A man spoke, his voice quiet and soft. She didn’t know the words he said. In her time in the dark, she’d learned a few of her tormentors’ words, she thought, but none of them good, and none of what this man had said.
Again, he lifted her head, this time using both hands, and something happened—he shifted, and lifted her higher. Oh, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, and she tried to close her mouth against her pain but her head was full of sparks and swirls. Images of the woods at home crowded in with the door to Valhalla and the flash of the lash and she didn’t know which one was real or where she was.
She felt arms around her—they were gentle and strong. That wasn’t real. There was nothing gentle in what was real. Gentle was a dream. But it was one she wanted. How long since anyone had been gentle with her?
Again the hard, cool press at her lips and the wet over them. A cup. It was a cup. That couldn’t be real, either. No one had offered her a cup in the black place.
The soft, deep voice at her ear, very close, speaking words she didn’t know. It didn’t matter. Here in this dream place, there was water in her mouth, and soft hands on her agonized body, and gentle sounds of safety at her ear. She swallowed, and the water turned to broken glass and cut its way down her throat, but it was cool and good. It was good. There was something still good.
Shhh. The deep voice said in this dream. Shhh. She understood that. There were more words, but she didn’t need them. Only the soft sounds. In this unreal place, she was leaning against a warm chest, and strong arms were around her, holding her tenderly, and she had water. Even if it cut her, it was water, cool and brilliant.
A woman’s voice spoke in the strange words. Never had a woman been in the black place. What was this place? Had her mind conjured something new? Not past or future but something else entirely?
The man answered her. Then they conversed. Back and forth. Unable to understand, and unable to care, Astrid focused on the little good she’d found here in this new unreal place. She turned her head and felt cool skin on her cheek. She heard the deep rumble of the man’s voice. He stopped, and she felt a whisper-light touch, like fingertips over her cheek.
Then there were different hands on her, small and sharp, probing at her legs, her arms, her back. Pushing into her wounds, tearing them open.
This was just a new torment, then. The worse one yet, offering her a reminder of comfort and then wresting it away. She found the last dregs of her will and strength, and she fought back, throwing her arms and legs out, wheeling away from the man’s gentle touch, lashing out at all the hands on her, the soft and the harsh.
After a moment, the last of her strength faded away, and she collapsed again.
The voices continued, softly, man and woman, but they were far away. Astrid let her mind leave the black place. She couldn’t fight. They would do to her body what they would.
Time fell into its void. Her mind spun, images shifting, memories and dreams, one over the other, and she didn’t try to find one place to go.
A weight fell over her, soft and thick. She didn’t understand what it was. It hurt, but lightly, a scant pressure over each wound. But something under the sting was new, was not pain, and she felt…eased.
Warm. She felt warmth. She had been bare so long that she hadn’t remembered what it was to be warm.
The man’s hands were on her again, gentle again. He lifted her, and pain snarled through her muscles. She tried to resist, afraid to go into the bad room again, but there was no fight left in her.
The man cradled her against his chest. She felt his voice rumble against her ear. He hadn’t taken the warmth away. He shifted her in his arms, tucking her closely to him. She could smell the warm clean fresh of his skin, a scent so good and clear, so different from the rank reek of the black place, that it stung her nose.
He carried her from the black place. He carried her and carried her.
He carried her into the light.
~oOo~
The room was too bright, brighter than her eyes could see. It hurt, it burned, and Astrid wondered if the man had brought her to the sun.
Or Valhalla? Was this how a shieldmaiden was carried to Valhalla? Not the Valkyries but their brothers? She’d never heard of such a thing.
There was more talking, there were more voices. A crowd of them, all female. Yet the man held her, and she was soothed by the rumble of his voice, steady and firm.
Then the sound of water. Splash and pour.
No. No, not that. Not the freezing water dumped over her bare, broken body. She had no strength left to close her mouth against that. Where was Valhalla?
Had she cried out? Had she been weak? Was the man carrying her to Helheim instead?
Yes, that had to be it. She felt herself falling, falling, falling toward Hel.
She tried to fight and found that the brief moments of ease—how long had she been headed toward the sun?—had restored to her some small strength.
He held her firmly, whispering Shhh, shhhh, shhhh at her, but she struggled. She tried to find her battle cry, but only a croaking groan came from her ragged throat.
Then she wasn’t falling any longer. She tried to see, but her eyes could only burn in the white light.
The man was arguing with a woman—the woman with the cruel hands. Astrid could hear the fight in his voice.
He moved, and she was falling again, and she heard the splash of water, but her limbs wouldn’t struggle against it this time. To prepare herself for the bitter bite of the icy water, she untethered her mind from this white place.
But the water was warm—very warm. And the man had not let her go. She could feel him under her body, under the water with her. The water bit into her wounds, but the pain didn’t torment her. There was ease in it. There was hope. This was helpful pain.
Healing pain. Were they healing her?
His voice at her ear, speaking unknowable words meant to soothe.
Hands at her head—small hands, but gentle. Pulling at her hair, but slowly. Undoing old braids that had been tangled into knots.
Were they washing her?
Had she been saved?
Was she home?
Again, she tried to see, and again her eyes gave her back only white light. “Leif?” she made her voice croak out his name.
Or was she with the healer? Her mother. Were those her mother’s hands in her hair? Was she finally knowing her mother’s gentle touch?
“Mamma?”
Soft, strange words at her ear. A deep voice. The scratch of a beard at her cheek. Lips—lips on her skin.
Not her mother. She knew no one who would touch her in such a tender way. She had not lived a life for tenderness. She had not wanted such a life.
She could think now of nothing she wanted more.
Valhalla or Helheim or home or just another cell, she didn’t care. She would take this soft salvation for as long as she could have it. She let her body ease into the arms around her. She turned her head as much as she could and felt the quiet strength of the one who held her.
She tasted salt on her lips and didn’t understand.
~oOo~
The man washed her, dabbing a soft cloth over her body as he held her. When he struck a spot where vivid pain lurked, he whispered in her ear and lightened his touch even more.
The hands at her hair worked endlessly, and then there was more warm water, and her hair was washed.
She could feel some of the pain wash away in the warm water. Other pains sharpened, but they didn’t vex her as they might have. Calm was easing into her flesh.
Time still spun aimlessly, but her mind settled a bit. Though it was still full of fire and confusion, it wanted to be in this present, and she could catch purchase and know sense every now and then. The room began to go dim just as the man lifted her from the water and wrapped her in something warm and as soft as lambswool.
Then there was the glow of fire, and Astrid knew alarm. Was she in the bad room after all?
Her eyes flew
open, and she could see—not well, but enough to make out furnishings. A bed. Chairs. Sconces on the walls. A fireplace. She was in a room like those in the Estland castle. There were windows, showing the darkening blue of new night sky.
She looked up at the man, her savior. She couldn’t make out his features, but they were dark—dark beard, dark hair.
Was she still in Anglia? She was. Gods, no. She hadn’t been saved.
Had she been sold? Was she a slave?
He carried her to the bed. Would he use her now? It didn’t matter. Of all the harm that had come to her, men putting themselves inside her was by far the least.
He pulled a fur over her naked body, speaking some of his strange words. Then he brushed his fingers over her forehead. He laid his palm over the same spot.
He turned and said strange words to someone else in the room.
Astrid didn’t care. She was weary and sick, her head burned and her mind reeled. Pain ravaged her body. But, for the first time in an eternity, she felt some comfort, buried under a fur, lying on soft linens.
She rolled to her side and wrapped her arms around the man’s arm. If he had bought her, she was glad. He had taken her from the black place, and nothing else mattered. If he would only be gentle, he could use her as he would.
It wasn’t pain that had broken her.
It was tenderness.
Leofric brushed his hand over the woman’s damp hair, blonde again since the bath and Elfleda’s careful attention to the filthy snarls and mats. Out of its braids and clean, it was long and the color of spun flax, too pale to be called gold. The strands still bore the kink of the braids, even after washing.
The woman had rolled to her side and wound her arms around the arm on which he’d propped himself, and he hadn’t the heart to pull away. In her restive sleep, she whimpered quietly with each panting exhale.
She’d been delirious since he’d entered her cell, shifting from unconsciousness to an indolent insensibility to a frenzied, pallid madness, over and over again. She spoke in her language, and Leofric wished he understood her. Sometimes, it sounded like she called out names, as if pleading for friends to help her. Friends she didn’t have here, who were far away from her now.
Once, she’d called out Mama, and he’d understood that. His heart had seemed to rend.
His heart had confused him since he’d entered her cell, since he’d settled on the floor to help her drink. Mercy, he was sad. Sadder now, perhaps, than when Dreda had been carried to him and his brother.
They had done all this to her, this woman, this warrior, who’d been sleek and powerful and was now wasted to nearly nothing. When he’d lifted her, she’d seemed lighter than Dreda had last been.
He brushed his fingertips over her full, cracked lips. An old scar ran through them, from her nose to her chin—a thin, straight, pale line. It was a fighter’s scar. So odd to see it on a woman.
“She’s too hot,” he murmured. Now that she was clean, her wounds were all the more horrible, and her skin, what little of it wasn’t open and festering or mottled with bruises, was a vivid red.
Elfleda huffed. The healer had behaved brusquely with him, giving him the barest respect due his station, since he’d insisted on getting into the tub with the woman.
But she had panicked badly when he’d tried to lay her in the water, and he couldn’t bear the sight of this wonder of a woman in fear. So he’d toed off his boots and climbed in, fully dressed, her bare, broken body on his.
After a moment of frantic delirium, she’d calmed and turned into his hold. His embrace.
That was what it had become, as she’d settled with him and let them clean her: an embrace. When she’d begun to cry, he’d even kissed her cheek, and her head, again and again, without thinking.
Elfleda had seen it all and given him a stern eye.
“The corruption is terrible, Your Grace,” she said now. “She is hot with fever because the poison in her wounds feeds on her.”
“Make a poultice, then.”
“A poultice for her whole body?” She shook her head and waved off the challenge he’d been about to make. “It matters not, Your Grace. The corruption goes too deep.” Pulling back the fur—the woman moaned at the loss of its warmth—Elfleda made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “You see the color? The seeping? Already the linens go dark with it. There is little to be done.”
No. He couldn’t abide the thought that she would die of illness they’d given her. “Little to be done is not nothing. What can you do?”
The healer pulled the fur over her patient and stood straight. “It would cause her terrible pain. Mayhap more than she’s yet known.”
He looked down at the woman beside him, at more peace than she’d been since he’d brought water and healer into her cell.
She was still unclothed—they couldn’t dress her because her wounds were too many and as yet untended. She was still unfed—she’d vomited water repeatedly and could only keep sips down as yet. She seemed to be blind, or near to it—the consequence of weeks without sun and with only occasional torchlight. But now, she slept with a semblance of ease, her body quiet, her face in repose. Only the shallow panting of her ailing breath told that she suffered.
And her arms wrapped around his arm—cleaving to a stranger for comfort.
“What can you do?” he repeated. He wouldn’t let her die. If the healing caused her pain, he would be here to offer her what comfort he could.
“What’s rotting must be cut away, and what’s left must be closed. Blade and fire, Your Grace. In all these rotting places. Do you understand the pain she would feel? Better, I think, to speed her way to her eternity.”
“Can you not give her a dwale?”
“She is too ill, Your Grace. The potion could kill her.”
There seemed not much risk in any event. “Then we will have speeded her way, yes? And she will be at ease when she goes.”
Elfleda sighed and then nodded. “I shall seek out Brother Thomas. He is deft with a healing blade.”
“No. No men. I want no men in this room but myself.” The woman had been subjected to too many men over too many weeks. Other than himself and the guard outside the door, only women would tend her.
“Brother Thomas would not…” The healer was obviously scandalized even to think the thought she’d had.
“It matters not what he would do. It matters what she would fear. No men, Elfleda. You will do what you must for her.”
She gave him a long stare pregnant with meaning. “Your Grace, if I may speak…”
“Go on.”
“Is this woman not your father’s enemy?”
He answered her question with one of his own. “What do you think of what we’ve done to her, Elfleda?”
She ducked her head, her first true showing of respect in this night. “It is not mine to say, Your Grace.”
“You say much without using your tongue, woman. Now use your tongue and answer the question I asked. What do you think of what you see before you?”
“I think…I think if she was not the king’s enemy before, she will be now.”
Leofric was sure that was true. She’d turned to him for comfort in her delirium, but if she regained her strength and her senses, he was under no delusion that she would see him kindly then. She might not even remember that it was he who’d taken her from the Black Walls.
But that didn’t matter. He wasn’t doing this for her gratitude or her friendship. He was doing this because it was right.
“Prepare what you need to clean her wounds. Bring what assistants you need, as long as they are women. Give her a potion to help her sleep through what you must do. Do it now. And bring me dry clothes.”
Elfleda nodded. “Yes, Your Grace.”
She left the room, and Leofric settled at the woman’s side, letting her keep hold of his arm.
~oOo~
The dwale Elfleda gave her was enough to keep her sleeping, but not enough to erase her pain completely.
>
They laid her on her front, and Elfleda and her apprentice spread her arms and legs wide on the bed. In her deep slumber, the woman moaned in protest, but she couldn’t resist. Leofric sat on the bed and wrapped his hand around hers.
Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3) Page 12