Patroclus favored big, dramatic swings of his blade. Stepping onto the trestletable was an invitation for him to hew at her legs - and he took it. Gliding forward smoothly, he slashed at her knees, looking to sever her limbs as he’d done to Iofast.

Skadi leaped into the air, her body alive with vitality and power, the huge blade passing under her as she dropped beside the kentarch and slashed at his face with her seax.

Patroclus swayed back, laughing, then stepped away again as she pressed, stabbing and slashing as quickly as she could, refusing to give him time to bring his huge sword up once more.

But the kentarch was terribly skilled with his weapon, and Skadi a novice at fighting; he wielded the great pommel of his blade as a buckler, smashing it into her seax again and again, then burst forward to slam his shoulder into her chest.

The power behind the blow was incredible. It lifted her right off her bare feet and sent her staggering back, giving him room at last to bring his blade back and around, then scything down to cut her in twain.

Damian yelled and hurled his stool. It hit the great sword mid-swing, shattering to fragments but knocking the slash askew. Skadi dropped into a crouch, an arm upflung defensively, then burst forward, low and fast like a striking snake, to stab at Patroclus’s belly.

He grunted as her blade slid home, right to the hilt, piercing his chain as if it were mountain mist.

Only it didn’t. One of his golden threads faded from view, and he’d turned instead, so that Natthrafn’s edge skittered along the rippled links of iron instead.

Leaving her dangerously overextended.

Patroclus grinned and brought his elbow cracking down upon her back. The blow felt like a rock falling from a high cliff; it slammed Skadi down to one knee, driving the breath right out of her, and she barely hurled herself aside in time to avoid his knee to her face.

Damian threw a wooden trencher, then another enameled pot of ale.

Snarling in annoyance, Patroclus swayed aside, raised an arm to fend off the other objects, and gave Skadi time to rise gasping to her feet. She slashed at Patroclus’s legs, but he danced back, hewed at her, cursed as a mug hit him square in the chest, then chopped with his blade, two-handed, to cut her in half.

Skadi saw the blow coming too late. The Archean was so fast. She tried to dart aside, but instead the sword caught her across the side, cut clean through her ribs -

A golden thread disappeared.

A second jar of white ale hit Patroclus full in the face, knocking his head back and sending his blow askew.

Skadi dove under the trestle table, amidst old bones and rushes.

Only for the Archean to chop the table in half, a gigantic blow of terrible violence. Her half collapsed upon her, and she cried out in shock, wormed free, took a boot to the chest, and was sent sprawling onto her back.

Patroclus reversed his grip on his blade and stabbed down, grimacing.

Her second thread disappeared, and she somehow rolled aside, the sword’s edge parting the fabric of her tunic and nothing more.

The kentarch roared a curse as a spinning platter forced him to duck, then barked out a threat of some kind in the southern tongue.

Heaving for breath, Skadi launched herself at the man, Natthrafn stabbing again and again at his torso as she tackled him around the waist.

But each stab was turned by the heavy chainmail, the seax’s point failing to find purchase between the links and thus pierce through.

With a roar the kentarch seized Skadi about the waist and with pure brute strength hurled her from him.

The great hall spun and then she hit the wall hard enough to bounce off it, crashed down amongst fallen shields.

It was all she could do to lie there on her back, body aching, the hall still spinning, gasping for breath like a landed fish.

Footsteps and the cold edge of a blade pressed against her throat.

“You put up a good fight. Few do, or can, these days.”

Blinking, she looked over to where the kentarch towered over her. His expression was pensive.

“I’ll spare your life. You’re worth too much. Both as a bargaining piece and a slave on the mainland.”

He kicked Natthrafn away.

Damian had fallen back, his face hollowed by dismay, clearly unsure about what to do next.

Run, she urged him, but he didn’t.

Trying to regain control of her body, to fashion a plan, she turned onto her side. Hook his heel, haul his booted foot out as she struck at his knee, send him toppling, wrestle for his blade, go for Natthrafn, slice his throat -

The kentarch sneered as he read her expression. Raised his boot before she could go for it, and stomped down on her head, hard.

* * *

When Skadi awoke, she was seated, hunched over, hands bound in her lap. Her head pounded and she had to force herself to open her eyes. Her right one, at least - the left was swelled shut.

She was on the docks. Seated with her back to Dofri’s overturned rowboat, people all around, voices talking in earnest, the stench of smoke and blood thick in the air.

Wincing, she looked around covertly.

Others were seated around her, a small crowd of prisoners. Shoulders hunched, heads bowed, they were the picture of bitter defeat. Damian was there, his white, high collared shirt torn, his nose bloodied. Glámr was seated by her side, hands bound, his black hair having slipped its knot to fall in greasy locks before his saturnine visage. A thread of gold extended from his breast to fade into the sky, glistening bright and pure.

Shocked, she studied the half-troll, but he was busy biting his lower lip as he studied the guards in turn, his massive tusks bright against his gray skin.

She scanned the other prisoners quickly, and saw her mother bound and kneeling beside the other women farther down the dock, Riki awake and scowling by her side.

“Mother!” she shouted.

A soldier stepped in menacingly and barked at her in his foreign tongue.

Her mother looked in her direction, her expression bleak. Riki’s expression was thunderous.

Skadi grimaced, seeking a way to reach them, but the soldiers looming over them both glared until she subsided.

The Archeans were busy. Soldiers carried crates and barrels onto their ships, while others brought every manner of valuable good to a central pile where other men took note.

Raising her gaze, she took in the ruin of Kalbaek. The sight pained her heart. The great hall was burning, huge flames raging across the wooden tiles, most of which had already fallen into the hall proper to reveal the rafters, huge as bones within a dying beast. Everywhere she looked she saw destruction and death. Heard the weeping of children, the moans of the wounded and dying.

Her heart was a stone. Her mind blank and smooth as a pool of water. Even the fishing boats had been scuttled.

By the time the fires burned themselves out, Kalbaek would be no more.

“Why?” she whispered, unable to help herself. “Why destroy everything?”

It was Glámr that answered, shifting his weight so that he could turn and glance at her sidelong with one all-too-human brown eye. “If they don’t wish to hold Kalbaek, that means they wish rather to deprive King Harald of it.”

Skadi blinked at the half-troll. All her life he’d skulked about the edges of the village, a figure that had scared her as a child but grown familiar with the years, who never spoke, never complained, who slept in the abandoned byre at the eastern tip of town. Tolerated, ignored, occasionally beaten for no reason, she’d simply taken him for granted, a fixture of the town, an oddity grown commonplace for being seen and not seen every day of her life.

“But why?” She tried to make sense of it. “Why spend all this effort in destroying a realm they don’t wish to keep?”

“They must want something else.” Glámr scanned the assembled guards uneasily, pitched his voice so low she could barely hear him. “The destruction of the North Kingdom must serve some other end.”

Even now, in the pit of despair, Skadi couldn’t help but marvel. The half-troll’s voice was sardonic and rich, more fitting to a skald than a brutish laborer. A dozen questions burned in her mind, about his past, about their situation, and she realized that his self-possession was such that she believed he’d have the answers.

But the moment was shattered by a bellowing roar of distress, and Skadi wrenched around in alarm. Aurnir.

The half-giant was being herded down to the docks by a phalanx of spearmen, his wrists bound with chains, his massive shirt torn to reveal dozens of cuts and stab wounds that he seemed to feel not at all.

Skadi’s heart rose to her throat, fury and fresh outrage awakening within her. “Stop,” she cried out. “Stop, you’re hurting him!”

Aurnir heard her voice, oriented on where she sat. His lank, flaxen hair was so fine that it blew across his craggy features and about his boulder-like shoulders. No hair grew on his cheeks or lantern jaw, so that despite being over nine feet tall and weighing over a half ton, there was something childlike about him.

But the first time Skadi saw something else about the gentle half-giant - a thread of gold, a wisp of fate, emanating from his broad chest and extending out into infinity.

Glámr and Aurnir both - was it because they had a foot in the realm of the elves?

Aurnir let out a wounded moan of distress and began wading through the soldiers directly toward Skadi, leaving the road to step down the retaining wall, his chained wrists thrust before him plaintively.

The Archeans shouted in panic, sought to redirect the half-giant back onto the road. One stabbed his spear deep into the half-giant’s side, and Aurnir roared in pain, rearing back and swinging both bound fists so that he shattered the shaft.

“Wait!” Skadi leaped to her feet, ran forward, but another soldier shouted in outrage and shoved her back. “Wait, let me talk to him! Stop!”

Aurnir, hearing the distress in her voice, moaned even louder, and again swept his chained fists about him, knocking spears away.

Someone shouted impatiently, the voice rich with command and annoyance, and then Patroclus was there at the gunwale of the largest trireme. He gazed out over the docks, his displeasure obvious.

A soldier with gold at his shoulder replied with earnest apology in his voice. Aurnir moaned, tried to move toward Skadi again, but drew back when the dozen spearmen shouted and waved their weapons in his face.

“Kentarch!” Skadi swallowed her hatred and pitched her voice to carry. “Let me talk to Aurnir! He’ll calm down if I do.”

Patroclus frowned at her, considered the half-giant, then gave a curt nod. “He’s worth his weight in gold in the quarries, but worthless if he can’t get there. Keep him quiet or I’ll have his throat slit and tossed overboard to feed the salt hags.”

The Archean guard stepped back, his expression sour, and Skadi rushed forward, forcing a smile as she moved to the edge of the docks below the half-giant. “Aurnir! Aurnir, it’s all right -” How those words caught in her throat. “It’s all right. Calm down. Come to me. Slowly. Come slowly. Come.”

The spearmen backed away, and the half-giant moaned unhappily again as he stepped down at last onto the harbor road, then again onto the docks proper, moving to loom massively over Skadi. He keened, low and bereft, and his eyes rolled in his skull.

“I know, shh, it’s all right. Stay with me. Come, sit over here. Come with me.”

She led him back to her group, and there smiled encouragingly once more as she sat.

Hesitant, glancing nervously at the soldiers, Aurnir hunched his huge shoulders but finally sat as well, forming a hillock of pale pink muscle by her side.

“Good. Very good.” Tears prickled her eyes as she forced herself to keep smiling up at the half-giant’s distressed face. “We’re going to be all right. Just you wait and see. Everything is going to be just fine.”