Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Eastern approach is cut off.” Freyr fell into step beside him at a near-run. “Four groups confirmed. Maybe five.”
The smoke above the tree line was already churning black, a rolling column of thatch crackling and popping with the flames of hell. Ragnar swept the courtyard in a single pass—thirty-two mounted, twenty on foot, three trackers already pressing against the gate.
“How many?”
“Twelve counted. More in the smoke.”
Douglas has come out tae play.
“Freyr, north flank moves first.” He took the reins from the stable hand without breaking stride.
“Split ‘em at the creek crossin’ before they consolidate. Leif, take seven men tae the mill road. Push ‘em toward open ground, where we can see the bastards.” He swung up into the saddle, his still-healing shoulder protesting with a spike of pain that he ignored. “The rest of ye ride wi’ me.”
Freyr turned to bellow orders, his voice booming across the courtyard.
“Ragnar.”
He recognized the voice before he turned.
Isolda was already crossing the courtyard toward him. Not hurrying, not scrambling, simply moving with that contained, purposeful directness she carried everywhere, as if the black column thickening above the tree line was an inconvenient detail rather than a catastrophe.
Liv kept pace two steps behind, healer’s satchel already buckled over her shoulder.
“Nay,” Ragnar said.
“Liv cannae manage alone. Ye ken what’ll happen if the tent’s overflowin’. I can—”
“Absolutely nae.”
She stopped at Termr’s shoulder, which put her at eye level with his knee, forcing him to look down at her.
Clever little wolf.
“Ye know as well as I dae,” she said, quietly so that his men wouldn’t catch it, “if ye ride out without givin’ me somethin’ useful tae dae, ye’ll spend the whole time wonderin’ whether I’m actually listenin’.” Her chin lifted, just fractionally. “That means ye’ll be distracted and—”
“Reckless?”
“I was goin’ tae say slower. Someone will put a blade in ye.” A pause. “And I’ll have tae stitch ye up. Again.”
He hated that she was right. He pressed the horse one step forward and leaned down.
“Ye stay close tae Liv.” He said. “Dinnae leave the tent. Dinnae follow the wounded outside it.” His voice dropped low. “And if ye hear two long horns and one short—”
“I run. I come back. I get inside the walls.” She waved a hand. “Now go, husband.” The impatience softened just slightly, but something raw underneath it. “Our people need ye.”
He held her gaze one beat longer, long enough to note the steady grey-green of her eyes and the exact curve of her mouth before he wheeled the horse around and rode off.
The village was worse than the smoke had suggested.
It rolled thick and low between the buildings, the particular grey-black of burning thatch, and Ragnar let it take him. He’d fought in worse—longships alight from stem to stern, raids on moonless nights where vision meant nothing and survival depended entirely on instinct
Three cottages were already gutted to their bones, thatch sheeting down in burning strips, the heat off the nearest wall pressing flat against his face from twenty yards out.
Around him, villagers scrambled and fled in scattered groups while Douglas’s men worked the lanes with torches in pairs, their movements methodical, unhurried.
Hired hands.
Ragnar knew it in the first ten seconds by the loose formation, the wide spacing between pairs, the absence of any command position anchoring the line.
Douglas’s men had expected panic, scattered villagers and warriors scrambling in all directions, too many fires and not enough hands to fight them—chaos doing their work for them.
What they had not anticipated was The Stag of Uist.
He came off the horse at a dead run.
The first man caught his shadow and nothing else.
Ragnar’s forearm broke across his nose with enough force to drive his head back into the fence post behind him, and the man folded and stayed there.
The second turned in time to swing—which was just what Ragnar needed.
He stepped inside the arc before the blade could make contact, caught the wrist in both hands, and applied leverage in the direction joints were never meant to travel.
He moved on without slowing.
The smoke thickened, turning the village into a half-seen world of orange and grey ash that cut visibility to twenty feet. Ragnar moved through it the way he moved through everything he’d ever walked into—steadily, certain, reading shapes before they fully formed.
A man lunged from behind a toppled cart. Ragnar shifted his weight, let the blade pass his ribs by a hand’s breadth, caught the outstretched arm and used the man’s own momentum to drive him face-first into the churned mud. His knee found the man’s spine and pinned him there.
Freyr’s group thundered in from the north exactly on time, cutting the creek path off before the remaining men could regroup. They broke off in splinters and scattered south through the smoke.
“Take one alive!” Ragnar bellowed. “Gut the rest!”
Three of his warriors peeled off in pursuit while Freyr rode one man down, unseating him without killing him and the man uttered a stream of creative curses that cut through the chaos like a beacon.
He worked through the smoke with the focused efficiency that is body knew all too well.
What it had never been subjected to before was the particular pull toward a fixed point somewhere south, at the edge of the village, dragging against his focus.
The healer’s tent.
He was halfway across the square when he heard it—not a shout, not a signal, but a scream, from the direction of the healer’s tent, high and sharp and all wrong.
Ragnar was already moving.
But this was not the measured, deliberate movement of a commander.
Ragnar ran—flat out, through the smoke, past his own men, past every careful defense he’d spent twenty years constructing—with the single, undeniable urgency of a man who had just discovered what truly mattered to him.
Isolda had stopped noting injuries by name and started cataloging by type.
Einar, Finlay, the boy from the eastern quarter whose name she hadn’t caught before Liv sent her to hold his arm still, the older man with the burn across his forearm who hadn’t made a sound the entire time she cleaned it, which was somehow worse than if he had.
“Dinnae look at it.” She kept her voice even—not soft, not bright, just steady, the same register she’d found worked on all of them.
Einar obeyed the way injured men did. His eyes found hers and stayed there while Liv’s hands moved across his ribcage with brisk movements and gentle pressure.
“Tell me about the headland. Does the current run south or west past the rocks?”
“S-south…mostly me lady—” His jaw was working against the pain. “Me uncle says if ye dinnae read the pull right, ye’ll end up half a mile off course before ye, ach!” A sharp exhale as Liv tightened the binding. “Before ye even ken it.”
“Keep talkin’, lad.”
The linen went on in clean, overlapping passes. By the time Liv tied the final knot, Einar had worked himself through half a story about a herring net and a badly timed tide, and the white had left his knuckles entirely.
Liv straightened and caught Isolda’s eye across the stretcher. “Quick thinkin’, me lady. Ye’ve a real gift fer keepin’ a man’s attention exactly where ye want it.”
Isolda gathered the soiled strips from the ground. “Distraction’s the only currency that buys ye anythin’ with stubborn men.”
Liv’s mouth curved. “And daes it work on our jarl?”
She moved toward the rear partition before the silence could sharpen into something more pointed. “Makes him easier tae manage.”
The back of the tent was dim as she stepped inside to discard the bloody rags, the canvas pressing close against the alley wall.
Isolda pushed through toward the waste basin—and stopped.
The shadow on the canvas was wrong.
It pressed too closely. It held absolutely still but the weight planted behind had nothing to do with anyone needing medical care.
The fine hairs along the back of her neck rose, one by one. She had barely drawn breath to call for Liv when the canvas split open. The hand came through the canvas seam—palm flat across her lips, fingers clamping around her jaw, an arm slamming across her chest like a bar dropping into a latch.
Then the ground was moving under her heels, hauling her backward into the alley, her heels cutting furrows through the dirt, and then there was only smoke and stone walls and a man’s forearm crushing the air from her chest.
“Stop yer squirmin’.” His voice was low, breath rank with ale and smoke against her hair. “Dinnae make this harder than it needs tae be.”
He’ll come. He kens where I am.
She had to stall. So, she did the only thing she could think of.
Isolda went limp. Every muscle at once, completely and instantly—head dropping forward, knees folding, her full dead weight hitting the man’s grip without warning.
“Och, fer the love of—”
“She’s fainted! Just haul her over yer shoulder!” A second voice, further back.
“I’m tryin’—”
His arm loosened just enough for her to twist sideways in his grip and go for his eyes.
She didn’t hesitate, just spread her fingers, nails angled outward, palm flat and raked her nails across the skin beside his eye socket.
She felt the catch and drag of it, the warm slick beneath her fingernails, and he made a sound low in his throat and wrenched backward.
“Grab her!”
The second man was bigger and had been watching. He caught her wrist before she could turn and twister her arm up behind her shoulder until the joint screamed protest, his arm slinking over her throat.
She bit down on his forearm, sank her teeth in, jaw locked, the salt-iron taste of him flooding her mouth—and the sound he produced was high and raw and bounced off the stone wall of the outbuilding in a way that had absolutely no dignity in it.
“Ach! Ye wee bitch!”