The Estlander smiled. He had blackened his teeth, surely in an effort to terrify. But Vali was a berserker. His greatest weapon was his fearlessness, and even as death stood before him, he saw only a man with black teeth.
And then an otherworldly shriek lanced through Vali’s head, and a spirit glowing with bright fire rose up above the Estlander and brought a mighty sword down. The Estlander’s head dropped heavily from his shoulders and rolled downhill, losing its helm along the way. His body crumpled, first to its knees, and then dropped forward.
Vali’s body mirrored it. He fell to his knees and then forward, into the deepening, still-hot pool of horse’s blood. His face sank in, and he knew enough to hold his breath—though why he bothered, he wasn’t sure.
Brenna, his glowing spirit, caught him by the arm and dragged him out of the blood. Ignoring the battle around them, she crouched near his head and peered into his face. With one hand, she roughly wiped the blood from his eyes and nose.
She wasn’t gentle, and her hand had been coarsened by war and work. But Vali felt nothing but pleasure in the touch.
“It seems we’re fated to save each other, Brenna God’s-Eye.”
He didn’t know whether he’d given those words voice or had merely thought them, and he doubted that she had saved him from anything but a speedier death than he now faced, but she gave him a brusque nod and then leapt up and rejoined the fight.
Vali lay with his face in the bloody mud and waited for the Valkyries to carry him away.
Blood had so soaked the earth that Brenna’s boots sank to her ankles with every step. Then, of a sudden, while the raiders separated their dead and wounded from the remains of their vanquished foes, the twilight sky went near full dark and opened up, driving sheets of frigid rain down, as if the gods sought to cleanse the earth themselves.
Torches guttered out in the torrent, and the raiders finished their work in the dark, leaving the dead soldiers to the elements and bringing their own close. They had lost seven more, five men and two women. Of the shieldmaidens on this raid, only Brenna and one other yet survived. Twelve raiders lost in all, and six wounded gravely. Brenna couldn’t recall a raid when they’d lost so many.
Among the gravely wounded was the berserker Vali, who seemed to wish friendship with her, for reasons she had not yet discerned. His back had been opened, rending his woolen tunic nearly in two. The gash was deep and long, from his shoulder to nearly his waist. When she had pulled him out of the deep pool of blood, she had seen the white gleam of ribs. She didn’t believe any man could survive such a wound.
With their dead as well tended as they could be in the storm, Brenna went to the healer’s tent and ducked inside. Candlelight flickered with a near blinding brightness after the deep dark of the night storm outside.
The healer and his two helpers—one of them a captive woman, Brenna noticed—looked over as she entered. The healer and the raider both nodded without meeting her eyes. The captive woman, though, let her glance linger, her brow furrowing as she noticed Brenna’s right eye. And then she looked away.
But there had been something different in that woman’s glance. Though she was a captive, and rightly anxious, still there had been something more normal in her curiosity. It gave Brenna a moment’s pause.
Then she saw Vali, lying on his stomach, his bare back exposed. The healer was sewing the gash closed with a bone needle, making large, rough stitches with coarse black thread. Brenna’s own flesh tightened as she imagined the pain.
If the healer were taking such care, though, then there was a chance Vali would live.
“How is he?” she asked, surprising herself and the healer, too. He looked up at her in shock, his eyes lifting no higher than her mouth.
“There is no offal in his blood. He might yet live if the bleeding stops.”
Healers tasted the blood in a wounded torso to determine the severity of a wound. The taste of offal meant that vital workings had been rent, and there was little a healer could do in such a case. Vali had been fortunate, then.
“See, Brenna God’s-Eye?” Vali gasped from the ground, his voice weak and hoarse. “We are fated to save each other.”
She hadn’t known he was awake. It would have been a mercy had he not been, as the healer speared his ravaged flesh and pulled the rough-spun thread through again and again, sealing the long wound. The pain must have been enormous. Brenna knew something like it; she bore a savage scar on one thigh and another across one shoulder, and both of the wounds that had caused the scars had been sewn together. She, though, had been made to sleep by the healer both times and knew only the pain upon waking.
And yet, with his face turned toward her and away from the healer, still covered in a dark mask of blood, he smiled. “Will you sit?”
Brenna turned and considered the opening of the tent. The rain was too heavy and the night too dark for Calder to call the raiders together to discuss the next move. But she wasn’t sure what she would do in here, sitting in the way of the healer.
Yet she couldn’t make herself refuse him. She sat at his shoulder. The healer paused his sewing, his mouth agape. When he started again, Vali groaned.
“Is the pain very bad?” she asked, fighting a sudden urge to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.
His smile grew, and his eyes met hers. “It was. And then you sat with me.”
With that, he closed his eyes. Brenna sat quietly while the healer sewed. Then she noticed that each time the needle pierced his skin, Vali’s hand twitched. Following an impulse she didn’t understand, she leaned forward and set her hand in his, wrapping her fingers around the hard, broad mass as best she could. His fingers closed over hers, and he was still.
Brenna felt deeply confused.
~oOo~
“To have such a force arrive in the same day, the seat of this lord must be very close.” Calder turned to Leif, his closest advisor. “None of them will speak yet?”
Leif shook his head. “Four died in the night. Two are near death. Only three might speak, and they are staunchly silent.”
Calder shook his head. “And no word of the scouts?”
“No.” Leif took a deep breath and let it out. “We can assume they’re dead.”
One of the scouts was Leif’s own son, Einar, only fourteen and on his first raid. Both were young, barely men, but Halvar, the other, was at the end of his third raiding season.
The morning had broken bright and clear, and those raiders who could were seated in the middle of camp, planning their next move. Brenna sat on the edge of the group, but close to Calder. She knew her place as protector—and as talisman. She had once saved Calder’s stepmother and younger siblings, and he didn’t like her far from him on a raid.
He had never said as much. Calder, like all the others, kept personal distance and rarely spoke directly to her except to issue an order. But he called her close when he needed her, and he sought her, even met her eyes, when he had a problem to solve.
He did so now. As always, she simply gazed steadily back and let him take from that whatever he needed. Whatever mystical power she had came from the people who projected it onto her from their own superstitions, their own needs.
Such was her role and her fate, she’d come to understand: to be the proxy for the fears and desires of others.
Taking what he needed from Brenna’s fixed gaze, he turned back to the group. “We need to know who the cloaked man was. He was important. We might have learned much from him, had Vali been temperate.”
“Because he fell so quickly, the soldiers lost focus. They were on horseback. We were greatly outnumbered, and we were weary already. We might well have been overrun if Vali hadn’t taken down their leader.”
Brenna turned to the speaker—a short, bull-necked man pledged to Jarl Snorri, with close-cropped, flaming red hair and a full beard. Brenna had seen him talking with Vali, but she didn’t know his name.
“Erik speaks true,” said another, answering the question Brenna
hadn’t asked. “We owe our victory to Vali’s spear.”
Calder seemed irritated by the dispute of his own opinion, but he let it stand. He turned back to Leif. “We need to know, or we lose this chance. We cannot take the time to send more scouts. Our time is now. How many soldiers have we slain?”
“Two hundred and twenty,” came the answer.
“Two hundred and twenty,” Calder repeated. “We have been outnumbered at every turn and yet victorious. The gods are with us, and we must take what they’ve offered us. We must strike before the lord here can gather allies and reinforcements. Make the soldiers talk.”
He turned and stormed off toward his tent.
Brenna wondered why they would strike. They had raided well the day before, taking much plunder, and they had vanquished two attacks as well. That would afford them the space to refresh and recuperate. They should pull in, bury their dead, protect the camp until their wounded could sail, and then return home.
Moreover, the summer neared its end. They needed to be home.
Instead, Leif stood. “Knut, Oluf, come. The rest of you, take the time to make yourselves ready. We have not seen the last of blood here.”
Brenna watched the three men walk toward the captive soldiers.
She didn’t like not understanding, and on this raid, it seemed she understood very little.
~oOo~
Vali was asleep when Brenna went into the healer’s tent after the meeting. She had stayed long the night before, well after his back had been closed, until his hand relaxed and freed hers. They hadn’t spoken again.
She had found peace, sitting there quietly as he rested, holding his hand.
Another of the wounded had died while the raiders met, and the healer was preparing his body for removal as Brenna crouched at Vali’s side and laid her hand on his brow. He was warm. Too warm.
When the body had been carried out, Brenna turned to the healer. “He’s hot.”
Without looking at her, the healer nodded. “Yes. Corruption in the wound. I’ll prepare a poultice, but he is in the gods’ hands.” He stopped and met her eyes directly. “If he matters to you, you might use your influence.”
She had none. But it was pointless to say. So she simply turned back to Vali and watched as her hand, without her intention, smoothed over the stubbled skin of his shorn scalp. Her fingertips combed lightly through his long hair. It was stiff with blood.
He stirred and groaned at her touch, and his eyes blinked open. “Brenna…” he rasped, seeing her. “Are you real?”
It was rare that she heard her given name only, without the addendum that made her both less and more than she truly was. Something fluttered in her belly. Hearing only ‘Brenna,’ she felt for a moment like the girl she knew she was. She felt real.
“I am.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. Brenna sat with him, watching the healer make his poultice and listening to the screams of the soldier Leif and his men had chosen to make speak.
~oOo~
Brenna sat with Vali while the poultice was applied and held his hand as the hot, acrid-smelling cloths made him tense and moan. She didn’t understand the draw she felt toward him. It was physical, something deep inside her that knew ease when he was close. His pain pained her. The thought that he was dying made her chest feel tight.
She knew him not at all, and yet she was comforted by his presence, and by the idea that her presence comforted him.
Perhaps it was only that no one else in years had spoken to her as simply another person. No one else in years had sought her company. Not since she’d left her parents’ home in the thick of night.
When the healer was done with him, Vali slept again, his breathing harsh and irregular. It seemed to Brenna that his color was wrong, but she didn’t know, and she couldn’t find the will to ask. She knew nothing of healing and wished she knew less than she did, so she put her trust in the man who knew.
The blow of a horn pulled her attention from the man sleeping before her. Two short blows and a long. An envoy approached.
Before Brenna stood, she leaned forward, realizing only at the last chance that she had meant to kiss Vali’s cheek. Pulling back abruptly, shocked at herself, she stood and hurried to the tent opening. The captive woman stood near the open flaps, and their eyes met. Strangely, the woman gave Brenna a kind smile. Brenna hurried past without returning it. She wasn’t sure she remembered how to smile.
Grabbing her sword from the rack outside the healer’s tent, she slung it on her back and took her place behind Calder as three riders, the lead bearing a flag rather than a weapon, approached. They stopped at the edge of the camp, where the raiders had erected a spiked fence.
Calder stepped forward. Brenna and Leif did as well. In a haphazard approximation of their tongue, the envoy raised his voice and said, “My lord Prince Vladimir seeks…seeks…p-parley. He asks that you…steal…er…you…you accept this…in-invitation. My lord seeks peace.”
Calder looked over his shoulder, first at Leif and then at Brenna. Then he grinned back at all the raiders assembled.
He faced the envoy party again and, in the Estland tongue, in an accent that seemed, to Brenna’s untrained ear, fluid and flawless, Calder answered.
She didn’t understand the words, but she could read the reaction. Calder had accepted the invitation.
One of the riders behind the envoy, a grey-haired man in polished leather and a rich cloak, urged his horse forward and dismounted. He was stoic, but Brenna saw fear in his eyes and knew he had been offered as a hostage to ensure the safety of the raiders at this parley.
Calder took the man by the arm, said some words in the Estland tongue, and then turned to Knut. “Our guest. Bind his arms and keep a guard on him.”
~oOo~
They had captured enough horses alive that they could all ride to the castle. They left enough raiders back to keep the camp safe, and the rest followed the envoy party to the castle of Prince Vladimir. The ride was short, only a few hours.
As they came through the gates, the people within, commoners and soldiers alike, stopped and watched—not in greeting, but in curiosity. And fear.
In all her years as a shieldmaiden, Brenna had never been so deep into raided territory. She shared these people’s curiosity. But not their fear.
As she dismounted, she realized that she had not seen anyone make a ward sign. People stared, or they looked away, but not at or from her particularly. They had not marked her as different. Not yet, anyway.
Calder spoke with a small man with a long, pinched nose and hair as black as the darkest night. He wore a jeweled crown and a grand cloak trimmed, even in this waning summer afternoon, with fur and fixed over his shoulders with jeweled brooches. Arrayed at his sides were men in gleaming armor.
The prince, Brenna guessed.
He turned, the cloak swinging, and Calder followed him through tall oaken doors. Brenna and the rest followed Calder. The armored soldiers followed them.
She didn’t like having the soldiers at their backs, and she rested her hand on the hilt of her shortsword. A glance at Calder and Leif showed them to be likewise prepared for trouble. All the raiders rustled with readiness.
They found themselves inside a hall, much like the great halls of their own jarls and chieftains, but made of stone, and bleaker and colder for it. Rather than the rich warmth of the wood and fur of a great hall, this room echoed and chilled, despite the many people filling it. It seemed all the grand lords and ladies of this realm had assembled for the parley.
In the middle of the room was a long table laden with food and drink. Calder stopped at the nearest end of the table and waited. The prince turned and spoke, rattling off long streams of gibberish beyond Brenna’s comprehension.
Unable to understand the words being spoken, she used the time instead to scan the room. A dozen soldiers had followed them in. Another dozen lords were assembled along the sides, with women and even children in attendance with them. A woman wearin
g an elaborately jeweled crown held an infant at the far end of the assemblage. Six servants stood by. And the prince, still babbling.
They, on the other hand, were twenty. Assuming that Brenna was right about the general incompetence of the women for fighting, then the odds were good. It bothered her that there were children here, but she had not made that decision.
The prince finally stopped and stretched out his arms in a gesture of welcome. Two servants moved to the table, in the middle of which sat a large tray with a domed cover. As they reached for the cover, Brenna was not surprised at all to hear the heavy chunk of an iron bar being dropped over the doors. They were barred on the inside, but the delay in heaving it up could be deadly in a fight. They were effectively locked in.
God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) Page 4