Page 20 of Alien Viking's Passion

Bragr jumped out of the shortship before it had slowed down. “Eira!” he yelled. “Herjer, are you alive?”

It didn’t look good, Craxon judged. She had clearly been ambushed by skrymtir jumping out of the trees. One rusty cutlass was sticking out of her back, and she was bleeding from several cuts all over her.

He drew his own sword, recited its battle poem, and cut the still moving skrymtir to pieces.

The shieldmaiden groaned as she opened her eyes to dark slits. “My chief. Skrymtir…”

“Yes,” Bragr hissed between clenched teeth, kneeling down. “And you vanquished them, herjer Eira. Don’t speak! We shall get you to safety.”

“The alien woman,” Eira coughed, blood spraying from her mouth. “She ran. That way. I heard her yell ‘trolls’!” She lifted one blood-stained hand to point weakly up the hill.

Craxon felt coldness going down his back. That thin voicehadbeen familiar. “Which one?”

“Aretha,” Eira managed before she fainted.

Craxon’s teeth clenched all by themselves. If there were trolls, Aretha was in big trouble.

Bragr got up and looked behind them, where the other shortship was still far down the hill. “Prince Craxon, I would be grateful if you would pursue the alien female and see if there in fact are trolls here.”

“If so, they must be rock trolls,” Craxon pointed out, his voice grim. “The sun is still up. They will be slow, but hard to kill. I heard blades don’t bite on them.”

“So you’ll need help,” the earl of Hjalmarheim said. “I don’t need that many men to get Eira down to the coast. I cannot leave her here, now that...” His voice faltered.

“You are her chief, and it is your duty,” Craxon replied automatically. He doubted Eira would live to see the sunset.

Gnashing his teeth, he peered up the slope. He had been doing his best to stay away from Aretha since that wonderful night. The last thing he wanted was to go after her. But he also couldn’t stand the thought of her being alone and possibly confronted with trolls.

“There is no need to send warriors after me,” he decided and jumped into the shortship. “Keep your forces to defend your lands. They’re only trolls. I can deal with them.”

Again he drove the shortship up the hill as fast as it would go. It was obvious where Aretha had gone — there was only one possible path through the chaos of sharp-edged rocks and boulders.

He knew that he should turn around, that he was risking all of Ragnhildros with this. No woman had ever come as close as Aretha to capturing his heart without even trying.

Perhaps that was it; she hadn’t tried. She was just being herself. Her magnificent, wonderful self, so womanly and yet so resilient, so smooth and soft to the touch, so welcoming… his crotch swelled hard.

No, he had to stop this. He had to be entirely cool and focused, to think of her as dispassionately as he would any passing acquaintance that he was trying to rescue.

He spotted a blade on the rocks, stopped and picked it up. It was a skrymtir item, rough and ugly, made without care or skill. But it was small and light, something an Earth female might be able to carry, until she was taken…

He sped up again and passed the tree line. The vegetation gave way to bare stone, lichen, and moss. Ahead was a deep valley between two peaks, and in the middle of it he saw the silvery glint of a lake, long and narrow.

He slowed down and rose in the shortship to look around. Surely the trolls couldn’t have come this far? All he could see were two cairns, tall stacks of stones that some ancient travelers had built to mark the spot. There had been three cairns, he noticed, but the third had fallen over into a heap. Perhaps something important had happened here. Or perhaps it marked a boundary, the gateway to the lake. It might be a holy place.

The intense light from Straum dimmed as heavy clouds descended from above, sinking down from the mountains. Weather up here was unpredictable at the best of times, and the Big Shine was probably not helping matters.

The shortship moved slowly towards the cairns. He’d have to drive between them to go further, and it was a narrow opening. Craxon saw no sign of any movement, and certainly no Earth female. And the clouds were making everything darker. Already it was as if the sun had set.

He steered the shortship in between the two intact cairns, careful to not scrape against them. It was a tight fit. Almost as tight as Aretha—

No!he admonished himself. He had to stop those thoughts.

A thin whimper reached his ears.

Great. Now he was hearing her, too. Holy Zhor, was he going mad?

He leaned over the side of the shortship to judge how close he was to the ground.

And there was a small, pale face, staring up at him through the irregular mesh of a net.

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