The door; an old thing, protested under her hand. Lagertha paused there, fingers pressed against the rough grain, feeling the texture beneath her palm. The weight of her belly pulled at her lower back. She adjusted her stance, redistributed the burden, then pushed.
The hinges creaked, a long, slow sound that seemed to stretch in the darkness beyond.
She kept her hood drawn as she stepped inside, though she knew it was pointless theater. The seer always knew. He'd probably known she was coming before she'd known it herself.
The hut was smaller than she remembered. Or perhaps she was larger now, swollen with child and memory both. Darkness pooled in the corners where firelight couldn't reach, thick and almost tangible. She could feel it against her skin like cobwebs.
The air was heavy. Not unpleasant exactly, but dense with layers. Dried yarrow hung from the low rafters, bundles of sage turning brown with age. Something sweeter underneath—meadowsweet, maybe, or something that had been sweet once and was now edging toward rot. And beneath it all, cutting through everything else, the sharp bite of whatever the seer was drinking. It smelled like fermented honey and something darker.
He sat with his back to her, a hunched silhouette against the dim glow of the hearth. His cup tilted to his lips, paused there, then lowered. He didn't turn or speak. The only sound was the faint crackle of embers and his wet breathing, like something in his chest was slowly drowning.
Lagertha closed the door behind her. The sharp sound echoed in the small space like a fist against a shield.
And she waited.
The seer drank again a long, slow pull from his cup. She watched his throat work, watched his fingers—gnarled and spotted with age—curl tighter around the vessel.
Finally, he spoke.
"Lagertha." His voice scraped out of him, rough as stone dragged over stone. He still didn't turn. "Queen mother of Kattegat."
She stood there for a moment, letting the words settle in the air between them. Then she moved forward one step after another. The floorboards creaked beneath her weight. Dust motes drifted in the thin light from the hearth, lazy and undisturbed.
When she reached him—close enough to smell the sour-sweet of whatever he'd been drinking, and close enough to see the tremor in his hands—she stopped. She reached up slowly and pushed back her hood.
Her hair fell free. Blonde, streaked with lighter strands where the sun had bleached it. It caught what little light the embers offered, seemed to hold it.
"You make mistakes even now, wise one." Her voice was calm. "I'm mother to the king. Not queen."
She wouldn't claim what wasn't hers by right of blade and blood. Titles were earned, not given. Any warrior knew that.
The seer was silent for a long moment. Then he laughed, his shoulders shaking with it.
"You split hairs over words the gods have already written. Queen you are, whether you wear the title or not. Fate doesn't wait for your permission, shieldmaiden and doesn't care about your pride." he said, when the laughter finally subsided into something like breathing again.
Lagertha's hand drifted to her belly. The child inside had been restless all morning, pressing against her chest as if eager to break free. She could feel him now—a small pressure, then gone, then there again. Like waves against a shore. Another son, the seer told her years ago.
Another prince of Ragnar's bloodline.
And another descendant of Odin himself, if you believed the people, the skalds and their songs.
She believed in steel and in shield walls. In what her hands could hold and what her eyes could see.
But last night...
She breathed in slowly through her nose, then out. Steadying herself.
"I came because of a dream." Her voice was steady, though her jaw ached from the effort of keeping it that way. "I need to know what it means."
The seer said nothing. He lifted his cup again, drank, lowered it, waiting. He was patient as stone. As if they had all the time in the world, as if there weren't ships being loaded at the docks, as if war weren't coming whether they spoke of it or not.
Lagertha closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she began.
"I stood on a battlefield." The words came slowly at first, pulled from her like thread from a spindle. "But it was wrong and silent. Completely silent. No wind moving through the grass. No ravens calling, though the ground was covered with dead warriors, their swords still planted beside them, axes half-buried in mud and blood. I've fought in a dozen battles, seer. More. I've heard men scream and die. And I've heard the sound a blade makes when it finds bone and meat. But I've never—never—heard silence like that."
She paused. The child moved inside her, a flutter against her ribs. The seer took another drink.
"I stood there," she continued, "trying to understand what I was seeing and why everything was so still. And then I looked down."
Her hands curled into fists at her sides. She forced them open again, deliberately, finger by finger.
"My hands were red and soaked to the wrists. The blood was already drying, cracking in the creases of my palms. And I was holding a child. My child. I knew it the way you know things in dreams, without question and without doubt. He was so small I could barely feel his weight. Light as air and light as nothing."
She swallowed and her throat felt tight.
"His legs were bound tight. Cloth wrapped around them, layer after layer, like they'd been prepared for burial. Like someone had taken great care to do it properly. I tried to unwrap him—pulled at the bindings with my fingers. But they wouldn't move. Not even when I pulled hard enough my fingers went white. Not even when I used my teeth. It was like they'd been tied by the gods themselves, and what the gods bind, mortals cannot loose."
The fire popped. A log settled deeper into the coals, sending up a small shower of sparks.
"I looked at his face then, really looked. He was beautiful ad perfect. Except..." She paused, searching for the right words. "One of his eyes was wrong. Not closed. or missing. But wrong. There was darkness inside the blue, like something coiled beneath the surface. Like a serpent curled up in the depths of a well, waiting."
The seer's breathing had changed, slower now.
"And there was a serpent," Lagertha said. "On the ground beside me. Huge. Stretched across the bodies like it was claiming them. It wasn't dead forI could see it breathing and see its sides moving. But it wasn't whole either. Part of it was just... missing. Gone. No blood or wound where it should have been. Just absent, like it had never existed in the first place. Like someone had simply decided that part of it shouldn't be, and so it wasn't."
She stopped. The words had run out. She stood there in the dim light, breathing, feeling the weight of what she'd said settle around them both.
The silence that followed was heavier than before. It pressed against her eardrums, made her aware of her own heartbeat, of the child's movements inside her.
The seer didn't speak or move. He sat there like he'd turned to stone, cup frozen halfway to his lips.
Lagertha's hands curled into fists again. "Speak, wise one." Her voice was harder now, sharper. "Tell me what it means."
"You ask me to explain the language of gods." He set his cup down slowly, carefully, like it might shatter. "I only see what they allow me to see. They don't explain themselves."
"Then tell me this—" Her voice cracked, just slightly, just for a moment. She hated herself for it, hated the weakness, the fear that leaked through despite all her efforts to contain it. "Should I prepare a grave? Should I mourn my son before he draws his first breath?"
The seer finally turned.
"The gods give nothing without taking," he said, and his voice was different now. "You know this already, shieldmaiden. You've known it since you were old enough to hold a blade. Every blessing has its price. The gods are not kind. But they are not cruel. They simply are, and they do as they will."
Lagertha stared at him. Her heart pounded against her ribs, against the child who pressed there, against the cage of bone and flesh that held them both.
"He'll be blessed, then." Her voice was flat. "And broken."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't need to."
She stood there for another long moment, looking at the eyeless face, at the empty sockets that seemed to hold more knowledge than any seeing eyes could. Then she moved forward. Bent down, slowly, her belly making the movement awkward.
She took his withered hand in hers—the skin was dry, paper-thin, like touching oldparchment. She brought it to her lips and pressed her palm against her tongue, tasting salt and ash and something bitter underneath.
The old way and the proper way to take leave of a seer.
When she straightened, her back protested, but she ignored it. She pulled her hood back up, turned, and walked to the door. Her hand found the handle, then she pulled.
The world outside rushed in—light and noise and the smell of salt water. After the darkness of the hut, it was almost blinding. She blinked against it, let her eyes adjust.
Her shieldmaidens waited in a loose circle, hands near their weapons even here, even home. They always waited like that. Always ready. It was one of the reasons she'd chosen them.
"My queen," They said.
Lagertha didn't correct them this time. She was too tired and full of thoughts that wouldn't settle.
They walked through Kattegat in silence. Past homes where smoke rose thin and gray from cooking fires. Past workshops where smiths hammered at iron, the ringing of metal on metal punctuating the afternoon. Past the market where fewer merchants than usual called out their wares.
The children noticed her passing. They always did. But they didn't run or shout the way they had last summer, didn't try to touch her cloak or beg for stories. They watched from doorways and street corners with old eyes, understanding things children shouldn't need to know.
Understanding that their fathers and brothers were leaving. That some wouldn't come back. That the world was about to become a harder place.
The women looked worse. They stood in doorways or knelt by firepits, working with hands that had done this work a thousand times before, but their minds were elsewhere. On ships. On battlefields. On the men who were walking toward spears and axes and the kind of poetry skalds sang about and widows wept over.
Lagertha understood their fear. She'd lived it once, before she learned to carry a shield herself. Before she learned that you could fight back against fate, even if you couldn't change it. That there was power in choosing how you met what came.
But these women hadn't learned that and truth is, most never would. They'd wait and worry and hope, and when the ships returned they'd count the living and mourn the dead and life would go on because it always did, because it had to.
This wasn't a raid. Raids were quick and brutal and bright and over before the blood dried. You sailed out, you struck, you sailed back. Raiding is a simple thing.
This was war, and it's a hungry thing. The kind that swallowed men whole and spat back pieces if you were lucky. If the ravens left anything at all.
The docks came into view slowly as they descended the hill. The ships first—masts reaching up toward the sky like a forest of bare trees. Then the crowds. Then the noise.
Here, the air was different. Men laughed too loud, their voices carrying over the water. They checked their weapons too often, ran whetstones over blades that were already sharp, adjusted straps on shields that needed no adjustment.
They wanted this in a way that went beyond reason or sense. They want their names carved into memory, their deeds measured against their fathers' and grandfathers' before them, to see themselves reflected in the eyes of their children, in the songs that would be sung in halls and mead benches for generations.
Glory was its own kind of hunger. It ate at you from the inside, made you reckless, made you brave. Sometimes both at once.
The ships rocked gently against their moorings, wood creaking with the rhythm of the tide. The knarrs were loaded heavy—provisions in sealed barrels, weapons wrapped in oiled cloth.
The two longships dominated everything else. Dragon-headed and sleek, built for speed and death in equal measure. Their hulls were fresh-painted, their sails new. They sat low in the water, ready, waiting.
Bjorn stood near one, speaking with Thorstein. His second. His friend. They had their heads bent close together, discussing something, gesturing. Bjorn wore his black leather tunic, scarred and familiar, not the new armor.
They were to fight at sea, where wearing armor would be a death sentence. Yet Bjorn had brought his, stacked on the ships as if its weight mattered nothing to him.
He saw her approaching and his face changed. First a genuine smile reaching his eyes. Then it faltered, shifted into something else. Concern and worry.
He crossed to her in three long strides, his boots heavy on the dock planks. "Mother." He stopped in front of her, close enough she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. When had he gotten so tall? "You should be resting. The midwives said—"
"The midwives worry too much," she said. She kept her voice calm. "I've done this four times before, Bjorn. I know when to worry."
"That doesn't mean—"
"You're sailing into a war." She cut him off. "That concerns me more than birthing another child. I've survived childbirth. Many times. War is less predictable."
Bjorn's jaw worked. She could see him struggling with it, wanting to argue, knowing it would be pointless.
Finally, he nodded.
Around them, the docks continued their chaos. Men shouted orders, checked ropes, loaded the last of the supplies onto the ships. Barrels of salted fish. Casks of ale. Spare weapons. Spare everything. The noise created a strange privacy, a bubble where only the two of them existed, separate from the world.
Bjorn's gaze drifted past her to the shieldmaidens who stood waiting. He acknowledged them with a slight nod. "Shieldmaidens."
"King Bjorn," they answered, and Lagertha could hear the edge and the bitterness in their voices that hadn't faded in the months since the challenge.
They were still angry and bitter. Her women had fought his huskarls for the right to stand in the shield wall, to fight alongside the men as equals. And they'd lost.
Not because they weren't skilled or strong or fast or clever, they were some of the finest warriors she'd ever trained. But because Bjorn's men had fought smart, defensive and patient. They'd let the women exhaust themselves throwing everything they had at the shield wall, and when the women were tired and breathing hard and their arms were heavy, the men had simply... crushed them.
It had been almost gentle. And somehow that made it worse.
"They could be scouts," Bjorn had said afterward, when the fighting was done and both sides were nursing their bruises. He'd been reasonable, and had offered it like a gift.
Lagertha had refused immediately and absolutely. She wouldn't accept scraps when her women deserved the front line. She wouldn't let them be pushed to the edges, made into support while men took the glory.
It was pride, maybe. Probably. But pride was all they had sometimes. Pride and skill and the refusal to accept less than what they'd earned.
Bjorn hadn't budged. He'd stood his ground with the stubbornness he'd inherited from both his parents, arms crossed, jaw set. No women in the shield wall. Not his.
They hadn't spoken of it since. The wound was still too fresh.
"Don't die stupidly," she said now, quiet enough that only Bjorn could hear over the noise of the docks. "Either of you."
She meant him and Ragnar both, though Ragnar had already left—riding overland with the inland jarls three days past, moving pieces into position. He'd always been better at strategy than she was, better at seeing the whole board while she focused on the immediate fight in front of her.
"The gods aren't finished with me yet." Bjorn's smile was crooked. "This is just the beginning of the story, mother. Not the end. I can feel it."
She wanted to believe him. Mostly, she did. The gods had been watching Bjorn since he was twelve, when he'd fought Jarl Haraldson's men and lived when he shouldn't have. Maybe they'd been watching since before that. Maybe since birth.
But gods were fickle. They gave and took in equal measure. And serpents in dreams didn't promise easy fates.
"Then go," she said. Her throat felt tight again. "Write the next lines. Make them good ones."
Bjorn embraced her then—careful of her belly, fierce in everything else. His arms came around her and she let herself lean into it for just a moment, let herself be held by her son who was taller than she was now, stronger than she was, ready to sail into something that might kill him.
When he pulled back, his eyes were bright.
He turned and strode toward the ship, his back straight, his shoulders squared. His huskarls fell in behind him—Thorstein first, then Arne and Torstig and Erik and all the others.
They would die for him without question. She knew that. Hoped it wouldn't come to that.
More than five hundred warriors in total, spread across the thirty ships like seeds scattered for planting. They'd sail to Kaupang first, where they thought the coalition would meet them. And where half the battle would be decided.
The men began to board. One by one, then in groups. The ships settled lower in the water under their weight.
The sails began to unfurl. They caught the wind and snapped taut with sounds like thunder.
The ships began to move. Slow at first, then faster as the oars bit into the water and the wind filled the sails. The dragon heads seemed to come alive, rising and falling with the waves, cutting through the harbor toward open water.
Lagertha watched until they were small against the horizon, until the dragon-heads looked like actual dragon, distant and mythical. Until she couldn't tell which ship was which anymore, couldn't pick out individual men on the decks.
Around her, the other women watched too in silend". Some crying, some stone-faced, all of them waiting for the moment when the ships would disappear completely and they'd have to turn around and go back to their lives, back to the waiting.
Inside Lagertha, the child kicked hard this time, insistent.
She pressed her palm to the spot, felt the small life moving beneath her skin.
She thought of that battlefield and of that silence and of those eyes that held darkness coiled beneath the light like serpents in wells.
"Whatever you are," she whispered, so quiet even her shieldmaidens couldn't hear, "you're mine. And I don't give up what's mine. Do you understand? The gods can take what they want, but you're still mine. You'll always be mine."
The wind carried her words away. Out toward the ships and toward the open sea. Out toward whatever fate the gods had already written in their halls, with their golden threads and their endless patience.
The ships grew smaller.
Lagertha stood and watched until there was nothing left to see but empty water and distant sky.
-x-X-x-
Kjotve had wanted this. The glory of hosting the great coalition in his own halls, pouring mead for kings and jarls, watching them eat his food and sleep under his roof while they planned their war. There was power in being host. You controlled the ground men stood on, the food they ate, the debts they accumulated simply by accepting your hospitality.
But no one had trusted him enough for that. No one trusted anyone in this coalition.
He could feel it in the air as he walked through the camp at Lindisness. The distrust was almost tangible, thick as fog rolling off the sea. The warriors had already divided themselves without anyone giving orders, clustering into groups that made the fractures obvious to anyone with eyes to see.
The kings who had publicly humiliated Bjorn—who had sent their insults by messenger and made sure everyone heard them—they gathered in tight knots. Speaking in low voices, casting sideways glances at everyone who passed. Suspicious and paranoid.
Probably right to be.
The others, the ones who had joined more quietly or who had accepted Bjorn's gifts before rejecting them, they formed their own groups and standing apart and watching the watchers. The suspicion bred more suspicion, feeding on itself like fire on dry wood.
Kjotve understood it. The gifts had done their work perfectly. Even those who rejected them knew what they meant—Bjorn trying to divide them, to plant seeds of doubt. And in soil where trust had never grown deep, those seeds found easy purchase. Every sideways glance became evidence of betrayal. Every private conversation became a conspiracy.
They had chosen Lindisness for obvious reasons. The island sat like a gate across the route to Bjorn's lands—anyone attacking Kattegat would need to pass through these waters. It had hidden anchorages where ships could shelter from storms and prying eyes. Shallow bays perfect for hauling longships onto the beach. Skerries that broke the worst of the North Sea swells and made observation from distance nearly impossible.
Good ground for a staging point.
But strategy only worked when the men holding the ground could trust each other.
Kjotve moved through the camp slowly. He was late—he knew that—and lateness in a gathering of kings was noticed and judged. He'd chosen to be late anyway, had his own reasons for it.
More than sixty ships lay beached or anchored in the protected waters. Each carried twenty men, give or take. Some more, some less. The math he learned from the merchants in Kattegat was simple enough—somewhere north of twelve hundred warriors.
Housecarls sworn to their lords, paid in silver and fed in their halls. Farmers and freemen who owed service and had come because obligation demanded it, not because glory called.
Not all of them wanted to be here. Kjotve could see it in how they moved and how they gathered their own supplies instead of sharing, how they kept to their own fires. These weren't men united by purpose.
They were men united by fear—fear of what Bjorn would become if he kept growing unchecked, fear of what their own kings would do to them if they refused the call.
Fear made poor foundation for victory, but sometimes it was all you had.
King Kjotve was led to the meeting ground; an open space near the center of the camp, marked more by absence than presence. No structures or shelter. Just packed earth and stones worn smooth by generations of feet.
The kings and jarls had already gathered, sitting or standing in loose groups that mirrored the divisions in the camp beyond.
Kjotve studied them as he approached. The distinctions were painfully clear. King Sulke of Rogaland sat with his jarls, loud even in his silence, taking up space the way he always did.
Near him, the brothers Gud Hordr and Groad Hryg spoke in low tones, their heads close together.
On the other side, somewhat apart, Jarl Gunnar stood with his arms crossed. He was here representing King Eirik the Accursed—that's what people called him now, ever since the sickness took him. The king who was neither dead nor alive, trapped in some twilight between worlds while his wife ruled in his name and everyone pretended it was normal.
"You are late, King Kjotve." Sulke's voice cut through the low murmur of conversation. He didn't stand, didn't even turn his head fully. Just spoke into the space between them, making sure everyone heard. "Now clear my misunderstanding, you are the closest to this place, yet you are one of the last to arrive. How does that work?"
Next chapter Tomorrow!