Chapter 11: Helga’s Hands-On Approach

By noon the rings had been in four hiding places, and I didn’t trust any of them.

The first was the front of my trousers, which lasted until a Skullcrusher I had never met grabbed my crotch on his way past to check that Bjorn’s prize was still in working order. He gave it an approving squeeze, said something in northland to his friend, and they both laughed, and I spent the next ten minutes hard and terrified in equal amounts. The second hiding place was under the floor furs in the tent, until I watched a dog two tents down dig a whole leg of mutton out from under somebody else’s. The third was my mouth, which lasted exactly as long as it took me to work out that you can’t answer a question with three iron rings and a velvet pouch behind your teeth, and everybody in this camp asked me questions, mostly about my ass.

In the end the pouch went back where Felix had first put the rings, into the little pocket Mistress Ashara had sewn into my smallclothes. The smallclothes themselves had turned up that morning in a heap of loot by the cookfire, inside out and smelling of somebody else.

So all afternoon I walked around with the rings against my balls. Every time I sat down they reminded me they were there, and every time they reminded me, I looked for Sigrid.

She wasn’t hard to find. The Skullcrushers celebrate a won battle by hitting each other some more, and by midafternoon they had a ring of trampled snow behind the long-house with half the clan around it, drinking, betting, and bleeding on purpose. Sigrid had been in that ring since the gnomes left.

She should have lost to Brynhild. Even I could see that, and I know nothing about wrestling except how to lose at it. Brynhild had a head on her and forty pounds, and the old men by the ale barrels said she took Sigrid three falls in four, and they were paying out on Brynhild before the first fall. Sigrid picked her up by the belt and the back of the neck and threw her out of the ring and into the ale barrels. Brynhild got up laughing with foam in her hair. Sigrid didn’t laugh. She stood in the middle of the ring breathing through her teeth, with her hands opening and closing at her sides, and waved two more in.

She beat both of them at once. One of them was a man about the size of a barn door, and she put him down with her forearm across his throat and kept it there until two people pulled her off him. The crowd cheered for that. A few of them stopped cheering early.

I was there because Bjorn had decided his prize should carry the ale, so I was going round the ring with a jug, bare-chested, collared, with northlanders pinching my ass at every third step. I would like to say I minded more than I did. By the time I got round to Sigrid’s side of the ring I was flushed and half-hard and holding the jug in front of me, and she was shouting at the next fighter to get in and stop wasting her afternoon.

“Get in here,” she said. “Get in, or I come out and bring the… the…” She stopped. Her mouth stayed open. Her right hand closed on nothing, and her eyes went down to it, and she stared at that hand with her brows pulled together while the whole ring waited for the end of the sentence. It didn’t come. She growled at the fighter instead, a real growl, from the chest, and he got in.

Her axes were on a rack outside the ring, two of them, with blades as long as my forearm. When she had put the barn door down a second time she stepped out of the ring and walked toward them, and I was close enough to see it. Before her hand was anywhere near them, the edges of both blades went a dull red, the color of a poker left in the coals, and the snow on the rack under them hissed.

The ring went silent. A woman next to me made a sign against the evil eye and spilled her ale on my foot.

Bjorn got there before anybody else moved. He came through the crowd clapping his hands, bellowing that the ale was getting warm and the fighting was getting cold, and he put one huge arm around his daughter’s shoulders and turned her away from the rack in the same motion. She tried to shrug him off. He kept the arm where it was and walked her off toward the long-house, telling her a story about a frost troll at the top of his voice, and the clan laughed at the story because their chief was telling it, and by the time anybody thought to check the axes again they were plain iron with steam coming off them.

Bjorn checked them on his way past, though. His eyes went from the axes over the heads of the crowd to the storage tent, and his mouth went tight under all that beard.

I didn’t like that at all. My balls had gone up so hard I nearly dropped the jug.

I found out what he was thinking a few minutes later, because a prize who carries the ale can go anywhere in camp as long as he’s holding a jug, and when Bjorn left Sigrid at the long-house and headed for the storage tent, I trailed after him with mine.

The two guards from the morning were standing in front of it with Bjorn. The young one had his thigh wrapped in a bloody rag where Felix had stuck him, and the bald one had a lump on his head the size of a goose egg where I’d hit him with the crowbar, and both of them were telling their chief what had happened in the most heroic way they could manage.

“Gnomes,” the young one said. “Through the roof, chief. A dozen. More. Little bastards came down on ropes.”

“Two dozen,” said the bald one. “Big ones.”

“Big gnomes,” Bjorn said.

“For gnomes.”

I nearly laughed, and then I nearly cried with relief, because two Skullcrushers would rather swear they’d been beaten by two dozen gnomes than admit they’d been beaten by two half-naked southlanders, and I could have kissed both of them. He thumped each of them on the shoulder, which nearly put the young one on the ground, and sent them off to drink, and he stood by himself in front of the open tent flap with his arms folded, staring at the iron safe at the back with its door hanging open.

“Gnome rings come into my hold,” he said, to nobody, “and my girl goes strange. Gnome rings go out of my hold, and she goes stranger.”

He didn’t sound angry. He sounded calm about it, and I liked that a lot less than shouting. He turned round and saw me standing there with the jug.

“Little thief!” He made it sound like a pet name, which I suppose it was. “Bring that here.”

I brought it. He drank about half of it in one go, and while he drank I stood there with the evidence against my balls and tried to look like a man who had never been near a safe in his life. I held the jug lower.

He wiped his beard and studied me for long enough that I started sweating under the collar. “You stole those rings once,” he said. “Before you came to me. You’d know what they do.”

“I only steal things,” I said. “I don’t wear them. Wearing them is how you get caught.”

He laughed and slapped me on the back hard enough that I went three steps sideways and into a tent pole. When I turned round he was already walking away, but he glanced back at the storage tent one more time, and then at the long-house where he’d taken Sigrid, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.

I spent the evening thinking about what he’d said, which lasted right up until Bjorn came into the tent, and after that I couldn’t think about anything.

He came in already unbuckling his belt and already halfway through the frost troll story he’d started on Sigrid that afternoon, and he didn’t stop telling it while he got undressed. He didn’t stop telling it when he dropped onto the furs on his back, either. He just lay there, taking up most of the tent, with his cock standing up heavy against his belly, and crooked one finger at me without missing a word about the troll.

I had a problem, and the problem was my smallclothes. I had been wearing them since noon with three stolen rings in the pocket, and the man waiting for me on the furs had spent his afternoon staring at the safe they came out of. My cock didn’t care about any of that. It had been half-hard since the storage tent, and the sight of Bjorn spread out on his back finished the job. I stripped with my back to him, folded my smallclothes, and laid them on top of my trousers by the tent pole with the pocket side down. It was the neatest I have ever folded anything in my life.

“Little thief folds his clothes,” Bjorn said, interrupting his own troll. “Like a wife.”

“Ashara trained it into me,” I said, which was a lie, and I kept one eye on that pile the whole time I was crossing the tent to him.

Twice now he had done whatever he liked with me, on my knees and on all fours, and I had let him, and enjoyed it, and felt used afterward. So tonight, if I was going to be had, I was going to do the having. I climbed on him. I straddled his hips with my knees spread as wide as they would go, which was not wide enough for a man that size, spat in my hand, and got his cock slick, and his cock was so thick my fingers didn’t meet around it. He let me. He put his hands on my hips and left them there, not pushing, and went on telling me about the troll coming down the mountain.

I sank down on him slowly, because nobody sinks down on Bjorn Skullcrusher fast. It burned and stretched until my eyes watered and my thighs shook, and I had to stop halfway with my hands flat on his chest and breathe through my teeth. Bjorn waited. He was at the part where his father’s father sees the troll for the first time, and he described its teeth to me in great detail while I worked the rest of him in, inch by inch, until I was sitting on him all the way down and so full I couldn’t tell where the ache stopped.

I rode him hard, on purpose, because the plan was to make him lose the thread. I clenched on him and rolled my hips and leaned back with my hands on his knees so he could see everything, and I watched his face for the moment he forgot the troll.

“And my father’s father,” Bjorn said, “takes his axe in both hands, and… HAH!”

On the HAH he drove his hips up into me, once, so hard my teeth clacked and my knees came off the furs.

“And the troll roars,” he went on, perfectly calm, while I hung there gasping on him, “and it has a second head.”

That was when I understood whose plan we were following. Every time his father’s father swung that axe in the story, Bjorn’s hips swung with it, and the troll had a lot of heads. I stopped riding him and just held on. I braced on his chest and let him fuck up into me on every blow, and by the third head I was making noises I would deny under oath, and he hadn’t lost a single word. He took my cock in his fist without looking at it. His hand swallowed it whole. He worked it slowly, slower than he was fucking me, and kept talking about a cave, and a blizzard, and some cousin who froze to a rock.

I came when the troll lost its fourth head. I couldn’t help it. His hips came up on the axe blow, his fist went down on my cock at the same time, and I shot all over his belly and his beard with my head thrown back, yelling at the roof of the tent.

Bjorn finished the story. He told me how they dragged the troll home, and how many feasts it fed, and why no Skullcrusher has climbed that mountain in winter since, and all through it I lay slumped on his chest with him still hard inside me and twitching every time he shifted. When he said “And that is why,” he took my hips in both hands, pulled me down onto him as far as I would go, and came with a roar that must have woken the dogs. I felt every pulse of it.

“Good story?” he asked.

“I missed the end.”

“Tomorrow I tell it again,” he said, and fell asleep with one arm across me, in about three breaths.

I lay there sore in new places, with his come leaking out of me and his arm pinning me to his chest, and the pile of clothes by the tent pole in the corner of my eye. Whatever else you say about Bjorn, he can tell a frost troll story and fuck at the same time without losing the thread of either. When he was snoring, I wriggled out from under his arm, pulled on my smallclothes, rings and all, and my trousers, and went to piss.

The latrine trench was behind the smokehouse, away from the fires, and it was dark back there except for a strip of firelight along one wall. I had just got my cock out and was enjoying the first good moment of my day when a hand closed on my collar from behind and hauled me backward by it.

I will be honest with you: I pissed on my own foot.

Helga turned me round with one hand and slammed me against the smokehouse wall. The back of my head hit a peg. Light went off behind my eyes, and when it cleared I could feel blood running hot down the back of my neck and into the collar.

She held me there with her forearm across my collar. Helga Skullbreaker is seven and a half feet tall, and from that close I could see the scars across her shoulders and the bone tokens in her braids, and smell the smoke in her hair. My body had been terrified for about a second. After that, being pinned to a wall by seven and a half feet of furious woman did what it always does to me, and my cock, still out and dripping, stood up and pointed at her like it wanted to be introduced.

She looked down at it. I looked down at it. Neither of us said anything about it.

“You came here with the rings,” she said.

I said, “I came here by accident.”

She banged me against the wall once more to tell me what she thought of that. The peg found the same spot on my head. “You watch,” she said. “Helga sees you watching. At the trials. At the fire. You watch her husband’s girl. You watch Helga.” She leaned in close enough that her braids brushed my face. “Helga does not like to be watched.”

That was when I was sure, because she had gone to talking about herself by her own name, and in a week in this camp I had worked out that Helga only did that when she was angry or scared. I had watched her ride a gnome on a pile of furs and heard every word she said to him. If she knew that, I’d be in the latrine trench already. She didn’t know it. She just didn’t like the look of me.

“Tomorrow you go,” she said. “Helga will leave the postern open before dawn. You go through it, south, and you keep walking, and you do not come back to this hold.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If Helga wanted you dead, little man, you would be in the trench.” She said it like a fact, and it was one. “Helga wants you gone.”

Her hand was shaking on my collar. I could feel it through the leather. She kept glancing past me toward the corner of the smokehouse, where the firelight was, and where Bjorn’s men were still singing, and every time they roared at the chorus she flinched, expecting one of them to come round the corner. She had broken one of her nails on my collar, and she kept checking it between threats as if it was the worst thing that had happened to her all week.

She wasn’t cruel. Cruel people are relaxed. Helga was scared out of her mind, and the thing she was scared of was singing around the fire on the other side of that wall.

I talk for a living. I took a breath around the collar and said the true thing, which in my experience is the hardest thing to argue with.

“Bjorn won me,” I said. “He counts what he wins. This morning his safe got robbed, and he’s been walking round all day staring at it. If his prize goes missing tonight too, he’s going to start asking everybody in this camp where they were.” I let that hang for a second. “Everybody.”

She went very still.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m not even watching you. I’m watching Sigrid, because she’s the best-looking thing in this camp and she might kill me. You can understand that.”

It was a guess, that last part, and a cheap one, but it landed. Her grip went loose. I sagged against the wall, one foot in the wet piss-snow, which soaked straight through my trousers, and I didn’t care. She studied me for a long time in the half-dark. She put her broken nail in her mouth and bit the rough edge off, and spat it, and stepped back.

“Helga did not speak to you,” she said, and went round the corner into the firelight. She walked straight past the singers, and none of them looked up.

I stood there with blood running down the back of my neck and my cock still out, going down in the cold, and I started shaking.

“Was that Helga?”

Felix was leaning against the far end of the smokehouse with his arms folded and a satchel hanging off one shoulder. He had a cloak on, which was more than I had, and his hair was perfect.

“How long have you been there?”

“How long would you like me to have been there?” He came over and inspected the back of my head in the firelight with polite interest. “I arrived for the part where she put you down.”

“She could have killed me.”

“Could she?” He tilted his head. “I thought you handled it very well. Though you’re bleeding on your collar, and I suspect Bjorn will be very cross with you about that. It’s his collar.” He reached down, took hold of my cock, and tucked it back into my trousers for me, slowly, while I stood there and let him. “There. Now you’re dressed for bed.”

The satchel on his hip bumped against my leg and growled.

“Is that the Tome?”

“I liberated it from the lodge while you were busy,” Felix said. “It was lonely. It has been talking to me about your technique.” He tipped his head toward the corner Helga had gone round. “What did she want?”

“Me gone.”

“And you said no.” He didn’t ask it. He studied me for a while with those violet eyes, and then he smiled the smile he uses when somebody else is about to lose a lot of money. “How interesting. You’re never this brave when it’s your own neck.”

He didn’t offer me a rag for my head. I didn’t expect him to.