Hold Me Like a Knife (xi, ao3)
Chapter 11: With King Alfred’s army advancing north, the Norsemen leave Jorvik and prepare to face the Saxons in battle.
(For @cassianappreciationweek day 3! 🎉)
(Previous chapter // next chapter)
“In that same year also, the army of heathen which dwelt in East Anglia disgracefully broke the peace which they had concluded with King Alfred.” - An excerpt from the monk Asser’s Life of King Alfred, from the year 885AD.
It was a horror, Nesta realised, as she watched the man she had somehow grown to love don his armour.
Mute, she watched as he tied effortless knots in the padded tunic that went atop his dyed linen shirt. His fingers were so steady and sure of themselves; a marked contrast to hers, shaking and twisting themselves over and over in the fabric of her skirts. Horror— pure horror sluiced through her as she catalogued each and every piece of metal and leather he strapped to that powerful, broad body of his. A chainmail shirt had been laid out on the bed, little more than a hunk of meticulously woven iron, and she couldn’t help but look at those tiny metal rings and wonder if it would really be enough to save his life if a stray arrow was sent his way. If a dagger might really be repelled by the padded tunic he’d secured to his chest. Something inside her hitched - came unmoored - but Cassian did not look up, too focussed on his work to notice the woman tying herself in knots on the other side of his chamber.
Or so she thought.
Then he looked up from beneath his eyelashes, offering her a slashing, slanted grin as he tied his final knot.
“Anyone would think you were the one going into battle, love.”
“It doesn’t concern you?” Nesta asked, swallowing as she watched him lift the mail shirt over his head, the clink of metal doing little to soothe her. So heavy— and yet still so many places the tip of a blade could breach. The space at his neck - so horribly exposed - made her feel nauseous.
“Of course it does,” he said softly, coming to take her hands in his. His thumb brushed a soothing path across the backs of her knuckles, and as she looked at the scars already decorating those hands, she wanted nothing more than to bar the door and never let him leave again.
But there was nothing more she could do— his hair had already been pulled back tightly from his face, braided and woven without a single strand left loose. The silver earrings in his ears had been exchanged for simple silver bars, and the kohl beneath his eyes had been darkened and smudged, to make him look all the more fearsome in his helmet, he’d explained when she had looked curiously as he’d rubbed his thumb back and forth across his face. Still, those eyes were bright and focused, like a hawk that had just spotted its prey.
“I haven’t yet faced a battle I haven’t walked away from,” he reminded her with a blithe shrug and another swipe of his thumb across her knuckles. “And I trust that my brothers in arms will protect me as I will protect them.”
It should have comforted her.
Didn’t.
The sun had only barely risen, and the sky beyond the single window of his bedchamber was stained pink— like it had already tasted blood. From beyond that window drifted the smell of smoke; the fires of the army about to embark mingling with the plumes from blacksmith’s forge, still working to repair and produce weapons that would soon taste Saxon blood and end Saxon lives.
Nesta felt herself unspool like a drop-spindle, unravelling like a length of fine thread. She turned her face away, unable to bear it - bear any of it - as she rested a hand on her lover’s chest and felt the cold, solid weight of that mail shirt as it bit into the centre of her palm.
“We have the advantage, love,” Cassian said smoothly, dipping his head to look her firmly in the eye. His gaze was so certain, so unwaveringly resolute that Nesta swallowed. “Alfred’s army will be tired from marching north. We know this terrain; they do not. For weeks we have been scouting for advantageous ground. We do not go into battle unprepared.”
“I don’t like it,” she said, scowling.
Cassian only laughed, pressing a kiss to her brow, right where it furrowed. Against her will, it smoothed beneath his lips.
“Nor I,” he said simply. “Anything that takes me from your bed irks me.”
“Your bed,” Nesta corrected.
He only shrugged. “Mine. Yours. The end result is the same, no? You’re in it, either way.”
Nesta rolled her eyes - grasping at familiar straws, letting him quip - as he pulled away to tie a leather belt around the chainmail, a golden buckle gleaming at his waist as he pulled it taut. Such finery— even in battle, in the bloody and brutal game of war, there was finery. The buckle glinted in the light, countless cut and polished garnets winking from within a frame of thick yellow gold, so precious it seemed that it ought to be holding up the cloak of a king, not the sword belt of a soldier.
And yet--
This was no ordinary soldier.
Even amongst the Danes, he had a reputation. Nesta saw the way they looked at him, like he was one of their gods walking amongst them in a mortal shell. Like he was… Tyr, she thought, as the name rose to the forefront of her mind. The god of war.
And yet.
Tyr had lost a hand to a wolf, Nesta recalled. Cassian had told her the tale by the fireside, when the flames had gilded his face and ale had made his voice as smooth as honey. What would Cassian lose, as a man facing down death? A hand, too? Or something far more vital?
Her stomach churned again, the blood draining from her face.
“Pass me my sword,” Cassian said gently. Too gently. Like he knew she needed some kind of distraction to keep herself from spiralling over the life of a bloody Dane— one she was never supposed to care for, anyway.
It took considerable effort to steady her hands as Nesta reached for the wooden sheath that had been placed by his bed, resting against the frame, containing a sword with a golden pommel worked into the shape of wings. Bat wings, she realised, as she lifted it up into the weak light to admire yet more of the finery designed for battle and bloodshed. A ruby gleamed at the hilt, casting a glow across her fingers as her trembling hands closed around its hilt, balancing her grip as, for a long moment, she looked at the blade that had taken oh, so many lives and would yet take oh, so many more.
Once, it would have horrified her.
Yet now she looked at that well-honed weapon and didn’t care how many lives it had ended, only how many times it had saved the man who had wielded it. She didn’t care that it would be used, now, against people she had lived amongst her entire life. Instead she lifted the blade to her lips and pressed a kiss to the ruby in the pommel, pleading with whatever god was listening that the blade in her hands would protect the man standing in half his armour before her.
His face softened, so at odds with the weapons and the armour and the sounds of an army preparing for battle outside the window.
With gentle hands he took the sword from her, sliding the sheath through a loop in the belt at his waist. His hands rose to cup her face, his calloused palms fitting so easily against her chin, his fingers curling around her ear. His nose pressed against hers, and when he kissed her, it was a soft, aching meeting, where his lips moved slowly against her own, like he was taking the time to savour the shape and feel of her against his mouth. Nesta was nothing more than candle wax in his hands, melting all the more with every passing second he had his hands on her, engulfing her in his warmth.
When he pulled back at last, he held her face, his thumb resting beneath her chin.
“Wait for me, my love,” he whispered. “I’ll be back before you even know I am gone.”
Nesta shut her eyes, refusing to let the fear - the sheer terror at what he was about to face - consume her. “Impossible. Every minute you’re away from me will feel like a full turn of the sun. Every night will be the coldest.”
Her warrior swallowed at that, his eyes boring into hers as he brushed that thumb along her jaw, skirting the edge of her lips. He kissed her again, sweet and bitter, made painful by his departure.
“Swear to me,” Nesta said when they parted. “Swear that you will come back to me.”
Cassian only smiled, placing a hand over his heart. “With Odin as my witness,” - his eyes flicked skyward for a heartbeat - “and with Thor at my back, I swear to you.” He cupped his face between her palms, dropping another kiss to the tip of her nose, swift and light. “I will return to you.”
He pulled the pedant he always wore out from beneath his layers of shirts and mail, and let it hang over the armour covering his chest. The small silver hammer gleamed - Thor’s hammer - and Nesta found herself forsaking all else and placing her trust in that foreign god, that he might keep the warrior before her from Valhalla’s hall.
And Nesta was about to kiss him again - to demand that he stay, just a little bit longer - when a knock sounded at the door, loud and blunt enough to suggest that it wasn’t a knuckle rapping against the wooden panels, but the hilt of a weapon of some kind.
“We’re ready to leave, Cass,” Azriel’s voice called through the door.
A moment later, heavy footsteps sounded— retreating, giving the warrior one last moment to say goodbye.
Nesta did not know Rhysand’s master spy all that well, but in that moment…
She had never been more grateful.
Swiftly, she took Cassian’s jaw in hand and hauled him down to her, pressing every inch of her body against his He groaned against her, his hands bracketing her waist as her nails scraped along the chainmail. This time, the kiss was harried. Frantic. A desperate meeting of lips and teeth and tongue, feral and unleashed. Nesta poured herself into that kiss— her very essence, cracking open her chest and handing him her heart on a silver platter. His fingers dug into her waist hard enough to bruise, and when she pulled back, his teeth nipped at her lip, like he wasn’t prepared to turn his back without some leaving some reminder behind.
And when Nesta looked into his eyes, she could have sworn there was an ocean of desire there— of devotion, too.
“Cassian, I…” She trailed off, wanting to say the words that she had been holding back for a while, now.
Immediately he understood.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not now— not yet.”
Nesta frowned, but he only grinned in response.
“Tell me when I return. When this is all over.”
And with that, in a rush of heavy metal and blades, he turned and left, leaving Nesta standing in his chamber, watching the sky outside lighten at the edges, wondering how long it would be before she could tell the man that she loved him.
***
“So,” Azriel said dryly, tucking his helmet into the crook of his arm as he removed it from where it had covered his face, “we didn’t need to lure the Saxon king north after all.”
He wiped his brow, surveying the landscape splayed out before them like a bolt of smooth, even fabric. In the distance, over the trees, smoke from King Alfred’s campfires drifted up into the sky.
“It is less than ideal,” Cassian said with a slow incline of his head. After all, their plan had been to back Alfred into a corner. To make him face them, with peace negotiations or with open warfare. To give him no choice but to meet them in the field, one way or another. But Alfred had marched north before they could even send a messenger. “But we still have the better location. Still have the advantage.”
That precious advantage— so loath had Cassian been to give it up, he’d insisted they march as fast as they could to reach this hill, where the ground sloped gently away from the rise, leading to a flat valley below. They stood at the summit of it now, a day and a half after leaving Jorvik, with a line of trees at their back providing valuable cover. More trees stretched in the distance, but the plain before them was level and wide, the ground dry after days without rain.
A good omen.
Cassian shuddered as he thought of all the times he’d fought knee-deep in mud and freezing hail, and though it had never once made him pause, he couldn’t deny that it was far more comfortable fighting when the ground was dry.
Arms folded across his armoured chest, he tapped his fingers idly across the mail coating his forearms.
“Tomorrow,” he said, looking at those fires on the horizon; each one of them, he knew, set before a huddle of tents housing Alfred’s soldiers. “They will advance tomorrow.”
A small distance away, fingers curled around his sword, Rhys huffed.
“They will not get far,” he said darkly, turning to survey their own camp spreading behind them— their own canvas tents and small fires. “Give the order to rest and be ready by dawn.”
Cassian nodded. “Shield wall on this ridge. Let them exhaust themselves getting up the hill before we engage.”
Azriel hummed his assent; Rhys, too busy scanning the land before them, merely dipped his chin in the barest attempt at a nod. Satisfied, Cassian turned and glanced at one of the other commanders standing a handful of feet away and, with little more than a flick of his fingers and a single look, he knew the order would be relayed as the warrior departed.
Somebody had taken the time to set up a small wooden table laden with dried meat in a small wooden bowl and watered down ale in a simple metal carafe, and Cassian was grateful for it as he poured three cups— plain and unadorned.
Only half a cup each, mind.
He’d need his mind sharp tomorrow; sharper than his blades.
Azriel rubbed a hand along his jaw as he watched Cassian pour, canting his head to the side.
“They’re fighting for more than just land, if his men believe the story Alfred tells them about Mandray’s wi—“ He hesitated, a momentary stumble as he took the cup Cassian offered and beheld the cool, dark glare on Cassian’s face “—about Nesta being mistreated at Jorvik. It will give them purpose. We shouldn’t underestimate that idly.”
Cassian still had Nesta’s wedding ring tucked into his pocket; was planning on sending it to Alfred after dipping it in whatever blood the butcher had readily available. To make them rush, to make them pin this battle on a single misplaced narrative. A king rushing north to save a Saxon, Christian woman from the hands of the ruthless, brutal Danes.
He fought a smirk.
An entertaining story.
But not one that would win the king his battle.
“Whatever they’re fighting for, it doesn’t matter so long as we do not surrender our position.”
It was strong enough to weather an army three times the size of Alfred’s, Cassian suspected. The slope of the hill put them farther out of the reach of Alfred’s archers, whilst giving their own perfect visibility. Their position was so easily defended, it was as though Odin himself had hand-picked the location for this battle, and though the trees were quiet and empty now - like all the wildlife had already fled in anticipation - they were the perfect place to hide away extra forces and allow them to circumvent Alfred’s— manoeuvring around the Saxons until they had them surrounded on all sides.
Rhys drained his ale, looking at the thin plumes of smoke still drifting into the sky from Alfred’s camp.
How many, Cassian wondered? How many men had the Saxon king brought north to die?
“We don’t surrender anything,” Rhys said simply, as though he were commenting on the colour of the sky.
Cassian only grinned. “Never.”
“Never,” Azriel echoed.
***
The dawn was a red smear, the horizon the colour of freshly spilled blood.
Dew still lingered on the grass beneath his boots, and behind him came the steady beat of hammering shields; a heartbeat, pulsing through the lines as the soldiers in their ranks hammered fists and blades and sword-hilts against the round wooden planks that formed their shields.
Smoothly Cassian slid his sword from the sheath at his hip, his fingers curling naturally around the handle and settling into the grooves worn into the leather-wrapped hilt. The ghost of his own grip; valleys made and set the hundred times he’d wielded that blade into battle. An extension of his arm, a part of his own lifeblood.
And—
Hers, too.
He looked at the ruby in the pommel, convinced he might feel her, somehow, if he looked hard enough at the stone her lips had kissed.
As the hammering intensified, grew louder and more determined, Cassian tucked away the thought of her - the thought of all he was fighting for and would be returning to - and settled himself beside Azriel, covering his brother’s shield with half of his own. On his other side, Rhys sank into a crouch beside him, the lord’s shield lifted up and above Cassian’s own.
Everywhere was the press of human, mortal bodies.
Shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek.
Cassian’s arm did not tremble from holding up his shield— hadn’t, for almost twenty years now. Had been ingrained into him from the moment he first picked up a weapon and stepped into a training yard. To drop the shield was to die, to allow weakness into the ranks. To let the shield wall be breached.
A northman did not easily drop his shield.
So Cassian inhaled deeply through his nose and breathed out through his mouth, tightening his grip on the leather strap that ran along the back of his shield. The hammering grew faster, in time with his racing heart, and as he opened his mouth, the breath he let out morphed into a rumble in his throat, a roar that started small before it ended in a battle cry, echoed by each and every one of them holding that shield wall.
Through the small gaps in the shields, Cassian could see the Saxon army waiting down the hill, ready to advance.
He thumped his sword against the back of his shield, the pommel that Nesta had so briefly kissed striking the wood with enough force to rattle his bones.
It shook— and the entire world seemed to hold its breath, like Loki was rattling the surface of the earth and waiting for the drums to sound, for the carnage to begin.
And as the first of the Saxons drew back his bow, ready to loose the first arrow, Cassian turned to his brothers and grinned as the madness, the frenzy, the chaos of battle entered his veins.
It had stormed the night Cassian was born, he’d been told.
Stormed so badly it had seemed like the sky was coming down, and it had always been an omen, a sign, that the babe birthed in the dark amidst the thunder and the lightning and the driving rain…
Was meant for something greater.
Meant for this.
As though Tyr, not Loki, had shook the world when Cassian took his first breaths. As though the god of war had marked him out somehow.
Chosen him.
So Cassian felt the calm wash over him as his battle cry echoed, knowing, without doubt that—
“Valhalla will not welcome us today.”
Azriel’s eyes darted sidewards. “Not today,” he echoed, those eyes dark as his mouth set into a thin, determined line.
Rhys looked straight ahead at the Saxon army advancing now, picking their way slowly across the plain. At length, he turned his eyes on each of his brothers as he, too, said,
“Not today.”
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