Chapter 11: Blood Oath
The deal struck, the hall’s tension thawed into brisk activity. Kenji helped move Ragnar to a pallet near the fire where a bent old woman poulticed his wound with stinking herbs.
Bjorn accepted a horn of mead from Isis, drained it, and stared into the empty cup. “Olaf held him down,” Bjorn said, his voice gone flat and cold. “Three others pinned his limbs while Ragnar fought like a bear in a trap.”
He looked at Kenji, his eyes hard. “They used a rusted iron hook. Carved his cords out as a lesson for staying loyal to me.” Kenji’s stomach turned, the image too vivid, too cruel.
“I found him,” Isis said quietly, leaning against a post. “Hours later, in the reeds. Olaf was still there, laughing, wiping his knife on the grass.” Her green gaze was fixed on the middle distance, remembering. “Ragnar’s blood was black in the moonlight. I thought he was already dead.”
Kenji’s hand went to his own throat, a reflexive, horrified gesture. The warmth of the hall suddenly felt stifling, the smoke thickening in his lungs. He stumbled outside into the sharp air, bracing against the wall, and retched onto the mud.
The violence here wasn’t stories or history. It was in the rasp of Ragnar’s breath, in Bjorn’s hollow stare, in Isis’s casual, terrible recall.
Kenji wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, the cold air helping to clear his head. He turned back toward the hall’s glowing doorway, steeling himself.
Inside, the firelight danced over Ragnar’s pallid face. His eyes were open, glassy but aware, fixed on Bjorn where he sat slumped by the hearth.
Ragnar’s chest strained with a sudden, deep inhalation. A sound emerged, raw and broken, nothing like a voice.
It was a wet, fractured syllable, all air and agony. “Bj…orn.”
The hall froze. Isis’s cup halted halfway to her lips. The old herb-witch crossed herself, stepping back from the pallet.
Bjorn’s face underwent a devastating transformation, shock stripping away every layer of hardened captain. He was at the pallet’s side in an instant, his hands hovering, afraid to touch. “Again,” he whispered, his own voice cracking.
Ragnar’s lips moved, a trickle of blood-streaked spit at the corner. “Bjorn.” Clearer this time. A name. A decree.
A decree. Bjorn stared, his breath trapped in his chest. The world had narrowed to the painful whisper from his friend’s ruined throat.
He reached out, his calloused hand cradling Ragnar’s bearded jaw. “You spoke,” Bjorn said, the words themselves sounding foreign. A disbelieving laugh broke from him, raw and relieved.
Kenji moved quickly, seeing the strain in the giant’s neck. He grabbed a water skin from a nearby bench. “Don’t try to talk again, not yet,” he said, his voice firm but quiet.
He gently supported Ragnar’s head, bringing the skin to his lips. “Small sips. Slow.” Ragnar’s eyes, sharp with understanding, met his. He obeyed, the water a clearer victory than any mead.
The old woman worked silently, threading a bone needle with sinew. She cleaned the gash with a clear, stinging liquor, her hands steady. Ragnar didn’t flinch, his gaze locked on Bjorn’s exhilarated face.
“I heard it,” Bjorn murmured, almost to himself. “By the gods, Ragnar, I heard your voice.” The giant’s fingers twitched, forming the silent language’s sign for home.
Kenji watched the needle pull the skin together, each stitch a promise. The wound closed, not as an end, but as a beginning.
The following morning, pale light seeped through the longhouse smoke holes, dust motes dancing in the silence. Kenji woke to the solid warmth of Ragnar beside him, the warrior’s bearded face relaxed in deep, healing sleep. A fond, quiet giggle escaped Kenji before he could stop it, and he leaned in, brushing a kiss against the man’s stubbled cheek.
Ragnar’s eyes snapped open—not with alarm, but with a swift, playful clarity. A massive hand came up to cradle the back of Kenji’s head, pulling him into a proper, passionate kiss that tasted of sleep and salt. He broke it only to nip gently at Kenji’s lower lip, a teasing, questioning grin in his eyes.
They moved together in the furs, a slow, urgent communication of hands and hushed breaths, each touch a silent affirmation against the previous night’s brutal memories. Afterward, they lay tangled, Ragnar tracing idle patterns on Kenji’s back, the world outside their pallet momentarily forgotten.
The moment shattered when Bjorn’s voice cut through the hall. “Up. Now.” He was already armed, his face a storm. In the central hearth space, Isis stood strapping a dagger to her thigh, her expression grimly satisfied.
“Your friend Olaf has made it to shore,” she said, her sultry voice now all business. “He’s in the southern cove, trying to patch his own hull. Seems the storm was unkind to everyone.”
Bjorn’s knuckles whitened on his axe handle. Ragnar sat up, the new scar on his temple livid, and met his captain’s gaze. He pointed at his own chest, then at Bjorn, and made a sharp, slicing motion through the air.
The promise was absolute. Kenji’s stomach tightened as he dressed, the morning’s warmth gone.
Kenji’s stomach tightened as he dressed, the morning’s warmth gone. The longhouse bustled now, Isis’s people bringing wooden platters of flatbread and smoked fish for the weary crew.
A half-dozen women moved among Bjorn’s men, their laughter bright and purposeful. They offered to mend torn tunics, to clean and oil weapons, their hands deft and their smiles inviting.
One, a brunette with keen eyes, reached for Kenji’s stained shirt. “This is salt-rotted, boy. Let me find you another.” Her fingers brushed his arm.
Kenji flinched back, a polite refusal caught in his throat. He felt Ragnar’s gaze from across the fire, a sudden, magnetic pressure.
The giant was on his feet in one fluid motion, crossing the space. He didn’t look at the women. He looked only at Kenji, his expression softening from a watchful sternness into something painfully open.
Ragnar’s large hand settled gently on the nape of Kenji’s neck. He leaned down, his beard brushing Kenji’s cheek, and kissed him—not a quick peck, but a deep, deliberate claiming in the full view of the hall.
He pulled back just enough to speak, his new voice a raw, precious scrape of sound meant for Kenji alone. “You. Only you.”
The women exchanged glances, their smiles turning knowing, and they drifted away toward other tasks. Kenji’s face burned, but his heart hammered with a fierce, glad relief.
Bjorn watched the exchange, a faint smirk cutting through his grim focus. “Good,” he grunted, shouldering his axe. “Now we can all go kill my former friend without any distracting confusion.”
The crew moved out, a grim procession into the damp morning fog that clung to the pines. Kenji fell into step beside Ragnar, his modern sneakers sinking into the soft earth with each squelching step. “You sure about this, red-eyes?” Bjorn called back, not breaking stride through the bracken. “I owe him for the shipwreck,” Kenji lied, avoiding the real reason—the haunting image of that rusted hook from Bjorn’s story. Ragnar grunted, a sound that was almost a word, and clapped a steadying hand on Kenji’s shoulder. Isis led the way, her movements silent and sure, the daggers at her thighs catching dull glints of light. “Olaf’s men are rats, but they fight dirty when cornered,” she warned over her shoulder, her tone all business. “We know,” Bjorn said, his voice tight as a bowstring. The cove’s roar grew louder ahead, a relentless crash of waves against stone that vibrated in Kenji’s teeth. They crouched at the tree line, peering at the black-sand beach below where Olaf’s ship lay beached like a wounded whale. “Looks like half his crew is still swimming,” Bjorn muttered, counting figures moving around the hull. Kenji’s mouth went dry; this was nothing like a video game, the salt air sharp with impending violence. They started down the slope, weapons held low, using the jagged rocks for cover against the open shore. The ambush hit when they were halfway across the exposed shale, vulnerability clear in every stumbling step. Arrows whistled from the cliffs above, thudding into the ground around them with sickening thumps. “Shields!” Bjorn roared, but the order was lost in the sudden chaos of shouting men. Warriors erupted from hidden pits in the sand, their axes swinging in low, brutal arcs. Ragnar shoved Kenji behind a rock as a blade glanced off his own raised arm, a line of red appearing. Olaf himself stepped from behind a boulder, his smile wide and cruel. “Been waiting, brother,” he called, hefting a notched axe.
The words hung in the salt air, a taunt that twisted the old mutiny into a fresh wound. Bjorn didn’t answer with words; he answered with a roar that started deep in his chest and became a charge across the shale, his axe a silver blur.
Chaos swallowed the beach. Olaf’s men, smelling of wet wool and old blood, swarmed from every shadowed cleft in the rock. Steel rang against steel, a terrible, discordant song punctuated by the wet thud of axes finding flesh.
Kenji saw one of Bjorn’s younger crewmen, the one who’d shared his bread that morning, go down with a spear in his gut, his eyes wide with pure surprise before the light left them. Another fell, his scream cut short by a hacking blow to the neck.
Panic was a live wire in Kenji’s veins. He scrambled backward, his hands fumbling over the shale, finding not a weapon but a loose, heavy stone. Ragnar was a whirlwind of fury nearby, but three men pressed him, using the rocks to limit his devastating swings.
Kenji’s gaze shot to Olaf, who was trading brutal, grinning blows with Bjorn. Distract them, his mind screamed. He didn’t think.
He just stood up on shaky legs and threw the rock not at a man, but at the stacked shields leaning against Olaf’s beached longship. The rock struck the boss of a shield with a deafening, gong-like crash that echoed bizarrely across the cove.
Every head—Olaf’s, his men’s—twitched toward the sound for a single, crucial second. It was all the opening Bjorn needed. He surged inside Olaf’s guard and slammed the pommel of his axe into the man’s temple.
Olaf staggered, his knees buckling, the notched axe falling from his hand. But he didn’t go down. He shook his head, dazed, and his wild gaze landed on Kenji, isolated from the fray.
With a speed that belied his size, Olaf lunged, one massive arm hooking around Kenji’s chest. The cold, sharp bite of a seax pressed against Kenji’s throat followed instantly.
“Drop your steel!” Olaf bellowed, his breath hot and sour in Kenji’s ear. The blade pressed deeper, a sting becoming a searing line of pain. “Or I paint the sand with his strange red eyes!”
The world narrowed to the sharp sting at Kenji’s throat and the panicked hammering of his own heart. Bjorn’s axe lowered an inch, his eyes blazing, but Isis hissed a curse, her daggers still raised. “He’s not worth your crew, Bjorn!”
“He is to me,” Ragnar rasped, the words a shattered, guttural force that made Olaf flinch in surprise. Kenji felt the man’s grip loosen for a microsecond at the sound of that ruined voice—the voice he himself had destroyed.
It was all the space Kenji needed. He drove his elbow backwards, not into Olaf’s gut, but into the fresh wound he’d seen on the man’s flank from Bjorn’s earlier strike. Olaf snarled in pain, his arm spasming. Kenji twisted, his hands scrambling for the wrist holding the seax.
The knife came free, clattering on the shale. For one wild, hopeful second, Kenji thought he’d won. Then a new, impossible coldness erupted between his own shoulder blades, a deep, invasive punch that stole his breath and his strength. Olaf’s other hand had pulled a second, shorter blade from his belt.
Kenji’s legs vanished. He fell forward, the grey sky tilting, the roar of the sea dissolving into a dull, throbbing rush. The wet heat spreading across his back was obscene, a sensation more felt than seen. He hit the ground, his mouth filling with the taste of salt and copper.
Ragnar’s roar was soundless, a pure vibration of air. He abandoned everything, shoving past a stunned Bjorn to crash to his knees at Kenji’s side. His huge, trembling hands pressed against the welling wound, trying to cage the life leaking out.
Olaf didn’t wait. “Go! Now!” he bellowed to his men, and they broke for their ship, scrambling over the rocks unopposed as every eye fixed on the dying boy. Kenji tried to speak, to warn them, but his world was dissolving into white-hot agony. Only one sound, one name, clawed its way from his lips in a wet, dying whisper. “Ragnar.”