God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) (27 page)

The water was icy cold, and Igul was brutishly rough as he scrubbed the linen over her body. He was especially cruel—and especially thorough—at those parts of her body he thought his touch would shame her. His fingers, covered in the increasingly soiled linen, probed deep between her legs. He hurt her, and disgusted her, but she stood tall and silent. She would make him pay for this.

When he was finished, he dumped the bucket over her head. Then, while her body was still wet, he dropped a clean, light woolen shift over her head and ordered her to put her arms through.

“You still look like a half-rotted rat, but it will have to do.”

He shackled her again, with a longer chain, and the iron sat even more painfully now on her raw skin. Then he pulled on the chain and dragged her out of her prison and into the daylight.

~oOo~

The great hall was nearly empty. Åke sat in his fur-covered seat, his posture relaxed. His grown sons, Calder, Eivind, and Ulv, sat nearby. Leif was with them. And Viger.

Brenna had not seen Viger since before the feast in Estland. She remembered missing him at that feast. Now she wondered if he had been somehow instrumental in the betrayal. He must have been.

She stared long at Viger, until the man felt the heat of her contempt and looked away. Yes, Brenna thought. Viger would know the bite of her blade.

She had neither shield nor sword, of course. But that was a matter of details.

“Brenna God’s-Eye,” Åke said, drawing her attention to his seat. “How fare you?”

Before she tried to speak, she swallowed to be sure her tongue was not too dry to move. “I am well.”

He smiled. “You are strong, there is no doubt. There are few men who would yet be able to stand after so long in your circumstance.”

There was no question to be answered, so Brenna remained silent. She stared and waited.

“I bring you here, in private, to save your dignity. I would have you renew your oath to me. That is all I ask. And then you will be released to serve me as you did when first you came to me.”

“As your thrall.” It wasn’t a question. She knew the answer. And it was irrelevant in any case.

“Of course. You think that I would allow you to bear a sword after the way you’ve disrespected my fine care of you? Trust is lost, Brenna God’s-Eye. It must be regained. Perhaps someday it will. But for now, you will return to serve me and mine.”

She found her full height. “I will not. I abjure you.”

The smug, false benevolence with which Åke had been speaking, and the easygoing posture he had affected, vanished with those words. His expression went dark with violence, and he sat forward. “What power do you think you have to abjure
me
? I am your jarl!”

“No. You are not.” Brenna could just see, from the corner of her right eye, Leif reacting in some way. She didn’t need to change her focus from Åke to know that he was upset with her. But she would not yield. Let Åke try to break her. He would fail.

For a long silent moment, while tension crackled in the room, the jarl and the shieldmaiden stared at each other. Finally, Åke sat back, affecting his calm demeanor again.

“You will break, Brenna God’s-Eye. And I will watch it happen.” Looking beyond her, he addressed Igul. “You know where to take her.”

As Igul grabbed her chain leash, Leif stood. “Jarl Åke.”

Everyone turned and gave him their surprised attention. Åke seemed ready to order Igul to take Leif as well. “You have something more to say, Leif?”

Despite the obvious threat, Leif’s voice was steady. “She is the God’s-Eye. Do you not invite the gods’ displeasure to do her harm?”

Åke answered Leif’s question with his eyes on Brenna. “So you say. Yet the gods gave her to me, and she abandoned her oath. She lay with my enemy and wed him. The gods agree that such disloyalty must be punished.” He nodded at Igul. “Take her and prepare her. I think the rods will do. Let us see the limit of the God’s-Eye’s strength.”

~oOo~

Brenna knew fear, fear so deep her empty belly felt full of ice, but she didn’t fight. She was too weak to win, and fighting to lose looked like nothing so much as desperation. Igul took her into the room where Åke had his questioning done. Justice was meant in their world to be determined at a thing, democratically among the members of the community, but Åke had always meted out certain kinds of justice beyond the notice of his people.

She was stripped again, and then bound prone to a long table, stained dark with the blood of others before her. She knew what Åke had meant when he’d mentioned ‘the rods.’ Face-down, with her arms and legs shackled and bound to the table legs, she knew what would happen next.

For an infinite time, nothing happened except that the room warmed as Igul stoked the fire until it roared. Then the door opened, bringing with it a quick rush of cooler, fresher air, and Åke came to the side of the table her face was turned to. “You will break, Brenna God’s-Eye. You will beg for my mercy.”

She stared back and did not answer. No, she would not. All that was left to her was this. She would not break.

“Leif.”

There was a stunned silence, and in it, Brenna felt a tiny chip in her resolve. If Leif hurt her, she wasn’t certain she could withstand it.

“Åke, no.”

“You would deny me?”

“I would ask you, as one who loves you as a son loves a father, please do not ask this of me. I have chosen you and renewed my oath, but it was you who made the God’s-Eye my friend.”

Another long silence. Brenna focused on breathing, finding her shieldmaiden, the one who knew only fury and not pain.

Åke’s voice broke the tension. “Viger, then. Would you deny me as well?”

“No, Jarl. I serve your will.”

When the first red-hot iron rod was laid across Brenna’s back, just above her shoulder blades, the hot was so hot it almost felt cold, and the pain took a sliver of a moment to assert itself. Then it was completely encompassing, deep and wide, like a vast multitude of beasts clawing and biting their way through her body. She didn’t scream. She didn’t even have to fight the urge to scream. The pain was so enormous that none of the muscles in her body would work, not even those which would have impelled forth a cry.

The room quickly filled with the scent of her cooked flesh. When Viger pulled the rod up, he had let it cool enough that the skin caught and stuck to it.

Another rod was laid just below her shoulder blades. While it sat there, Åke leaned down and stared into Brenna’s eyes. Inside, her mind was shrieking, crying, begging. Her hands clawed at the table legs. But she did not allow her face to tense in any way, or her eyes to drift from his. If there was power in her right eye, she wanted him to know she was using it.

“Again.” He stood up and flicked his hand at Viger.

Viger lifted the second rod and laid down a third. By now, her body was so entirely racked with agony that this third rod had little it could add.

The fifth rod nearly undid her, however. Laid across her hips, just below her waist, it found skin tender enough that it broke through the limit of her pain and found a new place, so beyond comprehension that her mind simply stopped. Though her eyes were open, though she could hear, and smell, and gods, she could feel, inside she knew nothing. Only blackness.

“Enough,” she heard but did not understand.

~oOo~

When next her mind was clear, she was in her hovel again, this time shackled by her wrists to the wall, face-first. She was still without any stitch of clothing, but that was the least of her concerns.

The pain she had known while Viger had laid red-hot iron rods on her back was a distant memory, dwarfed by the pain she felt now, with her arms raised, both bunching and stretching the tortured skin of her back.

“You are strong and willful, Brenna God’s-Eye.” Åke was there. Had he waited and watched while she’d been unconscious? “It made you a valiant shieldmaiden. I was proud of you. I despise that you’ve made me do this. End your suffering now. Renew your oath and serve me. I will bring you into the hall and have your wounds tended as if you were my daughter. Then you can take up the duties you once had. I was not a hard master. Not to you.”

“I will not.” Her voice cracked with weakness, but she fixed her stare.

He sighed and dragged a pointed finger down the open skin and frayed nerves over her spine. A great explosion of pain—yet another new place—made her gasp and twitch, but she refrained from crying out.

“If you will not serve me as I wish, then perhaps I will give you to Calder. He has always liked your look and asked me more than once to give him leave with you. He will be glad to have my ban lifted. He is unfortunately harsh with slave girls, of course.

“I will kill him if he so much as touches me.”

Åke dug into a wound and turned his finger. Brenna could feel the pain stealing away her consciousness.

“Then I think there is breaking left to be done,” Åke said and took his hand away. He turned and left, and Brenna opened her mind to the blackness and let it take her.

~oOo~

She felt the painful soothe of healing paste, and heard herself groan, before she knew she was awake. She opened her eyes and shut her mouth, lest Åke hear her vocalize her torment.

She was prone on the floor of her hovel, but laid on a clean straw mat, and unchained. She tried to lift herself onto her elbows, but the pain was too great, and she was too weak.

“Be still, Brenna.”

“Leif. You are safe?”

He smoothed cool paste over another burn. “I am, but Åke is suspicious, and he is unhappy with my resistance yesterday.”

“Only yesterday?” It seemed as though she had lived a lifetime, or more, since she had been taken from Estland. Each day stretched into years.

“Brenna, please heed me now. There is little more I can do for you if you hold to this folly. I got you these comforts and healing because I argued with Calder that his father might yet risk the gods’ wrath by treating you so ill, and he counseled him. But I doubt Åke’s restraint will last long. He will not hear me on the matter of you any longer. If you are ever to be free and reunited with your husband, then you first must live now. Yield, Brenna.”

The mere idea of giving in to the man who had done this to her, and who had done much more, repelled her. “I cannot, Leif. I cannot be subject to him, no matter what he would do to try to force me.”

“I do not mean that you give up. Yield in deed, not in spirit. What opportunity can you have locked in this hut? If you are in the hall, perhaps you will find a chance to fight. But here, you will not. So tell him that you yield. He will be self-satisfied, and you will reap the benefit of that. He will heal you well and treat you like a pet. And there are people here we might bring to our cause. Let them see what Åke did to the God’s-Eye, beyond the circle of the thing. Then you might find your chance. But burned and weak, hidden away, you will not.”

Even through the shriek of the pain blasting from her back into her mind, Brenna heard the reason in Leif’s words. As Åke tried to break her, even if he failed, he would have weakened her beyond the point of any resistance but death. And that would be a victory for him, as well.

Could she pretend to have yielded? Could she behave before him as if she had been tamed, until she was strong enough to show him her bite? Could she wait for Vali and be strong enough to drive Åke to Hel?

Was she that strong?