The Viking’s Sacrifice Read Free Page A

him, sword raised, about to finish what he’d started.
    Einar’s scramasax landed hilt-first between Bausi’s eyes. He staggered and his blade went astray. Instead of Einar’s neck, it sliced straight into the back of his knee. Einar had no breath to scream—blood clogged his lungs, filled his mouth. He could only lie there, under the weight of his misery. A glimpse of sky-blue in the flickering, flame-ridden dark. The girl, Wilda, she hadn’t run.
    Bausi recovered and swung toward her, his face full of menace. She stood transfixed, like a statue, except that her hands fluttered against her thighs, as though they didn’t believe what she’d done.
    Darkness loomed large in Einar’s thoughts as his blood leaked into the earth. He had to do one thing. Just one, and it might be enough for Odin, for Thor. He might then be welcomed by them. He’d stood against a murderer and saved one person, even if she was a Christian, a Saxon. He’d have died in battle, even if it was a battle with his own brother. It was all he had.
    He did the only thing left to him. “Wilda, run.”
    His whispered voice, maybe her name, startled her out of her trance. She met his gaze for a heartbeat, tears mingling with the blood that dripped from the cut under her eye. Bausi took another step.
    A cry of “Bausi!” made them both start. More raiders came, huge vague shapes in the smoke. With a last, petrified look at Einar, with two words he couldn’t understand, Wilda ran. Across a beam that had fallen through the barn and then she was lost in the bright flames and the smoky darkness beyond.
    It was enough. He’d done one thing, one good thing of courage. Odin, take me now. He shut his eyes and gave in to the blackness.
    He drifted there, brought only to sudden, screaming wakefulness when they cauterised his wounds. Iron hands held him down as he thrashed, and cruel words dripped in his ear but he didn’t hear them over his own noise. When they were done and a hard hand slapped the poultice on, he gladly sank again.
     
    The movement of water, the gentle slap of it on wood and the creak of oars brought him back. Odin didn’t want me then.
    He tried to lick his lips, to swallow, but his mouth was dry as ashes. Breath was hard to come by, and it felt as if his knee had been replaced with a red-hot coal. Opening his eyes seemed a monumental effort, one beyond him, so he lay in his own darkness and drifted with the soothing sounds of water, the familiar feel of it under him. He stirred when they left the sea, into the calmer waters of the fjord, again when the water stilled further and the current changed at the sound of waterfalls either side. He knew then where they were. The falls to the left were the Daughters, to the right, the Lovers. Above all would be the rock of Odin’s Helm that watched over Hrafheimfjord, Ravens’ Home Fjord. He was home.
    Bausi’s voice roused him. “I tell you, Agnar, that’s what happened. Shamed though I am to say it, my own brother a coward, taken in the back while running away. Makes me wonder if his mother didn’t have him on the wrong side of the furs, because he’s no son of Olav Hammerheart. Father was right, he wasn’t old enough.”
    Agnar said something in reply, though Einar didn’t catch the words.
    “True, years don’t make a man, but heart and courage. How to tell my father that one son is dead and the other a coward, when it was I who persuaded him to let Einar come? All right,” Bausi said. “Let me sit with him a little.”
    Einar managed to open his eyes a crack. He lay amidships, ropes creaking, the sail billowing over him, the raven’s eyes accusing him. Bausi sat down on a coil of walrus-hide rope next to him. Einar tried to speak, tried to call Agnar back and tell him the truth, but his lips were dry as dust, his throat constricted with thirst.
    “Now, now,” Bausi said with his twisted grin. “No good trying to tell anyone. You were lucky there, that little Saxon bitch saved