C. Dale Brittain (40 page)

He felt almost numb.
 
He had seen Karin again but only for the briefest moment.
 
While sailing up the coast he had promised the lords of voima in his heart to burn a great offering if he could only know she was safe so far, but he knew now that was not enough.
 
She
had
been safe that whole time but, as he should have known well, there could be no end of worrying about one’s children as long as they were alive.

Roric had fallen asleep, or at least his eyes were closed, as he sat leaning against the ship’s hull with his head at an unnatural angle.
 
How could he have thought such bitter thoughts about this young man?
 
Kardan was still not sure why Karin loved him, but he had to be better than whatever brigand had carried her away.

His men were right.
 
They could not try to pursue her captors before daylight.
 
And by then Karin would be violated at the least, he thought, perhaps killed as well—and maybe quick death would be best after all.
 
If he had not had to keep alert watch, Kardan would have put his face in his hands and sobbed.

The watch changed in the middle of the night.
 
“You can’t find her if you’re too exhausted,” said Hadros brusquely.
 
He himself had slept during the first watch.
 
“You’re not a young man to stay awake for three days and ride and fight on the fourth.”
 
Kardan wrapped up in his cloak and put his face in the crook of his arm.
 
Across the fire, Hadros talked quietly to Queen Arane, who seemed to be finding the whole series of events an exciting adventure.
 
Kardan himself slid into uneasy dreams, but when he awoke and rolled over the waking was even worse.

The darkness of midnight had given way to a dim sea fog in which it was possible to see faintly, but all shapes were distorted.
 
Sunrise, he guessed, was still an hour off.

Hadros and the queen were no longer near him, but he thought he could see them twenty yards away, walking slowly as though starting off on a circuit of the camp site.
 
He lay without moving, feeling the stiffness in all his joints, trying to decide how many men and dogs they should take in pursuit of Karin and how many would be needed to guard the ship and the wounded.

There was the scrape of a boot in the gravel by his head.
 
“Come with me,” came a hoarse whisper.
 
For a startled second he thought someone was addressing
him.
 
“Fate has brought us together this night.
 
You want your combat, you’ll have your combat.”

The voice was Gizor’s.
 
He was loosening both the ropes that bound Roric to the rings and the ropes around his feet, though not the bonds that kept his arms pinned to his sides.

Kardan feigned sleep, watching from behind his lashes.

“Untie me,” said Roric in a whisper of his own.
 
“Are you afraid I’ll attack you while your back is turned?”

“I’m afraid you’ll run away again!”

“I had my chance to kill you, Gizor,” said Roric in a hiss.
 
“I let you live.
 
You should be thanking all the lords of voima for your deliverance, not trying to kill me!”

Gizor jerked Roric to his feet by the ropes.
 
Kardan could see that he had not one but two swords hanging from his belt.
 
“You killed my best friends and let a woman attack me from behind.”

“And
you,
” hissed Roric, “kept me from protecting the princess.
 
The blood-guilt from her death will all fall on you.”

“You have insulted my honor for the last time, No-man’s son.
 
I shall release the ropes when we reach the island.”

They went soundlessly along the ship, past sleeping warriors.
 
Kardan waited until they were thirty yards ahead and then rose to follow as quietly as he could.

Gizor and Roric stopped while two of Hadros’s warriors went by, then slipped in silence out of the camp site and along the river bank through coils of fog.
 
Kardan, behind them, kept just far enough back that he hoped they would not notice his presence.

He was not quite sure why he followed them.
 
On the one hand, he could not interfere in a judicial single combat.
 
On the other hand, he felt that Roric was the only man who could save his daughter.
 
“And if they are both badly—even fatally—wounded,” he added to himself, “there will have to be a witness to determine the blood-guilt.”

A half mile downstream from the camp, an island rose from the river, a great boulder thirty feet high.
 
The fog hid the fires of the camp.
 
“This will do,” said Gizor.
 
He jerked the ropes, though Roric showed no sign of trying to escape, and the two waded out into the water.
 
The tide was out and the river low.
 
Kardan waited until they had reached the island’s edge and were scrambling up the rough stone before following them.
 
Neither one looked back.

Off to the east above the fog, the sky was lightening rapidly.
 
Kardan climbed slowly, finding finger and toe holds in the uneven surface of the stone, trying not to knock loose pebbles.
 
The strain pulled at his stiff muscles, and his fingers felt clumsy.
 
Karin, he remembered, had always enjoyed climbing as a young girl.

By the time he pushed his head cautiously up to the top, Gizor had freed Roric from the ropes and given him a sword.
 
The young man stretched his arms out fully, then grinned at the man who meant to kill him.
 
He was muscled and lean, almost the same age, Kardan thought, as his own dead son.

The top of the island was twenty feet across and fairly level, bare rock scattered with loose gravel, tufts of grass growing in a few cracks.
 
Kardan tried to find a secure perch from which he could see without being seen.
 
The two warriors stood facing each other in the dawn light, without armor or shield, hefting naked steel.

“Tell me one thing before I kill you, Gizor,” said Roric.
 
“Are you my father?”

3

The fire pit burned bright in the mountain hall, half cave and half castle.
 
Along both sides men sat sullenly drinking.
 
Every now and then the voice of one or another was raised in joke or curse, but for the most part they drank in silence.

Karin sat against the wall where she had been thrown, trying not to appear as terrified as she felt.
 
No one spoke to her, but some of the warriors looked at her over their ale horns.
 
And then the man with the permanent mocking smile from the scar on his mouth sauntered across the hall to stand before her.

“So, what have we captured here?” he inquired, hands on his hips.
 
The firelight, red behind him, made him dark and almost featureless, a shape and a voice that could have been a wight from Hel.

She forced her voice to be steady.
 
“A princess,” she said.
 
“Fate has given you a princess.”
 
She had never felt less like a princess in her life, but at the moment it was her only weapon.
 
“You may extract a rich ransom for me, but only if I am unharmed in any way.
 
If I am, all the Fifty Kings will unite to destroy you.”

“They haven’t united on anything yet,” said the man with a harsh laugh.
 
“Except of course outlawing me—that, I hear, they managed just fine at the All-Gemot.”

“Who are you?” she asked cautiously.
 
If he was more than a common bandit, someone who actually cared about the All-Gemot, she might live until morning.

“Eirik,
King
Eirik to you.
 
You don’t look like a princess to me.
 
You look like a farmer’s daughter.
 
And my warriors tell me you fight like a cornered mountain cat.”
 
He pulled out a dagger and flipped it into the air, catching it smoothly and flipping it again.
 
She recognized the knife as hers.

“I am Princess Karin, Kardan’s daughter, heiress to his kingdom,” she said with dignity.
 
Keep him talking, she thought.
 
The longer she could keep him talking the better chance she had.
 
This must be the king who had been outlawed by the All-Gemot for killing a man and hiding the body.
 
In that case, the burned-out castle down in the valley had been his.
 
“Look at my necklace.”
 
She reached inside the neck of her dress to pull out the thin chain that she and Roric had intended to give to the Witch of the Western Cliffs in return for information on how to find Valmar.

He grabbed and gave a jerk, breaking the catch, and studied it in the firelight.
 
She furtively rubbed the spot where the chain had dug into her skin before breaking.
 
“Fine workmanship,” he said after a moment, almost reluctantly.
 
“Either you really are from a rich family or else you’re a thief.”

“A thief like you?” she asked, making herself laugh.
 
Judging from the ambush laid for Hadros’s ship, into which she and Roric had ridden, he and his men now lived by raiding those who came near his old kingdom.

“Oh, I’m no thief,” he answered, sitting down beside her with his legs out before him.
 
He tossed the necklace into her lap.

Karin watched him from the corner of her eye, fearing that to face him fully would be to invite further closeness.
 
He looked much older from close up than his youthful bravado suggested.
 
She couldn’t tell if he was really smiling or if it was just the scarred lip.
 
Her hand closed around the necklace casually, to give the impression she hardly cared.

“I am an outlaw according to the Gemot,” he went on, “but I am a lover, a poet, a berserk fighter, and a king according to
me.
”

“A poet, Eirik?” she asked, her tone deliberately light.
 
“I wouldn’t mind hearing one of your poems—if you really do write them!”

He flashed her a dark look from under his brows.
 
“I’ll compose a poem about
you,
” he said and yelled to one of his men.
 
Karin noticed uneasily that the steady drinking had stopped; the warriors seemed to be following their conversation with interest.

In a moment someone shambled over with a rolled-up piece of dirty cloth that Karin thought looked distinctly unpoetic.
 
When Eirik unrolled it, however, he took out a lyre of smooth dark wood.
 
He slid his hands along its shape a moment as though considering.
 
When he plucked the strings, tuning, the tone was very sweet.
 
“They don’t sing songs like this back in
your
kingdom,” he said, maybe smiling for real this time.

Karin thought grimly that Queen Arane might feel herself an expert on maneuvering men, but she was quite sure the queen had never had to listen to the poems of a man who might decide at any moment to kill her.

When after a moment Eirik began to sing, his voice was still rough, but there was a deep resonance in it she had not heard before.

“Swiftly the red-sail sought the dead castle,

“Swiftly from ambush came death-proud warriors,

“Swords and eyes flashing, giving no quarter,

“Hands firm, hearts strong, killing the seamen,

“Led by King Eirik, they slew the invaders,

“Laughed in their faces, came home to the mountain hall,

“High above sea, high above river,

“Carried off a princess of mocking gray eyes,

“She’ll ask not to be ransomed, for Eirik’s her lover.”

At least, thought Karin wildly, he seemed to accept her as a princess.

An appreciative murmur came from the men—their battle already the stuff of song.
 
But the murmur seemed to irritate Eirik.
 
“Is that all you can manage?” he yelled.
 
“You should be celebrating!
 
We killed as many of them as they did of us!”
 
There were shouts of appreciation this time, even a few jokes, that made him square his shoulders as he turned back around.

He rested the lyre on his knees then and turned toward her the face that might—or might not—have been smiling.
 
“So how do
you
like my poem?”

Mocking gray eyes? she thought.
 
If he likes mocking, he can have all he likes.
 
“Well, maybe you are a poet after all, Eirik.
 
But how did a king and berserk warrior do something as dishonorable as conceal a body and get himself outlawed?”