The first collaborative effort by myself and my ever gracious Anglo-Irish co-writer is now available on Kindle.

Enjoy

Nancy Cole,
a.k.a. HW Coyle

For generations a saga that spoke of a young Viking girl who led a Saxon-Dane army against a usurper were passed from storyteller to storyteller, men who freely embellished the feats of Alfhildr as they sought to entertain and enthrall their audiences in the great halls of their lords and masters. Some claimed she had been raised by a wolf, others that she was a witch. The truth was very different.

Before she was a legend Alfhildr was a flesh and blood person with a family, a past and a secret. With the passing of time all but the legend was lost from living memory until an archeologist struggling to hold onto his university position stumbles upon something he had not been expecting. Bit by bit Professor Bannon and his students come to realize a legend once thought to be little more than a myth could actually be grounded in history. He also begins to suspect one of the students participating in the dig has a secret that links her to both the discoveries they are making and the legend.

That legend tells of a young girl known as Alfhildr who lived when Saxons and Danes fought over England. Alfhildr was no ordinary girl. Raised within a warrior culture she mastered all the skills necessary to survive in battle and on the hunt. Though this was more than enough to set her apart from those who came to know her, it was the secret she hid with equal cunning that led her kinsmen to cast her out. Left to wander the contested lands between Saxon holdings and Danelaw, Alfhildr collected an unlikely gathering of allies as she took up the sword, not to conquer or pillage, but to protect innocent farmers, both Saxon and Dane alike. In time this came to include a Saxon girl named Elvina, raised from birth to be a queen. With Alfhildr’s assistance Elvina survives a palace coup and rallies both Saxon and Dane to her cause, one championed by Alfhildr.

It is this story a troubled young graduate student at Bannon’s dig struggles to bring to light, for it holds the key that will help her find the courage she will need to live her life as she was meant to, just as a legend told of how another troubled young girl had.

From Kirkus Discoveries;

A conflicted Viking lass fights for justice in this gory but charming fantasy adventure.

Raised in the Danelaw settlements of ninth-century England, where killing and plundering Saxons is a Danish youth’s birthright, Gunnvor has a steady hand with weapons but a slight physique and embarrassingly beardless cheeks. Then a wound reveals the unthinkable; he is actually a girl, or, as the disbelieving Gunnvor puts it, “a useless female.”

Exiled from family and village, Gunnvor is taken in and redubbed Alfhildr by the Old Woman of the forest, who teaches her about breast-budding and menarche and the realities of being weak and outcast. She plunges into a wandering life, befriends a wolf, a crow and a scruffy Saxon sidekick, and acquires the awesome bow Falissar and the mighty blade Durthfang; before you can say “I am Alfhildr, sword arm of the gods and guardian of the innocent,” she’s made herself the scourge of all marauders, Saxon or Dane.

Materializing wherever war bands are slaughtering peasants, Alfhildr ruthlessly slaughters the slaughterers in her own bloody approximation of a peace process. But when she’s captured and forced to become a maid to a Saxon noblewoman (the humiliation!) she discovers fashion and jewelry and starts mulling more feminine methods of imposing Saxon-Dane harmony.

Coyle and Ellis regale the reader with Tolkien-esque heraldry and weapons fetishism, well-staged action scenes and lots of mayhem. But they also paint a vividly realistic panorama of a dirt poor, insecure world steeped in brutality, intrigue and warring Christian and pagan faiths. For all her prowess, Alfhildr is a complex, vulnerable heroine who is an unsettling riddle to her society and herself; with her warrior’s pride, she feels all the more keenly the limitations–and secret yearnings that rule a woman’s life.