The Ashes of Olaf
A tale of kings and crosses, set in the blood-soaked North
The Seer’s Fire
The old man’s eyes were milk-white, the color of a dead man’s skin, though he swore he had seen too much to ever be truly blind. He squatted in a seal-hide tent on the Scilly Isles, beside a fire that smelled of fish oil and ash. When Olaf came ashore—tall and broad and cruel-eyed—the fire danced. The blind man did not rise. He only spoke.
“You were born in blood,” he rasped. “You’ll die in it.”
Olaf snorted. His sword still dripped from a raid on the mainland. “So do most men.”
“But you will rise again,” the seer said, “as fire rises from ash. A king. A Christian. A death worthy of songs.”
The Viking prince laughed then, but quietly. The wind carried that laugh into the sea, where it sank like so many ships.
Olaf Tryggvason, Son of the Sea
The boy was born of a murdered king and a fleeing queen, and both his name and his fate were forged in exile. Pirates took him on the Baltic and sold him like cattle. A whore’s child, some whispered. A wraith. But others said the gods marked him, that Odin had placed a raven’s feather beneath his tongue.
In Novgorod, he killed his foster father’s murderer with an axe in the marketplace. The blood splashed across the bread of a merchant’s stall, and the crowd parted like sea foam. His … Read the rest