Page 1 of Lord of Fire and Ice

Chapter 1

“So that’s the great and mighty Brandr,” a grumbling voice said from somewhere above him. The speaker snorted and loosed a bark of a laugh. “Doesn’t look so great now, does he?”

Brandr tried to pry his eyes open, but they were crusted shut. His tongue was too thick for his mouth. Rough hands lifted and then dropped him into the back of a cart. The wood bit into his bare backside as they jostled over a plank road. He was vaguely aware that he was bound, hand and foot.

Odin’s Lost Eye, what did they put in that mead?

His lids scraped across his eyeballs like wind-driven sand. Familiar northern stars wheeled overhead, brittle and cold. The stars of the South were hazy and soft, but he’d learned to track them across the sky in the faraway city where he’d served the Byzantine emperor. After a five-year sojourn, he’d been grateful to be nearly home. Brandr and his companions were only two-days’ sail from his father’s jarlhof when they tied up on one of the islands dotting the mouth of Hardanger Fjord. His chest had constricted in aching joy to see the Great Bear lumbering across the sky and the fixed Lodestar as high in the black heavens as it should be.

But Brandr had forgotten that while stars don’t change, people do. Obviously, the folk of this island were no longer his father’s allies.

A heavy weight pressed against his throat each time he swallowed. A thrall’s collar burned shame into his neck. He was a warrior, the son of a respected jarl and a fire mage of no little power. The iron at his throat wiped all that away.

Brandr tried to focus his gift and call up enough fire to sizzle off the rope knotted at his wrists, but all he managed to do was singe the hair off the back of his hand. Whatever he’d been drugged with left his mind too disordered to attempt a fire mage’s solution.

How could he have been so thick witted? True, that serving girl was fetching, but he should have been more wary. When she poured mead between her breasts and invited him to lick it off, he’d been happy to oblige.

“Let this be a lesson to you, brothers,” one of his captors said. “Never follow your cock into more trouble than you can get out of.”

Brandr’s friend Harald always warned him about the same thing. Now he’d been proven right. Brandr would tell him so, if he ever saw his friend again.

Women were his weakness, and he’d known his share in the South. As a Northman, he towered over the populace of the Byzantine capital. With his fair hair and big-boned frame, Brandr was a novelty. The women of the great city were curious to learn if he was similarly proportioned beneath his scarlet uniform of the Varangian Guard.

None expressed disappointment.

But while the women of the South were inventive in the use of their tongues, none of them could speak his. He’d let his delight in hearing good Norse again lower his caution. When his friends returned to their longship, Brandr had stayed on at the mead house, drinking and dallying with the all-too-willing serving girl.

By the time he realized the euphoria and dizziness he felt wasn’t the result of high spirits and mead, he was stumbling and slurring nonsensical words. The drink had been tainted with an opiate, but the realization came too late.

Now he was bare arsed and gagged with a leather strap. His beard and hair had been shorn off like a yearling lamb. If this were a skald’s tale, he’d have laughed at his predicament, judging it fair recompense for stupidity.

But this was no tale.

The cart stopped, and his captors lifted him out. They carried him into a longhouse, through the common room where most of the inhabitants snored on broad benches lining the walls. Some had divided the space by hanging skins to enjoy a bit of privacy for their family. Most of the residents simply sprawled in the open, safe in their communal slumber.

The smoky central meal fire had subsided to glowing embers, but as Brandr passed by, the flame flared to life. He mentally ordered it down, but the blaze flickered a cheerful greeting. If he couldn’t control his gift well enough to free himself, he couldn’t chance letting his captors know he possessed it.

The aroma of a nourishing stew lingered in one of the pots. The smell of even wholesome food made Brandr swallow back rising bile. A burning acidic taste clung to the leather strap in his mouth.

Part of the longhouse had been walled off into a separate chamber with a stout wooden door. One of the men carrying Brandr rapped on it softly.

When there was no response, his captors loosed a collective sigh. The one bearing Brandr’s feet dropped them and banged on the door with his fist.

The door flew open.

“What’s the matter with you bunch of trolls?” a woman demanded in a hissing whisper. “It’s the middle of the night. Some of us plan on working tomorrow. Why aren’t you lackwits abed?”

Brandr strained to lift his head enough to snatch a look at the speaker. Backlit by the light of an oil lamp, her dark hair was as sleek as a selkie. She wore it unbound, shimmering over her shoulders and past her hips. She was younger than he expected, given her surly tone, and far more comely. Her cheekbones were high, with soft hollows beneath, a mark of bone-deep loveliness that never fades.

But a pair of frown lines marred her brow. Judging from her scowl, her temper was as black as her hair.

“We’ve brought you something, Katla.” The speaker signaled for the other two to haul Brandr over the threshold and into the lamplit chamber.

One of them was a spotty-faced boy, Brandr realized with annoyance. He’d let himself be taken by a lad with no more than thirteen or fourteen winters to his credit. Once they cleared the doorway, the men dropped him without warning.

Brandr groaned. Instead of packed earth, this woman’s chamber had hard slate flooring with no give to it at all.

Like the woman herself, he suspected.