Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (16 page)

Instead, he left her in her dark prison, chained all the night, and in the day he put her to the lowest women’s work there was. Åke had the shackle around her neck closed at the forge. She wore it always, even as she worked.

At Leif’s urging, Calder had convinced his father to allow her salve to heal her burns, and a straw mat to lie on.

And that had been the frayed end of Leif’s influence. Since, he had been set aside. Not pushed out, but not brought close, either.

No longer family.

But he stayed as close as he could, and he searched the hall for any who might also see Åke as he was. There were stirrings of concern, among freemen and thralls alike; many were unsettled the see the God’s-Eye brought so low, and some worried that Odin would be displeased and bring that down on Geitland and all loyal to Åke.

But others saw Brenna’s abasement as a testament to Åke’s power and his favor with the gods.

He had long been a powerful jarl, and before that he was a great warrior. He had led, and then sent, countless successful and storied raids. He welcomed shieldmaidens into his ranks as equals in a number like few other jarls, and all of his warriors had grown rich in their fealty to him.

Åke had been a great man once. But no longer. Now, he was only powerful. Yet that power was persuasive.

As the days passed, became weeks, and Vali did not come, as Brenna’s wounds began to heal under her shackle, Leif began to lose his last shred of hope that Åke would be unseated.

~oOo~

Settled in his victory over Snorri and his triumph over the God’s-Eye, and with his seer portending a prosperous future, Åke sent his raiders out, with Calder, Eivind, and even Ulv sailing.

He kept Leif back, making an ostentatiously halfhearted statement that he needed his trusted advisor with him. It was a punishment, Leif knew; and Åke knew he knew. The whole hall knew.

But Leif was glad. He didn’t see how he could’ve left Geitland and Brenna, and even if he had, he doubted he would have returned home from a raid this time. He had lost his lifelong friends.

Of all the losses he had suffered, it was the least.

~oOo~

What a beautiful sight was the look in Åke’s eyes, on his whole face, when his doom sailed in from the north. Leif would never forget it.

Viger, who had been injured in a drunken squabble the night before the raiders set sail and had stayed back as well, ran into the hall a few days later, shouting that three longships sailed into Geitland, ships teeming with warriors and bearing the colors of Jarl Snorri Thorsson, and that Vali Storm-Wolf himself stood at the prow of the center ship.

Leif was in the hall. Åke didn’t trust him enough to keep him close, but didn’t trust him enough to let him go far, either. So he was there to see the recognition in the jarl’s eyes that he could not win a battle with the Storm-Wolf. He had sent all his best warriors out to raid, to fill his coffers for the war he planned nearer to home, where he meant to oust Jarl Ivar and Jarl Finn as well and make himself king.

He recovered quickly and ordered what men he had left out to meet the ships, and then he flew from his chair and at Leif. When the old man grabbed him by his tunic, Leif didn’t resist. He simply met his eyes. It was not time yet to reveal his true allegiance. There was Brenna to think about.

Brenna God’s-Eye, the great shieldmaiden, favored of the Allfather, slaving in the stables.

“You said he was dead! You said you killed him! You swore to me!”

“I did not swear, Jarl. I thought I killed him. I was mistaken.” And all thanks to the gods for that.

Åke drew his dagger from its sheath on his hip. It was an ornamental piece, encrusted in jewels. An affect more than a weapon, but its point was sharp. He set it against Leif’s chest, over a heart already covered in scars. “I treated you like a son. I loved you like a son. But you are a traitor. An oathbreaker.”

“No, Åke. I am not.”

Viger came back into the hall, the limp that had kept him from the raid barely noticeable now. “Vali calls you out, Jarl. He challenges you to single combat.”

Leif had not expected that. He’d expected his hotheaded friend to leap from the ship and charge up, axes swinging.

He saw his chance. To turn everything around. To bring Vali and Brenna back together. To give them their vengeance on Åke. To save Geitland from his depraved ambition. And, perhaps, to redeem himself in the eyes of his true friends.

“I will fight for you, Åke. Let me prove to you my loyalty.”

Åke stepped back. “You will bring me the head of the wolf?”

“You will never again have cause to doubt my fealty, Jarl Åke Ivarsson.”

“Make it so, Leif Olavsson, son of my friend. Son of my heart.”

Leif nodded, gathered his sword from the wall near the door, and went out to face Vali, his true friend, in single combat. Viger came with him, carrying Leif’s shield.

Vali had brought with him an army; his men were arrayed across the pier and the shore around it, all the way back into the sea. At the top of the berm stood Åke’s men: half the number, at best. Leif walked through them, toward his friend, who stood at the cross of the piers, bare-chested and unshielded, as always, his great axes in his hands.

“Vali Storm-Wolf,” he called. “Jarl Ake accepts your challenge and sends me, Leif Olavsson, as his champion.”

If Vali were surprised at that, he didn’t show it. “I will gladly kill you, Leif, for the hurts and betrayals you have made against me and mine. But I will see Åke on my axe this day, whether he stands like a man in combat, or dies a coward’s death instead.”

Åke had become a coward; he could face no greater death, no matter what. Leif smiled. “I understand. I would offer another plan.”

He spun and swung his sword, opening Viger’s throat. The cut was swift and clean, and Viger simply stood there, looking shocked, holding Leif’s shield, while blood washed down his chest.

Before he finally fell, before Åke’s men around him had understood the turn of events, Leif turned back to Vali. “I am your friend, Vali. Always have I been.”

He couldn’t wait to see if his friend were persuaded; when Viger fell, Åke’s men shook off their surprise, and they turned their weapons on Leif.

As he fought for his life, a shadow fell over him. Vali was at his side.

~oOo~

The men and women Leif fought that day were not Åke’s best raiders. They were the old, the young, and the lame—the weary, the untested, and the impaired. They had been known to him all his life, or all of theirs. They were his friends, his clansmen. He had trained them, or been trained by them. He had supped and drunk with them. Laughed with them. Observed the rituals with them. They were the citizens of Geitland, his home, and he had no wish to lay waste here.

There were few among them he had any wish to kill.

But they were loyal to Åke, and he was no longer. He was their enemy; therefore, they were his. He stayed on the defensive, making every effort not to attack, but he cut them down when they came at him.

Old Egill whooped a battle cry and charged at Leif, his ancient axe high, and his long-used voice cracked and weak. Leif knocked the axe easily away and sank his sword into the elder’s chest.

Egill had been old in Leif’s father’s time. But he had been a powerful warrior in days long past. It was told that he, in his hale peak, had killed eleven men at once, using only his bare hands and his teeth.

Leif caught him and held him in his arms while the battle—it was no battle, truly, but a massacre instead—boiled around them. He laid the old man on the ground and pulled his blade free. Then he crouched low and bent to Egill’s ear.

“You have achieved Valhalla, great old one. Good travels to you.”

Egill smiled. Blood oozed, and then poured, from his toothless mouth, and he closed his eyes.

Leif doubted he would see Valhalla should he die in this bloodbath. Vali’s much greater, stronger force had come up over the berm and overrun a town defended by those not strong enough to raid. There was no valor to be found for him here, he knew.

But neither was there a choice. Åke had to fall, as did anyone who might prevent it. There was valor, there was righteousness, in bringing Åke down. That, he also knew.

When Leif stood, Vali was watching him. The Storm-Wolf’s eyes held neither love nor affection for him, but he gave Leif a single nod and charged on toward the hall, where cowered the jarl.

Åke had been defeated before Vali’s boots had hit land.

~oOo~

Two days later, Leif stood again on the pier and watched as Vali and Brenna and a score or so of Vali’s men sailed away in a small karve, leaving his great ships moored where they were.

Jarl Vali Storm-Wolf, lord now over the lands that had been Snorri Thorsson’s.

And Jarl Leif Olavsson, who claimed Åke’s lands.

The rituals and sacrifices had been observed to ask the gods to favor this new world.

Åke was dead, on Vali’s axe. Brenna was freed and restored to herself and her husband. They had had their revenge. Most of Vali’s men had stayed behind, volunteering to wait in preparation for the return of the raiders, when Åke’s sons would learn of the change in their family’s circumstance, and the new Jarl Leif would fight his first battle.

Vali had not stayed. He wanted Brenna far away from this place, and Leif agreed. She had suffered enough. She needed to heal and grow strong again.

Leif had shown Åke his true fealty. He and Vali were allies, and he was Vali’s true friend.

But Vali was not his.

He blamed Leif for Brenna’s abasement and injury. He blamed him for every horror she’d withstood, every new scar on her body. He blamed him for the deaths of their friends and the loss of their homes in Estland. He blamed him, and he did not trust him. He swore he would never trust him again.

But Brenna trusted him, and she held great sway over her husband. Leif held out a hope that Vali would see that he had done the best he could, that all he had done had been in the interest of his love for them. That his wife would make him see, and that someday they would again be friends.

Because Olga was in Karlsa, Vali’s home. She had survived, and she had sailed west with Vali and the others. She was only two days’ sail away from him. If Vali could be made a friend again, perhaps she could be as well. She was alive, and she was close.

Perhaps he had not lost her after all.

Olga fed another log into the pit and held her hands over the blossoming flame. Karlsa was well north of her homeland, and even what they called summer here was cold to her, especially now, at its end.

At Vali’s behest, she had taken a smallish hut near the center of town, what had been Sven’s home and workplace. The healer she’d helped in that long-ago time when the raiders had come, when Leif and Vali and Brenna had overrun her world, had been killed at sea, on the voyage home.

All of Vali’s friends from the raid had been killed at sea. The dark man Leif had treated like a good friend, whom she knew to be his jarl’s eldest son, had ordered his men to kill them all.

It was men like these Leif had chosen over his true friends. Over her. And she was alone in the world because of his choice.

Not quite alone. Jakob stirred and sat up, looking sweetly disoriented as he woke. His chestnut mop showed the restless night he’d had; chunks of hair stood nearly straight on his head. He shivered and buried his arms under his fur.

“Good morning,
kullake
. There will be porridge soon, and warm milk.”

The boy grunted and rubbed his eyes.

Jakob had fourteen years—the same as Kalju. Without making a plan to do so, Olga had taken him into her care. If she was replacing her brothers with him, she hadn’t meant to, precisely. But the lost boy had filled part of an aching emptiness inside her.

It was only Olga and Jakob, and Jaan, Hans, and Georg, who had survived the horrors that the last year had brought to their people. Anna and Eha had died during their long, hard voyage to this strange place. All the others had died by the raiders’ hands or in the bloodshed after their abandonment.

Jaan was away now, fighting Vali’s vengeance and their own, and the others were left among fair-haired giants who didn’t know what to make of them.

There had been fighting again immediately after they had finally, finally set their feet on the ground, when Vali and the others, weak though they were, had exhorted the people here to rise up against their leaders. Olga didn’t understand much; she had been ill and weak and lost in the world—she still was all those things—but Åke had taken Karlsa during the time Vali had been away, and he had left a band of men in charge. They had not treated the people here well.

And then Vali had learned that none of his friends from the raid had come home.

While his cheeks were still carved with hunger, Vali had stormed the hall here, his clansmen at his back. Olga had yanked Jakob back from joining them, and she had hidden with him under a cart. He was young and ill, and he had almost drowned on the voyage. She could not lose another boy to this madness.

She had had enough of war and blood and loss. Enough.

With the people of Karlsa in charge of their home again, their little band of refugees had taken a moment to be healed. They had been fed and warmed and rested. The people here treated Vali like a hero and a savior. Like a god. And his friends, even the strange ones from across the sea, were havened in that esteem.

Then they had planned their attack on Geitland, and Vali and most of the strong men and women in town had sailed away.

With Vali gone, Olga noticed more cautious looks among the Karlsa people, especially since Vali had announced that she was a healer and set her up in Sven’s old house before he’d left. She could see in their eyes that they thought her a witch. She had heard them use the word
völva
, and she had learned that it meant something like it.

But there were no witches in her world—not in the way these people meant it. There was no seeing beyond what could be seen when one looked closely, no knowing beyond that which one could know when one opened all of one’s senses.

No one had yet come to her for healing, even though there was no other healer or midwife in the town. It was perhaps early yet to despair, but despair sat always on the doorstep of Olga’s heart now, and she feared that she might be wholly dependent on Vali for all the rest of her days.

Jakob rose and shuffled to the table, and Olga ladled a bowl of barley porridge and set it before him. As he shoveled spoons of it into his mouth, she combed her fingers through his wild, dark hair. Curly, like Anton’s. And like Mihkel, another brother she’d lost.

“You slept badly,” she observed as she filled a bowl for herself and sat across the rough table.

He paused with the spoon caught between the bowl and his mouth, and he met her eyes. “Did I bother you?”

“No. I didn’t sleep, either. The night is…difficult.”

He nodded. “The sounds are wrong. And too many.”

“Yes.” Karlsa was much bigger than their little village, and even with most of the men away, people kept later hours. Long past deep dark, people yet moved around. Olga supposed that had to do with the how much of night there was. The hours of daylight seemed already to be dwindling quickly, and Orm had told her that in the deep midwinter, almost the full day would be spent with no greater light than twilight—and that in midsummer the opposite was true, and the sun barely set.

In her world, the winter nights and summer days were long, also, but not such as this. Everything about this world was different. This was not the balance that Olga knew.

It was that lack of balance more than the night sounds that kept Olga awake. It was fear that left her curled under furs in a strange house in a strange town. It was the abject loss of all she knew. It was the image behind her closed eyes of her own knife in her brother’s melting chest, of Anton’s blood gushing at her feet as she fought to save herself for no other reason than instinct. It was the remembered feeling of the fireplace stones abrading her face as the raider took her, a taking so very much worse than any other like it she’d experienced, because it would not have happened if she had not been betrayed and abandoned.

It was the knowing that she had given herself, and all the love she had, to a man who had used her, who had tricked her, who had connived to have her give herself to him and then left her to abasement and loss.

What Leif had done was the worst abuse she had ever suffered. It had emptied her, and it had broken her.

That was what kept her awake all the night.

~oOo~

“Here.” Nodding to Rikke to take the bowl of mess away, Olga held out a cup to Brenna. “Try this.”

Brenna pushed it away. “I cannot.”

“You must keep nourishment, daughter.” Brenna’s mother, Dagmar, took the cup from Olga and sat on the edge of the bed, holding the cup up to Brenna’s lips. Brenna turned from it like a petulant child.

The great shieldmaiden was always a difficult patient—too stoic and silent when her pain was truly terrible, and sulky when it was only unpleasant.

“I will simply heave it into the bowl again!” Looking past her mother, she sent pleading eyes to Olga. “This is so much harder than the first time.”

That was true. Many days, her sickness with this child had her too weak to stand. Olga sat on the bed, too, and set her hand on Brenna’s foot, with the furs between them. “It will be better soon, I promise. Remember that before it passed in weeks, and you say that you were seeded weeks ago.”

Dagmar nodded. “Oili said it would be a hard carrying, but a strong daughter grows inside you.”

Brenna and Vali had returned to Karlsa victorious, but without most of their fleet. They had arrived in a smaller ship, and Brenna’s mother had been with them. Most of the warriors who had left Karlsa to fight Åke had stayed behind after their victory, to aid Leif in another coming battle.

There was more fighting to be done, but Vali had put Geitland at his back and brought Brenna home. And more that Olga didn’t understand: Brenna had forgiven Leif. Vali had not, but they were allies again. And both men were jarls. Vali had come home as lord of this place, and the people here rejoiced.

Olga thought of the princes of her world and the jarl she’d known of this one, and she couldn’t say that she was pleased to find her friend so elevated. There was something in such power that twisted men into monsters.

That Leif lived and was a jarl as well, that he was friend to Brenna and no enemy to Vali, confounded her. He was certainly an enemy to her. She would kill him happily, sneak up to his bed in the middle of the night and slide a blade into his chest, through the scars and into his black heart.

Brenna had come to Karlsa emaciated and badly scarred—and sure she was pregnant, even though she and Vali had been reunited barely more than a week, because a seer had told her so. Olga had been deeply skeptical that, after such horrible trauma as Brenna had clearly experienced, she could have been seeded, and know it, in so short a time. Not by Vali, at any rate.

But she had assured Olga that no one had violated her in that way. And she had, indeed, soon shown the signs of a babe growing. The seer had seen true.

Olga wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. The seer had also been correct, so far, about the difficulty of the carrying, but Olga couldn’t say whether that was true because it was true or because Brenna had expected it to be so.

At any rate, it was very difficult to keep food in her. Olga had tried every concoction she knew. Some of the growing things in Karlsa were familiar to her and others not. No one here had the full knowledge of a healer, so she had relied on the few who could and would give her some insights, and she had tested others on herself—and made herself ill a few times in the process.

Since Vali and Brenna’s return to Karlsa, Olga and Jakob had found the way easier for them. They were true good friends to the beloved jarl and his storied wife, and, again, they found protection and respect under his aegis. She was gaining custom among the people, and Jakob had found apprentice work with a shipbuilder.

Olga had found something to settle her broken spirit, too, with her friends home. Taking care of Brenna—and of Vali, who was deeply anxious for his wife and struggling not to overwhelm her with his care—had given her a thing to focus on. Something she could do. Something to make right and well.

It didn’t heal her, but it eased her, and that was enough. She had survived again and again when nearly all others had not, and when she wished she had not. She had survived the torture and servitude of her marriage. She had survived the pillaging of the coastal village. She had survived the raiders’ camp. The betrayal of the castle. The burning of the inland village and the deaths of her brothers. The sea voyage in the fishing boat.

She lost and lost and lost, and she lived on. She had finally lost herself, and yet she lived on.

If the earth was not yet ready for her, then at least she had her friends to care for and fill her days. At least she could feel the ease of their love and know that there was yet balance in the world for some.

Brenna took a tremulous sip of the tea Olga had brewed for her. She pulled back, a light frown creasing her brow. “It’s hot but tastes…cold. Like the tea you made before, when my son made me ill.”

Olga smiled. “Yes. It’s not the same mint as home, but it’s close, and I found a good winter berry—still young, but ripe. And alfalfa. The mint and berry will soothe, and the alfalfa will nourish. Go slowly, but it should stay.”