Fires were being set. Bodies swarmed from the mouth of the village, rushing up the road toward the North King’s entourage as though they fled the fire behind them.
“Those aren’t villagers,” Aidan shouted.
“Close the gates,” Hod screamed.
“Close the gates!” Lothgar repeated.
But the Northmen were already falling upon the confused clansmen.
Hod began to shoot, letting arrows fly into the climbing horde, doing his best to ignore the clash and the shrieks and the stench. The smell of blood threatened to overwhelm everything else.
Then Bayr was among the throng, his heart thundering, and Hod knew he battled though Hod could not see him fight.
Alba screamed, Bayr roared, and Gudrun laughed.
Hod released one shrieking dart after another, picking off the men around Bayr as best he could before the heartbeats combined to one pulsating swell. It was like a line of drummers, one thumping out the tempo that all the others marched to, and he pulled back, thwarted.
Suddenly there was an archer by his side, and Hod pled for direction.
“I’m no good in a fight like this. I can’t determine which heartbeat to aim at,” he shouted.
Then Bayr was running through the gates, his grunts echoing the slice of his sword.
“There you are,” Hod breathed, relief straightening his aim.
“Is the Dolphys surrounded?” he yelled at the archer beside him.
“Aye. He’s twenty-nine deep, at least,” the archer said.
And Hod could hear them, the rat-at-tat of their hearts striking against the anvil that was Bayr. One by one, Hod started picking them off, hearing the moment each fell and a new one took his place.
“The Northmen are breaking down the temple doors! Do you hear that?” the archer yelled.
Hod nodded with a quick jerk of his head.
“There’s not one of ours near him.”
But Gudrun was among them; Hod knew his heart well.
“Make it rain, blind man. Make it rain!” the archer beside him bellowed.
He let another stream of arrows fly, but Gudrun was inside, the door giving way beneath his axe.
The archer who’d been beside him was racing down the rampart, and Hod turned back to Bayr but didn’t dare shoot.
“I need your eyes, archer,” he bellowed, but the man was gone.
In the cacophony of swords and shrieks, he could not determine the warriors from the Northmen, friend from foe. The stench of blood overwhelmed his senses, and he roared in impotence at his own weakness.
“I need your eyes.”
The trumpets wailed, the sound sitting on the breeze, and the women quickened their pace. Minutes later, another sound rose in the wind, a sound Ghisla could not immediately identify. It was a collective bellow bristling with shrieks and cries, like the sound of gulls caught in a gale or a frenzied crowd at a tournament. She couldn’t see the front of the mount or the northernmost edge of the village, but the sound curled the hair on her nape and curdled the contents of her stomach.
She stopped to listen, eyes turned up to the temple walls, but nothing looked amiss. The sound swelled, and she knew what it was. The attack had begun.
The women began to run, but Ghisla fell to her knees and pulled out her blade.
“Liis,” Dalys shrieked. “Get up.”
But she couldn’t. She had to know. She pricked her finger and traced the star on her hand just the way Hod taught her.
“What are you doing?” Elayne moaned.
She held the rune to her brow and whispered her imperative.
“Show me Hod.”
The square swam in blood. Everywhere blood and bodies—horses and men. A severed head, an arm clutching a sword, and then feet, legs, running, lunging. Sound ricocheted between her ears.
She saw a hand fitting an arrow against a bowstring, and knew it was his, even beneath the blood and dust that coated his skin. It was like she sat beside him, surveying the courtyard below. He was on the wall. She watched the arrow fly, and Hod grunted as it found its mark. He was keeping the Northmen off Bayr, who was bathed in blood and gore. Only the blue of his eyes and his size separated him from the men around him. His braid was gone and his hair, no longer weighted and bound, flew around him, as red and matted as his skin.
Hod nocked another arrow and it pierced the back of the man in Bayr’s path. Bayr raised his eyes to the wall, acknowledging the help, even as he spun with both hands on the hilt of his sword and cut a Northlander—his bone-studded braids rattling with his death throes—in two. The