Winds of Fate Page 28

  “Well, boys, shall we paint the sand red with their blood?” I asked the hirdmen, waving my sword.

  “Jarl, don’t you get too involved in the fight,” an older warrior from Hrolf’s ship said in a fatherly tone. “Otherwise, we won’t have anyone to get us that ale.”

  The boat, which was packed by a good twenty warriors, neared the shore. Among them, I finally saw Torsfel—he was a hulking mass covered in wild, bushy hair.

  Our first wave jumped out from behind the boulders the instant the boat hit the sand.

  Gunther was in front and landed the first blow. Steel clanged, and a warrior collapsed.

  “Kill them!” shouted the giant as he grabbed a bundled from the bottom of the boat and headed toward the forest with ten of his men. We met him halfway there.

  “Don’t let Torsfel go!” I roared, fending off one strike by a warrior in glistening chainmail and ducking to avoid another from a second.

  Torsfel’s warriors weren’t just aggressive NPCs; they were worthy adversaries that, happily, were right around my level. That was the only explanation for the fact that I held my own.

  “Wolf Soul,” I cried. My gray helper jumped out and latched his teeth into one of my attackers, buying me a few seconds.

  I dove to avoid the other’s blade and used an ability to slam my sword deep into his stomach and take off half his health. That oath in the temple has really come in handy.

  The temptation was to handle the problem with one blow of the horn in my bag, but I knew I couldn’t give in.

  A fireball hissed off into the sky.

  “A-a-ah,” I heard Sufor call, just as I brought my sword crashing down on my opponent’s head, ending his time on earth.

  You unlocked Level 50!

  Points ready to be distributed: 5

  Finally!

  The pitiful whine that came from my gray brother in arms told me that he’d gone off to visit the great wolf heaven in the sky.

  I managed to turn toward the boulders and saw Sufor lying on the ground. He was still alive, but he wasn’t going to be doing any more fighting that day. Another hirdman was lying prone, and I noticed Torsfel making a run for the forest. The rest of my troops were fighting the remains of the hairy jarl’s entourage.

  “Damn it, he’s getting away!” I shouted, just barely getting away from a swipe by the opponent my wolf hadn’t been able to gnaw to death.

  “A-a-ah,” I heard next to me, and I saw him collapse onto the sand.

  It turned out that Flosy had slashed him in the back of the legs with his ax. He immediately followed that up by hurling the ax at Torsfel…and somehow connected.

  The ax smacked into the running jarl right below the knees, and so he hit the ground hard, rolled forward, and, I swear, shuddered. Flosy dashed off after his ax, burying a knife in the back of one of Torsfel’s last people and yelling back at us on the way. “I can’t take him by myself!”

  All that was left of the first line was Gunther and a wounded Hegny, and they had their hands full with three of our ten adversaries.

  One of the hirdmen and I were the remains of the second line, and he has gamely trying to fight off a large swordsman. I jumped in to help him, so I didn’t know what was going on closer to the forest.

  It took us about forty seconds to finish him off—a shot to the back is always excellent medicine.

  A boom rang out from the line near the water’s edge. I turned to see two of Gunther’s opponents slump onto the sand, revealing a wet Bear Cub behind them. The lookouts had apparently noticed our skirmish and jumped in to help us.

  “Ja-a-arl!” Flosy’s shrill cry reminded me of our primary objective. As I sprinted toward the forest, I saw that Torsfel had regained his composure after the hit from the ax, had finished off the last hirdman, and was closing in on my toilet cleaner. Flosy was standing next to the bundle the jarl had dropped. I could guess what—or rather who—was in it.

  “Rally to me!” I bellowed back at everyone still alive. “Wolf Soul! Get the hairy one!”

  The wolf shot off like a streak of gray lightning, the rest of us hard on his heels.

  “There you are, you jackals,” muttered Torsfel as he looked us over. “You’re a jarl? We haven’t met, have we?”

  “No, I’m not one of the locals,” I replied modestly, signaling to Flosy to drag the bundle as far away as he could. “But I have friends here, and I’m helping them.”

  “Well, they’ll remember you when I spill your guts with my ax like I did for that wolf,” Torsfel said. “Hey, you there, those are my things.”

  He jumped toward Flosy, who had grabbed the bundle and was trying to drag it away. I jumped at the enormous man’s legs, knocking him down once again. When he tried to get up, he found two blades at his throat, Gunther’s and Bear Cub’s.

  The hirdman helped me up. Hegny, despite his wound, helped Flosy, who was bowed under the weight of Ulfrida. (I didn’t doubt that it was her wrapped up in the rags.)

  “You know, we could help each other. I have enough for you to go live the good life,” Torsfel said in an attempt to get us to change our minds. “Even better, you can come over to my side, and I’ll make sure your swords are trimmed with gold.”

  “Sorry, old man.” I straightened up and felt my back crack. “We don’t play both sides of the fence.”

  “Well said, Jarl Hagen,” someone behind me said.

  I turned to see Gunnar making his way toward us. “So, Torsfel, we finally come face to face. If only you knew how long I’ve waited for this moment.”

  “I hadn’t given it much thought, actually,” replied Torsfel with a shrug. “You’re nothing to me.”

  “We’ll wait for the rest. They’ll be here soon.” Gunnar sat down on a boulder.

  His and Elina’s people made their way across the water.

  “And what happens when they get here?” Gunther asked the Northerner.

  “Then we’ll have a holmgang,” was the quiet response.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In which everyone gets a little something.

  “You’d give me a holmgang?” Torsfel asked, pursing his lips in surprise.

  “Of course,” Gunnar responded calmly. “I don’t want you to die in the knowledge that you were unbeaten. You’re a strong warrior, and you won’t make a sound if they straighten your ribs. I want you to die knowing full well that you weren’t able to save your own life. I want to look you in the eye when my ax buries itself in your guts. And I won’t settle for less.”

  Gunnar gave his spiel in an even, measured voice, each word nailed home one after another.

  Torsfel chuckled.

  “Olavsson, are you sure that’s how it’ll go? Are you sure it’ll be your ax in my guts and not the other way around?”

  “If that happens, it just means that you’re luckier than me. I’ll at least die knowing that I did everything I could.”

  “Except you wouldn’t get your revenge.” Torsfel laughed. “What a lousy death!”

  “Jarl Gunnar,” Gunther chimed in, “would you mind if I stood in as your executor? Gunther von Richter, Knight of the Tearful Goddess Temple, at your service.”

  Gunnar looked at von Richter in surprise. The knight misunderstood his expression and tried to continue his explanation. “My family is an old and noble one, with twelve generations of warriors. I don’t think you need to worry about the purity of my intentions or whether I have the right to ask for the honor.”

  “I wasn’t worried; just surprised,” replied the jarl. “What did that son of a troll do to you?”

  “Nothing at all. Today is the first time I’ve ever laid eyes on him. Although to be fair, he has killed women and kidnapped girls, so there’s no love lost between us. It’s just that revenge, and especially revenge for loved ones, is too serious a matter to be left to simple chance. You should have someone who can finish the job if your opponent proves stronger than you.”

  Gunnar looked at the knight, a strange smile straying
over his face. “Well, then, Gunther von Richter, Knight… I’m sorry, I don’t remember the rest. My family is gone, I have no relatives, and my home has long been the deck of my drakkar. If truth fails me and this poor excuse for a human defeats me today, I bequeath my vengeance to you.”

  “Heard,” said Hegny as he wrapped his wound.

  “Seconded,” I said to my own surprise.

  “Ah, my ax will enjoy a feast of blood today, and the crows will eat their fill,” snarled the Crooked.

  Gunnar paid him no attention, instead wrapping his cloak around himself and throwing himself down on a rock to prepare for the holmgang. From what I could tell, it was, in other words, a duel.

  Sufor, who I’d already forgotten in the excitement, walked over to me and groaned. “That bastard is a beast!” he said, looking at Torsfel with hostility in his eyes.

  “Is he the one who took you out?” I asked.

  “Who else? No sooner did I sent that fireball up than that animal came running by with that sack under his arm. I didn’t even have time to react before he slammed his ax into me, apparently with a critical hit, and threw me into some rocks. All I had was 15% of my health left—there was barely enough of me to patch back up! It was just a good thing I brought a health potion with me…”

  Sufor wrinkled his nose in frustration, either disappointed that he’d had to use the potion or annoyed that he’d missed most of the battle.

  “Oh, the sack,” I said suddenly, slapping my forehead. “Damn it!”

  I looked around and picked a younger warrior from Gunnar’s hird, shouting over to him, “Hey, warrior!”

  “Yes, Jarl?”

  “This isn’t an order, just a friendly request. Flosy ran off in that direction. Could you find him and tell him it’s safe to come back?”

  The warrior looked quickly at Gunnar—who opened one eye and nodded—before running off into the forest.

  “Gunnar, you don’t mind me giving your people orders, do you?” I decided to make sure there weren’t any hard feelings.

  “Hirdmen should always be either busy or drunk. Otherwise, they have too much time to get in real trouble,” Gunnar responded before going back to sleep.

  “How did I know you’d be here?” I heard Elina’s voice ask. “Hagen, how do you always manage to get everywhere first?”

  “Karma, I guess,” I answered, turning to see her walking toward me. “You snooze, you lose, and I don’t like losing.”

  “Agreed.” She looked around and noticed the trampled sand strewn with weapons, the broken branches, and Torsfel, who was staring darkly at a point right in front of him. “What happened here?”

  “Oh, not too much.” I shrugged and nodded toward the hairy marauder. “That pleasant fellow stopped by, and we had a little fun.”

  Elina went over to Torsfel and looked him over. “Pleasant, indeed. A brutal nomad is more like it.”

  “It’s just a shame that my friends are here, sweetie!” Torsfel roared. “We could have played some hide-and-seek!”

  “Oh, so scary.” Elina laughed, then her face twisted into a sudden grimace. “Oh, God, him again?”

  Flosy appeared out of the forest, sweating under the weight of the bundle he was carrying. The young warrior tried to help him, but Flosy motioned away with his head as if shooing away a fly.

  “Don’t worry; he’s sober,” I said to Elina before calling Gunther and heading to meet Flosy.

  The toilet worker finally plopped the bundle down on the ground and sat down next to it, breathing hard. Sweat poured down his bearded face.

  “Phew, Jarl,” he said. “The könig sure feeds his daughter well. I barely got her over here.”

  “Why didn’t you unwrap her over there?” I asked in surprise.

  “You never know with girls. She might have run off, and then we’d have been stuck searching for her until the end of time,” Flosy explained reasonably.

  I bent over the bundle and saw that it was tied up with a ship cable.

  “I hear you,” I replied to Flosy. “Gunther, could you cut the cord? I saw that you have a dagger.”

  “My misericord?” Gunther’s eyes widened. “That’s not what it’s for.”

  “Come on, Gunther, give it a rest,” I said with a frown. “Just cut it before she gives up the ghost in there.”

  He sighed, but went ahead and pulled out his dagger. The bundle unraveled, and we were soon looking at a hefty girl with a dirty face, disheveled hair, and a ragged dress that looked to have been a beautiful one at some point. Her facial features left no doubt in my mind that she was the könig’s daughter—all she was missing was a beard.

  She stared at us before imperiously asking, “And who are you?”

  “We freed you,” I replied. “We’re fearless rescuers in search of injustice and people going through hard times.”

  That put the finishing touches on her confusion, and I realized it wasn’t the time for jokes.

  “Your father asked us—well, me and my friend, valiant Knight of the Temple von Richter—to free you from the clutches of Torsfel the Crooked, which is what we just finished doing. You’re Ulfrida, daughter of König Harald, yes?”

  “Phew,” she exhaled in relief. “Here I was afraid that I’d gotten away from that troll spawn Torsfel only to fall into the hands of a band of halfwits.”

  Gunther pursed his lips but said nothing.

  “Of course, I’m Ulfrida. You can’t see that?” She got up. “So my father was worried about me? Marvelous.”

  You completed a quest: Liberate the König’s Daughter

  You freed Ulfrida, the könig’s daughter, from captivity.

  To get your reward, talk to König Harald.

  “What’s so marvelous about that?” I asked. “You’re his daughter, aren’t you?”

  Ulfrida brushed off my question with a wave of her hand, letting me know what she really thought of her father’s warm affections.

  “Are you all right, Lady Ulfrida?” Gunther asked the prinzessin, in keeping with etiquette.

  “What the jotunns are you talking about?” Ulfrida responded. “First that Ingvar and his quirks, then that hairy oaf the Crooked with his stupid jokes, and then I got dragged and tossed around in those rags. My legs are all bruised and my ribs hurt.”

  “I mean, is there any irreparable damage?” Gunther blushed a little.

  “What? Oh, that’s what you’re talking about.” Ulfrida laughed with the air of someone who had already been through and seen it all. “No, he didn’t touch me; somebody apparently told him not to. Oh, hey, I know you, little guy. You clean the outhouses at the palace.”

  Ulfrida jabbed a finger in Flosy’s direction.

  “True,” Flosy replied, rubbing his nose. “I did.”

  “And what are you doing here with these two?”

  “The könig gave me to Jarl Hagen, so I serve him now,” Flosy said proudly, while also clearly letting Ulfrida know that he was no longer hers to command. He had his own jarl.

  “Ah, so you’re a jarl.” Ulfrida stared at me with newfound interest. “That changes things. I thought you were just a mercenary. Please accept my most sincere thanks, Jarl, for saving me. How many drakkars do you have?”

  The prinzessin’s eyes were alight, and I wasn’t a fan. She was apparently looking actively for her own little bit of happiness, I didn’t need that.

  “I don’t have drakkars,” I said quickly. “Not even a hird. Just Flosy.”

  Somewhere in Ulfrida’s brain, I was stamped incompatible, so her dark eyes turned toward Gunther and his glistening, newly washed armor.

  “And I’m just a knight,” he said just as quickly, having also seen which way the wind was blowing. “I just go here and there running errands mostly.”

  The grimace on the prinzessin’s face told us that she’d moved on, and Flosy had never been potential prey to her as it was.

  “So did you catch that parasite the Crooked?” she asked. “Or did the troll spawn get away?�
��

  “He’s right there.” I pointed at Torsfel, who was still sitting on the ground.

  “Excellent!” Ulfrida exclaimed happily. “Are you going to straighten his ribs yourself or have my father do it?”

  “No, he’s got a holmgang coming,” Flosy chimed in.

  “Who gave that bastard a holmgang?” asked Ulfrida, who appeared shocked by the news.

  “Olavsson. The one over there.” Flosy nodded toward Gunnar. “He has more accounts to settle with Torsfel than you do.”

  Ulfrida peered at the jarl, and I had to imagine that was the only reason she missed the liberty Flosy had taken.

  “Prinzessin,” I said, deciding to pull her away and get some answers to my questions. “You said that Ingvar was quirky. What did you mean?”

  “What?” Ulfrida looked back at me. “Ingvar? Oh, he’s always been strict, focused on his work, and he never paid attention to me. Then, in the last month, he started pushing me to go for walks in the evening.”

  “What’s strange about that? It happens with men.” I was having a hard time seeing what was out of the ordinary.

  “With men, sure, especially when they want something with women.” Ulfrida shook her head. “But not with Ingvar. He’s always been about his work—it’s his wife and girlfriend both.”

  “So, he took an interest in you?”

  “Yep. He even gave me an amulet, which had never happened before.”

  “What kind of amulet?” I asked, my suspicions aroused.

  “Round, forged with engraved runes.” Ulfrida gestured with her hands. “One evening, he came over and said he had a present for me. It was passed down to him from his deceased mother, he said, and he wanted me to wear it. Of course, I wasn’t sure how his mother could have had anything that valuable—I’d heard stories about her…”

  “And?” She was in far less of a hurry than I was.

  “And that’s all, damn him. I put the amulet on, and suddenly it was like I was falling into some kind of pit. I could still hear voices, first Ingvar’s and then some old lady’s. The next thing I knew, that shaggy beast had me. Speaking of pits, maybe we can just forget about that whole holmgang? We could just dig a deep pit, and throw the piece of trash in there without his pants. It would be funny, it would feel good, and your nice friend would stay alive.”