All around him combat was raging, horses rearing, neighing, the Bloodsworn standing solid in their shield wall. Here and there were a few fractured fights: Edel and her hounds bringing down a horse.
“Berser’s hairy arse, what are you doing up there?” Svik called up to him, a savage grin on his blood-spattered face.
Varg just stared down at him.
Horns were blowing, warriors with blue-painted shields pouring on to the dockside. Jarl Logur was there, bellowing orders, but the fighting had already stopped, both Bloodsworn and druzhina standing and staring out into the fjord.
There, three huge, sleek drakkar were gliding across the water, horns blowing from their decks. Their black sails bore the image of an eagle, wings spread, beak and talons striking.
Even Varg knew whose banner that was.
Queen Helka had come to Liga.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ORKA
Orka walked through the gates of her steading. The flames had burned out, much of the hall collapsed, some pillars and timbers still standing, black and twisted like diseased bones. Smoke hung in the air, churning sluggishly in a breeze. She walked to Thorkel’s body, lying with his axe in his fist, his eyes staring and sightless. A fresh wave of grief wracked her, a spasm in her belly, and she turned and bent over, vomiting on to the ground.
“Mistress,” a voice squeaked, and Orka saw a movement by the stream: Vesli the tennúr kneeling beside the limp form of Spert upon his rock. She spat, cuffing bile from her chin, and strode over to them, feeling the wounds in her back, shoulder and waist pulling. Small bodies littered the ground around the stream, a dozen tennúr lying twisted in death. There was one man, too, dressed like the ones Orka had fought by the river, in wool and leather. Woodsman’s clothing. He lay upon the ground, a spear by his side, one foot in the stream, mouth open in a rictus scream. Half of his face was black and blistered, veins dark and protruding, spiralling out like a cobweb. At the swelling’s centre there was a small, round wound, like a pinprick.
Spert’s sting, Orka realised. She had seen what it did to intruders before.
“Spert is alive,” Vesli said. She had cleaned the wound on her head and washed the blood away to reveal a ragged gash that stretched from her forehead up and along the crown of her skull. It had not been made with a sharp blade; it looked more like she had been chewed by razored teeth.
Orka looked at Spert. The chitinous segments of his long body were rising and falling with shallow breaths, the wound in his side covered with black congealing ichor. Orka frowned. The wound had been stitched, some kind of pale thread weaving through the segments around the gash, pulling them tighter. And a strange substance coated the wound, thick and opaque, like boiled glue. Vesli had soaked water into a linen bandage for Spert and was dripping it slowly into his mouth.
“You have stitched his wound?” Orka said.
Vesli nodded, looked at Orka and saw the bloodstains on her tunic.
“Vesli help you, too. Vesli good at fixing wounds.”
I am good at giving them, Orka thought.
Spert’s bulbous eyes fluttered open at the sound of Orka’s voice.
“Mistress,” he wheezed.
Vesli shifted, wings spreading, and she fluttered around to Orka’s back and shoulder, hovering, sharp fingers surprisingly gentle as she pulled back the tunic to inspect Orka’s wound. She used the linen bandage in her hand to clean the deep laceration, then there was a spitting sound and Vesli was rubbing something into the wound. Whatever it was, in a few heartbeats the throbbing pain across Orka’s back and shoulder began to fade.
Orka kneeled beside the vaesen, resting a hand on his head. “I am here,” she said.
“Spert sorry. Spert tried,” the creature croaked. “Spert kill many vaesen, but nasty Maeur stab Spert with a spear.” He coughed, a ripple through his body, black ichor leaking from his mouth.
Orka glanced at the man’s corpse by the stream.
You made him pay for that.
Vesli fluttered to the ground, sharp fingers tugging at Orka’s tunic so that the vaesen could look at the cut along Orka’s waist. She clicked her tongue, soaked and squeezed out the linen bandage in the stream and set about cleaning that wound, too.
“You did well, Spert,” Orka said, letting Vesli work. “Rest, now. Recover.”
“Breca?” Spert said, looking up at Orka. Vesli paused in her tending of Orka’s wound.
Orka drew in a deep breath, then found that she couldn’t say the words.
He is gone.
“What happened here?” she asked, instead.