Maidensong (25 page)

Once Rika and Helge were safely ashore with the
barrels and fur bales stacked around them, the men
stripped and waded back into the water around the
vessel.

“Tie yourself to the boat,” Ornolf shouted. “That
way if you slip, you won’t be swept away. The rest of
us can hold her
till
you find your feet. Feel your way
over the rocks and we’ll walk her down nice and slow.”

Bjorn positioned himself at the far down-river side
of the craft with Jorand on the bank side. Ornolf and Torvald took stations at each side of the stern. Rika
watched as Bjorn strained, his back and arm muscles
quivering with effort, to hold the
Valkyrie
from a
headlong plunge down the river. He eased the boat
along, waist deep in water, feeling his way over the
slippery bottom of the Dnieper.

If the situation had been less precarious, Rika would’ve enjoyed the way Bjorn’s muscles rippled
and flexed under his skin. As it was, the slightest mis
step could send them all careening down the rapids to disaster. Rika caught herself holding her breath.

A high-pitched wail made Rika turn her gaze up
stream. A crudely woven basket bobbed in the center
of the Dnieper, shooting toward the rapids. A tiny hand shot up from the wickerwork, grasping skyward.

“Oh, gods!” Her heart lurched. “There’s a child in there!” Without hesitation, Rika jumped into the
Dnieper and flailed toward the disappearing basket.
The swift current dragged at her and pulled her off her
feet, scraping her along the bottom of the river toward
the men and the boat.

She heard Helge’s scream and realized she was surg
ing toward the men. As the river whipped her past, Tor
vald let go of the
Valkyrie
and grabbed Rika around
the waist.
She was sure the other three men holding the boat immediately felt the loss.
He struggled to keep his footing,
stumbling out of balance with her in his arms.

“What are you doing?” Torvald bellowed at her,
shouting to be heard above the din of the water.

“There’s a baby,” she gasped. Someone from the Pecheneg settlement upstream must have sent the babe to its death.

“Let it go,” he yelled and hoisted Rika up onto the bank.

“Torvald!” Bjorn’s voice traveled over the roar of the water to them. “We can’t hold the
Valkyrie
much longer.”

The old man slogged back to his position, the deep
ening wrinkles across his forehead betraying the agony
his gouty foot was sending to him. He reached the
Valkyrie
and pulled back on her with all his might,
groaning with effort. Then Torvald tossed a look over
his shoulder at Rika. She winced at the anger in his
hard gray eyes.

What she’d done had endangered them all, but
it was for a babe. Someone had abandoned a help
less child to a terrifying and violent death. Why? There could never be an answer that made sense to her. The old hurt inside her smarted afresh. Tears streamed down her cheeks, both for the dead child and for herself.

“There, little elf.” Helge squatted beside her and put
her thin arms around Rika’s shaking shoulders. “My
master’s not really mad at you.”

“I’m not crying about that.” Rika swiped her
nose on her wet sleeve. “It was a child, Helge.” She
could hear Bjorn bellowing orders to the others as they
worked their way downstream. Now that there were
four men on the corners of the
Valkyrie,
they negoti
ated the rapids safely, if slowly. She sniffed as she re
membered the coldness in Torvald’s voice when he
yelled at her. “But he certainly sounded angry.”

“Men folk are like that sometimes,” Helge said, as
they both stood and followed the men’s progress along
the footpath overlooking the rapids. “They don’t want
us women to know they’re scared, so they hide behind
anger. Torvald was afraid for you.”

“He should have been afraid for that poor child.” Rika hoped she wouldn’t encounter a small
corpse farther down the Dnieper where the water ran
slower.

“I know how you feel,” Helge agreed. “No one loves
the feel of new babe in her arms more than I do, but think on it for a moment. We’ve got no nurse for a
child, no way to feed it. And even if we did manage to
save it, you couldn’t very well greet your new husband
with some other man’s babe. I don’t care how odd the folk in Miklagard are bound to be, I suspect some things are the same the world over.”

“Ja,”
Rika said sadly. “Some things are the same.” U
nwanted babies were exposed to the ele
ments by people of every race and tribe.

When the men finally pushed through Essoupi, Rika
and Helge were waiting to help them tie up the boat.
Bjorn hauled the
Valkyrie’s
prow onto the bank and se
cured her. Then for the first time in days, he looked di
rectly at Rika.

“How did you fall in?” He raised his voice to be
heard over the cataract. “Are you hurt?”

“No. And I didn’t fall,” she said. “I jumped.”

“Why?”

“There was a basket with . . .” Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. The child was surely lost, dashed to bits on the cold granite of Essoupi.

“Someone sent an unwanted babe down the rapids
in a basket, and she tried to catch it before it went,”
Torvald answered for her gruffly. “All she did was en
danger herself.”

And us
hung unspoken in the air.

An unwanted babe. Rika could see from his expression that Bjorn immediately understood how this
dredged up the ache of her own abandonment.

“You’re sure you’re not hurt?” he asked her.

“Just a scrape or two, nothing serious.” A
warm trickle of blood snaked its way down her
shin from a banged knee. It was nothing compared to
the heaviness in her heart.

 
That evening around their fire, the mood of the party
was subdued. When Jorand asked for a story, Rika de
clined.

 
“Don't fret yourself about the child,” Bjorn said
softly. “Its end was quick and there was naught to be
done about it. No doubt the Norns decreed it so.”

“No,” she said vehemently. “I don’t believe that. Not
anymore. No trio of fate weavers in Asgard decided
that poor babe’s end. Its parents did. They are to blame for its death.”

“There are a hundred reasons that lead someone to
expose a child,” Torvald said flatly. “Poverty, shame, grief—”

“None of it the child’s fault,” she interrupted.

“No, of course not,” the old man admitted. “But what
ever the reason, at the time, it seems the only sensible
course of action. And the decision is almost always
made in haste, in desperation, in the kind of madness only sorrow brings.”

An image of the child’s uplifted hand burned across
her eyes. “It was so small, so helpless.”

“I know you feel for the child, but your pity is mis
placed,” Torvald said. “The child feels no more pain,
but for the parents, the pain is only beginning.”

“They deserve to feel pain—if they are capable
of it.” Rika narrowed her eyes. “How could you
know what they feel?”

Torvald’s sigh seemed to come from clear down to his
toes. “ ‘Tis knowledge bought with bitter experience.”

No one stirred around the fire. Only the rustle and click of insects and the hunting call of an owl interrupted the silence.

Torvald dragged a hand over his face and a faraway
look filled his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten the group’s presence, lost in his own private Hel. When he
continued to speak, his voice was barely a murmur. “A small
ghost will dog them each day. Each passing year the
questions come. Would she be walking now? How tall
would she have been? Would she look like her mother
or be cursed to look like me?” Torvald’s eyes fogged
over as he seemed to see a phantom child at different
stages of growth. “What would it have been like to
bear her on my shoulders, to feel her chubby arms
around my neck?”

A small prickle found its way up Rika’s spine as the old man looked at her searchingly.

“At least I finally know the answer to some of the
questions,” Torvald said. “Rika, you are the image of your mother.”

 
“What?” Rika couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was unthinkable.

“You look just like your mother.” Torvald didn’t blink an eyelash. “My wife, Gudrid. You’ve defi
nitely got her way about you. If Helge hadn’t warned
me, I might’ve thought I was seeing Gudrid’s ghost that
first night I spied you in the great hall of
the
jarlhof.”

Rika’s eyes widened.

“She was a fair, saucy redhead just like you.” Torvald’s voice was firm. “I didn’t need any other confir
mation than my own eyes, but Helge knew it was you
because of that little hammer. She saw it on Lady Astryd and asked how she came by it.”

Rika’s hand went instinctively to her throat.

“It belonged to my Gudrid. I gave it to her at our wedding,” Torvald said as matter-of-factly as if he
were discussing the weather or which crops to plant. “
A simple little thing. In truth, not worth much, but in all her life, she never took it off.”

“I put it around your neck myself, so I did, on the day you were born,” Helge added. “I couldn’t bear to s
ee you leave us empty-handed, Little Elf, so I filched
it for you.”

“How can you just sit there and tell me this?” Rika’s belly churned.

“Because it’s the truth,” Torvald said. “I don’t say it
to be cruel.
I’m
not proud of what I did, and I’ve re
gretted it every day since.”

“Your mother died birthing you, you see.” Helge pat
ted Rika on the forearm, trying to ease the sting. “And they loved each other dearly, your mother and the mas
ter. When she died, he went fair wild with grief.”

“That’s no excuse,” Torvald said flatly. “Even then I
knew it was wrong. And I bore the guilt of it every day.
Then when I saw you at the
jarlhof,
I knew the gods
had blessed me with a second chance.”

“Just what is it you think you have a second chance at?” Rika’s cheeks burned.

“To know you,” Torvald said. “To care for you as a father should.”

“It would seem you’ve had little practice at caring,” Rika fired at him.

“True enough,” he said. When he met her livid green
eyes, he realized that this conversation was not going as he’d hoped.

Perhaps he should have waited to tell her who he was, but her anger at the baby’s abandonment that
morning was only exceeded by his terror when he saw her flailing in the swirling waters of the Dnieper. If he
hadn’t managed to snatch her when he did, he might
have lost her again and it would have been his own
fault both times. Right after he tossed her to the safety
of the bank, Torvald had decided to tell her the truth the next chance he got.

“After you were gone, there was little left in my life
to care about,” Torvald said. “For good or ill, my blood flows through your veins. I am your father,
whether you will it or no, and it’s finally time for me to
start acting like it. I only hope I’m not too late for
your forgiveness.”

No one spoke. Ornolf and Jorand hung on every
word batted back and forth. The drama being played
out before them was more potent than any story in
Rika’s repertoire. Only Bjorn felt the pain and anger
emanating from her in scalding waves.

“Blood is all I ever received from you, and I’ll never
ask for more. A man saved me from the water where
you sent me to die.” Her voice was brittle as ice. “His name was Magnus Silver-Throat. He was a good man,
a brave and gentle man, with a heart big enough to
shelter a helpless babe and not think himself anything extraordinary. But Magnus
was
extraordinary. He was
my father, the father of my heart, the only father I’ll
ever have.”

She stood and stalked out of the circle of light to
stand by the beached
Valkyrie.
Bjorn would have followed her, but he was sure she’d push him away as vehemently as she just shoved Torvald.