Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
I try not to think of the people I know who are going to end up on that fire. I try especially hard not to think of Thor, who was brave, strong, and who deserved a better end. They all did. The man who took me is the worst kind of demon. We had no intention of starting a fight, but they didn’t care. There was an opportunity for a shot and they took it.
It’s so unsettling to be the only one left out of a crew of a thousand. I feel a sense of solitude that I never experienced before, not even when I was alone for dozens of miles when tending my herds.
I traipse around at Drako’s heels, thoroughly exhausted. I just want to sit down. I try to keep up with him, but he has long legs and he moves quickly.
“What did I tell you would happen if you did not keep pace with me?”
“You’re going to beat me,” I yawn.
I half-expect him to lose his mind. I haven’t been the captive of a Vikar jarl before, but I have annoyed people in authority before, and generally speaking yawning when someone is threatening you is treated as an act of disrespect.
Instead of whipping my ass again, he gives me a hard look and comes to a decision. He wraps an arm around my waist and picks me up, putting me over his shoulder.
I am carried around like that for a few more stops, kept in close proximity by his strong arm and his even stronger back. It’s not the most comfortable situation, but it’s better than walking. I start to get lulled into a half-sleep somewhere in the midst of everything, though I wake up every minute or so to overhear some more heinous talk and general celebration about the destruction of our vessel and crew.
“Are you going to sacrifice that one? Blood must be spilled,” someone says.
“We’ve spilled the blood of plenty,” Jarl Drako says. “This one I am keeping for myself as a breeding mate.”
“You’re going to mix the bloodlines?”
“I am,” he says. “There’s no rule that says we can’t. And even if there was, I would not follow it. No man tells me who I can take for my mate.”
“I understand, Jarl,” the interlocutor says with a placating tone. “I just wondered, given you have turned down so many female suitors over the years, why this scrap of soft humanity has earned the honor of your seed?”
“It’s none of your fucking business, Rakir,” Drako says.
I don’t get to hear why I am more special to him than all the other ladies he rejected, but I already know I’m not. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t love me. I am a trophy. The living embodiment of all the death he has recently inflicted. He’s keeping me like some barbarians keep an ear, or a finger. It’s gross. He’s gross.
As the day begins to wane, and preparations for a grisly feast are almost finished, a long table is set up in a semi-circle sort of arrangement. It is big enough to allow several hundred people to eat at it. In the center of the circle, at enough of a distance that the smell isn’t immediately off-putting to the diners, the bodies of the crew of my ship are being stacked alongside dried wood.
I cannot bear to watch. I close my eyes, turn my head, and I think of literally anything other than this moment I am in.
My father’s face swims before my eyes. I just fell in the river, and he dived in and pulled me out. I am coughing and spluttering and crying with terror from the experience of being swept away by the current, unable to fight it.
“You’re brave,” he’s telling me. “Sometimes, things happen that you can’t help right away. When that happens, you let the current take you to the side, understand? Swimming against the river will only tire you out.”
That advice applies as well now as it did then. I can’t fight right now. I can fantasize about grabbing a weapon from one of the warriors and attacking these people, trying to avenge the crew, but even if I were to kill a few of them, I know they would bring me down in short order, and I also know that they would probably not give me the honor of a kind death.
I am carried to the head of the table, but of course I am not accorded a place there. The seats are for Vikar only, not human prisoners of a war they never agreed to engage in.
“I am going to drink, and you are going to be far too much trouble if you get away, so you can spend some time in your cage,” Drako says to me, shortly before he dips down and puts me inside a small cage behind his chair. His chair is elevated above the rest of the seating, so everyone can see him, and he can see everyone. He has to climb up to it, it’s that high.