“Thank you,” she said. She feared she looked as though she needed Oddi’s reassurance.
“It is sad to see you only to leave again on the morrow, but we will bring back treasure in time to celebrate Yule, I think.” Oddi smiled ironically. “I should not mention our departure, your brother entreats me. How foolish—you know why we are all gathered here tonight. But I hope nothing we do tomorrow brings you sorrow.”
With that he inclined his head, and he and Ragnvald left her standing alone. Svanhild supposed she would have to get used to conversations like that. All of these men were Solvi’s enemies. If he did not come for her within a year she could claim a divorce at the next ting assembly. Harald might pronounce it sooner if he liked.
Svanhild knew Harald had entered even before she saw his head above all the others, for suddenly the hall hushed and all of the guests’ heads turned like fish schooling in a current. His wild hair was bound back with a leather tie, showing his broad forehead and wide blue eyes. His beard, which had been unkempt when she saw it before, was in three short braids.
She did not truly think he would ask her to sit at the high table with him, with so many other demands on his attention, but he looked around until his eyes found hers. He beckoned her over, and when she reached his side, he led her up to the table, where she sat among the family of King Hakon of Halogaland: his daughter, Asa, by Harald’s side, and two of his sons, blond and handsome boys, dressed in bright finery.
Svanhild sat quietly for a time, picking at her food. She could not stomach the rich meats and cheeses, choosing instead a dish of stewed berries. When Asa noticed her eating them, she said, “I will call for more of those, if you like.”
Svanhild looked at Asa’s narrow, handsome face, so like her brother Heming’s, and her long fingers where she grasped her spoon. She wanted to ask Asa questions that could not be asked of a near stranger, like how she managed as one of Harald’s several wives. Did she like to share him or hate it, as Vigdis and Svanhild’s mother had hated to share a man they detested? Svanhild sensed that a similar reticence held Asa back, but what could Svanhild be asked, save questions about her enemy husband and dead child?
Servants came and cleared the dishes. “Are you sure you don’t want more berries?” Asa asked.
Svanhild smiled and shook her head no. A servant refilled her cup, and a skald stepped forward with his drum to keep the time and meter of his tale. His chosen tale was the Death of Baldur, which made Svanhild wish all she had to face was awkward silence with Asa. Her chest grew tight the moment he began to speak of the dream of Frigga, the god’s mother, whose prophecy showed her that some ill fate came for her son. Later, the whole world would grieve for him, all save for the evil trickster Loki, who had compassed his death. Svanhild understood Frigga’s grief, and it was her trickster husband who had hastened her son’s death.
King Hakon stood from his chair while the skald recited and moved behind Asa and Harald. “King Harald,” he said. “I need to speak with you.”
“Did you ask the skald to recite this?” Harald asked. “It is not fitting on the eve of battle.”
“It suits me,” said Hakon. “Baldur was killed by mischance, directed by another’s hand, much like my son was injured.”
Svanhild had not heard the whole story of Hakon’s son, though she knew enough to see where he would find parallels. Indeed, the skald reached the part of the tale now where Loki directed the blind god Hod’s arrow against Baldur, and it found its mark. Hod was killed for it, though he did not intend death, and Loki pursued through all of the nine realms for vengeance for Baldur, the most beloved of the gods.
“Have I not given you enough justice?” Harald asked, his voice suddenly chilly. That switch from warm to cold in the space of a heartbeat reminded Svanhild of Solvi.
“I must take my leave,” said Hakon. “You do not need me in Tafjord tomorrow, and I have heard word that I am needed in the Faroe Islands, for Solvi has made a claim there.”
“Solvi is everywhere!” said Harald. “He must be magical. Do you think he is lurking here? In this very hall?”
“You mock me,” said Hakon. “His wife is here, let us ask her.”
“Svanhild,” said Harald, “where is your husband?”
“I do not know.” Svanhild could not tell what he wanted from her, and decided on the barest version of truth that she knew. “But he traveled toward Tafjord when I saw him last. And he can go to Hel’s realm for all the care I have of him.”
“I have said what I heard,” said Hakon. “Would you prevent me from protecting my holdings?”
“While your son’s holdings go unprotected?” Harald asked, then continued before Hakon could reply. “You may go, if you leave immediately. You have spoiled this feast enough. Does that suit you?”
Hakon sneered. “Better than you could know.” He turned and left.
The feast’s attendees seemed so used to Harald and Hakon’s arguing that none marked it except Hakon’s sons. Heming looked at his father’s back with fear and hunger on his face. Oddi’s expression was less easy to read. Svanhild sat quietly picking at her food as the skald finished the tale—quickly now, with his patron gone.
When a lull came in the conversation, Svanhild turned to Asa and said, “My lady Asa Hakonsdatter, can you please ask the king if he would allow my brother to be seated with me. I have not spoken with him as much as I would like since my return.”
Asa agreed, pleasantly enough, and Harald beckoned Ragnvald to join them. He and Harald spoke briefly about the departure of Hakon, agreeing that the lack of his forces would not harm their fight against Solvi.
“Who knew I could simply ask him to leave?” Harald asked, grinning. Ragnvald glanced at Hakon’s sons, who looked less annoyed at Harald’s words than Svanhild would have thought. He sat down next to Svanhild, and she laid her head on his shoulder. “Please give me an excuse to depart the feast early. Even if it is rude. I do not wish to hear any songs sung of me tonight.”
“You won’t,” said Ragnvald. “No one wants to praise Solvi Klofe tonight, even in his choice of wife.” Svanhild forced a smile at that. “I am glad you are feeling better,” he added, hesitantly.
“Am I?” Svanhild asked. “I do not know. I suppose I must go on living, that is all.”
“I hate to see you so sad, yet I am glad you have returned, more than I can say,” said Ragnvald. “Before we leave to fight, will you give me your blessing?”
He sounded young when he asked, as if he desired the bond between them to be rebuilt. It was common for a wife to bless her husband, to call down the favor of the goddess Frigga on one she loved, so if Odin marked the man for slaughter, his wife might intervene on his behalf. Svanhild was not his wife, but a woman who wanted Ragnvald to return. To succeed even, she thought—yes, she could hope that, hope for Solvi’s defeat. Not death, though. The idea of his death hurt her as though she herself were spitted on the very sword she imagined for him.
She put her hands on his head and entreated Frigga to spare him to come back to his family. He remained with his head bowed, and so she placed her hands on him again.
“Let his wyrd not be to kill my husband Solvi. For I have left him, and I hate him, but I love him still,” said Svanhild, her voice breaking.
When he looked up, Svanhild saw this was as he had intended. He touched her chin where a teardrop was about to break free and fall to the floor. “I promise, I will not kill Solvi unless I must do it to save myself or another.” He gave her a tight smile. “I would rather capture him anyway. I will come back to celebrate Yule with you, my sister.” He kissed her forehead. “Now go to bed if you wish.”
17
The day after Eystein’s funeral was cloudy and blustery. The wind filled the fjord with whitecaps and kicked the dull water into spray. Solvi walked around what had been Eystein’s pyre, careful to stay outside its margin. The tide had risen and fallen overnight, sweeping away much of the ash, though the grayness still remained. U
ntil they returned to their original color, Eystein’s shade would linger.
A glint of silver near the water’s edge drew his eye, and Solvi crouched down and picked up a pebble that looked like it had been dipped in metal. A shadow of the pattern from the original silver remained, the knotwork that had traced over the boar’s head amulet Eystein had worn as a pendant. His son had chosen it himself, preferring Frey, a farmer’s god, a bringer of rain, to the gods of sea and treasure to which Solvi gave his allegiance. Even Eystein had stayed with him longer than Svanhild, who had been missing from her tent that morning. Katla slept through her going and had nothing useful to say, even after Solvi shook and slapped her.
“We need to leave,” said Snorri. Solvi flinched. “Harald will find out we are here.”
Thorstein, Snorri, and Tryggulf had been in conference since dawn. Solvi could easily imagine their conversation, the decision that had sent Snorri, with his damaged face and blurred speech, to be the one to speak to him. “He listens to you,” Tryggulf would have said. “You have to tell him.”
“You think that’s where she went? To Harald?” Solvi asked.
“You know she did,” said Snorri.
He did. Where else? Years ago, Harald of Vestfold had come to Tafjord and declared his intention of expelling Solvi and his family from their ancestral lands, leaving no room to bargain, but Svanhild could betray and bargain again and again, and her brother would always forgive her. When Solvi woke and found her gone, a part of him finally felt satisfied. He had never entirely believed that she would stay with him, and now she had proved him right. If he had not half-expected it, he would have found forgiveness easier.
He walked down to the shore and splashed some water on his face, then dried it with a sleeve that gaped at the wrist—Svanhild had not sewed it closed as she had every morning before this one. “Yes, we need to go,” he said. “Harald will send us a welcome we do not want. Ulfarr will have a better one for us in Tafjord.”
Why did he need to go to Tafjord now, with Eystein dead and Svanhild run off? He had wanted the land for them, to turn himself into a king like Ragnvald, and give them better shelter than they could find between the walls of a ship. He looked at Thorstein, who stood a few paces away from him, waiting for his command. Thorstein was young and eager—he loved battle and the sea as Solvi had at his age. He would follow Solvi wherever he went, into endless wandering and pillaging. So would Snorri and Tryggulf. They had already proven this. But Ulfarr awaited Solvi at Tafjord; he had made his bargains with Rane of Vermaland, now of Sweden, and with Gudbrand and his sons, with Ketil Flatnose and his followers, who wanted war and plunder. Svanhild thought he had no honor, but he could not break this promise, not if he ever wanted allies again.
Solvi bowed his head one more time, the silver rock clutched in his hand. He thought of his gods again, gods of sea and wind, the gods Njord and Ran, gods of the life-giving sea, and the destructive sea. Of Thor, who brought thunder and storms to fields and coastlines, and Frey, who brought gentle, nourishing rain. He had no prayers for his son. Who would welcome Eystein into the afterlife? Where was the child’s god, the gentle god, to make up for his harsh life? For once, Solvi saw the use of the Christian god, who, it was said, loved the weak and poor, though not enough to save them when Solvi’s raiders came to take their treasures. For a moment a cringing monk in Solvi’s memory wore his son’s face, and tears sprang to his eyes. He had not given his son what he needed in his life. Perhaps some god would in the afterlife. Eystein had loved growing things, burrowing animals, shorebirds, small creatures that lived within the sphere defined for them and did not venture beyond. He would have made a good farmer. Frey then, the mystic, the god of fertility.
Solvi knelt on the rocks, and touched the water again. One of Solvi’s earliest memories was his father acting as priest after his mother’s death. He did not remember her as a living woman as vividly as he did that moment: when her body was consigned to flames, and Hunthiof stood by as she burned. Solvi had not recovered from his own burning enough to walk without a stick, so he reached the pyre after the torch had already touched his mother’s body. He remembered her hands turning black as the shroud burned away, and panic in his throat, a fear that the flames might reach him, and beneath that, a fear that his legs might suddenly regain their strength, that the pain, which was sometimes all he could think about, would leave him, and he would run toward the pyre and throw himself on it. He remembered pressing the half-healed flesh of his thighs with his palms, riding the edge of pain and panic and grief, crying tears that no one noticed.
Now he prayed that Frey would find a home for his son, and that Solvi’s mother would welcome him there, to warm fields, to her hearth, to the peace and comfort that Solvi had prayed for himself as a boy. Eystein would always be a boy now, and never hold a sword, never take a wife, never love his own children. Solvi’s face was streaked with tears when he rose. None would think less of him for it. A boy’s tears might be mocked. A man’s tears showed his depth of feeling. Indeed, he saw he was not alone in his grief. Thorstein, on the cusp of manhood, who still feared being thought weak, wiped furiously at his own.
“We will sail for Tafjord on the next high tide,” said Solvi. “Harald is a tyrant, and there are none who can stop him except us. We go to defend the homes of our ancestors.” When Harald was dead, and someone of Solvi’s choosing controlled Trondheim Fjord, he would establish a priesthood of Frey here, give them thralls to clear their land so they could farm and prophecy and mark the grave of his son with more than an ash-covered beach that would be washed clean by the following morning.
* * *
Solvi had not seen Tafjord in many years, not since departing to attack Vestfold. The old living hall looked the same, though perhaps its turf roof overhung the eaves more now. His father’s drinking hall, constructed of upright staves, had been newly rubbed with fat, and many old boards replaced with gleaming new ones, so it looked trapped between some ancient age and a new one. Smaller half-built structures surrounded it, added by Heming.
Ulfarr strode down to the dock to greet Solvi’s ships, and to ensure there was room for it among the others that had already come, the ships of Gudbrand and his sons, of Rane and his allies. Seeing so many ships lashed to one another against the shore reminded Solvi again of taking battle to Vestfold. This time he would find a way to spring the trap on Harald, not the other way around.
“You had no trouble taking the hall?” Solvi asked him.
“Heming took some ships and sailed out to meet us,” said Ulfarr. “When the battle went against them, they fled.”
“Fled to Harald in Nidaros?” Solvi asked.
“So I assume,” said Ulfarr. “I see you left your wife in Iceland.” He sounded pleased.
A rushing noise filled Solvi’s ears, as if from a wave only he could see, a mass of losses that bore down upon him. He turned to Thorstein. “Tell Ulfarr what has passed. I need to go piss.”
He walked away quickly as Thorstein began his tale. Let his men unload the ships. Let them find their own way to the hall—it was obvious, and they should not need his guidance. Let everything proceed without him until dinner.
“You there, thrall,” Solvi called to an unfamiliar slave who fed the fire at the bathhouse. “Make this ready for me, and make sure I am not disturbed. I am Solvi Hunthiofsson, lord of this place.” When that was done, he dozed off in the hot confines of the bathhouse, and woke feeling even more tired than before.
Dinner was well under way when he returned to the hall. The men were teasing Thorstein about one of the girl thralls who made eyes at him. “She’s a hot one,” Ulfarr was saying. “She might like you—if she’s had enough of a man and wants to try a boy.”
“Can’t the boy have a girl who is not one of your leavings?” Solvi asked. Rane moved his vast bulk over to the side to make room for Solvi at the high table with Gudbrand and his sons.
“Not likely,” said Ketil around a mouthful of bread. Ulfarr h
ad another woman now. This one was a beauty, or would be without the fear in her eyes and tension thinning her lips. She had pale skin, red lips, and bright gold hair. In the dim hall, her vividness kept drawing Solvi’s gaze back to her. She sat next to Ulfarr and opened her mouth dutifully when he fed her bits of his food. He had his left hand between her legs, while his right hand rooted around in his trencher for other things to feed her. She squirmed away from him as much as she was able, wedged in beside him and the warrior on his left, while he kept pulling her back.
“Few enough of those, but maybe that one”—Ulfarr pointed his grease-covered hand at a serving woman with gray hair and a pronounced hump on her back—“I don’t think I’ve had her yet.” He turned toward the woman by his side. “What do you think, should I ask her to join us?” Svanhild had always hated to see Ulfarr humiliating a woman, and would not have allowed a spectacle like this at her table. Though Solvi would not forbid Ulfarr many of his pleasures, he had backed her in that.
“We should toast your son,” said Snorri, when Solvi had been silent for too long. He spoke slowly and loudly, to make himself understood.
“Thorstein said you did not have time afterward,” said Ulfarr. Solvi glared at Thorstein until he shrugged uncomfortably.
“He was a young boy,” said Solvi. “Few deeds to boast of.” At this moment, stupid with grief and exhaustion, Solvi could remember nothing of Eystein except his end. He had been his mother’s son, always by her side. He had not enjoyed sailing. He had been frightened of Solvi, as Solvi had been of his own father. He might have grown into a man, someone that Solvi could meet as a man, with his own strengths to make up for his weaknesses, but Solvi would never get to see Eystein’s strengths now.
He rose to his feet. “Toast him if you wish,” he said. “I do not want to hear his name again.”
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