Lord of Fire and Ice by Connie Mason with Mia Marlowe Page B

tugged at him. He remembered his father schooling him and his brother in the way of a blade. Ulf was a hard taskmaster, demanding to the point of viciousness, but he saw to it his sons could defend themselves.
    No one had done that for Haukon. Even though the boy would have no hope of success against a blooded warrior, he wouldn’t show an enemy his back. Grudging respect made Brandr sit up.
    “Whether it was your idea or no, you helped put the iron collar on my neck,” Brandr said. “Give me one good reason why I should help you.”
    “Because…Katla wouldn’t like it.”
    Brandr snorted. “Good enough.”

Chapter 9
    “May I reclaim for all time my rightful inheritance, the Iron Crown of kingship.”
    Malvar Bloodaxe leaned a hand on slabbed stonework as he whispered his prayer. The man-made hill rose starkly from the plain, a tribute to the defiant will of its ancient makers and in honor of the gods of the Orkney Islands.
    “May Gormson’s arm be strengthened, and may all my ally’s plans succeed.”
    Power tingled through Malvar’s palm and up his arm. There were places in the world where the primeval forces still thrived, where gods even older than the pantheon of the North yet walked unseen. This remote mound of earth on the largest island in the Orkney chain was one of them.
    “May my prisoner’s tongue be loosened and the path to victory made plain.”
    Malvar closed his eyes, letting the spirits of the place speak to him in half-heard sibilance, whispers from the disembodied souls of woad-painted warriors and fallen heroes. They reached out to him from the tall, waving grass, from the red sandstone bones of the island beneath its thin skin of dirt, from the artfully worked slabs that were used to build this sacred place in the deep past.
    This is our land , they cried. Our water and earth and sky. Our blood sacrifices and feasts. Let not the Carpenter God push us from it.
    Malvar opened his eyes, anger hazing his vision red. Not a handful of winters ago, the self-styled Norwegian king, Olav Tryggvason, had landed on the islands and forced the inhabitants to convert to Christianity at sword point. The Norse deities of the islands, Odin and Thor and that lot, were too weak to help the people resist then.
    But there were Others hovering about the island. Forgotten Ones, whose time was both long past and yet to come. They waited with the patient stillness of a spider for their chance.
    Once the Norse king left, Malvar heard their bloodless voices in the night. Hisses of hate woke him from a sound sleep and drenched him in a cold sweat. Then the more he listened, the more he understood.
    Might was the only truth, blood the only currency that mattered.
    Shoved underground, belief in the Old Ones was growing stronger now. Men who craved violence and bloodshed as much as the ancient gods did were drawn to worship them.
    In Orkney, the Hebrides, in deceptively quiet fjords along the Norse coast and barrier islands, Malvar Bloodaxe was amassing allies. He appealed to those who had a score to settle. They were second sons who didn’t stand to inherit their fathers’ lands, men who longed for a return to the way of the warrior. They wanted to resume the Viking raids, when a man might increase his wealth with a sword stroke instead of by trade or tilling.
    The Old Ones would see it done. Those ancient spirits delighted in mayhem and murder and atrocities that turned men’s bowels to water. With the army Malvar was gathering, the Old Ways would return.
    There’s not a farmer or a merchant in the lot , Malvar thought with a contented smile.
    Satisfied the spirits had heard his prayer and supported his intent, Bloodaxe stooped to enter the cairn. He was forced to crawl along the passageway burrowing into the heart of the man-made hill.
    Even the most powerful leader must be humble before the specters of Old Ones , he supposed.
    For he was born to be a powerful leader. His grandsire had been Eric Bloodaxe, exiled