Rune King

He turned to where Valdemar had stepped up beside him. The problem was that he couldn't give Valdemar his victory, either. He may as well have given up control at that point. He wanted command, anyone could see it. But Gunnar wasn't about to cede it.

The idea came to him in a flash of inspiration, and he spoke nearly before he'd thought it all the way through.

"Of course we go inland, Valdemar, but if we march direct, on the road, then we give away our intentions. We risk response from the English army. I look forward to that fight, but I'll have it on our terms—not theirs! We march to the right, and then double back after half a mile. That should throw them off our trails."

Valdemar made no effort to hide the look of victory on his face. There was no reason for him to, after all. He'd gotten the victory he wanted. Gunnar knew it as well.

He could argue until he were blue in the face that he had always planned this. Nobody in the band was going to be swayed by an obviously-false argument. No, he had changed his plans to make it seem as if he weren't listening to Valdemar's challenge.

The illusion was only paper-thin. A small voice in the back of Gunnar's mind told him that not one of them was fooled by the ruse. He glowered at Valdemar, and then began to march down the coast-ward road.

He would have to deal with that boy, and he would have to deal with him soon. Otherwise, he risked mutiny, and that was the one thing that he couldn't afford. He had more important things to concern himself with than trying to keep his men in line, but without doing at least that much he wouldn't have the men to make his plans work.

So that meant Valdemar had to go.

Seven

Her freedom was finally in sight, so why was it so hard to reach out

and take it?

Deirdre tried to ignore the eyes that she could feel watching her. Gunnar's eyes. He had stopped talking to her during her nightly visits, when he sensed that she was trying to concentrate. His silent notice, though, was as distracting as anything he could have said.

She couldn't help noticing him, either, and it chafed against her mind. She wasn't supposed to be thinking about men. She was thinking about freedom, and about how to take it for herself. She had already given up on men, on motherhood, on a future. She'd moved past it.

Which made it that much more confusing that she was thinking about Gunnar that much more than she should have been. What she needed was some time alone, by herself, to sort her body out. But that wasn't about to happen, not a chance.

She could have understood it if it were anyone else, but somehow Deirdre had always thought that she had control over herself, over her mind. The woman who taught her everything she knew, the first thing that she had taught was to control her own thoughts. Deirdre had remembered that lesson, had tried to emulate it, but now she was having trouble remembering why she'd always thought it was so important.

There was no future, though, in the fantasies that she was having. Gunnar wanted her for her magic, and her magic he would have. Nothing more, nothing less. He hadn't even shown any interest in her outside of it. What she'd interpreted, before, as some sort of attraction was only his interest in what she could do for him.

She took a deep breath of smoke and let the scent go to her head, sending her mind further away from her body. In her mind she looked down on both of them, sitting across the room from each other. Her mind imagined that she was seeing them doing something else, something very different. Something that brought a blush to her very real, very physical cheeks.

This wasn't about that, she tried to remind herself. She didn't need to know what it would be like, what it would feel like if he were to give her what she really wanted. It was about trying to find a solution to his problem. A solution that would give her what she wanted: freedom.

That was what this was all about, she reminded herself. Not about her desires. There was no use in visions of the pair of them on the ground, that was completely useless to her. The visions came again, the blush spreading lower, a heat spreading through her body.

With each thought, her body called her focus back to it, very effectively keeping her from thinking about the one thing she needed to concentrate on. There would be plenty of time for that later, she thought. When she waited again for night to fall, she could fantasize all that she liked.

The other prisoners already thought that she was laying down with him every night, enjoying his attentions. That she was being kept only for what she was giving him. Little did they know that they were more on the mark than they realized. She wasn't being kept for what she had between her legs, but she was very much there because Gunnar thought that he could get something from her.

She let out a breath that she hadn't realized that she had been holding and shifted her weight, ignoring the way that her clothes moved across her hardened nipples. Ignoring the painful shock of sensation that went straight up her spine, and the thought that flashed through her mind after.

Could he not just leave? She could have thought so much clearer if he weren't there, if he weren't distracting her. She wouldn't be able to use herbs to solve this problem, she decided. No trance in the world was going to overcome the sort of distraction that she felt when that man's eyes burned on her flesh.

She would have to think, then. If she couldn't approach it from the perspective of a witch, she would have to approach it from the perspective of a healer. She'd been much better at that, than divination, but it was hard to imagine how the knowledge of how to heal a man might help him to die.

The thought came to her so easily that for a moment she thought that she'd been making it up. There was a solution, and one that wasn't likely to fail, if she was right. A very simple one.

Her teacher's words echoed in her mind. 'There's more to the Earth's gifts than greenery, Deirdre.'

Part of the lecture that had followed was more applicable than Deirdre would have liked to her current predicament. Certain comments about the circle of death and birth, specifically.

But the thing that struck her in that moment was not a solution to Gunnar's curse. If she had a solution to her problem, a way to get her freedom, she would have to take it. And if she were betting on the Weak man's ability to stop the bloodshed, then that was the best solution of all.

Valdemar, he had called himself. He said that when she'd solved Gunnar's problem, he would take over the band. There was little doubt that it would be at Gunnar's expense. But he had promised that when he had control of the band, she would be freed, and that was enough.

She wouldn't be able to make the solution herself. It would take too much time, require too much movement. And she couldn't suggest it to Gunnar. He did not long for death, she knew that much. A fire burned inside him, the very fire that drew her attention.