A sample from
Sworn Skin to Skin
The sea did not want to give her back.
Hervor knew it the way she knew the weight of her own shield-arm — knew it in the cold black pull that closed over her head a third time and dragged her down by the wool of her cloak, by the iron at her belt, by every honest pound of muscle she had ever been proud of. The mail she had not worn in the storm would have killed her by now. The byrnie she had stripped off in the first lurching hour, when the steerboard snapped and Jarl Halfdan's ship began to come apart under her feet like a thing made of straw, had bought her this much: a chance to drown slowly instead of fast.
She fought up toward a paleness that might have been sky. Her chest was a fist of fire. When she broke the surface the wind tore the breath out of her before she could use it, and a wave the colour of a drawn blade folded over and slammed her down again, end over end, until she no longer knew which way the air was. Her shoulder struck rock. The pain was almost a kindness — it was direction. She turned toward it, clawed toward it, and the next sea did the rest, hurling her up the slick black shoulder of the skerry and leaving her there as it sucked back out, gravel and broken shell hissing past her cheek.
She did not let go.
Her fingers found a seam in the rock and she jammed them into it past the second knuckle and held while the undertow tried to take her legs back into the dark. Then the wave was gone, and there was only her, and the cold, and the gravel under her belly, and the brine boiling up out of her in a long, helpless heave.
She vomited the sea. It came in ropes, scalding the back of her throat, salt and bile and the bitter ale she'd drunk at the last fire she would ever share with men who were now feeding the fish. Her body convulsed with it, again and again, her cheek pressed to stone that ran with foam, until there was nothing left in her but the heaving itself. Her ears roared. Cold had got into the meat of her, deeper than skin, deeper than she had words for, a cold that did not numb but bit, that promised it had not even begun.
Up, she told herself. On your knees, you sea-spat coward. Up, or the next wave finishes what the last one started.
She got her hands under her. She got one knee, then the other. The world swung like a hung shield and she clung to the rock until it steadied, and she lifted her streaming head to see where the sea had thrown her.
It was barely land at all.
A spit of bare black rock, wet to the bone, ringed in white where the surf gnawed at it. Beyond the gravel strand the stone rose in broken ledges into a murk of spray and low cloud, and that was the whole of it — no tree, no turf, no light of any hall, no smoke. Just rock and the screaming dark and the sea that went on flinging the wreck of two ships against the strand. Timber rolled in the surf, pale-bellied, a strake here, a keel-shard there, all of it broken to the length of a man's leg or shorter. A shield turned slowly in a back-eddy, rim down. An oar. A coil of walrus-hide line, sodden and black. And among the timber, rolling with the same dumb patience as the timber, the men.
She saw Thrand first, because of his beard, the gold rings still braided into it. He came in face-up on the wash, and the sea laid him on the gravel almost gently and then took him out again, and his arms moved as the water moved them, beckoning, beckoning. Hervor had stood at the oar beside Thrand for two summers. She had no breath left to make a sound, and she would not have known what sound to make.
Past him, further down the wrack-line, something else was moving — and this one moved itself.
A shape, hunched, crawling out of the foam on hands and knees the way she had, retching as she had retched, hauling itself clear of the reaching water by main stubborn force. For one mad, drowning-warm instant her heart leapt at it: a living soul, I am not the last, the sea spared two of us — and then the figure lifted its head, shook the wet hair out of its face, and the storm-light caught it, and Hervor's gut turned over for an entirely different reason.
Gunnhild.
Of every soul that had sailed in Halfdan's two ships — of the threescore men and the handful of women who had crewed them, kinsmen and oath-brothers and a girl who had sung well — the sea had chosen, out of all of them, to spit up Gunnhild Authunsdottir alive on the same dead rock as her.
The cold forgot itself for a heartbeat. Ten years rose up through it, hot as a coal.
Gunnhild saw her in the same instant. Hervor watched it happen — watched the other woman's body go still in the surf, watched her come up off her hands onto her heels with the water sluicing off her, and watched her hand drop, without a thought in it, to the long knife still lashed at her hip. It was the purest thing Hervor had ever seen her do. No calculation. No words. Ten years of grudge made flesh, reaching for steel before the brine was even out of her lungs.
And Hervor's own hand had already gone to her belt.
The seax was there. Of course it was — she'd lashed it through the belt-loop with a thong against exactly this, against the sea's thieving, and the sea had taken her byrnie and her shield and three-score of her sword-brothers but it had left her the one thing she would have given gladly to be rid of in this moment, the blade, and the old hatred to point it with.
They came up off the gravel at the same time. Or they tried to.
Hervor got as far as one knee and a half before her body, which had survived the wreck on nothing but spite, simply stopped answering. Her legs were full of water and her arms shook like a foundering ship's strakes and the strength ran out of her all at once, the way the wash ran back down the strand. She got the seax half free of the belt and then she knelt there, swaying, gripping the hilt with a hand she could no longer feel, glaring across thirty feet of streaming rock at her enemy.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.