Brenna opened her eyes and met his. She was sure that she had never raided with him before, and she was sure she had not saved him today. She furrowed the brow that he was tending.
“I think not.”
He smiled. And then he stuck his tongue out at her.
She was about to pull away, offended, when she saw a small nick in the side of his tongue.
The boy in the woods, all those years ago. The first time she’d ever felt the fire of battle rage. That, she remembered, and remembering, she recognized his bright blue eyes.
But he had been like all the others—fearful, even as she gave him aid.
“You were afraid of me.”
His ministrations completed, he sat back, then leaned to the river and washed his hands in the clear water. “I was young and stupid and under the thumb of a stupider man. I’m sorry for that.”
“Why? Everyone is afraid. I am Brenna God’s-Eye.”
“You are. And a magnificent eye it is. Why be afraid of a gift like that? It seems to me a great honor.”
Again, Brenna looked away, turning her attention to the water before them. She didn’t want it to be true. It wasn’t true. She was nothing special, and she didn’t want to be. They said her valor as a shieldmaiden came from her eye. It did not. It came from her heart. She wasn’t magical; she was strong.
But none of that mattered. People believed what they wanted to believe. Brenna sighed. There had been a moment, just a flash, when she’d felt something new with this man. He’d treated her like a person. But he was the same as the rest, even if he no longer feared her.
A small fish jumped out of the current, flipped, and fell back. She had a thought that she would go back to camp for a fishing spear.
“You saved me. More than my tongue. I left that day and never returned, and my life has honor it would never have known had I stayed. I wanted you to know that. I wanted to give you thanks. I am Vali, and I am at your service.”
With that, he stood, picked up his bundle and his axe, and headed back to camp.
Vali returned to camp and brought his bundle of gathered herbs and mosses to Sven, a raider whose mother, like Vali’s, had been a healer, and who tended to their wounded. Then he pulled his tunic on over his head, fixed his belt and axe over it, and sought a place to rest. The camp was made and reinforced. Other than the guards stationed around the perimeter and the scouts still away, the raiders were at their leisure to refresh themselves.
A newly dressed deer was spitted over the main fire. After days of drinking only rationed water and eating salt cod and leiv bread on the boat, the thought of meat and mead made Vali’s stomach rumble. He wasn’t the only one; the whole camp was calmer than when he’d walked off to find a place to wash, and many of his fellows were sitting watching the animal roast, as if it were entertainment.
The captive women, bound with rope by their necks and hands, had been tied together at a stake and were cowering in a cluster. Several were barely dressed any longer, and the summer season was aging into winter chill, so they huddled for warmth, he guessed, as much as comfort. But they had been left alone, the men distracted by the promise of hot, heavy food. Vali was glad.
He didn’t like this Jarl Åke, or his son Calder, who was leading this raid. Both men were brutal leaders and had fostered brutality among their clan. Jarl Snorri, to whom Vali had long ago sworn fealty, would not have allowed the savagery that had gone on today. He would have taken the captives, yes. He would have taken all the survivors captive, in fact, not slaughtered women, children, and old ones and left them to rot in the dirt. Snorri would have taken them as slaves for trade. And he would have made the women work. He would not have left them to the violent whims of men drunk on bloodlust.
But Snorri had allied with Jarl Åke for this raid, and Åke’s son had been made leader over all the raiders. Vali hadn’t understood the alliance, but once they’d arrived and had moved so far inland, and now that they were camped and scouting for the castle of the ruler of this place, he thought he understood better. This was no mere raid. More was happening.
He knew not what, and it wasn’t his place to know. He followed his jarl. Freemen had a voice, and often a vote, in clan decisions, including raids, but to go against the jarl was dangerous business. Vali had never seen a reason to take a risk like that.
There had been one reason he had been glad to know they were allying with Jarl Åke: Brenna God’s-Eye fought for him. She had changed Vali’s life, and he had thanked the gods for the chance to tell her so.
Her name was known far and wide. The shieldmaiden who bore the eye of the Allfather, the girl who had sold herself into slavery and then had been freed when she’d singlehandedly saved the jarl’s wife and children during a failed insurrection.
The stories varied in the details, whether she had fought five men or ten, whether she had fought them off with one of their own swords or with a spit from the cooking fire. But the stories all said that she fought with the power of all the gods. They said she glowed. They said she rose up like a giant above her foes and drove them to the ground.
He knew the stories to be true. He remembered the small girl who had saved him, who had faced his beast of a father down and sent him skittering away with only the power of her voice and her fantastic eye.
And now, with his own two unremarkable eyes, he had seen her fight. She did glow. She did rise up above her enemies and smite them down. But not with magic.
With inner fire. With will. With spirit.
Such a marvelous creature she was.
Vali had watched her these days since the two parties had become one at Geitland. When they’d been gathered in Åke’s great hall, and then when they’d embarked in their longships, he’d kept her in his sight as much as he could.
It wasn’t difficult to do. She was always off on her own, along the edges of the group. Jarl Åke had named her personally as he’d spoken his words to send them off in the good will of the gods, and Vali had seen her drop her head at that.
People no longer tried to ward her away, but no one made any attempt to speak directly to her, either. She was treated as an icon of reverence, someone too powerful to touch. She moved through and around those near her as if she were invisible, when the opposite was true. Everyone noticed her, but no one made eye contact with her if they could avoid it.
She rarely spoke. She never smiled.
No—once, he thought, she had. On the sea, on a bright day of good wind after a hard night of storms, their ships had regained proximity with each other and sailed nearly side by side. Vali saw her at the prow, her arms around the carved dragon head, her fair hair blowing loose from its plaits. He thought he saw her smile then, turned away from all those she knew and facing the adventure ahead.
Whether she had truly smiled then or not, it was the first time he’d known he wanted more than merely the chance to thank her. He wanted the chance to know her.
She had been cold to him at the bank of the stream, but he wasn’t deterred. He owed her his life. His father might not have killed him that day in the woods; he might only have rendered him mute. But he would likely have killed him in short time.
It was more than simply his breathing body he owed the shieldmaiden, however. He was a man of honor, a warrior with renown of his own, and he would not have been had not the courage of a small girl with a strange eye shaken him to his toes.
His friend Erik sat at his side and handed him a horn of mead. As Vali nodded his thanks and took a long draught, Erik elbowed him, grinning amiably.
“Your sorceress returns.”
Erik nodded toward the far edge of camp, and Vali turned and saw Brenna walk in, past the spitted deer, and to a basket of leiv bread. She picked up two flat, round loaves and walked back the way she’d come, her full skin of water rocking at her hip, still dripping. She must have filled it at the stream. As always, people stepped out of her way, as if a force around her pushed them all two or three steps back.
Brea
d and water. While the air was redolent of roasting meat, and sweet mead flowed freely.
“Be careful, my friend,” Erik said at his ear as Vali swiveled his head to watch Brenna walk just out of camp and settle herself alone at the base of a tree. “She is beautiful, but many women are beautiful, and no other poses such a risk. Who knows how she might bewitch you. That is no mere shieldmaiden. That eye.” He shuddered. “If not the gift of Odin, then the judgment of Mimir. In any case, a man could be unmanned. I would not risk so much.”
Vali thought her eye lovely, not fearsome. Bestowed by the gods or not, it made her more beautiful to him. The eye no one noticed was lovely, too: a blue clear like summer sky.
She was beautiful, with a long, graceful neck, high cheekbones, and full red lips. Her fair hair was long and wild. On the day they’d left Geitland, the mass had been tidily trained in elaborate braids, but the ensuing days, with a rough sail and a tough fight, had loosened strands and left a halo of pale fire around her head. When the sun shone behind her, she did seem to glow indeed.
Though she had been small when he’d first seen her, now she was tall and strong, the power of her body obvious in the snug confines of her boiled leather breeches and tunic. She carried herself straight as a sword. She was magnificent.
Erik had gibed at him relentlessly since they’d first stood in Jarl Åke’s hall and Vali had laid eyes on Brenna. He supposed he hadn’t been subtle, drawn as he was to keeping her in sight, even as others looked away.
“Then I am more man than you,” he said with a grin and stood, taking Erik’s horn from him. Ignoring the protest of his friend, Vali went and refilled both horns and then carried them through the camp to the tree where Brenna sat.
As he approached, she looked up and glared at him with her bewitching eyes. The paste he’d made to heal her wound had hardened and paled, and it cracked slightly with her scowl.
She was among the raiders who painted their faces before battle, and she had landed on the beach that morning with her eyes lined heavily in black, the lines radiating from her storied right eye like rays of dark light. The effect had been eerie and had heightened the sense that it, that she, was more than human.
But her wash in the stream had cleansed most of that away, leaving smudges of grey that made her appear weary.
“Water is a paltry quench after a fight like today’s.” He crouched before her and held out a horn.
She didn’t take it. “You need not serve me,” she said, her hands in her lap.
Still holding out the horn of mead, he sat. “I’m not. I would like to join you.”
She frowned. “Why? What is it you want?”
“Only your company. Need you no friend, Brenna God’s-Eye?”
“No.”
Vali disbelieved that strenuously. Perhaps no one in all the worlds needed a friend so much as this girl sitting here. Having experience with that feeling himself, he smiled. “Well, I do. Drink with me.”
Though she still glared, she finally took the horn, casting a suspicious grimace into its contents before taking an experimental sip. As if he might have poisoned the mead.
After a moment’s quiet, she said, “If you seek a boon—”
“I do not. Except, as I said, your company. Perhaps some conversation.”
At that, she stared, her suspicion replaced by something that looked more like alarm.
But she was saved from the ordeal of talking to him by the sound of an actual alarm: the blow of a horn that meant the enemy approached—at a charge. They both stood, and Vali, in a move of instinct and habit, put his body in front of hers.
She scoffed loudly and stepped around him, her sword and shield already in hand. He pulled his axe from its ring on his belt as the horn blew again.
Their people were people of war and battle, and the camp before them had shifted from leisure to readiness fluidly and nearly instantly. As warriors and shieldmaidens abandoned their rest and prepared to fight, Brenna stalked forward, toward the heart of the camp. Vali kept step with her, picking up a racked spear as he passed it, without breaking stride.
There was no enemy in sight yet, but they could hear the thunder of galloping hooves. On horseback, then. No shield wall could withstand an onslaught of riders.
As if to answer the drumming hooves, raiders began to beat their axes and swords on their shields. Brenna did not. She took her place just behind Calder, and she bent her head forward and was perfectly still, staring ahead, shield and sword at the ready. Those around her made extra space, and she seemed to radiate focus and menace.
Vali, the biggest of them all, stood at her side. He carried no shield, but he drummed the spear into the ground in time with the beat that had taken over the camp, so heavy and loud that the air shook.
Horses broke through the trees, bearing archers at the front, firing as they cleared the tree line. Arrows began to rain down on the camp, and shields went up. Vali crouched for cover and scanned the scene, looking for his first target.
The archer at the center was clearly their most skilled shot. He’d gotten three arrows off and had already nocked a fourth when Vali stepped out from the cover of the shields and charged forward, setting his feet and then hurling the spear with all his might. It sailed past the line of archers and impaled the man riding behind the center. The man he’d aimed for.
That man wore a gleaming chain across his chest and a crimson cloak, and he’d been protected by their best archer. He was important.
And he fell dead from his black horse just as the archers, too close now for attack, pulled off and let the swordsmen through.
“VALI!” he heard Erik call. Knowing why his friend would hail him at such a time, Vali glanced back just quickly enough to set his aim and then held out his hand. Erik threw a second axe, and Vali caught it.
And now he was ready. As the first wave of mounted swordsmen came upon them, he bellowed and raised both of his axes.
Scores of riders had descended on the camp. When fighting on foot against riders, unseating them was vitally important—without killing the horse, if possible, but sometimes killing the horse was the most expedient path, and then that horse was meat.
The raiders were outnumbered, and expediency was crucial. So Vali went for the nearest horse first, burying an axe into its leg. When it came down, shrieking, he swung the other axe and separated the rider from his sword arm. Like the soldiers earlier in the day, these men wore mail tunics, so as the man fell, Vali sank his axe into his neck for the killing blow, and a great gout of hot blood sprayed Vali in the face.
He shook the blood from his eyes, and, with the preternatural sense that came with battle rage, spun just as an Estlander had raised his sword. Vali blocked him with one axe and buried the other in his exposed side.
In the efficient style he had learned and honed since he’d first begun training, Vali charged and spun, hacking and slicing his way through four more men, his throat roughening with his war cries, and no foe dealing him more than the most glancing blow.
Bloodlust, battle rage—these were the ways his fellows described the sing of their blood through their bodies, the heat of the fight in their minds, and Vali understood these. But for him it was more than that. He became something else, something other than human. Every impact of his axe gave him more power, not less, as if he took his foe’s life force into his own body. It fed a bestial hunger that heightened his senses and shrank his focus. Nothing existed but the fight.
And yet, today, he found himself sparing a glance every now and then for Brenna. His eyes seemed always to find her at once, as if he had already known where she was without seeking her out. She fought with fire and fury, using shield and sword with precision and might greater than one woman’s body should hold.
He didn’t allow himself the luxury of admiration, not then. He sought her, saw her, understood that she needed no assistance, then focused his senses again on his own fight.
Soon he’d created a pocket of quiet in the chaos,
killing all those near him. His focus flared outward, seeking more fight. The horse he’d hobbled, nearly severing its foreleg, screamed its suffering. Before he moved on into the battle, meaning to join Brenna, Vali took the time to open the horse’s throat and give it ease.
An Estlander fell on him while he was still pulling his axe through the horse’s neck. Vali had just time to duck from the blow, which sliced into his back, opening him, but did not cleave his head from his body. Too drunk on the fight to feel pain, he saw his chance for a killing blow and tried to lift his dominant arm, but he found that it weighed much more than it should have. The axe that hand held fell to the ground, sinking into the earth made sodden by the horse’s ocean of blood.
He had never lost his axe. In all his years of fighting, no man had ever disarmed him. Few had ever wounded him.
He was confused by that for just a moment, and then he remembered he had a weapon and an arm left. But when he raised that arm to block the next blow from his enemy, the impact knocked the axe from his hand as well.
God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) Page 3