Page 2 of Highland Warlord
Theworldneeded her help to save it. Even these bloody Saxon oafs and the blood-thirsty Viking pillagers they’d chanced upon. If any of them survived this battle, it would be for naught if she and her cousin, Kenna, didn’t make it home to the Highlands in time for Samhain.
Morgana renewed her struggles, focusing on freeing her feet from her boots, which were bound together. Her thick stockings allowed for some movement. If she could just peel her slender feet out of them, she might have a chance.
As she shimmied and worked, she cursed the entire masculine breed.Men.Why was it always kill-first-think-second with them? They’d abandoned their horses on the east bank because, from what she’d gleaned from their calls, Stamford Bridge was too narrow to support more than a horse or two, and the Viking’s long-spears would rid them of too much good horseflesh.
So they’d sacrifice men—soldiers—but not their horses. It was truly a wonder that men ruled the world. They held some particularly unbalanced priorities.
Morgana grunted, feeling one of her boots give, taking her stockings with it. Rejoicing, she kicked it off, much to the irritation of her very alive, very powerful equine conveyance.
“Steady,” she crooned. “Steady on.” Wincing as the stallion pranced, jarring her middle, Morgana murmured a sleep spell she’d memorized as a child, praying that it worked on animals as well as it had her nurse.
Thankfully, it did, and the beast stilled, allowing her to kick off her other boot and stocking, taking her bindings with them. Wriggling her body and reaching with her toes, she went limp,sliding down the side of the horse and landed in the cold mud with bare feet.
Heart racing, Morgana used the horse’s body as a shield and surveyed the rapidly emptying battlefield, considering her options. Something caused much excitement at the bridge, which remained hidden from her view by the thicket of trees. Too many Saxons lingered in the freshly harvested fields for her to make her way west, and the preponderance of the army made a bolt north impossible. The Saxons pressed toward the old Roman road, eager to claim victory from those across the river.
Homelie north and west. The river threaded directly to her east, and she had to make it to the cover of trees without being seen. She needed to reach the water, and fast. There had to be a jagged branch upon which she could free her wrists from their thick leather bonds, and use the cover to develop a plan of escape. Even if she had to flee to the south and make a large circle back west and north, that would be a better choice than remaining here.
Sending up a prayer to the Goddess for strength, safety, and concealment, Morgana took two bracing breaths and broke from the dozing horse, dashing toward the trees. It amazed her how incredibly difficult running with her hands bound behind her could be. Balance without the use of her arms proved surprisingly problematic. Dry stalks of whatever had grown in this field poked at her bare feet through the mud, and scratched at her shoulder when she stumbled and fell.
Scrambling back to her feet, she didn’t dare to look behind her, in case death in the form of a Saxon arrow whistled toward her. Better that than a pyre and her flesh melting from her bones, she thought, and forged ahead, doing her best to ignore her bleeding heels. Once she found water, she could heal them.
Plunging into the tree line, she willed the tears blurring her vision to cease. She’d never forget the violence and horror of thisday. Never rid her memory of the cruelty of men toward their enemies. And for what? She couldn’t fathom. She only knew that men—good men, family men—became monsters when ordered to be. And they killed without remorse. They were given permission by their kings and their Gods to spill blood upon the earth. The most precious and potent combination of water and life.
The forest ground was damp and mossy, strewn with freshly-fallen leaves. She slowed to look for jagged rocks, but couldn’t see any in her immediate vicinity. The trees still blushed with youth and their branches were thick with foliage and smooth with health. Her tender feet relished the soft earth beneath her, but she needed to find something—anything—to cut her bonds with.
The thin line of trees suddenly gave way to a very slim riverbank. Morgana’s first impulse to fling herself into the water and let the current carry her to safety disappeared with horrific alacrity.
Blood stained the river and filtered into pools of mud. Disembodied limbs bobbed in little gruesome fleets, swept downstream by the lazy autumn pull of the current. Morgana stifled the scream tearing up her throat. Though water was her element, Morgana couldn’t bear to be engulfed by all that death and gore.
She swallowed bile as a man’s head floated by, his sightless eyes frozen in a stare of terror that fixed upon her until disappearing around a gentle bend.
A fierce roar clawed at her bones with an icy chill and drew her frantic eyes to a stone bridge upriver. Though it was far enough away that she had to squint, what Morgana saw stopped her breath.
Vikings. Hundreds upon hundreds of them crouched behind a shield wall on the east bank. But the blood-lust palpablyemanating from the army wasn’t what froze her feet to the mud. It was the carnage wrought by the lone giant slaughtering countless Saxons on the Stamford Bridge.
Blood wept from the wooden slats. The water climbed the riverbanks, displaced by the weight of the dozen men dispatched with just a few strokes of his colossal axe.
The survival instinct to bolt warred with a different impulse. An unnatural one. This giant, the one who’d emitted that terrifying roar was like her. Different. Powerful.
Magical.
Mesmerized when she should be repelled, Morgana leaned her shoulder against a tree, and crouched low, willing her breath to slow.
The stone wall of the bridge mostly hid his legs, but the giant’s torso was bare except for the strap across his chest that would secure that impossible axe to his back. That and the blood of the fallen drenching his skin. His features were hidden by distance and a fearsome helm of iron decorated by skull bones.
Arrows seemed to glance off his flesh. The swords of his enemies found no purchase even if the blows rang true. The bridge could only support men about four shoulders wide, and four men could never hope to fell a warrior such as this.
He killed like other men danced, with light feet for bones encumbered by so much muscle, and swift, unpredictable movements for such a large weapon. He was a bard of blood. A legion of one. A painter whose brush only knew the color red.
The Viking not only held the bridge, he took it. Grinding forward through bone and flesh with a hoard at his back and a throng in front of him.
Morgana ached to run, but something locked her feet in place, her toes sinking into the soft earth of the riverbank. She was witnessing something epic. A feat of man that would be recorded in the ages until the end of times.
And yet… Morgana stretched her Druid senses. The ones that told her he was a man, and more than a man. He roared like a beast. He moved with the speed of a Fae. Swung his axe with the strength of a God. He had to have killed fifty, nay, a hundred men, and he didn’t show the first signs of tiring.
Movement beneath the bridge caught Morgana’s notice. A barrel bobbed in the river’s slow current. She squinted harder, trying to make out the long protuberance from the barrel’s edge from where she stood. She recognized it too late. The Saxon concealed within sprang from where the blood and entrails of his brothers-in-arms dripped on him from the bridge, braced one hand on the stones, and drove a long-spear between the slats, impaling the Viking warrior in the thigh.
A howl rent the afternoon, and still the giant fought on, cleaving clean through a shield and embedding his axe into the skull of a man. Kicking the body off his weapon, he roared again as a second spear lodged in his back, this one just beneath his ribs.
