Erik walked the rope line twice.
He didn’t trust knots he hadn’t tested himself the kind of checking a dead man’s memory never let him skip.
The logs were massive.
Erik stood at the edge of the work site, watching the crew drag them from the tree line.
Each one was the length of three men laid end to end, the diameter of a man’s torso, bark still rough and weeping sap that smelled of turpentine and wet earth in the morning cold.
They’d been felled two days ago.
Today they were being hauled to the longhouse expansion, and the hauling turned backs into knots and hands into split skin.
He’d been supervising because that’s what he did now.
The builder.
The one who knew angles and weight distribution and how to keep structures from collapsing onto the people underneath them.
The one who couldn’t stop thinking about scaffolds.
Twelve thralls and four junior warriors on the crew.
Ropes thick as a man’s wrist.
A path worn into the dirt from two days of hauling.
The logs came slow ten feet, rest, ten feet, rest and the rhythm was the rhythm of labor that outlasted the men performing it.
Lagertha was there.
Not supervising.
She leaned against the longhouse wall, arms crossed, watching the work with the evaluative stillness of a woman who’d managed households and battlefields with equal competence.
She didn’t give orders.
Didn’t need to.
Her presence was the order.
The crew worked faster when she was near.
Three times in the last hour, Erik caught her watching him.
Not the crew.
Him.
The old box strong thrall had been comfortable.
Whatever she was building to replace it wasn’t.
The rope snapped.
One moment the log was moving, the next the forward rope gave with a sound like a bowstring breaking, and the log’s momentum carried it sideways off the path, and a thrall thirty-something, gray in his beard, no name Erik could recall stumbled backward and went down, and the log followed.
A short scream.
The log caught him across the chest and hips, pinning him to the ground, and the scream cut off into a sound Erik knew from Minneapolis the airless grunt of a man whose lungs had just been emptied by weight they couldn’t reinflate under.
Twelve seconds.
Erik moved.
No thought.
No decision.
His body remembered what his mind had spent five weeks trying to forget the scaffold, the rebar, the terrible certainty that help was three floors down and he was going to die before it arrived and the memory made the choice for him.
He reached the log in four strides, dropped to one knee, and got both hands under the midpoint.
Impossible weight.
Twice his body weight.
More.
A load you lifted with a team and proper leverage, not with a construction worker’s arms and a kneeling stance that gave him no mechanical advantage at all.
He lifted anyway.
Heat bloomed behind his eyes.
Not pain. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Not effort.
Heat the particular burning sensation he’d felt once before, the night he’d saved the first thrall with a word he hadn’t known he could speak.
It built fast, spreading from his skull down his neck and into his shoulders and arms, and with it came a strength that had nothing to do with Minneapolis or twenty-three years of ordinary human muscle.
The log rose.
Six inches.
Enough.
The thrall underneath made a sound like a broken bellows and dragged himself backward, hands scrabbling in the dirt, and Erik held the log up and felt the heat climb higher, felt his vision start to narrow at the edges, felt something vast and old and furious shift in the back of his mind like a man rolling over in sleep.
Not yet.
He couldn’t tell if he thought it or if something else did.
The thrall cleared the log’s shadow.
Erik’s arms screamed.
The heat crested, and for one terrible second he felt the edge of something larger a presence, a voice, something ravenous that wanted to use his body as he was using this strength, and it pressed against the inside of his skull like a fist against a door.
Not yet.
The log hit the ground.
Erik staggered back, vision blurring, arms shaking so hard he had to clench his fists to keep his hands from flying apart.
The heat receded.
Slowly.
The presence if it had been a presence, if it hadn’t just been his own fear translating itself into theology pulled back, and he was left standing in the open with twenty-three witnesses and Lagertha’s eyes on him like a hand on a knife.
She didn’t move to help.
Ten paces close enough.
Close enough to cross the distance, add her strength to the lift, do any of the things a shield-maiden did when one of her people was dying.
She’d watched instead.
Erik met her eyes.
Saw the assessment happening behind them.
Saw the old understanding strong thrall, useful foreigner, manageable crack and fall away, and saw nothing comfortable rising to replace it.
Lagertha’s voice was flat.
Final.
A verdict, not a question.
“That was not a man’s strength.”
She never asked what it was.
Her expression said she’d compose the question later.
Silence over the work site.
Twenty-three people watching.
The thrall on the ground was breathing wet, painful breaths, ribs probably cracked, but breathing.
Alive because Erik had lifted a log no man his size should have been able to lift, and everyone present knew it.
Erik turned and walked.
No explanation.
No deflection.
He walked to the far side of the timber pile, out of sight of the crew and Lagertha’s measuring stare, and sat with his back against a log the bark’s resin sharp in his nostrils and his head between his knees and waited for the shaking to stop.
It didn’t stop. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
His arms wrung out, left to dry.
His hands still clenched.
He forced them open, watched the fingers tremble, and the heat was still there not behind his eyes anymore, but lodged in his chest, a coal that hadn’t quite gone out.
He’d touched it.
What the Seer had seen.
What Floki watched for.
The voice that had spoken through him when he’d saved the first thrall and left him vomiting on the docks.
He’d felt the edge of the beast, and the beast had felt him back, and they’d pushed his will against its hunger, a line drawn in the space between one second and the next and he’d held.
This time.
But the coal was still burning, a low orange throb behind his sternum that tasted of copper and char.
And Lagertha had seen every second of it.
Erik sat behind the stacked logs and listened to the work resume slower now, the crew shaken, voices low and careful, the hush that settled after someone nearly died and didn’t.
He heard the thrall being helped to his feet.
Heard someone say “forge-hot” and someone else say “felt the heat off him from three paces.”
The story would grow it always did, each retelling adding a foot to the lift, a shade of red to his skin.
He’d saved a man by becoming what he couldn’t name, and the only mercy was that he hadn’t transformed all the way.
Hadn’t raged.
Hadn’t wounded the people around him as the beast wanted to.
But he’d felt the proximity.
The place where control stopped and the beast began.
And the proximity terrified him more than the log ever could.
Footsteps.
Erik looked up.
Lagertha stood at the edge of the timber pile, shield leaning against her knee, face unreadable she’d already made her decision and was deciding whether to speak it aloud.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Looked at his shaking hands.
Looked at his face whatever she saw there, her expression never softened.
“You will tell me,” she said.
Not a question.
Not a threat.
A contract.
“When you are ready. You will tell me what that was.”
Erik didn’t answer.
Lagertha nodded once the silence added to a tally she’d been keeping since the day he’d vomited at the docks.
She turned and walked back to the crew.
Erik stayed where he was.
The coal in his chest cooled.
The shaking slowed.
The work sounds continued timber dragging, voices calling, the ordinary rhythm of a settlement that kept building because stopping meant dying, and dying meant being forgotten.
He’d saved a man and touched the beast to do it.
And Lagertha’s old name for him strong thrall was gone.
Whatever she was building to replace it, Erik would find out the Kattegat way: too late to prepare, and right on time to break.