‘Do you defy me, Aurvandil?’ Osvald’s fist slammed on the table, sending a horn bouncing to the floor. ‘I didn’t accept your oath nor feed you for an entire winter for you to question me. Now come up here and send this bald shit-spewing stoat to Hel!’
The men around Erlan eyed him. Many, he knew, would be only too happy to stick a blade in him to mollify their lord. Jealousy followed him everywhere – though, gods knew, there was little enough to envy him.
With a glance at the twins, he pulled himself off the bench. There was a squall of laughter as he limped through the muttered insults and mock encouragement towards Osvald’s table.
To refuse the order of an oath-lord was tantamount to breaking the very oath he had sworn. And to break that oath. . . For as long as he could remember, he’d had a terror of being an oath-breaker. His boyhood nurse Tolla had put that fear into him. A man’s word was the most precious thing he had, she’d said. To break it sent a tremor to the very roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Worlds, where the three Norns sat spinning his fate. A broken oath turned their malice against him.
He snorted. As if those blind bitches weren’t set against him already. . .
He reached the platform, his gait ringing unevenly off the wooden steps like a seiðman’s drum.
‘Draw your blade,’ said Osvald.
With the schick of steel, the hall fell silent. For a second the only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the soft murmurings on the lips of the wretched holy man.
‘Hold him still.’
The guards braced Vassili’s wiry body. He uttered not a word of protest. He was staring down at the planks under him, his scrawny neck exposed under the tufts of white hair, still muttering in a tongue Erlan did not understand. The hearth flame shimmered off his leathery pate. Erlan raised Wrathling, the ancient ring-sword of his ancestors. A weapon of honour. But not this night.
Suddenly Vassili’s head turned and looked up at Erlan – and for a second his hollow features blazed bright as the sun, clothed in a startling beauty. ‘I forgive you, chosen son,’ he said. ‘Remember. The blood of the king of kings. Seek him in the south.’
‘Do it!’ screamed Osvald, the blast of his rotten breath rankling Erlan’s nostrils.
And Wrathling’s cruel edge came sweeping down.
CHAPTER TWO
In twenty-two winters, Lilla could not remember one so cold. Cattle froze to death in their stalls, snowdrifts tall as frost giants buried the halls, hanging mead-skins turned into blocks of ice. Even the hearth fire seemed to have lost its heat.
Lilla’s breath steamed around her as she hurried back towards the Great Hall. The snow and ice on the path through the Kingswood nipped at her toes through calfskin shoes.
Maybe it just seemed worse, she thought. Maybe the cold was inside her, maybe it was the chill winds of fate that had left her heart numb.
Everyone was dead. Everyone she loved. Father, mother, brothers, sister, friends. Even the child that had been growing inside her. The last, secret connection to the man she loved.
As for him. . . Erlan had left many moons ago. Where to, she had no idea. That was a question with which she no longer tormented herself. She had, of course – in the days after he’d gone. She had thought of little else, her mind flying after him like a swallow fleeing winter. But the wheel of her thoughts brought her no closer to him and so at last she had forced herself to give it up.
Instead she had resolved to give herself wholly to her husband: King Ringast, son of the Wartooth, victor of the Bravik Plains, who that day had won the Twin Kingdoms of Danmark and Sveäland and been hailed King-Over-Them-All. He had since even taken on a new name, joining his own with her father’s: Sviggar-Hring. A sign to heal the wounds between their peoples. But few used it. Most folk called him by another: the Half-Hand King. Half he lost on that bloody plain. The half he kept was killing him.
It came on slow. So slow even she had failed to notice. The work to rebuild their riven land was never-ending and Ringast drove himself hard. At first he complained of dizziness after the long hours spent in council. Lilla persuaded herself he was just tired, that he needed more sleep, and with the onset of the long winter nights he would get it. But his condition grew worse. When they lay together, his skin was cold to the touch, like a wight’s – as if he were half-dead already. Now Lilla saw it had only been his extraordinary strength of will that had kept him alive this long. A weaker man would have succumbed weeks, perhaps months, before.
That morning she had gone to the old ash at the heart of the Kingswood to make sacrifice to Eir, hoping that the healing goddess would open her mind to some new knowledge that could save him. She had listened and heard. . . nothing.
The truth was stark. She could not save him.
Maybe this last loss would come as a relief – bringing her to that final, inexorable state of being completely alone. And yet she felt a horror of it.
The entrance to the mead-hall loomed before her, welcome shelter from the wind gusting across the hall-yard. But for a second she didn’t want to go back in, didn’t want to listen to those ragged breaths rattling in his throat, or to see his once piercing grey eyes grown so dim.
Gathering her skirts, she forced down her reluctance and went inside. ‘He’s asking for you again, my lady.’ The voice belonged to Gerutha, her Gotar maidservant. A year ago they had never met. Now Gerutha was her only friend.
‘Have you changed his blankets?’
‘Twice since you’ve gone.’ Gerutha’s cheekbones cast sharp shadows down her face.
