“Are you going to sacrifice that one? Blood must be spilled,” someone says.
“We’ve spilled the blood of plenty,” Jarl Drako says. “This one I am keeping for myself as a breeding mate.”
“You’re going to mix the bloodlines?”
“I am,” he says. “There’s no rule that says we can’t. And even if there was, I would not follow it. No man tells me who I can take for my mate.”
“I understand, Jarl,” the interlocutor says with a placating tone. “I just wondered, given you have turned down so many female suitors over the years, why this scrap of soft humanity has earned the honor of your seed?”
“It’s none of your fucking business, Rakir,” Drako says.
I don’t get to hear why I am more special to him than all the other ladies he rejected, but I already know I’m not. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t love me. I am a trophy. The living embodiment of all the death he has recently inflicted. He’s keeping me like some barbarians keep an ear, or a finger. It’s gross. He’s gross.
As the day begins to wane, and preparations for a grisly feast are almost finished, a long table is set up in a semi-circle sort of arrangement. It is big enough to allow several hundred people to eat at it. In the center of the circle, at enough of a distance thatthe smell isn’t immediately off-putting to the diners, the bodies of the crew of my ship are being stacked alongside dried wood.
I cannot bear to watch. I close my eyes, turn my head, and I think of literally anything other than this moment I am in.
My father’s face swims before my eyes. I just fell in the river, and he dived in and pulled me out. I am coughing and spluttering and crying with terror from the experience of being swept away by the current, unable to fight it.
“You’re brave,” he’s telling me. “Sometimes, things happen that you can’t help right away. When that happens, you let the current take you to the side, understand? Swimming against the river will only tire you out.”
That advice applies as well now as it did then. I can’t fight right now. I can fantasize about grabbing a weapon from one of the warriors and attacking these people, trying to avenge the crew, but even if I were to kill a few of them, I know they would bring me down in short order, and I also know that they would probably not give me the honor of a kind death.
I am carried to the head of the table, but of course I am not accorded a place there. The seats are for Vikar only, not human prisoners of a war they never agreed to engage in.
“I am going to drink, and you are going to be far too much trouble if you get away, so you can spend some time in your cage,” Drako says to me, shortly before he dips down and puts me inside a small cage behind his chair. His chair is elevated above the rest of the seating, so everyone can see him, and he can see everyone. He has to climb up to it, it’s that high.
Meanwhile, my cage is barely tall enough for me to kneel in. There is no possibility of standing in here. It is made of iron bars,and was probably intended to hold an animal of some kind. A dog, perhaps. They have a few around the place, big wiry, rangy things with powerful jaws. I pet one or two reflexively as I was carried around, and they seemed surprised at the affection.
I cower in the cage and I am grateful for it, because it means I cannot see the funeral pyre. The dinner ensues and Drako gives a speech.
“It is not often our enemies deliver themselves to us so conveniently,” he says. “But I like to think we provided them with convenience too, in the form of a quick death.”
A roaring laugh goes up around the table at what seemingly passes for Vikar humor. He cuts the speech short, raises his horn of brew to all assembled, and gives the order for the pyre to be lit.
There is a rumbling of drums and a short burst of trumpets, and then even behind Drako, I both see and feel the pyre being lit. There is a flash of light, and then a heat that washes over everything as the accelerant they used goes up in an instant, sending a bright flame towering high into the sky.
I turn my head away from it, and I close my eyes and try to think of better times. I think of playing with Mila and Freya when we were kids, when we thought our father would always be there, before they began to make new families of their own and somehow weaken ours in the process. That’s not how it’s supposed to happen, I think. I wonder where we went wrong.
The feast goes on for hours, and the revelry gets more raucous, and the drinking gets more intense. I am not a part of any of it, though Drako does give me a cup of water, and a little meat I do not eat.
Then, in the middle of the worst party I have ever been forced to attend, I hear a voice I never thought I would hear again.
“Don’t make a move. Don’t say a word.”
That voice, delivered close to my ear is quiet enough to go unnoticed by the revelers, and familiar enough to send a shiver up my spine.
Thor.
He’s alive. He’s here.
Or I just went full crazy, which would be very understandable given the circumstances.
I want to ask him how he is alive, or if I’m hallucinating him, but I don’t. If he is alive, then both of our lives are in immense danger right now. I sit very, very still, and I hear a light clinking as he works on the fastening of the cage.
He gets the door open pretty quickly, takes me by the hand, and the two of us sneak out of the Vikar camp under cover of darkness. Behind us, the party continues and the pyre burns, and I cannot believe he is not on it. Did fate really spare just the pair of us from death? Or are there more of us? We might never know. It’s possible that some survived and have gone into the depths of the bush or similar to avoid being caught by the Vikar.
We travel for a few minutes before Thor stops and turns to me. “Okay,” he says. “We can talk for a moment. I know you’re dying to…”
