‘Porco!’ Benedetta spat at him.

‘Father Oda,’ I said, ‘come downstairs with us. Vidarr, you stay here.’

‘Of course, lord.’

‘Don’t interfere. Just make sure it’s a fair fight.’

‘A fair fight, lord?’ Vidarr asked, puzzled.

‘He’s got a cock, she’s got a sword. Seems fair to me.’ I smiled at Benedetta. ‘There’s no hurry. We won’t leave for a while. Come, Finan! You, girl!’ I looked at the bed. ‘Are you dressed?’ She nodded. ‘Then come!’

There was a coiled whip made of braided leather hanging on a nail driven into the newel post of the stairs. I took it and saw dried blood crusted in the whip’s tip. I tossed the whip to Vidarr, then went downstairs.

Leaving Benedetta, Vidarr, and Gunnald in the attic.

And Gunnald was screaming before I reached the middle floor.

‘The church,’ Father Oda said to me when we reached the bottom of the two stairways, ‘does not condone slavery, lord.’

‘Yet I’ve known churchmen own slaves.’

‘It is not seemly,’ he said, ‘yet the scriptures do not forbid it.’

‘What are you telling me, father?’

He flinched as another scream sounded, this one more terrible than any that had assaulted our ears as we came downstairs. ‘Well done, girl,’ Finan muttered.

‘Vengeance must belong to God,’ Father Oda said, ‘and only to God.’

‘Your god,’ I said harshly.

He flinched again. ‘In his epistle to the Romans,’ the priest said, ‘Paul tells us to leave revenge to the Lord.’

‘The lord took his time revenging Benedetta,’ I said.

‘And the fat bastard deserves it, father,’ Finan put in.

‘I don’t doubt it, but by encouraging her,’ he was looking at me now, ‘you have encouraged her to commit a mortal sin.’

‘Then you can shrive her,’ I said curtly.

‘She is a fragile woman,’ Oda said, ‘and I would not burden her fragility with a sin that separates her from Christ’s grace.’

‘She’s stronger than you think,’ I said.

‘She is a woman!’ he said sternly. ‘And women are the weaker vessels. I was at fault,’ he paused, plainly disturbed, ‘and I should have stopped her. If the man deserved death then it should have been at your hands, not hers.’

He was right, of course. I did not doubt that Gunnald deserved death for a multitude of crimes, but what I had just unleashed in the slaver’s attic was cruel. I had condemned him to a long, terrible, and painful death. I could have satisfied justice with a swift killing, as swift as the one I had given Halfdan so many years before, but I had chosen cruelty instead. Why? Because I knew that choice would please Benedetta. Another scream sounded, faded, grew again. ‘It is not seemly,’ Father Oda repeated, ‘that you have put that woman’s mortal soul at risk!’ He spoke fervently and I wondered if the Danish priest was attracted to Benedetta and that thought gave me a pulse of jealousy. She was beautiful, undeniably beautiful, but there was a darkness in that beauty and an anger in her soul. I told myself she was ridding herself of that shadow with Wasp-Sting.