The archer who’d been beside him was racing down the rampart, and Hod turned back to Bayr but didn’t dare shoot.
“I need your eyes, archer,” he bellowed, but the man was gone.
In the cacophony of swords and shrieks, he could not determine the warriors from the Northmen, friend from foe. The stench of blood overwhelmed his senses, and he roared in impotence at his own weakness.
“I need your eyes.”
The trumpets wailed, the sound sitting on the breeze, and the women quickened their pace. Minutes later, another sound rose in the wind, a sound Ghisla could not immediately identify. It was a collective bellow bristling with shrieks and cries, like the sound of gulls caught in a gale or a frenzied crowd at a tournament. She couldn’t see the front of the mount or the northernmost edge of the village, but the sound curled the hair on her nape and curdled the contents of her stomach.
She stopped to listen, eyes turned up to the temple walls, but nothing looked amiss. The sound swelled, and she knew what it was. The attack had begun.
The women began to run, but Ghisla fell to her knees and pulled out her blade.
“Liis,” Dalys shrieked. “Get up.”
But she couldn’t. She had to know. She pricked her finger and traced the star on her hand just the way Hod taught her.
“What are you doing?” Elayne moaned.
She held the rune to her brow and whispered her imperative.
“Show me Hod.”
The square swam in blood. Everywhere blood and bodies—horses and men. A severed head, an arm clutching a sword, and then feet, legs, running, lunging. Sound ricocheted between her ears.
She saw a hand fitting an arrow against a bowstring, and knew it was his, even beneath the blood and dust that coated his skin. It was like she sat beside him, surveying the courtyard below. He was on the wall. She watched the arrow fly, and Hod grunted as it found its mark. He was keeping the Northmen off Bayr, who was bathed in blood and gore. Only the blue of his eyes and his size separated him from the men around him. His braid was gone and his hair, no longer weighted and bound, flew around him, as red and matted as his skin.
Hod nocked another arrow and it pierced the back of the man in Bayr’s path. Bayr raised his eyes to the wall, acknowledging the help, even as he spun with both hands on the hilt of his sword and cut a Northlander—his bone-studded braids rattling with his death throes—in two. The torso flew as the legs collapsed.
“I need your eyes, archer,” Hod shouted, though she couldn’t see to whom he spoke. “I need your eyes,” he begged.
She drew her palm from her brow, and her vision cleared with a dizzying snap.
“He needs my eyes. I have to give him my eyes,” she babbled, trying to make her sisters understand. She traced the rune of the blind god and said Hod’s name.
Her eyes went dark.
Elayne was shouting at her, and Bashti tried to wipe the blood from her palm.
Ghisla kicked out with her legs, the way Bayr had taught them to do so long ago. Willing them to understand, she began to sing:
Take my eyes and give me wisdom.
Take my heart and give him strength.
I will fight beside my brothers.
I will battle with my men.
“Go! I will stay with her,” she heard Juliah shout. “She is singing for them. Let her sing.”
He had eyes. Suddenly he had eyes.
Ghisla.
He raised his bow, exulting, and realized he might have eyes but he was out of arrows.
He crawled, moving along the wall. He could see his hands, and it made him dizzy. He could not make his mind accept the new source of information. He pulled an arrow from the breast of the watchman; the poor sod held a horn in his hand. He found two more and let them fly, the hiss and the pull matching his exhalations.
Hod bellowed, and his eyes—Ghisla’s eyes—followed his flight as he threw himself from the wall into a sea of swords and writhing flesh. He tripped and cursed and rose again, feeling like a man just learning to walk instead of a man trying to see. He wiped his hand across his face. A man ran toward him, sword upraised, and Hod closed Ghisla’s eyes. He was better without them once he knew where to shoot. The man collapsed with a sliding thud, and Hod narrowly missed being hewn in half by the force of his momentum. He opened his eyes again and chose his next battle before it chose him.
A smattering of clansmen fought nearby, their braids swinging, their shields bearing the mark of the wolf. All were sorely outnumbered. Aidan of Adyar fought with the same madness that seemed to beset them all, back to back with a son of Lothgar, hacking and skewering, trying to withstand the assault of too many Northmen. Clusters of clansmen dotted the grounds, treading on their own dead as they struggled to beat back the enemy.
The wide entrance was littered with bodies. Benjie of Berne, recognizable to Hod only because his cloak was made from the fur of a bear, was missing the top half of his head. An old woman lay staring at the indifferent sky, her eyes fixed and her chest gaping.
She had not left the mount after all.
Someone had attempted to lower the portcullis, but there were bodies in the way, and it rested on the backs of two temple guards who’d been hewn down, one on top of the other. From all sides, screams and cries for mercy were interspersed with the clashing of shields and the grunts of men.
A man stood alone and was entirely encircled, though he seemed to be holding his own against the warriors surrounding him. He was awash in blood and gore and armed with an axe in each hand. His hair was short and unadorned—no braids or bones—and for a moment, Hod gaped, dizzied once more. It was Bayr. Of course it was Bayr. He bellowed, bringing his axes together and felling three Northmen simultaneously.
More kept coming.
Hod pulled a quiver of arrows from a crumpled sentry and began to shoot, peeling the Northmen from around his brother. He used his new eyes to pick his target and immediately shut them before he let go. He sensed the motion a hair too late and was missed by the blade of an axe but battered by a Northman’s shield.
“You didn’t hear me coming, Blind Hod?” the man yelled, spittle flying, a moment before Hod ran him through with a fallen clansmen’s sword. He shoved the man off, his hand slick with blood, his head spinning. He dropped the sword, picked up his bow, and sent a dozen more men to their deaths.
When the cobbles buckled beneath his feet, he thought it just another dizzy spell.
Then his eyes—her eyes—caught and held on the temple.
A keeper stood with his hands braced on the pillars of the temple. The image began to shake, bouncing and blurring. Dust billowed and the screaming changed. Hod closed his eyes, listening to the keeper’s heart. He didn’t know faces.
“Dagmar!” he heard someone scream.
It was Dagmar. Of course. The man propped between the pillars was Dagmar, and he was about to bring down the temple.
“Run!” Dagmar roared. “Go!”
The sound was that of a mighty storm, like thunder and lightning, like Thor himself was taking his hammer to the temple walls. Hod stumbled back, the quaking beneath his feet worse than the tossing of the North King’s ship upon an angry sea. The fighting in the courtyard had ceased, the warriors around him more frightened of the quaking mount than the swords of their enemies.
He thought he heard Gudrun yell, cursing the gods, his voice echoing out through the entrance door, and Hod saw Alba and Ghost run, keeping each other upright as the temple continued to buck and break. Northmen began fleeing the mount, racing for the gates as the cobbles beneath them writhed, tossing the dead into the air and the living to their knees.