Behind Finn, ten sails furled in unison. Taking his lead, the following ships slowed down.
“Oars!”
Behind him, wood scraped on wood as the sailors mounted their oars and fell into an easy rhythm with each other.
The grayish-brownish mass on the pier turned into the worn and much-mended houses of Old Town, but no voices carried out to sea.
“Where is everyone?” the boatsman asked at his shoulder. Finn did not reply but instead looked at the walkways, the shadows, and the spaces in between. Sunlight flashed off something above Stenvik’s walls, and in three oar-strokes he’d made up his mind.
“Weapons!” he shouted.
Mail-clad spearmen emerged from the shadows of Old Town and marched silently to the pier, where they took up defensive positions. Bowmen stepped out from behind the old longhouse and crouched down, ready to fire.
Finn raised his hand and signaled for his fleet to stop. The command spread out behind him.
“We return from Trondheim with tales of King Olav’s great victories and demand that you step back from the pier!” he called.
None of the fighters moved, but one or two cast glances behind them.
“In the name of Jesus, our Christ and Savior! Step—back!” Finn shouted.
“Back off,” someone echoed from the beach, and the spearmen on the pier relaxed visibly. The bowmen turned their arrows to the ground, and a space cleared around the pier. A heavyset man with gray hair stepped up and stood in front of the assembled men: Gunnar Hovde. He had been a reliable chieftain, but no one of particular note.
As soon as Finn’s ship docked, he leapt ashore and closed the gap in big strides. “What is this supposed to mean, Gunnar?” he snarled. “Do we need to have”—he gripped the hilt of his sword—“a talk?”
“Calm down,” Gunnar said. “We just wanted to be safe.”
“Safe?” Finn looked around at the grim faces of King Olav’s soldiers. There were hundreds of them. “Safe from what?”
“You better follow me,” Gunnar said.
“What’s going on?” Finn said, but the chieftain had already turned around and was heading toward New Town.
They were soon met with cries of “Gates! Open the gates!,” followed by the rough, grating sounds of heavy wood on stone.
“You closed the gates?” Finn burst out. “What in Hel’s name has been going on here?” But Gunnar did not reply; instead he stopped in the middle of the tunnel, under Stenvik’s walls.
“Smell,” he snapped.
And when Finn breathed in, he did indeed smell it: fresh blood.
“We don’t know what it is,” Gunnar said, shifting uncomfortably on the bench. “The day after you lot left, three of the locals went into the north end of the woods, but only one came back. He said he’d lost them others somewhere, and they never returned. The day after, ten men went out to search for them—only two of those came back. I had to stop everyone else from charging out, armed to the teeth. Since then . . . well, strange things have been happening.”
The shadows in the longhouse suddenly looked a little darker.
“Like what?” Finn said.
“Like the tunnel,” Gunnar said. “That fucking tunnel. Do you remember Hildimar?”
Finn winced. “Big bastard from the south coast?”
Gunnar’s expression was grim. “The very same. You know how some men enjoy soldiering a little too much?” This time it was his turn to flinch. “It was a badly kept secret that accidents happened around him. Boys’ arms would break, girls would get . . . hurt, you know? He was always the picture of innocence, of course, and he was a good man in a fight, so King Olav either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“But not long after those men disappeared . . .” He paused and took a breath, before continuing, “We found him in the tunnel one morning, all sliced up. They’d cut off his fucking—”
“How many men did it?”
Gunnar slammed the table and leaned forward, his eyes blazing. “Listen to what I’m saying, Finn! He was butchered inside—inside—the fucking tunnel, Finn. Both gates were closed. I think you might want to ask yourself how the actual fuck he got there, who got in there with him, and how they got out.”
Finn met Gunnar’s anger impassively. “Did anyone see him enter the passageway?”
“No.”
“Did anyone hear the gates?”
“We’re not sure. We’ve kept them closed since the murder except for those men I know I can trust.”
“And the gates are operated from—?”
“—ropes on the ground, or up top.”
“Watch?”
“Three men on each gate.”
“Bring them.”
Gunnar barked an order; the door behind him opened and closed. Finn ignored the others in the longhouse and focused his mind on the puzzle at hand. How would he approach it?
He looked at the answer, smiled, and dumped it in an imaginary barrel of shit. Next he tried to figure out how King Olav would go about such a thing. The solution was fairly obvious and effective.
“Do you know when it happened?” he asked.
“Long after the raven’s time,” Gunnar replied curtly. “A bit before dawn.”
So King Olav’s solution was also wrong.
The door swung open, and three men entered. Finn vaguely remembered them; they were from somewhere in the Upper Dales. He rose and watched as they stopped, recognized him, and bowed their heads. He made the sign of the cross and told them to sit.
“Did you hear anything the night Hildimar was found?” he asked, as gently as he could.
“No,” came the muttered reply, all three answering in concert.
“Did you see anything?”
“No,” they all said.
He looked at the one on the left. “What was the weather like?”
“Moonlight, mostly. Some clouds.”
He turned to the man on the right and asked, “Where was your mead barrel?”
“By the wall—,” he said and then collapsed as the middle man elbowed him fiercely in the ribs.
Finn allowed the silence to settle. He’d found the third solution.
“And you saw him on that night?” Finn asked.
The man had been dragged off some shrieking wench by Gunnar, and now he stood shivering in his undershirt on the walkway. “Yeah, him and two of the locals,” he muttered. “Them two who came back from the forest.”
“What did they look like?”
“One of ’em I’d seen before, but I didn’t recognize the other. Scrawny bastard, older, looked like he’d had his beard hacked off in a fight or something. Wore a hood.”
Finn smiled and hoped it would hide the sinking feeling of dread. He gestured to Gunnar, who pushed the man roughly back toward the hut he’d been dragged from.
“What’s going on?” Gunnar asked. “What’s with all the questions?”
“You’d better follow me,” Finn said and walked toward the steps to the south gate. “And be quick. The light is going.”
When he was up on the wall, he immediately started looking for the telltale scuffmarks of the mead barrel, and sure enough, he found them. “Idiots,” he muttered. Then he turned to Gunnar. “Come here,” he snapped. “Look: barrel.” He pointed to the planks resting against the outer wall. Then he leaned over. “Handhold.” Tufts of grass had been pulled loose exactly where someone might have hidden up against the edge. “Powdered nightshade over the edge, straight into the barrel, and your guards are out like babies.”
“And then what?” Gunnar snapped.
Finn pointed toward the longhouse. “Three men come walking out of there. One is drunk; the other two are pretending. One of them says he knows of some pussy in Old Town; she likes it rough, he says. Hildimar is all for it, probably getting hard just at the mention. The gates open on one side, letting them in, then stay closed at the other end, leaving Hildimar stuck in the tunnel. They cut out his tongue first, then they pay back the pain
.”
Even in the fading light, Gunnar looked pale. “But—but—how’d they—?”
Finn walked over to a circular shield set into the walkway on the wall. “Busted murder-hole from the siege. When you were in the tunnel, you should have looked up,” he said.
“But hold on,” Gunnar said, “you’re saying one man drugged my guards, then the murderers took Hildimar into the tunnel—so who pulled up the gates?”
And Finn knew. He did the old man the courtesy of looking around first and making sure no one was going to overhear before he asked, “How many of the old Stenvik locals would you want no part of in a fight?”
Gunnar smirked. “I’d have no part of anyone in this hole—but of the fighters left, the ones who haven’t disappeared into the forest? I’d say maybe fifty, give or take.”
“That enough to open the gates?”
The truth hung in the air between them. Neither was smiling anymore.
“And where are they now?”
“They were—” As the gray turned to black in the east, the color drained out of Gunnar’s face. “They all volunteered to come out and meet you.”
The first red-yellow tendrils stretched to the sky from the roof of the old longhouse by the harbor as the fire reached upward, ever upward. In the spreading night it was an explosion of light and color. Within moments the whole roof was aflame, first backlighting and then biting into the huge wooden cross that someone had fastened to the front of the longhouse. Someone had stuck a horse’s head on top of it, facing New Town.
Finn and Gunnar watched the conflagration in silence. They saw the shadowy figures move like ghosts in the flickering light, drifting toward the forest.
The last one to leave the pool of fire was nothing more than a streak of moving darkness, but Finn thought he could feel the man’s gaze. Something in his bearing had a black promise.
Beside him, Gunnar snapped out of the flame trance and shouted, “I’ll rouse the men! We’ll go after them! They’re going to—”
“No,” Finn said, his voice flat. “This is their land, and they will cut you down. You will double the watch at all times and send no one out of the town without armed guards.”
“But—”
“But what?” Finn snapped.
“Why? Where are they going? What—what will they do?”
Finn sighed. “Just double the guard. Double the guard on the wall at all times. And no one goes into the woods. Ever. Did you get that? No one.” He was pretty sure he’d figured out what had happened in Stenvik while he was away, though he hoped and prayed that he wasn’t right.
On Huginshoyde, high up above Stenvik, a tall, white-haired man adjusted his broad-rimmed hat and smiled. Two large dogs lay at his feet. Below him the fields stretched to meet the tree line. “You’re not wrong, Finn Trueheart,” he muttered. “I really wouldn’t go into the woods. You never know what you’ll find.”
The scent hit both dogs at once and they scrabbled to their feet, but their throaty growls quickly changed into a high-pitched, keening noise as they backed into the old man’s legs, their heads low to the ground.
The old man did not move. “I thought you might make an appearance,” he said.
“You decided to meddle in my games. I’m surprised you didn’t . . . see it coming.” Smugness dripped off every word.
The old man turned and closed his one good eye. The other, milky-white and almost too big for its socket, stared unblinking at the black fox that was perched on a ledge above his head. It looked impossibly sleek, and its posture suggested more shapes than the eye could comprehend. “Games?” he said, sighing. “Is that all this is to you? A game?”
“No,” the fox said, “though it’s fun, too.” This time the smile revealed teeth. “Mostly because I know how the game ends.”
“And how does it end?” the old man said with a sigh.
“More battle. More death. More souls to Valhalla. More belief. More power. More of everything. And then, because no one really believes in you anymore, I’ll rule. See? Fun.”
Now the old man smiled, too. “I tend to win at games,” he said. “And you haven’t beaten me yet. I will stop you, Hell-spawn. I will right my wrongs.”
“We’ll see,” the fox said. “Although I admit that the trick you just pulled was quite clever. But those two are not going to be enough. They’re old, just like you.”
“We’ll see,” the old man said. “We’ll see.”
Without sparing the fox a second glance, he walked away, leaning on his staff. The fox watched him stride down the hill, followed by the two dogs with their tails between their legs. When the old man had left, the fox sprang down from the ledge, stretched in midair, pushed into spaces that weren’t there, blurred, and changed. When he landed, he was a tall young man with silky-black shoulder-length hair and smile wrinkles around green eyes that sparkled with mischief. “And how are you going to get there, old man? By walking? Parents. They’re so . . . boring.”
Grinning, the green-eyed youth turned and leapt off the cliff edge. Moments later the silence was broken by the beating of newly formed wings and an unnaturally large raven ascended, borne on the wind, heading north.
TRONDHEIM, NORTH NORWAY
EARLY NOVEMBER, AD 996
Valgard exhaled and watched his breath rise in a pale-gray cloud toward the rafters of the barn. His chest was tight with worry; it had been ever since he woke up. From his vantage point by the door he watched the men as they loaded horses and packed bags; his chest grew tighter still. This was it. He was setting out to find the source of whatever had nearly brought Stenvik to its knees.
Inside, the men worked in silence. No one asked, no one commanded: they all knew what they needed to do, and they were going about it with quiet efficiency. It had taken three days to assemble the group. Some he’d known already, some had come from Botolf, and Finn had supplied a few. While there had been those more than ready to leave Trondheim, others had needed a little more convincing.
A shape moved in the shadows on the edge of his vision. “Good morning to you,” Valgard said.
“Hmph,” Botolf said as he appeared out of the darkness.
“Not a friend of the dawn?”
“Stupid time of day,” Botolf grumbled.
“Depends,” Valgard said.
Botolf spat and stepped forward. “We’ll need more men.”
“These are the ones our lord gave me. Why do we need more? They look hard enough.”
“We’ll lose some,” he muttered.
“Lose some? Why? To what?”
“The cold. The north.” The lanky chieftain looked him up and down, then looked away again. “I forget. You’ve not done much of this.”
Valgard pursed his lips and swallowed the first three things he wanted to say. At first glance, he and Botolf weren’t that different in shape, but he’d seen enough murderers in his time to know that size would count for little when the blades came out. “No, you’re right. We need more men. I’ll go and see what I can do. Maybe we can ask him,” Valgard said, gesturing through the open door at a scrawny youth with his face pressed up against the wall, peering in through a crack.
Botolf glanced and frowned. “Skeggi’s pot-boy. Hmph.” He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. “If you need to go away and do something, maybe talk to someone for a while, now would be a good time.”
When Valgard looked outside again the pot-boy was gone.
“Why?” King Olav’s eyes narrowed. He shifted in the high seat, trying and failing to find a comfortable position.
Valgard cleared his throat. “I need to extract some information—you know, about the best places to collect taxes.” He teased out a sly, knowing wink and managed to keep his eyes from straying to King Olav’s sword, resting in its scabbard by the throne. One step, one word, and . . .
“It would be better if I go. He might let something slip.”
“I see. Taxes. Yes.” A flicker of a smile flashed across the king’s fac
e.
He looks tired, Valgard thought. Worn out.
“You make sure you collect the king’s taxes. Not too much—avoid unnecessary killing. Just gather the information.”
“I will, my King. I will. Where is he?”
“He’s taken to hiding in the chambers of his old mistress, says it helps him think.”
“If that’s where he does his thinking, I can see why he didn’t see us coming.”
The king smirked, pointed toward a door at the back of the hall, and promptly appeared to forget about him.
Without waiting for further permission, Valgard hurried out of King Olav’s sight.
So far, so good.
Beyond the door, steps led to a long earthen corridor that had fallen into disrepair. Chipped struts and skewed slats made it look like an old jawbone. Rubble covered the floor. “Into the belly of the beast,” Valgard muttered as he picked his way along.
The corridor ended in steps leading up to a thick bearskin covering the entrance to Hakon’s rooms. Valgard pushed the fur aside, and warm air flowed out to meet him, carrying with it the smell of old sweat and bad blood.
Hakon stood in the middle of the room, one hand on the hilt of a long-hafted ax, watching him. He still struck a formidable figure, but the shoulders sloped, the hands trembled ever so slightly, and there was more white than gray in the beard.
“I thought he’d send them in the night—and I thought they’d be bigger. And louder. What do you want?” the old chieftain snapped.
Valgard stopped, one hand on the bear pelt. “I want nothing,” he said. “Well, almost nothing.”
Hakon sneered at him. “You’re not offering me anything to eat or drink, Healer, that much is certain.”
“Because you’re neither a halfwit nor a suckling,” Valgard shot back. His stomach sank as the words left his mouth. There was nothing for it, then. This was how it would have to be played. He watched Hakon’s feet for the first signs of the swing.
Nothing happened.
He looked up at Hakon’s face; there was a hint of a sparkle in the old man’s eye.
“Hm. Maybe you’re not all bad.” He shuffled toward a table by the far wall, grabbed two mugs, and dunked them in a mead barrel. He turned, smiled, and pointedly took a sip from each mug. Then he slammed the mugs on the table and sat down. “So tell me. What do you want?”
Blood Will Follow Page 17
