Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (30 page)

It was Olga who changed their tempo. Leif had found a level place from which he could control his own need, and he was focused there, determined to be slow and gentle and to ease Olga to her enjoyment of this way.

But there came a point when slow and gentle clearly was not enough for her. Her hips began to rock back when he pulsed forward. Each time, she grunted, and the next would be a bit more vigorous, until she was rocking back hard, and Leif had to pay close attention lest she take him more deeply than she could stand and send this whole beautiful moment into disaster.

When she released, she wet his hand and clamped down around him with such force that she pulled his release from him before he was aware that he’d been so close. He dropped his head to her back and groaned, his body flinching with each spasm of her sheath.

As soon as he could form words, he asked, “Are you well?”

Her reply was slow in coming. Just as worry flowered in his belly, she muttered, “Thank you.” Which was not precisely an answer to his question, but it served well enough.

Chuckling, he pulled slowly free of her, then lifted her into his arms. He climbed into bed and settled in with her cradled in that way. He spent the night holding his wife and his child as they all slept.

~oOo~

“Enough. Get OUT, Leif!” Birte shouted, shoving him back from his own bed. “NOW.”

“I am not leaving!” To emphasize his point, he shoved right back past Birte and went to Olga and grabbed her hot, damp hand. “I’m with you, my love. I’m here. I’m not leaving you.”

His wife turned her flushed face, dark hair plastered over it, and looked him in the eye. “Get out, Leif.”

“What? No! I told you I would be here! I am here!” He turned to Birte. “You know I cannot leave. My place is here.”

Before anyone could answer him, another pain took hold of her. While he clung to her hand, and she closed her hand around his fingers with ten times the strength he’d believed she had, Birte went to her other side, muttering at him all the way, and helped Olga to come up into a crouch. The midwife, Gyda, sat between Olga’s legs, staring intently, her arms deep under Olga’s gown.

He had expected yelling. Toril had screamed and screamed with every birth, but Olga had yet to make a sound while she was in the midst of the pain. Even when she spoke during the moments of relief, she only whispered. It made Leif worried.

All of it made Leif worried. This was his eighth child coming, and sooner than was thought. Olga was greatly round and very much ready—in mood, at least—to deliver, but it was still early in the season, and, knowing precisely when she had conceived, she had said it would be midsummer.

His eighth child, and he had none living. Yes, he was worried. He was consumed by fear.

The pain passed, and Birte laid Olga back and went to talk to Gyda. Again, Olga looked at him. “You have to go, Leif.”

“I told you I would not leave you. I swore. I must be here.” Olga’s ways were not yet always his ways, but his place was with her. At her side.

She smiled and patted his hand. “I don’t want you to leave Geitland. I want you to leave the room. You may even stay in the hall, as long as you keep a closed door between us. But I need you to leave.”

“Why?” He heard the petulance in his voice, but he was hurt and…petulant. “You let Vali stay with Brenna.”

She laughed lightly and then rearranged her features and made them serious. “Your worry fills this room. It makes me tired. Don’t go far, but let me do this work. It is bloody and painful, and you are too anxious. I love you. Let me bring our child.”

“Olga…”

She pushed him gently away, and then another pain came on her, and Leif let Birte push him even farther back. He kept going, backing to the door and then out of the room.

He closed the door and went no farther. Dropping to a crouch, he stayed at the side of the door and waited, with no plan to move until he was allowed back in that room.

However, being still was impossible. So he stood again after only a few moments and began to pace. It was midday, but the hall was nearly empty. Only two servants and the random livestock that had wandered in kept him company.

The silence beyond the door was killing him. Shouting would have been preferable to this strangling quiet that told him nothing. Stalking around the hall, picking up a retinue of chickens and a lamb, he tried to force peace into his mind and think. She had been having her pains all the day, since before sunrise. Since even before that—she had woken him before sunrise to tell him she needed Gyda, but she had already been having pains by then. Now they were not far apart. That meant the babe was coming soon.

He had been with her all through the day, until now, when the time was near. It infuriated him to be closed away from the birth of his own child. It was wrong.

Time passed, and Leif paced, and fear chewed and chewed at his heart until it was raw, and still nothing but silence on the other side of the door. Occasionally, he pressed his ear against the wood, but he heard nothing. How could that be? She was bringing a child from her body! Had she lost consciousness?

And then she screamed. Loud and long—and then abruptly stopped. He was across the hall, and he fairly leapt back to the door. As he yanked it open, the first sound he heard clearly in the room was the cry of a newborn babe.

Birte’s face was the first he saw. She rolled her eyes at him and shook her head. “I would have called for you in a moment. You have a son. A fat, loud boy.” She stepped out of his path, and there was Olga, pale and exhausted, drenched in sweat, but smiling hugely, letting thick streams of tears run down her face. In her arms was a beautiful, beautiful boy, naked, covered in slime, and bawling angrily.

Ignoring the other women in the room, his frustration and offense for being sent away forgotten, Leif went to his wife and sat on the bed at her side. He kissed her forehead and then cupped his hand over his new son’s small, utterly bald head. At his touch, the boy’s cries stopped, and he turned his scowling face toward Leif.

“He knows who you are,” Olga whispered. The boy turned to her voice.

“And you. He knows his mother.”

“I never thought to have this—to hold my own child and have him see me.” She sobbed and cut it quickly off.

Leif leaned in, sheltering his son and his wife with his body, and wrapped his arms around them. Olga lost her battle and began to weep, and their son picked up his wailing as well, and Leif could not have been happier.

With a sharp pat on Leif’s shoulder, Birte separated them. She took the babe from Olga, who was reluctant to let him go. But, knowing the rituals, Leif laid his hand on her arm and nodded.

“The life cord,” Birte reminded him.

He turned and leaned over Olga’s belly. Picking up the thick, stiff cord that still bound mother and child together, he bit down on it and severed that connection.

Birte washed the boy while Gyda washed Olga and removed her soiled shift and the linens from the birth. Leif stayed close, holding his wife’s hand. Now that his anxiety was behind them all, no earthly force would move him.

When Birte returned their son to them, they saw that he was looking for his first meal. Her expression suffused with serene happiness, Olga, bare now, offered him a breast. He rooted around for a moment and then latched firmly on.

Leif’s reaction to that sight was potent and immediate—so much so that he gripped his thigh and squeezed his eyes shut as he fought it off. When he had control of his base urges, he looked up and was face to face with Birte, giving him a disapproving and far-too-knowing frown.

Olga had seen him, too; when his eyes met hers again, she smiled, and he thought there was a sheen of sultry heat in that look. But then she turned her eyes back to their child.

“What shall we call him?”

Leif studied the boy in his love’s arms. His perfect, bald head. His sturdy little arms and legs. That scowling, serious face. “Magni.”

“Magni,” Olga tried out. “Mighty one.”

“Yes. He is mighty. Conceived where there was no hope and brought forth where hope thrives. All his doing before he took a breath.”

“It is a good name.”

“
Äiu, äiu, kussu, kussu
,” Olga crooned in a whisper, brushing her fingers over Magni’s satiny head as he nursed. “
Maga, maga, maimukene
!”

Leif slept at their side, facing them. He had been long away that day, riding out into the countryside to speak with farmers and make arrangements for their yield to come into Geitland for trading. He had returned exhausted and distracted, and she didn’t wish to wake him.

“
Tsuu, tsuu, suuremasse,
” she sang, seeking to keep her son calm. Already, only two weeks in the world, Magni was a serious little soul. He knew what he wanted, and he complained mightily when he didn’t get it. He liked her to sing while he fed, and he didn’t much care if his tired father would be disturbed by his mother’s crooning—or his own screaming. “
Kasva, kasva karjatsesse, äti nänni pikkutesse
.” She kept her voice a whisper, but he opened his eyes and furrowed his brow when she paused.

“I like to hear you sing, too. It soothes me as it does him. You needn’t whisper.”

Leif had spoken with his eyes closed, so he didn’t see her smile. She reached over and brushed her fingers across his mouth.

“I wanted you to sleep.” She always tried to keep her voice in a singsong rhythm while Magni fed.

He opened his eyes and took hold of her fingers, pressing them to his lips for a kiss. “I feel far more renewed awake in your presence than asleep anywhere, even at your side. How was your day?”

“Long, without you. But good. We took a walk through the town.” Since the rituals for Magni’s naming the week before, they had stayed close to the hall. One of the townspeople observing had had a hard cough, and Olga had been badly frightened. Leif had had the sick person removed and sent Birte after him for care, but they had both been glad to keep Magni from the public for a while longer.

The cough had been a cough, nothing more. Even that man had not been truly sick. Once assured of the truth of that, Olga had wanted to be out in the sunshine with her son. He could not grow tall and mighty cooped up under a roof. Still, she had kept him swaddled in the sling she’d worn across her chest, and she had not allowed curious fingers to probe at him.

Now, Leif cocked a concerned eyebrow at her. “Alone?”

“Sigrid was with us. But we don’t need a guard. You are beloved here, and your son and I bask in that light as well.”

“I would have someone I trust with you always, when I cannot be. My talks did not go as well as I would like. Perhaps I am not so beloved outside the town itself.”

Olga traced her finger over the long, wide scar that bisected his chest. Pale, ruched skin where no hair grew, thickening into a web of scars directly over his heart. “Do they not see the man you are?”

He smiled. “No one sees me as deeply as you do, my love. But they do see my failings. In my time as jarl, I have given too much of my attention to the town and to…other matters.”

“To me, is what you mean.”

“To my family.” He bent down and kissed Magni’s head. “Where my attention was most needed. But my holding ranges far more widely than this town, and I have neglected those who work the fields that feed us. Today, I was reminded. Forcefully.”

“Forcefully?” She didn’t like that word at all, but at that moment, Magni unlatched and began to protest the interruption of his meal. Olga hushed him and resituated herself so that she could offer him a full breast. Now, her back was to Leif, and he made a rumble in his chest as their son latched again.

Leif’s arm came around her, and his hand settled on Magni’s bottom. Olga felt his sex grow against the back of her thighs, and she smiled. He had never yet acted on the need he felt when she nursed, and she would not want him to, even were her body ready to accept him again, but she did enjoy feeling his desire. Feedings like this, in the dark hours of the night, the three of them wound together in their bed, were the happiest moments of her life—a life that had become filled with happy moments.

She thought of all she had been through and knew that it had all brought her here, to this life, this home, with a child of her own and a love deep and true. She thought of that, and she could remember that the world kept its balance.

But her worry at Leif’s comment had only been interrupted, not abated. “Forcefully?” she asked again.

“Shhh.” He kissed her head. “Do not fret. There was no violence. Only anger—anger I deserved. I will make some changes. It seems that I was more influenced by Åke’s way of leading than I’d thought.”

That old jarl’s way of leading was cruel and irrational. She didn’t believe Leif was like him at all. “What do you mean?”

“I had forgotten that the sun doesn’t rise and set only in sight of this hall. I think I would like to ask for your help, my love.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him. “How can I?” Her days as a healer were over. Geitland had Birte and Gyda, and she had Magni to devote her attention to—and to keep away from the sick. Since his birth, she seemed to have developed a strong fear of contagion.

“You are calm incarnate. You know how to speak among people at odds, even when you are at odds yourself. I think more than your skill with herbs, your power is there—in your ability to heal the spirit. I think you will grow to be the true beloved between us, in the eyes of our people. You
are
heart’s ease.”

“Perhaps once, I was that way.”

“And again you are. Do you not see that you have healed your own spirit as well?”

“You did that. And him.” She lifted Magni’s hand from her breast.

“No, my love. You only let us in. You reclaimed your spirit and chose.”

~oOo~

One evening not long after the solstice, when the sun was in its low place, approaching the twilight glow that was the fullest dark of a midsummer night, a large trading ship came close to the shore and dropped its anchor.

The hall had been in the quiet stage of the end of the day, when people retired to their own homes and beds. Magni had a rash on his bottom and had been unhappy and sleeping poorly, so Olga and Leif were in the hall, taking turns walking him around the room, which seemed to give him some ease.

A town guard came in and reported the news to Leif, who handed Magni to Olga. “Go back to our quarters.”

“A trading ship is trouble?” she asked, worried. The trading ships coming to Karlsa had been exciting events—but it was true that Vali had been cautious in his greeting of them.

“It is until I know it’s not.” He took his sword and strapped it to his back, and he slid his axe into its ring on his belt. “Go back to the quarters with Vifrid and bar the door.” He waved to the servant girl he’d named and pushed all three of them toward the private door.

Vifrid barred the door, and Olga paced with Magni, wondering if her newfound happiness were at its end so soon. She clutched her son to her chest, so tightly that he complained and struggled, but she would not let him go. Her heart pounded and made her feel ill.

Years and years seemed to pass in that way, until there was a light pounding at the door, and then Leif’s wonderful voice came, muffled by the thick wood between them. “Olga. All is well.”

Smiling, Vifrid unbarred the door, and Olga ran to Leif, more frightened, now that it had passed, than she had known.

He held her and their son in his strong arms. “I don’t know this captain, but I know his second. They come for trade and not trouble. They will rest tonight at anchor and come to moor in the morning. I’ve sent Ulv and a few others out to bring word to the countryside. We will have a few days of excitement, I think. None will take it amiss if you would rather keep Magni away from it. But it could be a help to me if you were seen. Especially for our own farmers.”

Olga had loved the trading ships in Karlsa—so mysterious and exotic, with so many new colors and flavors and tastes and smells. “I will leave Magni with Vifrid or one of the other girls, and I will be with you. I would like to see what they bring.”

Leif smiled and lifted her chin. “More silks, perhaps. I like you in silk. And out of it.”

~oOo~

Olga and Leif wandered together through the market that had arisen at the docks. She did not see the anger Leif had spoken of on the night a few weeks before, when he had met with the farmers and shepherds. On these days, while the traders were here and commerce boomed, goodwill floated in the air.

Their farmers hawked the season’s first millings of grain and carts of vegetables to the traders, shepherds and the butcher worked together to offer fresh meats, the smith was hard at work repairing weapons and gear, and the leatherworker and carpenters were likewise flush with new projects. All of that was good for Geitland, and Olga did her part as wife of the jarl, making conversation and sharing in the festive feelings.

But none of that was her true interest. What she loved were the barrels and crates and vast bowls laid out by the traders, full of splendor and beauty the likes of which could not be found in their cold, earthy world.

Leif had brought a fat pouch full of coins in gleaming silver, gold, and bronze. He haggled with the silk trader, and the spice trader, and several other purveyors of wonders, and behind them, Gulla, one of their serving girls, labored under the weight of a large basket full of Olga’s new bounty.

He stopped at a dark-skinned man who displayed no wares but was spectacularly adorned with jewels. When Leif beckoned with a subtle flick of his hand, the man produced a large silk pouch from his clothes and opened it so that it sat on his two hands like a blossoming flower.

The pouch was full of jewels, smooth and faceted, loose and in settings of precious metal. Olga peered in as Leif probed through the pouch. Everything he lifted to examine took Olga’s breath away with its exotic perfection, but he discarded piece after piece, jewel after jewel. Finally, he pulled a gold chain from the pouch. Dangling from it was a vivid green jewel, elaborately faceted and shaped like a teardrop.

“You pick well, my lord,” the trader approved. “That beauty from far, far away. Many travels it takes. It called
emerald
and very rare.”

Leif held it up, and it caught the sunlight and sent it dancing between them. Olga couldn’t help the delighted gasp that escaped her lips.

The trader’s smile was oily with anticipation. “Great beauty like your lady need gem worthy. Twenty gold for such treasure.”

Olga sighed. That was far, far too much for a pretty.

Leif turned back to the trader. “No gem could approach my wife’s beauty. This is no more worthy than any other.” He set the emerald back in the wide pouch and took her hand to turn away.

“No offer, my lord?”

With a subtle smile for Olga only, Leif answered. “Ten gold.”

She nearly gasped again. So much yet!

The trader frowned. “So rare, my lord. Worth so much more than that.”