarled. There was a knife in her hand, suddenly, drawn from the small of her back. She’d used it at the gate; gore clotted its chape, and its blade was notched and ragged. “Where is she? Where did you bury her, you dung-eating old hag?”
Tears streamed down Sigrún’s burned cheeks. “Bog,” she said. “His bog. Kolgríma helped me—”
Dísa screamed; it was a feral sound, a cry of inarticulate rage and boundless grief. She did not stop to think. She did not try to rationalize. Teeth bared in a grimace of raw hate, she rammed the knife home. It slid up under Sigrún’s sternum to pierce her laboring heart. “Here’s my forgiveness, niðingr!” the girl snarled.
Rage lent Dísa’s limbs a fresh vigor. Ignoring Berkano’s pleas for help, Dísa rose from the corpse. She left her knife embedded in Sigrún’s heart and stalked from Gautheimr. None dared step into her path, nor to console her, so fierce was the look of murder in her dark eyes.
Outside, it was near sunset. Fires burned around Hrafnhaugr as she made her way down into the decimated first terrace. She stepped over dead men and women, skirted piles of rubble that had once been the houses of her neighbors.
She found Grimnir squatting in the lee of the main gate. Like the postern, it had taken a titanic beating. Rams had warped and broken the planks, but the iron-work held. There was a lull, beyond, but she could hear the thrice-cursed Crusaders massing for another charge.
And she did not care. She did not care if the world ended, if her friends and loved ones died in a welter of blood and horror. It did not matter to her if Gjallarhorn blew and the fires of Ragnarök descended to consume the earth. Nothing mattered, save answers.
Grimnir glanced up at her approach. His nostrils flared; she saw his black-nailed hand clench around the hilt of his seax.
“Little bird,” he said, spitting a gobbet of sooty phlegm in the dust.
“Did you know?” she screamed. All around, men stopped what they were doing. Úlfrún looked up from bandaging Brodir’s arm; the giant berserkr gently motioned her aside. “Did you know? Did you know what she’d done? Did you know what happened to Dagrún?”
For his part, Grimnir was unperturbed by her display of rage. In answer, he sucked his teeth and said: “That old hag should know when to keep her wretched tongue between her teeth.”
“So you did know? You lying bastard!”
Grimnir shot to his feet. “You think this is my fault? Faugh! Take it up with Sigrún, you little wretch!”
“I did,” Dísa snarled, leaning forward. “And I put my knife through her black heart!”
Grimnir rocked back on his heels, a sardonic half-smile on his blood-blasted face. “So-ho! And you mean to do the same with me, is that it? I’m not some old woman on my deathbed, little bird.”
Dísa’s fists clenched, but she made no move to draw her seax. Her rage seemed to deflate, replaced by a look of betrayal. Tears dampened the corners of her dark eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew, but you said nothing.”
Slowly, Grimnir sank back on his haunches. He bled from a dozen cuts, his blood thick and black. “What would it have gained me?” he replied. “More to the point: what would it have gained you? What would you have done, little bird? Gone after the old hag? Nár! You’d have ended up alongside your mother in the bog. You were brittle iron, girl. A long way from the steel you are today.”
Dísa sat. She felt hollow, used. Úlfrún started toward the girl, but Grimnir waved her off. Instead, he reached into his tunic and took out a strip of jerky. He bit a chunk off, handed the rest to Dísa. The girl accepted it and took a bite, chewing mechanically. “I boasted of my mother’s prowess,” she said, her voice small now. “I was proud of her. Proud she died fighting the Norse. She was Dagrún Spear-breaker, and I was her daughter … but who was she? Who was she, really? My father … did he know?”
Grimnir shrugged.
“Who was she?” Dísa sniffled.
But it was Bjorn Hvítr who answered. His voice was a deep rumble, weary. “She was Dagrún Spear-breaker, little one,” he said. “I remember her, your age but no more, fighting with us when we stopped the Swedes at the Horn. They’d tried to push across the Hveðrungr and claim part of our lands. She was there, though Sigrún had forbid it. She earned her name in that fight, by Ymir! Broke the Swedish Jarl’s spear with the edge of her shield ere she gutted him. She was the first in to any fray and the last out. You look just like her.”
“She was at Skagerrak,” Bjorn Svarti added. “I swear, I saw her on the left flank, with the Daughters of the Raven. You remember? They broke the Norse right, and she was in the vanguard. I thought that was where she fell.”
“So she was a shieldmaiden,” Dísa said.
“Sigrún might have told lies about her death, child,” Úlfrún said. “But these brothers of the shield can tell you the truths of her life. She sounds like a mother to be proud of. You—”
Suddenly, Grimnir glanced up sharply, nostrils flaring. His good eye narrowed to a slit of baleful red fire. “It’s time,” he snarled.
And with no further warning, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir felt the earth suddenly rise up, and then vanish under her feet …