Free Firemoon by Elí Freysson Page A

her socks and passed between the houses opposite Njall’s.
    What is going on? How many are dead? she thought.
    The hoofbeats could still be heard somewhere close by, but she couldn’t determine where they were headed or what they intended.
    The little village began to wake up to its own destruction. Katja heard frightened voices from inside of houses, heard doors and shutters slam, and a few people were already outside and shouting for their neighbours to wake up.
    She heard frightened cries muffled by walls and heavy blows of metal on wood, so rapid that a single man couldn’t be responsible. Some place was being broken into.
    Katja headed to the light cast by the expanding house fire and almost ran into someone. It was a man in a tunic and he thrust at her with something.
    Serdra’s endless training had drilled the proper reaction into her bones, and she parried with her sword and struck him in the head. The blade hit his temple like a kitchen hatchet hitting an apple and he fell without a sound.
    The slaying lit her blood up in honest and Katja ran towards the blows and the shouts.
    Two men in tunics were breaking down a front door with large axes. The third one had a leather bag and was splashing from it onto another nearby house. Katja felt a strong smell of oil and immediately understood why the fires she saw burned so greedily.
    The axemen worked together efficiently and the door was in its last gasps as the people behind it screamed and spoke over one another so nothing could be understood.
    The oil man was closer to her and she would need to turn her back on him to attack the other two. So she began with him and sprinted over the few meters separating them with the sword raised for a blow.
    He heard her at the last moment and looked around. He had time to take a step back and reach for a weapon in his belt, but no more than that. She split his skull and turned to the other two.
    They whirled around and saw her illuminated by the flames.
    “Here!” one shouted and they hefted their axes. They were heavy logging axes, not meant for combat, but would still cause grievous wounds if they connected.
    Katja ran towards them out of fear of reinforcements arriving, in spite of the growing noise about them. One of them approached her and thrust at her with the long axe, as the other one approached her from the left with the weapon raised high.
    They were competent.
    The one opposite her tried to drive her towards the other man but she batted his axe aside and went to the right. She slashed and connected with his left arm but then had to evade the other one before she could deliver the killing blow.
    The injured one lost the grip with his left hand but raised the axe with his right and threw it, as Katja tried to land a hit on his comrade.
    The one-handed throw wasn’t particularly strong but she did have to evade it and the enemy facing her took advantage of it and made a hard advance. He swung and swung. The heavy weapon was a disadvantage and he tried to make up for it with fury and relentlessness. The other one drew some kind of large knife from his belt and approached fast.
    Katja struck her opponent in the hand and he screamed and stumbled. She slashed him right in the neck and walked past him as he collapsed, and faced the other one.
    The man with the knife didn’t like the look of things and fell back to the house they had been breaking into. Katja followed him, sword in hand and fire in her veins.
    A broad-shouldered middle-aged man in a night robe appeared by the remains of the door with a hoe in his hands. The knife man didn’t look back and got the iron hoe in his back along with a scream of anger. He fell forward and the broad-shouldered man drove the tool down into the head of the man who had meant to break into his home.
    He looked at Katja and the fires illuminated a face contorted by emotion. Katja was fairly certain he was not a warrior.
    “Not bad!” she said, rather wound-up herself, and looked