The Girl the Sea Gave Back(21)

“Get him up,” Asmund ordered.

Kjeld and Bard took my arms, lifting me up and dragging me over the mud until we disappeared into the tall standing rocks that edged the water, where the other raiders were waiting. They stood with their arms crossed, watching silently as I worked at the clasps of my vest with numb hands, swallowing down the urge to vomit as I lifted it over my head. The gash in my side was still bleeding freely.

“What happened?” Bard looked down at me.

“Bekan’s brother betrayed him.” I swallowed, trying to steady my words as I got down next to the fire they’d put out that morning. The embers were still glowing beneath the thick white ash. “He killed Espen and they turned on us.”

I hissed, opening the wound with my fingers and trying to see how deep the cut was, but I could barely see straight. I took my knife from my belt and raked back the cool coals, burying the blade into the ones that were still hot.

No one spoke, the reality of what had happened slowly sinking in. The Svell chieftain was dead. The Nādhir leaders murdered. If there had ever been a chance of outrunning a war, it was gone now. And from the looks on the faces of the other raiders around us, they were thinking the same.

“The Nādhir are already gathering on the fjord. They’ll be ready to fight,” I said between tight breaths.

“When?”

“Two days. Three. I don’t know.” I turned the knife over in the coals and watched the dried blood sizzle off the blade.

“We should leave the mainland,” Kjeld said, looking to Asmund. “They’re probably tracking us right now.”

Bard’s voice dropped low. “We can’t leave.”

“Why not? This is their war, not ours.”

Bard glared at him, but he was right. As raiders, they’d left their obligations to their clans behind, but I’d known Bard and Asmund for more than half of my life. They couldn’t stay in Hylli. Not after all that had happened. But they hadn’t really ever left us.

“We should go. Now,” Kjeld said again, turning his back to Bard. “West, deeper into the forests past Svell territory.”

Asmund stared at the ground, thinking. “They won’t just be looking for Halvard, Kjeld. They saw us, too.”

“I can make it to Hylli on my own,” I said, giving him a way out. I had no right to ask for their help. They’d come for me in the glade when they owed me nothing.

Bard straightened beside him. “And if you don’t?”

“They’ll be ready, with or without me.”

“Espen’s dead, Asmund.” Bard squared his shoulders to his brother. “You know what that means. Halvard is chieftain of the Nādhir now.”

I breathed through the pain winding tighter around me. He was saying aloud what I hadn’t even had a chance to think. Latham, Freydis, and the other leaders would be waiting in Hylli, but Espen wasn’t coming and I was the one chosen to take his place. I was the one who was supposed to lead them.

Kjeld stood back, watching us. He’d taken down the Svell and saved my life like the rest of them, but if anyone had reason to leave, it was him. He had no heritage or lost home or ancestors among the Nādhir. He was Kyrr. And he’d only found a place with the raiders because it was easier to be picked off when you were alone.

But I was the one Asmund looked to. He met my eyes over the fire pit, his lip between his teeth. “Utan.”

It was the next Nādhir village pushing east toward the fjord, and I knew what he was thinking.

They were next.

“Get rid of the armor,” he said, pulling the knife from his belt.

Kjeld sighed, shaking his head, but a smile spread over Bard’s face. He picked up my vest from where it sat in the dirt and Asmund stepped toward me, taking the braid of hair over my shoulder. He cut it clean in one motion and dropped it beside me before he knelt down, taking my knife from the fire.

He held the glowing blade out between us.

“I won’t forget this,” I said, looking up to him.

He met my eyes, his voice even. “I won’t let you.”

I unbuckled my belt and folded it, biting down on the leather as I propped myself against the rough bark of the tree behind me. I took the knife from Asmund and marked the wound with the tips of my fingers, finding a place in the treetops to fix my eyes. I pulled a rasping breath deep into my chest before I pressed the hot blade into the wound.

I groaned, biting down hard as the skin seared and the smell of burned flesh filled the air. The sting heated the blood in my veins, the sky brightening overhead as a white light exploded in my vision and then flickered out, swallowing me in darkness.

Asmund was right.

There was no going back. Not from this.





CHAPTER NINE


TOVA


I stared into the trees, trying to conjure back what I’d seen—black marks winding around wrists in the spread of a raven’s wing as the man in the trees lifted his bow.

He was Kyrr. He had to be. But the Kyrr never left the headlands. I’d never seen another of my kind, not once in the years since Jorrund found me on the Svell’s shore. Any pictures of them had been washed away by the storm that brought me across the fjord, only broken bits and pieces left in my memory. The sound of a woman’s voice, the warm glow of firelight. The sting against my skin as someone worked at my marks with a bowl of wood ash ink and a bone needle.