The Viking's Woman Read Online Free

already called him the Spawn of the Wolf, or sometimes the Lord of Thunder, for where he battled, steel clashed and the ground trembled.
    This ground would tremble! he silently swore. Hishatred for the Danes was innate, he was certain. And he had been asked here to battle them.
    Asked by Alfred, the Saxon King of the English. Alfred, who had managed to draw his nobles together at long last against the devasting surge of Danes to hold tenaciously to the kingdoms of Wessex and Sussex and the south of Britain.
    Rollo, Eric’s companion and right-hand man, spoke suddenly from behind him. “Eric, this is a strange welcoming.” As massive as an ancient oak, Rollo pointed past Eric’s shoulder to the land. Eric frowned. If a welcome awaited them, it was a most curious one. The great wooden gates were being drawn about the harbor town. Atop the palisade, armed men were taking position.
    A coldness seized Eric, and his eyes glittered with pale blue depths of fury. “’Tis a trap!” he muttered softly.
    And indeed, so it appeared to be, for as his ships came into the harbor he could smell the oil being heated that would be poured down upon them from the walls of the village.
    “Odin’s blood!” he roared at the treachery, and his fury nearly blinded him. Alfred had sent messengers to his father’s house. The English king had begged him to come, and now this. “He has betrayed me. The King of Wessex has betrayed me.”
    Archers ran upon the parapets. Aim was being taken upon the seafarers. Eric swore again, and then he paused, narrowing his eyes.
    Something was catching the light from the lightning. A sheath of it, long and radiant. He realized that a woman stood upon the parapet and that the sheathof gold was her hair, neither blond nor red nor chestnut but some shade of fire that was a combination of the three.
    She stood among the archers and called out orders.
    “By Odin! And by Christ and all the saints!” Eric swore.
    A volley of arrows was set loose. Eric barely dodged the woman’s shaft as it sped toward him. He ducked. The arrow landed harmlessly against the prow. Screams went up from the wounded men. Eric tightened his jaw in fury, sick at the treachery.
    “We’re coming fast upon the shore,” Rollo warned him.
    “Then so be it!”
    Eric turned to his men, the ice-blue mist of Artic rage in his eyes and in his stance. He had learned to fight with control and thus to win, and he never gave away emotion, except through the terror-evoking chill in his eyes and the clenching of his teeth.
    “We were asked here to do battle! Begged to assist a rightful king!” he shouted to his men. He didn’t know if his words would carry to the other ships, but his wrath would. “We are betrayed!” He stood still, then raised his sword. “By Odin’s teeth, by Christ’s blood! By my father’s house, we will not be betrayed!”
    He paused.
    “A-Viking!”
    The word went up on the air and screamed upon the wind.
    The ships came to shore. Rollo brought out his double-headed ax, the Viking’s most heinous weapon. Eric preferred his sword. He called it Vengeance, and that was what he offered.
    They came in upon the sand and the shoals, and the Viking ships scraped bottom. In their fur-lined boots, Eric and his men splashed into the shallows. A horn sounded, and a battle cry began as a chant and rose to a chilling crescendo. The Vikings had come.
    The gates to the fortress opened suddenly. Horsemen appeared, armed, like Eric’s Irish and Norse crew, with two-headed battle-axes, the kiss of death, and pikes and swords and maces, but they were no match for the ferocity of the Vikings and the depths of Eric’s rage.
    Eric never fought as a berserker. His father had taught him long ago that anger must be controlled and turned to ice. He never let his temper carry his sword arm too far, to drive him too recklessly. He fought coldly and ruthlessly, slaying his first challenger and dragging the man from his horse. The challengers