Chapter 2: Enter the Barbarians

Roaring laughter rattled the windows when they hauled us into the long-house, and I half expected them to shatter. A hundred battle-scarred giants threw back their heads and bellowed like they’d never seen anything funnier than a couple of scrawny rogues in their lives. The heat from a dozen hearths and one massive fire pit made the air thick and hot enough to sweat the mud off me. Before I’d made it three steps, a grinning barbarian woman with braided red hair shoved a horn of mead in my face. It was big enough to drown in.

The Tome of Wanton Desecration had been sulking in my pack since the swamp, and it picked that moment to wake up.

“Look at these magnificent specimens,” it boomed. “Think you can outlast any of them, boy? Show these savages what a real man can handle!” The eye on its cover glinted with mischief.

“Magnificent specimens?” I yelled back at it over the noise. “They’re as big as houses!”

I had a lot to prove, and not much sense.

Felix watched me from a safe distance, lips twitching into smirks whenever I caught his eye. He knew what he was doing, letting me dive headfirst into the madness. He was happy to let me crash and burn while he stayed back, the smarmy bastard. I barely heard the Tome shouting above the ruckus, criticizing my mead-drinking form.

“Elbow up, arm out! You’ve got a brooch for that arm. Use it!”

“Little man parties with us!” the braided woman declared, nodding to the mead horn I was clutching. “Better keep up if you want to last the night!”

I tried to say something clever, but the words came out as a drunken giggle. This place was a madhouse, and it was everything I didn’t know I wanted.

“You’re on!” I shouted back, voice hoarse and laughing.

I wasn’t going to survive the night, but damned if I wasn’t going to give it everything I had.

It was a miracle I could lift my head, let alone my arm, but I wasn’t going to back down from another arm-wrestling challenge. I slammed my elbow on the table with all the force of a kitten, but I still got a round of cheers from the barbarian crowd. The mead didn’t even hit the table before a burly giant snatched my hand and crushed it into defeat. Another round, another loss, another cheer. Samuel Thornwood, party clown.

I got pulled into another contest, and this time I just threw up my hands and laughed. Sigrid lifted my arm like I was the champion of the world, and I stumbled through a victory lap that almost ended with me face down in the fire pit. A few more drinks, and I wouldn’t have felt it.

When Bjorn Skullcrusher came in, the whole room got smaller. He stood a head taller than any other barbarian, with muscles bulging out of his leather and furs, and I remember thinking, through the mead, that I would like to climb him. His booming voice carried over the clamor as he challenged warriors to outdrink him, and one by one, they fell around him. I swayed on my feet and let out a shout, barely coherent, but loud enough for everyone to hear. Bjorn’s eyes locked onto mine.

The crowd went silent, and I got the dizzy feeling that I’d said something monumentally stupid.

“I can take you!” My voice cracked, and it just made me laugh harder. “I bet I could outdrink the big guy!”

“And what does the little man wager?”

I stumbled, trying to find my footing and some semblance of sense. The world tipped dangerously as I held out a hand, offering whatever came to mind first.

“This magic ring against... whatever you want!”

The problem was that I didn’t have a ring in my hand. I had a ring somewhere. Felix had stuffed the whole haul into the secret pocket Ashara sewed into my smallclothes, and getting to it meant slapping my own ribs, my hips and my thighs like I was putting out a fire. A hundred barbarians watched me pat myself down. I gave up on dignity, shoved my hand down the front of my trousers, and rooted around in my smallclothes while the crowd howled. I found my own balls twice. On the third try my fingers caught the pocket, and I hauled out one ring and held it aloft like I’d planned the whole thing. The Tome shrieked in horror, and Felix’s face twisted into something between disbelief and laughter.

“FOOL!” the Tome screamed. “IDIOT! You absolute—”

I ignored it, my whole body buzzing with alcohol and adrenaline. Bjorn’s eyes gleamed with triumph, and he leaned down, his voice low enough that only the nearest hundred people heard.

“If you lose, little man, you become my personal prize by sacred rite of Drink, Gamble, and Take!”

I heard every word: personal prize, his to keep and his to use. A normal, sober man would have asked what “take” meant.

The Tome had stopped screaming, and when it spoke again its voice was a low purr right against my ear. “Look at him, boy. All that bulk, and he’s three horns from a nap. You are lean, wicked and brewed in mead. You cannot lose.”

Sigrid was laughing next to me, wild and joyful, and my head spun with noise and mead and the absolute certainty that the Tome was right. I was Samuel Thornwood. I had never won a drinking contest in my life, but I’d also never entered one against someone this smug.

“Deal!” I yelled. “If I lose, I’m your prize! Drink, Gamble, and Take! Say it again if you want, I’ll yell it back!”

“Horns!” Bjorn bellowed, and massive drinking vessels appeared, big enough to drown a warhorse in. The crowd roared, a sea of sound, and my feet slipped out from under me as I shouted again.

“You’ll never take me!”

The drinking contest began with me yelling something incoherent and triumphant, which in hindsight wasn’t as promising as I’d thought. The first horn went down smooth. The second slipped through my fingers. The third was a blur, and by the time the fourth came around, so did my head. The cheering was distant, like I was underwater and everyone else was having a party on the shore. I lost track of how many horns Bjorn downed, but I was pretty sure it was all of them.

I made a last, desperate attempt to bring the mead to my lips, and the world tilted. My vision blurred, my brain floated in a vat of mead, and I barely heard the laughter as Bjorn roared in victory. The Tome’s voice was distant and disapproving as the table rose up to meet me.

Everything went dark.

When I woke up, it felt like my skull was splitting in two and a very enthusiastic drummer was living inside it. My eyes opened to a tent I didn’t recognize, and panic slammed into me harder than the hangover. The world was terrifyingly bright, and I wished it would stop moving. A sliver of hope flashed through my mind. I hadn’t really done it, had I? I hadn’t wagered everything and lost, had I? Maybe it was all a bad dream.

It wasn’t.

A rough leather collar, Bjorn’s clan symbol marked in vivid red, hung from my neck like the world’s ugliest reminder. The tent spun, my stomach churned, and I realized with a sinking feeling that I didn’t have a damn thing to cover myself.

“You’re up, little man.” The voice was deep enough to shake mountains, and Bjorn loomed over me like a naked colossus.

If I’d been less hungover, I might have screamed.

He was enormous, every inch of him built to barbarian proportions, especially that one part I tried very hard not to stare at. It was an absolute monstrosity, and my own cock gave a slow, traitorous twitch at the sight of it anyway. His muscles rippled with even the slightest movement, a heavy pelt of hair covered his chest, and his braided beard jutted out like a second torso. The bastard looked amused.

“My personal prize,” he said, and I felt the heat rise in my face, somewhere between mortified and mead-soaked fever. “We have a saying,” Bjorn continued, leaning in so I couldn’t escape his grin. “You bet, you lose, you belong!”

I made a strangled noise and scrambled to cover myself with my hands. The leather beneath me was rough and itchy, and the cold mountain air wasn’t doing me any favors. Everything hurt, and my voice came out a shaky whisper.

“What happened to my clothes?”

Bjorn threw back his head and laughed, loud and long and impossible to ignore. “Barbarians do not lose clothes at the gambling table,” he said, looking entirely too pleased with himself. “You did.”

“Can I... can I have them back?”

He considered, still laughing as I tried not to die of shame right then and there. “We’ll see,” he said, looking far too entertained. “After the claiming.”

“The what?” I squeaked, because apparently, that was all I was capable of. The collar itched and chafed, and the symbol on it was as red as my face.

He slapped me on the back with enough force to send me reeling. “The claiming! But first, we hunt. You’re welcome to join, though you’d best stay out of spear range with that lack of protection.”

His laugh followed him out of the tent, leaving me alone with my hangover and my horror.

My hands were shaky as I tried to remove the collar, but it was on tight and well-knotted. Panic rose again, and I flopped back against the leather mat, more hopeless than ever. Felix was going to think this was the funniest thing in the world, if I ever saw him again. The bastard would probably let me rot up here, leave me to be the barbarians’ new pet. I could picture his amused little smile, the one he wore when I tripped headlong into exactly the kind of trouble he’d warned me about. But he’d come around. Eventually. Probably.

I didn’t know where my clothes were, where the rings were, or how the hell I was going to get out of this. The cold made me shiver, the collar made me itch, and Bjorn’s laughter echoed in my ears.

I had to admit, as far as consequences went, this was about as bad as it got.