It wasn't a negotiation; it was an attempt to establish a law of nature. He was a man who believed the saying of a thing made it true. He drove forward with a heavy, swinging combination, his shoulder behind the weight of the steel, trying to use his bulk to push Ivar back toward the fire-lit smoke that roiled behind them. "Years. I've been waiting years."
Ivar didn't answer. He didn't waste his breath.
He met the combination with his own blade and redirected the force rather than blocking it, letting Callum's frantic energy carry him past the line of attack. He stepped offline, reset his center, and waited.
Callum reset and came again. Faster this time.
The recklessness was a fever now. Ivar could feel it in the increasing speed of the lunges, the way strategy was being devoured by raw, blinding fury. A furious man hit harder, but he thought less. He committed to strikes he couldn't recover from. Ivar had been patient, waiting for that exact moment to arrive.
"She's afraid of ye," Callum said, circling like a trapped animal. The smoke moved between them in ghostly veils. "She'll always be afraid. Whatever ye think ye've built with her, she’s nae yers."
"Ye should worry about yer footwork," Ivar said, his voice a low, dangerous rasp, "nae me marriage."
Callum's jaw tightened until the bone looked ready to snap. He lunged forward again.
The cut came from a direction Ivar had miscalculated. Callum was left-handed by preference but had been leading right all night. The switch was a blur. The secondary blade, the short, wicked one at his belt, hissed through the air and caught Ivar across the shoulder before he'd fully adjusted.
It was a slicing cut, shallow but immediate. Ivar felt the sudden, white-hot bloom of heat across the muscle and the wet, heavy spread of blood soaking into his tunic.
He didn't stop. He didn't even flinch.
He stepped into Callum's recovery space, closing the distance to the point where the longer blade was a liability, and drove his elbow hard into the man's face. He felt the crunch of cartilage.
Callum staggered back, his head snapping over his shoulder. Ivar reset his stance. The calculation was now a cold tally in his mind. How much strength remained in the shoulder, and exactly what Callum's final, desperate move would be.
Movement flickered at the edge of his vision.
Low, from the ground. The first mercenary, the one Matilda had gutted, was reaching with a trembling hand for the dropped blade beside him. He was weak, half-conscious, but the steel was there, and Ivar's leg was closer than he'd registered.
He couldn't address both at the same time.
He didn't have to.
Matilda's boot caught the fallen blade and sent it skittering across the stone flags. She stood over the man's reaching hand, her jaw set and her eyes burning with a look that dared him to try again.
Ivar turned back to Callum.
Callum had seen it too. He had watched the woman he'd spent eight years reducing to the memory of her own terror kick a weapon out of reach with the steady, cold efficiency of someone who'd decided to be useful rather than safe.
Something fractured across his face. A moment of pure disbelief, and beneath it, the first real crack in the certainty that had driven him across the sea.
It cost him a second. One heartbeat in which his eyes were fixed on Matilda's defiance rather than the man in front of him.
When he lunged again, it was with pure rage rather than strategy. The full-body commitment of a man who had run out of lies and was left with only force.
Ivar had been waiting for exactly this. He had been patient.
He stepped aside.
Callum's momentum carried him into the void. Ivar pivoted on his heel and drove his blade through the man's chest from behind. Clean, complete, and absolute. He caught Callum as he slumped, taking the weight so the passage wall didn't have to.
He lowered him to the stone.
He crouched there for a moment, his chest heaving, his hand still tight on the hilt of his sword. The smoke moved in slow eddies through the passage. The sounds from the courtyard were shifting. The high-pitched chaos was giving way to the specific, different quality of an aftermath.
Men were shouting orders of command rather than alarm. The crowd's fear was resolving into something that could be managed.
He stood.