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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Gwynne
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November 21, 2024 - January 27, 2025
A wet slap, punctuated with the crunch of bones breaking, and she was gone, unrecognisable, just a pile of shattered bones in a sack of skin. Blood hung in the air like mist.
“Because I do not know the reason for a thing, does not mean that a dragon-god did it,”
“Why destroy something that someone cared enough to build?” Breca said.
She knew well enough that the braggarts like Guðvarr were not the real warriors. It was the ones who never threatened violence…
A weapon is just hard, sharp steel. A tool, nothing more, only as good as the one holding it.”
“We have bought everything you need to put holes in other people,” Svik smiled, “but you need to take some precautions in case someone else puts a hole in you.”
“I am blood. I am death, I am vengeance,” she said, her voice flat, empty. Then she wiped the seax clean and slipped it into her belt, finally placing timber and stone on to the barrow, sealing Thorkel inside.
He had expected arrogance, a cold, fierce haughtiness, but what he saw in the warrior’s eyes shocked him. Misery.
“Bloodsworn, we have work to do. Queen Helka has a problem in the north of her realm. A problem that is eating her people. We are going to find whatever it is, and kill it.”
They passed the creaking cages of criminals, each post with a rune-carved sign nailed to it. The one closest to Elvar read, “Worshipper of a dead god’.
Living a life where I could have died many times over is far more preferable to living one more day in this stinking turd of a town.
Instead she had turned on her heel and left, without uttering a single word. Closed the hall doors behind her to the renewed shouts of her eldest brother. Strange, how we revert to the behaviour of our childhood, when back in the presence of our family. I had so much to say: a fine speech planned.
“Some would think that a fine life,” Biórr said, “not wanting for anything: warmth, food, silver in plenty. Power.”
Smoke from a hearth fire was slowly filling the room, too much of it to filter through the smoke hole in the vaulted roof, the reek of whale oil and hops and urine thick in the air.
“Battle-fame is nothing; it is chaff on the wind. Bonds of love, of kinship, of passion, of friendship: that is what we should all be yearning for.
