The mead barrel had gone missing sometime in the night, and by midday two of Ragnar’s crew had convicted each other of the theft through the traditional method of standing too close and shouting.
Erik watched from his corner, tracking what he could still parse through the fog that had swallowed his right eye since Oswin shapes, not details; light, not color.
The nosebleed had stopped yesterday, but the socket ached like someone had driven a nail through it and forgotten to pull it out.
Recovery from the first Tithe was crawling, days now instead of the hours he’d hoped for.
Fourteen bodies moved through the haze he called sight.
Fifteen if the blur near the far wall was a thrall and not a shadow.
Halfdan, the younger one, had his fist clenched.
Orm, older by a decade, had his hand on his belt knife.
Neither man was drunk, which made it worse drunk men swung once and forgot, but sober men carried the bruise forward into the next disagreement, and the one after that.
Erik watched from his corner.
Aldric was at the far end of the hall, sharpening something too far to intervene even if he noticed.
Lagertha was outside, and Ragnar at the dock.
The fist came up.
Erik stood.
His legs held.
Barely.
The Tithe was still dragging at him, but he could walk, and walking meant he could test the thing he’d been turning over since Oswin.
The thrall had obeyed.
Full compulsion.
The word had dropped into Oswin like a stone into still water, and the man’s body had answered before his mind caught up.
The warrior Hrolf had resisted.
Partial effect.
The fist had frozen, but the man behind it had stayed whole.
If the Whisper was a tool he could learn to wield reliably, it had to work on more than broken men begging for rescue.
Erik needed to know where the line fell whether a warrior in the grip of real aggression would bend, or whether that gap between need and delivery was built into the power itself.
He crossed the hall.
Fifteen steps.
His right eye registered movement but couldn’t parse faces.
His left did the work.
Halfdan’s fist was cocked back.
Orm’s knife was half-drawn.
Erik stopped three paces away.
“Halfdan.”
The younger man turned.
Annoyance first.
Then recognition.
The stranger who sat in corners and built things.
“What?”
Erik met his eyes.
He felt for the thing in his throat.
The pressure.
The cold blade of intention that had risen unbidden when Oswin needed it, when Hrolf’s fist was falling.
It was there.
He shaped the word.
Not aloud.
Deeper than that.
In the space behind his teeth where the body kept the commands it didn’t name.
Calm.
The pressure built.
His throat tightened.
The air in front of him thickened, or maybe that was his vision breaking again, but something pushed outward from his chest, through his mouth, across the three paces between them.
Halfdan’s eyes didn’t change.
His fist kept rising.
Erik felt the rejection like being spit out.
His nose flooded.
Blood hit his upper lip, hot and immediate.
His right eye went from fog to ink.
Total black.
The left stayed, but the depth was gone.
The world flattened.
Halfdan’s fist connected with Orm’s jaw.
Orm staggered.
Grabbed the bench.
Came up swinging.
Erik stepped back.
Wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
The blood kept coming.
He turned and walked toward the door.
Fifteen steps, each one heavier than the last, his legs shaking by the tenth.
Behind him, benches scraped.
Men shouted.
Someone laughed.
Erik pushed through the door into cold air.
The sky was too bright.
He closed his good eye and let the darkness take both.
Footsteps behind him.
Close.
He kept his back to the sound.
“You tried again.”
Floki’s voice.
Quiet.
Hungry for the answer before the question landed.
Erik opened his left eye.
Floki stood two paces away, head tilted like a bird examining a dropped thing.
“Tried what?”
Floki smiled.
Not the manic grin the slow one, the smile of a man who had already built the theory and was watching it confirm itself.
“The thing you did with the thrall. The thing that made Hrolf’s fist stop.” He took a step closer.
“The thing that turned your eyes blue.”
Erik said nothing.
Floki’s gaze didn’t waver.
“It failed this time. I watched. You spoke, but Halfdan never flinched. His body refused the command like a hull shedding water.” Another step.
“Why?”
Erik wiped his nose again.
The blood was slowing, but his hand came away red.
“No idea.”
Floki laughed.
Once.
Sharp and delighted.
“No idea. The gods lend you their voice, and you have no idea how to aim it.” He circled Erik like a man inspecting a hull for rot.
“Thralls obey. Warriors resist. That’s the pattern, yes?”
Erik held his gaze.
One eye working, the other a hole in the world.
“I’m tired, Floki.”
“You’re always tired. Since the tide pulled you in, you’ve been tired.” Floki stopped circling.
Leaned in.
“But you’re not weak. Weak men can’t make Hrolf’s fist freeze. Weak men can’t turn a thrall into a puppet with a single word.”
Erik turned toward the waterline.
Floki stayed where he was. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“I’m watching,” Floki called after him.
“When you use it again, I’ll see. I always see.”
Erik kept walking.
The water was cold enough to sting.
He sat on the rocks and tested his right eye closed the left, opened the right, waited.
Still black.
Not fog.
Not shapes.
Nothing.
The Tithe had deepened, not lifted.
Whatever the first activation had cost him, this second failure had driven the price further in, and recovery felt further away than it had this morning.
He cupped water in his hand and pressed it against the socket.
The cold numbed the ache without fixing anything beneath it.
Halfdan’s fist had kept moving.
The word had left Erik’s throat with the same pressure, the same certainty as when he’d spoken to Oswin.
Same command, same force behind it.
But the warrior had a weapon and the reflex to use it, and the Whisper had slid off him like rain off oiled leather.
The difference was never Erik.
The difference was the man on the other end.
A thrall desperate for rescue answered.
A warrior mid-swing refused.
The gap between need and delivery was structural built into the power itself, not a flaw Erik could train away.
He could not rely on the Whisper in combat.
He would have to plan around failure, not assume success.
Erik leaned back against the rocks and stared at the sky with one eye.
Huginn circled overhead.
Wide, lazy loops.
Banking left, then right.
Erik spoke aloud.
“It doesn’t answer when I need it.”
The raven tilted.
Adjusted its path.
Whether it heard him or cared was beyond guessing.
The blood on his hand was drying.
He wiped it on his pants.
The power was not a tool.
Tools answered when you called them.
Hammers struck every nail the same.
But this thing in his throat chose its own moments the vessel borrowed at the god’s discretion, not Erik’s, and what the god withheld, Erik bled for anyway.
It came when it wanted.
Left when it wanted.
Used him as the channel and left him bleeding in the dirt when it was done.
Not a weapon to master.
An affliction to survive.
He closed his good eye and listened to the water lap against the rocks, steady and indifferent, the only rhythm in this place that owed nothing to anyone’s will.
Behind him, the longhouse noise rose and fell.
Voices.
Laughter.
The sounds of men who never bled from the eyes when they spoke.
Tomorrow he might try again.
Or the power might decide for him, the way it decided everything without warning, without permission, without mercy.
His breaths slowed.
In for four.
Out for six.
The raven’s cry cut once through the wind and faded.
Erik didn’t bother opening his eyes to check.