"What does it say?" Haelir asked from the bed, her voice thick with sleep and a yawn she didn't bother to stifle.
Rollo snapped the paper shut with more force than necessary. The smirk that crawled across his face was all teeth and no warmth. "The west. Finally. I want to hear the screams of the Christians again." And the moans of their women, he thought, but kept that particular hunger to himself.
Haelir laughed. She shifted her weight on the bed, the furs rustling beneath her as she repositioned her swollen belly. "Careful now," she said, amusement coloring her tone. "If the men heard their high chieftain talking like a hungry sell-sword fresh off his first voyage, they'd wonder what all those titles were for."
Rollo crossed the room and sat beside her on the bed's edge, the wooden frame creaking under his weight. His hand came down heavy on her belly—not rough, but not gentle either. She was to give birth this year, perhaps in the summer months.
He didn't caress the roundness at first. "Titles," he scoffed, the word bitter in his mouth. "I lead ships I don't own. I train boys who look to Bjorn for their silver, not to me. I am a 'leader' who has to ask permission to piss in the salt water."
"Then speak to the King," she said, her voice softer now. She covered his hand with hers, her fingers smaller but warmer. "He is your blood, Rollo. Speak to your brother too. He—"
Rollo pulled his hand away as if her skin had turned to ice, as if she'd burned him. The movement was almost violent. "Speak to Ragnar?" His voice climbed higher, incredulous. "To ask for what, exactly? To beg like a dog at his table?"
He stood abruptly, turning away from her. "We hold the same rank, Wife. On the field, in the eyes of the gods and men, we are equals."
"The gods might see you as equals," Haelir said softly, carefully guiding his palm back to the warmth of her belly, to the life growing there. "But Bjorn sees a father and an uncle. You cannot win that battle."
The truth of it felt like a cold blade pressed against his neck, sharp enough to draw blood if he moved wrong.
He looked at his wife, but for a fleeting, painful moment, his vision betrayed him.
Instead of Haelir's blonde hair and steady gaze, he saw the phantom of a different woman. He saw Lagertha in those early days, before Ragnar became everything. Before his brother's shadow swallowed whatever small light Rollo had managed to kindle.
He had tried to hate Bjorn. By all the gods, he had tried. A thousand times over the years, he'd sharpened his resentment like a spear, honed it with every slight and every moment he stood in Ragnar's shadow.
For years now, he'd kept that weapon ready, prepared to hurl it at the boy who carried Ragnar's name and Ragnar's impossible luck like a birthright.
But then Bjorn would smile—that crooked, easy smile—or swing an axe with the natural grace he'd shown even as a child, or look at Rollo with those eyes. Her eyes. Lagertha's eyes. And the spear would shatter in his hands, useless.
He couldn't hate the best part of Lagertha, the piece of her that walked and breathed and lived in this world. That was the cruelest joke the gods had ever played on him: he was forced to love the living, breathing proof of his brother's victory over him.
He often wondered, in the dark hours before dawn, how much more betrayal he would have to endure from the gods before they would smile upon him at last. The way they had always—always—smiled on Ragnar.
When he first came to Borre to rule it and keep it safe, he thought they finally had. He thought the gods had finally turned their faces toward him, had finally shown him their big white teeth in approval instead of mockery. He had even married Haelir, the daughter of Tunsberg's hird leader—a good match, a strategic match, a match that should have meant something.
But with each year that crawled by, he felt it less and less. The approval. The purpose. He felt like he didn't matter, not really. Like he was just a puppet dancing on strings the gods held, amusing them for reasons he couldn't fathom. Once again, after all these years, he was still just Rollo. Never quite enough.
"Where is the fleet going?" Haelir asked, her voice breaking through the heavy silence that had settled over the room like fog. "The Frankish coast? Or further south this time?"
"Frankia," Rollo lied, the word tasting bitter as ash on his tongue. Truth was, he didn't know. The message hadn't said.
"He summoned the ships to Kattegat," she mused, her hand still resting on her belly, tracing small circles there. "Perhaps he calls a Thing. Perhaps he wants the people to choose the path forward, to have their voices heard."
Rollo couldn't hold back the mocking laughter that burst from his chest. "A Thing? To decide a raid?" He shook his head. "Ha! We could see the gods themselves standing before us in all their glory, and Bjorn would never do that." He waved a dismissive hand. "Besides, what do those dirt-diggers know of the world beyond their fields?"
He stood up again, unable to stay still, pacing the small room like a caged animal that had forgotten what freedom tasted like. His boots scraped against the wooden floor with each turn. "They don't know how vast the world is. How many new lands there are just sitting there, waiting for us to reach out and take them."
His voice grew more animated. "There are the lands of the Muslims with their desert sands that burn your feet and their god named Allah who they pray to five times a day. Do they know of that?" He scoffed, though somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered Bjorn saying those lands were hard to raid. Well-defended. The Muslims fought differently than Christians.
He turned away from her completely now, already reaching for his cloak where it hung on a peg by the door. The heavy wool and fur felt familiar in his hands. "I'll have the ships gather here in Borre first," he said, his tone decisive. "Before we go to Kattegat. I will arrive with a fleet that looks like it belongs to me, not to him."
He fastened the cloak at his shoulder, his fingers working the bronze clasp with practiced ease. "For once, I will arrive like I matter."
-x-X-x-
Bjorn couldn't hold back his laugh. "Look at their faces, so ugly. They look as if they've swallowed a mouthful of bile."
The remaining Jarls in Norway were scattered throughout the hall, talking with the men who held higher positions than themselves in the army. And Bjorn could see it—Ragnar could see it too, he was certain—their egos couldn't hold the weight of it. The bitterness of standing below others, of waiting for orders instead of giving them.
"Pride is a dangerous thing to wound," Ragnar said from beside him, his voice low and contemplative. "It festers. They might be playing the fool only to see how much of a fool you can be."
"The joke would be on them then." Bjorn tapped Ragnar on the shoulder with easy familiarity. "I should go. I can see they are getting restless and eager to know where we are going to raid."
He walked from behind the curtains where they had been spying on everyone, watching how they talked with each other, trying to gauge the relationships between the people. The alliances. The grudges. The careful dance of who stood near whom and who avoided whose gaze.
Two weeks had passed since Bjorn issued a decree for a gathering in Kattegat, and the men had come in one organized wave. All on time. It satisfied him deeply. There was nothing better than being militarily organized.
Rollo was doing his job well.
Bjorn passed many people as he made his way through the crowded hall, and he stopped to talk with them about how everything was at their homes. How the training of their men had gone through the long winter months.
They complained—some with humor, some with genuine exasperation—that their women gave them headaches about when they were going to raid, when they would bring home plunder and riches to make the cold winters worth enduring.
He passed Floki with Hilda, the two of them talking animatedly with other shipbuilders, their hands moving as they spoke of keels and sails and the perfect curve of a dragon's head. They were to be married this year, and Bjorn was genuinely happy for them.
Floki had asked him to be present at the ceremony, and Bjorn had gladly accepted. It would be good to see his friend bound to someone who could tolerate his peculiar ways.
Many Jarls presented their sons as Bjorn moved through the hall—boys who were old enough now to raid with them, some barely past their first beard, others already scarred from training fights. Proud fathers with proud sons, all eager to prove themselves worthy of the family name.
As Bjorn got closer to his seat at the head of the hall, he was stopped again by another Jarl. This time it was the sole remaining Jarl of Trøndelag, the one who had joined his side against the two Jarls who had resisted him when Bjorn first moved to unite the north.
Bjorn had given him new lands for his loyalty. If you could call it loyalty. But Bjorn would take what he could get.
"King Bjorn! It is an honor to stand with you again," Jarl Haakon said, his grin wide as he clasped Bjorn's forearm in the warrior's grip. His fingers were strong, calloused. "To finally bleed those Christians and drown in their wine."
Bjorn returned the grip, his fingers locking like iron shackles. He squeezed until Haakon's arm began to tremble under the strain and the light of bravado die in Haakon's eyes.
"The gods will have a better sense of humor this time, Jarl Haakon," he said, his tone pleasant enough. "They won't send you home with empty bellies."
Haakon had raided before Bjorn united the north of Norway—somewhere across the sea, though the details were vague in the retellings—but he hadn't been as successful as his boasts would suggest.
Haakon forced a laugh that was too bright and performative under Bjorn's pressure. "The gods were testing our patience, that is all. This time, we have a real leader blessed by the gods to follow."
Bjorn's gaze shifted, pulled by instinct or curiosity, to Gunnhild. She stood near Gyda and Lagertha on the far side of the hall, her posture stiff and unnatural in her leather armor.
The armor itself was well-made, fitted properly to her frame, but somehow she looked less like a warrior and more like a girl trying desperately to stay still so she didn't look nervous.
"I see you've brought your daughter," Bjorn noted, keeping his voice neutral as he turned his attention back to Haakon. "A bold choice."
"She is a woman grown, and it is time she saw the world beyond the fjords," Haakon said, lowering his voice to something more intimate. He nodded toward Lagertha, who stood with her usual ease and confidence, completely at home in her own skin and her own power. "She reminds me of your mother at that age. Strong and fierce. She needs a man who doesn't fear a woman with a blade."
The Jarl paused, and his voice dropped even lower, heavy with implication. "I am getting old, King Bjorn, and my lands need a strong protector when I am gone. Someone who can hold them. And someone the people will follow."
Bjorn looked from the Jarl to Gunnhild, then back again, his expression carefully neutral. He understood the offer perfectly—as clear as if Haakon had drawn it in the dirt with a stick. Haakon wasn't just offering a warrior. He was offering an inheritance.
"The sea has a way of showing us who we really are, Haakon," Bjorn said after a long moment, patting the Jarl's shoulder with a firm, final thud that ended the conversation as much as any words could. "If she is truly like my mother, she won't need you to find a protector for her. She'll find her own path."
He gave the older man a curt nod, respectful enough for an ally who had stood with him, but cold enough to show that Bjorn will marry when he wants to do so. "I'm going to tell the men where we're headed."
And with that, he moved past Haakon, leaving the Jarl to digest the rejection wrapped in pleasant words.
Bjorn reached the high table where Lagertha, Gyda, and Gunnhild stood close by, their conversation dying as he approached. He didn't offer them a word.
Instead, he grabbed a massive iron tankard and drained it in one long, aggressive gulp. The ale burned down his throat, cold and bitter and perfect. He slammed the empty vessel back down on the table so hard the wood groaned beneath it, the sound cutting through the ambient noise of the hall.
He marched to the center of the hall with purpose in every stride, his boots heavy on the packed earth floor.
Without hesitation, he vaulted onto the heavy oak table that ran down the middle of the space, the wood solid beneath his feet. He raked his fingers through his silver hair, pulling it back from a face that suddenly looked twice as dangerous. Or so he hoped.
He wanted them to see a king. A warlord. A man blessed by the gods and hungry for glory.
"I hope you all had a fucking boring winter!" Bjorn roared, his voice filling every corner of the hall.
A ripple of dark laughter went through the assembled men. They knew. Everyone knew.
Winter stopped everything. The construction of the castle stopped due to winter. Shipbuilding stopped due to winter, the wood too cold and brittle to work properly.
Training stopped because men couldn't feel their fingers around their weapons. Everything stopped due to winter. Life itself seemed to pause, waiting for the ice to break and the world to thaw.
"I know what you want," Bjorn said, his voice dropping to a low, predatory growl that somehow carried to every corner of the hall. "You want silver. You want gold. You want the soft screams of slaves and the taste of Frankish wine on your tongues."
The room erupted in a thunderous roar. "AYE!"
Bjorn raised a hand, and an eager silence followed immediately.
"But news has reached me," he continued, his voice hard now, edged with contempt. "The King of the Danes—that shivering dog—raided the Franks and then begged for peace like a child caught stealing bread. He returned his plunder. He gave back the slaves he won with Viking steel because he feared a King named Louis. A Christian King."
He stopped for a moment, watching the faces below him darken with disgust and disbelief.
"And do you know what the Christians say now?" Bjorn leaned forward, his eyes burning with an intensity that could have set the hall ablaze. "They say their 'God' has broken us. They say our Gods are dead, and we are nothing but frightened children hiding in the mist. They laugh at us in their stone churches! They toast to our cowardice with the wine we should be drinking!"
He kicked a pitcher of ale off the table with a vicious swing of his boot, sending it flying through the air and shattering against the floor in an explosion of liquid. The crash punctuated his words perfectly.
"I will not have a cross-worshipper whisper that the blood of the All-Father is weak!" His voice rose to a roar that shook the rafters. "I will haul their priests out by their hair and make them scream their useless prayers into the dirt until their throats burst with the blood of their own lies! I will kill their women and their men! I will burn their churches and salt their fields!"
The hall was completely silent now, every eye fixed on him, every breath held.
"I, Bjorn, Reginkonungr (God-King), will do this," he declared, his voice ringing with absolute certainty.
"I will take you on the ships and turn their rivers red like no King has ever done before."
"This, I vow...I, Bjorn, descendant of Odin."
"I vow it by my blood, and the Gods are my witness!"
The hall exploded. Men were on their feet, voices joining in a single thunderous echo: "AND THE GODS ARE OUR WITNESS!"
They didn't waste any more time dwelling in Kattegat after that.
Within a day, sixty ships sailed from the harbor—fifty-five normal longships and five long serpents, the massive warships that struck fear into the hearts of anyone who saw them on the horizon. The dragon heads carved into their prows seemed to snarl at the sea itself, daring it to challenge them.
Bjorn embarked on one of the long serpents, standing at the prow as the wind whipped his silver hair and the salt spray kissed his face. He watched the oars dip and rise in perfect unison, disciplined and powerful. Fifteen hundred vikings, and this time they weren't just raiders—they were an army. A disciplined one.
The thought sent a thrill through him that had nothing to do with the cold.
-x-X-x-
Bjorn cleared the defenders on the wall with his hurling spears like a man fighting children. Each spear found a throat or a heart, or left a broken shield and a numbed arm.
While his archers loosed volley after volley into the chaos below. The rest of his men followed, breaching the gates with the ram and overwhelming the defenders who were outnumbered more than fifteen to one. It was a slaughter dressed up as a battle.
The smell of blood filled the air, thick and metallic, mixed with smoke and the acrid stench of fear-sweat.
There were guards kneeling on the ground now, getting stripped of their mails by eager hands. These had been the professional defenders of Hamburg in East Frankia, the Kingdom of Louis the German.
Though there were only fifty of them—real soldiers with training and discipline—the rest had been farmers who rose to defend their lands with pitchforks and axes meant for wood, not men.
They were courageous, Bjorn gave them that much. Waking up from your sleep to see dots on the horizon that slowly turned into ships, and those ships disgorging hundreds upon hundreds of Vikings onto your shores—most men would have run. These hadn't. Not at first, anyway.
Bjorn entered Hamburg for a little while, just long enough to get a sense of the place, but he left almost immediately. It wasn't big by any means—Less than a thousand people in population—and it was already crowded enough without him adding to the press of bodies.
With the thousand addition of his men flooding the narrow streets, he wouldn't have been able to move freely anyway, and there was nothing inside the palisade walls that required his personal attention.
It had been hours now since the initial breach. The men knew their priorities without needing to be told: neutralize the threat inside first, then organize the plunder in orderly fashion.
And capture an influential person. Like in Hamburg, where there was supposed to be an archbishop, a man close to King Louis himself.
The normal people—the farmers and craftsmen and shopkeepers—had surrendered easily once they saw resistance was futile.
Once the defenders were stripped of their mails, the chainmail coiled and bundled for transport, Bjorn interrogated them about nobles and officials.
They resisted at first, as soldiers do, loyal to their oaths and their lords. But when he caught the hand of one of them and let him bleed in agony until death finally took him, his screams echoing off the wooden walls, the others decided it was better to die in one swift stroke than to suffer. They were soldiers. They understood that, even if they hated it.
Through their reluctant testimony, Bjorn increased his understanding of the lands of Louis of East Frankia, son of Louis the Pious, grandson of Charlemagne himself. The empire was fragmenting, but the pieces were still dangerous.
There was a Count Thachulf of Thuringia who oversaw the eastern Saxon frontiers against the Slavs and Bohemians. Which showed how stretched thin King Louis was, how many borders he had to watch, how many enemies surrounded him on all sides.
There were even some small posts that housed fewer than fifty scouts along the Elbe River—places like the fort at Esesfelth. These were part of Louis's border defenses against the Danes and Slavs, watchtowers meant to give warning before raiders could penetrate too deeply into Frankish territory.
Bjorn wondered if Louis even knew about him yet, since he had raided Cologne last time—or at least the outskirts of the settlement, not the city proper. Perhaps the King thought he was just another opportunistic raider, not a threat worth mobilizing against.
From the look of it, Louis hadn't taken any serious measures yet to fortify this region. Bjorn wondered if his restraint in not raiding Cologne directly had made them complacent, made them think they were safe.
But from what he heard from the captives—both Franks and Slavs who had been pressed into service—Louis was a warrior King, unlike his brothers who preferred politics and treaties. And a ruthless one at that.
He subjugated Slavic groups for frontier defense, using them as human buffers against the Danes and other Slavic tribes. When they resisted, he burned their farms to cripple them, to make sure they couldn't rise again.
He also installed Christian puppet leaders and built churches in their lands, because once they accepted Christianity, they would indirectly admit that Louis was their divinely ordained King. Which created buffer zones against non-Christians as well, layers of protection built on faith and fear.
And if the Slavs raided his lands again despite their conversion, he could simply punish their leaders for failing to control their people. It was elegant in its cruelty.
'A well-thought-out plan,' Bjorn thought, grudging respect mixing with contempt.
Louis had even forced the Danes to release the captives they'd taken from raiding his lands last year by threatening a full invasion with his devastating heavy cavalry that could break a shield wall like it was kindling. And since there was no sea dividing them, no natural barrier to slow an army, he had made the Danes terrified of provoking him too far.
Bjorn had a certain understanding of Louis now, and he could tell what the King's ultimate plan against the Danes was: install a Christian King in their lands. Someone who would bow to Louis, who would keep the raiders at bay through faith rather than force.
That's why Bjorn had decided to raid and weaken Frankia before they could build anything substantial enough to threaten the North. Starting with Hamburg. The Archbishop Ansgar was the man Louis used to baptize the non-Christians, to bring them into the fold of the church. He was a weapon and a spy disguised as a holy man.
If Bjorn could capture the Archbishop and seize the relics that were used to legitimize Louis's rule as a Christian King, it would weaken his prestige at his assemblies. It would show the Frankish nobles that their King couldn't even protect his own priests, his own holy symbols.
In a matter of hours, the settlement was picked clean like a scavenged carcass. The survivors were marched outside the walls in orderly lines, alongside slaves who had spent their lives in Frankish service—men and women who would now serve a new master. And it was no man.
The books from the church and the small scriptorium were being escorted with care. Bjorn would sort through them on the sea, deciding what was valuable and what could be burned. He had ordered his men to take everything, because books were intellectual weapons for cultural dominance.
They burned the wooden library building itself to stall education and record-keeping in northern Saxony. To replace what they'd destroyed, Louis would need to divert resources from his military campaigns, weaken himself in other ways.
Swords and mails and seaxes and shields were loaded into the ships alongside food and wine and anything else that could serve as supplies for the journey ahead. The plunder was organized, nothing left to waste.
Chests filled with silver coins and ingots came next, hauled from the trading hub where merchants had stored their wealth. Bjorn was surprised that this Louis didn't keep much silver and gold in his churches—instead, it seemed most of it was used to buy alliances and to pay for his cavalry. The churches were just stone and wood and faith.
Now his trading routes were disrupted, at least temporarily. It would take time to rebuild trust, to convince merchants that the rivers were safe again.
Soon Rollo and Ragnar appeared, flanked by Jarl Runi and Jarl Styrkar, who were the right hands of Rollo and Ragnar respectively. Their faces were streaked with soot and blood, but they looked satisfied with the day's work.
"King Bjorn," Jarl Runi said, his voice carrying easily over the noise of men loading ships. He gazed at the hostages kneeling in neat rows, his eyes lingering on the women. "We found no Archbishop in the church. He left with his bones and all the ugly things they call relics."
Unlike many of the men who simply called Christian places of worship "temples," Runi preferred to call the church by its proper name—"the church"—as if naming it correctly gave him power over it.
"That's a pity," Bjorn responded, his tone flat and unreadable.
Runi tsked and whistled, still looking at the women being forced to their knees, the same treatment given to the men. "It's truly a pity," he agreed, though his eyes suggested he wasn't entirely disappointed by the day's haul.
"We still have a long journey ahead of us," Bjorn said, his gaze sweeping across the assembled captives. "And battles."
Then he gave the order for their execution, his voice calm. The moment he had raided their lands, they had been destined to become slaves, and slaves had no say in how they lived, nor when they died, nor how they died. That was the nature of their existence now—or rather, the end of it.
The men and women started pleading to be left alive when the slaughter began. Their voices rose in a desperate chorus of begging, prayers to their god, promises they couldn't possibly keep.
But it was to no avail. The men killing them were shouting and singing while they worked, beheading each one and treating it like any other task that needed completing. Some laughed. Some were silent and focused. All were thorough.
Soon silence reigned over the field outside the palisade wall. The only thing left was blood on the ground—so much of it that you could drown in it, pools of red soaking into the earth, staining it dark.
Nine men were left alive, spared from the general slaughter for a specific purpose. They were blinded, their eyes put out with hot iron. Their tongues were cut out with sharp knives and left on the road beside them like offerings. Then they were released, stumbling and bleeding, to make their way back to whatever remained of their lives.
For what was more terrifying than silent witnesses? Men who had seen horror but could never describe it, only gesture and moan and haunt the dreams of those who looked at them.
Now let Louis and his Christians say that their god was winning against the Norse gods. Against him.
Let them look at what their faith had bought them.
Bjorn turned away from the carnage, already thinking about the next target. He was just beginning, and as long as he didn't wander too deep into the rivers where cavalry could trap his forces, no one could stop them. The rivers were his highways, and the longships were faster than any army on land.
Let them try.