Blood on the Oar (The Bloodrune Brotherhood #2)

Prologue

Bear

The men beside me are praying.

I know this because I can hear the shapes of it, the rhythm of names being called on, Thor and Odin and somebody's mother, all of it coming through the fog in my skull like voices through a wall.

I can't make out the words. I stopped being able to make out words about the time the Fenrir ships came around the headland with their oars stroking in time, so pretty it was almost worth dying for.

Beside me, Halvard is talking.

"Sten." A hand on my shoulder. "Sten. Look at me."

I look at him. He has a scar through his eyebrow he got falling off a roof at nine years old and has been lying about ever since. He is the finest man I have ever known and I would put my body between him and the sea if the sea asked for him.

"Stay in the line," he says. "You hear me? Whatever happens. Stay in the line."

"I always stay in the line."

"You don't."

"I stay in the general area of the line."

He doesn't laugh. That's how I know it's bad. Halvard laughs at everything, at funerals, at fines, at his own wedding. He looked at me now the way a man looks at a dog he loves and isn't sure of.

"Sten."

"I heard you."

The first arrow comes in high and stupid and takes a boy three men down through the throat.

And then there is no more line.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about the red.

They say it comes over you. That's wrong. It doesn't come over you like weather. It comes up, out of the floor of you, out of some cellar you didn't know was under the house, and the door has been unlocked the whole time and you were the one who unlocked it.

It doesn't feel like rage. That's the other lie. Rage is hot and loud and human and I have been angry a hundred times in my life, at my father, at a horse, at a man who cheated me over a spearhead. That's not this.

This is quiet.

The world narrows to a hallway. Everything at the edges goes soft and grey and unimportant, and down at the far end of the hallway there is a man with an axe, and the only thought I have — the only one, all the way down — is that one next.

I don't remember most of it. I want that on the record, for whatever a record is worth to a dead man. I remember pieces.

I remember the boat rocking under me.

I remember an oar in my hands because my axe was gone somewhere and the oar was there, ash-wood, thick as my wrist, still slick from the water.

I remember the first one going down.

I remember not stopping.

Five.

I know it's five because I counted them later, in the four heartbeats after, when the hallway opened back up into a world.

The first was a big Fenrir man with a red beard who came over the gunwale and got the oar-blade in the side of the head and went into the water without a sound.

The second and third came together and I remember thinking, absurdly, that this was rude of them.

The fourth I don't remember at all. He's just there afterward.

The fifth had a shield, a good one, and he got it up in time, and it didn't matter. It broke. He didn't get to be surprised about it for very long.

And then there was a sixth.

He was already down.

That's the part. That's the part that comes back a thousand years later in a parking lot in Oregon and puts my hands on a chair.

He was already down, curled on his side against the mast-fish with his hands over his head, and he was young — younger than Rurik, younger than any man should be on a boat with an axe — and he was crying, and he was saying something in a dialect I half-knew, and I think what he was saying was I yield.

I remember that I heard him.

That's the horror of it. I have spent a thousand years and two lives trying to remember it differently, and it never goes differently. I heard him. Some part of me down at the bottom of the cellar heard him say it, understood it, weighed it, and decided that it did not signify.

And I brought the oar down anyway.

When it let go of me, it let go all at once, the way a cramp does.

Sound came back first. Gulls. Actual gulls, screaming over the fjord like it was a normal Tuesday and there weren't forty men in the water. Then the smell. Then my own breathing, which was so loud I thought at first it was somebody else's.

I stood up straight on the deck of the Bloodrune with an oar in my hands and blood to my elbows and I looked for my brothers.

They were there.

All of them. Halvard with his shoulder open.

Torvald with his mother's shield on his arm, which he should not have had, which meant she was already gone.

Kjell up in the bow with a face like a man watching his house burn.

Bo, bleeding from the scalp, still somehow holding a knife like he knew what to do with it.

They were alive.

And they were stepping back.

Not far. That's what I want you to understand. Not far — a half-step, most of them. The kind of adjustment a man makes without deciding to. The kind of thing you do near a dog you have known since it was a pup, the first time you see it kill something.

Halvard didn't step back.

Halvard was the only one, and he had to work at it, and I saw him work at it, and that was worse than the others.

"Sten," he said.

I opened my mouth to say something. I don't know what. My tongue was a stone in my mouth and my hands wouldn't come off the oar. My fingers had made up their minds about the oar somewhere in the hallway and hadn't been informed of the change in circumstances.

"Sten. Put it down."

"I can't."

"Put it down, brother."

"Halvard—" and my voice came out wrong, small, some other man's, some boy's. "Halvard, how many."

He looked at me.

He wasn't going to lie to me. That was the thing about him. In thirty-one years he never once lied to me, not about the roof, not about the scar, not about anything that mattered, and he wasn't going to start on the worst day either of us would ever have.

"Six," he said.

And the arrow came in.

It went into my chest a hand's width under the collarbone and I remember being offended.

That's the truth. Not afraid. Offended, like a man who's been shoved in a market.

Some archer forty feet away on a boat I never even saw, who never touched an oar, who never got within reach of me, who probably went home after and ate his dinner.

I went down on the deck on my knees.

The oar finally fell out of my hands. Funny — that's what did it. Not the man, not Halvard, not the six. An arrow the length of my forearm and my fingers opened up like they'd been waiting for permission.

Halvard caught me before I hit the boards. He was shouting. I couldn't hear him anymore.

Over his shoulder I could see the sky, and the mast, and the smoke starting up from the sail where the fire arrows had gone into it, and past all of that, at the very edge of everything where the hallway used to end, a woman standing on the black sand of the beach with her arms down at her sides.

Watching.

Not running. Not screaming. Just watching, the way you watch a pot you've already put on the fire.

I did not know her name yet.

I would learn it in about a thousand years.

The last thing, the very last, before the grey came up and took the whole beach:

My brothers, around me. Kneeling now. Close now. Kjell's hand on my leg and Bo saying my name and Torvald's face upside down above me with tears cutting clean lines through the mess on it.

They came back. When I was dying, they came back.

And what I thought — the last complete thought I ever had in that life, and I would give a great deal to have thought something kinder — was:

Of course they did.

It's easy to love a man once he's safe.

Here is what I would like the record to show about the four days before it.

We were happy.

That's the thing nobody puts in the sagas, because it doesn't scan.

Four days out of Hordaland with a fair wind and a boat that ran like a cart on a good road, and Bo made up a verse about Kjell's beard that Kjell has still not forgiven, and Halvard's wife sent us out with a barrel of something she had absolutely no business making and we drank the whole thing on the second night and none of us could hold an oar straight on the third.

Torvald's mother came. She wasn't supposed to. She got on that boat with a linden shield and a look, and Halvard opened his mouth once, and shut it.

The last normal thing that happened to me — the last, in that entire life — was that a nine-year-old boy asked me if I could lift him with one arm and I said no, and then I did it, and he laughed so hard he got hiccups, and his mother told me off for it while smiling.

Then we came around the headland at Vestrfjord.

And there were eleven ships in the bay where there should have been none, and every man on our deck went quiet at the same time, and Torvald's mother put her arm across her son's chest without ever looking down at him.

I wake up on the floor.

Not sand. Concrete, painted grey, gritty under my cheek, and there's a smell of stale beer and engine oil and the particular cold that comes off a roll-up door in Oregon in March.

The clubhouse. Our clubhouse. Ash Harbor. Two-thirty in the morning by the clock over the bar, which is fifteen minutes fast and has been since 2009 because nobody can reach it.

I'm on my knees on the floor of the main room.

And my hands are around a chair.

One of the heavy oak ones from the long table, the ones Ghost's uncle made, and I have it lifted off the ground about six inches, and my knuckles have gone the colour of bone.

I don't remember standing up. I don't remember coming downstairs.

I went to bed at eleven with a beer and a cold pizza and no more on my mind than a man ever has.

Slowly — very, very slowly, the way you'd set down something with a fuse — I put the chair back on the floor.

My fingers don't want to open.

I make them.

I sit down on the concrete with my back against the bar and my hands upturned in my lap like two dead animals, and I look at them for a long time, and the clock ticks fifteen minutes fast above the bottles, and out past the roll-up door the harbor works away at the pilings the way it has for a hundred years and will for a hundred more.

Six.

The number is just sitting there in me now. Solid. Like a stone somebody put in my pocket while I slept.

I know exactly what it means and I know exactly what I am, and upstairs there are eleven men asleep who would take a bullet for me, and I make myself a promise on the floor of that room at two-thirty in the morning, sixty seconds after waking.

I am never going to tell them.

Upstairs a toilet flushes. Somebody's up. Boots on the landing, then on the stairs, and I get myself off the floor and into a chair at the bar with my hands around a bottle of water like a man who came down for a drink.

It's Ghost.

Of course it's Ghost. Kjell Amundsen has not slept a full night in either of his lives and he comes down the stairs at two-forty in the morning the way he's come down every set of stairs since 1042, which is quietly, and looking behind him.

He stops at the bottom.

He looks at me at the bar. Then at the floor where I was. Then at the chair, which is not where the chair goes, and which he made — his uncle made the others, he made that one, and he knows every chair in this room the way I know every bolt on my bike.

"Bear."

"Couldn't sleep."

Ghost stands there a while.

"Yeah," he says.

And he goes behind the bar and gets himself a water too, and he sits down four stools away, which is exactly the right distance, and neither of us says one word for about twenty minutes.

Then he gets up and goes back to bed.

He never mentions it. Not once, not for six months, not until a night in a chapel with the whole club in it when he says nine words that I'm not going to write down.

But before he goes up the stairs he stops with his hand on the rail and says, without turning around:

"Whatever it is."

"Kjell."

"I'm just saying it out loud once," Ghost says.

"Then I'll leave it. Whatever it is — I ran.

At the beach. Everybody in this house knows I ran and nobody's said a word to me about it in two years.

" He taps the rail twice. "So whatever's got you on that floor.

It's not worse than mine, and mine got forgiven. "

He goes up.

And I sit at the bar under a clock that's fifteen minutes fast and think:

It is, though.

Kjell, brother, it's so much worse than yours.

You ran away from men.