Chapter 12

"Hello, Skade."

I touched a button on the phone and placed it on the bed. "Hi, Aelswith. You're on speaker. Gisela and Mildrith are here, too."

"I'm sure you know what I called about."

"To congratulate us. We're up to twenty-six in the rock charts, and gaining fans every day," I said brightly.

Gisela frowned and shook her head.

"Well, yes. Things are going well in that regard. I'm more concerned about the comments you're getting about your activities with members of the Vikings."

"People always twist things," I said. "Everyone hooks up on tour."

Mildrith's eyes widened.

"Apart from you two," I mouthed silently.

"It's true, then?" Aelswith said. "It's obvious with Brida and Ragnar, but I'm a little surprised at Aethelflaed. As for you—I seem to remember your reaction when I told you who you'd be touring with."

"I like Skorpa," I told her. "I didn't expect to, but I do. On the whole, the comments we're getting are good. There are always going to be a few idiots that say we're screwing them to get further in the business."

Mildrith and Gisela winced.

"Skorpa often gets bad press," Aelswith went on. "Your personal lives are up to you of course, but I'm concerned that if anything happens with him, he'll drag you down, too."

"Then why did you sign us up to tour with him?" I snapped. "Look, things are going great. He's fine. He's not drinking or doing drugs. He hasn't got in any kind of trouble. Also, we wrote a song together. We're going to play it at the last show. He thought it would be a good ending for the tour."

"Oh!" I could imagine the look of surprise on Aelswith's round face. "You wrote a new song with Skorpa?"

"Mostly, it's his work. I wrote the chorus. It's a kind of ballad, not like their usual stuff or ours. Erik and Ragnar are involved with the backing, Skorpa's playing guitar, and I'm playing piano."

"We'll need to make sure you're credited for your work on the song," Aelswith said immediately.

"It's unofficial so far. We haven't talked about recording it."

"Well, maybe I should talk to the Vikings' manager about recording it. Something this new and different will create a lot of gossip. This could actually do you a lot of good."

I raised my eyebrows and smirked at Gisela and Mildrith. "We'll talk about it when we get back," I said. "I assume you're not going to tell us to stay in our rooms like good little girls and keep our pants on?"

Aelswith tutted. "Like I said, that is your business. But please don't let me see you in any 'situations' on the front page of anything."

"You won't. See you in a week." I ended the call.

Brida and Aethelflaed joined us again a few minutes later. "Where'd you get to?" Brida asked. "We hardly get to see each other except on stage."

"Aelswith called," I said. "Aethelflaed, she's shocked at you for hooking up with Erik."

Aethelflaed blushed.

"What about me?" Brida threw herself on my bed, boots and all.

"She's not surprised at you."

"I bet she's surprised at you, though." Brida grinned. "How is Skorpa?"

"Fine."

"They wrote a song," Gisela said.

Brida rolled over and stared at me. "You wrote a song with Skorpa? When?"

"Last week. I didn't really have that much to do with it. He wrote the tune on guitar and piano, and most of the lyrics. I just added the chorus. But we're gonna sing it together at the last show."

"Wow. Is it just you and Skorpa, or you and the Vikings, or—?"

"Erik and Ragnar are going to be involved."

"Ragnar never said anything!" Brida glared.

"Well, don't have a go at him. It's no secret, but it's new," I explained. "I just told Aelswith about it, though. She said she's going to speak to their manager about maybe recording it. I don't know if that's on the cards. Skorpa was only messing around writing. It's not for an album or anything."

"You could make a mint out of it," Brida said. "Can you sing it for us?"

"We've already heard some of it," Mildrith put in smugly.

I took out my phone again and found the recording. I had to admit, even such a casual recording sounded good. Mine and Skorpa's voices blended perfectly.

"Wow," Aethelflaed and Brida said together.

A moment later there was a knock on the door.

"Come in!" Brida shouted without bothering to check who it was.

Skorpa and Ragnar came in. "The stage is free whenever you guys want to practise," Ragnar said.

"Playing our song?" Skorpa grinned at me.

"Yeah. Our manager called. She was concerned about some of us getting involved with some of you. I told her about the song to give her something else to think about," I admitted. "I think she might be calling your manager about, um, maybe recording it?" I avoided looking at him, unsure if he would be pissed off.

"Would you be up for that?" he asked.

"Yes, if you are." I relaxed. "I thought it was just meant to be casual."

"Let's see how it goes at the show. If the audience likes it, we could record it. I doubt we'd put it on an album, but we could probably do a one-off single release or something like that."

"That would be great. Do you think we should practise it all together before we perform it?"

"That's what we're doing here," Ragnar said. "We're going to come back to the club with you and run through it a couple of times. Erik's still there. This is the last opportunity we'll have to rehearse before we get to the Astoria. Your keyboards are already set up. Aethelwold came over this morning with our roadies."

"Great. I'm ready." Brida sprang up and went to Ragnar. He wrapped his arms around her.

Half an hour later, we were at the club, having travelled there on the Vikings' bus. Their equipment was set up, with Brida's drumkit in front of Erik's as usual, and Mildrith's keyboards at one side of the stage. We moved them into the position where Gisela usually played her guitar, and placed one of the mics in front of them. Suddenly, I was nervous, but not nearly as much as I imagined I would be at the Astoria. This was the first time of singing the song in front of anybody other than Skorpa.

The rest of the girls stood out of the way at the side of the stage, Erik sat down at his drumkit, and Ragnar grabbed his bass. Skorpa had an acoustic guitar with an amp that would compliment the piano.

"We'll run through the back-up first, Skade," Erik said. "You haven't heard what we've done with it yet."

"Okay, good." Relieved, I waited while Erik, Ragnar, and Skorpa played the music without the singing. The drums and bass filled it out perfectly, and I imagined the piano laid over the beat as they played. When they finished, I went to the keyboards and switched on. Erik counted in again, and we started to play.

My fingers flew over the keys and I counted the bars in my head, then started singing the first verse. All eyes were on me—it almost felt like the first time I'd performed to an audience. Skorpa joined in singing when I reached the chorus, and took over for the next verse. When it ended with a bit of ad-libbing, the girls cheered and clapped.

"It's awesome!" Brida exclaimed. "The audience is gonna love it. Shame you're not playing it here."

"Yeah, we'll save it for the Astoria," Skorpa said. "It'll be the first song of the encore. Let's run through it again, then we'll get out of your way so you can rehearse."

We played the song again, then the guys left us and went back to the motel. Mildrith sent Aethelwold a text and asked him to collect us in the minibus in a couple of hours.

That night's show went as well as all the others before. Aethelwold's note on my set list told me we were in Wolverhampton. Only three more shows to go before we would be in London. I had already looked up the dates for the Astoria and seen that our show was sold out. Its capacity was the same as Nottingham's Rock City at two thousand.

Later, Skorpa and I lay in bed talking about how things were going. "I want your opinion on something," he said.

"Okay."

"We've got two options. One, surprise the audience with the new song in the encore like we said. Or two, give them a hint that we have something new. There'll be a couple of magazine photographers there anyway—Kerrang and Metal Hammer at least. If I post something on Twitter beforehand, we'll probably get more out of it. Also, if we fire up the audience and they have an idea of what's coming, there'll be a couple of thousand phones out and it'll be on You Tube in less than an hour. If they like it, they'll be begging to buy it before we can even think about getting into the studio."

I rolled over and leaned on his chest so I could look down at him. "I like option two the best."

"Okay. Let's do it." He reached for his phone.

By the time we were eating breakfast in a coffee shop the next morning, Skorpa's tweet had been shared over a thousand times. All he'd said was that he would be showcasing a new song at the Astoria on Saturday and that Skade from Pagan Rock might just be involved, too. The other Vikings shared it, and I did the same. Within minutes, Brida and Mildrith had shared it and more and more people began following us.

I couldn't wait for Saturday. The show would be amazing. But at the same time, I felt sad that it was coming to an end. Being on the road had been constantly exciting, but in addition to that, I had no idea what would happen with Skorpa. Had it really just been a tour fling, or would we get to see each other afterwards? If he and his band returned to Denmark, I couldn't see that happening. The extent of my disappointment surprised me, and I hoped that somehow, it wouldn't be an end to whatever it was we had.