Erik’s knuckles had gone bone-white on the rope.
He hadn’t felt himself grip it.
The dragon-prow cut the morning fog like a blade through silk.
He stood near the stern, one hand on the gunwale, the other gripping the rope Aldric had shown him how to tie.
The North Sea was the color of wet iron, and his stomach hadn’t stopped churning since they’d lost sight of Kattegat three hours ago.
He’d thrown up twice.
Aldric had laughed the first time, clapped his shoulder the second, and then left him alone with a rag and the instruction to keep his eyes on the horizon.
The horizon was a line of green now.
England.
Floki stood at the prow beside the carved raven, his eyes wide and unblinking, lips moving in what might have been prayer or conversation with something Erik couldn’t see.
The shipwright hadn’t looked at Erik once since they’d launched.
The distance felt deliberate.
Ragnar sat amidships, one hand on the tiller, the other resting on the pommel of his sword.
He hadn’t spoken in an hour.
The blue eyes tracked the coast, the wind, the men.
When they passed over Erik, they lingered for an extra beat the assessment Erik had learned to recognize and then moved on.
The island appeared like a tooth breaking through the waterline.
White stone.
A church tower.
Walls that had never been built to hold against anything but weather.
Lindisfarne.
Erik’s right eye went dark.
The vision hit like a fist to the chest Huginn’s sight overlaying his own, the monastery from above, the layout he’d already seen two nights ago now rendered in daylight precision.
He could see the monks moving between buildings.
Could count them.
Nineteen.
No.
Twenty-one.
Two in the garden.
Three at prayer in the chapel.
The raven wanted him to know exactly how many there would be.
His left eye stayed fixed on the beach ahead, where the first longship was already grinding into the sand.
“Erik.”
Aldric’s voice.
Close.
Erik blinked and the double-vision collapsed into one.
Aldric stood beside him, shield already on his arm, axe loose in his grip.
His grin was gone.
“You’re doing it again,” Aldric said quietly.
“The thing with your eyes.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like you’re watching two places at once.”
Erik said nothing.
The ship lurched as the keel hit sand.
“On my left,” Aldric said.
Not a question.
A reminder.
The first scream reached them before they’d cleared the waterline.
Erik’s boots hit wet sand and his right eye went dark again.
Not Huginn this time.
Muninn.
The old monk at the altar Brother Cuthbert, his name was Cuthbert, Erik knew it the way he knew the layout of the monastery, the way he knew things he had no right to know looked up at the sound of splintering wood.
The axe caught him across the shoulder.
Not clean.
The blade bit deep but not deep enough, and the monk’s last word wasn’t a prayer.
“Edmund.” This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
A brother who would find him.
Who would hold his hand while he bled out on the stone floor, whispering the only comfort a man who’d never held a weapon could offer: You’re going home.
Erik’s left eye showed him the beach.
Vikings pouring from the ships.
Aldric three paces ahead, shield up, moving toward the monastery gate.
His right eye showed him Brother Cuthbert dying.
Both things were happening at the same time.
Both were equally real.
And Erik was walking forward through the center of them, one foot in the world of the living, one foot in the world of the dying, and the only mercy Muninn offered was that he didn’t stumble.
The gate was open.
Of course it was open.
Monasteries didn’t lock their gates.
Not against God’s creation.
Erik stayed near the rear, where Ragnar had told the builders and the supply-carriers to wait.
A safe distance.
Close enough to see, far enough to not be expected to swing an axe.
Muninn didn’t care about distance.
The young novice Benedict, sixteen, he’d taken his vows three months ago and his mother’s last letter was still under his pillow ran for the scriptorium when the axes started falling.
He thought the manuscripts were worth saving.
He thought if he could just reach them, just get them to safety, then something would survive.
He made it four steps past the chapel door before the axe caught him between the shoulder blades.
His last thought wasn’t about God.
It was about his mother’s handwriting.
Erik kept walking.
He counted without meaning to.
The number assembled itself the way Skaldic Memory assembled everything now precise, permanent, indelible.
Five monks in the chapel.
Three in the dormitory.
Two in the garden who tried to run and didn’t make it past the wall.
The abbot who threw himself against the door to the treasury and was simply pushed through it, his body folding like wet cloth.
Thirteen.
Eighteen.
Twenty-three.
The screaming had stopped.
The work continued in silence now, the quiet of men who knew what they were doing and didn’t need to waste breath on it.
Erik’s hands were shaking.
He pressed them flat against his sides and kept counting.
The scriptorium was in the north corner, stone walls and a heavy door that someone had tried to bar from the inside.
It hadn’t held.
The wood was splintered, the bar on the floor, and inside
Athelstan.
He was young.
Younger than Erik.
Maybe twenty, maybe less, pressed against a wall of manuscripts with a jeweled Bible clutched to his chest like it might stop an axe if his faith was strong enough.
His eyes were wide and dark and terrified, and when he looked at Erik at the strange Northman who wasn’t holding a weapon, who was just standing in the doorway staring at him something in his face shifted from pure fear to a desperate, irrational hope.
Erik’s Whisper-sense registered the monk’s will the way it had registered the thrall’s in Kattegat.
But this was different.
The thrall’s will had been a locked door Erik had to force.
Athelstan’s was an open door.
A threshold that had never learned to close, a mind that had been trained to receive the word of God and had no defenses against anything that arrived wearing authority.
Erik could compel him.
It would take one word.
He didn’t.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
Athelstan blinked.
The Bible trembled in his hands.
“Now,” Erik said.
The monk came.
Erik didn’t touch him.
Didn’t take the Bible.
Just turned and walked back toward the beach, and Athelstan followed three steps behind like a man following a rope in the dark.
Ragnar saw them.
Erik knew he saw them the extra beat of blue-eyed assessment, the slight tilt of the head but the earl said nothing.
Just nodded once, the smallest acknowledgment, and turned back to the work of loading silver onto the ships.
Thirty-one.
Thirty-seven.
The last monk died in the garden.
Brother Thomas.
Sixty-four.
He’d been tending the herbs when the axes came, and he’d kept tending them through the screaming, his hands in the dirt, his lips moving in prayer.
He didn’t look up when the shadow fell across him.
Just kept praying.
Muninn showed Erik the moment of severance.
The prayer cutting off mid-word.
The particular stillness that came after.
The tide was turning.
Erik sat in the stern with his eyes closed and his hands pressed flat against the wood.
The ship rocked under him.
Voices around him Vikings counting plunder, laughing, retelling the raid in the language of men who had done good work and lived to speak of it.
Aldric sat beside him.
Said nothing.
The silence stretched long enough that Erik thought he might leave.
“Thirty-seven.”
Aldric didn’t ask what the number meant.
His hand found Erik’s shoulder, gripped once, then let go.
“Scared men live longer,” Aldric said quietly.
Erik opened his eyes.
His right eye was his own again.
Muninn had released him.
But the monastery was still there, behind his eyelids, perfectly recorded.
Brother Cuthbert and Benedict and Thomas and thirty-four others whose names he knew now, whose last thoughts he’d witnessed, whose deaths would walk his peripheral vision for days and then weeks and then forever.
The only afterlife an unbeliever could offer.
Athelstan sat near the mast, the Bible still clutched to his chest, his eyes fixed on something in the middle distance.
He was shaking.
Erik looked away.
The fog closed in behind them as they sailed, and Lindisfarne disappeared into the grey like it had never been there at all.
But Erik would carry it.
He closed his eyes.
Counted again.
Thirty-seven.
The number didn’t change.
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