Halfdan had been dreaming, and it had been a god-sent dream, he was sure, even as he lived it behind flickering eyelids. The skies had been red as blood and shaking and booming, as though being torn apart. A black crack had loomed above him as he stood, sword in hand, watching his enemy emerge from the doorway of the stone hall. The man was tall, in a glittering shirt of silver. His eyes shone almost gold in the reflected light of the dreadful sky; in his right hand he held a sword that was the death of men, and in his left was a beautiful and terrible horn. It was that which transfixed Halfdan, even deep in the dream, for the very sight of the horn made the Loki serpents on his arm burn, as though he were aflame with the war-fire of the Greeks.
He woke with a start, his hand going to the hilt of the sword that he had left beside the bed the past few nights, ready to grasp at a moment’s notice. It closed on empty air as his eyes blinked into the darkness and his mind reeled, trying to reconcile the dark of the true world with the blazing red of the dreamland.
His heart was thundering with the realisation that he had been seeing his own death, for the golden-eyed giant with the horn could only be Heimdallr, watchman of the Aesir, and that horn could only be the herald of Ragnarok, which accounted for the sky above him. He was Loki, and Loki was doomed to die with Heimdallr, perishing together on the field of battle at the end of the world.
Loki unbound…
He was having real trouble pulling his mind back from the dream, even as his conscious mind shook him again and again and told him to concentrate, for there was seemingly just as much to worry about in this black existence. His sword was not there.
His eyes were open properly, and he turned to see in the gloom that his sword had gone, though not far. Someone had moved it by two feet, placing it just out of reach. He became aware then of another shape nearby, a black within the black, and as he turned to focus on it, it gradually resolved into the shape of Gunnhild. She had a finger to her lips.
‘What?’ he hissed as quietly as he could, as he sat up and his sweat-soaked back peeled away from the sheets.
‘Trouble,’ she replied in a whisper. A redundant explanation if ever there was one, for surely she would not have woken him in the middle of the night with a whisper because she had thought of a new poem.
‘What trouble?’
‘I do not know. I can sense something. A noose closing on us, just as one had closed on the traitor in the hall.’
Halfdan was becoming properly alert, almost all his senses in this world and just vague tatters of the dream remaining, flapping in the background. It had meant something, and something important, but it could not have been this, could it?
Loki unbound…
He reached out and grabbed the sword that he realised Gunnhild had moved out of reach to prevent him killing her in simple reaction when she roused him.
‘Wake the others,’ he hissed. She nodded and moved away from the bed, heading for the next bunk.
Halfdan rose and reached across for his shirt, pulling it on, feeling it cling to the sweat as he dragged it down into place. For now, he left the chain shirt where it lay. Some occasions called for subtlety rather than force, and until he knew which this was, he might be better moving without the shush and clink of armour. As he became fully accustomed to the gloom, he realised that Anna and Cassandra were already up and helping Gunnhild rouse the others quietly. He felt a little put out that it appeared the völva had woken her women before her jarl, but he brushed the annoyance aside. This was not the time for such things, and, besides, there was some sort of sisterhood growing between the three that he could barely begin to understand. Instead, leaving the others to rise and ready themselves, Halfdan crossed to the single shuttered window of the room. Carefully, and as slowly and quietly as he could, he opened the right-hand shutter just a little, not enough to be noticed by anyone watching from outside, but enough to put an eye to, with a limited range of view.
The castle looked eerie. The sky was mostly clear with a narrow sliver of a moon, but scattered with fast, high, scudding clouds that cast small areas of the world below into high-speed shadows that tricked the eye. He wished that he’d paid more attention to the layout of the castle over the few days they’d been there, but their host had kept them busy and entertained in the keep most of the time, with the promise of the hunt to come.
The window of this room looked out into the main outer bailey, across to the stable blocks and storerooms below that heavy palisade wall. He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined the place from above, as though he were one of Odin’s ravens looking down. One main stone gatehouse in a great oval circuit of timber palisade. A stone chapel, workshops, storehouses, stables and the like, all in clusters within. Then, off to the southern edge of the compound, the great stone keep on two floors, heavy and wide. From the outer bailey, a gate in a dividing palisade led into the smaller inner bailey, from where the door to the keep led off. The keep formed part of the barrier between baileys, but opened only into the small one. There was another gate in the inner bailey, but it was well protected, just a small postern in the rampart.
A movement caught his eye, and he focused, spotting the man on the wall-walk. He couldn’t make out colours in this strange light, but the man was clearly one of Neel de Cotentin’s soldiers patrolling the wall, which they would do all night with a lesser garrison than during the day. That did not seem amiss – that was all he could see.
Frustrated by the lack of view, he pushed both shutters and leaned forward, looking this way and that. He could see more guards on the wall. Quite a heavy tally for a night watch, but perhaps that was the norm, given the unsettled and potentially rebellious nature of the land. It was enough to draw his attention, but nothing to worry about especially, and had Gunnhild not been so sure, Halfdan would have been content that nothing was amiss, and would have gone back to bed.
Instead, he stood there for long moments, counting the men on the wall, trying to remember where everyone was. Cotentin’s men were all over the castle, of course. The Wolves were all together, either in this room or the one next door. He’d made sure of that. William’s men had been assigned appropriately. Three were in the antechamber of his room for protection. Others were in that bunkhouse within the smaller inner bailey, and a couple had been left with the horses in the larger, outer bailey.
The serpents on his forearm were itching again. Nothing was amiss, and yet everything was, even if he couldn’t see it. Gunnhild had been absolutely right.
He noted one odd thing in passing, just as the action began. The guards on the walls were all facing inwards, looking into the bailey, not over the wall into the town. Shit.
At that moment, the door of the stable opened. What happened did so in the blink of an eye, and had Halfdan not happened to be looking at the building at the time he would have missed it entirely. The door jerked open, and a man emerged in a desperate rush, but before he found his way clear, arms grabbed him and dragged him back inside, the door closing behind them.
There was no sound but the general night-time murmur of the town, yet in his mind, Halfdan could almost hear the sounds of butchery from within the stable, and the muffled gasps of the man trying to scream through hands over his mouth. The duke’s men down there had just been killed, and it had been done quietly and subtly – an assassination rather than an assault. And had he been under any illusion that this was not the work of their host, the fact that Cotentin’s men were watching the castle’s interior clarified it all.
The danger came from within the castle, and they were part of it.
He turned back to the room. Everyone was awake.
‘The rebellion against the duke has begun.’
‘Which side are we on?’ Bjorn asked as he shrugged into his chain shirt.
Halfdan blinked. What a damned good question that was. It had taken someone as plain-thinking as the albino giant to realise that they still had the option of taking sides. Halfdan and his men had given the duke no oath or promise, and their future lay wherever profit and fame was to be found. Maybe that did not mean with the duke.
But there were four problems with that. Firstly, Gunnhild had tied their future to William with the hope of learning more of Harðráði and their missing ship. Secondly, Ulfr and the gold were back at Pirou and in the hands of loyalists. Thirdly, Neel de Cotentin would already have them labelled as William’s men, and was unlikely to accept their offer of help. And fourthly, most of all, Halfdan did not like Cotentin at all.
‘We are on the side of the Golden Lion of Nordmandi.’
‘Who?’
‘The duke, you great idiot,’ Ketil grunted from across the room, where he was testing the string of his bow.
‘Oh. All right. Just point me at some fuck and tell me to kill him.’
Halfdan smiled. That was all he ever needed to do with Bjorn.
‘Gunnhild, go next door and stir the others.’
‘Where are you going?’ she replied.
‘To warn the duke.’
With Ketil and Bjorn at his shoulder, Halfdan passed his sword and belt to the tall Icelander, grabbed his chain shirt and pulled open the door, glancing this way and that. There was no movement in the corridor and no sound he could hear. Then he caught the distant murmur of voices down below. They had very little time. Cotentin’s soldiers would already have been within the keep. They would have dealt with the men out in the bailey first, and then closed the noose.
As he crept out into the hall and moved along toward where he knew the duke to be quartered, Halfdan did a little calculating in his head. William had twenty men with him, but two would be corpses out in the stables. There were three in the antechamber, guarding the duke, and the other fifteen were all quartered down in the small bailey.
Those fifteen men had to be assumed dead. If Cotentin had betrayed the duke, he already had control of the whole castle, and that would mean the inner bailey, too. If they were closing the noose, killing the men in the outer bailey and blocking off access to the main gate, they would have done the same in the inner bailey. They would have killed the duke’s men down there before moving into the keep.
Once again imagining the raven’s-eye view of the castle, he realised that at the next window he would be able to see across the inner bailey. Behind them, Gunnhild opened the other door and went to wake the others. Thank Odin that he’d had the sense to make sure all his men were quartered together – their presence was probably the only reason the enemy had not flooded the keep already. They were wary and were making sure to remove all other trouble first.
As Halfdan shrugged into his chain byrnie and accepted his sword back from Ketil, belting it on, he thought about it all. Seventeen Wolves. Three of the duke’s men, and William himself. Twenty-one men. There would be at least four times that in the castle. There was, therefore, no realistic hope of holding them off.
He reached the next window and pushed open the shutters.
Down below, in the inner bailey, he saw the demise of the rest of the duke’s men beginning. They were in a solid timber building, but half a dozen men in the livery of two different lords had blocked the door with barrels and beams, and even now they slopped pitch across the lower timbers of the building. They’d been working quietly, and the duke’s men inside would still be asleep, blissfully unaware of the horrible fate that awaited them. He turned away as two men with lit torches approached, but not before registering the colours of the livery now that the glowing fires illuminated the men. Cotentin’s blue and red stripes he recognised, but there were other men in blue and yellow quartered colours. His suspicions were confirmed. This was not just Neel de Cotentin making a play for power, but the strike of more than one revolting lord – the opening move of a rebellion. He had thought Neel had been hanging back for something – the man had been waiting for the reinforcements of a fellow rebel. The other guests had finally arrived, and their hunt was on.
Gesturing to the others, he ran, rounding a corner and heading for William’s room. Thus far everything had been quiet and subtle, but any moment, it was all going to become loud and active – the moment that fire woke the men within and the screaming started. The rebels would have to be ready to move by then.
He approached the next corner, around which William’s room lay, and stopped dead. He could hear the very subtle sounds of men trying not to be heard around the corner. Slowly, quietly, he drew his sword from its sheath and used his other hand to draw a finger across his throat and then point to the corridor ahead.
The others nodded, weapons at the ready. Ketil had his axe out, bow over his shoulder.
Halfdan ran around the corner and charged at the men outside William’s door. In that blink of an eye, he registered that these men were all in that new blue and yellow livery, and wondered whether Neel had found it too distasteful to kill his lord in his own castle and had left the job to his ally.
Then the Wolves hit them. There were five of them, but more a little further along, just arriving at the top of the steps.
‘Odiiiiiiiiiin!’ he bellowed as he drove the nearest man against the duke’s door.
His sword found its way above the collar of the Norman’s chain shirt and slammed into muscle and cartilage, half-decapitating the man in a single strike. Blood gouted out and coated both attacker and victim, as well as others in the corridor. Ketil’s axe bit into another man’s face, the Icelander cursing as the gleaming blade caught on the Norman helmet’s nose guard and picked up a chip that would take hours of polishing out. The ruined face within sprayed blood and worse as the Icelander pulled the axe free and the dying man fell away. Bjorn’s strike was the most brutal of all, for the man simply ran into the others, flattening one back against the wall, with an elbow to the gut, as the other went down with a cry under the great albino’s heavy boots. Bjorn had seen the other men in the stairwell and was determined to have them all to himself. Bellowing eye-watering things, the giant hit them like a boulder from a catapult.
Halfdan turned his attention back to the matter in hand. Ketil was moving about, axe in one hand now unused, dripping gore, as he used the sax in his other to cut the throat of every remaining figure there.
All subtlety was gone. Halfdan could just hear the screams of William’s men burning, various shouted commands outside, the cries of the men Ketil was finishing, and the bellowing from Bjorn and his opponents at the stairs. He could also hear the rest of his men emerging from their rooms and catching up. Good. The Wolves were equipped, alert, moving, and together.
Halfdan hammered on the door.
‘Who goes there?’ bellowed a man from inside.
‘Halfdan Loki-born. Open up.’
There was a click, and the door crept in a little. Halfdan, knowing time was of the essence, pushed it open and burst into the room past the surprised Norman guard. The three men were all armed, yet not armoured, woken and alerted by the struggle outside.
‘Get your shirts,’ Halfdan snapped at them. ‘We’re leaving.’
They might have thought to argue, but looking past the jarl at the pile of bodies outside the door, Ketil moving among them like a draugr, slicing into windpipes, galvanised them into obedient action. They didn’t even move to stop Halfdan as he reached the door to the inner chamber and pulled it open. Some instinct made him step aside as he did so, and he noted with satisfaction that little knife favoured by the young duke hurtle through the place he would have been, perfectly weighted and perfectly thrown. He ducked back to see William already dressed, booted, upright and armed.
‘You?’ the duke hissed.
‘The rebellion has started,’ Halfdan said flatly. ‘We are outnumbered. Time to leave.’
William frowned for just a moment, and then nodded. ‘Four to one, I reckon?’
‘More,’ Halfdan said as he moved past the duke to his window and pushed open the shutters. ‘Your men in both baileys are dead, and Cotentin is not alone. He has friends.’ He pointed back at the corridor, and William took in the blue and yellow figures in the doorway.
‘That looks like the colours of Bessin.’
‘Is this Bessin a short but heavy man in his twenties?’ Halfdan said, peering out of the window.
The duke ran across and looked out next to him. From this room they had a good view of the inner bailey. The wooden building housing William’s men was fully ablaze, and the screaming was deafening. There was little chance of the fire spreading. Common sense in the castle’s design had forced Neel to place his buildings far enough apart to prevent any sort of ongoing conflagration, so he could sacrifice just one building to disarm the duke. Soldiers in both colours were flooding into the keep’s doorway, but across the bailey, standing in the open, were five men. One was Cotentin, another the leader of the blue and yellow men. They were accompanied by a priest, a third man in green and in rich armour, and one figure that made Halfdan’s heart lurch.
‘That is Ranulf de Bayeux, Viscount of the Bessin,’ William snarled, pointing to the man in green. ‘The traitor.’
‘This goes deep and wide,’ Halfdan said, pointing at the fifth figure, a gangly man in very nondescript clothes, but with a pinched face and a bald spot amid his black hair gleaming in the firelight. A man he had last seen when he’d sat next to him at Pirou.
‘Who is it?’ William frowned.
‘He is one of Serlo de Hauteville’s courtiers. I don’t see Hauteville’s men among the warriors, but that one’s presence is enough to cast doubt on Serlo.’
The duke nodded. ‘We are surrounded. What do we do? Where can we go?’
Halfdan ground his teeth. They were caught like rats in a trap. There was only one door to the keep, and it was on the ground floor, leading out into the inner bailey, from which men were pouring, intent on their deaths. They couldn’t realistically get out there. And up was clearly out, too. That left…
Halfdan stepped back and looked at the window. It was big enough for a man – even one in armour – to fit through, at a push. The architect had known there was little need for defensive windows this high up. The jarl looked forward and down again. The drop to the grass below was at least twenty feet.
‘We have to go out of the windows.’
William blinked. ‘That’s a long drop.’
‘Easier than the front door,’ Halfdan pointed out. ‘The Wolves are outside in the corridor. Go with them. Get to our room. The window there opens out into the main bailey.’
‘And what then? On the assumption we survive the fall without broken legs?’
Halfdan was already thinking that through, and a Loki grin reached his lips.
‘There is only one way into the keep, and your enemies are flooding the door, trying to get to you. That means they’re concentrating in the inner bailey. The outer bailey should be fairly clear. Get out there and to the stables. Break out horses for twenty-one, and we’ll rush the main gate.’
William clearly knew better than to argue. It was a fairly ropey plan, but it was also the best one they had. The duke nodded and gathered his three men, running out into the corridor. Halfdan looked past them to Ketil and Gunnhild who, between them, were leading the Wolves.
‘We go out of the window from our room. Get to horses and gather there.’
‘Where are you going?’ the völva asked.
Halfdan pointed at the stairs, from which they could hear the sounds of furious fighting, punctuated by crude insults being roared.
‘To retrieve Bjorn.’
‘I’ll help,’ Ketil said, and joined him as Gunnhild began to usher the Wolves, the duke and his men back along the corridor to the rooms that looked out over the outer bailey. As the bulk of them disappeared around the corner, Halfdan looked his friend in the one eye. ‘This might be a last stand.’
Ketil snorted. ‘The day the Loki-born walks to his death, we might as well all give up, as Ragnarok will be here.’
That sent a shiver up Halfdan’s spine and brought back that vision-dream in horrible detail. He shuddered.
‘If I fall, get out.’
But in that moment, somehow he knew he would not fall. In a moment of clarity he realised he had been handed a gift by the gods, albeit a double-edged one. He had seen his death, which was not something to look forward to, especially given the circumstances of it. But that also meant that until he found himself face to face with Heimdallr, surely nothing else could kill him? He made a mental note to speak to Gunnhild about this when he had the chance, but for now he had other things to deal with. Just because he could perhaps not die here did not mean the same held for Ketil and Bjorn.
In moments he was pounding down the stairs toward the sound of furious fighting, the rangy Icelander at his back, jumping three steps at a time, avoiding the trail of human destruction Bjorn had left behind him. At the bottom, they rounded the corner and found a wide corridor filled with fighting. It seemed in an instant that the Normans were busy fighting among themselves while Bjorn, somewhere in the midst of it all, was merrily chopping bits out of anyone he could reach.
Then the jarl’s sharp eye picked out the details. Men in the colours of the two rebel lords were coming in through the door from the huge hall beyond, while Bjorn was fighting them back with the aid of another Norman and his men. He recognised the bloodied, tired face of Geoffroi from the previous afternoon, and nodded to himself. He’d recognised the man’s quality in the hall immediately, and it seemed he held to it. In the face of the rebellion, even against insurmountable odds, Geoffroi had clung to his oath to the duke.
‘We have to get that door shut and barred,’ Halfdan bellowed.
Geoffroi turned at the voice and focused on him. ‘Where is the duke?’
‘With my men. We’re getting him out.’
‘Then go,’ Geoffroi shouted. ‘Save him.’
For a moment, Halfdan considered arguing, rushing to help and close the door, but common sense took hold of him. With the door barred, the enemy would spread out, fill the baileys and look for other ways in, which would make their own exit that much more difficult. Geoffroi and his men fighting at the door would keep them busy long enough, hopefully, for the Wolves to get William out of there. With just a nod to Geoffroi – who didn’t see it, for he was already back to the fight – Halfdan and Ketil reached out and grabbed Bjorn.
It took both of them to drag him out of the fray, such was his desperate desire to fight. All three of them were slippery and sticky with other people’s blood, and in Bjorn’s case, some of his own, too. There were several moments when their hands slid free and the great white bear had another chance to struggle with the Normans, but finally they managed to drag him free.
‘Come on,’ Halfdan snapped at his big friend, and ran for the stairs, leaving Geoffroi to fight his desperate rearguard. Ketil followed him, and Bjorn, after one longing look back at the fight, sighed and made for the staircase.
Moments later they were pounding along to the upper floor.
‘I was enjoying that,’ the albino grumbled. ‘Haven’t had a proper fight since we were down south, fighting with Fuck.’
‘Fulk,’ said Ketil automatically, as he urged the big man on.
‘We need to get William of Nordmandi out of here and to safety,’ Halfdan said as they reached the upper corridor.
‘Why?’ Bjorn said.
‘Because we need him if we ever want to find the Sea Wolf.’
This seemed to satisfy the big man, and he nodded and thundered along the corridor behind them. They passed the carnage at the door of the duke’s room and found their own two chambers. Both doors were open, with men and women gathered around the windows. Even as Halfdan glanced into the first chamber, he saw Anna throw herself from the window. He gestured to Ketil.
‘Go into the next room and bar the door. We need to hold them as long as possible.’
Ketil nodded and ran to the far room, while Halfdan dragged Bjorn into the nearest, then turned, shut and barred the door. He then hurried over to join the others at the window. Five were yet to leave, and one of them was one of William’s Normans. The rest moved aside as the jarl approached, and Halfdan took a quick look outside.
The enemy were aware of their escape already. Those men who were still on the ramparts were bellowing warnings and pointing at the escapees, yet they did not seem to be running to help, held in place either by orders or by fear.
Below, one of the first to jump had had the wisdom to reach a cart of grain sacks nearby and push it up to the wall. Grain sacks would still form a hard landing, but it brought it a good six feet closer, which also minimised the risk of injury as long as the jumper hit the cart centrally. The other window was a straight jump to the turf, and already one of the Wolves was rolling around, cursing and clutching his knee.
Halfdan’s attention went out a little further, and he could see two small fights going on. Some of his men had reached the stable block and were struggling with the men there, while two more of his Wolves had run for the gate that separated the two baileys and were busy fighting to hold it.
Halfdan stepped back, and another jumped from the window, landing with a thud and a curse.
‘Go,’ he urged, pushing someone else into the aperture.
He had no idea how long Geoffroi could hold the room downstairs and how long these chamber doors would hold, but that was immaterial if they were slow enough in their egress that the enemy had time to move and bring their forces back out into the main bailey.
Breathing heavily, racing through what he could remember of the castle, the town beyond its walls, the forests beyond that, and the general geography of the peninsula, Halfdan waited impatiently until Bjorn, the second to last in the room, climbed up to the windowsill.
‘This was not made for a big man,’ Bjorn grumbled, trying to fit his enormous bulk into the opening.
‘Jump.’
‘Easy for you to say, Halfdan Loki-born. You’re the size of my thigh.’
As Bjorn swore and shifted, scraped and struggled, Halfdan turned sideways, rolling his eyes, and slammed his shoulder into the big man’s back. Bjorn popped from the window like a cork from a bottle, bellowing something about bastards as he fell. Halfdan grinned and climbed up in his wake.
‘Best get out of the way,’ he shouted to the huge albino.
And with that, he jumped.