The Reluctant Berserker Read Online Free PDF

now, but they were wide open, fixed on Wulfstan’s, and everything behind them was sharp and hard and proud, demanding. Though slight, he was taller than Wulfstan.
    He pulled at Wulfstan’s face, angling it, and Wulfstan let him. Just at that moment, Wulfstan would have let him do anything. He felt that someone had taken his bones out and replaced them with honeycomb, and that as long as he didn’t frighten this away, if only he didn’t move, he might burst into puddles of gold, sticky sweet.
    “Huh.” That small laugh again, surprised, delighted, and the harper leaned in a touch more and the mocking lips closed hot over his own.
    Breath against his mouth and the tentative press of a very daring tongue, and Wulfstan’s mind and scruples joined the wash of thick liquid gold that was oozing out of all his pores, making his heart thud slow and heavy and his loins ache deep. All the resistance in him, false as it was, melted into warm oil and left him boneless, compliant, waiting for the other man to take the lead, wanting him to.
    Who knew where it would have led, but just as the young harper had shaken off his surprise, taken back his long hands and might have done something more interesting with them, the door bounced against them both, and a determined pressure began to grind it open.
    Someone was coming through. The thought knocked at the gates of Wulfstan’s mind once and was ignored. The second time it battered them down. Someone would see! Someone would see him, surrendering his body to another man’s use, like a slave—but worse, because he was doing it willingly. Heaven’s Warden! How they’d laugh. How they’d despise him, all of them. How his lord would mourn, his father too, and his mother would weep. No man in all of the kingdoms of the Angles, nor anywhere in the world, would ever look again on him without contempt.
    Wulfstan’s hands, which had been powerlessly clutching at the wall behind him, came up, grabbed ahold of the scop’s tunic. He lifted the man off his feet and threw him bodily backwards. The harper twisted, cat-like, in the air, so that he would not fall onto his back and crush the lyre he carried. He came down heavily on his shoulder, knocking cheek and chin against the portico’s other wall. Wulfstan had stepped forward, grabbed him by the collar and raised his fist to land a punch in that trespassing mouth, before the door opened wide to let through a burly fisherman and his sons. Behind them stood the boy’s master, bent and frail as last winter’s leaf left on the bough.
    The old man could move fast enough, mind. He had thrown himself at Wulfstan’s feet in a breath, clutching in supplication at his knees.
    “My lord! Please, whatever the boy’s done, leave him able to sing and to play. They are baying for music in there and I am an old man, and tired. He must earn our bread, or we shall go hungry. I beg you, lord…” Tears stood in the rheumy eyes, making Wulfstan feel like a monster atop all of the raging confusion of this moment. “I beg you. He’s a foolish child, and I have indulged him too much. I will punish him myself. I have no doubt his wicked words deserve a whipping. Only please don’t—”
    “He deserves…” Wulfstan stopped himself. The harper had drawn himself together in a tangle of long limbs against the wall, and looked shaken, perhaps even penitent. Struggling with his thick head—he hadn’t regained the power of thought—Wulfstan remembered what it was that the young man deserved, for suggesting that one of Ecgbert’s warriors could possibly want to yield to him. Death. If Ecgbert would let him kill Manna over the suggestion—Manna who was a shoulder-companion, the son of a man of rank—he would positively demand it for this nobody.
    The younger man wiped blood from his nose and came to his master’s side, which left him kneeling too, his blond head bent and his gaze fixed on the floor. Wulfstan was left looking down on the elder’s