Blood Will Follow
Blood Will Follow
Jo Fletcher Books
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2014 by Snorri Kristjansson
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2015
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e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-873-1
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To my wife and family.
Seriously. Thank you.
EAST
OF
STENVIK,
WEST
NORWAY
OCTOBER,
AD
996
Ulfar walked, and the world changed around him. With every step the colors shifted from green to yellow, from yellow to red, from red to brown. Around him, nature was dying. Every morning he watched the same pale sun rise over graying trees. He was cold when he woke and wet when he slept. He jumped when he heard a twig snap or a bird take flight. Every shadow threatened to conceal a group of King Olav’s men about to burst out of the forest with drawn swords. His ribs still hurt after the fall, but there had been no other way out of Stenvik. They’d hidden themselves among the corpses at the foot of the wall until dark, then made their way in silence to the east, past the bloody remains of Sigmar on the cross and into Stenvik Forest, over the bodies of scores of slaughtered outlaws, after King Olav’s army had charged through the ranks of the forest men, killing everything in its path.
Audun marched beside him, hardly saying a word. The blond blacksmith had regained his strength incredibly quickly after the fight on the wall. The only thing that remained was a hole in his shift, front and back, where Harald’s sword had skewered him.
Audun had died on that wall. They both knew it.
Yet there he was, marching stony-faced beside Ulfar, hammer tied to his belt. Neither of them spoke of the fey woman on the
ship—beautiful, evil, and serene in her last moments. Neither of them mentioned her words. Were they truly cursed to walk the earth forever? Would they never know the peace of death? Audun refused to speak of his experience, as if talking would seal their fate and somehow make it real. Just thinking about it sent chills up and down Ulfar’s spine.
On the first night after the wall he’d fallen into an uneasy sleep, only to wake with the breath stuck in his throat and Lilia’s falling body in his mind. Audun, standing first watch, had spoken then. He’d known what was wrong, somehow. He told Ulfar she’d be with him forever and that no matter what he did, he couldn’t make her leave and he couldn’t make her live, so he should accept it, let her into his head, and let her out again. That night Ulfar wondered just how many people visited Audun in his dreams.
The sharp wind tugged at Ulfar’s ragged cloak as his feet moved of their own accord, picking a path over stones, tree branches, and dead leaves. When they set out, they’d gone east, then north, then farther east, with the sole aim of putting the most distance possible between themselves and King Olav, ignoring everything else. They were fleeing, like animals from a fire. Like cowards from a fight. At their back was the smell of Stenvik’s corpses, burning on King Olav’s giant pyre. No doubt Geiri’s body was among them.
Ulfar stopped.
He searched for the sun in the sky. He looked north, then south. He looked back to where they’d come from.
Audun shuffled to a halt and glared at him. “What?”
Ulfar swallowed and blinked. “I’m going home,” he said. “There’s something I need to do.” Then he turned to the east. He felt Audun’s eyes on his back as he walked away.
STENVIK,
WEST
NORWAY
OCTOBER,
AD
996
“Do you accept our Lord Christ as your eternal savior?” Finn snarled, forearms taut with tension.
Valgard sighed. “He can’t hear you, Finn. Lift his head up.”
The burly warrior snorted, grabbed a handful of hair, and pulled the prisoner’s head out of the water trough. The bound man tried to cough and suck in air at the same time, thrashing in panic as his lungs seized up.
“Hold him,” Valgard said. Finn strengthened his grip and planted a knee in the small of the prone man’s back. The slim, pale healer knelt down on the floor, leaned into the prisoner’s field of vision, and put a firm hand on his chest. “You’re not dying,” he said. “You’re getting enough air to survive. Breathe,” he added, prodding at the man’s sternum with a bony finger. “In . . . out . . . in . . . out . . . Good.” The man stopped squirming and lay still on the floor. Finn shifted the knee against the prisoner’s back but did not let go of the man’s hair. “Now. My friend here asked you a question. Do you believe?” The man spat, coughed, and tried to speak, but all that came out was a hoarse wheeze. Valgard’s smile flickered for an instant. “Let me see if I can explain this,” he said. “King Olav has told us that for a man to accept the faith, he needs to be . . . what was it?”
“Christened,” Finn said.
“That’s right. Christened. And this involves pouring water over the head. We thought about this and figured that the more heathen you are, the more water you will need. So we have this”—Valgard
gestured to the trough—“and we have you. And we’re going to keep christening you until you believe. Do you believe in our Lord Christ?” He expected the tough-looking raider to spit and snap like the others had—either that, or accept his circumstances and lie. Some men had a bit of sense in the face of death, but among the captured raiders that hadn’t appeared to be a highly valued trait.
Neither of these things happened. Much to Valgard’s surprise, he noticed that the prisoner’s lips were quivering. The man was crying silently, mouthing something. “Put him down. Check the straps.” Finn lowered the prisoner to the floor and quickly did as he was told. When he’d examined the wrist and ankle straps to his satisfaction, he nodded at Valgard. “Good. Would you bring us something to eat? He’s not going anywhere, and you could use the rest.”
Finn lurched to his feet, favoring his right leg. “You staying with him?”
Valgard rose alongside the big soldier and put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think we should leave him alone. You go—I’ll be fine. You’ve made sure he’s all tied up.” Watching the concern in the eyes of King Olav’s captain as he left the house, Valgard had to fight to suppress a smile. It had taken fewer than four days since the fall of Stenvik to bring Finn over to his side. The fact that he’d made the big warrior dependent on the mixture that soothed his aches helped. Mindful of the lessons learned from Harald’s descent into madness, he’d gone easy on the shadowroot this time.
Still, Valgard felt the last days deep in his bones. The aftermath had been hectic—much to everyone’s surprise, the king had refused to put the captured raiders to the sword. He’d extended the same mercy to the men of Stenvik, explaining to Valgard that he wanted to show all of them the way of the White Christ first. Valgard had nodded, smiled, and done his best to patch up those most likely to survive—including his current visitor.
The man on the floor looked to be around forty years old, with thinning hair the color of an autumn field. Calloused rower’s hands and a broad chest suggested he’d spent his life sailing; weatherworn and salt-burned skin confirmed it. He’d probably killed a lot
of people, Valgard mused. This wolf of the North Sea who now lay trussed up on the floor of Harald’s old house had most likely raped, terrorized, and tortured with his group of stinking, bearded brothers, like all raiders. Apparently he’d followed someone called Thrainn, who’d been a brave and noble chieftain. But most of the brave and noble people Valgard had ever heard of shared the same trait—they were dead.
He knelt back down beside the man on the floor and waited, listening to his captive’s ragged breathing.
“She’ll . . . kill me,” the bound man whispered.
Valgard’s scalp tingled, and the breath caught in his throat. Was this it? He fought hard to keep his composure. “Who?” he asked.
“She is . . . she is the night . . .”
Working carefully, Valgard eased the bound sailor up into a sitting position. Heart thumping in his chest, he chose his words carefully. “She was . . . with Skargrim, wasn’t she?” The sailor shuddered and nodded. “And she would kill you.” Again, the sailor nodded, and when he tried to look around, Valgard said, “There’s no one here. You are safe. Five thousand of the king’s soldiers are camped around Stenvik. No one will attack us.”
This did nothing to ease the sailor’s fears. “She could do anything. We are all in her power.”
Fighting to control another surge of excitement, Valgard asked, “Who was she? Where did she come from?”
“She raised the dead,” the sailor muttered. “She was beautiful . . .”
“And she came with you?”
“Not us. Skargrim. Someone told me she murdered Ormar with his own knife. She was the magic of the north. She’ll find me. I can’t. I can’t abandon the gods. She’ll find me.” The words tumbled out as silent tears streamed down the raider’s cheeks. “I can’t,” he muttered, lapsing into silence.
After a moment’s thought, Valgard stood up and moved to his workbench. He came back with a small leather flask. “Here. Drink this. It’s for your throat. To make sure you breathe right.” The prisoner gestured to his tied hands and Valgard snorted. “Forgive me.
I’m thoughtless. Here.” He leaned forward, touched the spout to the bound man’s lips and tilted very carefully. “Sip, but be careful.”
The sailor drank from the flask, sighing when Valgard took it away. “Thank . . . you,” he managed before drifting off.
“No. Not at all. Thank
you
,” Valgard replied. He watched the sleeping man and listened to his breathing slow down. As it became more labored, the sailor’s eyelids fluttered. The time between breaths increased. Then the man on the floor was still.
Exhaling, Valgard thought back on when he’d first seen someone die. He hadn’t been much more than eleven summers. She was an old woman; her hacking cough had irritated him. Passing in and out of sleep, she woke up in the hut where Sven used to teach him about healing. She shouted her husband’s name, confused and frightened. Then she fell silent. Valgard had watched as she sank back on her pallet and the life just . . . left. He’d gone out of the hut and vomited. He was easily rattled back then: a sickly, weak boy.
Seventeen years had passed and Valgard had seen more than his share of death since then. Like birth, it tended to involve blood, slime, and screaming. Like birth, it was a lot more important to the people it was happening to than the rest of the world. It was a cycle, and it would keep on repeating.
Or so he’d thought.
He replayed the moments again in his head. As much as Valgard had been intent on his own survival when King Olav’s army walked into Stenvik, he had not been able to take his eyes off Harald when the raider captain started screaming on the wall, his wife Lilia kicking and squirming in his arms. He’d watched with growing horror as Harald denounced the leaders of Stenvik, mocked King Olav, and ripped through Lilia’s throat with a jagged piece of wood, sacrificing her to the old gods, throwing her to the ground like a sack of grain. Valgard was on the point of turning away when he saw Ulfar rushing the stairs and charging the sea captain, only to be beaten back by Harald’s mad fury. Ulfar stumbled, and Audun strode into the fight, throwing himself on Harald’s sword to get at the furious raider.
Valgard had seen Audun die in Ulfar’s arms after Harald crumpled before him. For all the raiders’ jibes, he knew what death looked like. He’d seen the sword come out of the man’s broad back, watched the muscles seize up, and felt the life leave the blacksmith’s body, like it had left countless bodies before him.
And then he’d seen the tiniest bit of movement on the wall. Audun had moved. The shock on Ulfar’s face had told the rest of the tale.
Valgard had watched Ulfar jump over the wall, holding Audun—and then the survival instinct kicked in, tore him off the spot, and hurtled him along. Blind panic pushed him to his hut just in time to retrieve the cheap cross he’d secretly bought off a traveling merchant when he’d heard the rumors of King Olav’s ascendancy. Valgard threw himself to his knees and started praying in Latin, not two breaths before King Olav’s soldiers burst through the door.
Since then he’d done his best to please his new master, but he couldn’t forget what he’d seen on the wall. Audun had cheated death, and it had to be connected to the attack somehow. That, or something to do with Ulfar.
In his quest for information, Valgard had volunteered to join Finn in christening the captured raiders from the north, but most had either drowned or Finn had snapped their necks when they refused to convert. A handful had come over to King Olav’s side, but Valgard did not trust them. This was the first tangible bit of information he’d received about the mysterious presence on Skargrim’s ship; there had been a bit of talk about a small, knife-wielding woman who’d been Skargrim’s boatsman, but after living with raiders his entire life and spending a lot of time with Harald, Valgard discounted that as nonsense. He’d heard the stories after Audun killed Egill Jotun, but anything from the battlefield was to be taken with a pinch of salt, too. No women’s bodies had been thrown on the pyre.
Well, except for Lilia’s.
Now, however, it looked like things were finally moving his way. He’d felt the truth in the sailor’s words. The man had been terrified.
As skeptical as Valgard was of the old ways, the stories from the far north had always appeared to support the idea of magic, or some kind of connection with the gods. Now it fell to him to determine whether this was true or not. This was what he needed. He needed to go north—but how?
“You must come.” Finn’s voice shook Valgard out of his thoughts. The big soldier could move quietly when he wanted to. “To the longhouse.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Valgard said, rising slowly.
“Hakon Jarl has replied, apparently,” Finn said. His face did not give anything away.
Valgard raised his eyebrows. “Has he? Well then. Let’s go.”
Finn did not ask about the body on the floor.
When they entered the longhouse, Jorn was already there, sitting to the right of King Olav. It was very faint, but Valgard still heard Finn’s snort of displeasure. The longhouse wasn’t anything like as great as it had been in Sigurd’s time. War trophies had been ripped off the wall, along with weapons and shields. In their place was a big, broad cross that the king had ordered built out of broken weapons, to signify how faith overcame war, apparently. It caught and broke the rays of the sun. Valgard couldn’t help but think that a handful of Harald’s men would have turned the components of that cross back into tools of pain and death in an instant.
The king spotted them and gestured to the dais. They walked past an old farmer, sixty if he was a day, clad in muddy rags and clutching a sack that looked heavy. He was flanked by two watchmen as he shivered in the cold air. King Olav paid him no mind; the rough and discolored woolen sack had all his attention.
“Sit, Finn,” the king commanded, gesturing to his left. Valgard took a seat by the wall. King Olav nodded very briefly to acknowledge his presence. Then he turned to the old man. “You bring a message from Hakon,” he said.
“Y-yes,” the farmer stuttered.
“In parts?”
“That’s what the riders said,” the old farmer mumbled. His voice trembled, and he did not dare look the king in the eye. Judging by the sound of King Olav’s voice, Valgard thought that was probably a good idea.
“So riders came from the north and brought you this,” Jorn said. Sitting on the king’s right, the self-proclaimed Prince of the Dales looked altogether too pleased with himself. A lucky strike against the Viking Thrainn in what was supposed to be the Stenvik raiders’ last stand had given him some notoriety among the men; turning on Sigurd had not worked against him as much as Valgard had thought it would. Always well dressed and groomed, Jorn looked at home as the king’s right-hand man. He pressed the old farmer. “Why didn’t you tell them to bring the whole message themselves?”
“They . . . they threatened me, my Lord,” the old man muttered. “They told me to take it to . . . the king . . . or I’d be on a spike.”
“Very well,” King Olav interrupted. “What’s in the sack?”
The old farmer shuddered, swallowed twice, and drew a deep breath. Then he grabbed the bottom corners of the sack and tipped its contents out onto the floor.
Two rag piles landed with a thud.
“Oh, the—,” Finn muttered before he bit his lip.
Jorn stared dumbly at the rags. “Is that . . . his—?” The messenger’s left hand had been cut off, as had his right foot. The farmer shook the sack. Another two bundles tumbled out and clattered onto the floor.