The greatest horror, however, was none of that. The thing that turned his stomach was the state of her wounds. Her back and her legs, her arms—they were nearly shredded with ragged gashes, the work, he knew, of multiple lashes repeated over many days and then left to fester. Or worse, to be filled with what the warden and cottars called black fire, some kind of unguent that burned and ate at the raw meat of wounds.
A sudden, powerful urge gripped Leofric’s body, and he nearly stepped forward. He wanted to take the woman from the executioner. He wanted to gather her to his chest. To protect her from these men.
He caught himself and stood still.
The executioner dropped her body in her cell, and Leofric heard her moan.
How the woman was alive, he could not imagine. What had her will been forged of?
He felt more than sick for this woman’s suffering, more than worry for his father’s soul, more even than grief for the loss of Dreda. The vengeance that had been in his own heart, which had stilled his tongue from protesting this from the start, from saying something in those moments when their father had stood up from the floor in the residence and pulled his regal bearing back over his shoulders, before he’d come to the Black Walls and been overtaken by this madness—the vengeance that had made Leofric complicit in this horror was gone from his heart. Now he felt…he didn’t know.
“Enough of this,” he said without thinking. “Enough.”
The three men who’d come from that room all looked at him. For the hundredth time, Leofric marked the oddity of a holy bishop so comfortable in a dungeon.
“Your Grace?” the bishop asked, and Leofric heard no respect in the address.
What was happening here was under his father’s orders. The king. He had no authority to stop it, and he transgressed badly to assert such a challenge. But he didn’t back down. That urge that had almost compelled him to wrest the woman from her tormentors drove him yet.
“I’m sending a healer to her. And proper food and drink. You’ve played your games, and now this is done.”
The bishop bowed his head. “Your Grace, I would obey, but I cannot. We are under orders from the king your father.”
“I will speak to my father. You would have done well to counsel him away from this sinfulness in the first place.”
Hard light glinted in the bishop’s eyes. “I think you are not the one to say what is sin and what is not, Your Grace. The Lord uses me as his tool here.”
That was terribly convenient for the bishop, then. Leofric set his jaw. “Leave her alone.”
Father Francis bowed and managed to show no obeisance. “I shall speak to the king as well, and we shall know.”
There was no point in quarreling with the man, so Leofric turned and sprinted up the steps. He would have to impress upon his father that the time for this horror was over.
~oOo~
As he entered the chapel, Leofric didn’t know what he would say. The father he’d known all his life would know reason. But that man would have had the captive woman killed as soon as it had become clear that she didn’t know their language and couldn’t be pressed for information. He would never have tortured anyone, man or woman, for so long, for no purpose but to cause pain.
This man had been twisted and stretched by grief, one doubly deep because it claimed two losses.
The queen had died while she’d held Dreda in her arms for the first and only time. Leofric didn’t know what exactly had happened, but childbirth was a dangerous thing, and often women died bringing new life into the world.
His parents had been married in the way royals were always married: to forge an alliance between realms. They’d barely known each other before they were husband and wife. But the queen had been beautiful in face and in spirit, and the king had been steady and kind, and they had grown to know deep love.
Leofric vividly remembered the day of Dreda’s birth and their mother’s death. Though he had been a man grown, he’d wept wild tears. He still felt the loss of their mother even now, and he knew that Eadric did as well. Her unconditional, unreserved love and devotion would always be missed.
But in the midst of that gaping loss had been a tiny, perfect girl. Their father had come from the queen’s chamber with his eyes full of sorrow and his arms full of hope. “She is not gone,” he’d told them with a quaking voice. “She is with us in our daughter. Meet your sister. She is Dreda.”
Their mother’s name.
The newborn princess had been calm and curious, her eyes open wide already, and Leofric had believed his father’s words. Their mother’s spirit had wrapped around her daughter and stayed with them.
Their loss had been eased, and every sweet thing that Dreda did—her smile, her laugh, her sighs in sleep—every new thing she learned, even the stormy blue of her eyes, reminded them all of the mother she’d never known.
In losing Dreda, they’d finally lost the queen.
Leofric knew that. He felt it himself. But none of them could be reclaimed from their pain by causing it to another. That would have been true even if the woman in the Black Walls had been the one to hurt his sister. Nothing they could do to the captive would change their loss in any way.
The king knelt at the end of the aisle, before the altar, beneath the golden crucifix. He wore only breeches and a linen tunic, not even a brocaded doublet. His iron grey hair was wild around his head. He might have been a trespassing peasant.
Leofric blessed himself in the font and walked down the aisle, his boots striking the stone floor, making his footsteps echo through the high-ceilinged sanctuary.
His father didn’t acknowledge that he was no longer alone. When he arrived at the altar, Leofric genuflected and then knelt at his father’s side. He didn’t speak. He put his hands together and made an effort to pray.
The words wouldn’t come at first, but as his thoughts circled the trouble of the castle, the grief, the anger, the vengeance, the horror, he understood that he was praying. He opened his mind and waited for the words to come to him that his father needed to hear.
He didn’t want the woman to die. That would be the most expedient solution, he knew—to tell his father that it was right to treat her as an enemy warrior, to take her head. It was the proper solution. Her suffering would end, the vengeance would be done, and they could turn again to life.
But he didn’t want her to die. Kneeling at his father’s side, he understood that truth—he wanted to save her.
Why? He didn’t know. How? He didn’t know. It was hopeless, of course. Nothing would induce the king to save the life of a woman he’d spent more than a month torturing. What purpose might she have? Her people had been driven away; they had no more need of information. And she couldn’t speak their language, so what information she might have was locked behind her barbarian tongue.
Nevertheless, the thought that rose to the top, that grew until it silenced all the others, was that he wanted the woman to live. To be released from the Black Walls and restored to that fierce, sleek strength she’d had.
That was folly. It was madness.
The king sighed heavily and stood. Leofric stood as well. His father looked at him, his eyes weary.
The man before him was broken, and it broke Leofric’s heart to see it.
“Father, I would speak with you, if I might.”
The king inclined his head, and Leofric took that for permission to continue.
“I would speak with you about the captive woman. I think she might be of use.” The words were there in a rush, and he spoke them as they came. It was as if they were being poured into his mind from the mouth of God Himself. “She was a leader among her people. She has information about their ways. She is a warrior. She can explain to us their ways of fighting.”
“We drove them away,” the king said, showing a glimmer of interest. “And she doesn’t speak. She never speaks. She never screams. I don’t understand why she will not scream.”
Leaving that rambling unaddressed, Leofric
continued with the idea that now charged through his brain. “And if they should come back? Mayhap she can be taught to speak with us, and prepare us for barbarians better prepared for us.”
The king blinked. “She is a savage. An animal.”
He wasn’t dismissing him out of hand. Leofric realized that the king had been ready for this challenge. Perhaps he’d been seeking a way out of the cycle. Something he couldn’t see for his own benightedness.
Leofric sent an angry thought—or maybe that, too, was a prayer—toward Father Francis. The soul of the king was the bishop’s first charge, and he’d let it fester while he’d sated his own prurient interests. Any one of the lesser priests in the kingdom would have been a better guide and guard for the king’s soul.
“Father, she is not an animal. She is a woman, heathen or no. She is God’s own child, like any other. And she is smart enough to lead and fight. She is strong enough to survive. She can be taught.”
Turning from him, the king gazed up at the golden crucifix. “I had the crucifix made so that the queen your mother might be wed under it. She didn’t like it. We were wed years, we had our two sons, before she told me that she thought the Lord wouldn’t like so well to be formed from gold. Humble wood befitted a carpenter, she said. But she wouldn’t have it removed because we had been wed beneath it.” He stepped to the altar and brushed his hands over its smooth surface. “Dreda was the last of her.”
“No, Father.” He closed the distance between them and rested his hand on his father’s shoulder. “She is in Eadric and me. She is in your heart. She is in our love. Dreda is there, too. Here. With us.” He set his hand on his chest, over his heart. “Mother wouldn’t like what we’ve done in the Black Walls.”
After a long, fraught silence, the king nodded. “No, she would not.” He turned and faced his son again, and Leofric was heartened to see life flickering deep inside his father’s eyes. “And you would have me free her?”
“Not free her. Tend to her. Offer her comfort. Bring her back to health. She is alone in our world now, and she understands nothing. After everything she’s suffered, kindness might be a balm. And if she is no help or use, then kill her as our enemy.”
“And who would be her tutor in this endeavor? Who would we trust so much with such a loose tether on a prisoner who would tear my heart from my chest with her teeth?”
“I would, Sire. I would teach her. I would build her trust.”
A spectral smile fluttered over the king’s lips and disappeared. “Do not exchange one kind of sin for another, my son. You would do better to keep your trust with the kitchen wenches and chambermaids.”
Leofric blushed and smiled. There had been a glimmer of his father in that scolding—the godly man who bore his son’s dalliances with aggravated patience and disappointed affection.
“No, Father. My interest is in making of her some use. Healing her wounds and ours. Righting what is wrong. That is all.”
“Very well. Bring her to the servants’ quarters. Keep her under guard. If she can be healed, do so. If she can be made to speak, do so. If she has knowledge, find it. But if she is dull, or stubborn, if she will not be useful, she dies.”
Brenna God’s-Eye had been a slave when Astrid had first known her. She’d sold herself into thrall to Jarl Åke when she was young, still on the cusp of her womanhood. Astrid, almost the same age, had been fascinated by the way people feared the girl, a mere slave.
But she was the God’s-Eye as well, her right eye full of color and light and said to have been Odin’s own. Not even the lowliness of thralldom could weaken the power of her eye.
Åke had taken great pride and power in calling the God’s-Eye his thrall. Astrid remembered the nervous reverence the people of Geitland, warrior and craftsman, farmer and thrall alike, had paid to the girl as she’d moved through town performing her humble duties. Slaves were usually beneath notice, but Brenna God’s-Eye had both attracted and repelled attention. She’d been a steady source of fascination.
Astrid had known real envy. For a slave. She’d wanted to be feared like the God’s-Eye was feared. She’d wanted men to quail to look on her.
Then, two years or so after the God’s-Eye had come to Geitland, the town had been attacked and nearly overrun. Åke and his warriors had defeated the chieftain—he who would come to know the Blood Eagle for his treachery—and the God’s-Eye, who’d fought and killed the invaders who’d come for the jarl’s family, had been freed to train as a shieldmaiden.
In the God’s-Eye’s strength, and in her change of fortune, Astrid had seen her own path. She would be a warrior, too. She’d taken up the sword at once.
For the first time in her life, her father had looked on her with something warmer than benign disappointment. He had seen that she might bring honor to her family after all.
But that had barely mattered to Astrid. The first time she’d hefted a sword and swung it true, she had felt a power fill her veins. She had known her calling, found her path. She had, for the first time in her life, seen who she was. Not a cart-maker’s daughter. Not a healer’s daughter. Not an only child who should have been a son.
A shieldmaiden. On the day she’d embarked on her first raid, she’d cast off her father’s name, no longer claiming that she was Hanssdottir. She was simply Astrid. And someday, she hoped to earn a name beyond herself. Like Vali Storm-Wolf.
Or she might remain simply Astrid. Brynhilde had needed no extension of herself to be told of in the sagas and revered among all the Northern people.
Like the great Brynhilde, like the great God’s-Eye, Astrid was a shieldmaiden. She was strong and brave and valiant.
A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
~oOo~
Her body was dying. Far away, on the floor of that black cell, her body was ending its use. She could feel it burn and throb, could feel the corruption dig deep, all the way to her bones. There was no place in that body, from her cracking scalp to her swollen feet, that did not hurt, that was not dying. Her head was on fire, her belly full of molten lead, her joints and muscles made of jagged rocks.
The pain was so acute and so complete, so constant, that it had become its own presence, separate from her mind.
Her mind had moved far away. Into the past, sometimes, and into the future, sometimes. Never in the present. At any cost, not the present.
She could see the rolling winter hills of Geitland; she could smell and hear and feel and taste her home. She could watch her mother at her healing. She could see Olga and Magni.
She could see Leif. Her friend. He had made her his right hand when he’d taken the seat of the jarl, and she’d found a talent in herself for seeing the things he missed. He looked ahead, and she watched their feet, and together they kept Geitland on a steady path.
She could see the great doors of Valhalla, gleaming ahead.
Leif was not coming for her. He and Vali would not break the cell door down and pull her back into the light. They were dead, then. They would have come for her if they’d lived.
They were in Valhalla already. She would drink with her friends soon.
How soon, she didn’t know. Time had lost all meaning. The signs of need in her body had gone silent as it progressed in its dying. There was only the black cell, and the bad room. The man in black, and the seer. The pain.
All she had left was to close her mouth and wait.
She would die with honor and valor, and she would join her friends.
A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
A true shieldmaiden
Closed her mouth
Closed her mouth
Closed her mouth.
~oOo~
The scrape of the cell door wrested Astrid from a hazy dream of home and shoved her back into th
e black cell. A small voice somewhere inside her urged her to fight, and she made an attempt to move her limbs. They had long ago stopped heeding her commands, however, and she lay passive, not even blinking to try to clear her sight.
There was nothing she needed to see. They would grab her. They would heave her up. They would carry her to the bad room, and they would do what they would.
It seemed as if it had been longer than usual since they’d last come for her, but time was a broken circle, spiraling into nothingness. She closed her eyes and tried to return to the woods above Geitland.
Something hard and cool was pressed to her lips, and she felt wet spilling over her, into the cracks of her skin. A hand slid under her head—it hurt, pressing on swollen, broken skin—and she called up what focus and strength she could and forced herself fully into the horrible present. She yanked her head away, and, unable to hold it up on her own power, she let it fall with a rattling thud to the floor.
Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3) Page 11