God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1)

THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

God’s Eye © 2016 Susan Fanetti

All rights reserved

Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

The Night Horde SoCal Series:

(MC Romance)

Strength & Courage
, Book 1

Shadow & Soul
, Book 2

Today & Tomorrow
, Book 2.5

Fire & Dark
, Book 3

Dream & Dare
, Book 3.5

Knife & Flesh
, Book 4

Rest & Trust
, Book 5

Calm & Storm
, Book 6

The Pagano Family Series:

(Family Saga)

Footsteps
, Book 1

Touch
, Book 2

Rooted
, Book 3

Deep
, Book 4

Prayer
, Book 5

The Signal Bend Series:

(The first Night Horde series)

(MC Romance)

Move the Sun
, Book 1

Behold the Stars
, Book 2

Into the Storm
, Book 3

Alone on Earth
, Book 4

In Dark Woods
, Book 4.5

All the Sky
, Book 5

Show the Fire
, Book 6

Leave a Trail
, Book 7

PRONUNCIATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

To build this Viking world, I did a great deal of research, and I mean to be respectful of the historical reality of the Norse cultures. But I have also allowed myself some creative license to draw from the full body of Norse history, culture, and geography in order to enrich my fictional representation. True Viking culture was not monolithic but instead a various collection of largely similar but often distinct languages, traditions, and practices. In The Northwomen Sagas, however, I have merged the cultural touchstones.

My characters have names drawn from that full body of history and tradition. Otherwise, I use Norse words sparingly and use the Anglicized spelling and pronunciation where I can. Below is a list of some of the Norse (and a few Estonian) names and terms used in this story, with pronunciations and/or definitions provided as I thought might be helpful.

NAMES (in order of appearance in the story):

• Oili (
  O-ee-lee
  )
  
• Åke (
  AW-kyuh
  )
  
• Vali (
  VAH-lee
  )
  
• Leif (
  LAFE
  )
  
• Einar (
  A-nar
  )
  
• Knut (
  kuh-NOOT
  )
  
• Jaan (
  YAHN
  )
  
• Bjarke (
  BYAR-kyuh
  )
  
• Thorvaldr (
  thor-VAL-der
  )
  
• Nigul (nee-
  GOOL
  )
  
• Jakob (
  YAH-kob
  )
  
• Eivind (
  A
  -
  vind
  )
  
• Solveig (
  SOL-vay
  )
  

TERMS (in alphabetical order):

• Hangerock—an apron-like overdress worn by Viking women.
  
• Jötunn—(
  YOH-tun
  ) one of a race of giants
  
• Karve—the smallest of the Viking ships, with thirteen rowing benches.
  
• Skause—a meat stew, made variously, depending on available ingredients.
  
• Thing—the English spelling and pronunciation of the Norse
  þing
  . An assembly of freemen for political and social business.
  
• Úlfhéðnar (
  OOLF-hyeh-nar
  )—a special class of berserkers who took the wolf as their symbol. They were known to be especially ferocious and in some sagas are identified as Odin’s elite warriors.
  
• Völva (
  VUHL-va
  )—a seer or mystic
  

To my Freaks: warrior women, every one.

Special thanks to Lina Andersson, who helped me out with understanding the various and fascinating cultures, histories, languages, and stories of ancient Scandinavia.

Skål!

By the time she had six years, Brenna had grown used to the way people stared and then looked away. She’d become numb to the space that always formed around her as she walked through Halsgrof with her mother and father while they did their trade and made their offering to the jarl.

Now that she had ten years, she was learning to make sport of people’s fear, to turn on them the eye they so dreaded and pull a face so that they might spend a sleepless night or three, waiting to see how she had cursed them.

The few souls of her own tiny village were less fearful but not much more warm. Even those who’d known her from her birth thought there something fantastical about her, something they could not understand. Some thought her a boon, others a bane, but none thought her simply a girl. Only the people who shared her blood spared her from their fear.

Her mother and father called it awe, that thing that turned people away from her, but Brenna thought that point too fine to split. Fear or awe, it meant friendlessness.

Brenna bore the Eye of the Gods. She herself had never seen it very clearly—her parents kept no looking-glass, and her reflection in water was of only a girl—but it must have been a fearsome thing to behold.

“Usch, Brenna,” her mother said, combing back a loose blonde tress and tucking it into Brenna’s braid. “You must go off on your own for a while, love. You know Sigurd will not trade with me if he sees you.” She pressed a small piece of hacksilver into Brenna’s hand. “Go get your sweet. But stay in sight of the docks and listen for your father’s call.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Her mother patted her head and gave her a loving smile, and Brenna wandered off on her own, tucking the hacksilver into her sleeve. She wouldn’t spend it. The sweets-monger was the worst place in Halsgrof for her. All the children loosed from their parents congregated there. And children turned their fear into cruelty.

But she let her mother think that she got to enjoy a treat; it eased her mind, and Brenna knew that her mother felt people’s crude fear almost as keenly as she herself did.

She had expected to be sent off, she was on every trip to town, and she had a place she went to spend that time. That night, at home, she would return the bit of hacksilver to her mother’s leather pouch. They could not afford to spend even that small sliver on sweets, especially imaginary sweets.

Giving a wide berth to the sweets-monger and to the crowded square before the great hall of Jarl Ivar, Brenna walked to the farthest edge of town, where the woods began again. If she stood on a rock and rose up on her toes, she could still see the docks. Her father’s voice was big and booming, and she knew she would hear his call when it came.

There was a tree here, an old, gnarled tree, whose roots and trunk had grown in such a way as to make something of a snug little nook, almost a cave. She’d found it several months ago, and no one else in the world seemed to know of it. She had padded the ground inside with mosses, and she always found it just as she’d left it, as if even the woodland creatures understood it to be her den.

When she tucked herself in, she thought she was well hidden, though no one had ever come upon her so that she might know for certain that she would not be seen.

Until she heard her father’s call, Brenna would sit in this snug, safe burrow. She would close her eyes, and she would tell herself stories. Stories of Brenna the Shieldmaiden. Brenna the Voyager. Brenna the Great Jarl.

Names she preferred to the ways she was known: Brenna the Witch. Brenna the Strange. Brenna the Cursed.

Just lately, her stories had begun to include strapping young raiders. Berserkers with fantastical pictures etched into their bare chests. She didn’t really understand why. Her father had been a berserker in his youth, but she didn’t think the way she felt when the young men were in her stories had to do with her father.

She had gotten well into a story about leading a raid across the sea when the crackle and thunder of heavy feet tromping into the woods broke through her reverie. It appeared that she would have a chance to know if her den were as secure as she’d thought it to be.

Her heart thumping, she hunkered low and peered through the laced roots of her tree. A man was dragging a boy—older than she, Brenna thought, but yet too slight of shoulder and smooth of cheek to be a man—into the woods. The boy resisted, his dark hair flying, but the man was much bigger, and he threw him to the ground.

“On your knees!” the man shouted, and the boy clambered to his feet.

“Father, please!”

“No more words from you! You have spoken your last word, boy. I said on your knees!” As he spoke, the man drew his axe—not a fighting axe, simply a tool like most working men carried on their belts—and swung it at the boy’s knee.

The boy howled in pain and fell to his knees, his hands grabbing at the one his father had hit. Brenna, secreted in her wooded nook, gasped and covered her mouth. She expected a gush of blood, but there was none. The axe was clean as well. The man must have hit his son with the flat or the back. Small mercy, that, but a mercy nonetheless.

Brenna felt sick and scared—and she felt an emotion that seemed new to her, an anger bigger than she’d known before. It felt like fire in her joints. It made her fists clench, and it made her body want to come up from the ground. It made her want to stand. It made her want to do much more than that.

But she was just a girl, sitting under a tree, nothing remotely like a weapon on her. She looked around her for a rock or a stick, but there was nothing apt nearby.

Then the boy made a strange, strangled noise, and Brenna returned her attention to him. His father had him by the head—no, by the tongue. He had pulled the boy’s tongue out and had it pinched between his fingers. Though the boy struggled, the man must have been very strong. She didn’t understand why the man would be holding his son’s tongue like that.

Then Brenna saw the knife, and she understood.

She was standing before she’d realized it, and she was walking toward them, a little girl, small for her age, no armor but the light wool of her summer hangerock.

“STOP!” she called, moving steadily toward them. “STOP.”

The man did stop, and he turned toward her. The change in his attention loosened his hold on the boy, who pulled away and then tried to run. But his hurt knee collapsed, and he fell and could only scrabble backward to a tree.

The man leered at Brenna and advanced on her, raising the hand that had held his son’s tongue. “Little girls should not be alone in the woods. They might get—”

He stopped, and his eyes went wide. Brenna knew that he had come close enough to her to see her eyes. To really see them. To see especially her right eye.

She pulled herself up as tall as she could and made her shoulders as broad as she could. Her heart raced and her knees shook, but she made her voice steady and deep and said, “Do not harm him.”

The man made a ward sign, and then he turned back toward town, his son forgotten. He didn’t run, but he came as close to that as he could and still preserve any dignity at all.

Brenna turned to the boy, who still sat at the base of the tree, his mouth bleeding and his knee swelling. She smiled and went to him, meaning to help him stand, or offer to get aid from town. Meaning to help him.

But he turned wide, scared eyes—both of them bright blue—on her and made the same ward sign that his father had.

She’d thought she was inured to that fear, but this time, she felt badly wounded by it. A tightness closed in around her heart, and she turned away.

She walked back into town and sat at the docks until her parents were ready for the journey home. She didn’t look to see if the boy ever came out of the woods.

And she didn’t bother to tell herself a story.

~oOo~

“Oof!” Brenna landed hard on the ground, and her already aching tailbone complained sharply.

“Sword out, daughter. This you must remember. Sword and shield, both are protection, and both are weapons.” Her father shifted his shield and held out his hand. He pulled her up and then took a step back, brandishing his sword. He had advanced her training to real, honed swords only the week before. “Again.”

Brenna made herself ready and circled, following her father’s movements. “I want to learn the axe,” she said and blocked her father with her shield.

“Good! Now attack.”

Remembering to come around the side rather than step forward, Brenna swung her sword, aiming for his shoulder on his sword side and remembering to slash, not stab. But her father parried her easily.

“The sword is the first weapon, and the most important.” He moved, and she parried. “When you are skilled with the sword, then you will learn the axe.” She took a big step sideways and almost made contact, forcing her father to turn into her move to block her. Grinning, he nodded and added, “As long as you keep up your work, and your mother has no more cause to find us out.” He waved his shield. “Enough for today. She will be home before the sun sets, and we both have work to do before she arrives.”

He nodded toward the house, and Brenna followed, knowing that the first work they had to do was clean their swords. Her father insisted that they be tended to after every use, even though little blood had ever been drawn in her training.

As they sat at the table and honed and polished the heavy blade, Brenna grumbled, “She should be proud that I want to be like her.”

Her mother had been a great shieldmaiden. In the stories, she was known as Dagmar Wildheart, and it was said that she had fought trolls and even giants of Jötunheim. Brenna knew that the stories were bigger than the woman who’d birthed her, but there was truth in her greatness nonetheless. She had seen with her own strange eyes her mother fight off raiders, with the ferocity and strength of a berserker.

And yet she would not hear of her only daughter picking up sword and shield and following her path. It was all Brenna wanted, and it was the only path to fulfillment available to her. She would never know love, never build a family. She had thirteen years now, and she knew already that no one would ever love her like a woman.

People shrank from her; in fear or in awe, they shrank from her. Those in awe of her might leave a gift on the doorstep in search of a boon from the magic they thought her to have, but none would ever come close enough to know her.

So Brenna would use that fear, that awe. She would be a great shieldmaiden, like her mother and her grandmother before her. She would do so against her mother’s wishes, because her father could deny her nothing.

“You know well why your mother wants another path for you.”

She did. Brenna had had four older brothers. Three had died raiding and had achieved Valhalla. One had been lost to a childhood fever. Dagmar Wildheart hadn’t the heart to lose another. She wanted to keep her only surviving child, born late in her life and later in her husband’s, safe.

But her only surviving child had been born different. Not much different—Brenna felt like a girl, a young woman, and she had no special powers she’d ever been able to discern—but different in a way the people of her world couldn’t accept.