combat, you’ll have your combat.”
The voice was Gizor’s. He was loosening both the ropes that bound Roric to the rings and the ropes around his feet, though not the bonds that kept his arms pinned to his sides.
Kardan feigned sleep, watching from behind his lashes.
“Untie me,” said Roric in a whisper of his own. “Are you afraid I’ll attack you while your back is turned?”
“I’m afraid you’ll run away again!”
“I had my chance to kill you, Gizor,” said Roric in a hiss. “I let you live. You should be thanking all the lords of voima for your deliverance, not trying to kill me!”
Gizor jerked Roric to his feet by the ropes. Kardan could see that he had not one but two swords hanging from his belt. “You killed my best friends and let a woman attack me from behind.”
“And you, ” hissed Roric, “kept me from protecting the princess. The blood-guilt from her death will all fall on you.”
“You have insulted my honor for the last time, No-man’s son. I shall release the ropes when we reach the island.”
They went soundlessly along the ship, past sleeping warriors. Kardan waited until they were thirty yards ahead and then rose to follow as quietly as he could.
Gizor and Roric stopped while two of Hadros’s warriors went by, then slipped in silence out of the camp site and along the river bank through coils of fog. Kardan, behind them, kept just far enough back that he hoped they would not notice his presence.
He was not quite sure why he followed them. On the one hand, he could not interfere in a judicial single combat. On the other hand, he felt that Roric was the only man who could save his daughter. “And if they are both badly-even fatally-wounded,” he added to himself, “there will have to be a witness to determine the blood- guilt.”
A half mile downstream from the camp, an island rose from the river, a great boulder thirty feet high. The fog hid the fires of the camp. “This will do,” said Gizor. He jerked the ropes, though Roric showed no sign of trying to escape, and the two waded out into the water. The tide was out and the river low. Kardan waited until they had reached the island’s edge and were scrambling up the rough stone before following them. Neither one looked back.
Off to the east above the fog, the sky was lightening rapidly. Kardan climbed slowly, finding finger and toe holds in the uneven surface of the stone, trying not to knock loose pebbles. The strain pulled at his stiff muscles, and his fingers felt clumsy. Karin, he remembered, had always enjoyed climbing as a young girl.
By the time he pushed his head cautiously up to the top, Gizor had freed Roric from the ropes and given him a sword. The young man stretched his arms out fully, then grinned at the man who meant to kill him. He was muscled and lean, almost the same age, Kardan thought, as his own dead son.
The top of the island was twenty feet across and fairly level, bare rock scattered with loose gravel, tufts of grass growing in a few cracks. Kardan tried to find a secure perch from which he could see without being seen. The two warriors stood facing each other in the dawn light, without armor or shield, hefting naked steel.
“Tell me one thing before I kill you, Gizor,” said Roric. “Are you my father?”
3
The fire pit burned bright in the mountain hall, half cave and half castle. Along both sides men sat sullenly drinking. Every now and then the voice of one or another was raised in joke or curse, but for the most part they drank in silence.
Karin sat against the wall where she had been thrown, trying not to appear as terrified as she felt. No one spoke to her, but some of the warriors looked at her over their ale horns. And then the man with the permanent mocking smile from the scar on his mouth sauntered across the hall to stand before her.
“So, what have we captured here?” he inquired, hands on his hips. The firelight, red behind him, made him dark and almost featureless, a shape and a voice that could have been a wight from Hel.
She forced her voice to be steady. “A princess,” she said. “Fate has given you a princess.” She had never felt less like a princess in her life, but at the moment it was her only weapon. “You may extract a rich ransom for me, but only if I am unharmed in any way. If I am, all the Fifty Kings will unite to destroy you.”
“They haven’t united on anything yet,” said the man with a harsh laugh. “Except of course outlawing me-that, I hear, they managed just fine at the All-Gemot.”
“Who are you?” she asked cautiously. If he was more than a common bandit, someone who actually cared about the All-Gemot, she might live until morning.
“Eirik, King Eirik to you. You don’t look like a princess to me. You look like a farmer’s daughter. And my warriors tell me you fight like a cornered mountain cat.” He pulled out a dagger and flipped it into the air, catching it smoothly and flipping it again. She recognized the knife as hers.
“I am Princess Karin, Kardan’s daughter, heiress to his kingdom,” she said with dignity. Keep him talking, she thought. The longer she could keep him talking the better chance she had. This must be the king who had been outlawed by the All-Gemot for killing a man and hiding the body. In that case, the burned-out castle down in the valley had been his. “Look at my necklace.” She reached inside the neck of her dress to pull out the thin chain that she and Roric had intended to give to the Witch of the Western Cliffs in return for information on how to find Valmar.
He grabbed and gave a jerk, breaking the catch, and studied it in the firelight. She furtively rubbed the spot where the chain had dug into her skin before breaking. “Fine workmanship,” he said after a moment, almost reluctantly. “Either you really are from a rich family or else you’re a thief.”
“A thief like you?” she asked, making herself laugh. Judging from the ambush laid for Hadros’s ship, into which she and Roric had ridden, he and his men now lived by raiding those who came near his old kingdom.
“Oh, I’m no thief,” he answered, sitting down beside her with his legs out before him. He tossed the necklace into her lap.
Karin watched him from the corner of her eye, fearing that to face him fully would be to invite further closeness. He looked much older from close up than his youthful bravado suggested. She couldn’t tell if he was really smiling or if it was just the scarred lip. Her hand closed around the necklace casually, to give the impression she hardly cared.
“I am an outlaw according to the Gemot,” he went on, “but I am a lover, a poet, a berserk fighter, and a king according to me. ”
“A poet, Eirik?” she asked, her tone deliberately light. “I wouldn’t mind hearing one of your poems-if you really do write them!”
He flashed her a dark look from under his brows. “I’ll compose a poem about you, ” he said and yelled to one of his men. Karin noticed uneasily that the steady drinking had stopped; the warriors seemed to be following their conversation with interest.
In a moment someone shambled over with a rolled-up piece of dirty cloth that Karin thought looked distinctly unpoetic. When Eirik unrolled it, however, he took out a lyre of smooth dark wood. He slid his hands along its shape a moment as though considering. When he plucked the strings, tuning, the tone was very sweet. “They don’t sing songs like this back in your kingdom,” he said, maybe smiling for real this time.
Karin thought grimly that Queen Arane might feel herself an expert on maneuvering men, but she was quite sure the queen had never had to listen to the poems of a man who might decide at any moment to kill her.
When after a moment Eirik began to sing, his voice was still rough, but there was a deep resonance in it she had not heard before.
“Swiftly the red-sail sought the dead castle,
“Swiftly from ambush came death-proud warriors,
“Swords and eyes flashing, giving no quarter,
“Hands firm, hearts strong, killing the seamen,
“Led by King Eirik, they slew the invaders,
“Laughed in their faces, came home to the mountain hall,
