Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan Page A

day. Even though it was late, the sun was still high and down in the river that skirted the farms people were still bathing, as they did every Saturday. As soon as he got the chance, he would join them.

    He laughed as he remembered the first time he’d met Adisla. He’d been at Eikund a week when he’d heard a commotion. She had gone to the bottom of the river and held her breath until her mother had plunged in after her on a mission of rescue only for Adisla to pop up behind her, giggling wildly. Even then, five summers before, no one could swim like Adisla. Her brothers called her ‘The Seal’, the first of a series of ever-evolving nicknames they had for her, not all of which were particularly flattering. Seals were known as ‘dogs of the sea’, so she had been called Garm for a while, after the hound that lives in Hel, and then - after Disa had objected to that - Woofy. Vali sometimes called her that himself when he was with her family, but he always used her real name when they were alone.

    Vali loved this place - the smoke with its promise of food issuing from the vent on the roof, chickens running around his feet and dogs coming out to bark at him in greeting, not warning.

    He had a place in the long hall of King Forkbeard in the port below but, since he’d come to Rogaland, this was where Vali had always felt most at home and he’d spent as much time at Ma Disa’s as he had at the court.

    ‘Hello, Ma!’ Vali shouted, and a woman taking drying herbs from the low roof of the hut turned to see them approach.

    ‘Been up to your usual tricks, I see,’ said Disa. Unlike her daughter, she was as brown as a baked barleycorn, having given up applying the lotions that kept her pretty and pale at about the same time she had ceased caring if she was attractive to men. Disa had divorced her husband and, since he was heavy with his fists, the assembly had voted that she be allowed to keep his farm. He’d died the next year on a raid that was intended to restore his fortune, and she hadn’t been sorry. Now she was queen of her house, which teemed with her own children and those of the surrounding small farms.

    On the summer evenings Vali would sit outside with Adisla and her family, playing the board game King’s Table, telling and listening to stories and eating the food from Disa’s incomparable hearth. He even managed something of an education there. Old man Barth, Disa’s only thrall, had been captured in a skirmish with the Danes. Vali was fascinated to learn his language and spent a long time talking to the slave about his homeland and customs. Barth had been a slave in Denmark and, it turned out, regarded Disa as a better mistress than the Danish jarl who had owned him before.

    In the winter everyone would cram into the tiny smoky hut, eating baked roots, salted fish and laughing until they couldn’t laugh any more. Her brothers, particularly Leikr and the youngest, Manni, were very dear to him and were his friends in hunting, play and conversation.

    ‘Ma,’ said Bragi, ‘I need to talk to you about your daughter.’

    ‘Oh yes?’

    ‘I want you to forbid her from seeing the prince.’

    ‘I’m not in the habit of forbidding my children anything,’ said Disa, ‘but I’ll talk to her.’

    ‘You can’t call her a child - she’s thirteen years old at least. There are girls of her age a year married and all the better for it.’

    ‘What appears to be the problem?’

    Bragi threw his hands into the air and gave a sound like a hiss, as if the bubbling cauldron of complaint he kept inside himself had finally boiled over. Still, he tried to maintain a grip on his politeness, to temper his language and to use fine words to emphasise the difference between himself and the farmers around him.

    ‘The problem is this. I am an oath-sworn retainer of King Authun the White Wolf. I am a veteran of twenty-three raids. I stood side by side with the king as we faced the Geats at the Orestrond,