“Wh—”

The breath that broke from him plumed the air. Fragments of ice still clung to his beard, water dripping to his chest. Neither so hot as it felt then, nor so cold as it had been.

Raising his head brought the wound at the back of his skull against the rough stone wall, and half an oath burst from his cracked lips. The hall before him housed a dozen men, crowded before a small fire in a cavernous hearth around the far end of a long stone table. Broke-Oar’s men, Red Vikings from the Hardanger, even less at home so close to the Bitter Ice than the Undoreth, who kept to the Uulisk shores.

Snorri roared at his captors, bellowed his rage, uttered dire curses, shouted until his throat grew raw and his voice weak. They ignored him, sparing hardly a glance, and at last sense prevailed over his anger. No hope remained to him, but he realized what a pathetic figure he cut, tied there on the wall and issuing threats. He had had his chance to act. Twice. He had failed both times.

The Broke-Oar entered the hall from a doorway close by the fire and warmed his hands there, exchanging words with his men before walking the length of the table to inspect his prisoner.

“Well, that was foolish.” He rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. Even close up his age proved elusive. Forty? Fifty? Scarred, weathered, raw-boned, huger even than Snorri, his mane of red-gold hair still thick, crow’s feet at the corner of each dark eye, a shrewdness in his gaze as he weighed his man.

Snorri made no reply. He had been foolish.

“I expected more from a man trailing so many mead-hall tales.”

“Where is my wife? My son?” Snorri made no threats. The Broke-Oar would laugh at them.

“Tell me why you ran. Snorri ver Snagason has been shown to be stupid and I’m not greatly surprised. Though I expected more. But a coward?”

“Your creatures’ poison brought me down. I fell and snow covered me. Where is my son?” He couldn’t speak of Freja before these men.

“Ah.” Broke-Oar glanced back at his men, all of them listening. There could be scant entertainment in the Black Fort. Even the coals they burned must have been hauled in by sled at great effort. “Well, he’s safe enough, as long as you carry on being no threat.”

“I didn’t tell you his name.” Snorri tugged at his ropes.

The Broke-Oar merely raised a brow. “You think the son of the great Snorri ver Snagason hasn’t been telling anyone who’ll listen how his father will storm our gates with an army to rescue him? Apparently you’ll take all our heads with an axe and roll them across the fjord.”

“Why do you have them?” Snorri met the man’s gaze. His pain helped distract him from thoughts of Egil’s trust in a failed father.

“Ah, well.” Sven Broke-Oar pulled over a chair and sat with his axe across his knees. “Out at sea a man’s a small thing, his ship not much bigger, and we go where the weather wills. We run before the storm. We rise and fall with the waves. Skinny fisherman off the Afrique coast, big Viking with a hundred kills to his name out on the Devouring Sea, it’s all the same—we’re driven by the wind.