Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (4 page)

And she could not ignore pain when it was so close and so obvious. She headed in that direction.

Leif was sitting on a large rock, his back to her. She recognized his leather and fur, and the long, loose mane of golden hair lying over it. He was folded over, his face buried in his hands, and he roared into his palms, again and again, a sound of pure misery.

This was, indeed, private pain. Deep and harrowing. He wanted to be alone. Meaning to turn and leave him before he knew she was there, Olga’s feet instead went forward, until she stood nearly at his side. He took no notice of her until her arm stretched out and her hand touched his head, stroking the length of his hair. Soft and straight, like spun gold.

He jerked from her touch and stood, his big hand gripping the pommel of the sword at his hip. His body was tensed to fight, but his face showed every shard of the anguish his voice had conveyed.

“You,” he said, but there was no accusation or malice in the sound. Only surprise.

“You have pain.”

His shoulders relaxed. “None that any healer can ease.”

Not knowing why she did so, Olga took the steps between them and laid her hand on his chest. “Pain of heart, then. Sadness.”

Leif stared down at her hand for a moment, and she felt the rise and fall of his breaths. Then he brought his own hand up and wrapped it around her wrist. He pulled her touch away and released her.

Again he said, “None that any can ease,” and he turned and walked back toward the heart of camp, leaving her in alone in the growing dark.

The captive woman’s touch seemed to linger even after Leif had left her, like a burn over his heart, although her skin had been many layers from his own.

She was small, so small. When she had come up to him and put her hand on his chest, that hand had been as high as her face. And delicate—her collarbones arced between her shoulders like an archer’s bow, and her limbs were long and slender. Her eyes were big and deep brown, like a doe’s, and her hair was likewise dark. It had been bound in a knot at the nape of her neck and wrapped in a scarf when Leif had first set eyes on her, but the trials of the camp had taken the scarf and unbound the knot, and the braid that remained dangled below her waist.

She seemed almost like a creature of Alvheim, beautiful and sensual, and not meant to dwell in this rough world of men.

He was glad to have saved her from further harsh use by his clansmen, but he could not save her completely. Calder would kill all the captives when they sailed. Even were he or his father inclined to traffic in slaves, and they were not, their plunder from the castle would be far too great to leave room for more than the raiders themselves.

At his thought of the castle, Leif’s mind returned to its place of horror and outrage, where it had been spinning when the woman had come upon him. He again saw Einar, his young son, the only surviving of his children, of his family—he saw his boy’s head displayed on a bed of greens, set out on a platter, his dead mouth and eye sockets stuffed with fruit.

He had but fourteen years. Leif should not have allowed him to join this raid, the boy’s first. But Einar had his arm ring. He was a man, not a boy, and he had made his choice. By the time Leif himself had had fourteen years, he’d been a year married and a new father.

That first child, and now all six of his children, and his wife, and the child she’d been carrying inside her—all were dead. Leif was alone.

Theirs was a brutal world, one of violence and early, gory death. It was the kind of death a warrior strove for—bringing with it entrance to Valhalla. Leif had been under no illusion; he knew well that Einar might lose his life on this raid, his first. Any of them might. Live by the blade, die by the blade. It was their way.

What the prince had done, however—that was a foul thing.

Prince Vladimir had thought it a grand jape to draw the raiders into the castle and insult and shock them with their young scouts, Einar and Halvar, arrayed like the main course of a feast.

Now the prince and all his nobles were dead, and the raiders held his castle and his lands.

But what Leif had done—he closed his eyes, but that only brought the memory into greater detail. Not the memory of the act; he had no memory of the act beyond the flex and pull of muscle and the sound of his own roaring agony. But he remembered the aftermath, the bodies of men and women—and children, young children—tumbled at his feet like so much dross.

They were his enemies, the people of the prince, and it was not he who had brought women and children into an arena of ambush. But it had been his blade, to great extent, that had opened young and vulnerable bodies.

Leif was sworn to Calder’s father, Jarl Åke, and he considered the jarl and his grown sons family. His only family, now. He had been close with the brothers all his life. Åke kept no prisoners beyond the encampment, and felt no compunction about the pain of those they attacked. Leif understood this to be the way of their people, and he made no judgment of any but himself.

In Åke’s service, Leif had killed hundreds of men and women. He had killed boys wielding blades too heavy for them to swing. And he had taken his plunder in raids. None of this caused his heart strife.

But he had left the raping of women and the killing of children to others with stronger stomachs and harder hearts than his. Bloodlust charged his body like any warrior in a fight, but for him, it diminished when the clang of metal ended. He could expend what was left with a simple warrior’s shout. He had no need to force himself on a terrified woman or slice open the babe in her arms to burn off the last of the rage.

Today, though, with the image his son’s abased head—all that remained of him—vivid behind his eyes, Leif had known a rage and a need greater than he could now recall.

And now he was alone, the last of his children dead, and the blood of other young ones on his own hands.

The pain in his heart could not be eased.

He would have to bear it.

~oOo~

Unable to sleep, Leif spent most of the night near the central fire, finally drifting off as the sky began to brighten.

He seemed to have closed his eyes for only a moment when he felt a nudge at his thigh and opened his eyes to see Calder standing above him. At least an hour had passed; the sun was not yet up, but the sky had turned to the grey that meant sunrise was near.

“Where is the God’s-Eye?”

Leif had seen her enter the healer’s tent the evening before, when they’d returned from the castle. Knowing that there was only one patient still in that tent, and knowing that the God’s-Eye had spent considerable time there, Leif sought something else to tell his friend.

Calder despised Vali Storm-Wolf. His father had allied with another jarl, Snorri, for this raid, and, though it had been agreed that Calder would lead the alliance, Vali was Snorri’s most trusted man. And he was a legend, an
Úlfheðinn, known for superhuman strength and ferocity and for a steady and loyal heart. Leif knew him also to have a quick mind and an agile way of speaking. He had Leif’s respect.

Though the jarls were allied, the history between them was full of conflict, and Calder had struggled to conceal his contempt for Snorri’s men. Vali, Calder’s chief competition—and, Leif thought but would never say, the greater warrior—bore the sharp focus of his enmity.

Jarl
Åke had a legend of his own: Brenna God’s-Eye, a mighty and valiant shieldmaiden, whom Åke and his sons believed had been given to them by Odin himself. Her strange right eye was said by their people to be Odin’s own, that which he’d given to Mimir in exchange for wisdom, and most people believed her to be a favored vessel for the Allfather himself. It was why no one dared look on her for long.

Leif knew the God’s-Eye well, perhaps better than most. He had trained her in the ways of the warrior. He knew her to be a solitary young woman, one who thought herself alone in the world and held loneliness before her like a shield. Though he had fewer than ten years more than she, Leif bore her fatherly feelings—not that she would perceive that or, if she did, welcome it.

If she had found a bond to another, even with a man who had once been and might again become an enemy, Leif was loath to interrupt it. And he certainly did not want to turn Calder’s suspicion in her direction. Calder was Leif’s oldest and greatest friend, but he had been raised by a hard man and taught that hardness was strength.

Leif loved the jarl, and he loved the jarl’s sons. He loved them for their good, but he did not pretend they were without their ills. Neither Åke nor Calder were temperate when they perceived a challenge or a threat, and they saw both in every dim corner.

If Leif told Calder that Brenna God’s-Eye had been keeping company with Vali Storm-Wolf, there might well be blood in the camp. So he said instead, “You know the God’s-Eye. She likely is off in the woods on her own.”

Calder grunted and looked out over the camp. “Walk with me, friend. I must speak today, and I would work out my thinking on your wise ear.”

Leif stood and went with his friend.

~oOo~

“You don’t seem surprised,” Calder noted after he’d explained his thinking.

“I am not. When we landed here, knowing that Finn’s raid took this shore not long ago, I assumed there was more than plunder you wanted. I would be more surprised if I am the only among us who considered that you intended to take the castle.” Leif took a breath and added, “I am surprised you thought it necessary to keep the knowledge close.”

“I mean to make a settlement here, and I mean to claim this all in my father’s name alone.”

Leif drew up short. Half of the raiders were sworn to Snorri. Taking claim of and credit for the spoils of the raid would break the alliance and be seen as an act of war. It had been Åke who’d sought the alliance in the first place. “Then why ally at all?”

Calder didn’t respond, and Leif stretched his mind for an answer. Before he could find one, Calder gave him an affectionate slap on the back. “Do not fret, my friend. All will be made clear. The seer has shown my father that the gods are with us. I tell you now so that your surprise is between us only, and so that your judgment will shape the way I speak with the others.”

Understanding what Calder needed of him, and what he expected of him, Leif considered his words. “Breaking the alliance here in Estland would tear the camp apart, Calder. Be temperate. Your father is jarl. If a move is to be made, it should be he who makes it.”

“But he is not here. It was
my
blade that washed Vladimir’s blood over the earth.”

Calder had grown impatient over the past few years to step out from his father’s great shadow. Leif saw that impatience at work now and sought a way to allay it.

“And you will have that glory. Return to Geitland and your father with laden ships. If we fight among each other here, we will take losses, and you will diminish the greatness of your return.”

After a long, heavy silence, Calder nodded. “You are wise, Leif. You see reason when I can only feel need.”

Such had always been true. Though Calder was the older of them, Leif was the wiser.

The men embraced and returned to the camp.

~oOo~

After the meeting, Calder stalked off on his own. Leif stood at the God’s-Eye’s side and watched him turn into his tent. The fabric shook as he drew the walls closed; his friend was angry.

Leif had not planned to volunteer to stay behind in Estland and hold the castle. But then Vali Storm-Wolf and the God’s-Eye had both volunteered, and Leif saw the trouble there. Besides, nothing and no one awaited his return to Geitland. The last of his family, his last son, was in this earth—what little of him they’d reclaimed. He was not ready to leave him behind.

“You should go to him,” the God’s-Eye said. “Make him see that it is right to leave strength behind.” She turned and stared at the healer’s tent, into which Vali had just returned.

Everyone, Calder perhaps especially, had been shocked to see the great man standing on his own power at the meeting, and speaking with a strong, true voice. Vali had challenged Calder’s claim and changed his intention, and Leif had seen the killing urge light his friend’s eyes.

But Leif believed the meeting had gone as well as it could have gone. A balance of both jarls’ raiders had volunteered to stay and hold the claim. At least in Estland, the alliance would remain intact, and Leif would do all he could to ensure that remained true.