Too fair to be Egil’s own. What are you doing up here, boy?’
Gunnarr glanced again at the pale figure lying in the water. Blood was bubbling out of a dark vent in his chest and rinsing down his thighs in long brown streaks. Gunnarr gathered his breath. ‘You should not have done that.’
The man glanced around at the body again and then eyed Gunnarr with a sideways look. ‘How long were you up there?’
Gunnarr offered no reply, so the man continued.
‘He’s my son, of sorts. I’ve fostered him as Egil has you, kept him fed when I’ve had scarcely enough for my own. He liked coming up here with me.’ He stopped there, as if that were explanation enough, and pressed a positive smile through closed lips.
‘You should not have done it,’ Gunnarr repeated.
Like water, the smile drained from the man’s face. His eyes hardened. ‘And who says so?’
Gunnarr answered without hesitation. ‘The rule.’
The man spat. ‘Egil’s rule.’ He seemed to be finished, and then the next words erupted as a shout. ‘And what’s that got to do with me? I never supported his claim. He was a man just like me once.’
Gunnarr shifted his weight. The temper had revealed itself, and now the man seemed to loom over Gunnarr, darkening like gathering storm clouds. The bloodied knife had appeared in his hand, apparently plucked from the air.
‘What were you doing to him?’ Gunnarr asked.
The man stared at Gunnarr for a moment and then turned over the knife in his hand, speaking more softly. ‘Opening his chest to the sky so that his spirit might escape, like the old ways for the dead. The old ways that all men of Helvik used to follow,’ he added in a louder voice. ‘Your father’s rule is taking that away from us as well.’
‘He’s not my fa—’ Gunnarr began, but that was all that he had time to say.
In a flash of movement the man sprang forward and snatched hold of Gunnarr’s arm. Gunnarr heard himself yelp and flailed out with his free fist, battering muscle, but the man dropped the knife and latched onto that arm as well. The wiry strength of his grip lifted Gunnarr from his feet, sapping his power away. The man’s face was ablaze with madness. His fingers drove so deep into Gunnarr’s arms that it felt like they were bending his bones. Agonised, Gunnarr twisted violently in the air, wriggling half loose, and from the side of his vision saw the stream rushing up to meet him. He hit the icy water with a clunk, and pain jarred through his bones as his hip came down upon a jutting rock.
The pain caused him to croak and convulse. His body sought to double over into a ball, but the man was kneeling on top of him, snarling in the thrashing spray as he sought to lock Gunnarr’s arms down against his sides. Gunnarr screamed and kicked out at the man’s groin, but he could generate no force. His strength was leaving him, his heart hammering against his ribs. He rolled onto his side, turbid water sloshing up to rush down his throat, and there on the river bank he saw the dead boy’s clothes lying in a ragged heap across the stones. A cry came unbidden to his lips.
‘Help!’
A hand clubbed down against his nose and mouth, trying to smother his cries, but Gunnarr twisted his neck free again.
‘Help me!’ His words came out high-pitched and shrieking, crying out to anyone that could hear. His throat felt like it was tearing. With a shout of his own, the man kicked Gunnarr hard in the ribs. The last of his air was driven from his lungs, and his cries turned into an empty gasp.
From somewhere far off behind him, there came a ringing shout. Someone was roaring at the top of their lungs. Gunnarr grunted with hope, and the man’s head jolted upwards at the sound. And yet it was a shrill, thin voice. A girl’s voice trying to sound fearsome. A little girl. Kelda, Gunnarr thought. She had come back for him.
A hidden energy flared in his chest, and he fought with renewed vigour to break free. The man was distracted, his grasp relaxed only slightly, but it was enough for Gunnarr to squirm loose. Still doubled over with pain, he tripped onto the river bank and dragged himself clear of the water.
Kelda was scrambling down the bank and arriving at the water’s edge, her delicate features scrunched with aggression, seemingly unafraid. She looked pathetically small, a child playing a game, as he had been only moments before. Gunnarr’s heart went out to her as he watched her play her role so dutifully, waving her stick left and right as she roared, just as he had told her to.
‘Run!’ he tried to call to her, to beg of her, but his voice was an airless whisper. He could only look at her, and before his eyes he saw the change that came across her face as she took in the scene properly for the first time. In the space of a heartbeat he saw the game become reality, her bravery turn to foolishness, and her innocence revealed as weakness.
Her cry fell silent when she saw the intent in the eyes of the man who still knelt in the middle of the stream, glaring at her. The stick fell forgotten from her hand when she turned her head to the boy in the water, whose mouth was gaping further and further apart with the weight of the liquid filling it, as if he was screaming in silent anguish. But it was when she turned to look at Gunnarr that the last of her resolve finally snapped, for there she must have seen something that she never had before: fear in his eyes.
Her face and body seemed to go limp. The focus drained from her eyes and they glazed over with terror. Gunnarr tried to drag himself towards her, but he was not half as quick as the man, who saw the girl’s senses leave her and surged eagerly from the water to take advantage. Kelda did not so much as react to his movement, like a hare transfixed by a stoat, and the man caught hold of her easily, a hand on each of her shoulders. For an instant he paused, thrown by her lack of resistance. Then he released an awful sound, like a beast about to gorge away a yearning hunger, and dropped to his knees at her feet.
‘Gunnarr,’ Kelda murmured quietly, as the man started tearing at her clothes, but otherwise she stood as still as a carving.
Gunnarr had plenty of time to choose his spot. The man was engrossed, intoxicated, his head bowed and hands shaking as he fumbled with the ties on Kelda’s smock. His ears were deaf to footsteps. The knife that he’d discarded as he wrestled Gunnarr to the ground was forgotten, or at least it had been until Gunnarr had retrieved it from the shallows. Even Kelda did not give Gunnarr away, so numb with fear that she barely seemed to notice his creeping approach even when he stood barely a yard from her face. As he stood looking down at the man’s shoulders, Gunnarr could hear his ragged breathing, coarse and urgent. He raised the knife two-handed over his head, and dragged it downwards with all of the strength he could muster.
The man erupted upwards with such force that Gunnarr was hurled backwards into the stream once again. Only a quiet groan escaped the man’s lips, but his neck arched as if he was being pulled by the hair, and his mouth opened so wide that the skin on his face might have ripped.
Gunnarr stared up at his work with morbid fascination. The knife had entered just beside the right shoulder blade and there it remained, almost hilt deep. He was certain that that would be enough, that the man would soon sink to his knees, but he did not. Instead he whirled in fury, and his eyes found Gunnarr lying in the water at his feet. A crazed expression burned on the man’s face. He began to lumber forward. Gunnarr scrambled to his feet and drew the curved skinning knife from his belt.
‘Kelda, go back,’ he said, his eyes never leaving the man that stood poised in front of him. And this time she listened.
When they eventually found him, as the evening shadows began to fall, he was still standing exactly as he had been when Kelda left him, ankle deep in the water, knife in hand. But this time his tunic was ripped open from neck to navel. His skin was as pale as salt. Drops of blood dripped from his white-blond hair and daubed his trembling hands. And his eyes were staring only at the corpse that lay face down at his feet, half in and half out of the water.
Expecting to find two dead boys and a killer to trail, the search party had set three hounds upon the scent. The first that Gunnarr knew of their arrival was the slate-grey