by Faye, Amy
Valdemar's voice shouted from behind. "You coward! Has your woman made you afraid of glorious battle? Do you fear going inland? I do not fear it! I think only of the riches I could win, and the tales I will tell in the halls of Valhalla!"
The murmur from the crowd told Gunnar exactly which sentiment they supported, and it made it all that much harder to answer him. Valdemar was many things, but he was hardly a fool.
Aside from Gunnar's rivalry, he had to admit that the man was likable enough, as well. He understood the men, and argued from their perspective as often as he did from his own. They would hear his sentiment, not the argument for a cautious, safe raid. They hadn't seen what Gunnar had seen, didn't know the dangers. He closed his eyes.
There was no choice, even though it burned. They would have to go inland, now. The argument had already been made, it couldn't be taken back. The only choice he had now was to either go inland, or look a coward. No, he couldn't afford to look cowardly. No amount of immortality would save him if the men left. He'd be left to find his own way home.
He turned to where Valdemar had stepped up beside him. The problem was that he couldn't give Valdemar his victory, either. He may as well have given up control at that point. He wanted command, anyone could see it. But Gunnar wasn't about to cede it.
The idea came to him in a flash of inspiration, and he spoke nearly before he'd thought it all the way through.
"Of course we go inland, Valdemar, but if we march direct, on the road, then we give away our intentions. We risk response from the English army. I look forward to that fight, but I'll have it on our terms—not theirs! We march to the right, and then double back after half a mile. That should throw them off our trails."
Valdemar made no effort to hide the look of victory on his face. There was no reason for him to, after all. He'd gotten the victory he wanted. Gunnar knew it as well.
He could argue until he were blue in the face that he had always planned this. Nobody in the band was going to be swayed by an obviously-false argument. No, he had changed his plans to make it seem as if he weren't listening to Valdemar's challenge.
The illusion was only paper-thin. A small voice in the back of Gunnar's mind told him that not one of them was fooled by the ruse. He glowered at Valdemar, and then began to march down the coast-ward road.
He would have to deal with that boy, and he would have to deal with him soon. Otherwise, he risked mutiny, and that was the one thing that he couldn't afford. He had more important things to concern himself with than trying to keep his men in line, but without doing at least that much he wouldn't have the men to make his plans work.
So that meant Valdemar had to go.
Seven
Her freedom was finally in sight, so why was it so hard to reach out and take it?
Deirdre tried to ignore the eyes that she could feel watching her. Gunnar's eyes. He had stopped talking to her during her nightly visits, when he sensed that she was trying to concentrate. His silent notice, though, was as distracting as anything he could have said.
She couldn't help noticing him, either, and it chafed against her mind. She wasn't supposed to be thinking about men. She was thinking about freedom, and about how to take it for herself. She had already given up on men, on motherhood, on a future. She'd moved past it.
Which made it that much more confusing that she was thinking about Gunnar that much more than she should have been. What she needed was some time alone, by herself, to sort her body out. But that wasn't about to happen, not a chance.
She could have understood it if it were anyone else, but somehow Deirdre had always thought that she had control over herself, over her mind. The woman who taught her everything she knew, the first thing that she had taught was to control her own thoughts. Deirdre had remembered that lesson, had tried to emulate it, but now she was having trouble remembering why she'd always thought it was so important.
There was no future, though, in the fantasies that she was having. Gunnar wanted her for her magic, and her magic he would have. Nothing more, nothing less. He hadn't even shown any interest in her outside of it. What she'd interpreted, before, as some sort of attraction was only his interest in what she could do for him.
She took a deep breath of smoke and let the scent go to her head, sending her mind further away from her body. In her mind she looked down on both of them, sitting across the room from each other. Her mind imagined that she was seeing them doing something else, something very different. Something that brought a blush to her very real, very physical cheeks.
This wasn't about that, she tried to remind herself. She didn't need to know what it would be like, what it would feel like if he were to give her what she really wanted. It was about trying to find a solution to his problem. A solution that would give her what she wanted: freedom.
That was what this was all about, she reminded herself. Not about her desires. There was no use in visions of the pair of them on the ground, that was completely useless to her. The visions came again, the blush spreading lower, a heat spreading through her body.
With each thought, her body called her focus back to it, very effectively keeping her from thinking about the one thing she needed to concentrate on. There would be plenty of time for that later, she thought. When she waited again for night to fall, she could fantasize all that she liked.
The other prisoners already thought that she was laying down with him every night, enjoying his attentions. That she was being kept only for what she was giving him. Little did they know that they were more on the mark than they realized. She wasn't being kept for what she had between her legs, but she was very much there because Gunnar thought that he could get something from her.
She let out a breath that she hadn't realized that she had been holding and shifted her weight, ignoring the way that her clothes moved across her hardened nipples. Ignoring the painful shock of sensation that went straight up her spine, and the thought that flashed through her mind after.
Could he not just leave? She could have thought so much clearer if he weren't there, if he weren't distracting her. She wouldn't be able to use herbs to solve this problem, she decided. No trance in the world was going to overcome the sort of distraction that she felt when that man's eyes burned on her flesh.
She would have to think, then. If she couldn't approach it from the perspective of a witch, she would have to approach it from the perspective of a healer. She'd been much better at that, than divination, but it was hard to imagine how the knowledge of how to heal a man might help him to die.
The thought came to her so easily that for a moment she thought that she'd been making it up. There was a solution, and one that wasn't likely to fail, if she was right. A very simple one.
Her teacher's words echoed in her mind. 'There's more to the Earth's gifts than greenery, Deirdre.'
Part of the lecture that had followed was more applicable than Deirdre would have liked to her current predicament. Certain comments about the circle of death and birth, specifically.
But the thing that struck her in that moment was not a solution to Gunnar's curse. If she had a solution to her problem, a way to get her freedom, she would have to take it. And if she were betting on the Weak man's ability to stop the bloodshed, then that was the best solution of all.
Valdemar, he had called himself. He said that when she'd solved Gunnar's problem, he would take over the band. There was little doubt that it would be at Gunnar's expense. But he had promised that when he had control of the band, she would be freed, and that was enough.
She wouldn't be able to make the solution herself. It would take too much time, require too much movement. And she couldn't suggest it to Gunnar. He did not long for death, she knew that much. A fire burned inside him, the very fire that drew her attention.
What he wanted was to let that fire burn hotter, not to snuff it completely. She had a strange sort of understanding with him, the knowledge of what he wanted and why. She was surprised how easy he was to understa
nd after only a few evenings spent in his camp, talking for an hour or two.
He hadn't spoken much about his feelings, but Deirdre felt as if she knew them instinctively. He was a soldier, down to his very core. The way that he could take wounds, and recover from them—it wouldn't have been long before he realized that he could use it to perform feats of courage that few others could boast.
There was the problem, though. What did courage mean, what did glory mean, when it was at no risk? She didn't need to be a genius to realize that it meant nothing at all, not to him and not to anyone else.
Valor only meant as much as you risked to achieve it. To a soldier, the greatest glory was to be able to sit in their strange heaven, telling stories about their deeds to the heroes of old. Stripping their sleeves and showing their scars and saying how they won them.
But for a man who bore no scars, whose body told no stories except for the power of a man who kept himself in peak physical condition—even if he were to have died, what stories would he have to tell?
She took a deep breath. Poison wasn't the sort of way that he would want to go, and it wasn't the way that she wanted to win her freedom. But there was more blood in the soil than she could be responsible for. If she had to choose between letting more men, women, and children die, and giving a man a dishonorable death, it didn't matter how she felt about him.
The needs of the many had to come before doing the right thing for one Northlander. Deirdre had to consider her people first and foremost.
Gunnar must have seen something in the way that she sat, because after an hour of silence, he finally spoke.
"What have you seen?"
Deirdre hated to lie, after the surprisingly easy treatment that she had gotten since she had allied herself with Gunnar. But she couldn't tell him, he wouldn't have accepted it. And that wasn't an option for her, or for her people.
"I've found your answer," she said, finally.
Gunnar felt strangely numb when Deirdre had finally told him that she had his solution. And to hear her tell it, the solution was a fairly simple one. Damn his utter lack of medical knowledge, he might have been chewing this foul herb for the entire raid.
Perhaps, though, it was better that he hadn't. Who knows what sort of damage the archers could have done if he hadn't been able to simply withstand so many hits taken from their arrows? So if there was one consolation, it was that he hadn't been vulnerable when he needed to be who he was.
The question wasn't one that he enjoyed entertaining. What would have happened if she had been that little bit quicker in her solution? What if he'd asked her sooner how to solve his predicament? Would he have died there, along with the rest of his men? What did that mean for their future?
He remembered the first raid they had gone on. Before he had known what he was. The arrow that he'd taken to his lung, the one that had found him wheezing and slowly leaking out every bit of breath in his body.
It hadn't been until that moment that he had realized what death was, what he had to be afraid of, and once he had tasted it, and come back from it, he had told himself that he would never taste it again. My, how things had changed in the years since.
The usual double-time toward the town, he was filled with doubts. It seemed unlikely that they would make it out of this raid unscathed; this town wasn't like the others. They were large, and a wooden fence had been hastily erected in preparation. Three deep, men stood at the only entrance, spears ready.
The risk of death made Gunnar's heart race. This wasn't the sort of wall that you run straight onto, but he had learned more than how to take a spear through his gut in the years since that first fateful raid.
He'd learned to be quick, to be accurate. And more than anything, he had learned that moving forward was always the safer option compared to sitting back and waiting. He ducked his head and let his shield knock a spear-point away, then ducked further and stepped inside the wall as his compatriots rushed up beside him. Valdemar smashed in between two of them like a great stone, sending men sprawling to the floor.
Gunnar hit one with his shoulder, but his focus wasn't on knocking them down. His sword came around and cleft hard, sending a spear-man down, and the sword came around again, hacking through a second. He caught an incoming blow on the shield, returning it with a push-kick that sent the man onto his back.
Another man went down under the sword, and then another. Gunnar kept moving. There was plenty of glory for all of them, but he couldn't afford to waste his time here. There was loot to be had, and Valdemar had yet to be dealt with. If he could ensure that he wouldn't have any trouble in the future...
It was cowardly, he thought to himself. Not at all the way that he wanted to approach the situation, but it was how it had to be. If the band split, then they would all perish. Valdemar should have waited for his coup until they were back on Danish land, where there weren't thirty other men relying on leadership to keep them safe.
He stalked after Valdemar as he turned a corner at a run, the sounds of battle from behind them starting to spread as more and more of the guards at the gate fell and the men started to get through.
He would have scant few chances to put Valdemar into a position like this again. No one would see, no one would have to see. If he was lucky, Gunnar could simply distract him for the half-moment that it would take to be laid low by a swordsman. Murder was not looked kindly upon by the Gods.
But if he had to do it himself, then he would, and that was how it would have to be. When he turned around the end of the brick building, though, he couldn't see where Valdemar had gone. Down the street, or down the alley?
It wasn't clear, and he couldn't begin to say for certain. But he didn't have time to question himself. Take a guess, and stick with it, because this was about more than just the loot from a single English town, this was about the survival of the band.
He ducked down a narrow street, and the sight of the berserker, his ax already swinging, confirmed that he had chosen the right path. As he passed a small door, though, it exploded out, catching him hard in the side. Whoever was inside, whoever had seen Valdemar go by, had apparently decided to make up for the mistake of not stopping him.
Gunnar sprawled to the ground, scrambling to his feet as quickly as he could as the Englishman lunged out of the low house. His blade was already back, the swing already beginning. Gunnar was not the fastest in the camp, but he had learned more than enough to turn the blow aside.
He was already readying his response when he felt the jab into his side. Right under his shield arm. Until the last moment, Gunnar hadn't noticed, and then it was too late.
He'd wanted his hand to appear empty, but the Englishman held in his second hand a small dagger, and he'd driven it all the way to the hilt in Gunnar's side. He could feel the same sense of deflation, the same wheezing that he had felt, all those years ago. He knew instinctively that he'd had his lung punched through.
Gunnar tried to ignore the pain; he wasn't going to go down without making an accounting of himself. He reached up and grabbed the man's head with his shield-hand, pulling him close as his sword drove through the man's torso.
Then the energy sapped out of him, and the both of them slumped to the ground. Gunnar spit out the bitter herb that Deirdre had given him to chew. If it would work, it had already done its job.
With what little remained of his strength, he pushed the English body off of his legs and tried to stand. There was more fight to be had. But his foot slipped on the stone street.
Why wasn't his leg working properly? Had he simply forgotten how to use it? What was wrong with him? He took a grip on the windowsill above where he'd fallen and pulled himself up. With a tentative step, he decided he could move. A second step sent him to the ground. The blade fell free from his chest, the blade clanging on the ground.
Was this what dying felt like? His vision started to dim. If it was, if that was what he was fated for, then he welcomed it. Welcomed his entry into Valhalla. Death during a raid—
how else could a warrior choose to go?
The blood that pooled under his chest was hot and wet, and it seemed to stain everything it touched. If Valdemar wanted the band, then one of them had to go. That was how it would be. Well, perhaps it was better this way.
Gunnar's vision dimmed, what little energy he had left flowing out the hole punched in his side. And then, all at once, his vision was black, and he wasn't thinking anything at all.
A voice echoed in his ears, somewhere in the distance. "Gunnar!"
He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn't. What was the point? He was already dead. He'd felt himself dying, felt the last vestiges of strength leaving his body. Felt his lungs emptying themselves even as he tried to fight for breath.
A second voice. Further away, indistinct.
Something pulled on his arm, and then his other arm, and the hard, cold stone pulled away from his face. Was this what it felt like to be taken away by the Valkyries? What were the voices he heard? Why could he not open his eyes?
He fought to open them, fought to see himself leaving the battlefield, carried in the arms of battle-maidens. Finally he did, but the brightness blinded him. Gunnar had to close his eyes to make the pain go.
His side hurt, badly. What was this? How was he supposed to feel about this? He tried to breathe, felt the same wheezing leak that he'd felt before.
He opened his eyes again, saw the ground moving below him. His feet dragged behind on the hard pavement, but he wasn't being pulled away from the ground.
He forced his head to turn, the effort almost too much to bear. A man's face. Leif. Eirik on the other side. They'd taken him by his arms, pulled up onto their shoulders, and they carried him.
Was he alive? How could that be possible? He had seen men take wounds like his. They lived for minutes. He breathed in the smell of smoke and burning around him. Whatever had happened, he had missed a lot. The raid, as far as he could tell, was complete.
