Rune King

s when he sits on a stool every day and watches petty thieves sit. There was hardness in him, a cruelty that might have been hammered out into discipline with time and effort. No one had put that discipline in him, so instead he delighted in meting out "discipline" of his own, to anyone unlucky enough to make it into his prison.

There was always some provocation, but they were so particular and so hard to predict that there was little reason to assume that they might be avoided. Rather, they were just meted out in a timely manner, to suffer each and every one of his charges before they left, and if they were repeat customers, perhaps twice.

The only ones saved from his ire, of course, were the Danes themselves. He seemed to feel in their case that discretion was the better part of valor, and that it was better not to let them loose for an instant, for fear they might snap their chains like they were only spider's silk, and crush his head.

Well, they wouldn't be able to do that much—but killing him would have been possible, if necessary. It wasn't useful to consider, however, until the time was right. So Gunnar ignored him as he rapped his billy-club against the bars and shouted to "stop talkin' gibberish in there!"

"It will be soon. Has to be."

"They're already building the gallows. You can see it, if you try. Across the way, there, in the distance. They mean to parade us like thralls through the street, so that their people can see how defeated we all are. Pfah!"

Lokir and Valdemar remained silent, their heads both bowed. Gunnar didn't have to wonder too much what they were thinking about, but the conclusions they came to were theirs alone.

Gunnar spoke up, finally. "Well, we'll need to get out of this box first and foremost."

The others nodded in agreement for a moment. "But the bars are too thick to bend easily. Surely, if we had time and we all worked together—but it wouldn't mean much, because they'd stop us right away."

"The bars are built into the stone, it seems. They won't be smashed down that way."

Finally Valdemar spoke. "No, there's only one way out we need to consider, and that's through the open door."

The others hushed. The criticism didn't need to be said, that the door was certainly locked. If he'd said it, then he must have an answer to the locked door, but none of them could begin to guess what it might be.

"We get the guard to come in here. You've seen him. He's violent. We've got him running for now, but what if we wanted him in here, with us? To show how big a man he is, of course he'd play along."

There was the suggestion. Gunnar liked it, but his mind started to turn. What happened if they made it out? What would he do, then? Go off on his own? Track her down and find her, make her tell him the truth? And then what? If Valdemar told it true, they didn't have any sort of future together. They'd all have to go, or he'd be stranded in a very hostile foreign land.

No, he couldn't afford that. But he had to think of something. It must have been a week or more, even on horseback, to get back to the town they'd taken her from. Why she would want to return to it, he couldn't say. But it must not have mattered to her that they'd destroyed the town nearby. Her little cottage was all she cared about, and that was good enough for her.

Perhaps it would be good enough for him, as well. He was a soldier through-and-through, but when he was with her, he hadn't thought about fighting, about dying. About his future in Valhalla.

He'd thought about children. About seeing them running through a patch of pumpkins, about teaching his boy to use a sword and shield. It wasn't the sort of thing that he'd given much consideration before, yet when he was with Deirdre the thought was… oddly enticing.

He turned his mind back to the conversation when he heard his name.

"You said something?"

"Odin's breath, we were talking about your role in this. It's an important one, are you certain you can handle it? Or are you too busy day-dreaming?"

"I'll ignore that you said that. Repeat it, I'll be able to make it happen."

"Magnus will lure him in with some behavior, sure to set him off. He's the smallest, surely if any of us can be attacked, that will be in our favor. The guard will be able to brag in the bar that he beat all of us into submission if he pummels the boy a few times. Isn't that right?"

Magnus's face was twisted into a wicked smile. "Aye, sir."

"You're right here beside the door. If I stay close, then you should have enough slack to grab him as he comes through. A quick death, and we'll have him—and his keys. The door will be open, and we'll be free to go."

"Interesting enough, but what if he is too much of a coward?"

"That's a concern—but if we wait until the right moment, we can mitigate it. When he's been in his cups, that's when we'll get him. We have already seen that he isn't opposed to drinking on the job. We just have to wait until he drinks to drunkenness, and then have Magnus do his thing. That'll be enough, mark my words.

"But what if it isn't?"

"Then we've got a problem, and we all try to smash it down. Why so many questions?"

Because if not, then we're all dead men, no one added.

Thirty