‘He never deserved you,’ he said, and told me that I ought to have married him instead of Skalpi. That he knew how to treat a woman properly, and that if I were his wife, he would make sure to plough me every night, over and over and over, until we were both of us hurting and I was crying for him to stop.
He edged closer, and I tried to draw away. The flagon slipped from his fingers and thudded upon the floorboards, and he was grasping at the blankets covering me, trying to pull them away.
I scrambled out of the bed, so that I stood barefoot in just my undergown, with the blade still in my hand. He followed me, but the mead had made him slow, and I was able to duck out of the way of his hands.
‘What did you do, Orm?’ I asked again. ‘Tell me!’
My path to the door was clear now, but I was no longer thinking about running. I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted him to confess what I knew he’d done. And so I stood my ground, the knife before me pointing in his direction. But still he kept coming. Maybe he didn’t see the glint of steel, or maybe he didn’t care. I swung wildly, but he caught my wrist and seized it in his hand. Before I knew what was happening he’d thrust his other hand against my collarbone and I was pinned back against the wall. I tried to break free, but his grip was firm and all those months spent in the training yard had made him strong. His breath was like fire upon my face, and as well as the sour reek of vomit I could smell the mead on him, and I was panicking because I’d lost my one chance of escape and now there was nowhere to go.
‘You killed him, didn’t you?’ I asked, almost in tears myself. I was thinking of Skalpi, who had always been kind, who had always been generous, who had done nothing to deserve his fate. ‘Say it. Say you killed him.’
He squeezed my wrist hard; I cried out and dropped the knife, and then he threw me to the floor beside the bed. I fell awkwardly on something hard and round that knocked the breath from my chest. Orm’s empty flagon, I realised. I fumbled for the handle as he stepped towards me and leaned down to grab at my hair. At that moment I swung the vessel towards his head. It struck him underneath the chin; he stumbled sideways and fell over his feet, landing in a heap by the kist where I kept my clothes. He was swearing and swearing and swearing, and clutching at his jaw, and I leaped to retrieve the blade lying on the floor.
I didn’t stop to think whether what I was doing was right. I was burning inside, and there was only one thought running through my mind.
Orm saw me coming towards him and, still in a daze, tried to get to his feet. His teeth were clenched and there was blood running from his mouth and from cuts on his cheek. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the darkness as I flung myself at him, and I saw that he was frightened.
He thrust out an arm to try to fend me off. I was probably screaming, but if I was and what I was saying, I don’t remember. What I do remember is letting the hate and rage pour out – all those feelings that for so long I’d kept buried inside.
Something warm gushed over my hand, as all at once the fight went out of him. I drove the blade deeper and deeper and deeper, until it met something hard and would go no further. I ripped it free, and he let out a wordless gasp as he tumbled to the floor. Before he could so much as think about getting up again I was on him, plunging the steel into his thigh and his gut and his groin and his neck and his chest and his face, each wound a punishment for the hurt he had done to me, to Tova, to his father and to others.
Over and over and over I did it, again and again until he was no longer moving, and still I kept going until the hilt slipped from my fingers and the blade clattered away across the floorboards and I sank to my knees and sobbed into my sticky hands, into my undergown’s soaked sleeve, with my hair in my face and blood in my hair. Blood everywhere, pooling underneath his body, running over my fingers, spattered all across my skirt. He lay in front of me, crumpled and empty-eyed.
It makes me sick even to think about it. About what I did.
He was just a boy. He was younger than me. And I snuffed out his life, stole it from him. I killed him. With my own hand I did it. And do you know what the worst part is? I enjoyed it. I enjoyed watching him die. I thought it was justice.
But now? Now I don’t know. Every time I pause to think about it, the less sure I am. Was it the right thing? I tell myself I had no choice, but maybe there was some other way. Some way that I didn’t have to . . .
I’m sorry. I’m all right, really I am.
What was I saying?
How long I knelt there, I don’t know. Eventually I had no more tears to give. Only the sound of my own breathing broke the stillness.