“This is one of your twisted jests,” Varg said.
“No jest,” Svik shook his head. He stepped closer to Varg and tugged on his red beard, an abrupt intensity in his gaze. A change came over his face, a subtle shifting of features, the angles sharpening. His eyes, always so blue, swirled and clouded, shifting to a greenish yellow, and the teeth in his mouth changed, suddenly small and sharp-edged.
“You see,” Svik smiled. A toothy grin.
Varg stumbled back and collided with the wall.
“There will come a time when you can control the beast in your blood, summon it when it is needed. But you are a long way from that,” Svik said. He cracked his neck and his eyes shifted back to blue; his teeth reverted to normal.
“This can’t be true,” Varg said, shaking his head. “You and Glornir, Tainted…”
“It is true,” Svik said, “but not just Glornir and me. All of the Bloodsworn. We are all god-touched.”
Varg looked from Svik to R?kia to Einar. R?kia nodded, and Einar looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Varg.
“Welcome, brother,” Einar said.
“Brother?” Varg whispered.
“Aye,” a voice from the far door said. It was Edel, standing in the entrance with her two wolfhounds. “You are Tainted, Varg No-Sense.” She reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a linen rag, black with dried, crusted blood. She held it up. “This was used to tend your cuts after you fought Einar, in Liga. Hundur the hound lives in my veins, and I could smell the wolf in you the moment your blood was spilled.”
“Wolf,” Varg mumbled.
“Aye, Ulfrir lives in your veins,” R?kia said. “You are úlfhéenar, like me.” A shy smile touched her lips.
“No,” Varg said.
“Search yourself,” R?kia said. “All your life you have hidden it, suppressed it, no? But it has always been there. A whisper in your thought-cage. A howling in your blood. A fierceness, a red mist that gives you strength and speed when you need it most.” She looked pointedly down at Olvir’s corpse, his throat open, and Varg remembered waking up on Kolskegg’s farm, seeing Kolskegg and a handful of his freedmen dead, blood everywhere. Kolskegg’s throat had been torn out.
“You know it to be true,” R?kia said.
Varg stared at them all, felt the world spinning in his thought-cage, his gut twisting, found it hard to breath, as if the walls were pressing in upon him, squeezing him, crushing the air from his lungs. He bent over and vomited, wiped his mouth and stumbled away, pushing past Edel and out through the door.
A tunnel split two ways, but he just followed the path in front of him, stumbling. He spilled into a larger chamber, his footfalls taking wing and echoing like a swarm of bats. In the hall’s centre was a huge slab of rock, roughly chiselled. Great chain links had been hammered into it, four iron collars for wrists and ankles. The rock was pitted and scarred like a blacksmith’s apron. Close to the rock Varg saw a handful of Bloodsworn around a hearth fire. They raised hands to him in greeting.
“Air,” he grunted.
They pointed to a tunnel and Varg ran through it, the path climbing, and then he saw light and burst out into the bright day, fell to his knees and gasped in fresh, clean air. He still had his belt clutched in one fist, weapons hanging from it, and his pouch.
I am Tainted. He knew it was true, the thought a dark, malignant cloud in his thought-cage. He did not want to believe it, felt ashamed, sickened, repulsed. Tainted. Lower than a thrall, only good to be hunted, enslaved, used. But he knew it was true, his whole life fitting together, making sense, like a key fitting into a lock.
He looked up and saw the muddy glade was busy with Bloodsworn. A hearth fire burned, a pot hanging over it, and elsewhere warriors were saddling and harnessing a line of horses. The body of the troll lay close to Varg, where it had fallen, but the other dead had been carried to one side of the glade and laid out side by side: skraelings, warriors, thralls. The warriors had been stripped of their war gear.
A line of thralls stood close to the hearth fire, at their head a man using hammer and a chisel to free them of their iron collars. He looked up and Varg saw it was J?kul. He saw Varg and handed the hammer and chisel to another Bloodsworn, then strode to the hearth fire, where he spooned porridge into a bowl and walked towards Varg. A bandage was still around J?kul’s head.
“They have told you, then,” the smith said as he squatted beside Varg.
Varg grunted, nodded.
“Here, you look like you need a good meal.”