Contender, page 1
Contender
The Viking Tales, Volume 3
W.J. May
Published by Dark Shadow Publishing, 2024.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
CONTENDER
First edition. September 15, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 W.J. May.
ISBN: 979-8227130952
Written by W.J. May.
Copyright @ 2024 by W .J. May
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Copyright 2024 by W.J. May
Contender, Bk 3 of the Viking Tales
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Have You Read the Kerrigan Series?
The Chronicles of Kerrigan
Book I - Rae of Hope is FREE!
Book Trailer:
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How hard do you have to shake the family tree to find the truth about the past?
Fifteen year-old Rae Kerrigan never really knew her family's history. Her mother and father died when she was young and it is only when she accepts a scholarship to the prestigious Guilder Boarding School in England that a mysterious family secret is revealed.
Will the sins of the father be the sins of the daughter?
As Rae struggles with new friends, a new school and a star-struck forbidden love, she must also face the ultimate challenge: receive a tattoo on her sixteenth birthday with specific powers that may bind her to an unspeakable darkness. It's up to Rae to undo the dark evil in her family's past and have a ray of hope for her future.
The Queen’s Alpha Series
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Resolved
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The Viking Tales
PREQUEL: Adversity
Bk 1 - Warrior
Bk 2 - Defender
Bk 3 - Contender
Bk 4 - Affinity
Bk 5 - Heroine
Bk 6 - Victory
Contender Blurb
What do we do with witches...?
With the smoke from the settlement still hanging in the air behind them, Liv and Eric strike out on foot into the wilderness. But the fates weave a twisted story, and it isn’t the escape either of them had in mind. Cut off from Trina by the arrival of the imperial army, the pair find themselves truly stranded, without the hope of either coin or supplies. The woods are rife with danger on the best of days, and that’s without the price that had surely been put on their heads.
Blood is in the water, and the imperial hounds have caught their scent. But even if they manage to stay ahead of the spears behind them, there’s trouble brewing on a different front. A closer front.
Liv’s not the only one harboring a secret.
Sometimes freedom comes at too high a cost.
They say some people are favored by the gods. Others need to make their own luck.
Contents
Have You Read the Kerrigan Series?
The Queen’s Alpha Series
Find W.J. May
The Viking Tales
Contender Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Affinity Blurb
Viking Tales Full Series
Adversity
Chapter 1 Sample of Adversity
The Viking Tales
Find W.J. May
More books by W.J. May
Chapter 1
“You should have seen it!”
It was the kind of voice one only heard at the crack of midnight, a whispering hiss that crept around the corners and shivered across the wooden table, finding its way into the cracks. A small audience of children jumped in their skin, terrified yet delighted, unable to look away. Goblins had this voice, they were sure of it, for they had been listening for quite some time. Crones and hags and the sort of things that peeled themselves from the shadows, twisting into the darkest of dreams.
This particular night was full of shadows. The moon had risen pale and huge outside the window, a perfect circle in a sea of darkness, alone in an otherwise empty sky. There were other voices outside, people calling out to one another, the ceaseless creak of wagon wheels. The village had been wrought with noise since early that morning; even now, the attentive quiet that held the room was contained only within its walls. But that was of little concern. It was the story, or nothing.
The voice made it worse. And so much better at the same time.
“And what happened?” one of the little girls asked.
By now, they had all heard the story. If they had actively tried, there could have been no avoiding it. Not only was the tale being shouted in streets, ringing up the dusky alleyways, and echoing between neighbors, it had come on the wings of a tragedy.
There had been a great fire in the center of town. The largest blaze within memory. It had taken almost the entire morning to subdue it, the afternoon to sort through the wreckage. People had come from the hillsides, from the harbor. Men and women hauling buckets and screaming instructions. The horses had been set to pasture, and the children stashed in the granary. A thick blanket of smoke still lingered above the tree line. The village well had been pulled dry.
Yes, they had all heard the story. But they couldn’t help asking for it again.
The two things had become intrinsically linked: the harrowing inferno, and the hellish woman who had summoned it. Even now, they could imagine her perfectly; throwing back her head with a cackle of evil laughter, outlined against the burnt oranges and violent reds in the sky.
“You wish to know what happened?”
The old woman who’d been charged with watching them leaned forward with a toothy smile. She had been a laundress, back in the day. But that was nearly a generation before, and she was bent and broken from the work. Already one of the most aged people in the village, this gave her a rather frightful appearance, which at first she had loathed, but now, she rather enjoyed.
The voice had been carefully cultivated. It was fine enough for a stage.
“You need only look out the window, to see what happened. You need only to breathe in that pestilent stench, as evidence of her wicked plan. A witch, the people called her. One of those dread sisters who thinks to outwit the gods. But to liken her to a witch, is to compare an eagle with a frog. This was no ordinary witch. Such a creature has never been seen, not in my lifetime.”
The children leaned forward breathlessly, as the hearth-fire crackled behind them. It was small, considering their delicate location, yet its flickering shadows climbed fingers up the walls.
“Over seven feet tall, with blood-red eyes, bones like twisting branches, and piercing talons where there should have been hands. Her voice was a thing of nightmares, and those unfortunate souls who caught her gaze...? Some people say, they were never heard from again.”
It was a bold claim, yet the children believed it without question. How could they not, when the air still smelled of smoke? All their lives, they had been warned of the dangers of witches; this one seemed to have been drawn straight from the void in the center of their dreams.
Hadn’t they felt a chill when they’d stood beneath the tower? The blacksmith’s son had sworn to the gods he’d seen her chanting at the window, wisps of flames leaking from the claws.
“When the good k ing returned and passed his judgement, she flew into a shrieking rage. A hundred men were sent to subdue her, but she ripped past them like wind through a tattered sail.”
Again, this was uncontested. Though the numbers struggled to stand up. The children had seen the bodies of several soldiers, dragged backwards by the arms from the empty tower where she had escaped. They were drowsing, but not dead. The local candle-maker had been among them.
Surely one so feeble as him had not escaped the dread witch’s wrath?
“And where is she now?” another child whispered, leaning instinctively into the crowd to avoid being singled out from the rest. It seemed madness to speak of such things, even behind the relative safety of the familiar walls. The tower had been familiar too. Along with the brothel. Yet each of these had broken beneath the witch’s screams, like stalks of wheat to the farmer’s scythe.
Where is she now?
The woman leaned back on her heels, thoroughly enjoying herself. The light of the fledgling fire deepened the grooves on her face, and made her look all the more frightening. Her eyes, a pretty green in her youth, had bulged and tinged with yellow, leaping amusedly from face to little face.
“Only the gods could tell you,” she rasped, pleased when they leapt in their skin, “the gods or whatever twisting devils the creature serves. The forest might be filled with the king’s men, the hillsides scorched to dirt, but mark my words, for all those roving eyes, they will not find her.”
There was a single boy who felt brave enough to contest it. Even then, his slender arms were trembling. “My father said...” he faltered, and began again, “my father said she’s nothing more than a scared girl. I saw her once, I think. Her eyes were not red, her hands looked the same as mine. She lived here,” he added, glancing at his fellows for support, “in one of the dwellings beyond the wall.”
A shiver went through the crowd, undoing any uncertainty he might have cast. The wall had been another failing of trust, a familiar landmark sworn to defend, then breached upon a whim. It had shaken them nearly as much as the fire. The power of their mighty fortress, those impenetrable gates in which the strength of a thousand men had poured, vaulted like a children’s game.
He felt the change himself, clenching his fingers into fists.
“He said they will find her,” he insisted. “And burn her, just as before.”
A whisper ran throughout the children, emboldening some, while making the others flash darting glances over their shoulder, or even up towards the ceiling, as if the gods themselves might be listening. The walls of the granary creaked and groaned as a fierce wind beat upon them. Clouds were rolling in from the harbor, having forgotten it was summer. It would soon begin to rain.
The woman nodded slowly, fixing her gaze upon his pale face.
“And that is how these things happen,” she answered softly, drawing the little ones closer as they strained their ears. “With a poorly-spoken word, the bitterness of a look. Your father claims they will be successful, because that is what he wishes to believe. But this is not some scared little girl, scrambling without hope through the forest. This is not a little girl at all, but a creature the likes of which the world has never seen. She is talons and smoke. She is ash and wind. With the fires of hell gathered around her, she will return in a shrieking vengeance to finish what she has started.”
She paused for breath, as lightning flashed above.
“Only then, we will see her again...”
* * *
I’m never making it out of these woods alive.
A crack of lightning split the sky, and I startled in spite of myself—lifting my eyes to the heavens, as they defied the well-established rules of summertime and opened into rain. Not just a shower, as might have been expected, but a drenching torrent. The kind that seeped through your clothes, then your skin, working its way to the bones. Considering everything that had already happened, it was hard not to take it personally, hard not to think it was intentional, the vengeance of some distant god. Considering everything that had already happened, it was hard not to merely surrender; give in to any of a number of things working against me, and lower my head in defeat.
But I couldn’t do that. Because the second I stopped running, the people running after me would catch up. And I would finally discover how much the realm truly hated a witch.
You wouldn’t taste that punishment alone. It would fall on you both.
I cast a quick look ahead of me, to the young man staggering through the trees.
Like a pair of frightened dogs, Erik and I had scrambled through the forest, our skin and hair catching on branches, flinging ourselves down ravines, only to heave back up the other side. It had been easier, in the beginning. When the sun was still shining, before all the rain. At least then, we could see the ground in front of us, and it felt like there was a chance—perhaps not a good chance, but a chance nonetheless—that we might achieve the impossible and manage to escape.
It was the secret thing we’d told ourselves, in moments when our strength was failing and we couldn’t imagine trudging up the next hill. We’d chanted it like a mantra, clung to it with the tips of our nails, offered it as a silent prayer to the gods. For a while, it had seemed to be working.
And now this.
“Are you all right?”
I startled in surprise, my eyes flashing once more to Erik. He stood a few paces ahead and above me, his legs angled slightly against the slope.
We hadn’t spoken much since fording the great river and leaving the settlement behind. It might have been a mere precaution; there were soldiers in the woods behind us, listening ears and ready hounds. It might have been something a bit darker. I didn’t know why he’d spoken now.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said quickly, lowering my eyes to the ground.
I didn’t know when I’d become so shy with him. Sometime after the river, before the rain? It might have simply been that things had been allowed time to settle. It was easy to get swept away, in the adrenaline of the moment. Easy to make plans, and promises, to envision the possibilities.
Things looked very different, on the other side of the wall.
Are YOU all right?
He certainly didn’t look it.
The handsome bannermen was soaked and shivering. The blood that had dried in the daylight hours was dripping through his hair, and a nasty bruise had begun to spread across his forehead—courtesy of being head-butted by a giant in a perilous tavern brawl.
For the better part of the day, I’d been watching him lift a hand distractedly to the back of his head. From the slight sway in his balance, he was most assuredly concussed.
“What about you?” I asked softly.
He blinked in confusion, like he’d already forgotten, before shrugging it off with the same casual disregard that was drilled into every Viking boy past the age of five.
“I’m fine—”
“You were struck,” I interjected, climbing a few steps to join him. The rain streamed around us, as I lifted a worried hand to the side of his head. “It may not have—”
He flinched from my fingers, just the slightest motion, but his eyes gave it away. A flush spread across his cheeks, as my hand dropped quickly to my side—hovering uncertainly, like it wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing there. A few seconds passed, neither of us knew what to say.
He’s afraid of me.
I’d known it from the beginning, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Yet I could never have predicted the sheer force of it. The way it needled into me, carving its way inside. Of course he was afraid. I was a witch, he’d been raised on their stories. In the last few days, he’d amassed several new stories of his own. As if that wasn’t enough, he’d seen me kill a man just a few hours before, slashing right through him in a burst of rage and power. Now I reached for him with the same hand.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure what else to say.
He stared back at me, looking as lost as I was, strands of ivory hair plastered to the side of his face. A moment passed, and he shook his head curtly, like it was long forgotten.
