SNAFU: Hunters

“True enough.” Valhild’s gaze swept Hreyth’s mail-coat, and the sheathed seax at her hip. She grinned. “Mine’s bigger.”

Hreyth smiled, touching Rook-Talon. “Mine gets the job done.”

Valhild roared a laugh and clapped Hreyth on the shoulder hard enough to make her stagger. “I like this one,” Valhild told the king, then turned to Egil – she towered over him, but he did not back down. “And who’s this?”

“Egil Einarsson,” Hreyth said. “Or, Egil Splitbrow, as men call him.”

“I can see why.” Valhild inspected the scarred, fissured dent at the front of his bald, lumpy skull. “You must have a hard head.”

Egil looked up at her, mouth unsmiling, eyes flat. “It gets the job done.”

Again, the big woman laughed, louder than ever. She slugged him on the arm. The sound was like that of a mattock meeting a bull’s carcass. “I like this one as well,” she said to King Jorfyn. “You’ll do worse than to put your trust in them, I think.”

With that, she stepped aside and let them pass into the circle, where spaces were made for them on the benches. Further introductions were made. The angry, resentful young man apart from the rest was called Anbjorn, who followed Kjarstan, the missing earl.

There had not been much in the way of serious confrontation between their armies as of yet this spring. The sides were too evenly matched, neither leader wanting to risk a direct assault, neither having the numbers to make a proper siege. So, they sat across the bay and tide-plain from each other, with occasional scout-parties and skirmishes, negotiations, insults, raids, and harassment.

“Fifty men more or less,” said Jorfyn, “may not seem like much in a war. But these are Earl Kjarstan’s men of which we speak. Among the best, each worth any three of Gunnleif’s.”

“Any five,” Anbjorn said, earning him not a few glowers.

“And in battles such as we face here,” the king continued, undeterred, “every man counts. If Kjarstan had come as intended, we would have taken the town by now.”

“But, if Kjarstan has joined Gunnleif,” put in an old earl, Olla, he of the sourest, expression. “Those same fifty men, whether worth five or three, will slaughter us like wolves upon lambs.”

Jorfyn raised a hand to forestall an argument. Or, rather, to forestall the rekindling of an argument that had already gone on far past its welcome – Anbjorn protesting his lord’s loyalty, Olla doom-mongering, the others debating how those fifty men could turn the tide and which way, and so on.

“I cannot move against Gunnleif without knowing what’s become of Kjarstan,” the king said, addressing Hreyth and Egil directly. “I need him with me. More vitally still, I need him not against me.”

“Your spies at the town?” asked Egil.

“Have heard nothing beyond that which we know.”

“Would be hard to keep so many men secret.”

“Agreed,” Jorfyn said. “Regardless of where matters lie with his loyalty – which I have never before had reason to doubt – I cannot believe he could be with Gunnleif and we’ve no word of it.”

“Nor would they have deserted,” Valhild said, which brought fervent agreement from Anbjorn. “We’re not speaking of Saxon farmers running back to their fields, or dirt-eating Britons skulking in the bushes.”

“Then there’s the matter of the riders we sent out,” Jorfyn went on. “A dozen men, hand-chosen by myself and my earls.”

“And Udr, my war-brother,” Anbjorn said. He shot Olla a look like an arrow. “Unless you think Udr betrayed them, led them into a trap.”

“They have not returned,” said Olla, uplifting his palms as if that itself proved enough.

“I’ve told you, something happened to them. Something strange.”

The old earl scoffed. “Armies of men don’t just disappear. It isn’t as if they were at sea, where they could have been sunk, lost, and drowned, ship and all.”

“Folk do vanish,” said Njoth, the skald. He was lamed, absent a leg at the knee, getting about on a stout wooden crutch. “Not only at sea.”

“My grandmother would tell me of farmsteads, or villages, or whole halls abandoned,” Jorfyn’s wife said, lifting her babe and patting its back to draw up a milk-burp. “As if overnight, leaving work half-done on the loom and unfinished meals upon the feast-tables.”

One of the other earls nodded. “Mine would tell me of travelers venturing into dark forests or over high passes, never to be seen again.”

“But not,” Olla said firmly, “whole armies out of thin air! Grandmothers’ tales? We’ll be talking of dark-elves and seidr-magic next!”

“Aren’t we already?” Hreyth asked. She rose and moved near the glowing hearth, turning in a slow circle to let them all see the strangeness of her mis-matched eyes – one blue as the fjords, one amber-gold. “Is that not why I’m here? Your king’s skald, in his wisdom, sent for me because folk do disappear, or worse.”

No one answered. Only a few – Valhild, Anbjorn, Njoth, and the king most among them – could long withstand her gaze.