Snow was falling heavily, in sheets of flakes so large they made the night opaque. The wind blustered from the north and drove the snow toward the south.
Into that storm, Vali ran out to the center of the castle grounds. He pulled the linens away and let them fall to the snow at his feet. Then he raised his arms and held the naked body of his son over his head, toward the stormy sky. “HE IS THORVALDR, AND HE IS YOURS. YOU HAVE TAKEN HIM ALREADY. WHAT MORE WOULD YOU HAVE OF ME? WHAT GREATER SACRIFICE WOULD YOU HAVE THAN MY CHILD? WOULD YOU TAKE MY LOVE AS WELL? BETTER YOU TAKE MY HEART FROM MY CHEST!”
He felt a hand on his back, and he pulled his son to his chest and whirled around with a vicious growl. Leif stood there, stalwart.
“Vali, my good friend. My brother. You tempt the gods.”
“I care not! Let them do what they will!”
“Your woman yet lives. You mean to give up before she has?”
With no answer to that, Vali stood and stared, his chest heaving with each angry gasp of icy, snowy air.
Leif held out his hands. “Let me take your son. I will see to it that he is treated with care until you are ready to say goodbye.”
Vali pulled away. “Brenna will want him.”
“No. It will cause her more pain, when she struggles already with so much. Of this I know. She awaited a child she could nourish. And she is in no state now to say goodbye. Your attention should be with her.”
Leif lifted his hands again, and this time Vali set his son in them. He bent and picked up the linens from the snow, and he covered his son’s body.
Then he walked back into the castle, through the crowd that had amassed behind him, and went to keep a vigil at his wife’s side.
He knew not what he would do if it was a deathbed he went to.
~oOo~
Snow fell for two full days and three nights, burying the castle again. The dawn broke bright on the third morning, and it was the first time the sun had shone since the morning Brenna had taken a sledge ride to the village and their lives had broken apart.
And still she had not woken.
Tord was dead; he had not lived through that first night, but he had told them what he could before he could say no more. Sigvalde was dead. The men who had attacked the sledge had been part of a band of Prince Ivan’s soldiers. They had overrun the village, killing the five men there and all the livestock. Orm and his men had come upon the aftermath. Two of the men who’d been in the village had lived long enough to tell them the story.
They had been fortunate. The harsh winter had brought all of the villagers into the castle, and the women and children and most of the men still lived there—all but the team whose rotation it had been to tend the bulk of the livestock.
The winter had saved most of the villagers, and the latest storm, which had brought fresh snow above Vali’s knees and drifts up to the second windows, had saved the castle from attack while it was distracted by its losses.
But the storm had ended, and the sun shone again. When Brenna came back to him, Vali would go off and seek the vengeance that his soul demanded.
That morning, while Olga opened the shutters to bring in sunshine and a moment of cold, clean air, Brenna finally opened her eyes and kept them open.
Lying at her side after his own short and fitful sleep had ended, Vali watched her, stroking her fair hair. He saw her come to wakefulness and take a deeper breath. She cut it off with a small grunt of pain and then turned her head and really focused on him.
“My love. My love.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “How do you feel?”
“I ache,” she croaked. She gave him a smile and pushed her hand downward, over her belly, in a gesture that had become habit in the weeks that their son had swelled her.
He watched her true awakening play over her face, and his heart broke yet more.
“Vali? Where? Is he…?” Her voice was rough and unsubstantial, and yet the panic in it cut like a blade.
Olga had come to the side of the bed and was pouring water into a cup. Vali ignored her and kept his focus on his wife.
“He lived for a time, but he was too fine for this world. Thor came and took him away to live among the gods.”
She made a face, turbulent with anger and sorrow, and then, in a blink, her expression went blank, and she turned away. Olga offered her a drink, but she didn’t heed her.
Vali understood what she was doing, and he would have none of it. He could not survive her cold remove, not now. Not ever again. He reached and took her chin in his hand, forcing her back to face him. “No, Brenna. Do not turn away. We share this loss, and we will share the healing. I cannot lose you, too. I have been sad and lonely and…and afraid. Stay with me. Stay. Please stay.” He slid his hand from her chin to her neck and leaned in close, resting his forehead on hers. “Please stay.”
She didn’t speak, but she lifted her hand from her empty belly and laid it over his hand.
And that was enough to let him know that he hadn’t lost her.
“I named him Thorvaldr.”
A stifled sob left her injured chest, and she nodded.
Vali scooted carefully closer and gently wrapped her in his arms.
Olga cared for her through each day, changing the dressings, helping her deal with her body’s needs, washing her, binding her broken chest. Brenna felt—was—helpless and humiliated.
But her friend was steady and kind. Every morning, Vali left her with a kiss to her forehead, and Olga came to nurse her until the night, when Vali came back again and stayed. During the day, he would check on her, but he never stayed long. Other women would come in with questions for Olga or to talk about goings-on in the castle. Olga was in charge, and she continued to manage, even though she rarely left the room during the day, except while Brenna slept.
The first thing she did every morning was to change Brenna’s dressings and clean her. There was little physical pain about this, but it was among the hardest things for Brenna to tolerate, with her legs up and her most intimate place bared.
Olga patted Brenna’s knee and stepped back, gathering up the bloody linens. Steeling herself against the discomfort that swamped through her whole body with every movement, Brenna straightened her legs.
There was still so much blood. Her son had been born and had died days ago, and yet she bled.
Though Olga assured her that much of her bleeding was normal after a birth, Brenna had lost too much of the blood she needed, and she was too weak to do more than sit up. Even that made her violently dizzy, and pain sliced through her chest.
After she disposed of the bloody linens, Olga washed her hands in the basin and came back. Brenna knew what was next: the worst part of Olga’s tender care. Her friend and nurse came to the side of the bed and turned back the furs.
“Come. Perhaps today it will not be so bad.”
Sliding her hands under Brenna’s back, she lifted, rolling her to her side. Brenna clenched her teeth and bore the pain. There was worse in store.
Olga leaned over her and placed a small fold of linen under Brenna’s face. Then, gently, she massaged her back, making long, slow, upward sweeps of firm but careful pressure.
Now Brenna was meant to cough. In her life, she had been sliced with a sword, and she had been hacked with an axe. She had been bashed with shields. She had been punched, head-butted, even bitten. But no pain had ever been so overwhelming as the pain Olga forced on her to heal her. With each cough, Brenna’s suffering heart seemed to tear from its moorings and leap into her throat.
The linen under her cheek was to catch the black clots of blood she coughed up. Sometimes, they would come up in a spray, and the coughing would take over and become a fit. That was the worst, more pain than Brenna could bear stoically. On this morning, though, only one clot came up.
When the torture was over, Olga helped her to lie back on the pillows. Then she picked up the cloth and studied it.
“You are healing. Every day is better. There is no longer fresh b
lood coming, and the old blood is less. Today we will walk across the room and sit by the fire for a while.”
Such a small thing, but the thought of it made Brenna weary.
“I’ll ask Vali to join us.” Olga’s voice was kind and encouraging.
Brenna shook her head. She hated for Vali to see her in her weakness, and she knew she would struggle to cross the room—to simply cross the room!—and to sit upright in a chair.
Her resistance to his company wasn’t vanity, as much as she hated her weakness. It was the turmoil she saw in him—in his eyes, in the rigid set of his shoulders, the narrow line of his lips. He saw her pain, her frailty, and he became enraged. Not at her, but for her.
He was solicitous and loving with her, and she needed the strength and comfort of his embrace. But he needed vengeance, and every sign that she was not as she had been made his need greater. She could see him choking on his need to avenge her and their child.
She needed vengeance, too. All the good that she had finally found had been yanked away from her, and that could not go unanswered. But she couldn’t even stand on her own, so vengeance seemed far away. It was likely that she would be lying abed, in this room, when Vali and the others attacked Prince Ivan. It was likely that, just as the birth, life, and death of her own child had happened without her, the revenge for his loss would as well.
It was a strange thing, to have carried and loved a child for months, and then to have woken one day to find that he simply no longer existed, that there was no sign of him anywhere except the blood still running from between her legs and the milk that swelled and seeped from her breasts. He had a name: Thorvaldr—a good name. But one she had had no part in choosing. The babe she loved was simply gone.
There was not even a marker she might visit when she could. The weather had prevented a burial. Her son had been burned away.
Her heart was broken and her head swam with sorrow, but she did not know how to grieve. Tears were agony. Vali thrummed with fury when he held her. There was nowhere she could turn for solace without causing more pain.
She was alone. Again. For the first time in her life, she had friends and love and a home, and it mattered not a jot. She was still alone.
~oOo~
Despite her wish, Vali came into their chamber while she was sitting by the fire. She dashed a sharp look at Olga, who pretended not to notice and went on with changing the bedclothes.
Her husband came right to her and crouched at the side of her chair, laying his hand over hers. “I am glad to see you up. How do you feel?”
Weak and stiff, sore in every part, and as though each breath dragged itself up from her chest with bared claws. “Better. I’m feeling stronger.”
He leaned in and kissed her fingers. “Soon you will be bearing your sword and your shield again.”
Not soon enough.
With a long, deep breath, Vali stared into her eyes. Then he stood and took the seat next to her. “We have been planning. I would speak with you about it.”
Brenna shifted in her chair, remaining stoic through the sharp discomfort, so that she could face him again. Neither Vali nor anyone had consulted with her since she had been with child. In the days since she had lost him, she had seen few people, and no one, not even Vali, had spoken to her of anything except her own health.
“Please, yes. Tell me.”
Rather than speak, he looked up, past her. To Olga. As if he needed permission from her before he would speak to his wife.
“Vali! Please!” The force of her plea rocked her chest and made her gasp. Vali’s eyes came quickly back to her, now shadowed under his furrowed brow.
“I don’t wish to tax you, Brenna. I want you well.”
“I’m locked away again. I’m lonely and sad. That is a worse hurt than any other. Please.”
Vali took her hand; then, after another infuriating glance at Olga, he nodded. “We were blind to Ivan, and I wonder if you would have been. You have the clearest sight of any of us. So I would have your counsel, if you feel well enough.”
Brenna’s pain was, for that moment, forgotten. “Please.”
“The snow holds us back. We are buried again, and the new cold has yet to break well. The band that beset the village was on foot—”
“What? What happened in the village?”
She saw it dawn on him that he was telling her something she hadn’t known. He squeezed her hand. “Burned. Destroyed. The men there and the livestock are all lost.”
Her last full memory of the time before was of laughing and eating with those very men.
She had known that Sigvalde was dead, and she had asked after Tord, who, despite the arrow through his own chest, had tried to help her before he’d realized that he had to go for more help than he could be, so she knew he, too, had perished. She knew that it was not Toomas but Ivan who had sent the men, because Tord had talked while he checked her over and covered her, his voice strained with pain and his fading breath, and he’d said that the colors their attackers carried were Ivan’s. Those bits of memory had fallen into shape since she’d woken.
But her memory fogged and then faded away after Tord had left her.
Among the most vivid of her memories, seen again and again in her turbulent dreams, was of a man in armor standing over her, an arrow aimed at her face.
As he loosed it, he had shifted his aim subtly, and the arrow had driven deeply into the ground a scant inch from her head.
He had muttered words she didn’t understand, and then he’d turned and called out Kõik surnud!
She’d known those words. All dead. He had been lying to someone—a superior, most likely. He had saved her.
But what he and his like had done had killed her son. And her friends. Had taken more even than she’d known.
If she ever saw him again, she would look him in the eyes—they were pale brown, like the color of mead—while she carved his heart from his chest. She wanted him to know, to see, that he had saved her for that sole purpose—as his own executioner.
“The whole village is lost?”
“Sadly, yes. It is fortunate that we opened the castle to the villagers, or they might all have been lost. As it is, we will rebuild when the season breaks. But that is when we expect trouble from the north, from Toomas. If it comes before the ships arrive, we are not enough men to fight on two fronts and to build as well—and now it appears that Toomas and Ivan might ally after all.”
The three princes had made war on one another again and again, according to Olga and the others. Even so, the raiders had at first considered the possibility that these frequent enemies would ally against an invading horde. Their scouts, however, had found little to suggest that Toomas would bother with such an alliance. Ivan’s more distant lands and smaller army, and his much poorer general state, had convinced Leif, Vali, and the others that he was no threat. Toomas, on his own, was a powerful force. He would feel no need to ally with a weak prince he despised.
And yet it had been Ivan who had made the first painful strike.
It made sense to Brenna. He would be the one who would need the factor of surprise in order to succeed. Toomas’s men outnumbered them. He could approach them in force and fight them head-on in a show of strength, and would thus wait for the weather that would support such movement.
Their scouting had shown Ivan’s soldiers to be fewer and comparatively poorly supplied. If he meant to attack without the benefit of an alliance—and clearly he did—then he would need sneak attacks and ambushes.
They should have been prepared for an attack from the south, but they had grown complacent, after months of quiet, nestled in the silence of the winter’s heavy snows.
Brenna noticed that Olga had stopped her work and was standing with a fur covering in her hands, frozen in the midst of laying it over the bed. Her full attention was on Brenna and Vali and their talk. Olga had been born on Ivan’s land, and what remained of her family still dwelt there. She had been sent to Vladimir years before, wi
th others of her home village, as part of a truce agreement between the princes.
Brenna motioned for Olga to join them. When her friend sat across from her and Vali, Brenna said, “You worry for your family.”
“Prince Ivan will make the village men to fight for him. But he does not train them as you have our men, and even some women, here. I have two younger brothers. They were small when I went away, but they are young men now and will be made to fight. I fear the blades of my new friends letting my own blood.”
God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) Page 16