Chapter 21

Russell jumped to his feet, knocking over the trencher of Aslaug’s blood and spilling it all down his shirt.

“We are under attack!” he shouted. He grabbed Sookie roughly by the shoulder of the ornate gown he had forced her to wear and propelled her towards a balcony overlooking the castle grounds. “Throw open the gates!” he shouted.

“What?” Rollo shouted, getting groggily to his feet, as though he had been drinking for days and was only just now emerging from his stupor.

“Just do what I fucking say!” Russell shouted.

He dragged Sookie to the balcony.

“What the fuck? It should have taken them weeks, maybe months, to get here.  That light – that fae light – he’s come at last!” Russell shouted, his eyes wild as he jumped around. “But I’m not ready! I’m not -“

The walls began to collapse in front of their eyes. The thick stone walls and battlements that ensconced medieval Paris, with the enormous portcullis that used the Seine as a kind of moat, began to crumble.

“Has my brother brought siege engines?” Rollo demanded. “How did he escape our detection -” Russell swore under his breath in ten ancient, now-dead languages.

“I didn’t count on Freyr and Niall joining them so soon – Fuck it.”

“We have to save the battlements – “

Russell turned to face Rollo.

“Nothing will save them. Your supposed god Freyr is out there, the oldest of the fae, and he is ripping the walls down stone by stone.”

Glowing light surrounded the still-standing stones as they were pushed by an unseen force inwards towards the castle itself, some of them hurled with such power they slammed into the castle and tore great holes in what was meant to be a fortress. One large fragment landed just centimetres from Russell’s face, smacking into the dining table where he had so recently held court and splitting it in two.

“Get to the basements!” Russell ordered. “He will level the whole town!”

“My brother – “

“Look!” Russell screamed, pointing to the demolished walls as Viking warriors began to pour in through the multiple breaches. “Your brother will be here soon enough!”

Sookie looked, hope rising in her heart and up to her mouth as she watched the fur and leather clad warriors wielding swords and axes pouring through, making short work of the hastily assembled and poorly organised Frankish troops. Was Eirek there? She tried to cast out her mind as best she could with her powers so depleted to begin the search for him.

A figure stopped in the caste forecourt, a tall and well-muscled man, standing stock still as he searched the castle’s interior. Eirek! Sookie tried to push her mind out to him, but Russell grabbed her, yanking out the stuffing that sat between her iron cuffs and her skin, the scars bursting open again and causing Sookie to cry out as the iron cut into her once more.  “No you don’t,” he spat, dragging her along by her chains once more, he forced her to follow him down to the deepest dungeons, a rabbit-warren of rooms with tunnels that spread out under Paris itself, a labyrinth beneath the city which were now his only means of escape.

Russell dragged Sookie away at vamp speed, so fast that he didn’t see that lone figure begin to run towards the castle.

 

Eirek saw them – Sookie’s cry still rang in his ears as he sped off after Russell, cursing his slow human speed and wishing yet again that he was vampire. The dining room was brightly lit with burning torches in sconces all along the walls, the castle’s newly torn wounds bleeding more light out into the sky that gave him all he needed to see his beloved and know that he would follow, wherever Russell took her.

Freyr and Niall had transported all of Ragnar’s forces to the outskirts of Paris in a show of power that had left him and his father stunned and speechless. All the men had gathered at the campsite, including his whining brothers who longed to raid the weak rather than clear the family’s honour of the stain of Rollo’s treachery. Freyr and Niall had joined hands, a glow lighting them up from within, something like what he had seen Sookie do but on a scale so large the night had turned to day. Then the light grew and spread out to surround them all, the warriors squinting as though looking at the sun itself when there had been a brighter flash, all of them forced to close their eyes, and then as it faded and their eyes opened the campsite was gone and in front of them stood the impenetrable walls of Paris.

“Damn!” said Niall. “I was aiming for inside the walls!” Freyr shrugged.

“I wasn’t.” Then he began to split the walls apart, stone breaking open and shredding into pieces large and small, some of them fine as dust and choking, some of them large and deadly as they flew with incredible speed and pummelled the castle, splitting it open to the night and Ragnar’s men.

Eirek watched stunned for a moment and then as the first of his father’s warriors began to flood through the breaches, he joined them, ignoring his father’s pleas to wait.  He ran into the city, half-stumbling and half-climbing across the broken field of rubble to reach what was left of the castle and to search for his Sookie.

 

Freyr saw him go.

“We must follow our kinsmen,” he said to Niall.

Niall nodded his head in agreement, knowing that was where he would find Russell – and he had sworn an oath to end him when he had drained his sister. Blasting the rubble out of their way, Freyr headed towards the castle with Niall at his heels.

 

In the feasting hall the great table lay split in two, all the fine food and wine sliding inwards into a great heap, mashed and pulped together and slathered in tiny particles of rock from the pulverised castle wall. Eirek saw Rollo scooping up great handfuls of the muck and pouring it into his mouth like a starving man, washing it down with whatever half-drunk goblet of wine he could lay his hands on.  Aslaug sat slumped in her chair as though she had barely noticed the wall was gone, her pale haggardness shocking to Eirek and making him wonder if she had been ill. But Ivar – Ivar looked like a man reborn. He stood without the aid of crutches as Eirek entered the room, his body twisted but strong enough to hold him. He raised his sword.

“At last we meet,” he sneered. “Oh how I have longed for this, dear brother.” And with that he swung his sword at Eirek, who met it with his own bared blade. Eirek countered his brother easily, but was shocked at the strength behind his arm that split his round wooden shield in two. Cursing and muttering under his breath because of the delay in getting to Sookie, Eirek soon found himself fighting for his life against his vicious brother and even had to duck below one of the broken halves of the table to miss a blow that would have otherwise killed him.

He used the cover to his advantage, feinting and dodging to surprise Ivar and skewer his shoulder with his blade, causing him to cry out. Eirek seized the advantage and pinned his brother to the broken table top, his sword at his throat.  He drove the point of his sword through Ivar’s neck and into the wood of the table, his blood spilling out and running down the table’s broken centre to pool and spread over the food Rollo continued to eat and Aslaug barely seemed to notice as her precious coddled cripple of a son bled out in front of her very eyes.

Eirek didn’t wait to see him die but left him there to bleed out, not wanting to waste another precious second  that belonged to his Sookie. But the fight had taken too long, and he did not know where Russell had taken her. Then Freyr and Niall were by his side, beckoning him to follow them as they led the way to the dungeons and system of tunnels beneath the castle, both fae men conjuring a ball of fire from their fingertips and leaving it poised there, doubling as a weapon and a light.

The dungeons were dank and filled with pale creatures, humans chained down here and left to rot without the sun or air for who knew how long. The stench of putrid flesh assaulted their nostrils and all three knew it to be the stench of death and wounds left untended.

“I can smell him,” said Freyr. “He has gone this way to try and cover his tracks, to make it difficult for us, but his stench is still there.” He headed past a torture table with an array of hot branding irons and sharp knives, a rack and a dunking chair. Littered about were bodies, some dismembered, some intact, but all rotting.

“Russell has made a mess down here,” Niall remarked. It was all Eirek could do to keep from throwing up.

They were almost to the end of the torture chamber when a pale hand reached out to grab hold of Freyr’s ankle. Someone was still alive? He was blind and thin and ragged, a scarecrow of a man with oozing wounds and the tell-tale sickly sweet smell of gangrene. Freyr crouched beside the man and summoned his light to heal him, that last man left living in Russell’s chamber of horrors.

But as soon as his hand reached out to touch the man, an iron arrow was loosed and pierced Freyr’s side.

“Lemon,” he gasped. “The arrow was soaked in lemon!”

Russell was at Freyr’s side at once, Sookie dragged along in his wake as he smiled and preened and dropped the bow he had used.

“Call yourself a god?” he demanded. “That was too easy, though shouldn’t you be a bunch of sparkly fairy dust by now? Normally you fae explode at the merest hint of lemon – but I’m impressed you haven’t. Perhaps you are a god after all.”

Freyr was bleeding but he had summoned his considerable light to prolong his life.

Niall was up and on his feet in an instant, fighting with his silver fae sword against Russell, whirling and cleaving and Eirek rushed to Sookie’s side, hopeful that he could save her in the confusion. Niall’s skill with a sword was impressive, even against a vampire as old and powerful as Russell, and the silver blade bit and stung at him, slowing him down. Working fast, his fingers clumsy as he tried to make haste, Eirek freed Sookie from her bonds.

Freyr reached out to touch Sookie, his hands filled with light.

“No,” said Sookie. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”

“I must.”

“What about Niall?”

“He is busy.”

“But you can live – you can still live! We can get you out!” Sookie sobbed.

” You are of my line. Take it – take what is left of my light.”

Light poured out of Freyr’s hands, soaking into Sookie’s skin and healing the burns from her iron manacles, restoring her spark and filling it so it grew bigger than it had ever been, the power crackling and sparkling under her skin.

Then she supposed she must have lost her senses because suddenly there were two Nialls, young and old, both of them fighting Russell for all their worth.

“Have you come to fulfill our blood oath?” young Niall asked his older counterpart. “To avenge our sister at last?”

“No. I have come to save our people. To save our king.”

Old Niall reached into his own chest, ripped out his spark and forced it down Freyr’s throat.

Chapter 22