Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (6 page)

“Then why make war?”

“It’s our way, and what I know.” He put his hands before him and opened them so that the palms were up, side by side. “My worth is in my hands.” He made two fists. “To live as a warrior is to seek the next life. Valhalla, where the brave dead dwell among the gods. Do you know of it?”

She shook her head. Her brother had told her a few stories of the Northmen’s capricious gods, but they were not of her ken. “No gods live here. Only earth and sea and air, fire and flower, man and spirit. Here, all is one, and we know this life only until we go into earth to…to make balance. Understand? No seeking. Only living. Is life made of war…” She paused, seeking the proper way to express herself. “Is it not very tiring?”

Leif chuckled. “It is, yes. And invigorating as well. I am not unhappy in my life. But the calm I know here, it’s new to me. A respite.”

His fists were yet held out before him, and he had not shifted his gaze from them. Olga reached out and set her hand over them. His hands were large, seeming even larger coiled into fists as they were, and she felt the aura of his great strength all around her.

“Where there is always striving, always there is strife as well. Sometimes to be in one place is good. To be still.”

Leif stared down at her hand over his, and Olga said no more. Since she had first seen him, she had thought him different from the others. Now, she knew them all not to be monsters but men and women, good and ill in portion like any other, but Leif was still different.

Olga had never known sensual love. She had not been loved in that way, and she had not felt that feeling for anyone else. She had been used by men, more men than the raiders. She had been forcibly married and used liberally and harshly by her husband, and on two drunken occasions by his soldier friends. When she was free of him, she had been glad to have become a widow, beyond the notice of men. She had never wanted the attentions of another.

But sitting at Leif’s side, feeling his gaze on her fingers like true heat, Olga felt a stirring—and it was not the first time she’d felt it while with him. When he unfurled his fists and lifted her hand to his lips, she gasped. The brush of his golden beard against her skin made her fibers and sinews go taut.

Still holding her hand, he turned to her and brushed the fingers of his other hand over her cheek, then folded those fingers under and brushed the backs over the same path. She closed her eyes and savored that gentle, genuine touch. Her heart seemed to slam against the sides of her throat.

“
Ilus
,” he murmured. The word in her language for beautiful. She sighed.

If he had come closer and kissed her, Olga would have welcomed it. She wanted that beautiful, kind mouth, that full beard. But his hand left her face, and nothing more happened.

She opened her eyes. He was watching her, as if waiting for her to come back to the moment.

“Leif?” Her hand reached to stroke his beard, but he caught her wrist and held her away.

“You are a good woman, Olga. Beautiful and kind. I think you are much of my calm in this place. But this is not my home. You have been too harshly used already. I will not take you and leave, and I cannot stay.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to her forehead. “I cannot.”

Too stunned by the strength of her reaction, both to her need and to his thwarting of it, Olga could not find the words to argue.

~oOo~

Olga pushed Vali aside. “I cannot work with you like a wall between.”

He stepped back, not far, but enough to make room so that Olga could lay a cool compress on Brenna’s still forehead.

“Why won’t she wake?!”

Olga reached back and grabbed hold of Vali’s hand—it was a massive, hard block of flesh. “Here. Feel this. Gently.” She dragged his fingers close and set them on the lump at the side of Brenna’s head. “She struck something when she fell. But she breathes steady and deep. She will wake. Let her rest, Vali. Calm is what she needs.”

He drew his hands over his face and beard and walked away, to the end of the bed. “It has to be more. She is ill somehow. They said she dropped from the saddle. It is unlike her.”

Olga thought she knew. She had noticed over the past few days that Brenna was pale and cross—more cross than usual—in the mornings, and she had stopped taking a morning meal, then seemed more well later in the day. She and Vali had been married several weeks. Weeks of punishing winter storms, where there was little to keep busy in the castle. Frankly, Olga was surprised that Vali had not thought of it himself.

Satisfied that Brenna was as well-attended as she could make her, and that she needed only rest before she woke, Olga turned and settled her hands on her hips. “Leave us, please, Eha,” she said in her language to the village girl who had brought a full water jug. The girl nodded and left the room.

Vali watched her go, then brought his intense, worried blue eyes back to Olga. “Something is wrong. Tell me.”

With little hope that he would have an answer—men were absurdly squeamish about such things—she asked, “Do you know her cycle?” Since she was speaking in his tongue, his blank look told her that he had no clue what she meant for other reasons, so she rephrased. “Do you know when she bleeds? Woman’s blood.”

“Ah. I think yes. She bled just before we were wed, and this morning, she said she thought she was ready to do so again.”

She was impressed that he knew that much. But they had been wed nearly two months, and in her examination of Brenna this evening, she had seen no signs of her blood. “None since? You are sure?”

The giant’s cheeks went pink, and Olga smiled. What would it be like to know love like their love? It was not her fate to know, it seemed. For the first time since she was a girl, she wanted physical, earthly love, but she could not have it, not as she wanted it. Leif refused to see her as more than a friend. They saw each other, spent time alone together, every day, but since that last warm day on the hill, before Vali and Brenna were wed, he had barely touched her except in passing.

She could still recall in vivid detail the sensation of his lips and beard and breath on her skin—on her fingers, her forehead. And the skim of his callused fingertips on her cheek.

The low rumble of his voice when he’d called her beautiful.

As much as she’d grown to care for Vali and Brenna, as pleased as she’d been to watch their love blossom and grow, Olga knew real envy of them, too.

“I would know,” he said. “We…enjoy each other.”

“I am sure. Why did she think her blood was coming today?”

That pink deepened. “She was…sore. Her breasts.”

Unwellness at the morning. Dizziness. Lack of appetite. Sore breasts. No blood for two months. Yes, it was as she’d thought. “Vali, I believe that there will be a child.”

The color dropped from his cheeks. “What?”

“Brenna is with child. This is why she fell. The early months are weak months. She will feel stronger—right and well—in time, as her belly begins to grow.”

“A child?” He looked down at his sleeping wife, and a smile grew to take over his full face. It changed his look completely. “A child. Of course! Haha! This is great news!” He turned to Olga again. “When?”

After some quick figuring, based on what Vali had told her, Olga answered, “Midsummer, I believe.” Her heart sank a little at the word. Midsummer. When her new friends and this particular life would be gone. When Leif would be gone.

But that was the future, and time had not turned so far as that yet. Only this moment, this present, mattered.

In this present, she had friends, and they had joy. Olga smiled and did not resist the crush of Vali’s exultant embrace.

The winter had held on long—longer than it should have—but after months of brutal storms, they were finally seeing the signs of summer dawning. The day before had been warm enough to turn the land to mush and swell the river until it nigh burst its banks, but this next day had risen colder and hardened the earth again.

Still, the sun was bright and the air had the brisk scent of good weather not far off. The people of the castle and the village were in generally good spirits. Vali, riding next to him on this northward patrol, had been smiling all day, jesting with their group.

His friend was a man who seemed to have everything—a great love, good friends, and a child due in the nearing summer. He was at peace and seemed unconcerned about the precarious point on which all he had was balanced. On that point stood likely disaster and certain strife: Jarl Åke Ivarsson would not simply let Brenna God’s-Eye go.

The jarl would have no choice; Brenna was wedded and with child, and, even if Vali were to abjure Snorri and swear to his wife’s jarl—which Leif knew he would not do—Åke’s claim to her was lost. Unless Brenna herself declared otherwise, her husband had the greater claim.

Åke would see it as a betrayal—in truth, it
was
a betrayal of her sworn oath—and he was not a man who stood by and allowed loss to happen. There would be consequences when the ships arrived, and they would be considerable.

And yet he could not wish his friends the loss of what they’d found. He understood why Brenna would cleave to Vali and risk the wrath of the jarl. She had come to Åke as a slave and sworn fealty as a condition of gaining her freedom. A bond of loyalty made on such a condition of course had its limits.

Leif’s own oath had been made unconditionally. He had grown up in the Geitland hall. His father had been a close advisor to Åke, and upon his death in battle, the jarl had taken Leif under his arm. His life had been entwined with Åke’s as if they shared blood. It had been the jarl who had arranged his marriage to Toril, and he had been the first visitor upon the births of all their children.

There had never been a question of his allegiance, and though he did not agree with every choice Åke made, though he had observed the man he loved as a father become brittle and petty as his power grew and his age increased, Leif could not imagine what could possibly happen that might cause him to turn his back.

If such a cause existed, it would definitely not be rooted in personal interest.

While his fellows talked and laughed around him as they returned from this routine patrol along the boundary between Toomas’s lands and theirs, Leif watched the sun move in blue sky and felt melancholy. He liked it here in Estland. Never before had he known a life like this one, one of quiet and peace. Even as they prepared for a very likely battle when the warm sun settled down to stay, the air in the castle was peaceful.

And Olga. Over these months, Leif had grown deeply fond of that small, marvelous woman. Built like a wee woodland creature, yet with a steady, strong heart. Most days, she sat on the edge of his mind, a constant presence. And at night, when he was alone in his cavernous, quiet stone rooms, in a soft bed that had taken him months to learn to be comfortable in—then his mind’s image of her took over his body, too.

He knew she would be receptive if he went to her in that way. He saw it often in her captivating dark eyes, the desire to be closer. He felt it when he forgot himself and touched her—the way her body moved toward him, as if drawn by his mere touch. What he would give to have her, and he had only to go to her…

But he would not. Olga had become impatient and cross with him of late, taking to avoiding him when she could, and he thought he understood why. But he would not take her. He was sworn to Åke, and so he would be leaving Estland when the ships returned. Even were he inclined to ask to be released, or at least to ask to be allowed to settle here and be his agent in Estland, he knew that losing the God’s-Eye would be trial enough for his jarl. So Leif would not ask him to let him stay.

Vali had asked him if he’d thought about asking Olga to return to Geitland with him, and of course he had. But his world was of war, and she was a woman of peace. It was apparent whenever he was near her, even in their aspects. Her delicate, graceful, small body, her sweet, open face, her slim, pale, long-fingered hands—and his broad bulk, his scarred body, the gnarled stones that were his hands. There was no safe place for her in their unforgiving world. So Leif would not ask her to join him.

And he would not take her and then abandon her. Men had brutalized her; he would not be listed among them.

He would honor his word, and he would do what was right.

~oOo~

As they came within sight of the castle, Vali, riding at Leif’s side, made a sound that was part sigh and part groan.

“Trouble, my friend?” Leif asked.

Vali offered a rueful laugh. “No. No trouble. I’m only thinking of Brenna and wondering which wife will greet me when we return.”

“Ah. Her mood is changeable of late, yes. It is a part of the making of a child.” Watching Vali negotiate his wife’s pregnancy, and advising him as one who had experienced many, abraded an old wound in Leif’s chest, but the pain was not wholly unwelcome. The memories had a sweet taste as well as bitter.

“So you say. I seem to vex her most when I try most not to—and she discards reason on a whim. She would have ridden her horse to the village today! With her belly so round! When I made to keep her from that mistake, I would swear she would have cut me down had her sword been in her hand.”

Leif had watched Vali send off his wife this morning and knew that her ride to the village, seated on the sledge between Tord and Sigvalde, who were running supplies, had been the result of a tense negotiation between a pregnant woman at her wits’ end and a protective husband and father at his.

“It cannot be much longer now, and then she will be awash in love for the babe and for you.”

Vali grinned. “I hold such hope dear. Olga told her at least two more months. I will be lucky if my head is still on my shoulders by then.”

There was good chance that the ships would have returned by then. Vali would indeed be lucky to keep his head on his shoulders, but Leif doubted that Brenna would be the one to swing the sword.

He sighed and watched the castle grow nearer. Danger lurked just beyond them. Danger and loss.

~oOo~

It had lurked closer than he’d known—than any of them had known.

When they had reached the castle, old Orm had told them that the sledge hadn’t returned. It should have been back before they—long before they.

The sledge, and the village, had been attacked. By soldiers of Prince Ivan, whom they had discounted as too weak to be a threat to them. The village, all the livestock, and the men who had been working there—all lost. Sigvalde and Tord were lost.

Leif sat in the somber castle hall and stared at the fire while in a room above him Olga worked to save Brenna and her babe, and Vali, who would not leave his wife’s side, watched his family leaving him.

He and Toril had, together, buried four of their children, three of them when they were still swaddled, and one of those while her life cord had still dangled from her small belly. Alone, he had buried a daughter, and now their son Einar. He had also buried Toril and the child that had been inside her.

Until Einar, only Toril and that seventh child, a son, had been lost to violence.

While Leif sat in the hall, among likewise silent friends, and waited to know if Olga would save Brenna and her babe, his mind retold him the story of finding his own wife attacked.

He had been fighting in the center of Geitland, fending off attacking raiders, and he had not known of his loss until later, when he’d secured the jarl and had seen Brenna, then a slave, save Åke’s children and Hilde, his wife.

The fighting had been brisk and heavy around the hall. He and Toril had had a small house toward the edge of town, far enough from the hall that Leif had not thought them at risk.

He had been wrong. And he had come home to blood and gore and foul death.

On this night, with Brenna’s bloody body so fresh in his mind, his memory wanted to braid the two images together—of Brenna lying in the bloody snow, and of Toril at the fire pit, her hands still over her open belly as if she’d tried to save their child as it had fallen from her.

The blood had still been fresh and warm, the insides of their bodies still glistening. Had he been only moments faster, he might have saved them.

A blast of thunder rocked the castle walls, and Leif looked around reflexively. The others in the hall looked about as well, surprised and curious. Thunder in winter, even late winter, was unusual. Thor was announcing his presence.

Perhaps he had come to save the child.

Another pound of Thor’s hammer. And another.

“Thor is angry tonight,” Orm muttered nearby. “Foul deeds and sad news.”

“Yes.”

Before Leif could say more, a door crashed above them, and he stood. In moments, Vali rushed into the hall and immediately through it, toward the front of the castle.

In his arms he carried a small, bloodied bundle.

“It is over, then,” Orm sighed. “But what of Brenna?”

Leif didn’t answer; his attention was on his friend, who had just run out into the night, leaving behind a violent wake of stormy snow. Thor had brought winter back with him.

He followed Vali out to the castle grounds. Others followed as well, but he paid them no mind.

His friend stood in the middle of the grounds, holding the naked, impossibly small body of his child high above his head, while snow fell in thick white sheets and thunder and lightning crackled around them.

“HE IS THORVALDR,” Vali shouted into the angry sky. “AND HE IS YOURS. YOU HAVE TAKEN HIM ALREADY. WHAT MORE WOULD YOU HAVE OF ME? WHAT GREATER SACRIFICE WOULD YOU HAVE THAN MY CHILD? WOULD YOU TAKE MY LOVE AS WELL? BETTER YOU TAKE MY HEART FROM MY CHEST!”

His own chest aching in grief for his friend’s loss and remembered grief for his own, Leif put his hand on Vali’s back. Vali whirled, his braid flying, and glared furious pain into Leif’s face.

“Vali, my good friend. My brother. You tempt the gods.”

“I care not! Let them do what they will!”

But he would care. Time would blunt the edge of this loss, leave a bruising ache where slicing pain now dwelt, and Vali had much more left to lose. This was not the time to call Thor down as if Vali could face the god and win. “Your woman yet lives. You mean to give up before she has?”

Vali stood and stared, gasping in each breath as a growl. Snow coated his hair, his brows, his beard, but he made no notice.

Leif held out his hands. “Let me take your son. I will see to it that he is treated with care until you are ready to say goodbye.” He was unhappily practiced in such a farewell.