Free The Eighth Lost Tale of Mercia: Canute the Viking by Jayden Woods Page A

quickly
away.
    Canute was so shocked by the humiliation of
the blow that he stood petrified for a moment, red flushing his
torso and face as if he’d been sunburned in a matter of seconds.
Tosti had just … spanked him! He could have done it for no
other reason than to make fun of Canute. To win the spar, one of
them had to knock the other over. So Tosti had nothing to gain from
such a ridiculous move.
    Meanwhile, the small crowd exploded with
laughter and jeers.
    “Oh, look at the great Sweynsson now!”
    “Where’s Thorkell the Tall when you need him,
Canute?”
    Seeing through a haze of red, Canute looked
dizzily at the faces around him. Is that what they really believed?
Did they truly think that without his great fathers and guardians,
he was a nobody?
    A shout of rage ripped out of his throat, so
strong it silenced most of the laughter. Canute didn’t notice, for
at last he was advancing on his opponent. He lifted his sword high,
pulling his feet from the mud at last to run towards Tosti. The
look on his face must have been frightening enough, for Tosti froze
with terror. At the last moment, he lifted his sword to block
Canute’s onslaught, but his stance was not ample; Canute’s sword
knocked Tosti’s aside, then it smacked him hard across the side of
the head.
    Tosti’s eyes rolled and he crumpled to the
earth, his energy cut off like a waterfall dammed from above.
    Everyone around Canute grew quiet. Soon he
heard nothing but his own heart thumping in his chest, increasing
in tempo. He had not meant to hit Tosti quite so hard. Why didn’t
he get up?
    He felt the unfamiliar feeling of guilt
flowing through him. Before today, he had looked up to Tosti,
secretly. He had been excited about getting this chance to spar
with him. He had anticipated an exciting and enlightening
competition. This … this was certainly not what he’d had in mind.
The possibility that Tosti might not get up filled Canute with
dread. He wanted Tosti’s respect, not Tosti’s death.
    Unable to help himself, he knelt down and
shook Tosti’s clammy shoulder. “Hey,” he said. He felt the intense
stares of the other Jomsvikings bearing down on him, but he tried
his best to ignore them. “Hey, wake up!”
    Slowly, Tosti’s eyes came open. He looked
dazed. As his lids parted, Canute studied his deep gray irises for
signs of consciousness. His eyes were a strange color, like stones
sparkling with silver grains in the sunlight. But that mattered
not. Canute gave him another hard shake.
    “Are you alive or aren’t you?” the Viking
prince demanded.
    Tosti reached up suddenly and thrust Canute’s
hand away from his shoulder. “I’m fine, no thanks to you, you
clumsy oaf.”
    Canute clenched his jaws and stood up.
Everyone was still staring at him, waiting for some sort of
response. Well let them have it, he thought as his lip curled. “Let
that be a lesson to you all,” he snapped. In the silence, he was
all too aware of how high-pitched his own voice seemed. His voice
did not boom like his father’s or Thorkell the Tall’s. But it had
its own strength, its own tenor. “Insult me again, and I’ll pay you
in kind.”
    He threw his wooden sword into the grass,
then turned and stormed away.
    For a reason he could not explain, he felt
even more humiliated now than he had before.
    *
    At the night meal, a great number of aspiring
young warriors sat near Canute, but very few spoke to him. He
chewed angrily on his meat as he surveyed the faces around him. The
only young men sitting here were the ones who wanted to sap from
his power and renown. None of them cared to engage in conversation
with him, nor ask him how his day had gone. They only seemed to
exchange such trivialities with one another .
    One of them bragged that on a recent trip to
Jom, the nearby town that the fortress of Jomsborg protected, he
had lain with an eager woman. Women were not generally allowed into
the Jomsborg stronghold, so encounters with the opposite sex