Blood started streaming down her cheek. But before she could get up he had locked her neck in a grip as strong as Volund’s tongs. Her nose was buried in the loose earth. She tasted its metallic tang. In her panic to breathe she sucked lumps of it into her mouth. She felt him behind her, heard his panting and then the weight of him on her squashed her flat. His arms were so long that it was no trouble to crush her face in the mud while he kicked her legs aside. He threw her skirts up over her back. Cold air coiled up her calves and thighs. She screwed her eyes shut in a horror of anticipation, powerless to move. Thrand was laughing at her, tugging at his breeches, pinching her hips cruelly to tilt them forward. ‘Hold still, you silly bitch.’

She screamed in her head but all it amounted to was a faint moan into the damp soil. Maybe Ringast could hear her, buried beneath her with his sword and his silver. No one else could.

The red dusk was bleeding to grey. She felt fury and fear and pain and. . . suddenly every sense rushed to the outrage in her most secret parts. And all she could do was squeeze her eyes tighter shut and taste the iron earth. . .

Afterwards, after he’d subsided, he bent low over her, his breath hot in her ear. ‘Whatever you have, Sviggarsdottír, I will take from you.’

Then he shoved her and sent her sliding down the shoulder of the mound. She lay face down, not moving. Breathing, nothing more. She listened to the buckle of his belt, the pad of his footsteps growing fainter through the wood, and then the yammer of her outraged heart.

When she was sure he had gone, she rolled onto her back and brushed away the mud that caked her cheek and lips. She gazed up through the treetops, unblinking, up into the thick darkness of night. She made a vow then, by that darkness, that no man would ever use her again.

CHAPTER FIVE

Erlan’s eyes opened.

He felt a wet slobber in his ear and sat up with a start. Aska shied away from him.

‘Ugh! You filthy mutt.’ He palmed away saliva from the side of his face, then seeing the dog looked like a drowned stoat he relented and pulled his shaggy head towards him. ‘Good boy,’ he whispered, burying his nose in the dog’s muzzle. He shifted his weight. Mud squelched under his backside. At least he was on solid ground. His skull was throbbing like a war drum, his mouth tasted foul with river water, and his hand was clamped around something hard. He lifted it. Wrathling appeared out of the silty murk, still in its leather sheath.

A dog and a sword, he thought. That was something.