Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  He met her eyes again. “You want this?”

  She understood those words. She wanted what he could give her, what he might give her if she had value to him. If she gave him what he wanted. She nodded.

  “You understand?”

  Again, she nodded. She understood enough: those words, and what he wanted, and what she needed.

  He walked away from her, but only to close the door. Then he came back and brushed his fingertips over her cheek.

  “Astrid.”

  Without his prompting this time, she laid her hand on his chest and said, “Leofric.”

  His face lit up in a broad grin, and he swept his arms around her waist, bending at the same time to kiss her. It felt like a claiming to Astrid, who had never followed a man’s lead before. Always she had sought out a coupling, or at least been the one to make the first move that turned flirtation into contact.

  She closed her eyes and tried to stop her thoughts, to simply feel the strength of his arms holding her, the softness of his mouth, the fervor of his tongue, the heat of his breath. He was taller than she by a few inches, and much broader than she. That wasn’t unusual; she had always favored tall, strong men, and the men of her people were generally taller than most of the men of this place, as far as she’d seen.

  What was unusual was her feeling of being overwhelmed by the man she was with. Leofric bent forward, cradling her in his arms, and she felt her braid swing loose behind her.

  She didn’t like it, couldn’t be subjected, even as she tried to give him what he wanted. Her heart beating fast and loud in her head, she tore her mouth free of his and shoved on his chest until he stepped back and let her go.

  Confusion wavered over his features. Astrid felt something strange in her arms and legs and realized with a jolt that she was shaking.

  She was afraid. She was quaking with fear. Gods, how she despised this thing she had become.

  No. She would not be subject to her fear. She was a shieldmaiden. She had fought many battles and killed men bigger than she and stronger. In coupling, she had taken what men had offered, not given them what they’d demanded.

  Gathering up the memories of her strength, she took the steps that brought her back in contact with Leofric, and she reached up and grabbed handfuls of his dark hair. It was soft in her hands, and the loose waves curled over her fingers. She yanked sharply, forcing his head down to hers, and kissed him with force and intent, the way she’d kissed Jaan, and Ulv, and any other man she’d wanted. A kiss that said anything that happened would be on her terms, and he should be thankful she’d chosen him.

  His grunt of hot surprise filled her mouth, and his arms were around her again, his hands filling themselves with her bottom, clutching her close. She could feel his need for her, hard and thick in his breeches.

  Without breaking her kiss, she let go of his hair and worked at his chestpiece, seeking the fastenings. As she became frustrated by her lack of success, his hands let go of her and moved between them, taking over. He worked the fastenings and shook himself free of the garment, then drew his tunic up. When he tried to break away so he could pull it over his head, Astrid bit down on his bottom lip, sucking it into her mouth and holding him.

  He groaned as if she’d done him real harm, but when she let go and he rid himself of his shirt, she saw the fire in his eyes and the stunned smile on his lips.

  He was…he was beautiful, and for a moment Astrid forgot everything else. Her fear and self-loathing, her heartache and homesickness, her worry for the future, her weak body and uncertain mind. For one perfect moment, all she saw with the bare torso of the man before her. Visibly powerful. Sleek with muscle. Battle scarred. And heaving for her.

  She set her hand on his chest. “Leofric.”

  “Astrid, please,” he answered and gathered her into his arms.

  A fire seemed to catch where her bare chest touched his, and she lifted onto her toes to claim his mouth again. To claim him. He groaned again, that sound of near pain, or of surrender, and a flicker of power rekindled in her heart. She was not giving up. She was not giving over. She wasn’t kneeling at his feet and begging. She was standing toe to toe with him and taking as much as she was giving.

  Cresting that rush of remembered strength, Astrid grabbed at his breeches and wrested them open. He helped her, changing his stance so that she could push them down his hips and release his sex.

  But when her hand wrapped around his thickness to pull him free, her mind mutinied, and the room she was in was gone. Leofric was gone.

  Everything around her, inside her, went black and cold.

  She shook her head, and Leofric and the warm, golden room came back, but she jumped backward, away from him, feeling the deep despair and agony of the black place cramping her muscles and her mind again. She wrapped her arms around her body and crouched down, trying to hold herself together.

  It was that which would undo her? What all those men had done with their sex? That? Not the lash or the fiery ointment, not the cane on her feet and across her knees, not the icy water dumped over her or the crumbs of maggoty bread shoved into her mouth? Not the shackles? Not the dark, the relentless dark?

  The raping had been the least of it. As many times as it had happened, as many ways, that had been the least of the pain. It couldn’t be that breaking her now.

  “Astrid?” She felt him come close, could see his shadow move over her. She shook her head, and he didn’t touch her.

  He said something, a long string of words she didn’t understand, and then he stepped away again. She heard the rustle of leather and the clomp of boots being dropped to the floor. He’d finished undressing.

  He meant to take what she’d intended to give him. Even now, in the face of her cowering fear, he meant to take her.

  This was the game, then, the move she hadn’t seen. She was his to do with what he would, and he was no different from the rest.

  “Astrid,” he said, his tone coaxing. She would have called it kind just moments before.

  When she didn’t respond, he repeated her name. “Astrid.”

  She looked up.

  He stood naked in the middle of the room. He wasn’t hard; his sex hung heavily from its dark nest, between his muscled thighs. When she met his eyes, he smiled, but not with pleasure. With sorrow, if that was possible.

  Then he spread his arms wide. She’d done the same on the shore, when she’d wanted him to run her through with the spear, when she’d begged him not to take her back to the black place. She’d opened her arms and made herself utterly vulnerable to him. Put her life in his hands.

  As he was doing now.

  She stood, and he didn’t move. She walked to him, and he stood still, his arms spread wide. Only his eyes moved, tracking with hers.

  Standing before him, looking up into his eyes, Astrid balled up her fist and punched him in the stomach.

  He coughed out a burst of air, and he bent forward with the blow, but his arms stayed wide, and when he regained his breath, he stood straight again. His eyes on hers, he nodded, and she understood.

  He was offering himself. He was atoning.

  Atonement was not the way of her people. Her people settled their wrongs with vengeance. But the concept wasn’t entirely foreign, and Astrid understood.

  She punched him again, and, again, he stood straight when he could and waited for another blow.

  With the next punch, thinking stopped and vengeance took over. It didn’t matter that he was offering himself up for this of his own will. It didn’t matter that he’d saved her from the black place and had taken care of her since. All that mattered was the hate and rage and pain that filled her blood with fire.

  She punched and scratched and bit and kicked, and he took it all. She knocked him to the floor three times, and each time, he stood and spread his arms wide. She beat him until her arms shook from exertion and her body dripped sweat.

  When she finally stopped, she heard herself for the first time. She was weeping
. Great, loud, heaving sobs. She slapped her hands over her mouth and reeled backward.

  She was a shieldmaiden. She didn’t cry. Tears were weakness.

  Leofric dropped his arms. His body was blotched with bright red, turning to purple. His nose was bleeding. His eye swelled. He came to her, reaching his arms out, meaning to hold her. She knew he meant to comfort her.

  “No!” she yelled, her hands slamming his chest, shoving him away. “No!” She shoved him again. And again, until his legs hit the bed. She shoved him again, and he fell back onto the mattress. She dived at him, landing on him, straddling him, curling her hands into fists and slamming them again and again into his chest.

  Still he didn’t fight back. Again he spread his arms out and simply took what she gave.

  She couldn’t stop crying, and tears struck her fists and his chest as she slammed and slammed, infuriated by her weakness.

  He went hard beneath her, his sex pressing against hers, and her body flinched away from it instinctually, enraging her even more. She would not fear that. She would not. It was nothing—nothing! Shouting, “No! It’s nothing! Nothing!” she stopped hitting and grabbed the offending part of him. Holding it tightly, she shoved herself down on it.

  Leofric made an earthy roar of surprise, but she didn’t want to hear his grunts. She wrapped her hands around his throat to stifle him, pressing her thumbs deep, feeling the slowing of his blood and breath against her hands. And then she rode him as hard as she could, driving him deep again and again and again.

  She told herself she was seeking the pain, wanting to find it and know it and draw its limits, to master it, but she didn’t feel pain, not in her body. Her heart and mind were racked with it, but her body didn’t hurt. What he was doing—what she was making him do—didn’t hurt. With each driving surge on his hips, she was reminded of how it was supposed to feel.

  Leofric’s face had gone deep red, and then purple, but he still had not fought her. She realized, just as the first feeling of what might have become pleasure glimmered inside her, that he truly would let her kill him and never fight that end.

  He had made himself subject to her. He had given her what she needed. He had taken nothing.

  She let go of his throat, and at the same time that he heaved in his first great, desperate breath, he released, explosively, his hips leaping off the bed and nearly casting her off of him.

  Comprehending too late that he’d spent inside her, Astrid threw herself to the far corner of the bed while his seed was still spilling, now over his belly and legs. She’d never let any man spend inside her before, under any circumstances. She wanted no children.

  She was a shieldmaiden and wanted no ties to any other life.

  She had been a shieldmaiden. What she was now, she didn’t know.

  Leofric lay on the bed, his arms splayed, dragging air through his aching throat. His body throbbed in every part.

  He could not fathom all that he was feeling.

  What had happened in this room, with this woman, was unlike anything he’d ever experienced in his life. He’d allowed her to beat him, to mount him, to nearly kill him, and never before had he let a woman take any kind of control over him.

  And who would have? He was His Royal Highness, the Duke of Orenshire, the second son of the King of Mercuria, second in the line of succession. Women knelt before him; they gave him what he wanted. He’d never been cruel or rough or taken what hadn’t been freely offered, but he’d never lain back, either. And he recognized that what was freely offered might not have been, had he not had power over the one who offered.

  But this woman had never given him what he wanted. Not until this night.

  Astrid. He finally knew her name, and it was lovely. She’d said his name, she’d touched him freely, without delirium. She’d offered herself to him.

  He wasn’t sure he fully understood her change of heart, but he’d thought it was that she’d given up, and he didn’t want that. As she’d stood there offering him all he wanted of her, he’d not wanted it in that way. Not because she was broken. He wanted her to want him, to offer herself truly free.

  Then she’d kissed him like she had—wildly, almost violently, grabbing and biting, her tongue thrusting into his mouth like a claiming—and he’d felt power and will in her again. He’d felt her desire for him. Never had a woman taken from him in that way before. When she’d touched his sex, wrapped her hand around him as though he were hers to take, the flame of his desire had burst into an inferno.

  And then she’d reeled away. She’d cowered. Even in the Black Walls, she hadn’t cowered.

  Gasping confusion had clouded his thinking for a moment as his body and his mind had tried to catch up to each other, and then he’d seen the terrible truth. In his body, she remembered the Black Walls.

  He’d thought of only one thing he could do to show her she was safe with him.

  Though she was weaker than she’d once been, she was still a warrior, and in her rage and fire, she’d remembered that. He would bear the marks of her remembering for days to come. He would feel every strike.

  For his part, never in his life had he felt a release like the one that had come in the moment when his life had been pulled back from the teetering brink of its end. The desperate ecstasy of it still sang in his bones and made his limbs shake.

  Never had he spent in a woman before, either. He hoped he hadn’t made her with child; he couldn’t fathom the tangle of trouble that would cause them.

  A small voice inside him cleared its throat then and suggested that no matter the tangle, if she bore his child, he could keep her truly safe. More than that, he could keep her in true comfort and ease. If he could persuade his father to acknowledge her, he might give her more yet than that. Make her royalty, even.

  If he could convince her to agree to be baptized, he might move his father. The realm needed an heir. If Eadric could not provide one, perhaps he could.

  Would he wed this woman if he could? A barbarian heathen whose name he’d known for less than an hour? A woman who refused even to wear clothes that would allow her to be seen in public?

  Yes, he thought he would.

  He thought he would wed her for love.

  He found the strength to lift his head and bit back a groan as the ache in his throat sharpened with the movement. Astrid was sitting at the far corner of the bed, her arms crossed over her belly, staring at him.

  Astrid. Oh, how he loved the shape and sound of her name.

  When he sat up, he felt more keenly all the aches she’d made in him, but he felt no shame in taking this beating from a woman. Astrid was no ordinary woman, and this was no ordinary night.

  What had transpired between them had been the most passionate experience of Leofric’s life, but it had been intensely violent as well, and she had, he knew, felt no pleasure from it. So many things about her made his heart ache, but now, with her eyes wary and her posture closed, the greatest ache was that she wasn’t feeling the things he was—the release, the ecstasy. The love.

  He wanted to take from her the memories that had made this warrior woman reel away from him in fear. If she would allow him, he wanted to give her pleasure. Not in violence, but in tenderness.

  He reached for her, but she tensed. “Nej,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Det är inget.”

  She’d shouted those same words, cried them, as she’d ridden him. They were the last words she’d spoken. He didn’t understand any but the first. Nej was her word for No, he thought.

  He dropped his hand. “Astrid.” His voice was rough, and the words came from his throat as if with sharp edges, but he swallowed and continued. “I want to show you pleasure. I want to take your pain away, if I can. Do you understand?”

  She shook her head. Though she seemed to understand more words than he’d realized, there remained a dense space of ignorant silence between them. He wanted to be able to talk to her. Until he could, he didn’t know how he could ease her mind or gain her trust.


  “How can I make you understand?”

  He didn’t expect her to answer, and she didn’t. She studied him, her eyes scanning over his face, coming to rest with his eyes. Then she twisted on the bed and put her legs over the side. She stood and walked away. Leofric sat where he was and watched her.

  She went to the ewer and poured water in the bowl. As she picked up a cloth and soaked it, he studied her back—her straight shoulders, her slim hips, the long, disheveled pale braid that followed the path of her spine.

  The red scars crosshatched over her alabaster skin.

  Words or no, how could he earn her trust? The beating he’d allowed her to deal him was nothing in comparison to what she’d suffered. Nothing.