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“Mayhap you shouldn’t drink more,” Kerek said. He knew that Ragnor would fall into a stupor very soon now and that was when Chessa planned to try her escape. Was he to watch them throughout the night? He cursed to himself. Ragnor turned on him. “I am the king of the Danelaw and you are naught, Kerek. After we return to York, I will take men to Hawkfell Island and we will destroy that miserable pile of stone and bring back Utta. Come, Chessa, it’s time I was your husband, at long last.”
“Certainly, my husband,” she said again, tucked her hand through his arm and helped direct him toward the enclosed cargo space.
Turella stood beside him, staring after them. “She will try to outsmart me, Kerek, but she won’t succeed. Don’t worry so. If Ragnor is too sodden with drink to take her tonight, why then, he’ll do it when he’s sober, tomorrow. Besides, once he’s taken her, then we will just keep him drunk. It will make things easier.”
Kerek turned to Turella. “I don’t like this, you know that. I never did.”
“You are too soft,” she said. “Come now, there is nothing she can do. The men are everywhere and there are at least a half dozen on watch all through the night.”
* * *
Cleve motioned the men to hunker down within the deep shadows of the fortress walls. “Stay back, all of you. I don’t want to take the chance that any of their warriors will see us. We don’t need to see the warship. Varrick will tell us what we need to know.”
“I see eight men, holding these watches,” Varrick said. He drew the men’s positions in the sand, all their men hunkered down in a circle to look. “Ragnor is in a drunken stupor in the enclosed cargo space. It’s here. Chessa is sitting next to him, waiting.”
“Waiting?” Igmal said.
“For us,” Cleve said. “For me. Then she plans to act. That frightens me. I think Turella would rather kill her than let her go.”
“Nay,” Varrick said.
Cleve frowned at the certainty in his father’s voice, but said instead, “Each of you pick your man. We must kill them quickly and with no noise. Allow none of them to fall into the water. I will get Chessa. We must be fast and silent for this to succeed. Does anyone have any questions?”
But the warship wasn’t tied securely to the long wooden dock as Varrick had told them it was. It lay at least fifty yards out, moored to the dock by stout ropes, held in place with an iron anchor. There were three more men pacing forward and back in front of the boarding plank. They looked alert. They were well armed. There was no chance Cleve and his men could swim to the warship without being seen, no chance at all. Besides, four of the men couldn’t swim.
Cleve cursed.
Varrick looked puzzled. “This isn’t right,” he said. “When did they move the warship away from its moorings? Damnation, I saw the warship moored to the dock.”
Igmal just shrugged.
Igmal said, “What will we do? Your plan can’t work now, Cleve.”
Cleve looked toward his father and said, “Can you do it?”
Varrick merely smiled. He withdrew the burra. He walked away from the men to higher ground at the far end of the fortress wall that protected Inverness. Cleve didn’t know if his father left them because he wanted himself to appear more the sorcerer or because he needed it. He stood on the high ground, closed his hands over the burra and raised it high in the air in front of him. He began to chant the strange words he’d learned so many years before. Soon a slash of lightning knifed through the still night, striking the wooden dock, not many feet from where one of the warship guards was pacing, sending smoke gushing into the night air. The man froze, then yelled.
Another streak of lightning came, then two more together, then one more, this one searing away the end of the wooden dock. Thunder boomed right overhead, so loud Cleve’s men held their hands over their ears.
The warriors on board the warship were running about, looking at the heavens, looking toward the men on the dock that was falling away beneath their feet.
Captain Torric yelled, “The ropes will break. Row to the dock and save the men. Quickly now, quickly!”
Rain poured down upon them. It had been silent and dry one moment, then the rain flooded over them. “Hurry,” Torric yelled. “Hurry!”
The men were rowing frantically, others with wooden pails were filling them from the bottom of the warship and tossing the water over the side, but the rain only came down harder and harder still in the following minutes.
“Aye,” Igmal said to Cleve, “see how they come to us. They’re like dead chickens that don’t yet know they’re dead. Soon now, very soon, and we will have Chessa back.”
But Cleve wasn’t so certain of that. He had seven men. There were nearly sixty men aboard the warship. What chance did they have even amid all this confusion?
Lightning struck the huge mast of the warship, tearing it in half. Men screamed in pain and fear as it fell on twelve of them, pinning them beneath it. It was then Cleve saw Chessa. She was standing in the entryway of the cargo space, staring toward shore, staring toward Varrick, whom all could see now, if they looked, his black cloak billowing out behind him, standing tall on that higher ground, which seemed even higher now than it had before, the burra held
in front of him, his head flung back, his throat working. Cleve knew he was speaking, but the words were low, nearly a whisper, and blown away by the wind that was now whipping the warship closer and closer to the dock. It would crash into it. The warriors on board were praying to Odin, to Thor, to Freya. They were terrified. Both Kerek and Torric yelled at them to row back out to sea, but the wind was shoving them harder and harder toward the dock and the shore.
Chessa stood there, smiling.
Turella ran to her, the wind so strong she could barely remain upright.
