Knud Ironhand, Head of the Jarls, first atop the walls of Ulspaan, victor of seven duels and survivor of the Lichstan massacre nursed a third mug of the piss that passed for ale in the south and half-listened to his mates babbling some bullshit or another. Well, former Head of the Jarls, truth be told. He scratched his hairy scalp and wondered again how he ended up a sea away from his past glory and working as a shipmate for a handful of coins. 

Live in civilization. Be a better man. Leave the killing life behind. 

That was fine and all, but it wasn’t working out so well for Knud. He’d spent two years in Straadhil doing whatever honest work came his way and he had nothing to show for it. A place to sleep, some coin for a meal, some for ale, but that was it. 

He took a sip. 

But then, that wasn’t so bad, was it? No danger, at least. And no excitement. Nothing with a shred of meaning to it, either.

He sighed. What a fucking predicament. 

“Hey Knud,” Gerard called from across the table. “Cheer up, mate. We’ve two days before we leave port and we got paid some. Ale and pussy, mate! Don’t know a man can’t be made happy by those.” 

The table erupted with laughter. Knud himself grinned. Drunk was, indeed, his favorite state to be in, and between a woman’s legs was, indeed, his favorite place to be. 

Edmund leaned close to him. The bastard’s breath reeked of cheap ale and rotten teeth. “See there, Knud,” he said with a toothy grin, pointing somewhere behind Knud. “That lass over there looks your type.”

Knud looked over his shoulder. There, at a far corner of the tavern, sat alone a slender but shapely woman with a huge ginger mane for hair, dressed in makeshift leather garments decorated with sticks, herbs, moss, and small bones. Though as Knud’s eyes focused a bit more he noticed her hair was ‘decorated’ the same way, so perhaps there was less intent to it than Knud initially thought. That or she had a weird sense of fashion. Either way it didn’t bother Knud. 

“Come on, big boy,” Edmund said. “Give her a shot. Me and the mates need something to bet on.”

Knud drained his mug, then refilled it from one of the jugs on the table. “Write down ten silvers on getting laid,” he said.

His mates laughed, cheered, and whistled. Edmund raised a toast. “To my man, bursting with confidence!” he said. “I’m down five silvers he’s sleeping alone tonight.”

“No way,” someone else replied. “They’ll get off like rats.”

Knud took his mug and walked mostly in a straight line to the lone woman. It wasn’t normal for any lass to be left alone in a busy tavern like this, but then she did look foreign and wild. Might be people got bad vibes, but that didn’t bother Knud one bit. All the better, in fact. He could walk up and start chatting her without any other wanker making his life more difficult than it needed to be. 

The woman looked up at him as he approached, but didn’t say a word. Knud pulled a chair with some lad in it from a nearby table, helped the lad off the chair with a small shove, then slid it beside the woman and sat. The lad wasn’t happy and quite vocal about it up until he noticed the size of Knud. Now, Knud wasn’t a fighter anymore, but he’d done plenty of it in his time and he came from a bloodline of fighters, so he was taller and wider than pretty much everyone he’d met in the south. The lad apologized and left Knud and the wild haired lady to their business. 

Up close she smelled of herbs, mud, and bone dust. It reminded Knud of the old healers in his village. 

“I’m Knud,” he told her. “Knud Ironhand, that is. You may have heard of me.”

The woman sipped from her mug silently. 

“I mean,” Knud said. “You look somewhat northern. I have a reputation there, so. I thought, you know.” He shrugged.

“Your reputation is that of an ember,” the woman said. 

Knud’s face twisted with confusion. “An ember?”

“A fading remnant of a once-strong fire.”

Knud frowned. “That don’t sound so good.”

“Where did you expect swimming upstream would get you?”

Knud sensed his ten silvers slipping away. “You think you know a lot, huh?”

“I know little,” the woman said. “The Gods know all.”

“Where are you from anyway?” Some all-important hillwoman cunt, he guessed.

“Tkha, beyond the Frosinn Hlieth.”

Knud burst out laughing, spraying spit all over the table and a little bit on the woman, who flinched as a result. 

“That explains it,” he said. “There’s only brutes killing and eating each other that far north.”

“Have you been there?”

“Well, no, but it’s too cold there. The Frosinn Hlieth is literally a frozen river.”

“It is indeed cold, but the strong and the useful survive.”

“Which one are you then? Strong or useful?”

She looked him in the eye. “Both.”

“ ‘course you’d say that.” 

“In due time we’ll share a vision,” she said. “Then you’ll know.”

“Speaking of sharing things, do you wanna fuck?” 

Knud wasn’t always so blunt, but he’d lost a significant portion of his interest in the woman, so he rathered let what was going to happen happen, or not, and if need be move on to some less crazy lass. The night was still young. 

The woman smiled and pulled some strapped papers from a satchel around her waist. She took a dry leaf from between two pages, one Knud didn’t recognize, broke it in half and squashed each bit to pieces over each of their mugs, then returned the papers to her satchel. 

“Ask me my name, tell me tales of Ironhand’s glory, and I will sing you the world.” She clicked his mug with hers and took a long sip. 

Knud glanced back at the table where his mates were. Some pretended rather poorly they weren’t watching, but they all were. He sniffed his ale. It smelled a little bit like basil, he decided, so it was probably okay. Besides, she did drink the same leaf, and she was still very much good looking, and he did have ten silvers hanging on this. 

Ah, what the hell. Some little leaf wasn’t going to scare him. He’d smoked plenty in his time. He chugged some of the ale, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and smiled his charming bastard smile at her. 

“So,” he said. “What’s your name?”

. . . M a e v e

“And then I swung with my mighty sword!” Knud was saying as he climbed atop a chair in her room, bare chest thrust out and full of pride over past glories. “And off with his head! Then I swung again at the other, and with one fell swoop,” he spun around with the chair to show how it happened, miraculously maintaining balance. “Off with his head!” 

She giggled through the haze. He laughed. 

“No, ow! That hurts,” he said, then laughed again. 

She shushed him. “Quiet, you’ll wake everyone.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Fuck em!”

She stuffed something like a bean in his mouth, then kissed him. 

It was so warm and cozy. She was soft in his arms, and fragile. Such a small creature. 

He smiled. 

Knud lay in the carriage between some boxes and stared at the ceiling. Maeve hummed a pleasant melody on the side. How’d it get to that? He chugged some of the ale in the waterskin. 

“Gods damn this life,” he said. 

Maeve didn’t respond.

“Tell me again,” he said. 

She stopped humming. “What did you see?”

“A goat,” he said. “This part always gets me. Why a goat? I’ve never been a farmer or anything.”

“What have you been?”

“A warrior,” he said. “I’ve killed farmers’ goats for food while on the march. Could it be a punishment?”

“What did the goat do?”

“It looked at me with its dumb eyes.” He saw it again as he stared at the dull brown ceiling of the carriage. “It kept looking for a while, then the shade covered it and it was gone.”

“Do you want to save the goat, or run from the shade?”

“Fuck if I know,” Knud said. “If I’m the goat I want to run from the shade, right? And if it’s someone else, I should go and save the goat. That’s what it means, I think, but which one is it?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Maeve said. “Either way it’s the same shade.”

Knud’s head was blurry. His eyes too, from the tears. He lay the wrong way on a double bed and sobbed quietly while Maeve sat in a corner of the room and knitted something. The two of them were naked despite the chill coming in through the open window. Knud wiped a tear as he watched the sun set. 

It was hot by the bonfire, even outside. The sky was clear and full of beautiful stars, which carried fond memories of Knud’s childhood. Maeve sang something in a northern dialect so obscure he couldn’t make out most of it. Something about wolves and gods. Green fields and dark nights. Her voice was soft, beautiful, and a touch foreboding. He grinned. His heart raced with excitement. 

His palm bled. 

Knud woke up with a mild headache, a mighty boner, and a nagging bladder. He didn’t even bother with the piss pot under the bed, he’d sprayed piss all over his ship cabin more than once before. Instead, he took a flipped stool from one of the corners of the room, put it proper in front of the window, opened the window, climbed up, and started pissing on the street below. 

“Oi!” a woman called from below. “Mind your manners, brute!” 

Knud wasn’t paying much attention, but from where he stood she didn’t seem to have piss on her, so it was probably an overreaction. He ignored her and instead took in the view. Tall, dark houses, cobbled streets, and no ships to be seen anywhere. Hell, there was no sea on the horizon, either. 

“The fuck did the sea go?” he said. 

Behind him Maeve shuffled in the bed. “What?” she said half asleep.

“What part of town are we in? I can’t see the sea from here.”

“You don’t remember?” She sat up, eyes barely open and hair somehow even more dishevelled than before. “We’re one day on horseback from Straadhil.” 

Knud stepped down from the stool, scratched his balls and closed the window to keep the cold out. “A day away? On horseback no less? How did we get that far in one night?”

Maeve fought off the blanket as she searched under it for something. Her clothes, perhaps. She was as buttnaked as Knud was, and the sight of her kept his morning erection from fading away. Damn it but he loved women. 

“We didn’t,” she said. “We spent most of yesterday travelling. You’d won some coin on a bet, so you paid for a carriage.”

Knud looked out the window one more time to confirm it was, indeed, not the familiar sight of Straadhil outside. 

It wasn’t.

“Why would I do that? Where are we?” He scratched his balls one more time as he watched Maeve bend to look under the bed while still sitting on it. “Wanna go for another round?”

She pulled a piece of clothing, inspected it, then tossed it on his side of the bed. It was Knud’s pants. “We’re in Gjurnd looking for a goat, and if we go for another round we’ll be late for the execution.”

“None of this makes any sense,” Knud said as he took his pants from the bed and put them on. “There’s plenty of goats in Straadhil, why would we come to Gjurnd? And why would I care about an execution?”

“Because of the goat.” Maeve found what she was looking for in the nightstand’s drawer — a long pipe and a tinderbox. “It was as I said — we sang the world and you saw a goat taken by a shade.” She took some dry tobacco looking thing from the stand and stuffed it in the pipe, then lit it using the tinderbox. “We came all the way here so you can stop the execution and save the goat.” She dragged on the pipe, held it for a few seconds, then puffed out smoke in the form of circles. “Whether the man with the noose is your goat or another’s, however, we don’t know.”

Knud remembered the dumb yellow eyes of a goat. There one moment, then dark the next, then gone. The memory sent chills down his spine. 

“Yeah,” he said. “For peace of mind, I suppose.”

Maeve offered him the pipe. 

“Tobacco?” he asked. 

She shook her head. 

“I’ll pass then,” Knud said and for the first time he noticed her palm was bandaged. “What was that thing you drugged me with? And what happened to your hand?”

She looked at the bandages, then dragged another lungful of smoke. “Forest Guide,” she said. “It opens the senses. Shows us the way.” She stretched her back like a cat, then pointed with the long pipe at Knud’s hand. It was also bandaged. “We’re married,” she said. 

Knud looked between their bandaged palms with a rising sense of alarm. “We’re what?” 

“We mixed blood under the moonlight,” Maeve said. “We sang, we danced, we loved. Now we are one.”

“Why did you do that?” Knud snapped at her. 

She shrugged. “You asked nicely.” 

“I...” 

Knud planted his hand on his face, moved it up and rubbed his head. 

“My hair!” he said. “It’s gone!” 

Maeve puffed more smoke. “In your pocket,” she said. “We should dress and move, lest we miss the execution.”

Knud checked the pockets of his pants. In one of them he found a small knitted doll loosely resembling his features made of hair, presumably his. It was cute, he had to admit, and creepy. 

“Did you make that?”

Maeve nodded as she walked a couple of meters to take a piece of her clothing from the floor. “A wife’s gift,” she explained. “For you to burn once you are ready to be remade.” 

Knud looked at the doll’s eyes. Empty as they were, it seemed to him it was looking back. 

“Keep it for now,” Maeve said. “Shedding your skin is no easy task.”

“Sure,” Knud said as he put the doll back in his pocket. “I guess.”

###

Knud stood close to the hangman’s gibbet amid the gathered crowd and tried unsuccessfully to listen to a man in fancy red clothes and tight pants reading the charges. His head was too preoccupied to pay attention. He was drugged, kidnapped in his delirious state, goaded into saving a stranger from the noose, married, and shaved. All in a bit over one day. By his new wife. 

He looked at his bandaged palm again. Him. Married. His ma’ would’ve never believed it. Hell, he would not have believed it. It would never have happened if not for the particular circumstances of yesterday. What was he supposed to do now? Settle somewhere, make a bunch of kids, and provide for the family? How would he raise his children? How would Maeve?

An elbow poked him in the ribs. He perked up at the pain. It was his wife, looking at him expectantly. Was this married life? The peace he gave up fighting for? Meaningless labour and elbow in the ribs. Safer than out on a battlefield, sure, but — 

Wait, something was wrong. The man with the parchment on the gibbet’s stand had stopped reading. This was it, Knud’s moment.

He raised his hand and screamed over the crowd. “I object!” This won him a few confused stares, but not much more. He shoved people out of his way to make it to the stand where he could be heard before they sent the boy with the noose flying down. 

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”

“What’s the meaning of this?” the man with the now rolled parchment demanded.

“Darkness falls upon the land,” Maeve’s voice rang over the murmuring crowd. 

Knud managed to spot her ginger mane, tall as he was. She rubbed her nose, spread her arms and turned her head to the skies with eyes all white. She’d snorted something serious. 

“Shit,” Knud spat. 

The crowd around her parted as her body convulsed. She turned her gaze to the man with the parchment, her eyes now properly located in their sockets, though their pupils were so dilated Knud could spot the change from where he stood. They looked like black pools. 

“As blight spreads no weak man will bear innocence,” Maeve said. “The Gods are angry.” 

As if to prove her point the skies darkened. Rain followed, at first only a few drops, then spades of them. 

“Hear this, cold husks!” Maeve called. “The champion of Ulf will fight for rights over this lamb.”

“Wait,” Knud said. “Who said anything about fighting?”

“Are you this ‘champion of Ulf’?” Parchment Man asked Knud. 

“No,” Knud said. “Ulf is the evil cunt in the northern pantheon. Don’t sleep with wolves and all that? They say that down here?”

“Not that I’m aware,” Parchment man said, then louder to Maeve: “Tell me, witch, about this Ulf?”

“She’s not actually a witch,” Knud corrected him, but Parchment Man didn’t pay attention. 

“He’s winter, snow, and ice,” Maeve replied. “He is the wolf that never prowls, the scourge that never comes, the dark that never falls. He knows. He is.”

Parchment Man’s eyebrows inched closer in confusion. “I still don’t get it,” he said to himself, then turned to Knud. “You want to fight for the life of this man?” He pointed at the boy with a bag over his head and noose around his neck.

“Well,” Knud said. “Not fight, necessarily. I was hoping we might come to an agreement of some sort.”

“An agreement, hmm?” Parchment Man rubbed the beard on his chin. “And you and that woman are together?”

Knud scratched the back of his shaven head where the Norse symbols tattooed were now visible. “She’s my wife.”

“I see,” Parchment Man said, then snapped his fingers. “Guards, arrest them both.” 

“Arrest? There’s really no need,” Knud protested, but when the armored men with drawn swords approached him he did not resist. 

Maeve murmured something in the northern dialect Knud didn’t quite understand as they took her, but otherwise didn’t resist either, for which Knud was glad. They hadn’t really done anything wrong, so he hoped they would let them go with a fine or some such. 

As things went, they weren’t in as bad of a situation as the boy with the noose. But then, maybe not just yet.