Winter by Winter

by Jordan Stratford

  Because we’re strong, and we’ve paid every price, and we’ve won everything now. And we have nowhere to go, not even to our deaths anymore. We can’t be forgotten, because all of forgetting is full and will not take us. So, we stay. Survive. Endure.

  Remembered.

  I step back, and nod, and watch until the sparks from the fire become the glints of stars, and the song is no longer in my throat.

  “To the Galaurdale, then?” asks Ragnar.

  We’re sharing a rock on this beach, as the tents are hammered around us, and weary rowers attend ropes, wounds. Rowboats scrape ashore against tumbled rocks, and the wind’s come up. The beach is a chorus of fires in the night, stretching along the shore in both directions around the bay.

  I don’t answer for a moment, so he continues. He’s just filling up space, but he’s not saying he’ll miss me. Which he will.

  “You’re very rich now, you know,” he says. “Richer than you realize. Eindr can tell you. You have enough silver to turn your village into Hjorring. Into Aalborg.”

  “Eindr is dead,” I say calmly.

  “I’m sorry,” Ragnar says. “How do you know?”

  “My sister would say a swan turned into a goddess and told me before sinking Harald’s fire-ships.”

  He nods. “That is a lot to know.” Again, he kicks the pebbles on the beach.

  “I am divorcing Thora,” he adds.

  “What? Why?” This makes no sense to me. “She’s a good queen.”

  Again, he nods at the fact of it. “It’s true. But she wants me in the south, in the hall. To be king.”

  “And you don’t want that?”

  He shrugs. “I want to be with you. Out here. Simple.”

  “This is not so simple, Ragnar,” I tell him.

  “She can stay where she is as jarl. I’ll pay her to keep the city. All of Harald’s lands are mine now. Silver, too. Contracts. She’ll be rich. Richer than she is now. Her family will like that. There’s no loss to her.”

  “But she loves you.”

  “No, but we trust each other. And I’ll take care of her. She won’t mind.”

  “So that’s your plan? Now that you’re the king of the Nordvegr and Jutland and Sjeland and all the Kattegat Sea? Divorce?”

  “That’s my plan, yes,” he says.

  “And the Swanfleet?” I ask. “What is to become of it?” I pick up a pebble from the beach, toss it in my palm, and arc it high into the water.

  “What do you want? You won’t need a hundred ships in the Gaular. The war is over.”

  He bends to the shore to find a stone for himself. So we talk like children, and not of fortunes.

  “A hundred and twenty,” I say. “A hundred and fifty, perhaps, once Harald’s ships are repaired.” Plonk. A fragment of earth, returned to the tide.

  “Midgard has never seen such a fleet,” he says, approvingly. His arm is strong and his stone sails high and far, so far the sound of its falling is muted.

  “Let’s say a hundred and fifty ships, then. Five thousand warriors,” I say.

  “Faster than any army in the world. Up river, deep inland, down the coast, across the sea. Anywhere,” he agrees.

  “You could take the mouth of the Finnmark,” I tell him, the toe of my boot idly searching for another rock.

  “Or the entire coast of Anglia.” He’s thinking. Raids of Christian gold like the times of our grandfathers.

  “Or the Seax, to the south, who would never harry the Jutland again,” I remember, hearing this from Eindr.

  “Or you could just go home,” he says. He smiles a little at this. Daring me.

  “I could. I will, in fact.” And there’s some stubbornness in my voice, challenging him to push me further.

  “Good. Good,” Ragnar nods. “You should do that.”

  “I will,” I say, tossing the stone in the palm of my one unbound arm, feeling the salt rub on my skin.

  “Good,” he repeats. “Go home.”

  When he leans in to kiss me, my mouth is already open for him, my hand on his strong jaw and his hands in my hair, the taste of the salt air on his lips and woodsmoke on his skin, and my chest expands in breath and heartbeats until I could moor the entire fleet in there. And just as quickly, he stops, though he takes my hand.

  “And the Frankish capitol?” I ask. “How far is that? From here?”

  “Paris? The richest place in all the world. Where they spend gold as we spend copper,” he says. “Three days?” He thinks for a moment, nodding. “Three days.”

  “Three days,” I say, tossing the stone. Plonk.

  “Interesting.”

  And we both smile in the night’s breeze, knowing.

  FIN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jordan Stratford has been pronounced clinically dead, and was briefly (mistakenly) wanted by INTERPOL for international industrial espionage. He has won numerous sword fights, jaywalked the streets of Paris, San Francisco, and São Paulo, and was once shot by a stray rubber bullet in a London riot. He lives in the crumbling colonial capital of a windswept Pacific island, populated predominantly by octogenarians and carnivorous gulls.

  He has been featured on c/net, io9, boingboing, WIRED, and Reading Rainbow and is represented by Silvia Molteni at Peters, Fraser + Dunlop in London.