Page 18 of The Last Valkyrie

Chapter 6

Grim

“WHERE’S SVEN?!!”

The words came from Ravinica as we crept deeper into the woods. I vaguely recognized we were heading west, maybe a bit south, toward the Niflbog. The ground was turning from dirt to mud, swampier, harder to traverse.

At this point we were on a rescue mission to find as many Vikingruners as possible, so we could form a resistance against these sporadic draug attacks.

The questions were endless: Where had they come from? Not the ground, but fromwhom? Why did they have such a hateful glint in their soulless, dead eyes, to kill living humans?

It was the consensus of the group that something or someone must have been controlling them. And now one of our group was missing. We hadn’t noticed amidst the turmoil.

Rav looked around, panicked.

I gripped my war-axe and came to her side. “He’ll know where to go, love. North, into the plains.” It was the designated escape route we’d discussed if we got separated.

“Was he with us when we mentioned that?” Fear made her eyes big.

“Whether he was or not, he’s the best tracker and survivalist in our pack.”

The others nodded agreement. We had no time to console Ravinica, though I knew we all felt a pang of loss at Sven’s absence.

There had been a terrible fight ten minutes ago, where the wooded field had filled with smoke and fire. Draug charging out of the darkness split us. That must have been when we got separated from Sven.

We dug deeper into the woods, pushing aside branches. The fire was less frequent this far west.

“We should be listening to our own advice and moving further north, not west,” Magnus said.

“We need to make sure there are survivors over here, between our regiment and the initiates,” Ravinica replied.

No one argued with her. She was clearly in command.

As we moved, we picked up a few straggling cadets along the way—watchmen who had been left to guard our western flanks, and a scout who had gone to exchange information with Hersirs Kardeen and Selken.

Then we found the bodies. Two of them were smoldering husks, wafting a smell of sickly death and the cloying sweetness of burnt meat before we reached them.

“Gods,” Arne breathed, shaking his head as we toed the dead bodies and continued moving past them. “Not a single part of our army was spared.”

“How did they know exactly where we’d be?” Rav mused.

I took a shot in the dark. “They didn’t. Which is why they’re coming out of the ground at random-seeming intervals. Whoever is controlling them must have known this was the best time to attack us, before we reached the plains.”

Corym said, “Do we have any idea where these corpses come from? I’ve noticed a few of them as . . . Huscarls.” He glanced pointedly at the three cadets—stragglers who didn’t know oursituation with the Huscarls and how we had killed them out in these fields. He kept that part to himself.

“They must be bodies lost to time,” I said. “Buried for centuries, some of them, no doubt.”

“Vini,” Arne quipped, “did a community ever live in this forest, do you know? A town perhaps?”

She scoffed. “I never paid enough attention in Thorvi’s history lessons to know that. You’d be better off asking Dagny.”

She said her friend’s name with pained longing. We hadn’t found the cat shifter yet, and we seemed to be going in the wrong direction of where she might be. She had spent most of the night with us at our camp near Hersir Osfen’s command tent, before leaving to take her post nearby. When the battle began, she wasn’t at her post.

For another twenty minutes, we traveled slowly through the trees, inching forward with our shields and weapons out and ready. We picked up two more stragglers, found six more dead bodies.

Then Ravinica let out a hearty sigh. “Okay, you’re right, Mag. We need to be heading north. Enough of this. The fight sounds distant now.”

She wheeled us around—

---