Elvar looked at Grend and blinked. The old warrior rarely praised anyone or anything, and all in the room knew it.
Grend looked at Thorun. “I would sit down, if I were you.”
Thorun’s hand moved to the hilt of his sword.
Jarl St?rr gave Thorun a dark look. “You will stop your bleating,” he said quietly, “or you will leave.”
Thorun’s glare flickered from Elvar to Grend to his father, finally withering, and he dropped his eyes.
“Good.” Jarl St?rr fixed his heavy-lidded gaze on Elvar. “I came here to speak with you, daughter, of reconciliation. I would have you back at my side.” She opened her mouth, but he held a hand up, silencing her. “Perhaps a marriage alliance with Helka is not the only road to consider. There are other ways to fulfil our ambitions.” He shrugged, his eyes touching on Silrie.
“There is always more than one path through the forest,” Silrie said. “If one is brave enough to search for it, and perhaps strong enough to cut down a few trees.”
Jarl St?rr grunted. “Either way,” he said, “I would have you with me, Elvar St?rrsdottir. Perhaps it is time for you to be given your own drengrs, to lead your own warband.”
Elvar blinked at that, surprise washing away all her anger.
Her father stood.
“Think on that,” he said, “and come to me when you have an answer.”
Elvar stared dumbly at him.
He turned away and walked from the room, Thorun, Broeir, Silrie and his guards following. Broeir hesitated at the doorway, looking back at Elvar.
“Come back to us, sister,” he said, a shy smile spreading across his face. “Thorun’s an arseling, and I have missed you.” Then he was gone.
Gytha snapped an order and the remaining drengrs left the tavern room. She looking at Grend, then closed the tavern door behind her.
Elvar stared down at Grend. She sat down on abruptly weak legs, and then she started laughing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ORKA
“There,” Orka said, pointing at a bank of tall reeds growing thick on the riverbank, little more than a collection of different shadows in the first grey of dawn.
Mord and Lif bent their backs, changing course on the river and rowing their fisher boat towards the reeds. The two brothers were soaked with sweat, exhaustion heavy upon them, though Orka was just as sweat-soaked. She had taken shifts on the oar through the long dark before dawn.
The boat’s prow cut into the reeds and ground on silt, Orka jumping from the prow on to the bank with a splash. She searched a few moments, then saw what she was looking for, her spear shaft pale and grey and straight among the wind-bent reads. She pulled it from the ground and hefted her hemp sack, tied around the shaft, then clambered back into the boat.
Lif looked at her with dark, wide eyes. He was crow-haired and as tall as Virk, his father, but slim and lithe where Virk had been thickset and solid. His beard was patchy, pale skin showing his youth. He could not have seen more than seventeen or eighteen winters.
“What?” Orka grunted.
“Are you hurt?” he said. “You are covered in blood.”
Orka looked over the boat’s side and saw her reflection in the river. Her face and hair were thick with crusted blood. Sweat had carved grooves through it, looking like some runic knotwork. She reached up and pulled a fragment of bone from her hair.
“It is not mine,” she said, remembering her axe and the woman she had slain at the riverbank less than a day ago. It felt like much longer.
“Oh,” Lif breathed. He chose not to give voice to the questions in his eyes.
Mord was slumped across his oar, fresh blood seeping through the bandage around his head. He was more like his father, fair-haired, broad-faced and solid, a thick hedge of beard on his chin. Orka stepped over their stowed mast and touched his shoulder.
He looked up at her. “We need to talk,” he mumbled. “Why have we rowed in one big circle around the fjord?”
“We will talk later,” Orka said. “No time, now. Move,” she grunted, helping him to stand and guiding him on to a pile of rope and net at the stern of the boat. She pushed them out of the reed-bank with her spear, then sat at the bench and hefted Mord’s oar, looking at Lif.
“How much longer? Where are we going?” Lif muttered.
“A little further, then we can look for somewhere safe to camp,” Orka said.
He looked at her with black-rimmed eyes, but only nodded. Together they dipped their oars into the river and pulled.
The boat grated as Orka and Lif dragged it up on to the riverbank, pausing to help Mord clamber out and collapse beneath a willow, then the two of them hauled the boat higher up the riverbank, into a stand of bog myrtle and juniper, almost covering it from sight. Mist curled sluggishly across the river, the morning sun slowly burning it away. Orka stood and looked back the way they had come, the river wide, curling like a serpent through a steep-sided valley before it spilled into the fjord where Fellur village squatted. Beyond the river she saw hills rising towards cliffs; she could still see the spot where her steading lay.