Page 2 of Highland Warlord (The Highland Magic #7)

Sending up a prayer to the Goddess for strength, safety, and concealment, Morgana took two bracing breaths and broke from the dozing horse, dashing toward the trees.

It amazed her how incredibly difficult running with her hands bound behind her could be.

Balance without the use of her arms proved surprisingly problematic.

Dry stalks of whatever had grown in this field poked at her bare feet through the mud, and scratched at her shoulder when she stumbled and fell.

Scrambling back to her feet, she didn’t dare to look behind her, in case death in the form of a Saxon arrow whistled toward her.

Better that than a pyre and her flesh melting from her bones, she thought, and forged ahead, doing her best to ignore her bleeding heels.

Once she found water, she could heal them.

Plunging into the tree line, she willed the tears blurring her vision to cease.

She’d never forget the violence and horror of this day.

Never rid her memory of the cruelty of men toward their enemies.

And for what? She couldn’t fathom. She only knew that men—good men, family men—became monsters when ordered to be.

And they killed without remorse. They were given permission by their kings and their Gods to spill blood upon the earth.

The most precious and potent combination of water and life.

The forest ground was damp and mossy, strewn with freshly-fallen leaves.

She slowed to look for jagged rocks, but couldn’t see any in her immediate vicinity.

The trees still blushed with youth and their branches were thick with foliage and smooth with health.

Her tender feet relished the soft earth beneath her, but she needed to find something—anything—to cut her bonds with.

The thin line of trees suddenly gave way to a very slim riverbank. Morgana’s first impulse to fling herself into the water and let the current carry her to safety disappeared with horrific alacrity.

Blood stained the river and filtered into pools of mud.

Disembodied limbs bobbed in little gruesome fleets, swept downstream by the lazy autumn pull of the current.

Morgana stifled the scream tearing up her throat.

Though water was her element, Morgana couldn’t bear to be engulfed by all that death and gore.

She swallowed bile as a man’s head floated by, his sightless eyes frozen in a stare of terror that fixed upon her until disappearing around a gentle bend.

A fierce roar clawed at her bones with an icy chill and drew her frantic eyes to a stone bridge upriver. Though it was far enough away that she had to squint, what Morgana saw stopped her breath.

Vikings. Hundreds upon hundreds of them crouched behind a shield wall on the east bank. But the blood-lust palpably emanating from the army wasn’t what froze her feet to the mud. It was the carnage wrought by the lone giant slaughtering countless Saxons on the Stamford Bridge.

Blood wept from the wooden slats. The water climbed the riverbanks, displaced by the weight of the dozen men dispatched with just a few strokes of his colossal axe.

The survival instinct to bolt warred with a different impulse. An unnatural one. This giant, the one who’d emitted that terrifying roar was like her. Different. Powerful.

Magical.

Mesmerized when she should be repelled, Morgana leaned her shoulder against a tree, and crouched low, willing her breath to slow.

The stone wall of the bridge mostly hid his legs, but the giant’s torso was bare except for the strap across his chest that would secure that impossible axe to his back.

That and the blood of the fallen drenching his skin.

His features were hidden by distance and a fearsome helm of iron decorated by skull bones.

Arrows seemed to glance off his flesh. The swords of his enemies found no purchase even if the blows rang true. The bridge could only support men about four shoulders wide, and four men could never hope to fell a warrior such as this.

He killed like other men danced, with light feet for bones encumbered by so much muscle, and swift, unpredictable movements for such a large weapon. He was a bard of blood. A legion of one. A painter whose brush only knew the color red.

The Viking not only held the bridge, he took it. Grinding forward through bone and flesh with a hoard at his back and a throng in front of him.

Morgana ached to run, but something locked her feet in place, her toes sinking into the soft earth of the riverbank. She was witnessing something epic. A feat of man that would be recorded in the ages until the end of times.

And yet… Morgana stretched her Druid senses. The ones that told her he was a man, and more than a man. He roared like a beast. He moved with the speed of a Fae. Swung his axe with the strength of a God. He had to have killed fifty, nay, a hundred men, and he didn’t show the first signs of tiring.

Movement beneath the bridge caught Morgana’s notice.

A barrel bobbed in the river’s slow current.

She squinted harder, trying to make out the long protuberance from the barrel’s edge from where she stood.

She recognized it too late. The Saxon concealed within sprang from where the blood and entrails of his brothers-in-arms dripped on him from the bridge, braced one hand on the stones, and drove a long-spear between the slats, impaling the Viking warrior in the thigh.

A howl rent the afternoon, and still the giant fought on, cleaving clean through a shield and embedding his axe into the skull of a man. Kicking the body off his weapon, he roared again as a second spear lodged in his back, this one just beneath his ribs.

And yet more men fell before him. But his movements began to slow. Blood flowed from his back and thigh with startling speed.

Hot tears branded Morgana’s cheeks, and she couldn’t reach up to wipe at them.

Didn’t understand why she already mourned for this lone, violent beast. A strangled gasp escaped her as the spear found purchase a third time, again in his back.

Shoulders heaving, the warrior’s head dropped and his magnificent body swayed before plunging over the stone wall and into the river, his blood mingling with that of the countless men he’d massacred.