Beyond a Darkened Shore(26)
“If only,” I said, my eyes narrowed at his smirk. Unperturbed by my acidic tone, he sat down across from me and pulled out a small blade to skin the rabbits. “Where did you get the knife?”
He continued skinning the rabbit, but he spared me a moment’s glance. “I’ve had it all along,” he said. “Your men didn’t search me well enough. Useless as those chains.” A flash of teeth. “You didn’t really think they’d hold me, did you?”
I had, actually, but of course I’d never admit that. My hand tightened on the grip of my sword when I thought about how easily he had escaped. His profile was to me, his nose as straight as a blade, his entire face as though it was chiseled from the rock itself, though his lips were surprisingly full. He was beautiful, a dangerous beauty, and again I thought of my earlier comparison to a lion. “If the chains were so ineffective, then why didn’t you leave sooner?”
He quickly and efficiently finished skinning one rabbit and moved on to the next. “I wanted to hear what you had to say. And,” he added with a grin, “if you’ll recall, I had recently suffered a blow to my head.”
He could have left at any time. A flush of embarrassment sneaked up my neck. “I could have killed you instead,” I snapped, “though I suppose you would have liked that better, since you Northmen are all so eager to die.”
“Not just die,” Leif corrected. “Die in battle.”
I scoffed. “Either way, you’d be dead.”
He slid the rabbits onto two sticks and held them over the fire. “Would you have me explain to you about our afterworld, then? About Valhalla’s golden halls overflowing with ale and mead—where we can fight all day and feast all night.”
“How is that any different from what you do on earth?”
Amusement touched the edges of his mouth. “Because in Valhalla, we will never tire or grow old.”
I shifted my gaze from the fire to his face. “And just how old are you? You can’t be much older than I am.”
He turned the rabbits expertly over the flames. “Old enough to have earned the right to sail my own longship, to lead my own men.” I shook my head over his cryptic answer, but then he added, “I have seen eighteen years.”
As I’d thought, only a year older than I was. But as I had learned long ago: power aged you. “Will you tell me more of the enemy we face?”
“That depends. How much do you know of our gods?”
“Nothing.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. I knew a little; it was hard not to, when the Northmen had infiltrated so many of our cities, intermarrying with my own people, bringing their strange gods with them. I knew that Odin was the father of the gods, and the god of war. His most famous son was Thor, the thunder god. “You said the giants wanted to overthrow the gods. Why do they want to do that?”
“The gods and j?tnar may be descended from the same being, but they’ve been in a struggle against each other over control of the realms since the beginning of time. The j?tnar are gluttons of all: gold, women, power, flesh. More than anything, they desire control over mankind—to be worshipped as the gods have been. Because of this, the gods banished them to their own realm: J?tunheimr. The j?tnar have forever tried to break free of their realm, but we’ve always trusted the gods to keep them in check. Until the most powerful of them, led by Fenris, escaped.”
My father would have immediately dismissed everything Leif had said as heretical pagan nonsense, and part of me wanted to do the same, but there was a powerful ring of truth in his words. They raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“Why would men join with such monsters?”
“Because the men are drawn to the same thing as the j?tnar. Promises of riches and power. In exchange for men helping them conquer the lands of both the Celtic gods and the Norse, they will defeat the gods, who have already become weak since the Christian God has spread throughout our lands. Not having to answer to our gods is a tempting proposition for many who are tired of bloody sacrifices that have gone unanswered by the gods.”
Weak. The Morrigan certainly hadn’t seemed weak when she was holding me captive in my own tub. But then, she was also working through me . . . and possibly through Leif. Was it because she didn’t have the power to stop the j?tnar on her own? It made me think of what the Morrigan had said before—that the old gods of éirinn had grown weak and unable to interfere in the mortal realm. It was hard to believe, but the Morrigan was also a war goddess. She would have destroyed the giants already had she the power to do so.
“Have you seen these giants?”
His gaze shifted to mine briefly. “I have seen evidence of them, and talk of them has spread throughout the north.”
“Must be strong evidence for you to take on such a quest.”
“As strong as a crow’s vision,” he said with a smirk.
I looked away—I didn’t want to be reminded of that horrible vision. “What I saw was terrible enough to make me join with you, it’s true.” I glanced back at him. “What evidence did you find?”
A muscle in his jaw flexed—perhaps at the memory of them. “Not long ago I encountered a Norse village that had been reduced to splinters. There were no bodies to burn; only pools of blood were left. Like a herd of swine had been slaughtered—in some places, the blood dripped from the roof. My men and I found footprints, ten times the size of a normal man’s, covering the village. It was clear to us what had happened—that the j?tnar had escaped J?tunheimr. When we consulted with the seer, the warnings of our gods were passed along to us: that Fenris planned to overthrow them and take over Midgard.”