“Mercy, lord,” the thrall hissed. “I serve you,” she groaned, and crawled towards Jarl Sigrún, touching her forehead to the jarl’s boots.
Jarl Sigrún nodded, then looked up from the thrall to Virk’s body. His sons were kneeling beside him, weeping.
“Give us justice,” the older one, Mord, said to Jarl Sigrún.
“Your father broke the holmganga,” she said. “All at this Althing heard: Virk and Guevarr agreed to fight to submission. Guevarr submitted, and yet Virk lifted his blade for a death-wound.”
“He was goaded by that… nieing,” Lif, the younger son said, pointing at Guevarr.
“Be careful, child,” Guevarr said, back on his feet now, Arild binding his shoulder, “else I shall challenge you to holmganga, too.”
“Silence,” Jarl Sigrún snapped at Guevarr, who looked sulkily away.
“Virk broke the holmganga, so justice has been done,” Sigrún said to Lif and Mord. “Though…” she glanced at the thrall and shook her head. “Wrap your father’s body and take him from here.” She looked up at the gathered crowd. “The Althing will break awhile, to allow Virk’s kin to do what is proper.”
“Help me get them out of here, before they get themselves killed,” Thorkel said quietly to Orka as he strode over to Virk’s two sons.
“Here,” Thorkel said, unfastening the pin of his brooch and laying his cloak across Virk.
Orka grabbed Breca’s hand and pulled him with her, and together they helped Mord and Lif to wrap Virk’s body.
When they were done, the four of them lifted Virk’s body on to their shoulders and carried him from the clearing, Mord and Lif weeping quietly. As they turned a bend in the path Orka looked back. The crowd were raising the hazel rods and filling the square, heated conversations spiralling, a space left around the dark patch of Virk’s blood. Sigrún was talking to Guevarr, and the thrall was sitting at Sigrún’s feet. She was watching Orka and the others, and at the same time she raised one of her seaxes to her mouth and licked the blood from it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VARG
Varg walked into the mead hall. He was exhausted, sweat stinging his eyes, his filthy tunic clinging to him, every limb aching as if they were filled with lead. R?kia had kept him working in the courtyard long after everyone else had finished their sparring and filtered away. The only thing that had stopped her maniacally training him through nightfall and on until dawn was a shouted order from some disembodied voice that Varg suspected was Glornir. He seemed to be the only person that R?kia would take an order from.
It was dark now, and torches were lit in the mead hall, flames flickering, shadows dancing and smoke hanging thick in the rafters. Thralls were preparing the mead benches for supper.
Varg saw his cloak was still folded as a pillow behind a column, so he picked it up.
“Sit there,” R?kia said from behind him, where she walked with Svik, the two of them whispering some muted conversation. Varg swayed, put a hand on the bench to steady himself and looked where R?kia was pointing. There was a space on the end of one long bench, the furthest point from the high table. Varg sat without thinking. R?kia and Svik strode past him and R?kia paused, turning to look down at him.
“You have fought before,” she said to him.
“Yes,” Varg admitted, “but only with my fists.”
“Huh,” R?kia grunted.
“And with your teeth,” Svik added, his smile twitching his red beard. “As is evidenced by the teeth marks in Einar Half-Troll’s leg, and his limp.”
Varg shrugged.
Svik laughed.
R?kia walked away.
“You did well,” Svik said before he followed her.
“I fear I may die,” Varg muttered, finding it hard to even control the movements of his jaw.
“We are all born to die,” Svik called back over his shoulder.
The hall began to fill, men and women entering, all setting their shields and spears around the halls’ outskirts and taking their places on the mead benches as thralls were filling the long tables with food and drink: bowls of creamy skyr yoghurt and curds, pots of honey. Boards were full of dried and smoked sliced mutton, trenchers of rabbit and beef, slabs of whale meat and barrels of horsemeat floating in whey. Fresh-baked bread, still hot from the ovens. Dried cod, pungent and salty. Herring fermented in brine, blood pudding, cauldrons of stew glistening with fat and bobbing with carrots, parsnips and onion, and horns of warm mead spiced with juniper to wash it all down. Varg had never seen so much food and drink in all his life, the scents almost overwhelming. His stomach growled like a bear waking in his cave.