The storm ended during the night, and dawn brought the sun. For all the crash and heave of the storm, for every time it picked them up and threatened to slam them upended into the water, the little boat had held. The sail was in tatters, so their prospects remained grim, but they had survived, and Vali took that, and the return of the sun, as good omens.
With the sun, they could at least head again westward with certainty. He no longer had any understanding of where they might be, or if west would even bring them to land, but west was the direction they knew of as home.
Then he heard the most beautiful sound he had ever heard in his life. At first, he would have sworn before the gods that it was the soft, husky trill of Brenna’s laugh, right at his ear, but then sense took over, and he knew he’d heard something outside his mind’s fantasy. He froze, with his friends still deep in the exhausted sleep that had taken them over almost as one when calm had returned to the water, and listened hard.
He heard it again, faint and distant: the cry of a gull. Rising to his feet and clearing the remnants of the sail shelter, Vali stood and scanned the horizon, turning all his hope toward the west.
And yes—he stared until he was sure. The western horizon broke and became jagged. Mountains.
“LAND!” he shouted, but his voice failed him. He tried to swallow, but was too dry. Finding a skin, he squeezed a few drops into his mouth and tried again. “LAND! LAND!”
Within scant moments, everyone was moving, even Jakob, who had hit his head on the boat as he’d fallen overboard. They had the ruined sail unlashed and the oars locked in, and Vali, Bjarke, Hans, Jaan, Astrid, and Harald began rowing with a strength Vali would not have believed they still had.
It took hours, and they rotated the crew twice, as much as they could. Vali stayed at the oars, as did Bjarke, the next biggest and strongest, both of them taking the middle oars.
The sun was full in their faces when the land stopped being a growing hope and became truly discernible. Vali paused in his strokes and scanned the coast. He scanned it again, the other direction.
He knew where they were.
The storm had corrected their course—or perhaps had done one better.
Bjarke, taking on the drag from Vali’s neglected rowing duties, said, “Vali?”
Vali turned to his clansman and smiled. “Look. You see where we are?”
Bjarke looked. Now everyone had stopped rowing. It was Orm who voiced what those who would know—only Vali, Bjarke, Harald, and Orm—understood.
The old man pointed at the thick brush of green atop the cliff that had marked Vali’s first view of their salvation. A dense, familiar forest. “That is the Wood of Verđandi! We are home!”
Olga turned to Vali. “Home?”
Vali grinned and began rowing again, feeling strength charge into his body. All the rowers followed his lead. “Not where we meant to be. Well north of that. But to those of us pledged to Jarl Snorri Thorsson, this is our homeland.”
She frowned. “But is this not also Åke’s land, then? Is that how it would be among your people? That the victor would take the holdings of the vanquished?”
“Yes,” Orm answered. “But our people warred with Åke long before that hollow peace was made. And he has slain an honorable and beloved jarl. If he has kept these lands, it will have been with force. Our home is far removed from Åke’s seat. He will not have a large presence here. Vicious, yes, but not large. If he holds it, we can break his hold. The return of Vali Storm-Wolf will galvanize a resistance.”
“The gods brought us to an army, Olga,” Vali added. “We will go for Brenna and find our vengeance, and we will do it with a host of warriors at our backs.”
The gods had not forsaken them after all.
Åke had lied, and Leif had been wrong. Neither of these truths had surprised Brenna.
She had yielded, but Åke had not taken her into the hall and healed her as if she were his own daughter. He treated her not like a pet, but like a beast.
He had left her in her rank hovel. But he had lengthened her chain and left her her straw mat, and he had ordered Igul to treat her wounds—which he did, cruelly but effectively enough. And he had fed her water and leiv bread, enough to survive on. It was so much more than she’d had since she’d been taken from Estland that she even began to gain strength on mere bread and water.
When Åke determined that she was sufficiently healed, she was put to work. Not in the hall, at her old duties with his family. Instead, she was sent to the most menial women’s work. She slopped the beasts and slaughtered them. She cleaned the pots and scrubbed the linens. On days of rain too heavy for anything but the most essential outdoor work, she was put on the dye vats. After a wet spell, her hands were dyed a rusty red like old blood, and she had not yet been able to wash it fully away.
She did her work, and she lived her life, chained. Åke didn’t trust her—Brenna knew it was fear he truly felt—so, ostensibly to mark her out and prevent her from running or fighting, he had left the iron shackle around her neck, having the smith seal it closed. A long length of heavy chain dragged from it. At night, she was chained down in her hovel. During the day, she looped it around her waist like a belt over her rough slave’s shift.
The heavy iron dragged on her throat and rubbed her skin raw. For days, her blood had stained the otherwise undyed wool of her shift. Then the skin began to heal. Someday, it would toughen, and the weight and rub of the shackle would be familiar. Then, when she had grown used to it, she would truly be a slave again.
Unless she could find a way to get free.
As had been the case the last time she’d been in thrall to Åke, those who had to work with her, or in her vicinity, did so with evident nervousness. This time, they were more afraid, and Brenna had heard enough of their mutterings amongst them to know that they feared that their jarl was failing a test of the gods.
They all knew the stories of the gods walking among them, or even possessing men and women’s bodies, and those who believed her eye was a gift from Odin, rather than a curse from him, now believed that he would never have allowed his shieldmaiden to fall so low without a godly purpose. They cast their average eyes sidelong at her, watched her throw slop and muck waste, saw the heavy shackle and her blood-stained shift, glimpsed the healing burns on her back, and perhaps even saw the resolve in her expression, and they tried to make distance between themselves and whatever fury Odin might bring down upon their jarl.
Brenna was, again, alone.
Leif kept his distance. She understood; he had made himself too vulnerable in his efforts to save her life, and he would be no good to her if Åke killed him. So all they had managed in the time since she had begun to work was a rare moment of eye contact. Until Brenna was allowed back in the hall, she couldn’t see how they would manage more.
That was her first task: to be brought into the hall again. She knew that she had to remain quiet and seemingly humbled so that Åke might want to gloat. She had spent years in his hall, and she knew him well. He believed what he’d said to Leif, that Odin was on his side, and he would see his success in breaking her as a testament to his vast power and righteousness.
If she could somehow prove herself unbroken at the right moment, with the right audience, she might erode his support. It could not be only slaves who worried about the God’s-Eye and if Odin might be unhappy with her abasement. If his freemen saw that she had kept her power, from wherever it came, they might think twice about their fealty to Åke.
And that might make a chance to kill him.
~oOo~
She accomplished her first task several days later, on the day of the thing. The freemen of Geitland and the surrounding villages came together at a thing to right wrongs among them, to administer justice, to oversee transactions of property, to witness young men get their arm rings and swear to the jarl, to plan the next raid, and then to feast.
Brenna had expected a massive attendance, since Åke had usurped Snorri’s lands as wel
l, but she saw few new faces in town. Åke had either decided to leave his new holdings in its people’s own hands, or he was cutting them out of the power of the thing. The latter seemed more likely than the former. If she could get into the hall, she might know for sure.
In the late afternoon, Vifrid, one of the house slaves, ran up to Brenna as she carried full pails of water from the well, hanging from a yoke across her shoulders. Fetching water was one of the more difficult jobs Brenna had. The yoke pressed down on the shackle and dug into the tender new flesh of her topmost burn, and she nearly always had to pull up her shieldmaiden to make it across the town.
The burns no longer caused her excessive pain, in general. They were tender, and they protested when she stretched the skin too far, but after the maddening agony of the first week, almost any other pain was bearable. The yoke pushed at that limit somewhat.
The worst part now was the itch. A constant buzzing just under her skin. Most of the scabbing had fallen away, and Brenna had hoped that the itch would abate thereafter, but as yet it had not. It made her cross and impatient, not that that mattered. No one spoke to her, except to give her commands, so she had no cause to be genial.
But Vifrid came running up so quickly, while Brenna was focused on keeping the yoke still so that it would not dig more than necessary into her wounded back, that the two women nearly collided. Water sloshed from the buckets, and the yoke rocked painfully.
“Usch!” Brenna snapped, hurting and annoyed. She didn’t have to be obeisant to another slave.
Vifrid ducked her head, “Apologies, Brenna God’s-Eye. Forgive me. You are wanted in the great hall. Jarl Åke calls for you himself.”
He meant to make of show of her, she was certain.
“I will take the yoke,” Vifrid offered, still not meeting Brenna’s eyes.
“My thanks.” Brenna lifted the yoke over her head and set it on Vifrid’s ready hands.
Then she walked toward the hall, with her back tall and straight. She didn’t bother to check her appearance. She wanted all to see the extent to which Åke had tried to debase her. She might not get her vengeance on this day, but she could lay the ground for it.
~oOo~
Åke sat with his family and closest friends and associates at a long table at the head of the hall. Long, but less great tables accommodated most of the rest of the freemen and freewomen. Others sat around the edges of the hall, dining at their laps.
The atmosphere was bright and jovial, as always during such a feast. Brenna came in from the kitchen and found a place in Åke’s line of sight to stand until she was summoned. While she waited, with her head canted at a downward angle in supposed supplication, she scanned the room, looking for potential friends or true ones.
Leif was seated at the head table, but at an end far from Åke, rather than amongst the jarl’s children. He was yet being punished for his interference on her behalf, though it was obviously only a punishment and not a true loss of favor. He didn’t see Brenna right away, and she took a moment to study him and settle in her mind that he truly was her ally.
He, too, seemed watchful, scanning the room and taking in its mood. She waited until his eyes met hers. After a pause, with a subtle tip of his head, he let her know that he was with her.
Just to have a single known ally in this room made Brenna feel immensely powerful. She was not, she knew that, and she could not be rash. But this was the first chance she’d yet had to even understand the field of the battle she meant to fight.
The hall had begun to go quiet as people around her recognized her. Even with her eyes downcast, they knew her. She was the only of Åke’s slaves to be thus shackled, and the story of the God’s-Eye’s fall would have been traveling already.
When the quiet became noticeable, Åke saw her and stood, and with that, the last of the conversation stopped. Staring at her as if his eyes alone could hold her in place, he lifted his hands, and Brenna knew he meant to give a speech.
“My friends. We have done good work today. Our world is in balance, and our strength and power grows ever greater. Now we prepare to raid again, and for the first time all three of my grown sons will raid. I sought the seer’s counsel before the thing, and he told me that we have the eye of the gods and will soon see the seat of Geitland begin a long era of greatness.”
As a cheer went up at that, Åke swung one arm forward and flicked his hand at Brenna. “Come, girl,” he said, and the hall quieted again, watching Brenna walk around the edge of the room, her chain rattling dully, until she stood behind the jarl.
He grabbed the chain where it hung down her back and yanked her forward. Then he spoke again.
“I know that there is talk that I tempt the gods’ wrath with my treatment of the God’s-Eye. But know this—I do not forget what power she holds. It is she who forgot. Odin gave her to me as my thrall. I raised her up and allowed her to fight for me, my smiths made her sword and shield, and she gained great renown on the shoulders of my good care. Then she turned her back on the will of the gods and abjured me.”
Now he grabbed her hair, in its long, simple, dirty braid, and jerked her head up so that her face was visible to everyone in the hall. “Do not fear her. She is nothing more than a vessel. Her power is Odin’s power, and she sought to claim it for her own. It was she who tempted the gods. Her degradation is their justice, not mine.”
Brenna opened her eyes wide and watched the people staring at her. Åke was convincing them, she could see it. If they truly believed that he acted within the will of the gods, then her chance to find allies here dwindled to nearly nothing.
But they were raiding again. That would take the strongest among his men away—and all three of his grown sons. And Vali might still be coming. She would not give up hope. Even now, as Åke pulled sharply on her braid and her chain, driving her to her knees before him, she did not lose hope.
When she knelt, he shook her chain. “The gods are with us, my friends. We go to greatness!”
As the hall erupted in cheers, Åke yanked Brenna back to her feet. “Go back to your slop, slave,” he snarled in her ear. Then he pushed her away.
As she walked back to the door, she sought out Leif, whose eyes were already on her. He looked immeasurably sorry for her. So she turned her warrior’s face on him—only for a moment; now was not the time to show anyone else that she had not been broken—and he blinked in surprise, then gave her a nod.
She was strong enough for all of this. She was not done fighting. She would never be done fighting, not until she could drive Jarl Åke’s head onto a pike.
~oOo~
That night, after Igul chained her down in her hovel, he stayed crouched in front of her. She met his leering stare and knew what was in his simple mind. The jarl’s words had taken away his fear of her.
He pushed her down on her mat and tugged roughly at her shift, exposing her below the waist. Then he untied his breeches and dropped his soft, sour-smelling heft on top of her. Chained to the floor as she was, there was little she could do except stare at him and imagine the vengeance she would someday claim.
But his floppy worm wouldn’t stiffen. He pushed it at her pathetically for a while and then grabbed her hand. “Take me in hand, slave, and if you try anything, I’ll find a branch to do you with instead.”
She yanked on him, resisting the strong urge to pull until it came off. His rank breath filled her head as he panted in increasing frustration, but still his little man wilted.
When he took hold of her jaw, she knew what next he intended, and she was not willing to lie still for that, no matter the price of her rebellion. She twisted her head free. “I will bite it off.”
Igul punched her hard in the face, and blood gushed from her nose. Then he punched her between the legs, and Brenna was shocked by the pain that flowered into her belly and through her chest. It stole her breath.
He stood then, and Brenna remained still, despite the blood washing down her throat and the fire churning up her belly and
chest.
“No food or water for you,” he grunted as he closed his breeches. And then he left.
Brenna rolled to her side, pulling her legs and arms in against the pain, and choked up blood onto the dirt.
When she had her breath back, she put her hands to her face and, with a quick and practiced motion, reset her nose. It wasn’t the first time she had done so in her violent life.
She was strong enough for all of this. She was.
She was.
She had to be.
Two hundred and thirty men and women in three longships. Vali had his horde.
In Karlsa, they had found a small contingent of Åke’s men making themselves at home in the great hall. With the help of locals unhappy with the interlopers, Vali and his friends had dispatched them, taking no new losses despite their weakened condition.
God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) Page 26
