The shield-maiden called Sigrún did not scream when the arrow punched through the meat of her left shoulder.
She snarled instead.
Teeth bared, black war-paint cracking around her mouth, she ripped the shaft out with a wet crunch and flung it into the dirt like it had personally offended her ancestors. The battle-rage was already burning too hot for pain to matter.
Around her the shield-wall had splintered like dry birch. Bodies of friends and enemies lay tangled in the churned mud. The air tasted of iron, smoke and the sour stink of opened bellies. And still the southern iron-men came, fresh waves of them, gleaming in scale and arrogance.
Sigrún spat blood (hers or someone else’s, she neither knew nor cared) and hefted her battered round-shield higher. The boss was dented so deeply it looked like a struck gong. Her sword — old family iron, edge notched to hell — felt almost weightless now, drunk on the day’s killing.
She saw him then.
Across the field, through drifting smoke: a tall jarl in fine mail, silver wolf-head on his helm, pointing a longsword straight at her. He shouted something in the southern tongue. Probably poetry about her death. They always did.
Sigrún grinned, all teeth and madness.
She raised her sword in mocking salute, then slammed the flat of it against her shield three times — the old thunder-call that every warrior of her people knew from childhood stories.
The few remaining of her shield-sisters heard it.
Broken, bleeding, limping — they still answered.
Three heartbeats later they crashed into the southern line beside her like a thrown axe.
No beautiful last stand.
No noble speeches.
Just ugly, howling, red work.
Sigrún met the silver-wolf jarl in the middle of it all.
His longsword was faster. Hers was meaner.
When his helmet finally came off, rolling in the mud, the last thing he saw was a woman with braids like blood ropes, face painted black and crimson, laughing through split lips as she brought the notched iron down one final time.
After that — only smoke, ravens, and the low moaning wind that always arrives when the killing finally stops.
And somewhere beneath the settling ash, the small stubborn heartbeat of a story that refuses to die quietly.