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