Page 29 of The Last Valkyrie

Canute ran at the bull head-on like a fucking madman, staring eye-to-eye in silence at the enraged, spitting beast.

The bull zeroed in on its target and charged Canute, and the Huscarl commander planted his feet in the ground. The bottom point of his triangular shield hovered inches above the ground, and he bent his knees.

My eyes bulged, a grimace crossing my features as I kneeled beside Corym and watched the foolish event playing out like a trainwreck. Ordinary man against magical beast more than ten times his size, its shoulders coming up above his fucking head—and Canute washugefor a human!

Soldiers screamed and catapulted out of the way of the charging bull. It lowered its head, bloody horns ready—twenty feet away.

Canute slammed his shield into the ground and slanted his shoulder into it.

Ten feet away.

Canutepushedat the last second into his shield, squaring up to the bull’s rabid gallop, hiding his head behind the tower—

Theycrashedtogether in an earth-shattering clash of hide on steel. A huge plume of dust and grime billowd around them.

I jolted, recoiling from the explosive collision.

The dust settled. Somehow, Corym stood tall. His shield rested against the beast’s forehead, horns lancing through the air on either side of him but not skewering his body or heavy mail.

My jaw dropped.That fucking bull has to weigh at least three tons! How the hell did Canute not get tossed fifty feet back like a ragdoll, like all the others?!

Corym was dazed but getting to his feet beside me, cursing in Elvish. “Ga’ten’thyl tur keefan’it.How in the spirits is he . . . doing that?”

I shook my head dumbly.

In a snapshot of picture-perfect clarity, the image of Canute withstanding the bull’s charge tattooed itself on my mind. All around them, madness and mayhem. Dust in a giant ring, a mushroom cloud of grime. Heavy silver armor defying all odds, shield staying true and upright with the Thane behind it.

Now I understood why Gothi Sigmund kept this one-eyed, surly bastard around. Because with him nearby,no onewas getting through to the chieftain, human or elf or magical oversized cow.

The bull’s eyes went wild, its brain likely scrambled from the impact and its failure to stampede over Canute.

Soldiers rushed it. Gothi Sigmund came from behind with his ice-and-fire sword. I ran in with Corym. Magnus and Grim took the other side, with my bear shifter back in his human form and swinging an axe into it.

Faster than me or my elf was Sven and his kin, who took to their wolf forms and skittered into the clearing in sprinting gray shapes. The wolves got underneath the bull and ripped at its softer underbelly, clawing and biting and nipping at its bulging stomach.

The bull shrieked.

Then Svenbitthe monster’s gigantic swinging bull-cock, which was as large as Sven in his wolf form, and the monster let out a shriek of a different timbre.

I felt savage and bloodthirsty as I joined my comrades and stuck the beast a million times from a million different directions. Blood sprayed as we finally got through its hard hide and into the skin and muscle below.

Beneath the combined weight of about fifteen Vikingruners, the bull wobbled on its powerful legs and then toppled forward with a pained moan.

The jotun to the north bellowed and charged.

“Fuck!” I yelled, looking over my shoulder at the incoming giant.

Two valiant soldiers ran up to try and stop him, and the jotun simply waved a hand and sent them careening through the air with some type of invisible magic. They landed against treesdotting the sides, embedding their bodies in broken piles of man and armor.

I gripped my spear with sweaty hands, realizing this foe could use magic on a whim and hadn’t even laid a finger on the cadets to send them flying to their doom.

Still, against my better judgment, I charged at it with a belly-roar—

But someone else got in front of me first.

It was Hersir Thorvi Kardeen, waving her hands, Shaping runes and casting a luminescent green shield of energy in front of her, thirty feet high. It was a wall of magical power the likes of which I’d never seen from the quaint, diminutive historian.

Thorvi was trying to buy everyone time to regroup, realign, and attack this monster. For the moment, it worked. The jotun bonked against the magical barrier and stumbled back a step, snarling at her through its translucent color that reminded me of an aurora borealis.

---