A silence settled over the room. Outside, pigs snorted and the wheels of a cart turned, the donkey finally deciding to move. Orka emptied her drinking horn.
“Why kill them all but one?” Lif said into the quiet as he stitched.
“The one would tell me where my Breca is. They would see what I have done to their friends and comrades, would know what I could do to them. They would be likely to tell me the truth.”
“See,” Lif said, “I told you she was a deep-cunning thinker.”
“Doesn’t sound like wolf-cunning to me,” Mord muttered, staring out the window.
Nor to me, now it’s had a chance to work its way around my thought-cage.
“That’s done,” Lif said, dropping his fishhook into a bowl of boiled water that was cooling now; they’d used it to sterilise the hook before stitching Orka’s wound. Lif poured more water over Orka’s back and Mord passed him the bowl of yarrow and honey. Lif dripped the herbs and honey on to Orka’s wound and then placed a patch of linen over it, finally wrapping a longer linen bandage around Orka’s shoulder and chest.
“How is that?” Lif asked her.
Orka stood and rolled her shoulder. She felt a twinge of pain, and the stitches tugged a little. She swirled mead around her mouth and spat out blood into the bowl. Put her hand to her nose and blew a clot of blood out. Her lip and nose were split and swollen from where Drekr had headbutted her.
“Good,” Orka said. “My thanks.” She reached for her linen tunic, but Mord thrust another at her.
“Have mine,” he said. “Yours has got a hole in it.”
“Huh,” Orka grunted and took his tunic, shrugging it on. It was a little tight, but she could manage.
“Why were you looking for me?” Orka asked them. “I told you to leave Darl.”
“That is what we planned to do,” Lif said. “We were buying food from traders on Darl’s dockside as you advised, planning to row further north and find some land to farm, fish from the river, and make our deep-cunning plan to end Guevarr next spring.” He looked at Mord.
“And then we saw a ship rowing into Darl’s harbour. Jarl Sigrún’s drakkar, and she was stood at the prow,” Mord said.
“You are sure it was her?” Orka said, frowning.
“Aye,” Lif nodded.
“She had a red-cleaved wound through her face,” Mord added, tugging on his blond beard.
Orka grunted.
“That still does not explain why you came galloping through a street on two horses and dragged me from a fight,” Orka said.
“She is looking for all of us,” Lif said, Mord nodding. “That must be why she is here. So, we sold our boat and bought some horses. Thought that if we could find you and ride inland, away from the River Drammur, where they are clearly searching for us, then we might escape them.”
“You sold your boat and came looking for me, to save me?” Orka said slowly.
“Aye, of course,” Lif said. “You did not know Jarl Sigrún was in Darl. You could have just walked into her and her drengrs.”
“At this point we did not know that you were happy to try killing entire warbands all on your own, you understand,” Mord said.
“And Guevarr could be with her,” Lif added.
“We were trying to think of a plan with more deep-cunning than just walking into a tavern where we would be outnumbered twelve to one and try to put some steel in his belly,” Mord added, a smile twitching his mouth.
“Huh,” Orka said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She sighed and picked at a cut on her forearm, another reminder of Drekr and his axe. She looked at her brynja. It was draped over a chair, a rent across its back, rings shattered and twisted by Drekr’s axe blow.
“I need some rings and rivets,” she said. “And a hammer and tongs.”
Lif and Mord frowned at her. “What for?” Mord asked.
“I don’t want a hole in my brynja if we are going to go back into Darl and try to kill them,” Orka said.
“Kill who?” Lif said.
“All of them.”
Orka stood in a shadowed alley and waited, leaning on her spear, her hood pulled up over her head. She had crept back to the room she had rented alongside a stinking canal, climbed up a wall and through an open shutter to find, to her surprise, that her spear was still there, along with the rest of her kit. Not that there had been much of it.
Lif stood beside her, leaning against a wattle and daub wall and peering around a corner, into the street. Rush torches burned outside a tavern door, pushing back the darkness. It was a crow-dark night, cloud blotting out the moon and stars. People walked in the street, indiscriminate shadows, red-tinged when they passed close to the torchlight.