A dozen or so people sat at tables, mostly sailors from docked ships and a couple of whores smiling at men deep in their cups. Closest to her was a man sitting and stirring a bowl of stew. One side of his head was burn-scarred, what hair he had left on his head tied back tight at his neck. A short-axe and seax hung from his belt, and Orka spied the hilt of another seax poking from his boot.
“Want something to eat?” a serving girl asked her, a young girl in a dirty hangerock over a threadbare tunic.
“No,” Orka said. The girl moved to turn away, but Orka pulled her hand from her belt and rolled a bronze coin on the table. The sound of it drew the girl’s gaze like carrion calls to crows.
“If you want a man, or a woman, I can find one for you,” the serving girl said. A pause. “I finish soon…”
“I’m looking for someone,” Orka said.
“Who?”
“Drekr,” Orka said, loudly enough to fill the room.
The serving girl blinked; other heads turned, looking Orka’s way for a moment.
“Don’t know anyone that goes by that name,” she muttered, turning and hurrying off. She glanced at the burned man as she passed him, but he continued to stare at his bowl of stew. Slowly he lifted the spoon and slurped a mouthful. The girl reached the bar, where what looked like the landlord dragged her close and had a hissing conversation with her.
Orka took a sip from her cup.
The landlord strode around the bar towards her. He was balding, with a flat nose and red veined cheeks. On his belt he wore a seax in a worn leather scabbard.
“You should go,” he said.
“I’m minding my own business,” Orka said, “and I haven’t drunk this jar of horse-piss that I have paid for, yet.” She lifted the cup and sipped, twisting her lips.
“Have your coin back,” he said, flipping her a half-copper. “Don’t need your sort round here.”
“My sort?” Orka said.
“Out,” he grunted, his hand going to the hilt of his seax.
Orka stood, her chair scraping, and rose to her full height, looking down at him. She was a head taller, and wider as well. He took a step back, a ripple of fear crossing his face, his eyes flickering to the burned man and then back to Orka.
“Don’t want no trouble,” he said sullenly.
Orka walked past him and out through the tavern door into a face full of hissing rain. It was dark, which meant it was somewhere between midnight and dawn, as the summer nights were lengthening towards solstice. Orka turned left and walked on twenty or thirty paces, then turned into a shadowed alley that ran between the tavern and the next building. She stood and waited, hidden in darkness, leaning against a wattle and daub wall at an angle where she could see the street in front of the tavern’s entrance. After a count of a hundred the tavern door creaked and a figure stepped out, looked both ways, then turned right and walked away. It was the burned man.
Orka followed him.
She kept at a distance, clinging to the shadows. Despite the hour the streets were busy, song and laughter echoing out from numerous taverns, drunks stumbling, traders shouting to sell their wares, spits of rabbit and squirrel turning over fires that hissed in the rain, soups and stews steaming in cauldrons. The burned man walked through a series of wide, bustling streets, seemingly in a half-circle around the base of the hill the fortress of Darl was built upon. Canals had been carved into the land, feeding from the river like leeches, and the burned man led Orka past a host of moored ships, boathouses and barns. The acrid stench of a tanner’s yard clawed up her nose and she saw a courtyard with skins pinned and stretched upon frames ready for scraping. It was quieter here. The burned man was turning again and they were soon back in a street full of taverns, torchlight flickering, deeper shadows in the alleys, whores and cutpurses plying their trades. Mud sucked at Orka’s boots.
The burned man stopped at a large tavern, a sign creaking above the entrance painted with a red-wounded warrior and runes. Orka moved a few steps closer to see through the rain, then stopped, merging with the shadows at the entrance to an alley. The tavern was called The Dead Drengr. Three figures stood outside, two of them men in wool and leather, both tall and thickset, one bald and with a cudgel in his hand. He nodded to the burned man.
The other figure was a woman, clothed in a brynja and cloak, the bulk of a sword visible beneath the cloak. She had a shield slung over her back, painted black with gold eagle wings spread.
One of Helka’s drengrs.
She stepped in front of the burned man, but the bald man with the cudgel said something and she moved aside.