The burned man entered the tavern.
Orka stood in the shadows, watching, waiting, thinking, the rain soaking into her hood and cloak. Grey light began to leak into the street, the herald of dawn.
Then she was slipping into an alley. It was empty apart from rats, and she emerged on the far side to see the glitter of an oil-black canal dappled with rainfall, boats moored and bumping gently on the water. She crept along the back wall of a building, and then she was at the rear of The Dead Drengr. A high wattle wall and gates enclosed a courtyard, stables and other outbuildings. Orka heard the whicker of horses. A voice.
“Move,” the voice said, and then a figure emerged from the open gate. It was a man, tall and thickset like the two on the tavern’s front door, a hood pulled up over his head, a wooden staff in his hands. Behind him walked a line of children: seven, eight, more, all in cloaks and hoods, their hands bound at the wrists. Orka could hear some of the children crying. Another man followed at their rear.
The first man reached a boat moored on the canal and jumped in, ushering the children after him, spitting out sharp commands. An awning had been rigged across the rear half of the boat behind the oar-bench, and the first children clambered underneath the woollen sheet. One refused to climb on to the boat and just fell to her knees, sobbing. The man at the rear cuffed the child and hoisted her up by her hair, throwing her into the boat.
Orka cursed herself for leaving her spear in the room she’d rented earlier, but she had wanted to look as inconspicuous as possible. Her hands checked over her other weapons, an old habit. She had bought plain scabbards for the two seaxes she had pulled from Thorkel’s body, and now one of them was hanging from the front of her belt across her hips, and the other was nestled in the small of her back. She checked the draw on both, that they would not stick, and then lifted her hand-axe from the loop on her belt.
Without conscious thought she was moving, running across a mud-slick path to the canal, her axe in one fist, a seax hissing into the other.
The man on the boat must have glimpsed movement because he stopped pushing children into the boat and looked up at her. Orka’s arm swung and her axe was spinning through the air. It took the man in the face with a wet slap like splitting wood. He fell back and disappeared into the canal with a splash.
The second man stared, frozen for a moment, then turned. He was reaching for an axe at his belt and opening his mouth as Orka hit him. Her seax punched into his belly and she headbutted him across the nose. He gave a grunt and muffled cry as she ripped her blade across his torso, then shoved him hard. He stumbled backwards, blood and intestines spilling at his feet, tripped over the edge of the canal and then he was gone, too, just a widening ripple in the canal to mark his existence.
There was a frozen moment as Orka looked back at the tavern gates, waiting to see if anyone had heard. No movement, no sound.
“Breca?” Orka asked desperately to the children who stood staring at her from the boat, more shadows beneath the awning peering out at her.
“Breca?” she said again, then a child opened her mouth to scream.
“No,” Orka pleaded. “I won’t hurt you. They took my son, Breca. Is he here?”
Another silence, all of the children staring. One snuffled, started to cry again.
“No one called Breca here,” a boy said, with dark curly hair and large eyes. He looked older than the others, with maybe twelve or thirteen winters on his back.
“Are you sure?” Orka said, stepping into the boat. Children cowered away from her and she froze, then pulled her rain-soaked hood back. She was wearing Thorkel’s n?lbinding cap, her blonde hair braided, a coil across one shoulder.
“Anyone here called Breca?” the boy said, looking at his companions. They were all grime-streaked and hollow-eyed. Some shook their heads; others just stared.
“There are others,” a girl said. “Like us.”
“What do you mean?” Orka said. “Where? Here? Come close. I’ll cut your bonds,” she added and squatted down.
The girl took a hesitant step towards her and held her arms out, tied at the wrists. “I heard Bersi talking about them.”
“Bersi?” Orka said as she raised her seax to the leather cord around the girl’s wrist.
The girl nodded over the side of the boat, a twist of revulsion creasing her face and she spat where the man who had received Orka’s axe in the face had fallen. Orka lamented the loss of her axe.
I will find another.
“Bersi was talking about others like us, that had been kept in there.” The girl looked at the tavern. “They’re gone now.”