Berserker Series, Book 1

by Emmy Laybourne

  Hanne staggered to her siblings and came to stand at Sissel’s other side, supporting her. The snow whirled around them, flakes coming faster now, but not so thick they couldn’t see.

  They hurried up the hill, following the remains of the tracks Owen had made in his rapid descent.

  Daisy whined. She reached her head up to lick Owen’s neck.

  He felt wetness on his upper leg, which meant the dog was bleeding and the blood had flowed down his oilskin coat. It was snowing too hard to see if there was blood on the trail behind them.

  They weren’t moving fast enough. He pressed up behind Stieg, Hanne, and Sissel, urging them to hurry, but Sissel was walking clumsily, still wailing. Stieg was looking around, dazed and shivering. He seemed to be listening intently to the distant but rising shrieks of the gusting blizzard winds. Only Hanne was moving quickly enough.

  A more granular snow was falling now. It began to whirl faster, gritting against their exposed faces like blowing sand.

  Sissel stumbled again.

  “Hold up,” Owen shouted. “Here, take my dog.”

  He meant to place Daisy in Stieg’s arms, but Stieg was staring up at the sky, his mouth open in awe or terror. Instead Owen shifted Daisy into Hanne’s arms.

  “Thank you,” he said. Then he moved his gun so that it was slung over his chest, uncomfortable but necessary if he was to carry the girl. He bent down in front of Sissel, putting one hand on the ground to steady himself.

  “Sissel, get on!”

  It took her a moment to understand what he wanted to do. She leaned her weight over him, and he hoisted her up, looping his arms under her legs. She clung to his neck with her good arm.

  They must go faster.

  Up, up, they moved.

  “Hold on to my coat, if you must,” Owen shouted over his shoulder. And then the blizzard hit them. The snow slammed into them. It was like running into a barn wall.

  The snow abraded their faces, streaming up and into their noses and mouths and clothes.

  “Don’t let go,” he tried to shout.

  Owen could not see three feet ahead of him. Only due to the incline of the earth under his feet could he tell that he was still traveling in the right direction.

  If they didn’t reach the horses and their supplies, they would die. And it’d be his fault, because he had been stupid enough to lead them into the wild during early blizzard season.

  He cursed himself, driving on. He fought against fatigue and weakness, though his thighs burned and his arms were beginning to cramp from the weight of the girl. It was terribly cold. A killing cold. They would not be able to walk much farther. And where was Hanne? Had she stumbled in the snow somewhere behind him?

  The wind hacked at him, slicing into any exposed skin. Without his poncho, he could not last long in these conditions.

  Then it seemed to him that the trail in front of him became clearer. Sissel shifted on his back, and he shrugged her up to get a better hold.

  It couldn’t be true, but his hands began to feel warm. They were clutching Sissel’s ankles. He thought he must be losing sensation in them. Maybe he was freezing to death. Then he realized he could see. The air around him was clearing up, though three feet ahead the blizzard muted out the world.

  Owen turned his upper body and saw Stieg, walking behind, taking great breaths and blowing forward, his mouth a great O shape.

  Hanne was stumbling next to Stieg, holding Daisy close to her chest.

  Owen stopped, the storm raging around his lower legs, but hardly touching his face. Stieg trudged onward, past Owen. Stieg was somehow blowing the storm away from them.

  “Come, Owen,” Hanne said. He stumbled after them, dumbfounded, his head and shoulders in the warm pocket of air Stieg was creating.

  Soon they stumbled right into Pal. Knut was there, hunched near Pal’s side. Knut had tied the livestock together.

  Knut looked up as the warm air pocket Stieg was creating enveloped him. He grinned at his brother in amazement, saying something in Norwegian that could only be an exclamation of delight.

  The warm air swayed and shifted over them, like a veil blowing in the wind.

  Owen felt dizzy, his mind reeling. It was as if the blizzard were inside his own head—inside his understanding of the way the world worked.

  Hanne was looking at Owen with great, horror-struck eyes. Daisy whimpered and licked Hanne’s hands.

  Owen shook himself. He did not have time to be incapacitated by the strangeness of what was happening. They must have shelter, or perish.

  “I’ll go for the tents,” he told them as he let Sissel down.

  Stieg stopped to draw a breath, and the storm came rushing in. The moisture on Owen’s face froze instantly. Snow blanked out his vision as Stieg leaned toward him, melted snow running from his face.

  “I need a large pile of snow!” Stieg shouted, over the howling wind. “I will make us a cave in the snow.”

  “Stay here!” Owen shouted to the other siblings.

  Owen grabbed Stieg’s arm and dragged him toward the stone wall at the back of their camp. There had already been a sizable drift—if they were lucky, it would have collected more snow by now.

  Owen pulled Stieg toward it. Stieg seemed weak, was saving his breath for whatever miracle he would next perform, so Owen got his arm under Stieg’s shoulder and half dragged him to the drift.

  Stieg stuck his head into the snowdrift and began to exhale forcefully.

  After a few moments, Stieg pulled his head out from the snow. His face was, for a moment, moist, red, and entirely clear of snow, then the flakes stuck again.

  A hole was forming. A hole with crisp, glassy edges. Warm air was coming out of the hole, and the hole was growing, within the snowbank, as if Stieg were blowing a bubble inside it.

  Stieg sought better footing and drew a big breath and put his head back in the hole. Steam issued from around his neck.

  Owen came up behind him and looked in. Hot air steamed past his face. Stieg drew in another deep breath and then exhaled into the hole.

  He was making an ice cave.

  The snow scoured against the back side of Owen’s body, while his face and front began to get sticky with the warm, moist air coming out of the hole Stieg was making.

  Who were these people?

  The hole was large enough, and Stieg stepped through it, and then sank down to his knees. He had made a small space within, maybe two feet around.

  Behind him, the gray surface of the stone cliff wall showed through in one dry circle surrounded with ice, then snow. A trickle of blood was falling from each of Stieg’s nostrils. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

  Stieg took in Owen’s shocked, blanched face.

  “Get the others,” he said. “We will explain. I promise.”

  “Good,” Owen said.

  “Wait,” Stieg said. “Will the horses survive out there?”

  “They don’t need a cave. They’ll make it, if it doesn’t blow too long,” Owen said.

  Stieg nodded, took another breath, and began to blow again.

  The gritty snow scoured Owen’s face again, and he was grateful for the whiteout of it. The shocking, numbing cold.

  Owen felt betrayed. Yet another secret. He felt left out. Again. Always left out. Always different. It was stupid, he knew it was. But feelings didn’t seem to care if they made sense. He had felt like one of the Hemstads for a few days, and now he knew that they were different from him. Not only different, but superior.

  It was an ugly feeling he had in his gut, ugly and familiar. Owen struggled in the direction of the horses, fighting against the biting snow and the slamming, howling wind.

  Owen found the flank of one of the horses; then, by feeling along, he found the siblings. Hanne was facing Knut. The two of them bowed together, protecting Sissel from the worst of the snow.

  Owen pulled Knut’s arm.

  “This way!” he shouted. The wind snatched his voice out of the air. He gr
abbed them and pulled them toward the ice cavern their brother was carving from a snowdrift with nothing but his breath.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hanne gnawed on a piece of hardtack. It was meant to be soaked in coffee or fried in grease, but the hunger in her gut could wait no longer.

  Owen was trying to build a fire near the rock wall of their ice cave, though the wood was wet. He had poked two vent holes in the icy dome of the ceiling to let smoke out and fresh air in. One was near the rock wall, the other near their entrance hole.

  Owen was not asking any questions. That was a blessing, Hanne supposed. He would leave them when it was safe enough to do so. That seemed a certainty.

  He had been working with a steady efficiency for the last hour. He had unloaded the mule and unfolded and spread out the canvas cover sheet from his bedroll on the floor of the cave.

  Sissel insisted that Owen tend to the dog before he examined the wound on her arm, explaining that the dog had surely saved her life. The arm of Sissel’s coat and the new shirt beneath had been ripped to shreds. Hanne’s muffler was wrapped around her arm.

  Hanne had been proud of her sister at that moment, and also while Sissel held the lantern as Owen sewed up Daisy’s wound. Knut held the dog down, his fist clamped around her muzzle, in case the pain overcame the dog’s training and she tried to bite. She hadn’t, though. She’d borne the surgery well, only struggling when Owen tied off the stitches at the very end.

  Now she was sleeping again, after having licked the wound thoroughly.

  The walls in the shelter had frozen, slick with melted water. What a strange, dark cave it was.

  Under Stieg’s direction, Knut had used scoops of snow from outside to form a wall, bit by bit shutting the hole they had come through. Once Stieg thought it had thickened enough from the snow piling against it outside, he had blown on it softly, melting it into place.

  Now the air was warm, moist, and close, despite the whistling vent in the ceiling. The snow on their clothes was melting, which meant everything was damp, and the canvas “floor” Owen had laid out was muddy. The cave bore the smell of too many bodies in a tight space.

  Stieg sat with his head cradled in his hands. Coffee might help the crushing headache that accompanied his using his Nytte.

  Hanne wanted to make her brother some coffee, but in this state of hunger, she could help no one but herself. She had kept herself out of their small supply of sugar only by feeling how great the shame would be if she gave in. She would not have Owen see her eat up the sugar straight from the bag. She would not! The hardtack would have to hold her.

  Owen cussed under his breath. The wood seemed too wet to light.

  “Owen, are you frightened of us?” Stieg said softly. His voice had a raspiness to it. He sounded old.

  Hanne stopped chewing. All was silent in the ice hut, except for the intermittent whistling of wind down the chimney hole. Sissel was sitting curled in a ball, against Knut.

  “No,” Owen said. “I don’t see as you’d hurt me.”

  The two young men met eyes across the small space. There was blood clotted around Stieg’s nostrils.

  “Would you?” Owen asked.

  “No!” Hanne cried. “We would never hurt you.”

  Sissel scoffed. “You might,” she said.

  “Sissel!” Stieg reprimanded her. A new trickle of blood came flowing down his lip, and he brushed it away.

  Sissel made a sour face and then dropped her head on her drawn-up knees.

  “I would like to tell you about the way we are, if I may,” Stieg said.

  Owen shrugged assent, but then made no sign of listening. Hanne was not even certain he was paying attention. He was still trying to light the damp wood.

  “We are from an ancient bloodline. A Viking bloodline. This gift was given to our forefathers, three Norse kings, to create successful war parties. We call it the Nytte. If two people with the Nytte have children, their offspring frequently, but not always, will be Nytteson—children of the gift.

  “Of the many children a father might sire, one might be gifted with immense strength, another with an ability to protect members of the group, another with the ability to create winds to power the ships. That is what I have. I am a Storm-Rend.

  “Knut is an Oar-Breaker—he possesses great strength—and Hanne is a Berserker. You’ve seen her gift, a drive to protect those she loves.

  “There are other types of Nytte as well, which aren’t represented among us. Our father was a Shipwright. Our mother had no Nytte. Sissel hasn’t found her gift yet, as she is still a child.”

  “I’m not so much a child,” Sissel said. “I’m just not getting a Nytte. It’s skipped me over. Aunty Aud said so.”

  Owen did not speak, only kept trying to start the fire.

  Stieg let out a long breath. He was in pain, Hanne could see it.

  She worried about him using so much power. One day, he would “blow himself blind.” That was how Aud had described it.

  “Do you have any questions?” Stieg asked Owen.

  Owen said nothing.

  “I must rest,” Stieg snapped. “My head is splitting open. But I want to answer your questions, if you have them.”

  Owen still did not meet his eye, but kept knapping at his flint stone, sending sparks onto the wet wood.

  With irritation, Stieg leaned forward and blew on the wood. Hot air issued from his mouth, drying the wood as if it were in a kiln. Owen’s next spark caught the tinder easily.

  Smoke went up and milled around them. It bloused out, for a moment, then was sucked, as if by a straw, through the hole at the top of the cave.

  “I got a lot of questions,” Owen finally said. “Only I need to think awhile on which order I want to put them.”

  He looked up at Stieg and met his eye.

  “That’s the truth of it.”

  Stieg sat back.

  “Very well. Wake me when you wish to speak.”

  Owen nodded. Stieg settled down onto the ground. Everyone relaxed a bit.

  “Knut,” Hanne said. “Could you break me off some ice so I can make some coffee?”

  While Hanne heated water on the growing fire, Sissel sat next to Daisy, peering anxiously at the sleeping dog.

  “Good dog,” she said, petting the dog’s soft black-and-white fur.

  “Let her rest,” Hanne said.

  Sissel rolled her eyes and snuggled down next to Knut, who watched the fire with drowsy eyes.

  Hanne made strong coffee and then some weak oat porridge. She woke Stieg and forced him to choke down some coffee. He would not eat and went back to sleep right away.

  Hanne knew Owen was studiously avoiding her gaze. She tried not to look at him, lest they meet eyes, but it was a small space and he sat opposite the fire from her, leaning against the stone wall.

  Whispering in Norwegian, Knut asked Hanne to ask Owen if he was worried about the horses.

  “My brother wishes to know if you think the animals will die,” Hanne said.

  “If the horses stay together, and likely they will, they should be all right.” Hanne translated this for Knut. “We get blizzards like this, and the livestock manage. Biggest danger is they’ll smother in their own breath. It frosts up around their faces. But I’ll clear the ice tomorrow morning, if it hasn’t stopped blowing by then.”

  Owen looked at the thick ice walls, likely wondering how he’d get through.

  Knut patted the walls and told Owen in Norwegian that he’d help him to get out.

  Owen nodded his understanding.

  With Stieg asleep, Hanne realized how often he had spoken for them. It was somber without him, and very quiet.

  Hanne did not know what to do with herself. The dishes could not be washed, nor scrubbed out. They were in a stack, inside the cast-iron spider. Soon the fire would go out. They’d only had a few sticks of wood to start with, and now that the food had been cooked, they didn’t need it. The little ice cave was, in fact, overly warm. The air
moist and close.

  Soon Knut’s breathing grew heavier and rumbled into steady snores. Owen cleared his throat.

  “Will Stieg be all right?” Owen asked her softly.

  She met his gaze across the coals of the dying fire. Owen’s eyes glimmered with warmth, it seemed to Hanne.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

  Owen poked the fire with a stick and sparks flew, dancing up to flare out against the ice cavern’s sloped ceiling.

  Hanne did not want them to fall into silence again, so she offered more information. “Each Nytte has a … a punishment?” She did not know the word in English for penalty. And penalty wasn’t quite the right word either. “Storm-Rend suffer from headaches, and eventually the headaches take their vision away. But this headache should fade in a day or perhaps two.”

  “And Knut, what’s his punishment?”

  “It is horrible, what happens to Oar-Breakers. Their hearts stop. They get too big, and their hearts give out. You see, it’s not such a good thing, the Nytte. Stieg calls it a gift, but it doesn’t feel like a gift.”

  Owen said nothing. His hand was petting Daisy’s fur rhythmically. The dog looked weak and weary, but her breathing was steady.

  Hanne knew he was too polite to ask her—and you? And what happens to you? So she told him, “And Berserkers like me are possessed with hunger. If I don’t eat after I kill, I will become sick and die from it. Though Berserkers are usually killed before that can happen.”

  “Why’s that?” Owen asked.

  Hanne looked at him. Her voice came out strangled. “Because we are killers. And killers get killed. Which is good and right.”

  “No,” Owen said softly. “Don’t say that.”

  She shrugged.

  “You must be an excellent hunter,” Owen ventured. “With your … how do you say it? Knit?”

  “Nytte—like, um, knit-eh.”

  “Knit-eh.”

  “That’s it. But no, I cannot use the Nytte that way. I only have the power when someone I love is in danger, or there is danger to myself.”

  “And you keep them safe, then. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “No. It is not good.”

  Owen stared into the fading fire.