Blood Will Follow (3 page)

A stillness filled the longhouse. Outside, the autumn light faded as afternoon turned to evening. The door to the longhouse opened slowly, and Finn entered with Valgard close behind. After a short while, the big warrior cleared his throat.

King Olav rose without a word. He moved to the dais and motioned for them to approach.

“I’m glad you are here, Finn. We need to talk about your reign as chieftain of Stenvik.” He smiled. “No need to look so worried, my friend. It will all work very well. Valgard will counsel you and make sure you don’t step on any toes.”

Valgard cleared his throat. “If I may, your Majesty. There is one thing I must mention to you. It is very important. I think that you should be careful—”

One of King Olav’s guards burst in. “My King! My King!”

“You will salute!” Finn shouted. “What do you want?”

“It’s . . . it’s Sven and Sigurd! The guard just told me to come fetch you!”

“What?” the king snapped.

“They’re not breathing!”

NEAR
BYGLAND,
WEST
NORWAY

OCTOBER,
AD
996

The morning sunlight filtered through the yellowing canopy. Leaves crisp with night-frost crunched under Audun’s feet. He had no idea what this wood was called—it was somewhere south, toward the sea. That was enough.

He needed to get away: away from this country, away from people, away from anyone who knew what happened in Stenvik.

Anywhere would do.

The hill was steep but not impossible to climb. He picked his way over broken branches, minding his step around treacherous mossy stones. The forest was slower going, but it was better than the roads. He hadn’t yet seen any of King Olav’s men and wanted it to stay that way.

He thought of Stenvik again.

The hot, metallic air in the forge.

The sounds of weapons clashing, men screaming, skulls crushing.

The stench of the blood.

Audun slapped his arm, hard.

“Stop,” he croaked. His throat hurt with the strange effort of speaking. He swallowed and tried again. “Stop it,” he tried.

Better.

Audun hadn’t said anything in a while. Nothing to say, anyway, and no one to say it to. Ulfar had walked off east; he’d decided not to follow—maybe it had been the right thing to do, maybe not. He spat and cleared his throat. “So where should I go, then?” he asked
the trees. “South?” Nobody answered. “Why not.” There was something in his voice that sounded strange. An edge. “Only graybeards and halfwits speak to themselves anyway,” he snarled as he crested the hill.

On the way down, his feet slipped, and he had to grab a branch to steady himself. He regained his balance, stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and scratched at his chest through the hole in the tunic. “Oh, for f—” Audun jerked his hand away as if he’d touched fire. Since Stenvik . . . since a couple of days after Stenvik, when he’d recovered fully, he’d tried to stop scratching the spot where—

No. He pushed the memory away.

The ground sloped sharply ahead of him, and he could see over the tops of the trees. The forest thinned out at the foot of the hill, and gentle waves of farmland stretched as far as he could see. A reedy road meandered over the nearest rise. Far in the distance he thought he could see a thin blue line—the sea.

“South will do,” he muttered.

A twig snapped above and behind him. Much too close.

Audun whirled around.

There were four of them. Somehow they’d sneaked up onto the crest behind him without making any noise. They looked just like he did, filthy, ragged, and hungry. The tallest one, all skin and bones and dirty hair, stepped in front of the group and leaned on a long walking stick.

“Give us your food,” he snapped at Audun. Two of his companions started moving off to either side. “And your shoes. And everything else you’ve got. Then we’ll let you live.”

“Please,” Audun said. “I don’t want trouble. I have nothing to give, and it won’t be much of a life if you leave me naked in the woods.” The slope behind him was a tempting option, but turning his back on these men felt like a bad idea.

“Farms round here,” said the tall man, trying to sound reasonable. “Or you might find someone stupid enough to be walking through the forest alone. Everyone’s got to hunt these days.”

Audun looked at the tall man. Stained, pointy teeth. Clumps of dried blood in his beard. Where were the others? The blacksmith’s head spun. “I don’t think I will. Thank you,” he mumbled. “Now go away. Please don’t start—”

A tree branch thick as a man’s forearm thwacked across his shoulders. He stumbled, nearly lost his footing, and grabbed hold of a branch for support. Instinct kicked in and he shifted his weight to the left; another attacker stumbled past.

The tall man strode forward with murder in his eyes. “Grab him!” he snarled.

Pain exploded in Audun’s lower back.

He twisted around to see a wild-eyed man wielding a fallen branch and getting ready to strike again. Backpedaling, Audun slipped and fell. Something hard smashed into his hip and set his leg throbbing. He fumbled around for purchase, dodged a vicious strike from the makeshift club, and caught his hand on something sharp.

Fist-size rock. Jagged edge.

Without thinking, he flexed and hurled it at the next moving target.

There was a dull crunch as the club-wielder’s head changed shape. He dropped to the ground. His friends screamed in rage, but the noise was almost distant to Audun. The rich, iron-tinged smell of spurting blood stroked him, lured him, called to him.

“Oh no . . . ,” he muttered.

A feral grin spread on the blond man’s face as he rose to his feet.

An attacker charged him, armed with a rock of his own. He swung hard overhead and screamed in pain as his wrist was smashed by a blocking forearm. His cries were cut short when a straight right from the stocky blacksmith drove the man’s nose up into his brain.

The tall, gaunt leader approached with caution. He had a stick with a point. The lunge was sudden and surprisingly fast. The blacksmith saw the wood pierce his side, felt it rip into his flesh and didn’t care. Wood wasn’t metal.

Horrified, the tall man glanced past him a moment too soon.

The blond man grabbed the spear, held on to it, and stepped backward into the path of the third attacker. A hard elbow broke the scrawny sneak’s sternum, crushed his rib cage, and sent him coughing and wheezing to the forest floor with blood bubbling out of his mouth. Fear blossomed on the tall man’s face as he scrabbled to get away, but his feet betrayed him on the slippery surface. As he fell to the ground, an iron grip seized him by the back of the neck. Another grabbed his crotch, squeezed mercilessly, and lifted the tall, gaunt and screaming man off the ground, grunting with the effort.

The blacksmith threw the scrawny man down the hill, watched him flailing and screaming as he flew until he bounced off a tree, watched the lifeless body fall and crash into the ground, roll down through the undergrowth, and come to a stop at the foot of the hill.

He looked around, but nothing moved. Slowly, almost gently, the thrumming in his temples slowed and the pain returned. Audun’s right leg spasmed and collapsed underneath him, sending him to the forest floor. The wooden spear throbbed in his side. The suffocating feeling of bile exploding from his stomach threatened to overwhelm him until he managed to roll over and vomit.

After the first convulsion, Audun reached for the long spear, pulled it out, screamed, and lost consciousness.

When he woke, he was wet and cold. His mouth tasted sour and his head throbbed. For the first couple of moments, old dreams confused him. The shivers and the stab of pain from his side cleared his head soon enough, though.

The hill.

The fight.

Audun looked around. The promise of rain still hung in the air. As he moved, an opportunistic fox scampered away from a corpse with a broken skull. He staggered to his feet, shook himself, and
immediately regretted the decision as lightning flashes of pain erupted in his back. He had to fight for his balance, breathing in shallow gasps.

He coughed, choked, and spat. The taste of bile reminded him of other times, other fights. For a brief, tantalizing moment, he could remember what he had dreamed about, where he’d just been, but then it was gone.

Biting back the waves of nausea, he started moving again. One step. Then another. He did his best to ignore the three dead men as he picked his way carefully down the slope of the hill. The rain had made the ground even worse for walking. He stumbled, almost lost his balance, and had to grab hold of a tree for support. After taking a moment to catch his breath, bite down hard, and try his best to ignore the lancing pain in his hip and back, he set out again.

His leg gave way completely and everything tilted. Waves of heat washed over his back as he crashed to the ground, sliding, moving, rolling. Trees whipped by his head, the horizon pitched and lurched, suddenly he was staring up at the sky, then he was turned around again. His shin smashed into a tree stump; he flailed and grabbed for a bush, a root, anything to slow his fall. When he finally rammed into a big fir tree, the breath was knocked out of him and he rolled over, gasping for air. Around him, the red, gold, and yellow of the dying forest blurred into the colors of the forge. Tiny stars burst across the blue sky. In a panic, Audun started punching his chest—harder and harder. He could feel the veins in his throat bulging, his face heating up.

Something gave way inside him, and sweet, cold life flooded his lungs. He coughed painfully as he tried to swallow all the air in the world. When his heart had stopped thundering, he clambered to his feet. His back screamed at him, and he broke out in a cold sweat, but he remained standing.

Then he noticed the tall man, lying like a child’s broken toy in the clearing. The side of his head was one open wound.

“I told you to go away,” Audun mumbled. “I told you.”

He stumbled off, away from death and blood, heading south.

The going was slow.

He’d found a branch that served as a crooked walking staff of sorts, but his leg was still giving him a hard time, his back seized up, and his throat felt like it had been scraped raw. He coughed and permitted himself a cold smile.

Things had worked out fucking great, hadn’t they?

He should never have got involved. And he never should have followed Ulfar off that wall.

The sun was sliding down beyond the horizon. Soon it would be dark. Winter would come. Audun scanned the horizon and found nothing—no shelter, no hills with good caves, nothing. Just acres and acres of fields.

He did not like the idea of sleeping outside again, exposed to everything and anyone, not in this state. Swallowing hard, he turned and walked toward the road he’d seen from the hill.

It was overgrown and underused. Audun shivered and stumbled onward, gritting his teeth and ignoring his back, legs, and aching shoulders. The road led him up onto the small rise. The farmer had not yet done his harvesting, and from the looks of it he’d be too late. Beyond the field, the farmstead appeared about ready to collapse. The road led in a curve alongside the cornfield and into a yard. He could see a ramshackle shed of some sort, a main building, and possibly something behind that, but none of it looked very good. The wood was gray with age. About five hundred yards behind it, the forest rose like a green-capped wall.

A sharp wind bit at Audun’s back, and he felt suddenly sick: sick of it all, the wandering, the fighting, the loneliness. He hunched his shoulders, winced, and set off toward the house, tightening his grip on his makeshift quarterstaff. Just in case.

The door to the main house opened when he was about four hundred yards away. He flinched but kept going. An old man
walked out; Audun’s heart beat faster when he saw the soft glow of a hearth inside the house.

“Well met, stranger!” the man shouted. His hair was white, but his voice was strong.

“Well—” The rest of the greeting was lost in a fit of coughing as his back locked up, his leg buckled, and he had to clutch the staff to avoid falling over.

The farmer stood and watched him from his steps.

“Well met,” Audun croaked at last.

“Where are you headed?” the man said.

“South,” Audun replied. “I seek shelter for the night.”

“I suppose you do,” the old man said. “I have little, but what’s mine is yours.” As Audun approached, the man added, “It looks like you might need it. Are you badly hurt?”

“No,” Audun lied. “A fire and some broth should set me right.”

“We can see to that,” the man said.

The house had not looked like much from afar, but it turned out to be well maintained. To Audun’s travel-weary eyes it was a palace. Three beds fitted snugly into the corners, two of them unused. Chisels and wood-carving knives were scattered across a small table by the only window, which faced toward the fields. Underneath the chair next to the table, a woven basket stored sticks of various sizes. A small fire gave warmth to the whole room; a bubbling pot sent off smells that made his stomach growl.

“Settle down, stranger. Settle down. Do you have a name?” The man led Audun to one of the unused beds and nudged him to sit. Then he reached into the pouch hanging off his belt and pulled out something wrapped in linen cloth, along with a small paring knife.

“Audun,” he mumbled, settling down with his back to the wall. Looking around, he noted the carvings on the walls. Most appeared to have something to do with battle. He tried to focus, but his head felt fuzzy.

“Audun.” The old man mouthed it, as if it was something he’d never heard before. “Audun. Welcome to my home, Audun. My
name is Fjölnir.” He unraveled the linen cloth, revealing a joint of meat. The weary blacksmith’s mouth watered, and he swallowed.

Fjölnir saw it and smiled. “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s goat, and a tough old one at that. What brings you to Setr Valley?” he asked.

Audun couldn’t think of any reason, so he remained silent.

The old man looked at him, smiled, nodded, and handed him a slice of meat. “Help yourself,” he said. Setting the joint down on the table next to Audun along with the paring knife, Fjölnir reached into the folds of his tunic, and another, bigger whittling blade appeared in his hand. He reached for a stick from the basket underneath his chair and started gently carving.