Whoever Sigtryggr had left in charge of Eoferwic’s garrison had been clever, using the same tactics to defend the city that the Danes had used when my father had died. I had been a child then, forbidden to fight, and had watched as the Northumbrian army had charged through a great gap in Eoferwic’s wall. The gap had been left on purpose, and once through the breach my father’s forces were faced by a new wall, a barricade edging a killing ground, and the Danes had made great slaughter that day. Their poets had sung of it, their hard words chanted to a harpist’s chords, and I still knew that song and sometimes chanted it myself, not out of bitterness because of my father’s death, but out of gratitude because it was on that day of killing that Ragnar had captured me.

I was his Saxon slave and became like a son to him. I loved him like a father. I called myself Uhtred Ragnarson and took his religion, sloughing off Christianity like a snake shedding its skin. I grew up thinking I was a Dane, wanting to be a Dane, but fate had driven me back to the Saxons. Wyrd bið ful āræd.

“Sigtryggr will come for revenge,” I told Enar.

He gave that threat a mocking laugh. “Jarl Sköll will want revenge too.”

“For capturing you?” I asked in derision.

“For wounding his son,” he said. “Or did you kill him?”

So the young man with the silver-chased helmet had been Sköll’s son? I wished I had known because I would have dragged him with us as another prisoner. “I gave him a headache he won’t lose quickly,” I said. “What’s the boy’s name?”

“Boy?” Enar said. “He’s a warrior, a man.”

“Unker Sköllson,” Njall said.

“Unker is a warrior, a man,” Enar repeated, and then added the words that told me the nature of the curse that the gods had wished on me, “and destroyer of queens.”

“Destroyer of queens?” I asked.

“He and his father killed Sigtryggr’s queen,” Enar said.

And I could hear the gods laughing.

“He and his father killed Sigtryggr’s queen.” For a bleak moment those words seemed unreal, almost as if I had dreamed rather than heard them.

In the dark, of course, Enar could not see me or else he might have kept quiet. Instead he continued his tale. “She led them. She was in mail and helmet, carrying a sword.”

Finan’s hand gripped my arm to keep me still and silent. “She fought?” he asked.

“Like a fiend. She was screaming insults at us, at Sköll and Unker.”

“How do you know it was the queen?” Finan asked. He was still gripping my arm.

“She boasted of it!” Enar said. “She called out that her husband thought a mere woman could defeat Sköll.”

“She must have had a bodyguard,” Finan said, refusing to let go of me.

“No bodyguard could stand against Sköll!” Njall said proudly. “He and his son killed a dozen men.”