Chapter 137: Oaths Before Battle
He closed his eyes, listening for the third horn.
It didn’t come. Not yet. Instead, a different sound permeated the settlement, a low, rhythmic drumbeat that vibrated through the earth. It was the big skin drum from the hall, beaten not for feast, but for gathering.
“The oaths,” Astrid whispered behind him, her voice still rough from their passion. Her arm unwound from his chest. “Eirik binds the men before a fight. He’ll do it now, with the Swedish dog in a cage and Hakon’s blood still cool.” She sat up, the furs rustling. “You must be there. To refuse is to declare yourself outside the shield-wall. Hakon would kill you for that alone, and the law would side with him.”
Nick pushed himself up. The warmth where their bodies had joined was already fading, replaced by the pervasive chill of the hut and the heavier cold settling back into his core. They dressed in silence, their movements practical, hurried. Their fingers brushed as she handed him his tunic, a last point of contact that felt electric.
Outside, the world was painted in the bruised purples and deep oranges of late dusk. A line of men was already moving towards the longhouse, their faces grim in the failing light. Nick and Astrid fell into the stream, not together, but near one another. Leif materialized at Nick’s elbow, his eyes wide.
“It’s happening,” Leif breathed, his earlier anxiety replaced by a sort of dreadful awe. “The berserkers are already painted. Bjorn looks… gone.”
In the broad space before the great hall’s doors, a fire had been built in a shallow stone pit. The flames were still young, licking hungrily at the dry wood and casting long, dancing shadows. The men formed a loose ring around it. Eirik stood before the doors, a broad silhouette against the torch-lit interior. Beside him, Skarde held a small iron bowl. Bjorn stood a pace behind, his massive chest bare and streaked with ashes and something darker. His eyes were fixed on the middle distance, seeing nothing in this world.
Nick took his place at the outer edge of the circle. He felt the weight of stares. Hakon stood directly across the fire, his arms crossed, his face a mask of grim satisfaction. This was his arena. These were his rituals.
Eirik’s voice, when it came, carried over the drumbeat and the crackle of the fire. It wasn’t a roar. It was a low, carrying chant that silenced everything else.
“The Svear come for our homes,” he intoned, his gaze sweeping the ring. “They come for our women. They come to put our children in the dirt.” He paused, letting the image settle. “They think we are tired. They think we are divided.” His eyes flicked, just for an instant, to Hakon, then to Nick. A warning. A command. “We will show them they are wrong.”
He drew the seax from his belt. The firelight ran like liquid down its blade. He held out his left palm, and with a quick, practiced motion, drew the sharp edge across it. A dark line welled up instantly, brimming over and dripping onto the packed earth. He didn’t flinch.
“My blood for Bergen,” he said, his voice hardening. “My life for yours. My death for your vengeance. This I swear with Odin as witness.”
One by one, the seasoned warriors stepped forward. Hakon went first, cutting his palm with a violent jerk, his good eye locked on Nick as his blood fell. “I swear,” he growled. Bjorn stepped up, lost in his trance, and sliced his own flesh without a sound, his blood black in the firelight. Each man made his cut, spoke his oath, and then, following Eirik’s lead, pressed his bleeding palm against the wood and iron face of his shield. A dark, personal blotch stained each one, a promise sealed in iron and oak.
The drumbeat was a steady, pounding heart. The air grew thick with the smell of woodsmoke and the sharp, metallic scent of fresh blood. Leif watched Nick, his own face pale, his hands clenched at his sides. He wasn’t a sworn warrior yet. He was a witness, a disciple recording every detail of his Frost-Bearer’s path.
Nick’s turn came. He felt the circle’s attention tighten like a noose. He stepped forward. Eirik held out the seax, hilt-first. The blade was sticky with many men’s blood. Nick took it. The handle was warm from Eirik’s grip. He looked at his own left palm, the lines unfamiliar yet not, faint scars from other lives crisscrossing the skin. The cold in his chest was a silent, watchful pool.
He drew the blade across. The pain was bright, sharp, and clarifying. His blood, darker than he expected, welled up and spilled over the heel of his hand. It felt more real than anything in weeks.
“My strength for this wall,” he said, the words coming to him from nowhere and everywhere. “My cold for their fire. This I swear.” He wasn’t sure who he swore to. The old gods? The spiral? The woman standing in the shadows behind him? It didn’t matter. The oath felt true.
He turned to the shield Leif had nervously brought for him—a plain, borrowed piece of equipment. He pressed his bleeding palm against the cold wood. The stain spread, a lopsided handprint that seeped into the grain.
As he stepped back, Astrid moved. She wasn’t part of the warrior’s circle, but no one stopped her. She walked straight to Nick, ignoring the stares, holding a narrow strip of soft, grey leather. She took his bleeding left hand in hers. Her touch was clinical, firm. She wiped the excess blood away with a corner of her tunic, not gently, then wrapped the leather strap tightly around his palm and wrist, covering the cut. She tied it with a swift, efficient knot, her fingers brushing the inside of his wrist.
She looked up, meeting his eyes. Her own were fierce, glistening in the firelight. “Come back,” she said, her voice low but clear in the sudden quiet.
A faint, weary smile touched Nick’s lips. An old, automatic response rose from some deep, recycled part of him. “I always do,” he answered.
And as the words left his mouth, he knew it was a lie. He’d told it before. In other tongues, on other fields, to other faces blurred by time. It was the lie of the soldier, the survivor, the one who walks away. He knew with a cold certainty that this time, the ledger might come due.
The gods listen.
They always do before war.
Across the fire, Hakon watched the binding, watched the intimacy of the act. His remaining eye narrowed, a hot, jealous coal in the painted dark. The oath-taking was done. The shields were stained. The drumbeat ceased, leaving a ringing silence.
Hakon took one step forward, into the center of the ring by the fire. He didn't look at Eirik for permission. The time for that was past.
He pointed his blood-crusted hand at Nick, his voice slicing the dusk. “Now, stranger. Now we settle what is mine.”
The challenge, held in the smithy’s spark-filled air, was now spoken. The fire popped, sending a spray of embers skyward. The circle of men tightened, becoming an arena. Leif’s breath hitched. Astrid’s hand fell from Nick’s wrist, but her presence at his back was a brand.
Nick stepped forward to meet him.
=====
The circle was complete. No spears marked its edge, only men and the wall of their silence. Hakon crouched slightly, his weight on the balls of his feet. He drew his sax, the heavy-bladed fighting knife catching the fire in a bloody wink.
Nick held his ground. He had no weapon. He had not thought to ask for one, and none had been offered. This was not a duel of arms. This was a thing of hands, teeth, and owned earth.
“No blade, ghost?” Hakon sneered, a thread of saliva connecting his lip. “Or are your hands enough for her, but not for me?”
He lunged.
It wasn’t a clean fighter’s move. It was pure aggression, a bull-rush meant to end it fast. Nick sidestepped, the rush of air brushing his side. Hakon’s momentum carried him past, and Nick pivoted, using the man’s own speed to shove him hard between the shoulder blades.
Hakon stumbled, caught himself on one knee, and snarled. The men grunted. It was not the start they’d expected.
“He moves like smoke,” a voice muttered from the ring.
Hakon rose slowly, turned. His face was mottled with rage. The humiliation burned hotter than the fire. He came again, more carefully this time, his knife hand held low and close. He feinted a slash at Nick’s belly, then reversed, aiming the hardened knuckles of his free hand at Nick’s temple.
Nick saw the feint, saw the knuckles coming. He didn’t block. He dropped. He went under the swing, coming up inside Hakon’s guard, his shoulder driving into the man’s solar plexus.
The air left Hakon’s lungs with a pained whoosh. Before he could bring the sax down on Nick’s back, Nick hammered an uppercut into the soft flesh under his ribcage.
Hakon staggered back, gasping, his single eye wide with surprise and pain.
Nick gave him no room. The cold spiral in his chest was a humming crystal now, dictating angles, dictating fracture points. He was not fighting a man. He was solving a problem of violence. He closed, his foot hooking behind Hakon’s ankle.
They fell together in a heap of limbs, crashing onto the hard-packed earth. Dust and ash plumed. The world narrowed to the smell of sweat and blood, the ragged sound of their breathing, the bony press of an opponent’s body.
Hakon was stronger. He writhed beneath Nick, muscles bunching like coiled rope. He bucked, and Nick slid. Hakon’s free hand, the one slick with his oath-blood, clawed for Nick’s face. Thick fingers dug for his eyes.
Nick jerked his head back, the nails raking his cheek. He tasted iron where one scratch broke the skin. He retaliated by driving a knee, hard, into Hakon’s groin.
The blow connected with a sickening thud. Hakon’s body arched, a choked scream ripping from his throat. His grip on the sax faltered.
Nick seized the opportunity. His left hand, still bound in Astrid’s leather, shot out and clamped around Hakon’s wrist, pinning the knife hand to the dirt. He put all his weight on it.Bones ground. Hakon roared, fury overriding pain.
The man’s free hand, blood-slicked and desperate, scrambled at his own belt. It came up clutching something small and dark.Not metal. Bone.
He drove it towards Nick’s neck.
Nick saw the polished tip of an antler tine, sharpened to a needle point. An improvised dagger, illegal in a fair fight. A gutter’s weapon.
There was no time to think. The spiral flared. Nick’s head snapped forward. Not away. Into the strike.
His forehead met the bridge of Hakon’s nose with a wet, crunching sound like a walnut cracking.
Cartilage and bone gave way. Blood erupted, hot and sudden, soaking Nick’s face, filling his vision. Hakon’s good eye rolled white with shock. His body went limp for a crucial second. The bone dagger fell from his slackening fingers.
Nick’s right hand, the one still clean, scrabbled in the dirt. His fingers closed on a rock. Not large, but jagged. A fist-sized piece of the earth they were fighting for.
Hakon was shaking his head, trying to clear it, blinking through the mask of his own blood.
Nick raised the rock.
He brought it down.
Not on Hakon’s head. On the man’s knife wrist, which still thrashed under his pinning grip.
The impact was terrible. A single, sickening crunch.
The sax fell from Hakon’s shattered hand. A low, guttural moan of pure agony seeped from him. His body convulsed.
Nick released the rock. He stood up, breathing heavily. The cold in his chest was a quiet triumph, clinical and remote. He looked down at the broken warrior. Blood from Hakon’s shattered nose dripped steadily onto the earth, merging with his oath-stain.
Silence held the ring, thicker than before. It wasn’t approval. It was something colder: acknowledgement. He had won, not with glorious skill, but with brutal pragmatism. He had chosen fracture points.
Leif’s face was a mixture of ecstasy and horror. Bjorn’s trance was broken; the berserker stared at Nick with a new, unsettling curiosity. Eirik, watching from the hall doors, showed no expression at all. He was accounting the cost, weighing the utility of a man who could break another’s hand with a stone.
Skarde stood apart, near a barrel lit by a solitary torch. His stylus was already moving across a wax tablet, the scratching faint and frantic.
Hakon tried to push himself up with his good hand, failed, and collapsed back into the dirt. A helpless, keening sound escaped him. The kind of sound that would never leave a saga-song. The sound of a shield broken.
Nick turned away. He began walking, not towards Astrid, but towards the edge of the settlement, towards the blackness where the land met the sea. He needed the dark, the cold salt air to scour the scent of blood and fractured bone from his nostrils.
“Nick.”
Astrid caught his arm just beyond the firelight’s reach. Her grip wasn't gentle. She spun him to face her. Her pale eyes scanned his face, the new scratches, the bloody smear from Hakon’s nose, the cold, vacant cast of his gaze.
“Look at me,” she demanded, her voice low and fierce.
He blinked. The grey in his eyes seemed to swirl, then settle. He focused on her face.
“You’re still here,” she said, not a question. An affirmation.
He exhaled, and a shudder ran through him. The clinical distance receded, replaced by a wave of fatigue and the raw memory of the rock’s impact in his hand. “Yeah.”
She pulled him then, not towards the huts, but around the back of the mead hall, into the deep, narrow shadows between the timber wall and the stockade. It was a space only used for pissing, strewn with damp straw.
She didn’t speak. She pressed him back against the cold, rough-hewn wood of the hall. Her hands went to his face, cradling it, her thumbs wiping clumsily at Hakon’s blood on his cheek. Then she kissed him.
This was different from before. It was not the desperate gorging of the hut. This was a claiming. A branding. It was teeth and tongue and a furious, possessive energy that said you are mine, you came back, you are alive, and I need to feel it.
Her mouth opened under his and he groaned, his own hunger rising, hot and urgent, to meet hers. He needed to erase the feel of breaking bone, the sound of that moan. He needed this dirt, this life, her.
He grabbed her hips, yanking her against him. The hard ridge of his cock, already full and aching, pressed into the softness of her belly through their clothes. She gasped into his mouth.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Fuck. Now.”
Her hands dropped, fumbling with his trousers. He helped, unlacing them with frantic fingers, pushing them down just enough to free himself. The cool night air brushed his heated skin. She shoved at her own trousers, shoving them down over her thighs. There was no time for more.
She turned, bracing her hands against the wall, presenting herself to him. The curve of her arse was pale in the gloom.
“Do it,” she panted, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes wild.“Hard. Fucking ruin me. Make me forget everything but this.”
He needed no more invitation. He stepped forward, his hand guiding the thick head of his cock. He found her entrance, slick and hot already, and pushed inside with one relentless, deep stroke.
She cried out, a sharp, ragged sound muffled by the wall. She was so tight, her cunt clutching him like a hot, wet fist. He buried himself to the hilt, his balls tight against her. For a second he didn't move, just reveled in the complete, searing fullness, the shocking reality of her.
Then he withdrew and plunged back in.
He set a brutal, driving pace from the start. This was not lovemaking. This was exorcism. Each slap of his hips against her arse was a beat driving out the memory of the fight. The wet, filthy sound of their coupling was all he wanted to hear.
“Harder,” she grunted, pushing back against him. “Yes, you bastard, just like that. So deep. I feel you in my fucking guts.”
He gripped her hip with one hand, tangled the other in her braids at the nape of her neck. He fucked her with a focused, animalistic intensity. Every thrust was a punctuation mark on the violence he'd just committed. Here. Alive. Mine.
His cock slid in and out of her dripping channel, the friction unbearable, glorious. She was so wet for him, her juices coating his length, making the slide smooth and obscene.
“Gonna come,” he ground out, the words ripped from him. The coil in his belly was a white-hot spring. “Astrid…”
“Come in me,” she demanded, her voice trembling with her own rising pleasure. “Fill me up.Mark me. Do it.”
Her words shattered the last of his control. With a harsh, guttural cry he slammed into her one last time, pulsing deep inside her as his orgasm tore through him. Hot jet after hot jet of cum spurted into her depths, and he shuddered violently, his forehead dropping against her shoulder blades.
The pulsing of his cock inside her triggered her own release. She clenched around him, her cunt milking him through his own pleasure, and she let out a choked scream against her own arm, her body shaking with the force of it.
They stayed like that, joined, panting, for long moments, the chill of the night finally seeping into their sweat-slicked skin.
Slowly, he softened and slipped out of her. A trickle of their combined wetness traced down the inside of her thigh. They righted their clothes in silence, movements clumsy in the dark. There were no tender words. Her hand found his again, gave it one hard squeeze. It was enough.
They walked back towards the main path. The fire in the oath-ring was burning low. The men had dispersed, taking Hakon away. Only a few remained. Eirik was gone.
Skarde approached Nick quietly, stepping from where he’d been a witness in the deeper shadows. The wax tablet was tucked under his arm. He didn’t look at Astrid; his sharp eyes were only for Nick.
“Songs will be sung of you,” he said, his voice a dry whisper.
Nick looked toward the dark sea, invisible beyond the stockade but felt as a vast, breathing presence. “Do you want them true—or glorious?”
“True,” Nick answered, the word tasting of ash, blood, and salt.
Skarde nodded slowly. “Then they’ll be dangerous.” He brought the tablet forward, lifted his stylus. He began to write anyway, the sound a tiny, persistent scratching against the night.