Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (15 page)

Olga picked up her knife from where it had lain on her worktable. She would not stay hidden. Women who hid themselves ended up turned over a table or shoved into stone or earth. They were taken. It was the way of things.

She would never be taken again.

She would kill anyone who tried, or she would kill herself. One meant the same to her as the other now. But she would not be taken. Never again.

Kalju stared at her with eyes wide and wild with fear. The pitchfork shook in his hands. But when she tried to take it from him, to take over and protect the boy, he stilled his muscles and stiffened his spine, and he pushed her back.

“I won’t let you be hurt, sister.” His voice barely shook.

~oOo~

The soldier who would kill Kalju came through the door with a flaming torch in one hand and a sword in the other. Olga’s little brother shoved his pitchfork forward with a high-pitched warrior’s shout, and the tines went through the looped mail of the soldier’s armor but got caught before much damage had been done. The soldier knocked the fork away, knocking Kalju back as well. He fell into her worktable, upending a basket of dried grasses Olga had planned to bundle as that night’s work.

With a malevolent grin, the soldier dropped the torch onto Kalju’s chest. The dried plants and his light linen summer tunic went up like the ripest kindling, and her brother began to scream.

Olga held back her own scream and ran forward, leaping onto the soldier’s back. She buried her little knife in the nape of his neck, pushing upward, into the meat under his skull. He flailed for a few short seconds, then dropped to his knees, and then his face.

Her brother’s screams nearly overwhelmed the sounds of battle and death that rang in the air around them. Olga lunged for the water bucket and dumped it over him. He screamed louder as the flames died and steam rose over his body. He screamed and screamed, and Olga saw the blackening skin melt and slide over his face and neck.

There was no healing for him. There was no herb to take this pain away.

There was only one thing.

She knelt at his side and sank her blade into his chest.

~oOo~

When Kalju was gone, Olga set her knife aside and stood. She picked up the sword of the dead soldier and went out into the battle.

There was no thought in her head as to what she would do out there. Her thoughts were consumed by young Kalju, who had known no mother but her. Her mind whirled with the sight of him burning, the feel of the knife sinking into his heart, the smell of his cooking flesh that filled her nose. There was no room for any other thought.

She picked up the sword and walked through the door as if called to do so by a force beyond herself. She walked out and through the town in what might have been a straight line, only barely aware of the fighting going on around her, and of the smell of fire and smoke. The overwhelming smell of fire and smoke and burning meat. The whole town crackled and waved with fire.

“Olga!” Anton shouted in her face, and she came back to the moment. His face was covered with blood. He still had his scythe, and he had picked up a shield as well, one of the thick, round wooden shields the raiders carried. “What are you doing? Where’s Kalju?”

Words failed her, so she shook her head. Grief made a wave across her last brother’s face, and then he threw the scythe away and yanked the sword from her hand, shoving her hard from him as he did so. She landed on the ground and scrambled back to her feet just as a soldier charged in and swung.

Anton was insufficiently trained, but he blocked the blow with the shield and then swung the sword. The scythe had been a better weapon for him. The soldier brought his sword up under the attack, and the sword Anton wielded flew away with such force that it made a loop in the air. Next, his raider’s shield went flying, this in Olga’s direction. It landed within her reach, and she grabbed for it, meaning to get it back to her brother somehow.

Before she could, Anton fell, his throat gaping and his lifeblood gushing.

Then the soldier turned on her. With the shield still in her hand, she screamed and threw it up, and the sword bashed against the wood so hard her whole body, all the way to her teeth, shook.

He swung again, and she managed to block him again. And again. Her arms sang and screamed from the force of the blows.

On the next blow, she blocked again, but this time, the shield broke right in twain.

He swung again, and Olga knew she would die in that moment. She didn’t care. She was glad, in fact. She would go into the earth, and this hard life would be over, and she was glad.

But then the soldier’s sword fell to the ground, along with half his arm, and Vali was there.

She should have been dead. She wanted to be dead.

He shouted something at her, but she didn’t understand him. She understood nothing.

~oOo~

Of all the raiders, and all the villagers from Vladimir’s and Ivan’s lands both, only twelve people remained alive: five raiders and seven villagers, eight men and four women. Vali had gotten those few safely back to the castle.

Then he had brokered a truce with Toomas, one that ceded all the land to the last prince and allowed the twelve of them to sail away. In a fishing boat modified with a strange sail. Over the open sea.

Vali had brought Olga back to understanding with the promise that Leif would pay for what he’d done.

She now understood one thing clearly, and one thing only: hatred. There was nothing left to her but that.

So she sat in the rickety boat with the few people left known to her in the world, and she watched the only world she’d ever known recede into the horizon. She would go to the place where Leif would meet his justice, or she would die on the way. There was nothing else.

The world kept its balance.

“She’s strong, Jarl. A bitter bitch is what she is. I could soften her up, though, if you’d let me—”

When Åke flicked his hand, Igul, the fat sloven who did the jarl’s darkest bidding, closed his mouth and let his sentence go unfinished.

“You’ll not touch her. She is the God’s-Eye, and she is mine to do with as I please. But you say she is not tamed.”

“No, Jarl. She kicked out this morning, and tried to spit at me with her dry tongue.”

Leif sent a sidelong glance to Calder. They had spoken this morning, and Leif had tried to convince the jarl’s eldest son, Leif’s own old friend, that Åke tempted the gods with his treatment of Brenna. He needed Calder to speak for her, because Åke was growing suspicious of Leif and his reservations. Thus far, he still had Calder’s ear, but he was losing the jarl’s.

He hadn’t considered the consequences for himself if he lost favor completely. They would be dire, but that truth didn’t change what he had to do.

They’d been back on Geitland soil for days, and Brenna was chained to the ground in a grimy hovel at the edge of the town. Her health and strength had deteriorated badly. Åke waited for her to break—to beg for food and water, for herbs to curb her fever, for anything, but to beg.

She never would, no matter what the jarl did, and Leif knew it well. She hadn’t died already in Igul’s brutal care because Leif himself had been sneaking her bits of bread and water, meat as he could get it, and herbs to make her well. More well. Slightly less ill.

He had Brenna’s trust again, and it had been not so hard to win it back. When he told her that Vali still lived—he hadn’t suggested any doubt on the matter; doubt would not give her strength—and that he’d done what he had to save them, she had simply believed him. Perhaps it was her desperate need of a friend, chained as she was and starving, or perhaps it was their years of familiarity and goodwill, but she had taken him at his word, and he felt her trust as a great boon.

Now he balanced on the edge of a blade, trying to stay in Åke’s good graces and so have power to protect her and know where their opportunity might come to deliver justice unto the jarl, and trying to keep her alive and as strong as he could. But every time Leif spoke on the matter of Brenna now, Åke stared long at him, and Leif could feel in that questioning gaze the erosion of the jarl’s trust.

It would do Brenna no good if Leif ended up chained beside her, or if his head turned up impaled on a pike.

He needed to convince her to yield. Not to beg, and not to give up. To yield in deed and not in spirit. To make time for them to wait for Vali’s return—or to find their own moment—and destroy Åke for all the destruction he’d wrought.

Now Åke said, to no one in particular and everyone in general—his sons Calder, Eivind, and Ulv; Leif; Viger; and Igul—“Then she must desire more attention from her jarl.” To Igul, he said, “Clean her up and bring her here. We’ll see how strong she is.”

~oOo~

In will, Brenna God’s-Eye was strong as ever she had been. She stood before the jarl, in a dingy, rough-spun shift, her body and hair carelessly washed, leaving soft swipes of mud and grim over her skin, her matted hair a damp clump. She was shackled at the wrists and neck, and Igul held a chain from her neck like a leash.

Åke sat in a grand chair covered in furs, a chair that Olga would have called a throne.

But Brenna’s back was straight as a spear. Her head was high, as if she had no care for the vicious shackle tearing at her flesh below it. Her eyes were fiery sharp. She had a habit in battle of staring with her eyes somehow widened in the center and tightened at their outside points. The effect made it seem as though she were focusing her strange right eye particularly on her target. Her warrior face. Leif had seen men falter at that look before she had as much as lifted her sword.

She turned it now on Jarl Åke.

“I abjure you,” she snarled, spitting each word like a weapon itself.

Åke had been behaving as a long-suffering jarl who only wanted to put unpleasantness behind them. He had offered to ease Brenna’s hardships by making her his thrall again. Enslaving her anew in exchange for a fresh oath of fealty.

It was that so-called mercy that Brenna had spat back at him.

Åke gave up the pretense of kindness and surged forward in his chair. “What power do you have to abjure me? I am your jarl!”

“No, you are not,” the brave shieldmaiden replied. She might have been standing before them with her sword and shield at the ready, there was so much confident strength in those words, even as they came from a throat gone too long with too little to wet it.

The room crackled with tension, until Åke sat back with a sigh and relaxed his posture again. “You will break, Brenna God’s-Eye. And I will watch it happen. You know where to take her.” The last sentence, he’d spoken to Igul, who stepped forward, rattling the chain by which Brenna was tethered.

Åke meant her to go to the dark room, where he perpetrated torture and torment on people he’d deemed unworthy to be judged at the thing. Shocked, Leif stood. “Jarl Åke.”

Every eye in the hall turned to him. The jarl’s narrowed dangerously. “You have something more to say, Leif?”

In that room, Brenna would be broken. No one could withstand the agonies arrayed there. He had to save her from that. He took a breath and, through sheer will, kept his voice steady. “She is the God’s-Eye. Do you not invite the gods’ displeasure to do her harm?”

This was a refrain Leif had sung often since he’d returned to the jarl’s company, and he knew its power was weakening, but he had no stronger course that might hold sway. Calder was still moved by such an argument, and his father still gave it heed. Fear of the gods was a powerful deterrent.

Åke turned back to Brenna before he answered. With his eyes on the shieldmaiden, he said. “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.”

Fear of the gods had lost its power, then. Leif had lost his best argument for Brenna’s safety. And, he knew, he had lost the jarl’s favor as well.

Åke 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.”

The rods. Leif’s stomach rolled at the thought of what the jarl might want done with those.

As Igul yanked Brenna away, Leif managed to meet her eyes for a scant moment. Before her face settled into its stoicism, he saw a flash of fear.

~oOo~

Åke called Leif to join him and his sons and witness the God’s-Eye’s undoing. Leif knew the jarl meant it as a punishment, and it would indeed be one, but Leif would have asked to go in any event. He had failed in his efforts to save Brenna. He would not spare himself the full knowledge of the consequences of his failure.

She was stripped and bound prone to the large oaken table in the center of the dark room, a table that had gone dark and soft soaking in the blood of others bound to it.

Igul had stoked the fire, and iron rods stuck out from it like bristles. Leif’s heart knew more weight than it could carry, but he settled his eyes on Brenna’s bare back, bruised and dirty, and sickly thin. He would not look away.

Åke went to the table and bent down near Brenna’s face. She stared at him, stoic and defiant even now.

“You will break, Brenna God’s-Eye. You will beg for my mercy.”

Brenna simply stared.

“Leif,” Åke said as he stood back, and at that, Brenna flinched, making her bonds clank and clatter.

Leif flinched as well. Åke wanted him to torture her. This he would not, could not, do. There was no way to allay the pain Åke’s chosen torment would cause her. He could not make it easier by being the one to wield the rods, and he could not be the one to cause the kind of pain she faced.

He would fight before he caused her any more hurt than he already had.

In this dark room with Leif and Brenna stood Åke, Calder, Eivind, Ulv, Viger, and Igul. Ulv, the youngest of Åke’s grown sons, was gentler than his father and older brothers, and he seemed pale and ill at the prospect of what was about to happen, but Leif did not think he could count on Ulv to turn on his father now. Perhaps he would be slow to fight, but he would not turn—and if his father were attacked, he would not be so slow to fight at all.

Brenna was chained and naked. Even were she willing—and he knew well she would be willing—she was not able.

Everyone was without sword or axe or shield, but the room was full of weapons. Leif could kill Åke first, and that at least would be accomplished. Then he would have to fight five men, four of whom were young and strong trained warriors. He could, at best, hope to kill two, maybe three before he was killed himself. And then Brenna would be left to the whim of the survivors.

Prepared to fight, Leif first tried talk. “Åke, no.”

The jarl showed tired contempt in his eyes. “You would deny me?”

Choosing his words carefully, Leif replied, “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.”

Åke stared long and hard, and Leif returned the look, scanning his image of the room in his mind’s eye and choosing the weapon he would grab and shove into the soft meat of the old man’s bearded chin.

Then the jarl sighed and gave Leif something that might have been meant to be a smile. “Viger, then. Would you deny me as well?”

“No, Jarl. I serve your will.”

Relieved of that burden, Leif focused on the other. He made himself watch as red-hot iron rods were laid across Brenna’s fair back, and left to rest there until the glow had faded. One after another, until her back was a ladder of long chasms from her shoulders to below her waist.

She twitched and flinched, and every muscle in her body flexed to complete tension, but she never screamed. She seemed to swoon as the last rod, the fifth rod, rested on her skin, but she never screamed.

Åke had not broken her. But he would kill her if she wouldn’t bend.

“Enough!” Åke barked, and Viger, looking ill and sad, lifted the final rod. “Take her back to her pen.”

The jarl turned and stormed from the room. His sons and Leif silently followed him out.

~oOo~

Leif convinced Brenna to bend. He convinced her to yield and take on the yoke of the thrall once more.

It was that or see her be killed as Åke continually tried and failed to break her.

Åke had promised to be gentle with her, to heal her and feed her and bring her back into his hall to serve him as she first had. But that had been before the rods.