And yet, she found herself smiling, as if good cheer were contagious. She felt a bit lonely, too, left out of the jokes, and that struck her more than it would have a few months earlier. She decided that she would speak with Olga and put another effort into learning the language.
As they neared the halfway point in their short journey to the castle, Brenna felt suddenly quite ill. She had the thought that the mead must in fact have turned, and then the world shifted sharply to one side, like a ship tossed in a churning sea. In a moment of senseless instinct, she clenched her legs and pulled against the pitch. She felt Freya shy at the contradiction in signal, and then she felt surreal weightlessness as she lost the saddle and fell to the ground.
A blast of pain in her head as she struck the snow was the last thing she knew.
~oOo~
When she opened her eyes again, she was in the bed she shared with Vali. The room had the golden, flickering glow of a fire. It was night. Vali sat in a chair at her side, staring across the bed at the crackling fire, a much bigger blaze than they usually built. The room was snug and warm.
Her head ached horribly, and she lifted her hand to touch the place that hurt the most. There, she found a large knot, both soft and firm. She must have struck a stone under the snow when she’d fallen from Freya.
Her movement stirred Vali, who left his chair and sat on the bed at her side. “Brenna. My love. How do you feel?”
“My head pains me. And my ego as well. I haven’t fallen from a horse in many years. I’m sorry to worry you. It’s only a bump.”
He smiled and lifted her hand to his lips, brushing his beard over her knuckles as he kissed them. “Brenna. Olga believes you are with child.”
Her head ached, and she felt strange. She heard his words, and understood them, yet they were foreign to her. “What?”
“She asked when last you’d had your blood. I told her what I remembered. The tenderness in your breasts, your lack of hunger, the swooning—Olga says these are signs that a babe is coming to us.”
“What?” It was the only word she could think.
He cocked his head. “Love, are you surprised? I sow my seed inside you every day, often more than once. Did you not think we might make a child that way?”
She had not. It had never occurred to her, not even as a dream or a wish. Long ago, Brenna had given up the thought that she would ever know love, much less be a wife or a mother, and the concepts must have decoupled in her mind. Even as the wedding rituals had stressed their descendants, it had been an abstract idea, part of the ritual, not of her life. She had never considered it, and they had never discussed it. “I never thought I would. I gave up hope in my life long ago.”
He frowned and cupped his hand around her face. “Well, bring it back. You deserve every happiness, and you shall have it. You are carrying my child, shieldmaiden. The gods smile on us and like us well.”
Brenna pushed her hands under the furs and laid them flat on her belly. She had been changed into a linen sleeping shift, so she could almost feel her skin.
A babe. Vali’s child inside her. “I want him to have your eyes.”
Vali’s hands came under the furs and covered hers. “You are so sure you make me a son?”
She was. Though she knew not why, certainty had suffused her mind. She carried a son. “Yes. Somehow, I know it.”
Her husband grinned with golden pride. “And he will be strong and perfect, with his own eyes.”
Brenna liked that answer, and its thought, very much. “When?”
“Midsummer, Olga says. The ships should have returned by then, but we will wait to sail home until he is born.”
At once, like a bolt of lightning, Brenna had another powerful certainty. “Vali, I don’t want to go.”
It was his turn to be confused. “What?”
“Every good thing that has happened in my life has happened here. I want to stay—to settle here. To make a home.”
His hands left her belly, and he stared at her. “Brenna, I am a warrior. I know nothing of farming.”
“I know farming. And your father was a smith. You were his apprentice once.”
His light frown deepened into a scowl, and he stood abruptly and walked a few steps away, to the end of the bed. “You know the way of that. I want no part in anything of his. I’ve worked my life to forget that past, and you hurt me to mention it.”
She had spoken rashly. “I’m sorry.” She held out her hand. “Please come back.”
He came at once, this time to the other side of the bed, and stretched out beside her, propped on his elbow. “Can we not make a home among our own people?”
“I have no people, Vali. But here I’m treated as equal. Even those who’ve known me many years treat me now like Brenna and not the God’s-Eye. I know it’s you who made them stop calling me that, but now I believe they no longer think it, either.” She turned the furs back and covered her belly with her hands again, studying that part of her body as if she could see the child within her. “I am afraid that our child will carry my burden if we live among people who think of me as different.”
Looking up again, she turned to Vali, whose eyes were fixed on her belly. It hurt her head terribly to turn her neck as she had, but she stayed that way and said his name, so that he would look her in the face. “It’s a hard life, to be different. I wouldn’t wish it on our child if I might avoid it.”
His eyes searched hers for a long time. Finally, he sighed and shook his head, and Brenna knew a spark of fear.
“I can deny you nothing, Brenna mine. I shall learn to be a farmer.”
Relief and happiness swept through her, leaving a warm exhaustion in their wake. “Thank you. I love you.” She rested back in the bed and closed her eyes. “No doubt there will be war to make here in Estland, as well,” she sighed, feeling darkness coming on in her mind.
Vali settled at her side and pulled her close. With his hand on her belly, he kissed her cheek and murmured, “Enough talk. Rest, little mother. Be strong and well.”
Jaan surged toward Vali, and Vali sidestepped and brought his sword down on Jaan’s, knocking it from the younger man’s hold. It clattered to the stone floor, and Jaan shook out his hands.
“Again!”
At Vali’s command, Jaan huffed and bent down to retrieve the longsword. Vali kicked it out of his reach, then came in with his own sword, swinging low and stopping just as he made contact with Jaan’s ribs. “Now you are dead. Pick it up.” When Jaan muttered under his breath words Vali didn’t understand, Vali rose up to his full height, more than a head above Jaan’s, and made his shoulders as broad as he could. His back caught uncomfortably as he did so; he expected that he would always feel some discomfort under the scar from the wound that had rent him from shoulder to hip, but he ignored it.
“Pick it up.” He spoke in the Estland tongue, though Jaan had learned almost as much of his. He had noticed as raiders and villagers spent more and more time together, battened down against the vile weather outside, they were developing a language of their own, a blend of all their words and experiences.
Confronted by Vali’s mass and the scowl above it, Jaan swallowed and collected his sword. Vali held back a smile. The boy was a fierce fighter already, but he was intemperate, and Vali enjoyed putting him in his place.
All around them, other men sparred, and the stone walls of the hall echoed with the ponderous clang of forged iron. They had heaved the big oaken table off to one side and opened the room to serve as a training space, now that the snows piled high along the castle walls and only those with important work outside braved the elements.
Inside, they were warm and comfortable. Most of the men training, Vali and Jaan included, had shed their tunics and were staining their breeches with the sweat that dripped from their bare torsos.
Vali held out his hand and flexed his fingers, signaling to Jaan to come in again. This time, however, as he read Jaan’s body’s intent to move forward, he said, “Hold!”
and Jaan froze, his sword held in both hands, straight out before him.
“Are you Prince Vladimir, a tiny man dancing in a crimson cape?” He thought he’d said the words right.
He must have, because Jaan made a face that only a young man, with the harshest lessons of life yet in store for him, could make: full of contempt and bravado. “I am not.”
“Then why do you move like this is for show?” He tapped Jaan’s sword with his own. “Held like that, out from you, I can block you here”—he brought his sword down on Jaan’s blade, near the tip—“and here”—he did it again, moving inward—“and here, and here”—he was at the hilt now—“and here.” The last time, he laid the edge of his sword over Jaan’s bare wrist, not quite touching his skin. “Then you fight no more.”
Vali held up his own sword and drew his fingers over the tip of the blade. In the manner of his people, the tip was subtly tapered, almost rounded. “See. A blade like this is not meant to leave a tiny spot of blood. Not to…”—he searched for the word—“stab, but to slash.” To illustrate, he swung the blade in a powerful, but slow, sideways arc. “No man will stand. Move on the side, not headlong. Perhaps a shield for you.”
Jaan grimaced and shook his head. He answered in Vali’s language. “You use no shield.”
“No. But I am of the Úlfhéðnar, and I have trained and fought long.”
“That makes your flesh harder than mine?”
“It makes me harder to hit.”
Jaan smirked. “Your back says another thing.”
Unoffended by the snide reference to his vicious scar, but unwilling to let the point go unanswered, Vali swung his sword again, quickly and silently, this time aiming for Jaan’s neck. He let the blade strike home before he pulled back, leaving a thin seam of red under the cocksure youngster’s ear. Caught entirely unawares, Jaan’s expression was of shock and fear, and he dropped his sword without even trying to block the attack.
Fierce and stupid, like most young men. Vali shook his head. “You are not ready, pup. I would have killed you many times today. Too much”—Vali came close and grabbed Jaan’s crotch, hard, making him grunt in pain—“and not enough”—he let go, made a fist, and thumped the boy on his head. “It will kill you.”
Jaan shrugged him off and picked up his sword, this time holding it properly, at an angle, ready to block or to slash. He wanted to go again. He was angry and embarrassed, but he had learned. Keeping his grin to himself, Vali gave Jaan a snarl instead and nodded. “Come then, boy, and show me.”
They and the others sparred and bantered through much of the afternoon; then, when all were weary, serving women brought them water, and they sat about, in chairs or on the floor, to rest. Vali watched the men watch the women. Many of the raiders that had stayed behind had been brutal to the captive women at their camp, and a few of them had been slow to come around to the plan to build community with the villagers rather than simply enslave them. Once the leaders among them had understood that Vladimir had treated all his subjects as slaves, they had decided that their likeliest path to a peaceful winter and, should any other prince attack, a victory against him was to make the villagers allies.
And they had. But it meant that the women were not subject to the raiders’ whims, and a few men had had to be dealt with when they forgot it. Now, though, months since they’d been left behind, the separation between the groups was almost nonexistent. Even the language barrier had come down for most.
Not for Brenna. She struggled mightily with the language, and Vali thought her skill little improved despite her efforts. The effort and the failure made her impatient and cross.
Vali was impatient, too. She wanted to make this their home. She would need to learn to speak the language of the people here eventually.
Sitting in a tall wooden chair by the fire, his eyes aimlessly scanning the hall, he saw his wife standing in a doorway, and he felt a momentary burst of guilt, as if she’d caught him thinking critically of her. Their eyes met, and she smiled, and then he was simply dazzled.
In the few months since they’d learned she was with child, Brenna had changed. She spent more time with the women, learning or re-learning the skills of the wife: weaving and cooking and home-tending. She had even asked Olga a bit about healing. It was as if the babe had freed the womanly part inside her, a part she had tucked away.
Not much more than a week earlier, Brenna had stunned him by appearing in the hall in a gown and hangerock, her hair twisted into soft, loose braids. Only on the day of their wedding had he ever before seen her in a gown. She had explained that her breeches had become uncomfortable; her belly had grown too much.
Vali could hardly complain. As alluring as he found her dressed in her mannish clothes, her legs so available to be seen, the hide of the breeches snug over her muscled flesh, womanly garb was much more convenient. When the need overtook them during the day, rather than their customary struggle with hide lacings and snug breeches between them both, he could toss up her skirts, loose himself, and be inside her in the space between two breaths.
Lately, that had been quite useful. In the past weeks, freed of the weakness and illness that had plagued her in the time right after they’d learned of the babe, Brenna had become insatiable. She had been enthusiastic and responsive from the night he’d first taken her, she was always ready and always curious to experience everything he could think of, but lately, Vali was fairly certain that she could only be satisfied if he kept her naked in bed all the day and all the night. Truth be told, he was feeling a bit…overextended.
He’d been reluctant at first, thinking it safer to forgo physical love until their child came to them, and for a few weeks, while she felt ill and faint quite often, Brenna had agreed.
And then one night he’d woken with her mounting him, sliding him into herself. She hadn’t even bothered to try to wake him—and after she’d found her release, he’d had to grab her hips to keep her from moving away before he could release as well. He wasn’t sure she herself had ever fully woken. She’d needed; she’d taken.
That dawn, she’d wanted him again and demanded much of him. He’d spoken later with Olga, worried that he might have been hurting the child, probing around so close. Olga had laughed at him and told him to carry on.
And they had been carrying on.
Still smiling at him, Brenna stepped into the room and walked to him, through the damp mass of men. The small roundness of her belly stretched her blue woolen hangerock so that the lacings on the sides widened noticeably at that point. Vali often found himself transfixed, staring at that pretty swell. His child growing inside his wife. Their love perpetuating.
She came to him as if with a purpose, her eyes never leaving his. When she arrived before him, she kept advancing until she had straddled him, hoisting her gown and hangerock up, baring her legs and boots.
On the whole, their people were physical and affectionate. They lived in congregation with each other, sharing almost everything. They had found the Estlanders’ tiny huts confounding and the many walled rooms of the castle bizarre. Privacy was not a need of their kind.
Brenna, his once solitary and suspicious wife, had been markedly more publicly affectionate with him of late, but she had never made such a stark display before. Everyone in the hall noticed. Most kept noticing, staring unabashedly, not even dissuaded by Vali’s glare over her shoulder.
Shocked, at first Vali only sat, trying to catch her eyes with his so that he might understand. He went hard at once, of course he did, but he had no intention of taking his wife on a chair in the middle of the well-lit hall, with two dozen sweaty men lazing about around them. Or being taken by her, as more aptly described this circumstance.
“Brenna?”
She bent down and licked his chest, moving up over his shoulder, along his neck, to his ear. “I like the taste of your body after you work.”
“Brenna.” This time he groaned it. If she kept wiggling on him, he might have no choice but to take her
right here. He could feel the heat of her through his breeches, and his body wanted hers as badly as hers wanted his.
“I need you,” she breathed into his ear. “I itch for it.” She ducked her head and sucked on his throat, burying her face in his beard. Vali could not help but let his head fall back. He stilled her hips, cupping the firm mounds of her bottom in his hands, and stood. As she felt him move, she hooked her arms and legs around him, so that he brought her up with him gracefully.
Trying to ignore the reactions of their audience, which varied from lewd amusement to gaping shock, he retraced her path through the hall and carried her away to their room.
~oOo~
Once in their room, he set her down and barred the door. She kept her hands on him, tracing her fingers over his back while he was turned from her, then plucking at the lacings of his breeches when he faced her again.
God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) Page 12
