I fell into a cold dream, numb and frozen, huddled in the saddle or stumbling in Joscelin’s trail, only his curses and exhortations keeping me moving. I don’t know how long we traveled that way. Time becomes meaningless, measured out in lengths of endless staggering in a frigid daze, broken only by brief moments of lucidity when the snows broke and the landscape lay visible before us, showing our markers.
There is a sound the wind makes when it gusts, a high keening sound, as it bends around rock and tree. I grew so used to it, I scarce noticed when it changed, no longer rising and falling but rising steadily, rising and rising.
"Joscelin!"
The wind tore the word from my lips, but he caught it, turning back, a strange and hoary figure under the wolf-pelt. I pointed back along our trail with one mittened hand.
"They’re coming."
He threw his head back in alarm, gaze sweeping our surroundings. There was nothing for the eye to see, nothing but swirling snow. "How many?"
"I can’t tell." I made myself be still, straining to hear the distant yells over the keening wind. "Six. Maybe eight."
His face was grim. "Ride!"
We rode, then, blindly, the way one flees in a nightmare. I hunched in the saddle and clung to my pony’s neck, the air gasping in my lungs like knives as my mount struggled gamely in Joscelin’s wake, plunging and churning the snow. I could hear them now, clearly, a bloodthirsty Skaldic war-chant that rose above the wind and battered our ears like raven’s wings, urging us onward, onward, into the madness of flight.
It was too much, and we had too little left to give. I heard the sound of howling Skaldi pursuers string out, half their number circling around our forefront. I rode, floundering, alongside Joscelin and shook my head at him as we burst into a clearing, near a promontory of rock. His horse was nigh done in, and I could feel my pony’s sturdy sides heaving under me.
Joscelin drew up his horse, then, a serene calm settling over his wind-burned features. "We will make a stand, Phèdre," he said to me, very clearly. I remember that so well. He nodded at the promontory, dismounting and handing me Trygve’s shield. "Take this, and guard yourself as best you may."
I obeyed, getting down from my exhausted mount and settling the shield on my arm, my back against the rock. Our horses stood without moving, heads low, trembling as the lather turned to ice on their coats. Shield-armed and settled, I stood watching while Joscelin drew his sword and walked out into the middle of the clearing to meet them, a lonely figure half-lost in the swirling snows.
I’d been right; there were seven of them. Volunteers, Selig’s best, the fastest riders, the most skilled trackers. It was something, that it had taken them four days to catch us. The howling had stopped when we ceased to flee, and they rode silently out of the snows, dark and ominous. Seven. They halted before Joscelin, ranged in a semicircle. He stood alone, his sword hilt at shoulder-height, the blade angled across his body in the Cassiline defensive pose.
And then he threw it down, and clasped his hands in the air above his head.
"In Selig’s name," he cried in passable Skaldic, "I surrender!"
I heard laughter, then a gust of wind came, and snow-devils obscured my vision. When it died, I saw four had dismounted and approached him on foot, swords drawn, and one battle-axe among them. Two riders hung back.
The third rode toward me.
Joscelin, hands clasped above his head, waited unmoving until the nearest Skaldi reached him, poking his chest with the tip of his sword.
Then he moved, and steel rang in the clearing as he swept the Skaldi blade away with one vambraced forearm, both daggers suddenly in his hands, moving as unexpectedly as the skirling winds. No one will ever write of the strange poetry of that battle, the Cassiline’s ballet of snow and steel and death in the Skaldic hinterlands. Figures moved like wraiths in the snow-veiled clearing, only the clash of arms giving the deadly lie to their dance.
And the Skaldi rider approaching me drew nearer, until I shrank back against the rock and threw up my shield in defense.
It was Harald the Beardless, of Gunter’s steading.
I stared, astonished; in two heartbeats, he was off his horse and inside the reach of my shield, wrapping one arm around me and setting the point of his dagger to my throat. "D’Angeline!" he cried, pitching his voice toward the battle. "Let be! I have the girl!" I struggled in his grip, and he tightened it. "Don’t worry," he muttered under his breath. "I’ll not do it, Selig wants you alive."
On the field, I could see one of the figures pause; Joscelin, it had to be. He had his sword back, and I knew it by the angle at which he wielded it. Two of the Skaldi were down, but as I watched, one of those still mounted spurred his horse forward, axe sweeping for a blow.
"Joscelin!" I filled my lungs to bursting with the shout, willing it to reach him. "Don’t listen to him!"
Harald swore at me, clamping a hand over my mouth. I stamped on his foot and nearly broke free, but he regained his grip, shifting the dagger so I felt its edge. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Joscelin was down, rolling, but he fought still; the mounted Skaldi was slumping sideways in the saddle.
"I traded places with one of Selig’s thanes to come after you," Harald hissed. "Don’t make me harm you, D’Angeline! I mean to regain the honor of our steading with your return."
He held me hard against his side, my shoulders pinned, the shield awkward between us. Fumbling at my waist, I slid my hand out of my oversized mitten and felt the hilt of Trygve’s dagger beneath me. I wrapped my fingers about it and eased it from its sheath.
Joscelin was on his feet again, dodging through the snow, quick and agile. If nothing else, he had learned to maneuver on this terrain, the hard way. Two Skaldi yet opposed him on foot, and one on horseback. None of them had ever been forced to run over miles of wasteland behind one of Gunter Arnlaugson’s horses. The Cassiline sword flashed through the snow-laden air, and another of the unmounted Skaldi went down.
"Let me go, Harald," I said softly, twisting to gaze at his face. So young, the golden stubble of his first beard just thickening. Despite the cold, my hand was slippery with sweat, clenched about the hidden dagger hilt. "I am a free D’Angeline."
"Don’t try to sway me!" He looked away stubbornly, refusing to meet my eyes. "I’ll not fall under your witchcraft, D’Angeline. You belong to Waldemar Selig!"
"Harald." My hand was trembling, holding the dagger so near his vitals, hidden behind the shield bound so awkwardly to my left arm. Pinned against him, I could feel his warmth. He had given me the fur cloak I still wore and been the first to sing songs about me. My vision was blurred with tears. "Let me go, or I swear I will kill you."
Intent on the battle, he shouted a warning to the last mounted Skaldi, who narrowly avoided having his horse hamstrung by Joscelin. It was a measure of our desperate straits, that he would attempt such a thing.
As was what I did.
"Forgive me," I whispered, and pushed the dagger into Harald with all my strength.
I do not think, at first, he knew what had happened; his eyes widened, and his arms fell away from me. He looked down, then, and saw between us what the shield had hidden. With a gasping sob, I forced the dagger upward toward his heart and let go the hilt. Harald took a step backward and looked up at me, his eyes quizzical as a boy’s. What have you done? they seemed to ask of me. What have you done?
I gave no answer, and he crumpled to the ground and lay unmoving.
The last Skaldi rider saw, and gave a cry. Turning away from Joscelin, he spurred his horse toward me, looming through the snow. With nowhere to run, I waited, dumb and silent. In the distance, Joscelin dispatched the lone unmounted warrior and raced for a horse, any horse.