Skalk looked at him.
“It is hard to tell exactly, you understand,” Skalk said. “Here a leg, there an arm, elsewhere just a bloodstain.” He looked up at the star-flecked sky. “Perhaps as many as thirty.”
Murmurs rippled around the Bloodsworn.
“That is a lot of dead, which means a lot of vaesen, most likely,” a new voice said, quiet and sinuous. It was Vol, standing beside Glornir. “They must have crossed from beyond the Bonebacks, and that means finding a way past the Grimholt. Past your tower of guards. How is that possible?”
Skalk turned a heavy-browed look upon Vol, eyes abruptly cold and hard.
“I am not accustomed to answering the questions of thralls,” he said, “or hearing their criticisms.”
Glornir straightened, and Varg felt a shift around him, a sudden tension in the air that made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
“It is not a criticism,” Vol said, speaking slowly and ignoring Skalk’s insults, “just an observation. If vaesen have found a way through the Bonebacks…”
“I am not being clear,” Skalk said, glowering at Vol. “You are a thrall. Do not speak to me unless I give you permission.”
“Vol has saved my ship and my crew more times than I can count,” Glornir said with a glare. “Thrall, freedman, all on my ship risk their lives, and will be respected for that. If you choose to travel on my ship, with my crew, you will give her the same respect as any other of my Bloodsworn. Or we are going to have a problem. Do I make myself clear?”
Skalk stiffened, and his guards, Olvir and Yrsa, shifted. Fingertips twitched, brushed a sword hilt.
“She is a Tainted thrall,” Skalk said with a sneer.
Glornir shrugged. “I am not in the habit of repeating my words,” he said.
“Neither am I.”
“It is my ship, and my crew. You can always walk from here,” Glornir said.
“It’s my coin,” Skalk said, his voice quiet now, cold.
“Queen Helka’s coin,” Glornir replied. “If you want to pay someone else for your vaesen-hunting.” Glornir gave a thin smile, holding Skalk’s gaze.
There was a long, drawn-out moment, and then Skalk smiled. “As you wish. You will do the fighting, and the dying if there is any to be done, so…” A shift in his shoulders suggested the matter meant nothing to him. “I will ignore the collar about your thrall’s throat.” He looked around at the gathered Bloodsworn, his easy smile back on his face. “That is all I know. We shall travel there together and root out the vaesen-filth. And Queen Helka will show her gratitude to you with a chest of silver.”
Skalk stepped around Glornir to the iron cookpot hanging over the fire and ladled some fish stew into a bowl, then walked away, Olvir and Yrsa following.
Varg sat and stared at his own bowl, his thought-cage whirling.
Galdurmen and vaesen. I am sailing into an adventure, hunting trolls or wights or whatever the Boneback Mountains are hiding.
A shiver ran through him.
Troll-hunting is a long way from Kolskegg’s farm.
There was a humming in his blood: fear or excitement, he was not sure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ELVAR
Elvar sat on a patch of wind-blasted bone high on Snaka’s skull, staring out over the fjord of Snakavik far below as the sun rose behind her. Tendrils of mist coiled like serpents around the cliffs that edged the fjord, gulls swirling small as motes of dust, and the fjord glistened in the new sun.
Grend lay snoring beside her, wrapped in his cloak.
Elvar stood, breathing out a long sigh, and buckled on her weapons belt, the familiar weight of sword and seax settling around her waist and hips.
“Come on,” she said, nudging Grend with her toe.
“Could have chosen somewhere warmer to sit and think,” he muttered as he climbed to his feet, then looked at her. “I hope it has helped?”
“It has,” she said, striding off.
They made their way over thick ridges of bone, until they came to the skull tunnel. Grend nodded to guards bearing Jarl St?rr’s yellow shields as smoke and firelight wrapped around them and they descended through Snaka’s thick skull into the town below.
Elvar walked in silence, chewing over her thoughts, working through all that Hrung had said. Like her father, he said far more with the words he did not speak, but with Hrung Elvar knew that there was an impartial truth wrapped within his words that she had never been able to uncover in her father’s.
Grend walked quietly beside her, something that Elvar always valued in his company. He never pushed or hurried her, always followed, whether he agreed or not.