Chapter 27
In a melee, a man dare not look further than the tip of his own blade. Brandr’s attention was divided between three adversaries, the little wiry fellow, the big man, and the fire quickly engulfing the sethus.
Any one of them, he was sure he could best.
All together, he had his doubts. The other men took turns fighting, snatching bits of rest Brandr was denied. His sword arm grew heavier with each pass.
The women’s screams from the burning house pierced his chest sharper than a blade. He pivoted, slashing with his broadsword, trying to get close enough to lift the bar on the door and free Katla.
The little man sneaked in under his guard while he whacked away at the big fellow. Pain screamed up his leg. He twirled and caught the wiry man across the throat. Blood spurted like a red fountain as he sank to his knees in the dirt.
“Guess he won’t be here when the Bloodaxe comes,” Brandr said as he sliced the other fellow across the chest. The man’s hardened leather breastplate took the brunt of the blow and left him unscathed. “What’s your friend going to miss?”
A wicked smile stretched unpleasantly across the big man’s face. “The return of the Old Ones and the Old Ways. And death to those who think to stop us.”
The man shrieked a battle cry and launched a flurry of blows.
Brandr could think only as far as the next parry. The coppery scent of blood filled the air, mingling with the reek of smoke and his unwashed enemy. Sticky warmth streamed down Brandr’s thigh, but he couldn’t let it slow him down. His wound was a small matter now.
Keep moving. Only the dead deserve rest.
Part of the sethus roof collapsed near the back wall.
A fresh chorus of wails pierced the night.
The women’s screams were joined by a baby’s cry.
Brandr tried to send an order to still the flames, but he was too distracted by his remaining combatant to focus his thoughts adequately.
The big man began circling again, thrusting and jabbing.
The fire roared in triumph.
“Don’t be thinking you’ve done anything praiseworthy, Ulfson. You’ve killed only a pus-filled worm,” the big man said, kicking his friend’s body out of the way. He crouched into a defensive posture and beckoned with one upraised hand. “Come now and try to kill a man.”
“I would if there was one to hand,” Brandr said through clenched teeth. “I’ll settle for killing you instead.”
He sucked in a deep breath then loosed his rage in a fierce berserkr howl before he charged. His blade sang a death song as it flashed in glittering arcs. His strength waned. This blistering attack would be his last.
Only death would stop him.
***
Katla pried Aldis and her child from the corner mere heartbeats before that part of the roof would have caved in on them. Sparks filled the air, and the woman collapsed in a coughing fit as the black smoke grew thicker.
“Come,” Katla urged, crouching down. “Stay low. The air is better here. We must get to the door.”
The other women were obscured by dense smoke, but she could hear them still clawing at the locked portal. Perhaps there was a way to dislodge the hinges.
“It makes no difference,” Aldis wailed. “Here or there. We die anyway.”
“Do you want the child to die too?”
The woman’s face crumpled, and she thrust the babe into Katla’s arms. “Take Linnea. Take her. I can’t bear to watch when death comes for her.”
Katla clutched the squirming babe to her chest and crawled one-handed toward the door. Aldis keened behind her but didn’t follow.
“Keep moving. Only the dead deserve rest.”
Brandr’s last message jerked her from hopeless stupor and filled her with determination. Katla wouldn’t give up. Not so long as she could draw breath.
A fiery beam crashed to earth behind her, burying Aldis behind a wall of flame. The keening stopped abruptly, the sound snipped off mid-wail.
Katla kept moving.
The child stopped struggling and went limp in her arms. She passed the bucket by the central fire pit and splashed a handful of water over the babe’s face.
Linnea sputtered, gave a weak cry, and began rooting against Katla’s breast. Katla swallowed back a sob and poured the last of the water over both of them to protect them from burning ash.
Then she continued to crawl toward the door.
As she neared it, the smoke parted, swept away as if by an invisible hand. Overhead, there was a loud whoosh, and the fire was suddenly snuffed out. The opening to the sethus swung wide, and a man was framed in the doorway, his face in shadow.
The other women pushed past him, squealing with relief.
He strode into the sethus and knelt beside Katla long enough to scoop her into his arms.
“Brandr.”
With a grunt, he rose, carrying her and the baby out into the night.
Once they cleared the doorway, Brandr set her down a safe distance away.
She sank onto the stubbled grass, dragging in breaths and coughing out the smoky air trapped in her lungs.
The sickly sweet scent of roasting meat made Katla want to retch.
There was no sign of the other women. Katla assumed they’d taken to their heels without stopping to see who’d won the fight.
“Is there anyone else inside?” Brandr asked.
The child’s mother was dead. She shook her head and clutched the snuffling baby tighter.
“It’s dangerous to leave the sethus like this then,” Brandr said, “Only half-destroyed. It might fall down on someone.”
Then as Katla watched in amazement, a blue flame bloomed in the center of Brandr’s palm. He tossed the ball of fire to the charred roof and rib cage of beams, where it caught and blazed up into an inferno almost instantly.
Katla gasped. “What did you…what are you?”
Her vision wavered for a moment, then darkness gathered at the edges. Finally she winked out as completely as a pinched-off candle.
***
Brandr lifted the baby from Katla’s arms and set the squalling mass off to the side.
As long as the brat’s making enough noise to wake the dead, there’s nothing truly wrong with it, Brandr reasoned.
Katla, on the other hand, was pale and drawn, her eyes open and unseeing. He checked her for injury and found none. He laid his head between her breasts and was relieved to hear her heart beating, though it was thready and rapid.
“Princess.” He gave her shoulders a slight shake and tried to wipe the black soot from her face with his sleeve. Panic clawed at his gut like a cornered badger. “Katla. Love. Come back.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed, and she coughed twice.
She sat up, her body racked by another bout of hacking. He wished he had a water gourd to offer her. She lifted her arms to him, and he gathered her close, rocking her slightly.
“You’re alive,” she whispered. “We’re both alive.” Then she pulled away and cocked her head at him. “Why is the baby crying?”
“Because it’s a baby, I expect,” Brandr said with a grin. Always looking out for someone else, his princess was back.
“She. Not it. And her name is Linnea. She’s not hurt, is she?” Katla snatched her up and examined her down to counting her toes. The child quieted and tucked its tiny thumb between a pair of rosebud lips.
Brandr sank down beside her. Of the three of them, only he was bleeding, but that’s how he’d have ordered matters if he’d been given a choice.
He’d already decided the wound on his leg wasn’t serious.
Blood had matted his trousers to his flesh, and it would bleed again when the wound was cleaned, but there was no major damage.
“What did you…before I…” Katla began. “I saw you and…there was…”
“What did you see?” He’d known this was coming, but he’d hoped to break the truth to her in a gentler way. Of course, there was nothing gentle about what he was.
“You were holding fire,” she whispered.
“Ja.” He blew on his palm. “Like this?”
The blue flame sparked to cheerful life. He’d almost forgotten how good it felt to summon fire. As if his life had turned a perfect circle. Complete.
Katla scooted away from him, her eyes round as an owlet’s. “Are you a…seid-man?”
Brandr snorted. “What do you take me for? I dabble not in magick. You’ve been in my bed, and you’ve seen me fight. Do I seem the weak-wristed type who takes power by dark methods?”
“No, but…how else could you do that?”
One shoulder lifted in a shrug. “I don’t know.
I’ve always been able to call the fire. I set any number of accidental ones when I was a boy, and was whipped for it more often than I like to remember.
Mayhap if I’d told my father the truth of how the fires happened, he’d have seen the matter differently, but I doubt it. ”
She leaned forward to peer at the tiny flames licking his palm but not raising so much as a blister.
“Some are gifted with prodigious memory. Others can sing the stars from the sky. I was given control of the fire.” He snuffed out the flame between his palms. “At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“What does that mean?”
“I didn’t understand it myself until I met a sorcerer in Byzantium and sat under his tutelage. According to him, there are four elements—earth, air, water, and fire. Once in a great age, someone is born with the ability to call a particular element to them, to shape and control it.”
“And you’re one of them?”
He grimaced at her. “I’m a fire mage, Katla. I don’t know how I do it, any more than I know everything involved in drawing a breath. It’s just part of who I am.”
“I see.” She stared at the burning sethus as the back wall collapsed in a shower of sparks.
“To control flame takes concentration,” he said as he rose and retrieved his sword. It was still implanted deeply in the big man’s chest. “I wasn’t able to stop the fire right away because…well, I was a little distracted.”
He pulled out the sword and cleaned the blade on the grass. “Did that worthless piece of shite harm you?” He shot her a piercing gaze.
“No, once I told him you’d be coming, he decided to wait until he’d dealt with you,” she said with a sigh. “Thank the gods.”
“It wouldn’t have been your fault.”
“Nothing happened.” She shook with delayed tremors but managed to settle herself. Then she asked in a small voice, “Did you start that fire?”
“No, not on the house, at any rate.” He shoved his sword back into the shoulder baldric. He pointed to the mound of cooling meat that used to be a man splayed on the ground. “That was his doing.”
“Oh.”
“I’m very careful about how and when I use my…ability.”
Brandr noticed a bulge beneath his slain enemy’s belt. He bent and fished it out. It was a small figurine of a pregnant female. He’d never seen its like, but the way his palm tingled, he sensed it was a thing of power.
“The return of the Old Ones and the Old Ways,” the man he’d killed had said.
Could this image have anything to do with that?
He secreted it away in the leather pouch at his waist. When he reached home, he’d ask someone with a much wiser head about the figurine and the power he felt emanating from it.
Silence drew out between him and Katla, a wall of separation growing higher as the moments slipped by. He turned and looked back at the sethus. The last of the roof had collapsed into the main room, and the charred walls began to sag inward.
Say something.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
He turned back to her. Had she heard his thoughts? No, that was fanciful in the extreme. Katla was many things, but fanciful was not one of them. She was the practical sort. If she had an ability to hear another’s thoughts, she’d have used it on him long before now.
“Say you understand,” he suggested.
“How can I? You don’t even understand it.”
He had to give her that one.
His leg was starting to throb. He swallowed back a foul curse.
“There’s no need to be vulgar,” she said primly.
“Wait. Are you telling me you heard that?” He hurried back to her and settled by her side.
“I’m not deaf. Of course I did.”
“But I didn’t say anything,” Brandr said. “I only thought it.”
A smile burst over her face. “Oh, then I didn’t imagine it. I heard you, your thoughts, in my mind when I was trapped in that awful place.”
“You did? What did I say?”
“Encouraging things mostly,” she said. “Things to give me hope.”
“Can you hear my thoughts now?” he asked, imagining her on his bed of furs in Jondal with a whole night of loving before them and nothing of this sorry night in their heads.
She studied him for a moment then shook her head.
“Pity,” he said with a waggle of his brows. “You’d have enjoyed it.”
She gave his chest a playful swat.
“Maybe it works only under duress.” Katla frowned, tapping her front teeth with her fingernail. “While I was in the house, I tried to send my thoughts to you as well. I told you how many men were in the house and to be careful. Did you hear my voice in your mind?”
She looked so hopeful he wished he could say yes. If she had a special gift, perhaps she’d be more inclined to accept his.
But truth would serve him better than hope at present.
“No, I didn’t hear your voice,” he admitted, “but as I said, I was distracted at the time.”
“But not too distracted to make fire out of thin air.”
“No, I set the cattle byre ablaze before those two came out of the house.”
That was how his gift worked. He needed to be able to empty himself of all fury, all feeling.
A double-minded mage is mute to his element.
The fire wouldn’t be able to hear him. If he’d been able to control his emotions, he’d have put the fire out before he engaged in swordplay.
But with Katla in danger and armed men between them, there was no use seeking that dispassionate, calm center he needed to draw the flames out or make them dance to his will.
And he certainly didn’t need to go into a long, drawn-out explanation of how his gift meshed with the secret of Greek fire.
“So,” she said with a sigh, “I’m married to a fire mage.”
“Ja, you are. Any regrets?”
She shook her head and gave him a quick kiss. “At least it’s a useful oddity. We’ll never have to worry about having tinder and flint.”