The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft Page A

“Whether he will or no, he learns what the man has to teach. I learned with more fear than love, but I learned nonetheless, and sometimes, when I will it least, the habits break through.”
    His brows pinched in further, lowering, leaving his eyes showing as cornflower lines between golden lashes. The rest of that baby-round face was smooth and impassive as always, but Wulfstan remembered the days when it had been covered with bruises, and he reached out and covered Cenred’s knee with his hand, under the table, stroking a thumb reassuringly along the side of it. This they had in common, that they were both out of true, somehow, inside. This it was that made him more tender, more careful with Cenred, who alone out of his lord’s household warriors, Wulfstan had never struck in anger, never laid flat on his back with his ears ringing and the knowledge of defeat embedded in his spine.
    Now, he thought, now I will lay him flat another way. The breath caught in his throat as a fierce flush of warmth poured from his hand into every part of him, met the itching intoxication of want that centred in his prick and drove the chill away as effectively as though he had been a fire giant. It was suddenly very hard to think of waiting patiently through the feasting and the drinking for hours on end, until he could finally have another man’s hands on his flushed and needy skin.
    The evening did not oblige him by hurrying. His temper frayed under the endless waiting—all his life, he’d been waiting, and these last moments were the worst. One thing only diverted him from his ball-aching hunger, and that came when at the end of the night’s meal, Ecgbert took out his lyre and passed it down the table for every man to play his single party piece.
    When the instrument came to him, sat nestled onto his knee and into the crook of his arm like a lover, when he struck the chords and felt the music vibrate in the wood as though the lyre itself were alive and singing, that night came back to him in a physical rush. The young harper’s slight arms and thin lips made into something swordlike, something that pierced him and made him bleed out his strength, by a spirit strong as any angel’s. He leaned his face against the lyre, felt its hum against his cheek and wished with a vain, hollow desperation that tonight he could have been sharing his cloak with that man.
    When the song ended he could not follow it with another—he had learned one only, to avoid being humiliated when the harp was passed around, but that he had thought was enough. He let the instrument go to the next player and told himself that he had not known that man above an hour before he had been humiliated at his hands. He told himself that if they ever met again, he would take a handful of that curly hair—was it soft or rough, it seemed important to know—and force the man to kneel to him, and do whatever it took to put in his eyes the wary respect that was due to a man of Wulfstan’s status.
    The picture kept slithering out of his mind. He thought he’d got it—the kneeling youth a tangle of long limbs, the face, upraised, long nose and high cheeks, thin jaw and downcast eyes. But when his imaginary harper looked up, his twisted smile was full of mockery, his wide, clear eyes as scorching as fire. At the picture, rather than feel fury, Wulfstan’s mouth dried and a deep, delicious throb went through his spine from the nape of his neck to his balls.
    “You’re having pleasant thoughts.” Where no one could see, concealed in the hall’s brown-gold light by tablecloth and tunic skirts, a hand wormed its way past Wulfstan’s hose and began to untuck his thin linen braies from the top of them. Rough fingertips burrowed underneath and alighted on the smooth, sensitive skin of his upper thigh, stroking, seeking. He managed not to gasp, but he closed his eyes and shifted closer, lost in his dreams, and for a moment when he opened his eyes again, he was confused and