Free The White Raven by Robert Low Page B

looked? Nine, I had reckoned — but he spoke like someone ten times as old.
    'So it is agreed,' I said. 'Show us Klerkon's secret.'

    'Lend me your axe,' demanded the boy and Kvasir, after a moment's narrow-eyed pause, handed it over.
    The boy weighed it with little bounces of his thin arm, then stepped to the boxbed and swung it, hard. Chips flew.
    He swung it again and part of the frame cracked. A coin flew out and smacked on the beaten earth of the floor. Kvasir picked it up, turned it over, bit it. 'Gold, by Odin's arse,' he said. 'A Serkland dinar in gold, no less.'
    The boy swung again and more chips flew.
    'Here, give me that — you need more muscle,' said Runolf Harelip with a grin. The boy handed him the axe and stepped back. Harelip split the bed in two blows and Kvasir, Tjorvir, Throst and the others scrambled to gather the coins that spilled from the hollow frame.
    In the end, they filled a sack the size of a the thrall boy's head, all gold coins, most of them Serkland dinar with their squiggly markings, each worth, I reckoned it up in my head, about twenty silver dirham each. It was as great a loss for Klerkon as it was a gain for us.
    The boy stood, unsmiling and straight. I saw that the iron collar was rubbing his skin raw and looked at Kvasir, who had also seen it.
    'Ref Steinsson has tools,' he said, 'that can strike that off.'
    'Just so,' I said, then turned to the boy, feeling that heart-leap as our eyes met. 'Do you have a name, then, or will we simply call you Prince?'
    'Olaf,' said the boy with a frown. 'But Klerkon called me Craccoben.'
    There was silence. The name squatted in the hall like a raven in a tree. It was a name you gave to a full-cunning man, rich in Odin's rune magic and one who, like him, could sit at the feet of hanged men to hear the whispered secrets of the dead.
    Not a name you took or gave lightly and I wondered what had made Klerkon hand it out to this thrall boy.
    Crowbone.

    5 We came up the coast, running before a freezing wind until we had found the narrow mouth of the river we sought and had to drop sail or risk running aground.
    We all groaned, for we would have to row upriver now and crew light at that. It was a heavy, lumbering beast of a ship when there were not even enough men on benches for one oar shift, never mind two.
    I sweated with the others, which at least took my mind off the boy, who had been cooed over by Thorgunna the minute she had set eyes on him. Ref had deftly struck off the iron collar and Thorgunna had at once started to wash and salve the sores it had made on his neck — not to mention the ones on his head, which showed where he had been shaved by ungentle hands. Old, white scars showed that such a razoring had not been his first and she tutted and crooned at him.
    Finn, grinning and happy now that he was raiding and getting money out of it rather than feathers and acorns, gave Kvasir a nudge where he sat, in front of Finn and pulling hard to the stroke.
    'You have been hung up like old breeks, Spittle,' he chuckled, nodding to where Thorgunna was wrapping the boy in a warm cloak and patting him. I wondered if she would croon quite so softly when she found out the whole story of what he had done, what he had urged hard men to do back there in Svartey.
    The wind hissed, the skin of the river crinkled and the thrall women huddled, blowing into chapped, cupped hands, but none of that was as cold as the dead we rowed away from.
    'It seems,' Kvasir agreed, grunting the words out between pulls, 'that I brought back a treasure greater than my share of those dinar coins, which I plan to make into a necklace for her.'
    'She's broody as an old hen. You will have to bairn that one and soon,' agreed Finn, which left Kvasir silent and moody.
    There was a flash behind my eyes of the fat limbs and round little belly, fish-white and so small it made Thorkel's blood-smeared hand look massive. The bud-mouth and wide, outraged blue eyes crinkling in bawls in a red face