Text copyright © 2016 by Johanne Hildebrandt
English translation copyright © 2017 by Tara F. Chace
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Estrid was first published in Swedish as Estrid: Sagan om Valhalla by Bokförlaget Forum in 2016. Translated from the Swedish by Tara F. Chace. Published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781503943575
ISBN-10: 1503943577
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
CONTENTS
Map
“Vanadís, hear your. . .
Their time was. . .
At the foot. . .
Ax time, blade. . .
The oars sliced. . .
The beast was. . .
Estrid had seen. . .
The breakers troubled. . .
The members of. . .
A large crowd. . .
“Did you see. . .
“It’s madness. The. . .
It was over. . .
Queen of Niflheim. . .
Sigrid needed only. . .
Knut Danaást was. . .
“Don’t you long. . .
Sigrid looked up. . .
“My dear,” Sigrid. . .
There was no. . .
Palna left the. . .
Erik had a. . .
“Tell me what’s. . .
“I am your. . .
Sweyn and his. . .
Estrid hesitated as. . .
“Raiding with you. . .
“Let’s take the. . .
The flickering light. . .
Come, my child. . .
Battle-Fire struck right. . .
The ground was. . .
It was starting. . .
Sigrid’s heart ached. . .
The ship heeled. . .
“It’s our duty. . .
No matter how. . .
“Do you have. . .
“The men lost. . .
“It’s been a. . .
The journey to. . .
“We can’t feed. . .
“What curse has. . .
The veils of. . .
It shouldn’t be. . .
“Mutiny?” Sweyn shook. . .
“It looks just. . .
Åke was waiting. . .
“Bring that Scylfing. . .
“More warriors. They’re. . .
The house was. . .
Sigrid raised her. . .
The strong wind. . .
Sigrid trembled with. . .
“I see what. . .
Asta ran her. . .
Sigrid angrily stormed. . .
King Erik’s servants. . .
Vanadís’s colossal rage. . .
Estrid stood silently. . .
There were so. . .
Erik was dead. . .
“The guardian of. . .
Agnatyr had been. . .
Grief sat heavily. . .
Sweyn had witnessed. . .
Estrid squatted down. . .
Sweyn smirked at. . .
“I have served. . .
It was as. . .
Estrid stood in. . .
“I won’t leave. . .
“It’s going to. . .
The drums echoed. . .
“Please wake up. . .
Sweyn and Sigrid. . .
“It looks worse. . .
Toste sat in. . .
Estrid knelt by. . .
When Sweyn and. . .
The stench of. . .
The stench of. . .
Of all his. . .
She had arrived. . .
“I can’t believe. . .
Seldom was life. . .
Life was destroyed. . .
“Einherjar!” Sweyn yelled. . .
Pain was a. . .
They were lost . . .
A quiet calm. . .
The Nordre River. . .
God had shown. . .
Jovar Kobble, the. . .
Sweyn wandered through. . .
Sweyn was alive. . .
His heart pounded. . .
Standing beside the. . .
“She’s a singularly. . .
APPENDIX
GLOSSARY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
“Vanadís, hear your humble servant’s prayer.”
Sigrid leaned over and dipped the sprig of birch into the bowl of fresh, steaming blood and splashed it over the sacrificial stone, an outcropping that rose cold and mute in the dark gray twilight.
“Accept the gift I am about to give you.”
Her kinswomen stood around her in a silent ring, hopeful that this most precious of sacrifices would be received and that the goddess would begin favoring them again.
Sigrid gulped. “Beloved Freya, my mistress and radiant light of my life: Why won’t you heed my invocations? Why do you leave your most loyal servant to wither in darkness?”
Sigrid pushed her despair from her mind and splashed more blood on the altar stone so that it trickled down toward the cold wet ground, which greedily drank up its power.
“Bless my land with a bountiful harvest. Drive away this ominous darkness. Free my people from this famine.”
The frost giants prevailed over the lifeless moorland soil, and Utgard’s darkness weighed heavily upon them. Storm dísir raced across the gray sky, tearing their sharp claws into people to drink their vitality. No life sprouted in the fields. There were only darkness and the slow trek toward the afterworld caused by widespread starvation.
They had been locked in the iron grip of the frost giants for two summers, which had led to crop failures and plagues. Never before had so many funeral pyres been lit in the land. There would soon be more because people had eaten all the seed grain on the farms, and few would make it through yet another year of famine. Sigrid had offered sacrifice after sacrifice and prayed to Freya, but the Radiant One had not accepted her offerings.
“Watch over my son, Olaf, your chosen one, the king of kings, when his father, the mighty Erik of Svealand, comes to officially recognize him as his heir,” Sigrid said. “Grant my daughter, Estrid, strength and health, and guide her so that she does not lose her way between worlds.”
Blood silently dribbled down the altar stone, but Vanadís gave no response.
As the people suffered, the goddess watched in silence, without granting them any of her blessed vitality. Despair cut through Sigrid like a knife.
“Beloved goddess, give me a sign,” she whispered so softly that no one could hear.
A cold wind swept over the hilltop, pulling and tugging at her cloak, but the altar stone sat silent and lifeless beneath her hand. The goddess’s absence caused a void that was the heaviest of all Sigrid’s burdens.
“Vanadís,” she tried yet again. Her faith must not waver. She had to endure this and prove that she was worthy. Sigrid straightened back up and turned to her maidservants, still standing with their heads bowed, ready to receive the blessing.
The body of the dead slave girl, mouth agape and wearing a white dress, lay on the stone slab beside them.
A human sacrifice was the most precious of offerings, and the girl had volunteered to die in the hope of saving the estate and the world. The girl had not been fearful until Asta, Sigrid’s willing sacrificial priestess, greedily slit her jugular veins. Then they had been
forced to hold her down on the stone.
Sigrid dipped the sprig into the bowl of blood again.
“May Vanadís, the most powerful of the goddesses, bless you.”
Sigrid’s voice remained strong and powerful. She was careful to reveal neither her despair nor her fear. In the goddess’s absence, it was Sigrid’s duty to give her people the hope and strength to withstand Utgard’s darkness. Hope was the only nourishment they had.
Sigrid splashed blood onto her kinswoman Lia’s face and chest and watched how greedily she drank in the blood’s life force in the hope of recovering her strength.
“You were chosen by the power of the Radiant One,” she said, and splashed the blood on Gynnya’s emaciated face. The young maid, once so full of blooming vitality, was like a pale shadow of her former self.
Then she proceeded to Borghild and the other now-solemn young women who served in her court. Eir with her curly dark hair was the last one. By the time Sigrid set down the sprig, they had all been spattered with blood from the sacrifice to Vanadís.
“Vanadís, I pray you: free us!”
But it was in vain. Sigrid closed her eyes as aching despair tore through her. Vanadís remained absent. None of the gods took pity on them. They couldn’t rise out of this abyss of death and devastation yet.
“What do you want from me, Radiant One? What can I do to persuade you?” Sigrid opened her eyes and looked at her kinswomen. “Wasn’t the slave girl’s life enough? Do you want still more offerings?”
Her cloak fluttered in the wind, but there was no response, only accursed silence.
Their time was running out. Sigrid stood in the doorway of her formal hall, watching the members of her court comfortably seated on the benches around the fire as they ate their morning gruel. They basked in her prosperity, unconcerned about the winter of starvation afflicting those outside the warmth of her hall.
Measuring forty paces across, her torch-lit hall had gleaming white walls hung with embroidered tapestries, shields, and bronze discs. The benches lining the long walls were covered in the finest marten pelts, and the decorative beams overhead were painted in beautiful colors.
The Scylfing clan nobles, dressed in dyed tunics with silver chains around their necks, joked with one another. Those rich and powerful men with graying beards sat with their legs wide apart, debating the latest gossip. Sigrid’s kinswomen chatted merrily together as if there were no imminent threat. They played with their intricately braided hair and strutted around, trying to capture the men’s attention.
Tall and handsome, Olaf sat among them, his curly hair like a victory crown. He leaned forward, smiling, and then said something that caused the warriors in his retinue to burst into resounding laughter.
Sigrid smiled sadly.
The gods had chosen her blessed son, Olaf, to vanquish the darkness of Christianity. Their fates all rested on the blade he wielded, and if he came up short, they would tumble into the abyss. Not even he understood that the world was falling apart.
“He’s far too young,” she told Jarl Edmund, who quietly joined her in the doorway.
“Young King Olaf is well raised, my queen,” he said. “He will not fail.”
Sigrid sighed. Edmund’s faith in Olaf had never faltered, but Sigrid was all too familiar with her son’s shortcomings.
The jarl’s cheeks flushed beneath his dark beard, his hair mussed from their most recent romp. Though he was the lowly third son to a poor Scylfing family, the charming Edmund, who had quickly risen to the rank of jarl in her hird nearly a decade prior, enjoyed both Sigrid’s confidence and the people’s respect for his leadership. Now, when the nights grew too cold and lonely, she let him warm her bed, and he had proven himself adept at this, too.
“You need more in your head than hunting, swordplay, and chasing girls,” she said, alluding to her son.
Once Olaf had safely taken a seat on the throne beside his father as coregent of Svealand and Geatland, wily, battle-hardened men willing to do anything to seize Olaf’s birthright would surround him. As king he would have to fight for his power and his life day and night, but currently Olaf’s only aspiration was getting under young women’s skirts.
“All adolescents are like that,” Edmund said.
Sigrid made a face.
“He’s going to need to be so much more than that,” she said, and stepped into her hall.
Her warriors and relatives rose smiling and bowed their heads in deference to their queen.
“My lady,” said Lia, Edmund’s slender wife, holding out a bowl of porridge. She still had a little blood on her cheek from the sacrifice that morning.
Sigrid pretended not to notice and instead walked over to Estrid, who was still sitting in her ornate chair, her own untouched bowl of porridge beside her. Her dark hair hung unbraided around her face, and her eyes focused on the fire.
Sigrid put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Olaf might be the sun, but Estrid was the moon; what he lacked in common sense, she had in excess.
“You look well, daughter.”
Estrid merely smiled at her mother’s lie. Then she giggled and said, “Brothers will fight, slay each other. Sisters’ sons will betray their kin. It is hard in the world, much whoredom, ax time, blade time, shields are cloven, wind time, wolf time, until the world perishes. No man will then spare another.”
Worry pierced Sigrid’s heart both at her daughter’s words and her childish laugh.
“That’s how it goes, my dear,” she said with a tender look at her daughter’s frailness. “That’s what the seeress prophesied.”
Estrid had been only a few years old when Sigrid had summoned Helga, the powerful seeress, to her estate. Attired in a multicolored gown with a cat-pelt cloak over her shoulders, she had sat at a table while she traveled through the worlds, seeing Estrid’s fate in the web.
“Marked by Hel, her death will come soon, because she is already in the borderland,” Helga had said.
That night Sigrid had screamed out her sorrow and rage. Though she ought to have been proud that Hel, the mistress of the realm of the dead, had singled Estrid out, her anguish was still a wound that ached anytime she looked at her daughter. When Estrid did die, Sigrid would know it was because Hel had summoned her. My little girl. Sigrid could hardly breathe and was forced to look away. She looked around the room, noting how the noblemen around them averted their gaze in fear and disgust at her daughter’s presumed powers. Those weaklings in their embroidered cloaks with their silver necklaces feared her daughter because Hel had chosen her. They believed that Estrid, like the death goddess, could send them to the afterworld. Those small-minded men didn’t understand.
A soothing rage washed over the wound of grief in Sigrid’s chest.
“Ragnarök isn’t upon us yet,” she said.
“No, not yet,” Estrid said, twisting away from Sigrid’s hand on her shoulder and staring vacantly into the fire. “But soon.”
Of all the people in the hall, her daughter was the only one who understood the forces that threatened Geatland. Olaf, their only hope, couldn’t even look at his twin sister. He seemed to make a point of averting his gaze.
Sigrid pushed her way through the warriors and walked over to Olaf. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“Follow me.”
“Where, most esteemed mother?”
Sigrid’s brow furrowed. King or not, he shouldn’t be questioning his own mother.
“We need to survey the larders.”
He ate a spoonful of his porridge and regarded her with amusement.
“That’s women’s work.”
There it was again, that scornful derision, showing that her son didn’t respect anything. She ought to box his ears for his disrespectful words. He had changed. His outlook had been warped. This was not the son she had sent to her brother, Ulf, to raise as a warrior, as custom dictated. If she had known he would return to her as a fornicating drunkard full of fa
lse flattery, she would have never sent him.
If Olaf couldn’t be made to grasp the poor conditions in the fields and how their survival depended on what they had in reserve, he truly was not ready to rule. She gave him such a furious look that he stood up and put on his cloak.
“As you wish, most esteemed mother.”
Sigrid did not allow his suave smile to beguile her. She could see the kind of man he was turning into, and it made her shudder.
The storm dísir galloped across the dark clouds, tearing at Sigrid’s cloak with their claws as she stepped out of the formal hall’s warmth. The dull gray light hung like a shadow over the longhouse, the straw roofs of the larders, and the moorlands where the emaciated cattle searched in vain to graze in the mud. It was a disaster.
The month of Gói had come and gone, and now it was Einmánuður, the end of winter. The fields should have been green with life and fertility, but the dísir had not yet returned with their light and warmth to drive away the frost giants.
For the second year in a row, they were suffering from darkness and crop failures. They were teetering on the brink. Sigrid shuddered as she looked up at the leaden clouds, which hid any inkling of sun.
Three winters in a row with no summer in between. That was how the prophecy Estrid had just cited described Fimbulwinter, a portent of Ragnarök and the end of the world. If Vanadís did not take pity on them, and Olaf didn’t accede to his full reign as monarch, they would all starve to death no matter how much silver they had in their coffers.
She turned and watched her son as he stepped out of the hall and pulled his cloak tighter about him.
“Why are the larders so urgent that I can’t eat my porridge?”
Sigrid scoffed at his words as they strolled down the hill. He sounded like a whiny brat. Edmund followed at a distance behind Sigrid and Olaf. She pretended not to notice.
She had been the same age as Olaf when her father sent her to Svealand to marry King Erik to secure the peace between the Svea and the Geats. She had left her Jómsviking, Sweyn, the only man she had truly loved, without complaint. She had endured the hatred of the Svea and Erik’s bloodthirsty insanity all on her own. He was so twisted that he had threatened to kill her and the babies the night the battle raged between the Svea and the Danes at Fýrisvellir, the night she had given birth to Olaf and Estrid.
Erik was certain his sworn enemy, Sweyn, whom he had driven from the Danish throne and into exile, had fathered the babies. Now Sweyn was off ravaging England along with Olav Tryggvason and her own father, Toste. Sigrid shivered at the thought of what would happen when Erik learned of this.
Estrid (The Valhalla Series Book 2) Page 1