Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (23 page)

Orm crossed his arms. “What good is this if we don’t know the place? The table in Estland showed us the place we were. This…thing shows us a place we don’t know.”

“Ulv has been there. He knows the way.”

“Ulv,” Vali grumbled. “Son of Åke. Are we to trust him? You should have killed him.”

“It was you, Vali, who told me that we do ourselves no good if we kill everyone who
might
be an enemy.” Leif turned to Brenna. “You know Ulv, Brenna. He swore to me while his brothers’ bodies lay at my feet. He has been true to that vow since.”

Brenna nodded. “I know him, yes. He was a disappointment to his father and, so, not much tutored by him in his ways. If Leif is satisfied that his oath is true, then I believe it, too.”

Vali studied his wife, and the table was quiet while he did so, until Leif broke the silence.

“Vali.” When he had the jarl’s attention, he pointed to a square with crossed lines atop it, in the center of a cluster of plain squares, just on the edge of the hide. “Ulv says that he believes this is where the gold and jewels were.” With a sweep of his hand over the map, he added, “Look.”

Everyone at the table leaned in. When they saw what he was showing them, they looked up, grinning.

There were two score boxes with crosses on them, strewn over the hide.

Vali leaned back and smoothed his hand over his beard. “You raided this summer, yes?”

“Yes. Good raids in the south.”

“You didn’t take Ulv to this magical place where gold lies about in heaps?”

Deciding to ignore the bite in Vali’s tone, Leif answered, “It’s too far for a small raid. Calder was cast off course to find it, and he almost lost two ships. We need skeids to make a true raid at such a distance, and my ships, like yours, are snekkjas. We need new ships and the men to sail them. We are allies, yes?”

Vali nodded. Brenna answered, “Of course we are.”

“Good. Then let’s ally and raid in the next summer.”

Bjarke cut in. “You assume that men will go so far from home. These are waters we don’t know.”

“Water is water,” Harald said. “Traders come here from far in all directions and seem to make their way. It cannot be so very treacherous. And we didn’t raid this year. Men will be eager to wet their blades in blood and carry gold home to their families.”

“Men and women,” Brenna corrected, her voice low but clear.

“Of course,” Harald agreed, blushing.

“But not you, shieldmaiden,” Vali said, and Leif knew that he had his raid. If Vali was already thinking about what Brenna could or could not do, then he had made his decision.

Brenna sighed. “I know. I will stay home with our daughter and keep your jarldom in order, and you will go and plunder.”

Vali kissed his wife’s hand and turned to Leif. “I will bring it to the people here, and we will all decide together, but I think the answer will be yes, we will build great ships and explore the world with you in the summer.”

~oOo~

That night, after the last meal, Leif sat in the hall drinking with seemingly everyone in Karlsa. Almost everyone—Olga, of course, was absent. He expected nothing else. His chest was a cold hollow, but he was accustomed to that emptiness. He worked to keep his attention on things he had some control over, lest his mind crawl into the dark loneliness and stay there.

There had been great enthusiasm for the idea of a new raid in a new place and the work their preparations would bring. The shipbuilder was especially pleased, as was Jakob, his apprentice. Leif noticed that Jakob treated the flame-haired girl who’d come on him and Olga that morning—he couldn’t recall her name—with a possessive gentleness. He wondered if they were mated.

He hadn’t had a chance to ask him, because Jakob did not seem inclined to be friendly.

While the revelry was in its fullness, Leif felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned toward Vali, who had come up at his side.

“Might we speak in quiet?”

Leif nodded, but he wondered whether he was walking toward an ambush. Brenna had retired with Solveig not long before. Perhaps Vali had been waiting until his wife wasn’t paying attention to finally exact his revenge.

He followed Vali out into a night that again had the crisp chill foretelling of winter rolling toward them. Vali went around the corner of the hall, and Leif’s senses heightened further, but he relaxed when Vali simply sat on a stack of crates near the back and gestured to another. Leif sat, too. Another bright moon shone over them.

“Brenna wants us to come to terms. But I don’t know how we do that. Every time I see her back, I think of you standing there, watching it happen,
letting
it happen, and I want to reach down your throat and tear out your heart.”

Maybe Vali meant him violence after all—but Leif didn’t think so. The words had not been said angrily.

“I know. Vali, I am out of words. I know of no more ways to apologize, and no other way to explain. If we are not friends, then I will accept it. I will not beg your forgiveness again.”

Vali nodded. “Have you seen Olga?”

He hadn’t expected the sudden change of topic, so Leif took a breath before he answered. “I have. She is not my friend, either.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. For her. I think I understand her in this.”

“Do you?”

“Perhaps. We are the ones who were left behind, and we nearly drowned in fire and blood, and then in the sea as well. We knew only that Åke had taken Brenna and destroyed us, and that you had helped him, and in that knowledge, we watched the little we had left fall into ruin. We struggled across an angry sea seeking vengeance against you as much as any other. Brenna says I don’t understand, and she’s right. But she doesn’t understand, either. And neither do you. I would let it go if I could, Leif. I remember our friendship and miss it. I remember that you took care of my son while I sat with Brenna. I remember that you counseled me that Åke was a threat to her, and I thought he was no match for me. If I had taken him more seriously, perhaps we might have been better prepared for what he did. I see my own fault, too. I remember that you were my good friend.”

Vali paused and looked out toward the dark water beyond the shore. “But I look at Brenna and see her neck, and her back, and each of the other scars she suffered in those weeks, and I cannot remember how to be your friend.”

Why they’d had to come out into the night to say things that had already been said, Leif did not know. He regretted making this trip; apart from the plans for raiding, all he’d done was tear open wounds that had at least scarred over. He could have sent Astrid to negotiate for the raid. He was heartbroken and exhausted, and he just wanted to go home.

“Well enough, then. Alliances don’t require friendship.”

Vali seemed truly disheartened. There was a small comfort in that, Leif supposed.

“I do believe that you didn’t betray us purposefully. I believe that you acted with good intent. But I do not understand how you thought it was right. I cannot forgive what you let happen.”

“And I cannot explain any better than I already have. I will not.” Leif stood. “So I will sail in the morning and we will make our preparations, and come the summer, we will raid together. We need have no other contact.”

~oOo~

As his ship left the pier the next morning, Leif stood and scanned the crowd. He had said his goodbyes to the few friends he had here, and Brenna had given him a hard hug. But he wanted at least to see Olga in the crowd, to catch a last glimpse of those wide, dark eyes.

She wasn’t there.

Just as he had given up and was ready to turn and settle in the ship, he caught sight of her, standing far apart from the crowd, alone near a house at the edge of a bluff, most of her dark hair loose and whipping in the wind like a flag. He raised his hand to her. She didn’t return the gesture.

After a lonely moment, he dropped his hand, but he couldn’t make himself turn away, not as long as he could see her. She stayed, too, at the edge of the bluff, and they faced each other until the horizon came up and took her away.

Olga had been wrong to think that coupling again with Leif would clear the darkness from her spirit. Being with him again had cleared the anger and the hate, but without those potent guardians, all that was left was love and loss.

She had fallen into an abyss of shadowy despondency after his ship had disappeared from view, and when that had at last abated, she was left feeling tired and ill. Her body was made of aches.

More than two months later, as Karlsa prepared for jul, their celebration of the winter solstice, Olga would rather have spent all her days abed. If it hadn’t been for Frida’s smiling face appearing every day to begin their work, perhaps she would have.

This time of year was much more difficult for Olga to bear here in Karlsa than it had been in her homeland. Here, there was a long stretch of days with no sun at all and only the barest lightening of the sky at the height of midday. The darkness weighed on her as if the sky were made of lead.

As the solstice approached, and the sun abandoned them completely, Olga’s mood sank more and more deeply into despair, and the toll on her body was heavy. Things inside her seemed to be shutting down. She had grown ill enough that she struggled to keep food down, and the work of making her most common healing aids—her salve for healing wounds, traveler’s tea for digestive difficulties, and trader’s vinegar for ailments of the breath—had begun to repulse her. Of late, she had simply sat and supervised Frida, whose skill had advanced to the degree that she needed little in the way of instruction.

Frida had been the center of gossip in the town lately, as she was many months married and still had a flat belly. Olga knew the reason: Frida made Jakob spill his seed on their bed. She was not ready, she asserted, to be a mother yet. She wanted to complete her training first.

Gossip or not, Olga was proud. Frida was a young woman who knew her mind.

On the day of the solstice, the first day of jul, the town began a celebration that would last days. That morning—an irrelevant notion in a world of night—Olga crawled from her bed, dressed in the near dark of her smoldering fire, and slumped to the hall, where Brenna had asked her to join the women to break their fast together and deck the hall for the festivities at the midday. She felt weary and nauseated, and the bright glow of hundreds of candles and a roaring fire and the happy chatter of women already at work nearly sent her hurrying back to the safe solitude of her house.

But Dagmar, Brenna’s mother, saw her and came over straightaway. She hooked her arm around Olga’s waist. “Come. We have warm food and good cheer today. Today is the beginning of new hope.”

It had been much the same in Olga’s world, though they’d had no gods demanding the death of living creatures for no purpose but their deaths. The winter solstice marked the bleakest, darkest day of the year, thus it marked the beginning of brighter days. Each day until the summer solstice would be a bit brighter than the one before. The sowing would return. New life would rise up. Dark became light. Death became life. Ice became fire. Balance.

~oOo~

Struggling against her inner sorrow, she’d had no appetite for the morning meal, and she’d sat quietly and listened to the happy chatter around her, taking her chance to play with little Solveig, who had half a year now. She remained a happy and sweet-natured child, much in demand by all the women. She sat on many laps, babbling and grabbing at all she could reach.

Brenna’s favorite cat, a queen named Lofn, after some goddess or another, stayed near the babe all day. She was enormous, her back as high as Olga’s knees, and her long, thick fur was the color of a morning fog. Seeming to have taken Solveig on as her personal charge, the cat sat near the babe and watched the people around them with regal green eyes. When Solveig yanked on a fluffy ear or clutched a fat handful of fur, Lofn simply turned and licked her until she let go.

Olga found her attention drawn especially to Lofn on this day. That cat seemed to have what she herself had lost: the ability to live in the world as it was.

But she was learning how to pretend. So she helped festoon the hall with fragrant pine boughs and, when she began to feel a bit better, she went out and helped hang bundles of food, and ribbons, and little carved wooden figures on the massive pines on either side of the great hall entrance. The people of Karlsa believed that spirits lived in the trees, but the deep cold and dark chased them away. The gifts were meant to entice them to come home and bring the warm with them.

To Olga, the trees hung with little packages and figures were pretty, and that was enough to warm her heart a little.

At midday, two men pulled an enormous boar into the meeting place before the hall, and Vali stepped into the circle of his people. The height of the day was nearly as dark as the deepest of the night, and the ring of torches was lit.

He held a sword high and spoke over the squealing boar. “Sunna is birthed by Sól after she is swallowed by the wolf. She shall ride, as the wolf dies, the old paths of her mother. We offer this boar to help her on her way.”

Olga didn’t know what most of it meant, but he had said the same words the year before. He bent and drew his sword across the boar’s throat. A bowl on the ground caught much of the blood. But Olga turned away. The sight of the blood made her woozy, and the death of the boar swelled her throat with pity.

~oOo~

Much of the jul celebration, like much of every celebration among her new people, consisted of consuming great quantities of mead. They toasted the gods again and again, and before the feast was over, men and women were beginning to keel over in drunken heaps. Those still celebrating didn’t take much notice; they went on with their toasting and singing and drinking and shouting, and Olga would have sneaked away to the quiet of her house if she hadn’t been sitting with Jakob and Frida, who would have fussed if she’d left.

Jakob had gotten well drunken himself, and he was singing along with everyone else, despite knowing only a few of the words. As one high-spirited song ended with a shout, his voice broke, and he began to cough. At first, it was just a quick bark, as if he’d inhaled something he oughtn’t have, but then it built on itself until he was doubled over and tears streamed from his eyes. Frida and Olga helped him to sit, and Frida filled his cup with mead and urged him to take a drink and wash away what vexed him.

At last the coughing ceased, and he worked a smile onto his flushed face. “I’m well,” he gasped, his voice as rough as a husk of bark. “I’m well.”

Olga smiled back and brushed his dark curls from his forehead. He was hot—but not the muggy heat of exertion. The dry heat of illness. She caught Frida’s eyes. “You’re not. You’re ill. Let us get you home to bed.”

He began to shake that idea away, but Frida slapped his shoulder. “Don’t be stupid, Jaki. If you’re ill, then you take care and get well quickly.” She set her hand on her husband’s forehead as Olga had done. “You are too hot. We go now.”

Another attack struck him as he bent to stand, and by the time it was over, he went meekly from the hall with them.

As Olga reached in to close the door, another song ended, and in that moment of quiet, she realized that there was a secondary chorus going on in the hall.

Many people were coughing.

~oOo~

“I believe it is borne on the breath. That is the most dangerous of all illness, because it is so difficult to keep it contained. The vinegar isn’t working. I am trying to come up with something new, but it is winter, and I have only the herbs I’d dried.”

Olga was overcome with fatigue, and she rested her head in her hands on her table, at Vali’s side. He sat there with Brenna. They’d come to her for understanding about what had happened to their town.

Four days after the solstice, more than fifty people now lay on pallets on the floor of the great hall, in varying degrees of critically ill. Six had already died.

Karlsa had a plague.

And Jakob and Frida were both among the sick. Bjarke as well. Thus far, Olga had remained well—or as well as she’d been before the sickness had taken over the town. She and Dagmar and some of the servant girls from the hall were tending to the ill.

But what Olga was seeing, she’d never seen before. The pace of the disease’s progress, the way it overtook the chest and the head and stole the breath and senses from its victims, it was beyond her ken and her skill.

Vali turned to Brenna. “You and Solveig must stay far from the hall. As far as you can. Go to Åsa.”

“The seer? Vali, no!”

He cupped his hand around her face. “She is farthest but still close enough for me to know you’re safe. This isn’t like when you were a girl, and you know that. You must go where you and our daughter will be away from this illness.”

“And you?” There was a strident note in Brenna’s voice.

“I am jarl. You know I must stay.”

Brenna didn’t protest further, though Olga saw torment in her eyes. She was nursing their daughter; she could not allow herself to be ill, so she could be of no help, and Vali was right—he could not abandon his people. He was a better jarl, and a better man, than that. If he took ill, he would die with them, but he would not leave them.

When Vali and Brenna were ready to leave, Olga stood to see them out. The room seemed to shake, and then she sat down again, hard enough to rock her chair. Vali crouched immediately at her side and put his huge hand on her face.

“You’re cool. That is good. But you feel ill?”

She took his hand away, setting it in her lap and holding it there. Brenna was at her other side, looking down with stern worry. “I’m not ill. Only tired. I don’t sleep much.” She looked up at Brenna. “You know that. But I’m not ill. The sickness is in the breath.” She took a deep, clear breath and smiled. “It does not have me.”

Brenna’s eyes went to her husband. “Vali, go to my mother and collect Solveig. I’ll be along.”

Vali looked from one woman to the next, then nodded and stood. “Do not tarry.” He kissed Olga’s cheek, and his wife’s mouth, and he left.

When he was gone, Brenna turned to Olga. “When Leif was here, did he bed you?”

Olga blinked, surprised by the question, but not by its directness. Brenna was nothing if not direct. As she tried to decide how much to tell her friend, understanding dawned about why she had asked.

“Brenna, no. I cannot be. I…I cannot bear children. You know that.” Over the course of their friendship, they had spoken often and deeply about their lives. No one knew Olga as well as Brenna did.

“And you are sure this is true?”

“I’ve never been seeded again since my son. Years ago. Yes, I am sure. This—how I feel—is only sadness and weariness coupled with work and worry for the ill. I will rest before I return to the hall, and I will be well.”

Her friend’s expression softened into compassion, and she set her hand on Olga’s shoulder and squeezed softly. “But Leif fathered many children with his wife. Seven children. Perhaps his seed is more powerful than most.”