DIVINE [HVITSERK RAGNARSSON]

19: REASSURANCE

CHAPTER NINETEEN — 'REASSURANCE'

"Heathen!" A shout came from the crowd as something was thrown at her. It landed in the bottom of the cage and she could smell it almost instantly - rotten food of some sort that splattered on the metal bars. Asta moved her hand ever so slowly to bat it away so that it fell back down to the ground. She had been locked in the cage, hanging above the church door for hours while the townspeople jeered and mocked her, calling her a heathen or a pagan and throwing rotten food at her. Bishop Heahmund had said 'a heathen must hang before the eyes of God so that he shall see the evil those heathens create.'

As the cage hung and the shouts came, Asta looked up to the sky. She spoke to Odin, to Freyja and even to Thor and wondered if she would ever leave this town alive. She wondered if her brothers and their people would pay a ransom, or if they had given up on her entirely. She wasn't important enough for a ransom, and so her fears of a dishonarable death loomed over her - she would not go to Valhalla. Which meant she would not meet Hvitserk, or her brothers, or her father there eventually. She would be alone in the next life.
"Pagans should die!" A witchy looking woman shrieked as she threw another piece of rotten food; Asta leant sideways in the cage to dodge it, and the cage creaked an awful noise as it swung high above the ground.

She'd been there for hours, being ridiculed and insulted, and before that it had been hours of torture - whips slashing at her back and knives dragging across her skin leaving stinging wounds, and Earl Wilfred demanding that 'the heathen's head be dunked underwater until she was almost drowning' - which was perhaps worse than any pain she'd experienced before. Asta was unsure why the Saxons were going through so much effort to torture her - she wasn't vital to them, so why not just kill her? They were trying to extract information from her of course, about Ragnar Lothbrok's sons and where their Great Army were planning on raiding next. Asta knew all of this information of course, however she would never release it to the Saxon's.

It was as another insult was hurled at the girl that she looked down and noticed Earl Wilfred looking up at her, Bishop Heahmund loitering at his side.
"Bring her down!" Wilfred called out to the men guarding her. "The ransom talks begin soon."
The ransom talks. Surely she had misheard? She didn't think Ivar would fold so easily to pay a ransom, but all she could believe in that moment was that it may finally be the end of her nightmare.

The cage was lowered roughly, causing pain to rush through every wound on Asta's body. She was taken, a guard gripping tightly onto each arm, to a room in the Earl's castle. She could hardly walk for she was too weak and feeble and her hands had been tied behind her back so tightly that her wrists were red raw. After being left in the dark and dripping room for what felt hours, Earl Wilfred and Bishop Heahmund returned, along with the man who had been tormenting her for days and days. He was the one who placed the sack over her head, which smelt of vomit and blood.
From that point on, Asta Stensdottir had no idea where she was, where she was going, or what she was doing.