Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Three attackers rushed them in a coordinated strike.
Henry met them with the kind of brutal efficiency that came from thirty years of violence.
Steel met steel with sounds like thunder breaking, sparks flying as blades scraped and shrieked.
Blood sprayed. A man’s scream cut short as Henry’s sword found the gap between helmet and gorge, severing a vital artery.
The man dropped like a sack of grain.
Claricia’s heart hammered against her ribs so hard she thought they might crack.
She pressed her back flat against the mast, eyes darting desperately for anything she could use as a weapon.
Her fingers closed around a belaying pin—solid oak, heavy as a small club—just as one of the masked attackers broke through Henry’s defense and lunged straight for her.
She swung with everything she had.
The pin cracked across his jaw with a sound like splitting wood.
Bone crunched. He staggered, spitting blood and what might have been a tooth, cursing in guttural Gaelic.
She didn’t give him time to recover. The second swing caught him across the temple.
His eyes rolled white and he dropped like a stone at her feet.
If I’m goin’ tae die on this wretched boat, I’m takin’ at least three of these bastards with me!
But even as the fierce thought burned through her, Claricia’s stomach dropped.
There were too many. The royal guards fought with desperate, doomed courage—she could see it in their faces, in the way they pressed together, trying to form a defensive circle around her even as they fell.
Bodies littered the deck, blood running between the boards in dark rivulets that made her boots slip.
Henry still fought like a demon, his sword a blur of deadly motion, but crimson soaked his side where a blade had found the gap in his mail. His movements were slowing. Weakening.
We’re all goin’ tae die here.
One of the attackers grabbed her arm with bruising force. “Got ye, ye wee—”
Claricia drove her elbow into his throat with every ounce of strength and rage she possessed. Cartilage crunched. He released her, gagging, but another set of arms locked around her waist from behind, lifting her clear off her feet.
“I’ve got her!” the man bellowed. “Take her tae the ship! Kill the rest!”
Panic flooded her veins like ice water, sharp and chemical.
Nae, nae, NAE—
The ship lurched.
Not the usual pitch and roll of the waves, but a massive, violent shudder that sent everyone—attackers, guards, Claricia herself—stumbling across the blood-slick deck. Wood screamed in protest. Something massive had struck them, the impact reverberating through the hull like a death knell.
And then she saw it.
A third vessel bearing down on them like vengeance itself.
Sleeker than the others. Faster. A longship with a dragon’s head carved into its prow, painted in faded colors that had seen years of salt and storm.
Warriors crowded its rails—not armored like knights, but wild-looking men in leather and mail, their weapons raised, their faces fierce with battle-hunger.
Vikings!
“Brace fer impact!”
The warning came too late. The longship slammed into the attacking vessel with a bone-jarring crunch of splintering wood. The collision vibrated through her bones.
At their head stood a man who made something in Claricia’s chest twist despite her terror.
“With me!” he roared with a Norse accent, and his warriors answered in howls that had terrorized these waters for generations.
He was tall—taller than any man she’d ever seen—and broad through the shoulders in a way that spoke of brutal strength.
Long blond hair whipped around his face in the wind like a lion’s mane.
His eyes, even at that distance, burned cold and gray-blue as winter ice.
And in his hand, he held a sword that caught the dying light like frozen lightning.
Och fer the love of… now’s nay the time tae be noticin’ how bonnie he is!
He raised that blade high, roared something in old Norse that made his warriors howl like wolves, and the longship crashed into them with the force of divine wrath.
Viking warriors poured across the gap in a living tide of violence and fury.
Their war cries split the air—guttural, inhuman sounds that raised every hair on Claricia’s body.
The man holding her released his grip, shouting orders to his comrades, trying desperately to rally them against this new and overwhelming threat.
It was chaos. Pure, bloody chaos.
Steel rang against steel in a chorus of death. Men screamed—some in rage, some in agony, some with their last breath gurgling through cut throats. The smell of blood grew thick enough to choke on, mixing with brine and sweat and the acrid stench of fear.
Claricia backed toward the rail, trying to escape the carnage, her mind spinning.
Friend or foe? Because at this point, me luck with ships is spectacularly terrible.
The blond warrior moved like death given form.
He cut through the attackers with brutal, efficient precision—no wasted motion, no hesitation, just pure and deadly purpose.
His blade opened throats. Shattered bones.
Painted the deck in fresh crimson with every swing.
She couldn’t look away, couldn’t understand how something so violent could be so terrifyingly graceful.
Then his eyes found hers across that blood-soaked deck. Gray-blue, storm-cold, and utterly inhuman in their focus.
For one single heartbeat, the world narrowed to just that gaze. Everything else faded to nothing.
Then the ship tilted again, harder this time, groaning like a dying animal. Claricia felt the rail press hard against her back, felt the entire vessel listing dangerously as water rushed through the breach in the hull.
One of the attackers saw his chance. He broke free from the melee and rushed straight for her, desperation written in every line of his blood-splattered face.
Claricia had nowhere to go but up.
She grabbed the rail and hauled herself onto it, balancing precariously above the churning water that looked black and hungry and utterly lethal. Her eyes darted frantically. There—a smaller boat tied to the attacking vessel, just a few feet away. If she could jump, if she could just—
The ship lurched violently.
Her foot slipped on wood made treacherous with blood and spray.
Time seemed to slow as she fell. The cold autumn air rushed past her face.
The dark water rose up to meet her like an open mouth.
And in that frozen moment, every childhood nightmare came roaring back—the fear that had lived in her bones since the day she’d seen a village child pulled from the loch, blue and lifeless.
The terror that had kept her from ever learning to swim, kept her from the water’s edge, made her freeze at the sight of deep water.
This is how I die.
The thought came with crystalline clarity even as the cold struck her like a fist.
Nae by Norse steel or royal decree, but drowned like a kitten in a sack. At least it’s bloody original.
The freezing water of the Inner Minch closed over her head like a grave.
It filled her nose, her mouth, her lungs as she gasped in shock. The cold was so intense it felt like burning, like every nerve in her body was being flayed. She couldn’t tell which way was up. Couldn’t see through the murky darkness. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t—
The current grabbed her with invisible, inexorable hands and pulled her down into the black.
Logan… Da… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—
Something broke the surface above her.
Through the murk and her fading vision, she saw a shape diving toward her. Large. Fast. Cutting through the water like a blade through silk.
A Viking!
Terror flickered through her dying thoughts.
His hand closed around her wrist with crushing strength, fingers like iron bands, and even as the darkness swallowed her whole, even as consciousness fled, one last thought whispered through her mind:
He’s come tae kill me too…
Then nothing… nothing but black water and the cold, cold deep pressing down on her.