Blood Feud [COMPLETED]

CHAPTER TWO ☀︎

Erik had lost his cousin and breeches.

He lay in the sand, his body still convulsing with the icy chill and tried to decide which to retrieve first.

His eyes remained closed, encrusted with sea brine and tears, but he felt how bare his legs were with the tips of his frozen fingers. He could not feel his body much, bar a long wound on his thigh, perhaps explaining the missing trousers.

The parts of his body he could feel sang in pain. He checked himself: quieted the dark voices, fought off the need to vomit and propped himself up on his elbows, at last able to focus.

His ribs screamed in protest at the movement, which alerted him to the damage he sustained in the wreck. His forearm grazed his injured thigh, an intense wave of nausea forced his head between his legs and he began to vomit saltwater.

"Erik!"

He ignored his cousin, trying to angle himself away from the voice and the men convening by the shoreline. He wished to vomit the ocean's contents in peace before he would celebrate his cousin surviving.

"Come now, cousin! It was only a few storm clouds!" Sigtrygg hollered.

His cousin was seemingly in great form, what was considered perilous to some were boring pastimes to Sigtrygg. Death and shipwrecks excited him and his companions in more ways than one.

A memory rammed itself into the forefront of Erik's mind — Sigtrygg dangling from the weighted ropes of the sail during the storm, sword brandished and slashing madly at the sea and the sky, screaming for danger, adventure. His wide smile revealing his razor-shorn teeth and furs wetted through.

Erik vomited again, unable to prevent some pitiable groans after. He mewed like a foal and of course, his brethren heard.

"Come now, princeling." A hand dragged him up from the sand. Sigtrygg's voice rumbled right into his ear, his acrid breath causing shivers of revulsion, 'We sons of Søren don't get upset tummies from a little seawater. Or lose our trousers."

Sigtrygg dropped the young man as quickly as he grabbed him, Erik had just enough strength to land on his knees, rather than his face. The men laughed cajolingly with their commander as Erik took in his surroundings.

They had washed up on a beach, their beautiful ship lay in pieces dotted along the shoreline. The water lapping at Erik's feet, unnoticeable because of the cold, was gentler than the tumultuous sea that tore through their ship. He looked down along the beach, careful not to focus on the bodies unmoving and entangled in the ship's remnants and sand, and he tried to find beauty.

He wiped his eyes free from the crust, forcing himself into a standing position aided by a broken wooden post beside him for leverage. Focussing his eyes on this new environment he could subdue the darkness threatening the corners of his vision. Who knew how long he had been unconscious for? When his last meal was?

There, just behind a protruding cliff face, was a minuscule islet.

No, not even anything you could reach, get on top of. It must be a sea stack, solitary in its battle against the ocean's onslaught. Erik focused on the colours of nature's spectacular creation, dark at the bottom and scorched by the core's inferno, graduating to greys and sands and the brown-greens that signalled life, with a smattering of grass on top like stray tufts of hair.

His mother had always reminded him to focus on the beautiful, to block out the awful.

And right now, Erik was feeling awful.