In a brief exchange, from ambush, Bragi and Haaken slew three men and sent a fourth fleeing into the pines. They received their own first man-wounds.
“Half of us are down,” Bragi observed, after studying the main action. “Bors. Rafnir. Tor. Tryggva. Both Haralds. Where’s Bjorn?”
Ragnar, roaring and laughing, stood out of the fray like a cave bear beset by hounds. Bodies lay heaped around him.
“We’ve got to help.”
“How?” Haaken was no thinker. He was a follower and doer. A strong-backed, stolid, steadfast lad.
Bragi had all of his mother’s intellect and a little of his father’s crazy courage. But the situation had rattled him. He did not know what to do. He wanted to run. He did not. With a bellow imitative of Ragnar’s, he charged. Fate had made his decision for him.
He had discovered what had become of Bjorn. Ragnar’s lieutenant was charging him from behind.
No warning could reach Ragnar’s blood-drugged brain. All Bragi could do was race Bjorn to his prey.
He lost the footrace, but prevented the traitor’s blow from being fatal. Bjorn’s deflected blade entered Ragnar’s back kidney high. Ragnar howled and whirled. A wild blow from the haft of his axe bowled Bjorn into a snowdrift.
Then the Wolf’s knees buckled.
The rebels whooped, attacking with renewed ferocity. Bragi and Haaken became too busy to avenge their father.
Then twenty rebels wailed.
Ragnar surged to his feet. He roared like one of the great trolls of the high Kratchnodians.
There was a lull as the combatants eyed one another.
The pain had opened the veil across Ragnar’s sanity. “A crown has been lost here tonight,” he muttered. “Treason always begets more treason. There’s nothing more we can do. Gather the wounded.”
For a while the rebels licked their wounds and fought the fire. But the raiders, burdened with wounded, gained only a few miles head start.
Nils Stromberg went down and could not get up again. His sons, Thorkel and Olaf, refused to leave him behind. Ragnar bellowed at all three, and lost the argument. They stayed, their faces turned toward the glow of the burning longhouse. No man could deny another his choice of deaths.
Lank Lars Greyhame went next. Then Thake One Hand. Six miles south of Hjarlma’s stead, Anders Miklasson slipped down an icy bank into the creek they were following. He went under the ice and drowned before the others could chop through.
He would have frozen anyway. It was that cold, and the others dared not pause to light a fire.
“One by one,” Ragnar growled as they piled stones in a crude cairn. “Soon there won’t be enough of us left to drive off the wolves.”
He did not mean Hjarlma’s men. A pack was trailing them. The leader already had made a sally at Jarl Kinson, who kept lagging.
Bragi was exhausted. His wounds, though minor, nagged him like the agonies of a flensing knife in the hand of a master executioner. But he kept silent. He could do no less than his father, whose injury was much greater.
Bragi, Haaken, Ragnar and five more lived to see the dawn. They evaded Hjarlma and drove the wolves off. Ragnar went to ground in a cave. He sent Bragi and Haaken to scout the nearby forest. The searchers passed near the boys, but without slowing.
Bragi watched them go, Bjorn, the Thane and fifteen healthy, angry warriors. They were not searching. They were talking about waiting for Ragnar at Draukenbring.
“Hjarlma’s not stupid,” Ragnar said when he received the news. “Why chase the Wolf all over the woods when you know he has to return to his lair?”
“Mother —”
“She’ll be all right. Hjarlma’s scared to death of her.”
Bragi tried reading behind his father’s beard. The man spoke softly, tautly, as if he were in great pain.
“The war is over now,” Ragnar told him. “Understand that. The Pretender has won. The Old House is in eclipse. There’s no more reason to fight. Only a fool would.”
Bragi got the message. He wasn’t to waste his life pursuing a lost cause.
He had had fifteen years of practice reading the wisdom behind Ragnar’s terse observations.
“They’ll abandon him as quickly as they flocked to him. Eventually. They say...” A shudder wracked his massive frame. “They say there’s a demand for Trolledyngjans in the south. Over the mountains. Beyond the lands of the bowmen. Past the reeving kingdoms. There’s war a-brewing. Bold lads, bright lads, might do well while awaiting a restoration.”
Itaskia was the lands of the bowmen. The reeving kingdoms were the necklace of city states hugging the coast down to Simballawein. For half a dozen generations the Trolledyngjan dragonships had gone out when the ice broke at Tonderhofn and Torshofn, to run the gauntlet of the Tongues of Fire and plunder the eastern littoral.
“Under the shingle pine, beside the upper spring. The northwest side. An old, broken hearthstone marks it. You’ll find the things you’ll need. Take the copper amulet to a man called Yalmar at the Red Hart Inn in Itaskia the City.”
“Mother —”
