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“All that you can see before you is Vigrið, the Battle-Plain. The land of shattered realms. Each steppe of land between the sea and those mountains, and a hundred leagues beyond them: that is where the gods fought, and died, and Snaka was the father of them all; some say the greatest of them.”
When gods go to war, it is no small thing. The world was broken in their ruin.”
“They call this the age of peace, because the ancient war is over and the gods are dead, but if this is peace…” She looked to the skies, clouds low and heavy, snow falling in sheets now, and back at the blood-soaked corpses. “This is the age of storm and murder…”
The Bloodsworn were famed throughout the whole of Vigrið, and most likely beyond. A band of mercenary warriors who hired themselves out to the highest bidder, they hunted down vaesen-monsters, searched out god-relics for wealthy jarls, fought in border disputes, guarded the wealthy and powerful. Tales were sung about them by skálds around hearth fires.
“You are Berak Bjornasson, and the blood of the dead god Berser flows in your veins. You are Tainted, you are Berserkir, and you are wanted by three jarls for murder, blood-debt and weregild. And now you are mine,” Agnar said, and smiled. “You will fetch a fine price.”
“I make a choice, each and every day,” he said, his smile gone now. “I think on what I have. On what is before me. You. Breca. And they make my heart swell and my head giddy. There is no room left for any dwelling on the past.”
“Why destroy something that someone cared enough to build?”
All that can make the world fair is this.” Thorkel leaned forward in his chair and put a finger to Breca’s temple. “Your thought-cage. The choices you make. Choose to treat others fairly: you’ll sleep better for it.”
when the possibility of death looks you in the eye. Fear can be ice or fire in the veins, freezing the body or setting a blaze within it.
We all have our scars, and not all of them are etched in our skin. It was a long time before I would speak to anyone of my father, and I still do not like to talk of my mother, though she deserves to be spoken of far more than my father ever does.
Because a mother’s love is a powerful thing. An instinct like no other. I would let the world drown in blood if it would mean my Bjarn was safe and back in my arms again.” She looked away.
