Free The White Raven by Robert Low

Hauk Fast-Sailor were old Oathsworn, yet they raved through that place, mad with the lust of it, so that the terror in faces only made them worse. Others, too, showed that they were no strangers to raiding and, for all that I had done this before, this time seemed too bloody and harsh, full of screaming women, dying bairns and revenge.
    I saw Klepp Spaki, bent over with hands on his thighs, retching up at the sight of Brawl's bloody mess.
    Now he knew the truth of the bold runes he carved for brave raiders who would never come home.
    I saw Thorkel and Finnlaith laughing and slithering in the mud trying to round up a couple of pigs, which was foolish. We wanted no livestock on this raid — we had provision enough for where we were going.
    It was the others who brought red war and ruin to that place. Women and thralls died there, right away or later, after they had been used. Weans died, too.
    In the dim, blue-smoked hall, men overturned benches, flung aside hangings, cursed and slapped thralls, looking for loot. When they saw me, they fell silent and went still. Ospak, Tjorvir and Throst Silfra, like three bairns caught in the larder with stolen apples, dropped their thieving when they saw me. It was a half-naked, weeping thrall woman they had stripped between them — but they only dropped her because I had told them to leave the women until we were sure all the fighting men were dead.
    Finn lost himself in it — him most of all. Like a drunk kept from ale, he dived headfirst into the barrel and tried to drown himself, losing his sense so much that I had to save him from the boy who was trying to avenge his mother. Since Finn had killed her before he flung her down on a dead ox in the yard and started humping her, it was futile, but I had to kill the boy anyway, for he had a seax at Finn's exposed back.
    A few kept their heads. Runolf Harelip spilled into the red light of the rann-sack in the hall, dragging a struggling thrall-boy with him, cuffing the child round the head, hard enough to throw him at my feet and almost into the hearthfire. I looked down as the boy looked up and a jolt went through me, as if I had been slapped.
    A sensible man crops the hair of a thrall — it keeps the nits down and reminds them of their place — but this boy had been shaved and badly, so that hair stuck in odd dirty-straw tufts between scabs. He wore an iron collar with a ring on it and I knew there would be runes that told how he was the property of Klerkon.
    None of the other thralls, I noted, had as much as a thong and bone slice, for Klerkon's steading was an island with no place for a thrall to run — but this one had tried. More than once, I suspected, for Klerkon to collar him; Harelip had noted that, too, and thought it strange enough to bring him to me rather than kill him.
    'Chained up outside the privy,' Harelip grunted, confirming my thoughts. Fastened like a mad dog, dumped near filth for more punishment.
    The boy continued to stare at me. Like a cat, that stare, out of the muck and bruises of his face.
    Unwavering and strange — then I saw, with a shock, that he had one eye blue-green and one yellow-brown and that was what was strangest in that gaze.
    'Klerkon is not here,' offered Ospak, stepping away from the weeping woman, though not without a brief look of regret. Light speared through the badly-daubed walls of the rough hall, dappling the stamped-earth of the floor.
    'That much I had worked out,' I answered, glad of the excuse to break away from the boy's eyes and angry at being made so twitched by him. I stepped towards what was Klerkon's private space in the hall, throwing back the curtain of it.
    Furs, purest white fox. A cloak with bright-green trim. The frame of a proper box-bed, planked over and thick with good pelts. No chest. No money. No Thordis.

    'I am a Northman,' the boy said. A West Norse tongue, stumbling through the Slav he had been forced to speak, stiff with the old misuse of defiant silences.
    I