shrieked for help in her cracked bell of a voice.
Gudrod held both Crowbone’s wrists, knife hand and free hand, trying to lurch the weight of himself to pin the struggling youth down. Crowbone, for his part, snarled and writhed and kicked, so that Gudrod freed one hand to try and punch the youth senseless.
Instead, he found himself turned, felt a sharp blow in his cods and yelped as he lost control of Crowbone’s knife hand. In desperation, he saw the blood staining the youth’s shoulder, saw an old wound and an opportunity and smashed at it, making Crowbone howl and roll away, knife spilling free.
Blind and blurry, with fireflies dancing at the edge of his vision, Crowbone saw Gudrod snatch up the knife, just as the third guard tore himself free from the tangle that was Martin. Orm sprang forward and he and the guard clashed like rutting stags, straining and grunting, sliding and scrabbling for purchase on the floor and getting in Gudrod’s way.
Finn rose up from where he had broken the neck of the second guard, into the mad shrieks and shrills of Gunnhild, screaming for help that never came; he gave a growl as he stepped for her. She waved her hands frantically at him, yelling: ‘Blunt, blunt,’ but Finn, lumbering and grinning like a bear woken too early, shook his head.
‘That old spell worked on me once when I fought another witch like you,’ he snarled. ‘Now I do not bother with edged steel.’
His fist took her on the point of her jaw, breaking it, shattering the mask of her face to shards of powder and artifice, snapping her head back and cutting off her howls. Gudrod saw it as he weaved to his feet at last, panting, the knife in his hand and ready for Crowbone’s throat. Instead, he saw his mother slumped, blood trickling from her nose and he howled like a trapped wolf and started toward Finn.
Crowbone leaped up, a salmon leap as good as any he had ever done before. He hit the table and scattered the board and the pieces into the shoulder and face of Gudrod, who reared back, his mouth opening with horror at what he saw.
The Bloodaxe, snatched up by Crowbone, coming down on him, all glitter and dark shaft, the edge growing bigger and bigger until it was the whole world crashing on Gudrod’s forehead and splitting him to the chin.
Finn was leaping to the aid of Orm even before the black blood and gleet had washed down Gudrod’s falling chest. Before he hit the floor, Finn had broken the neck of the last guard — and there was stillness, suddenly, where the rasp of their breathing was loud and ugly, the iron stink of blood cloying their throats. The King piece rolled backwards and forwards and finally toppled off the table, landing with a sticky little slap of sound in Gudrod’s blood.
‘Game to me,’ Crowbone said and his own voice sounded like a stranger far off.
Finn got off his knees, canting his head sideways to where Crowbone still stood on the table, arms dropped to his side, staring at the body of Gudrod with the axe buried deep in what remained of his skull.
‘You were ever handy with an axe and a skull,’ Finn declared climbing wearily to his feet and wiping his hands down his breeks. ‘I thank the gods for it now, of course.’
Crowbone barely heard it. The death of Gudrod, the axe that had done it, sent a thrill through him from soles to crown; the side of his head, where it had been smacked, seemed suddenly to have an ice spear thrust into it.
Here was a sign. The axe had betrayed Gudrod, who was clearly not worthy and the weapon had sprung almost unbidden into Crowbone’s own hand to prove that he clearly was. And yet …
He blinked away from the corpse of Gudrod to the slumped figure on the High Seat.
Her. It was her. He peered across at her, no more than four steps away. Gunnhild, the Witch-Queen, who had ordered the death of his father — and, next to her, Gudrod, the son who had carried out the deed. Because of her, that bundle of rags there, everything that the Norns had woven for Crowbone’s life had been unpicked then re- woven in suffering and the death of his mother; Crowbone could not move for breathing.
When he did, he slid from the table into the sticky mess of Gudrod’s blood and plootered through it to the figure on the chair, her head lolling, the veil fluttering free to show her ancient, ravaged face and open, dead eyes. The gnarled fingers which had worked her last spell curled like a cold-killed spider.
She was dead, for sure, though Crowbone, feeling the fresh burn in his shoulder, had to reach out and touch the cheek, snake-scaled with age and marbling into cold death; when he brought his fingers back they were wet. A tear? Yet the thin lips were drawn slightly back, fretted all round with lines like a badly-fired clay pot and revealing teeth yellow as walrus tusks, a last snarl of defiance.
Here she was, then, the Mother of Kings, his enemy from the moment he drew his first breath — from before even that. Crowbone stood, feeling the insistent heartbeat agony of his shoulder, blinking with the pain and trying to feel as if something had ended, that his father was close by nodding approval, his mother’s presence draping him with love and thanks.
But there was only an old dead woman, with a mouth dropped open to make her look foolish and eyes turning to dull ice.
A grunt and a whimper broke him from the moment and he turned, to where Martin levered himself upright to the table and reached out one clawed hand to grasp the spear. In one swift movement, Crowbone snatched it up, just as men spilled into the hall.
Orm and Finn were poised like dogs spotting wolves, but Crowbone merely glanced up at Arnfinn and his Orkneymen, smiling. He nodded towards Gudrod and Gunnhild.
‘Done and done,’ he declared and Arnfinn, after the briefest of glances, stared back at him.
‘It were best if you were gone swiftly from here,’ he said and Crowbone nodded. This, too, had been part of his plan, for Crowbone knew how to play the game of kings in life and he had surrounded the King piece before he had even sat down with Gudrod.
‘Mine,’ Martin managed out of the crazed ruin of his mouth and Crowbone looked at him, then at the spear in his hand.
‘There was a dog,’ Crowbone said and Martin scowled.
‘No more tales,’ he mushed. ‘I have heard enough of your tales.’
For an eyeblink, Crowbone was back on the steppe, huddled with Orm round a mean fire, with Martin and the men he had persuaded to kidnap them. He had told a story then, though he could not remember it — but he remembered Martin’s fury at it. Next day, in a raging blizzard the warrior women of the steppe had attacked and killed everyone save Orm, Martin and himself. That had been his last sight of Martin, Crowbone thought, scuttling into the snow like a wraith, clutching his holy stick and wearing only one shoe.
Crowbone glanced at Orm and saw that he, too, had remembered. Finn’s grin was wolfen.
‘The dog had stolen meat. “What a good time I shall have eating this meat when I get home,” thought the dog as it started to cross a stream of water,’ Crowbone went on. ‘Then he looked down at his own shadow in the water and saw a dog with a large piece of meat in its jaws. “That dog has a larger piece of meat than mine,” he thought. “I want it. I will have it!” He growled, but the dog in the water did not move, nor did he drop his piece of meat. He snapped at the dog in the water. The meat he carried slipped from his mouth and sank to the bottom of the stream — and the dog in the water lost his meat at the same time.’
‘You have your axe,’ Martin mumbled. ‘Give me my spear.’
Crowbone looked at the axe, slanting blackly up from the body of Gudrod. He smiled.
‘Odin’s Daughter does not look so attractive in this light. I do not believe I wish to marry her this day, or the next — though I will in time. I have no need of this cursed axe to cut a path to the High Seat of Norway. It is only a
A
‘Heya,’ Finn sighed, ‘I wish you had realised all this before we came to this hall. Before you set off on the entire Thing of it.’
‘Just so,’ Orm said, then shrugged. ‘It seems wise to me, mark you. Perhaps you will be a great king after all.’
Martin shrieked then, a long howl of anguish and utter rage. He did it until he coughed and spat more blood up, then collapsed on the ground, panting. Orm stared at him, remembering the years — gods, the long years —
