And it was the wolf that Revna had always associated with her younger son. Leif was her beast of burden, her dutiful heir – but Rune was the wild thing, head thrown back to the sky, eyes alive with starlight.
Tessa would do her duty, same as Leif, but hearts went where they willed.
Revna turned to glance over her shoulder, wanting to see the way her two sons gazed at the girl, to see if she could read in their eyes what they would not say with words.
But her gaze was caught – and arrested – by another’s.
Revna could not recall her eldest brother, Herleif, save in the vaguest terms. An impression of a grin, of a hand gently cupping the top of her head in careful affection.
Arne she remembered better, but he’d been heir by that point, and too old to be her friend, too focused on the future, and on battle, and on living up to Father’s expectations.
It was Erik she’d tagged along after, wanting to get her hands dirty, and play boy games. For all that he’d probably resented her presence, he’d been patient with her, a leader even then, though he’d never expected to lead.
Of his two closest companions, Torstan had been the golden god with the glittering smile and the sly looks. Bjorn had been the stolid, steadfast right hand. Always agreeing with Erik, always ready to jump in front of him to take the first blow when a friendly sparring match turned to a skirmish. Father had always joked that when his mother named him for a bear, he’d been bound to become one. In a world of large, strong men, he’d been larger and stronger. He carried a sword that a Southern lord wouldn’t have been able to lift, much less wield. With his thick, dark hair, and his massive hands, his booming laughs, he’d grown into his name admirably.
But Revna thought it wasn’t always a fair assessment. For all that he was huge and fearsome in battle, he wasn’t brutish. Wasn’t cruel. He was, despite all outward appearances, quite soft-hearted.
She hadn’t begun to suspect that he might be in love with her until after she was married and expecting Leif.
And then, after Torstan died, when the boys were only young, she’d asked herself an ugly, terrible question: did I pick the wrong man? If she’d married Bjorn instead, she wouldn’t be a widow. The guilt and revulsion such a thought had inspired in her lingered still, though fainter.
And tonight, Bjorn was looking at her.
His hair had been tamed with a few slightly-crooked braids, capped with beads of duty, loyalty, friendship: gifts from Erik some years ago. He’d trimmed his beard up short, so the strong line of his neck showed, and his face, though never as fine-featured as Erik or Torstan, held a blunt appeal of its own: his straight brows, and his serious dark eyes, and the unexpected softness of his mouth. A nose that had been broken more than once, and a gaze full of intensity, as he watched her.
Revna felt a tolling shiver, deep inside; a response. She turned and put her back to him, clapped her hands, and called the others forward to decorate the tree with their prayers.
~*~
Aeretoll and Aquitainia worshipped the same gods, though some of the names were different, and a few of the attributed powers. Down South, it was more of a formality, a bit of rote gesturing at certain holidays, and pleas for mercy when men lay dying. Oliver had never been religious – he’d never seen how prayer might improve his situation – and so when Tessa pressed a small, silver fox into his hands and told him he ought to say a prayer before hanging it, he hesitated.
A fox, he noted, recalling Lord Askr’s words from earlier. Tessa hadn’t known about that, but the irony struck him all the same; left him feeling a bit manic, though maybe that was just the wine he’d drunk to keep his hands from shaking.
He smoothed his thumb across the runes etched in the animal’s side. “Pray for what?”
“For whatever you want,” Tessa said. “For luck. That was why” – a sly smile totally out of character touched her mouth, lit up her eyes – “I chose the fox for you. I thought you might be feeling lucky tonight.”
“Tessa Louise,” he chastised, face heating, and she giggled. “That’s highly inappropriate for a young lady such as yourself.”
Still giggling, she reached to touch one of the braids behind his ear, the beads clacking together. “These are lovely.”
“Yes,” he said, dryly. “Aren’t they?”
She actually winked at him.
“Someone around here has been a terrible influence on you.”
She kissed his cheek. “Go and hang your prayer.”
He sighed, and rolled his eyes, but he did step up to the tree, as instructed. The lords, ladies, and children all milled around it, hanging their own ornaments, murmuring quiet prayers or chatting excitedly with one another. He managed to slip between a pair of ladies to find himself a bit of branch space, and there he hesitated, too aware of their gazes landing on either side of his face. On his beads, probably.
He had no idea what to pray for. Tessa wasn’t wrong in assuming that he did, at this point, want a little luck with a certain king. If the moment alone in the solar, Erik’s dexterous fingers braiding his hair – Erik’s breath warm in his ear, his teeth sharp and promising – was any indication, Oliver was more than welcome in the royal bed tonight.
But that felt like a wish to be made with crossed fingers – not something to be prayed for. Prayer shouldn’t get muddled up with sex, he thought.
“Ooh,” a voice said beside him, and he braced himself. “You’re the Southern boy. Mr. Meacham, right?”
He turned his head to find a woman with intricate, silver braided hair and a kind, weathered face studying him with open curiosity. “That’s me. Oliver Meacham, my lady.”
She grinned. “Lady Helga, of Silfr Hall. My lord husband presides over all the kingdom’s silver mines.”
“Ah,” he said, because he wasn’t sure what else to say.
She reached up, just as Tessa had, and touched one of his beads, set it to clacking against its fellows. “All the silver for the pretty hair bobbles comes from our mines,” she said, proud, and, he thought, with a knowing twinkle in her pale eyes. “These are a lovely bit of work, here.”
He felt a hand on the other side of his head, tugging less gently at the beads there. “A bold gift, if you ask me,” a less friendly female voice said.
He turned toward it and found a younger, flaxen-haired woman with a throat heaped with emeralds on silver strands, winking and sparking as each breath heaved her tremendous bosom. She was giving him a pointed look. “Revna’s sure not wasting any time, is she? Already putting lover’s knots in your hair. Bit young for her, aren’t you?”
Shit. “Oh, I’m not – Lady Revna and I aren’t–”
“Really, Alfhild, you can’t say that sort of thing,” the first woman – Helga – said. “It isn’t done.”
“I’m only curious,” Alfhild said, scowling in a way that was certainly not curious, but hostile. “I’d like to know if it’s to be a double wedding, Leif and his mother both.”
“Ladies, I assure you, I’m not romantically involved with Lady Revna. Not at all.”
“No, I don’t think he is,” a new, masculine voice said.
When Oliver glanced back toward Helga, he found Ragnar, lord of the Úlfheðnar, standing just behind her. He was grinning, gaze fixed on Oliver, and Oliver’s blood ran cold. That smile was a threat; he could feel it.
Lady Helga glanced over her shoulder, noted him, and gave ground immediately, fear plain on her face.
Ragnar stepped into the place she’d vacated, close enough for Oliver to smell the oily, unwashed ripeness of him. The furs he wore were not merely for show, but all that kept him warm in his world of ice, and snow, and few creature comforts.
He looked down at Oliver with a chuckle, and one large, unclean hand lifted to touch the beads, the same as the women had; only his fingers closed tight, and he pulled hard enough that Oliver bit back a wince at the prickling pain in his scalp.
“These are a gift from my cousin,” he said, “but
not from Revna, I don’t think. No, you’re much more Erik’s type.”
For a moment, Oliver could only stare, caught like a rabbit in a snare. Logically speaking, he was the foreigner, and the bastard, and he should give sway to any lord – even a barbarian one who’d just blown in on a snowstorm.
But stubborn instinct left him bristling inside. If he didn’t bow up his back and prove that he wasn’t one to be cowed, he would never have an ounce of respect from this clannish, barbarian warrior. He probably wouldn’t anyway, as unimpressive as he was, but he’d be damned if he allowed himself to be manhandled and grinned at like this.
Slowly, deliberately, Oliver lifted his hand, and forcibly removed Ragnar’s fingers from his braid. It didn’t matter that Ragnar let him do it, that he could have drug Oliver across the floor by his hair if he wanted to: it was the principle of the matter. This was not a man, he thought, who listened to much beyond physical force.
“Excuse me,” Oliver said in his firmest voice. “But that’s too forward of you.”
Ragnar gaped at him a moment, comically shocked. Then his grin stretched wide, and he gasped a laugh, and another, delighted. “Look at that. The pup has fangs.”
Oliver felt a warm presence at his back, and feared, immediately, that it was Erik, that a spectacle was about to be made. But it was Bjorn’s voice, to his shock, that said, “Aye, Ragnar, didn’t your father ever teach you anything about dogs? It’s the little ones that bite.”
Ragnar continued to laugh, but when his gaze lifted up and over Oliver’s shoulder, a guardedness entered it. There was a healthy respect there; an internal acknowledgement that Bjorn was a man capable of putting him on his ass in front of everyone.
“Bjorn,” he greeted. “Still licking boots, I see. Why don’t you quit my cousin and come north? You could earn some notoriety for yourself, up there. Found your own tribe.”
Oliver couldn’t see Bjorn’s grin, but he could hear the nasty edge to it when he said, “Now where would the challenge be in that?”
Ragnar’s smile became a grimace. “You always did like a challenge, didn’t you? Especially the ones you couldn’t win.” His smile returned, twice as malicious, and his gaze cut pointedly to the side.
Toward Revna, who joined them with a thunderous expression, blue eyes flashing. “Boys,” she said, even tone belying the glare she shot at Ragnar. “You’re blocking the tree for our guests.”
“I’m a guest,” Ragnar said, still grinning wickedly.
Revna’s cold look ought to have turned him to stone. “No. You’re family. Family doesn’t get special dispensation.”
He held up both empty hands with a low “ooh,” but moved off, chuckling under his breath.
Revna traded a look with Bjorn, her jaw firming, and then looked to Oliver. “A word of caution, lamb. You play too many word games with that one, and he’ll start swinging.”
“Yes.” Oliver suppressed a shiver. “I can see that.”
~*~
The tree gleamed and sparkled as the flickering candlelight caught on the hundreds of silver ornaments the feast guests had strung from the branches. The hall was warm – from the fires, and the number of bodies packed close, and the candle flames, and the free-flowing wine – but it wasn’t the cause of the warmth that had settled in Tessa’s cheeks. She was being watched.
In the crush of decorating the tree, Revna had introduced her to a number of the highborn ladies – those that hadn’t pushed boldly forward and introduced themselves. All had been smiling, all had exclaimed over her dress and her hair, and wished her well. There had been a few dark looks, a few upturned noses, but nothing like back at home, in Drakewell. To be honest, she preferred the outright snubs to the false smiles and compliments of high society in the South. If someone didn’t like her, she wanted to know about it, rather than try to parse each bit of flattery.
It was the daughters she worried about. The young ladies her own age, most of whom had come together in a loose knot on the other side of the room, whispering to one another and shooting assessing glances her way, some curious, most narrow and evaluating, a few outright hostile.
One, a statuesque blonde with hair braided into thick ropes, and a belt of silver circles around her waist, broke away from the group, pasted a beatific smile onto her face, and approached Leif where he stood near Birger. She touched his arm, and said something that made him smile down at her. Tessa couldn’t miss the sly, mocking glance the girl slid her way before she refocused her attention on Leif, head tossed back in laughter at something he’d said.
“That’s Estrid,” Rune said, appearing at Tessa’s elbow. A glance proved that his lip was curled in distaste.
“She’s very pretty,” Tessa said.
Across the room, the blonde slid her hand higher up Leif’s arm, until she cupped his elbow familiarly.
Rune snorted. “She’s a witch.”
She whirled to face him, startled by the vehemence of his tone – and then of his face, when she saw his furrowed brow, and his frowning mouth. Always so jovial, his smile so quick and easy, he looked nearly as stern as his uncle, now.
He glanced down, saw her curious expression, and said, “My mother, having no daughters of her own, lets the young, noble ladies of other houses come to court sometimes. Usually in groups. They shadow her, learn from her, and get to attend all the official functions.
“Estrid started coming around when she and Leif were ten – they’re the same age. She glommed onto him right away – ten years old and already thinking about marriage. It wasn’t because she liked Leif, but because she wanted to be queen someday.”
“Can you really know that? Maybe she did – does care for him.”
Rune tilted his head and cocked a single brow. Come on. “She doesn’t. She’s completely mercenary, and she hated me, because I was always tagging along with Leif. She made a game of trying to get me to go away: she’d say the cruelest things she could think of to send me running.” He made a face.
Tessa glanced back toward Estrid – standing even closer to Leif and looking at Tessa over her shoulder, her smile close-lipped and triumphant. She had to admit that she recognized that look, had seen it on many a girl’s face at the Drakewell court.
It was all too easy to envision a young Rune, already determined and proud, but still a child who played with toys, and who was willing to climb into his mother’s lap, and who worshipped his big brother. Only five. The thought of being cruel to a child that age, even if she’d been young herself, fanned her unease about Estrid into full-fledged dislike.
“Don’t worry,” Rune said. “Leif is polite to her, because he’s polite to everyone, but he doesn’t care for her.”
When she glanced toward him again, she caught the flicker of a fleeting, wistful smile.
But then a true smile split his face; she felt a little swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach in response. “Ooh, look, it’s about to start.”
“What is?”
“The fighting.”
~*~
While the guests milled about the center of the room, the serving boys began to break down some of the trestles. A few whoops and glad shouts went up from the men.
“What’s happening?” Oliver asked, and then did a double-take when he realized it was no longer Bjorn standing at his side.
Erik sipped from a pewter mug, and nodded toward the activity: men were moving toward one another, talking and gesticulating, looking eager. Negotiating, it looked like. “It’s time for the fighting.”
For a moment, admiring his profile, and the intricacy of his braids, sapphires winking down the length of them, the word didn’t register. But then Oliver said, “I’m sorry. Fighting?”
“Only friendly sparring matches. Contests of strength, more like. Blunted or wooden swords, even, and after they embrace and share a drink together.” He slanted a coy look down at Oliver. “I suppose there’s dancing and jugglers at Drakewell parties.”
“Naturally. You great ba
rbarian.”
Erik grinned and passed him the cup. It was wine – strong wine. A darker, drier red than what he’d had at dinner; Oliver took one sip and felt the heat of it all down his throat.
“You could make yourself a fool on that,” he said, passing it back.
Erik hummed. “Come sit down again. The combatants will want my blessing.”
“And mine as well, I should think,” Oliver joked, rolling his eyes.
But Erik said, “One day they will, most likely.”
They climbed the dais again, and resumed their seats – only, not quite. The boys and Bjorn had stayed below on the floor, at the edges of the crowd. Leif had a wooden practice sword lifted over his head, stretching out his toro in preparation for a match. Revna was already seated at the high table, in the seat that had been Oliver’s.
“Sit by Erik,” she said, breezily, lifting her wine cup and not meeting his eyes.
Oliver made a face, but complied. He supposed if people were already talking – if even Ragnar had noticed his beads – there was no sense pretending he was just any old guest.
Oliver was struck with the absurd thought, as he sat, that his father would be staring at him slack-jawed and gaping if he were here now. His worthless, sickly bastard son seated in pride of place beside a king – one who’d woven lover’s beads into his hair. He chuckled, before he could catch himself, and Erik sent him an inquiring look.
“Life is funny, that’s all,” he said.
Erik studied him a moment, and then smiled. “Yes. I suppose so.”
The large expanse of flagstone floor between the high table and the decorated fir stood empty, now. Two men stepped from the lines of spectators, wooden practice swords in their hands, and approached the dais. Bowed low, fists pressed to their chests.
“Your majesty,” they said in unison, and then straightened. They looked like brothers, with light brown hair, and green eyes, and similar builds: strong and a bit thick in the middle.
Heart of Winter (The Drake Chronicles Book 1) Page 27