The Fetch by Chris Humphreys

Author:Chris Humphreys [Humphreys, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48474-1
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LAST OF THE VIKINGS

There was a moment, such a brief one, when Sky saw Kristin. He thought it would feel like this if you leapt from a tall building and glanced into the various rooms as you fell. A snapshot. He saw her seeing him, her eyes wide, mouth already opened to shout. He was in his body on the pine needles and then he was out of it. Past her. Gone again.

Then there was Sky-becoming-Bjørn; and there was Kristin. Except now her name wasn’t Kristin but Ingeborg, and she was no longer a cousin. She was a daughter.

And in the last moment he had as Sky, he felt one thing clearly—when he’d been Bjørn before, he’d been young, with a young man’s strength, had felt it in the way he pulled at the oar or hefted the ax. Now he felt tired, so tired and weak. And not in the way a young man does when he gets sick.

Bjørn is old, Sky thought … the last thing he thought …

“Father?”

Bjørn’s eyes opened to the voice, the gentle shaking. They’d closed to hold in the feeling, that strange one he’d felt once or twice before in his life when he was himself, and not himself. But it was certainly his youngest daughter, Kr … Ingeborg. Ingeborg, born in the autumn of his life, who shook him.

“Are they here?” he whispered. And his daughter nodded and tried to smile because she knew he could not bear tears.

“Then bring Edmond to me.” As she turned away, he added, “Bring him, child, and stay. I need you both.”

She lifted the cowhide that shut this room off from the other, larger one, admitting a hum from the people waiting there. She beckoned and held the curtain up to allow one of them to enter.

Edmond came straight to the bed, lifted Bjørn’s hand, pressed it to his forehead. “How fares my lord?”

Bjørn never regarded his own face anymore, too disgusted by what he saw. But the man’s before him told the tale for them both. It was thirty winters since he had seized the English lad in a raid, and they had shrunk the boyish cheeks, thinned the mop of fair hair, grayed what little remained. Only the light in the eyes remained, a dance that had charmed Bjørn from the first. He had made Edmond his body slave and he had grown as dear to him as any of the three wives he had lost. Dearer, perhaps, in some ways. And certainly the two people who stood before him now, slave and daughter, were the only two left who loved him. Those others who waited outside didn’t. But he didn’t need love from any of them for what he was planning. He needed obedience.

He used Edmond’s hand to pull himself up, swing his feet slowly to the floor. “My bearskin,” he said, “and my ax.”

His daughter wrapped the cloak around him, fastening it at the shoulder with the fine gold dragon brooch he’d seized from the Moors off Sicily.

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