Lord of Fire and Ice Page 28

  “And then?”

  “Then we’ll see what a fire mage can actually do.”

  ***

  Malvar stood in the prow of his ship, scanning the horizon for any signs of organized resistance. The mist obscured his vision, but it seemed the signal fires hadn’t called down the warriors of Hardanger to meet him. The only thing out of the ordinary was the way the mist piled up in one place, dead center in front of Malvar’s ship.

  “What’s that?” one of his men asked, a superstitious tremor in his voice.

  Out of the watery mists, a fierce dragonhead rose, and behind it, as if he were mounted on the great wooden beast, a single man wreathed in clouds lying on the water. Silently, he stood, unmoving and unflinching, as Malvar’s flotilla drew nearer.

  The mist parted, curling upward like disembodied souls straining skyward, and a blue glow was visible, growing between the man’s upraised palms. It bloomed as big as a head of cabbage and then divided into two, so the man held a glowing orb in each hand.

  “Sorcery,” someone whispered.

  “A fire mage,” said another. “He holds the flame and isn’t burned.”

  “Who is this that he thinks to dazzle us with cheap tricks and false magick? The Old Ones are the only power we revere,” Malvar roared. “Someone put an arrow down his gullet. He’ll bleed like the rest of us.”

  But before anyone could obey him, the man hurled the ball of flame to the base of Malvar’s mast. The sail caught in a searing moment. The second ball of blue fire burst on the deck of Bloodaxe’s flankship, sending the crew into a panicked rout.

  “Archers!” Bloodaxe bellowed. “Bring that man down.”

  ***

  “Shields up,” Harald shouted from the tiller.

  Brandr’s crew let their oars drift in the oar ports while they hunkered beneath their round discs of hardened leather. Brandr flattened himself to the dragon’s neck, sheltering under the beast’s horny head. He was glad Arn had spared no expense for this figurehead, choosing a design with a flared horizontal crest at the base of its skull that acted as a shield for Brandr now.

  From this place of relative safety, he commanded the existing flames on his enemy’s ships with a slow wave of his arm. Tongues of fire leaped from one ship to the next, dancing along the rigging and dropping burning ash on the panicked crews beneath. The long line of attackers broke as the outer ships sheared off, trying to distance themselves from their burning cohorts. Brandr arced fire from his palms to their retreating sterns.

  The air was filled with screams and the hollow song fire always sang when it fed, licking at the pitch-soaked hulls with relish. The fjord around the attacker’s ships boiled with the flailing of drowning men as they fled the flames for a watery grave. Brandr recognized one of them as Albrikt Gormson.

  But Bloodaxe’s burning flagship continued to advance on Brandr’s. While panic reigned on the other ships, a bucket brigade had formed on this one and was dousing the flames with methodical efficiency. Growling curses carried across the water as Bloodaxe drove his men to keep rowing.

  Brandr glanced back at his friends. “He means to ram us. Time to abandon ship.”

  Without a word of dissent, Ragnar, Orlin, Torvald, and Torsten grasped their oars with both hands and leaped into the water.

  “You too, Harald.” Brandr clambered back to the stern where his friend still sat.

  “Can’t swim.”

  “You’ll never learn any younger,” Brandr said as he broke off the steering arm of the tiller, shoved it into his friend’s hands, and pushed Harald over the gunwale into the frothing water.

  Harald surfaced, sputtering and complaining, but he was afloat.

  Brandr turned to face Bloodaxe’s dragonship bearing down on him. His Greek fire mixture didn’t work as he’d planned, but he was certain it would burn. He gathered all his concentration and drew a deep breath. The shouts and chaos faded around him. Flame grew between his palms, beautiful in its purity, terrible in its destructive power.

  He focused all his strength, and as the neck of Bloodaxe’s drakkar smashed Brandr’s dragonhead to kindling, he hurled the hottest ball of fire he could produce into the prow of his own ship.

  The Greek fire machine erupted into a blazing inferno that scorched the sky.

  ***

  After Bloodaxe’s horde left her steading, Katla and Finn sailed around the island and cautiously nosed into the sheltered cove. Her people who’d survived the invasion were overjoyed to see her. She ordered all their thrall collars struck, because she wanted to convince them Bloodaxe wouldn’t be returning. He was going to meet her husband in battle, and Brandr Ulfson was more than his match.

  Even if she wasn’t entirely convinced herself—after seeing Bloodaxe’s massive flotilla of ships—she had to present a brave face. But that didn’t stop her from having Finn organize a party of archers to guard the cove against returning enemies.

  Then she asked for help moving Ulf Skallagrimsson into her old chamber. At first her people balked, since they’d seen him with Bloodaxe, but when she told them he’d been responsible for lighting the signal fire, and the defense of the fjord was underway because of it, they grudgingly accepted him.

  It was a small matter. He was dying, at any rate.

  When Ulf refused to let her try to remove the arrowhead, she was relieved. The shaft had sunk beneath his skin, and going after it was beyond her doctoring skills. So she cleaned and dressed his wound and made him lie down in her own bed. She gave him willow bark tea for pain until he demanded mead instead.

  She was delivering his fourth horn of sweet oblivion when the flashes of a vision came. Katla’s knees gave way, and she sank to the flagstone floor of her chamber on Tysnes.

  Fire scorched through her mind. Ships aflame. Men leaping into the sea, their clothing alight with blazing tongues. Smoke obscured her sight.

  A blazing orange tunnel encompassed her, held at bay by a pair of outstretched hands.

  Brandr’s hands.

  As he passed through the conflagration, Katla cowered on the cold flagstones, seared by the heat in his Sending. The acrid scent of burning wood, flesh, and pitch made her belly heave.

  A man whose beard and hair were aflame hurled himself toward her, and she was plunged into the frigid water of the fjord. The link between her and Brandr was sliced in two as completely as if someone had taken an axe to it.

  Shaken and gasping, Katla came to herself in her bedchamber, spilled mead soaking her hem and filling in the cracks between the flagstones.

  Old Gerte’s grandmother had been linked with her grandfather by the chains of inn matki munr while he drowned. If Brandr was underwater, he must have been unaware of it, for she received nothing more from him.

  She wept in silence. She couldn’t keen and wail. She was too empty to do anything but let her soul seep from her eyes.

  ***

  Brandr tumbled into the sea, tangled up with Bloodaxe, each of them grappling for the other’s throat. Water doused the man’s flaming head, but Brandr saw Bloodaxe’s lips were gone, his flesh pulled back to reveal his teeth clenched in a death’s-head grin.

  Bloodaxe was a dead man, but he wasn’t satisfied to travel to Hel’s cold hall without the man who’d sent him there in tow. A thumb pressed against Brandr’s throat. He wrapped his arms around Bloodaxe and squeezed for all he was worth. Dark spots bloomed before his eyes, but Brandr held on. Finally, Bloodaxe released his last pent-up breath in an explosion of bubbles.

  Brandr brought his feet up and kicked himself away from his drowning enemy. Bloodaxe struggled feebly for another few heartbeats and then floated away in the relaxation of death.

  A single bubble of air escaped Brandr’s nostril and tickled his cheek. Overhead, the surface of the water blazed with his Greek fire. Beneath him, the broken back o
f Arn’s dragonship sank into the blue depths. Lungs burning for a breath, he kicked toward the surface.

  Even a fire mage couldn’t put out the Greek fire till it had exhausted all its fuel, but he could move it if he could summon the concentration. He splayed his fingers toward the roof of flame and willed it to part above him.

  A small oval of open water appeared and then shrank back. Brandr continued to kick toward the surface, trying to marshal his remaining power. Death by fire or death by drowning was still death. If he couldn’t open and maintain a space in the oily surface, he was going to die either way.

  Chapter 37

  Katla sat by Ulf Skallagrimsson’s bedside through the dark watches of the night as his life wheezed out of him. He’d drunk enough mead to send him into a stupor so deep he should have been insensible, but Ulf balanced on the cusp between life and death, fighting for each breath.

  “Be at peace,” she told him. If he must suffer a straw death, she wished it would at least be an easy one.

  “No, I must wait for Brandr,” he said, his voice a wisp of sound.

  Katla turned her face away. She couldn’t let his father see her hopelessness.

  “He’s coming, girl. I feel it.”

  Katla wished she did. She hadn’t felt anything since that horrific vision. It was as if her heart had gone numb. Like a limb that had gone to sleep, the muscle in her chest felt like a heavy void, taking up space inside her but only as dead weight.

  Someone was shouting in the distance, and Katla gave herself a small shake.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to Ulf.

  “Hurry.”

  She pushed into the main long hall and found all her people stirring. The double doors at the far end of the longhouse swung open and let in the dawn. And her brother.

  “Brandr Ulfson,” Finn shouted, slightly winded from sprinting up the hill from the wharf. “He’s returned. Malvar Bloodaxe is dead, and his forces routed!”

  Katla’s chest was full of prickles, as if the blood only then began rushing back into her numb heart. She ran down the center of the long hall and out into the pearly light. Brandr and his friends were making their way up the winding path. She drank in the sight of his golden head.

  Her people spilled out of the longhouse behind her. Finn was shouting out details of the sea battle and the way Bloodaxe’s force had dissolved before Brandr’s unconventional use of a southern weapon that incinerated the lot of them.

  Someone started up the chant: “Herra af eldur!”

  Lord of Fire.

  Brandr topped the last rise and stopped when he saw her. The way her insides sizzled at the sight of him, she could well believe he was the lord of flames.

  “My very own ice princess.”

  The rumbling timber of his voice reverberated in her head, and she heard his smile in the warm sound.

  “If I was ice, you have melted me, my love,” she Sent back to him and lifted her skirts so she could run unimpeded into his arms.

  ***

  Ulf was still alive when Katla led Brandr back to his bed. Her husband’s sadness pressed on her chest, as if it were her own grief.

  “Bloodaxe?” Ulf asked between gasps.

  “Dead,” Brandr affirmed.

  Ulf’s eyes closed in satisfaction, and he nodded. Then he reopened his eyes to fix Brandr with a steady gaze. “Does your brother yet live?”

  “I left him alive, but—”

  “But I will probably see him again before you do. Is that long face you’re wearing for your brother or for me?”

  “Both.” Brandr swallowed hard, and Katla gripped his hand tightly to offer her support.

  “In my life, I have done many terrible things. But when I look at you, I see one thing that turned out right.” Ulf’s chest rose in a shuddering gasp. “Despite my best efforts to bend you otherwise.” His blood-stained mouth twitched in a half smile. “So you see, I do not mind to die now. I am joined to my people, knowing I leave a worthy jarl in Jondal. Rule long, son.” He reached out a quavering hand. “Rule well.”

  ***

  Ulf would not have liked to be buried, Brandr knew. So, he was sent to his gods in the old way, in a small soul boat built specially to become his floating pyre. Once the craft cleared the mouth of the inlet, Brandr arced a blue flame to it from the shoreline and watched it burn until the last charred spars sank beneath the waves.

  He put an arm around Katla’s waist and drew her close. “We need to go home, I’m thinking.”

  “I’m already packed.”

  “What? I won’t have to abduct you this time?”

  “No. I can’t wait to see Linnea again. I’m sure she’ll have grown so while we’ve been gone, we’ll scarcely know her,” Katla said. “Besides, Finn has things well in hand here. The people are rebuilding. Everyone knows what they need to do without me goading them along.”

  Brandr kissed her temple. “Don’t fret, woman. You still have me to goad.”

  “And don’t you forget it.” She smacked his chest playfully. He caught up her hand and pressed a kiss in her palm. Heat bloomed between them.

  “But Finn will want to come with us for this trip. He left Inga at Jondal, and I’m thinking we’ll have a wedding before they sail back to Tysnes.”

  Brandr nodded. “A good beginning.”

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, reveling in the contentment she felt rolling off him. It was like the smell of fresh, warm bread, or the comfortable texture of well-worn linen on her skin.

  “Ja. Finn and Inga had a rough beginning. I only hope they find the mighty passion as we did,” she said. “Then whatever befalls them, they’ll have a good ending too.”

  Here’s a sneak peek at

  Sins of the Highlander

  by Connie Mason with Mia Marlowe

  The peat fire had burned out and the ash gone gray, but Rob MacLaren didn’t feel the least bit cold. Not while his hot-blooded woman writhed under him. Their breaths mingled in the frosty air of the bedchamber. Fiona tilted her hips, welcoming him deeper, and he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from emptying himself into her.

  It was too soon.

  He never wanted it to end, this joining, this loss of himself in the woman he adored.

  Rob raised himself up on his arms and gazed down at her. The candles had burned down to nubs but still flickered enough to cast her in soft light. He could see his wife clearly. Her strawberry nipples peaked, with cold or arousal he couldn’t be sure, but he loved looking at them just the same.

  “What are ye doing, daftie man? ’Tis too cold!” Fiona raised herself up and clung to him for warmth.

  “That’s what ye get when ye marry a man on Christmas Day—a cold bridal night.” He gently pushed her back down, and she sank into the feather tick.

  “It doesna have to be cold.” Her skin rippled with gooseflesh. “Come back under the covers, love.”

  “I canna. I need to see the lass I wed,” he said. “I want to watch ye melt for me, to see your face when ye make that wee kitten noise just afore ye come.”

  “Wee kitten noise, is it?” She shook with laughter. “Have a care, husband, lest I bare my claws.”

  She raked her nails across his chest, and the sensation made his balls clench.

  He lowered himself and kissed her, devouring her lips and chasing her tongue. He withdrew for a heartbeat for the sheer joy of sliding slowly back into her slick wetness. Then he raised himself again and reached between them to stroke her over the edge.

  “Oh, Rob.” Her inner walls clenched around him, and he felt the soft tremor that signaled the start of her release. “When ye do that, I don’t care a fig if it’s so cold I catch my death…my death…my death…”

  Her voice echoed round the chamber and faded into the distant thatch
overhead.

  Rob jerked awake.

  He wasn’t in his bridal bedchamber. He was lying on stone-hard ground with a stone-hard cock still primed to make love to the woman in his dream. Stars wheeled above him in a frigid sky. His band of men snored nearby.

  And the fact that Fiona was dead slammed into him afresh.

  He’d married her two years ago at Christmas, and she’d been gone by Epiphany. Twelve days, he’d been a husband. Only twelve.

  And now a night didn’t pass without his wife visiting him as some phantom, sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying. She lived in his dreams, but always he was powerless to hold her to earth.

  She was so vibrant, so real by night, he suffered all the more in the waking world with the knowledge that he’d not find her there.

  One of the men in the clearing let out a loud snore and mumbled in his sleep. It was hours till dawn, and even more till Rob could accomplish what he intended in the coming day. But he would not seek sleep.

  He couldn’t bear to lose Fiona again so soon.

  ***

  Rob narrowed his gaze at the stone kirk across the glen. The bagpipes’ celebratory tune ended with an off-key wheeze. He and his men, concealed on the edge of the forest, had watched the bridal procession and the arrival of the groom’s party. Now he heard nothing from the kirk. The only sound was the harsh cry of a jay from the branches above him.

  The ceremony must have been beginning in earnest. Rob snorted, his breath like a curl of dragon smoke in the chilly air.

  “’Tis time, Hamish.”

  “I wish ye’d reconsider.” His friend shook his head, his scruff of red beard making him look like an alarmed hedgehog. Hamish never let his beard grow beyond the stubble stage. A metal worker couldn’t chance much facial hair. Even his eyebrows were habitually singed off. “If ye go through with this, folk will say ye’re…that ye’re—”

  “Mad? They say that already.” Rob mounted his black stallion. The beast sensed his agitation and pawed the dirt, restive and spoiling for action. “I see no other path before me. Now will ye help me or no?”