What they had not anticipated was The Stag of Uist.
He came off the horse at a dead run.
The first man caught his shadow and nothing else. Ragnar’s forearm broke across his nose with enough force to drive his head back into the fence post behind him, and the man folded and stayed there. The second turned in time to swing—which was just what Ragnar needed. He stepped inside the arc before the blade could make contact, caught the wrist in both hands, and applied leverage in the direction joints were never meant to travel.
He moved on without slowing.
The smoke thickened, turning the village into a half-seen world of orange and grey ash that cut visibility to twenty feet. Ragnar moved through it the way he moved through everything he’d ever walked into—steadily, certain, reading shapes before they fully formed.
A man lunged from behind a toppled cart. Ragnar shifted his weight, let the blade pass his ribs by a hand’s breadth, caught the outstretched arm and used the man’s own momentum to drive him face-first into the churned mud. His knee found the man’s spine and pinned him there.
Freyr’s group thundered in from the north exactly on time, cutting the creek path off before the remaining men could regroup. They broke off in splinters and scattered south through the smoke.
“Take one alive!” Ragnar bellowed. “Gut the rest!”
Three of his warriors peeled off in pursuit while Freyr rode one man down, unseating him without killing him and the man uttered a stream of creative curses that cut through the chaos like a beacon.
He worked through the smoke with the focused efficiency that is body knew all too well.
What it had never been subjected to before was the particular pull toward a fixed point somewhere south, at the edge of the village, dragging against his focus.
The healer’s tent.
He was halfway across the square when he heard it—not a shout, not a signal, but a scream, from the direction of the healer’s tent, high and sharp and all wrong.
Ragnar was already moving.
But this was not the measured, deliberate movement of a commander.
Ragnar ran—flat out, through the smoke, past his own men, past every careful defense he’d spent twenty years constructing—with the single, undeniable urgency of a man who had just discovered what truly mattered to him.
Isolda had stopped noting injuries by name and started cataloging by type.
Einar, Finlay, the boy from the eastern quarter whose name she hadn’t caught before Liv sent her to hold his arm still, the older man with the burn across his forearm who hadn’t made a sound the entire time she cleaned it, which was somehow worse than if he had.
“Dinnae look at it.” She kept her voice even—not soft, not bright, just steady, the same register she’d found worked on all of them.
Einar obeyed the way injured men did. His eyes found hers and stayed there while Liv’s hands moved across his ribcage with brisk movements and gentle pressure.
“Tell me about the headland. Does the current run south or west past the rocks?”
“S-south…mostly me lady—” His jaw was working against the pain. “Me uncle says if ye dinnae read the pull right, ye’ll end up half a mile off course before ye,ach!” A sharp exhale as Liv tightened the binding. “Before ye even ken it.”
“Keep talkin’, lad.”
The linen went on in clean, overlapping passes. By the time Liv tied the final knot, Einar had worked himself through half a story about a herring net and a badly timed tide, and the white had left his knuckles entirely.
Liv straightened and caught Isolda’s eye across the stretcher. “Quick thinkin’, me lady. Ye’ve a real gift fer keepin’ a man’s attention exactly where ye want it.”
Isolda gathered the soiled strips from the ground. “Distraction’s the only currency that buys ye anythin’ with stubborn men.”
Liv’s mouth curved. “And daes it work on our jarl?”
She moved toward the rear partition before the silence could sharpen into something more pointed. “Makes him easier tae manage.”
The back of the tent was dim as she stepped inside to discard the bloody rags, the canvas pressing close against the alley wall.
Isolda pushed through toward the waste basin—and stopped.