WRATH OF WAR [BJÖRN IRONSIDE]

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Björn and Ubbe stood up from their chairs, the rest of the brothers frozen and stared at Vál with wide eyes. Vidar and Ulvar stood up to help her but she shot them an angry glare. Her hair was messy and covered in dried blood, her clothes ripped and the slowly healing wound on her thigh was slightly visible. Harald and Halfdan moved slightly so she could sit down beside them. Halfdan handed her a cup filled with mead which she emptied quickly.

"You can all stop staring at me now." Vál growled. "You're staring as if I risen from the dead!" She exclaimed loudly before taking a big piece of chicken and some vegetables. She looked up at the sons of Ragnar, looking at Björn who did seem to barely understand what had just happened.

"You were— how?" Ubbe tried to form his words but she only rolled her eyes causing her to wince to due her headache.

"Please I wouldn't have died from this. Look at it, it's a little cut and nothing more." Vál said to them with her mouth filled with chicken.

"How can you be so sure?" Sigurd asked, slightly angry yet happy.

"Because I don't die stupidly Sigurd!" Vál argued, she had been unconscious not long ago and now her body was worked up. She swallowed the food. "There's only less than a hand full of people whose actually capable of killing me and it's not a group of incompetent saxon archers who misses the head!" She argued before pointing at the chicken, silently demanding Harald to send it over which he did. Silence engulfed them once more and she continued to eat, feeling absolutely on the brim of starvation.

"What have I missed?" Vál asked after a while and stared at non in particular.

"Ecbert is dead." Ubbe said and she noted the look Ivar gave Björn.

"How?" She asked quickly with a frown.

"He cut his wrists open in the baths." Björn told her and she frowned.

"When you got here?" She asked and they shook his head and she saw Ivar clenching his jaw.

"No, Björn let him kill himself instead of letting me blood eagle him. It was only him and the bishop here when we arrived." Ivar spat bitterly and she looked at Björn with a frown.

"You let him off the hook?" Vál asked, growing annoyed and her frown was present on her forehead. "Why?" She questioned and glared at all of them. Ubbe and Hvitserk stared down on their hands like guilty children who just broken something valuable.

"We got legal rights to land in east anglia in return." Sigurd said and she blinked quickly.

"Why would he give you land and agree to kill himself in the process?" She asked them and neither one could answer it. "Why was he here alone? Why have the others left but he is back here and giving us pieces of their lands to the sons of the father who he just killed!?" Vál asked, raising her voice since she didn't like what she was hearing. Harald looked at her and so did the everyone else. Ivar clenched his jaw, growing angry when he knew what Vál was hinting at. The look in Vál's eyes could kill, Thor's own thunder was visible in them.