‘Will you stay with us while we wait for Danr’s safe return?’ Lady Breanne asked in her lilting voice after the oath swearing. ‘It has been a long time since the brothers were together in friendship and harmony.’
The last little ache in Sandulf’s heart eased. His brothers were proud of him. He did matter to them, but he had another life, one where he was more than vital. He held out his hand to Ceanna, who came over. She squeezed it and he knew it was her way of saying that she’d support him in whichever decision he made.
‘I will always be there for you, my brothers, when you need me, but I must return to Dun Ollaigh with my bride. I made a pledge to help its people and I will. I want to dedicate my life to them and my bride.’
Read on for a teaser of
the next instalment of the
Sons of Sigurd series
Redeeming Her Viking Warrior
by Jenni Fletcher
Redeeming Her Viking Warrior
by Jenni Fletcher
AD 877—Isle of Skίð, modern-day Scotland
The woman appeared out of nowhere. One moment Danr Sigurdsson was alone, his body cradled amid the tangled roots of an oak tree, the next she was looming above him, the spear in her hand pointing straight at his throat.
He stared up at her, absently wondering who she was and where she’d come from, then gave up the effort and closed his eyes. His head and chest were throbbing. So, too, was his pulse, so hard and fast it felt as though his heart were trying to force its way through his ribcage. Considering how much blood he’d lost over the past few hours, he was surprised it could still summon the strength to beat at all, but at least the pain in his arm was fading to numbness now.
If he kept still, he could almost forget the angry red gouge where the blade had caught him, slicing through skin and muscle and tendon. If he didn’t move at all, scarcely allowing himself to breathe, in fact, he could forget almost everything.
The rustle of leaves overhead had already faded to a dull murmur and the light behind his eyelids was dimming, narrowing around the edges like a tunnel collapsing in on itself, enveloping him in darkness.
Something prodded his neck and he prised his eyelids open again. It was the woman, the blunt edge of her spear nudging his skin. What did she want? Was she threatening him? If she was, then she didn’t need to. At that moment he couldn’t have put up a fight with a kitten.
The very air felt heavy, pinning him to the ground as if there were a fallen tree lying across his chest. He was going to die whether she impaled him or not and he wasn’t going to protest either way. Perhaps it was best that she went ahead and put him out of his misery quickly. He would have failed his brothers—again—but at least it would have been while trying to fulfil his oath.
He curled the fingers of his good arm around the hilt of his sword, Bitterblade, determined to die with it in his hand like a warrior, even if he couldn’t lift it, but the woman didn’t move as much as a muscle. As far as he could tell, she didn’t even blink.
He felt a flicker of unease, wondering if she were some figment of his imagination or perhaps an apparition. She looked like one, her narrow, expressionless face streaked with grey smudges while her hair tumbled in such wild, half-braided, half-loose disarray that it resembled a cloak of golden hay around her shoulders.
She was a lot like a spear herself, he thought, sleek and slender with a flat chest and shoulders the same width as her hips, though he hated himself for noticing. Apparently it was true what Rurik had always said, that Danr would still be looking at women on his deathbed...
Well, he was on it now, so perhaps it was only fitting. A woman had brought him into the world, albeit reluctantly, and now a woman was going to take him out of it. It would be a fitting revenge for all the ones he’d known and discarded in between.
He waited, feeling increasingly uneasy beneath her silent scrutiny. Even from where he lay on the ground he could see that her eyes were pale and striking, like oyster pearls, mirroring the sky behind her head, an iridescent grey speckled with flakes of silver that looked a lot like... Snow?
Somehow he dragged a laugh up out of his chest. This was truly the end, then. He hadn’t even realised that it was cold enough for snow yet, though now he thought about it he could see whispery coils of air emerging from his mouth. From hers, too, which at least proved she was a real flesh-and-blood woman, no matter how spectral she seemed.
Snow was filling the air all around them, covering his broken and bloodied body in a gauzy white layer. After everything that he and his brothers had gone through, after they’d travelled so far and fought so many enemies from Maerr to Éireann to Constantinople to Alba, now he was going to die here in a forest all on his own and be buried in snow. His body would probably lie where it was all winter, encased in ice, refusing to rot away until spring. Maybe Hilda would be the one to find him eventually and know that she’d won.
He gave a grunt of disgust and then froze, the hairs on the back of his neck rising at the sound of an answering growl. With an effort he lifted his head, his already pounding heartbeat redoubling in speed at the sight of a wolf—no, wolves—stalking through the undergrowth towards him, their teeth bared in twin snarls, no doubt
