Blood Will Follow - Snorri Kristjansson Page 0,102

up alongside what had to be his brother, still clinging on to the girl. “If you don’t step away right now, you scratchy fart, we’ll let the little bitch go and make sure you have an accident instead.”

Thormund gestured to Audun. “Want to go up against him?”

The boys turned and stared. Audun suddenly felt numb and tired. The people in front of him didn’t look real.

He shrugged and walked away from the surprise in Thormund’s eyes. The boys howled in triumph, and the bigger one pushed the old horse thief to the side.

The girl’s shrieks died down soon enough.

Later, when they were on their way again, Thormund caught up with him. “I don’t need you to save anybody,” he hissed, “but where I come from, you do as your chieftain asks you.”

The buzz from the blood-rage, the fistfights, and the four men he’d knocked down had turned into a dull, throbbing ache. It had been an effort to control it, but he’d managed. Now he just wanted to lie down.

He looked at Thormund. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It won’t change them, won’t change her.” He saw, or thought he saw, disgust in the old man’s face, but he didn’t care. “Fate is fate,” he said.

“Well, I hope I don’t need your help when I meet mine,” Thormund said.

Audun thought of the wall, of the blonde woman. “Most of us do, sooner or later.”

The old horse thief saw the look on his face and inched away from him, carefully. “Just saying, it’s a shame about the girl.”

Audun turned and looked ahead, at the gritty road, at the setting sun, at the back of the man in front of him. “It always is,” he said quietly.

After a while, Audun struggled to tell the days apart. They blended one into the other, like blood into water.

The farms were big, or they were small. The farmhands could fight, or they couldn’t. Sometimes they met men who’d seen battle before, steady hands holding rusted swords that had rested for too long in an oilcloth somewhere.

They died like the rest.

He could remember one thing, though: the weasel-faced brothers had suffered a bit of bad luck. They’d dragged a girl behind a bush, but she had a knife on her and managed to stab them both. Mouthpiece wanted to ask how they’d both been stabbed in the back, but Audun stopped him.

Thormund had been in a good mood since.

The warband, now down to eighteen men, had sought refuge in the dense oak forest and now trudged along the path leading through the trees. Up ahead, voices rang out.

“. . . just fucking climb, you lard-ass,” Thormund snapped.

“I’ll step to the side, if you don’t mind,” came Olgeir’s terse reply.

“Suit yourself,” Thormund said.

“What’s going on?” Mouthpiece mumbled.

“Trees across the path,” someone said. “Four of them. Weird that they’ve all fallen in the same—”

The forest came alive with war cries and up front, two men leapt out from the cover of the fallen trees, thrusting spears. Thormund disappeared from view. Metal clanged to their left where Olgeir had stepped into the thicket.

Audun whirled on Boy. “Play dead, face down. Now,” he snapped, and Boy fell as if he’d been smacked on the head. He lay on the ground, head buried in his arms.

The moment after the first attacker had burst out from the thicket by the roadside, Audun reached for his hammers and let go of the world.

Somewhere on the edge of his senses, he felt the retreat. There was a difference in the fighters, the shift from killing rage to fighting for your life.

The hammers rose and fell; bones broke, blood gushed. The stench of voided bowels was all around him, but Audun didn’t mind. He liked the feeling of life as he dealt death, the heightened senses, the pulse of the blood coursing through his veins.

Most of all he liked the control. With every fight he felt more in charge of the fire that coursed through his body: he was stronger, quicker, more powerful. He could hit harder and take more punishment than ever before.

He didn’t notice the wound until much later, when the others had all been seen to. Boy came up to him, concern written on his pale face, and pointed at Audun’s left leg. Puzzled, Audun looked down. A gash the width of his thumb gaped back at him, crusted over with blood, dirt, and ripped cloth.

“Well, shit,” he said.

A pinpoint of pain spread and bloomed from the wound, coursing up and down.