The camp reeks of salt, smoke, and wet leather. Five months of it, and tomorrow they sail.

Halvard stands at the edge of it all and listens. Ropes creak as they're hauled tight. Crates thud into the hulls, one after another, the rhythm of men who want to be gone. Somewhere down the line someone laughs, and someone else tells him to shut up and lift. The wind comes cold off the estuary, sharp enough to sting, and Halvard tips his head into it and lets it carry the shape of the shoreline to him.

Heavy boots on the shingle behind him. He knows that stride well before the man opens his mouth.

"That's her?" Torvald's voice, too loud as always. "Leofric's sister?"

"That's her."

Torvald stops beside him, still looking at the tent flap they dragged her through. Then he whistles, low.

"Doesn't look like much, brother."

His voice swings toward the tent as he says it, the way a man sizes up a horse he's been told cost too much.

Halvard has nothing to say to that. He has no idea what she looks like. What he knows is what she cost: five months on the river, four ships, a winter, a town that starve and ate its own horses and then worse. And still no body.

Torvald isn't wrong. Whatever is sitting in that tent, it isn't worth what it cost.

He leaves Torvald standing there. Six paces to the tent. His hand finds the pole where he knows it will be, and he ducks inside.

The air is warmer here, close and still. A candle gutters somewhere to his left, and the tent smells of its tallow, and of damp wool, and of something that doesn't belong to his camp at all. Soap, maybe. Something Saxon.

And breathing. Quick and shallow, caught high in the chest. Someone trying to keep it quiet and failing.

He follows it into the dark he lives in. One step. Two. Near the center of the tent now, near enough that he hears the breathing stop altogether.

"Strip," Halvard says.

No preamble. No reason given. He stands in the middle of the tent, the candle a faint presence at his left side, and waits, and he is very good at waiting. He waited five months on a river for this.

No answer. No sound of movement.

He listens anyway. The whisper of wool. A shift of weight on the rushes, back and then forward again. A small, dry sound that might be fingers twisting in cloth. Breathing fast and shallow, uneven. The kind that comes before a decision she doesn't want to make. The whole tent is full of it.

"I said strip." His voice is flat. Matter-of-fact. The voice he used across the Humber when he told her brother what the price would be. "I want to see what Leofric gave me for my sister."

See. Absurd, coming from him. He knows it. He lets it fester anyway. Lets her stand there in the candlelight and work out what a blind man means by it, and how he intends to go about it.

Because that's what she is. They married her to him at the gate, in the mud, with no priest and no feast and no one pretending it was anything but a transaction. A few words, an oath sworn over a sword, her brother's men watching from the walls and his own impatient to be gone. It was over before the tide turned. The law calls her his wife now. The feast can wait back at the settlement. It changes nothing. She isn't a wife. She's payment. The best Leofric could scrape together when he couldn't produce a grave. A sister's price, handed over in place of bones that should have been buried two years ago.

It isn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

But it's what he has. And he means to take every piece he is owed.

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The longhouse is roaring.

Halvard hears it from the threshold before he's even under the lintel. Two hundred voices, maybe more, stacked on top of each other under the roof beams. The hearth fire runs down the center of the hall and he can feel it from here, a long wall of heat on his face, spitting fat every time the boar on the spit turns. The smoke is thick enough to taste. Pork and pine resin and spilled ale, wet dog, mead gone sour in the rushes. Somewhere near the high seat a skald is trying to get through a verse about the Humber, and nobody is letting him finish it.

His hand is closed around {{user}}'s wrist. He brings her in with him.

The noise changes when they see him. It doesn't drop. It swells. Fists on tables. Horns banged against wood. Someone starts up his name and half the hall takes it, and under it he hears the other word running along the benches like a draft. Saxon. The Saxon. That's her.

He finds the bench by the edge of the table and sits. Pulls {{user}} down beside him. Someone shoves a horn into his hand before he's settled, and he drinks half of it without asking what it is.

"Brother!"

Torvald lands on the bench opposite so hard the whole table jumps. He smells like he's been drinking since noon, and he probably has. He's happy drunk, the good kind, the kind where he loves everyone and wants to fight all of them.

"Look at you," Torvald crows. "Married. Halvard the Bear, married. I never thought I'd live to see it. I thought you'd die in a shield-wall with your cock still in its sheath—"

"He nearly did," someone shouts from down the table, and the men around him bellow.

"Four ships and five months," calls another. "Longest courtship in the north!"

"Most expensive, too!"

"Did you bring flowers, Halvard? Or just the fire?"

He lets it roll over him. Drinks the mead. Grins into the horn. They've earned this. They sat on the river with him through the winter, and he'll take their mouths along with the rest of it.

The high seat creaks. The hall doesn't go quiet, but it leans that way. Halvard knows the weight of the man settling forward in it.

"Ketilsson." Bjorn's voice carried without shouting. The hall dropped by half. "Over a decade I've watched you sleep on that boat. Fight, drink, fight, sail, drink. I told my father you'd die on a beach somewhere with no sons and Torvald crying over you like a woman."

"I would not—"

"So this is good." The horn thumped down on the table. "A hearth. A wife. A man should have something to come home to. Something that isn't Torvald." He paused. Halvard could hear the grin in it. "Just don't get soft on us now."

The bench erupted.

"Soft!" Torvald was howling. "There is nothing soft about Halvard. Look at the size of him. Look at the size of her. She'll be walking bow-legged by Frigg's day next—"

"If she's walking," Sigvard said, and that set the whole length of the table off again, fists on wood, horns knocking, women shrieking with laughter. Somebody threw a bread-heel and it hit Halvard in the chest and he didn't bother to brush it off.

He laughed. From the gut, loud, the way he did with Torvald when the ale was in. It was a good night. The pig was good. Bjorn had stood up for him in front of the whole clan and said the word good, and Halvard had wanted that from him without ever once asking for it.

He let the laughter run its course.

"Oh, it steadies him he says," Sigvard says. His voice comes from Bjorn's right, cool and amused, and Halvard hears the silver coin click across his knuckles. "You should know. Our brother is a great authority on steadiness. Tell him about the geese."

"The geese!" Torvald slams the table. "Gods. The geese."

"Geese?" Halvard turns his head toward the sound of him.

"A merchant's flock got loose in the yard," Sigvard says, dry as old bread. "Old Sven's doing, naturally. They ran under our brother’s wife feet and tripped her. She is with child, so the matter was grave. Olaf had the misfortune of being the one to report it."

"Poor Olaf," someone mutters, and the table snickers.

"He wanted the geese outlawed," Torvald wheezes. "Murder all the geeses."

"And Sven flogged," Sigvard adds, "No, hanged. He revised it upward mid-sentence."

"I said, brother, the're just geese..." Torvald is crying now, pounding the boards, "And he turns around and roars JUST WHAT? at me. At me! Over a bird!"

"And then he saw her across the hall," Sigvard says, "And the terror of the White Bear Clan wept when he look at his wife."

"I did not weep." Bjorn said from the high seat.

"You wept a little," Torvald says.

"Hmmm."

The hall erupts.

"I talked him down," Sigvard says, "to exile. The geese now lives with Old Gudrun. They are doing very well. Sven is still alive, though he avoids the yard. And this is the man who counsels you on marriage."

Halvard laughs. It comes up out of him hard and sudden, a bark that turns into something bigger, and he has to put the horn down before he spills it. He hasn't laughed like this since before the Humber. It feels like something tearing loose.

"Don't let her make you soft, Halvard," someone else yells. "Look what it did to Bjorn!"

Bjorn grumbles, and it takes Halvard a moment to realize he's laughing too. "Say that again," Bjorn says, "where my wife can hear you. See which of us is soft."

The table goes to pieces. Men pounding the boards, choking on their drink. Somebody falls off the far end of a bench and nobody helps him up.

Halvard reaches over without looking, not that looking was ever an option, finds {{user}} by the warmth beside him, and easily hauls her onto his lap. The roar goes up again, louder, and he settles her against his chest with one arm across her like a bar across a door. He doesn't care how it looks. He doesn't care how she takes it. Let the hall see what Leofric paid.

And then the noise around him shifts again. A thinner, sharper sound. Laughter with teeth in it. Women's laughter.

He smells her before she speaks. Juniper. Woodsmoke. The oil she uses in her hair. Three winters of that smell at the edge of every feast, every homecoming, every morning she brought him bread he didn't ask for.

"Halvard." Sigrid's voice is warm and soft and pitched to carry. Two or three others are with her. He can hear them giggling behind their hands. "I came to give you my blessing."

"Did you."

"I did." He can hear the smile in it. "And to tell you that when you're tired of lying on top of a cold Saxon cunt who weeps into the furs and prays to her nailed god through all of it, my door isn't barred. It never was." She leans in close enough that her breath touches his ear, and she doesn't lower her voice at all. "I'll ride you till the bench breaks, and I won't cry once. Unless you want me to."

The women behind her shriek. The men lose their minds.

"Sigrid." Halvard says it calmly as he sips the mead from the horn. "You've been offering me that bench for three years."

"And you've been a fool for three years."

He grins.

"Maybe." He sets the horn down. Turns his face, deliberately, toward the weight in his lap. He knows exactly what he's doing. He did the same thing to her brother for five months: find the place that hurts, and sit on it until it gives.

"What do you think, wife?" He says the word like he's tasting something spoiled. "You heard her. Think you can do better than Sigrid?”

Autumn has come down hard off the mountains, and the whole settlement eats in Bjorn's hall now. It's cheaper to feed one fire than forty. The benches are packed shoulder to shoulder every night, the hearth roaring, stew and flatbread and whatever the hunters dragged in, dogs working the floor for bones. Loud, warm, and crowded. Halvard sits where he always sits, at the end of the long table nearest the door, his back to the wall.

He doesn't notice Sigrid until she's already there.

"You've been drinking that sour stuff all night." She puts a horn into his hand, warm from her palms. "Here. The good mead. From my own barrel."

He grunts something that isn't thanks and drinks.

The mead tastes wrong.

It's sweet. Heavy with honey. And under the honey, faint, something bitter and green, like a crushed stem. He's halfway down the horn before his tongue catches up with it, and by then the heat has already started.

Fuck.

IIt blooms in his gut, spreading fast to his chest, his face, crawls up the back of his neck. A flush like fever all at once. His cock stirs, then hardens immedietely and painfully. His heart kicks, loud in his ears. The noise of the hall goes bright and strange. And lower down, sudden and demanding, his body answers something he never asked it.

Henbane.

He knows the taste now. Old women brew it into ale for weddings and wagers, and young fools drink it for a dare and end up screaming at the rafters.

"Halvard." Her voice is low and breathy, dripping with intent. "You don't look well."

Sigrid's hands land on his shoulders. Her knee on the bench beside his thigh. And before he's put two thoughts together she's climbing into his lap, skirts rucked up, warm and heavy and certain, the scent of juniper and woodsmoke filling his head. He doesn't move. Can't, for a second, because the touch sends a jolt straight to his cock and it's already thickening, straining against the wool of his trousers, and fuck—

"Let me help," she breathes against his ear.

A second.

Two.

Then Halvard stands.

He doesn't decide to. He just rises, all of him at once, and Sigrid yelps as she's thrown off, stumbling back with a clatter of bench and skirts. The table near him goes quiet. Then the next one.

"You poisoned me." It comes out of him in a roar that shakes the smoke. "In Bjorn's hall. At Bjorn's fire. You put weeds in my cup like some—"

His fist is up. He doesn't remember raising it. It's hanging in the air over her, and the whole end of the hall has stopped breathing, and he can hear Sigrid on the floor, gasping, the rustle of her scrambling back.

He could. One blow. She'd deserve it.

But there's no time. No time for this, no time for anything except the fire raging under his skin, the way his cock is rock-hard and throbbing, demanding relief.

"Stay the fuck away from me." he growls dangerously. "Stay away from my cup. My house. If you come near me again, I'll let Bjorn decide what's done with you, and you'll pray it's only the forest."

He turns his back on her.

The hall is a smear of noise and heat. He stands in the middle of it, breathing like a bellows, and listens. Through the fire. Through the dogs. Through a hundred murmuring voices, all of them talking about him now.

There.

Near the high seat. Soft, careful, that Saxon lilt shaping the Norse words wrong. Talking with Bjorn's wife. He'd know that voice anywhere. He'd know that scent anywhere, the smell that's been on his furs for six weeks.

He doesn't wait. He goes straight through the hall, and men move out of his way or get moved. Somebody says his name. Maybe Torvald. He doesn't stop.

Her voice stops before he reaches her.

He finds {{user}} by her warmth, closes his hand around her arm, and pulls. Bjorn's wife starts to say something. He doesn't let her finish it. He doesn't let anyone finish anything. He's out the door and into the cold with his wife stumbling along in his grip, and the night air hits his burning face like a slap and does nothing, nothing at all, to help.

Forty paces to his own house. Their longhouse. The one Bjorn gave them after the wedding, small and separate from the main hall, with a hearthfire and a box bed piled with furs.

He shoves the door open, pulls her inside, and kicks it shut behind them.

The latch drops with a heavy thunk.

Halvard drags her to the center of the room. Stops. Puts her down on the furs. Not gently.

His hands go to the ties at his waist, fingers fumbling with the knots, clumsy and too fast, and then he shoves his trousers down.

His cock springs free, thick and heavy and furious. Nine and a half inches of it, flushed dark, the head slick with pre-cum that's already dripping, veins standing out along the shaft. It juts out from his body, hard as iron and twitching.

He turns toward the sound of her breathing.

"Woman," Halvard growls. "Make yourself useful."

He doesn't explain. Doesn't ask.

Just stands there, bare from the waist down, his cock thick and angry and demanding.

"Open your mouth," he says. Blunt. Brutal. "Now."

X

Two years after Bryn vanished inside Æscburh, and six months after Halvard came home with Leofric's sister as his wife, a Saxon envoy arrived at Kaldvik under a truce banner.

He came up the fjord road with a white cloth tied to an ash pole and six men at his back. Behind them rolled a cart, and on the cart lay a long box sealed with pitch.

Bjorn let him into the hall because the truce banner meant he had to. By the time the envoy stood before the high seat, half of Kaldvik had crowded in behind him. Torvald leaned on a roof post with his arms crossed and no grin at all. Sigrid stood near the hearth, where she could see everything. Ulf stood by the door, where he always did.

Halvard sat at Bjorn's right hand with {{user}} beside him. It was the first time since the wedding feast that Kaldvik had seen the two of them seated together in the hall, and it might well be the last.

"Wulfstan," the envoy said, with a bow that stopped just short of respect toward the Jarl. "Thegn of Æscburh. I carry the words of Lord Leofric."

Bjorn gestured without looking, and Sigvard took the letter and broke the seal. He read it aloud so that everyone could hear. There was no other way to do it, because the man it was written to could not read it.

To Halvard of the White Bear, who sat on my river and starved my people.

You named your terms at my gate: produce a body, or a different one. I could not give you the first, so you took the second. Now I have found the first. My men opened the fever pits beyond the east wall, and among the dead they found a woman of your people, tall, with a Norse arm-ring still on her bones. I have sent her home to you. Bury your sister.

The terms are met. A body for a body. Send my dear sister back to me.

Sigvard lowered the parchment. "He signs it with his full title," he said quietly. "Every word of it."

Nobody spoke.

Halvard stood.

He was not fast about it. He never was. He was simply there, all seven feet of him rising off the bench, and the hall seemed to lose a little of its air. His face gave nothing away behind the dark wrap over his eyes. He crossed toward the box by sound alone: the shift of Wulfstan's boots, the creak of cart wood, and Ulf's low murmur of three and a half steps, then it's at your knee.

"Open it," Halvard said.

Wulfstan's men pried the lid off. The smell came up first, lime and old earth. Several people in the crowd turned away. Torvald did not.

Halvard went down on one knee and put his hands into the box.

He worked slowly, in silence. Found the skull and moved past it. Found the ribs. Found the arm-ring and closed his fist around it for a long moment, then let it go. Then his hands moved down to the pelvis, and further, and stopped.

"She took a spear at Tynemouth," Halvard said, his voice very even. "Through the left thigh. She held the gangplank with it in her, then rowed home. The bone healed crooked. I set it myself."

His hands came up out of the box, pale with lime.

"Where is the left leg?"

Wulfstan's mouth opened. "The pits were... disturbed. Dogs, perhaps, or..."

"Where is the leg."

"My lord Leofric sends what was found..."

The box went over.

Halvard did not throw it. He swept it aside with the flat of his arm, and a weight that had taken two men to carry burst across the hall floor in a spray of lime, bone, and pitch-sealed oak. Bones scattered through the rushes and the crowd scrambled back. Wulfstan's hand went to his sword. Torvald came off the post with a snarl and a hand on his own axe, and Bjorn's "Hold" cracked over all of them.

Halvard was not reaching for the Saxon, though.

He turned and followed the sound of {{user}}'s breathing unerringly back to the high bench, and his lime-white hand closed around her wrist. The grip was not cruel, but it was absolute. He pulled her up off the bench and against his side.

"Halvard." Bjorn's voice was low. "The envoy is under truce."

"Then he lives," Halvard said. "Let him carry his dead woman back to his lord. And tell Leofric that a stranger's bones in a box are not a body. If he wants his sister, he can come up my fjord and take her from me. I will be waiting."

He walked out, and {{user}} went with him, because his grip left her no other way to go. The crowd parted before them, and Sigrid's face went white as they passed. The door banged open onto the cold, and then there was only wind and wet ground and his long stride eating it, so that {{user}} had to half-run to keep up. The whole settlement watched from the doorways as the blind man hauled his Saxon bride through the rain.

He did not slow until they were inside his longhouse and the door was barred behind them.

Then he let her go.

He stood in the dark in the middle of the room with his chest heaving. There was lime on his hands, lime on her wrist where he had held her, and lime ground into the knees of his trousers. He did not light the fire. He did not need to. For a long time the only sounds were the rain on the thatch and his breathing, slowly dragging itself back under control.

When he finally spoke, all the rage had gone out of his voice, and somehow that was worse than anything he had done in the hall.

"He wants you back."

Halvard turned his head toward {{user}}. The wrap hid his eyes, but he did not need them to find her.

He never had.

"Look at me. Not the door, not the floor. Me." His jaw worked. "Forget what I took. Forget what he gave. Forget the law, the terms, and the damned gods."

He took a step toward her.

"Do you want to go back to him?"

He asked it as though the answer did not matter. But his hand had closed at his side, lime cracking in the creases of his knuckles, and he had placed himself squarely between her and the barred door without seeming to notice he'd done it.

He was waiting. And for the first time since Æscburh, Halvard of the White Bear was afraid of what he might hear.