When they bit her breasts, she sought out their seer and memorized that leering face. That watcher seemed worse to her than these dumb animals rutting in her.
When they spent their seed on her, on her face, over her chest, her legs, she stared up at the rough ceiling and thought of home.
When one of them tried to force himself into her mouth, she bit down, swallowing his blood, relishing his screams, until a blow to her head loosened her jaws and brought dark to her mind.
~oOo~
Again and again, they took her to the room. Again and again, the men took their turns. Sometimes, they would bind her to the strange table. Other times, she would wake with her belly over a saddle and her wrists and ankles bound, and the men would take her that way. Again and again. Even as she knew contempt for them and no shame for herself, her body ached with the ill use.
But it wasn’t long before Astrid learned to be relieved when the men filled the room. Their rutting was the least of the torments.
When they weren’t abusing her, they kept her bound in the black, silent cell. They offered her water by dumping it over her face, and food by shoving small bits of bread into her mouth, once each day, she guessed, after they were finished with her.
They talked but almost never at her, and never with any expectation that she would answer. She understood few of their words, but she understood the men. Their only intent was to cause her pain, as much as they could without killing her. That had become quickly obvious.
They meant her to suffer, and they meant her to do so for as long as they could manage it.
Sometimes, the window in the door would open. Astrid knew that someone was watching, someone besides the seer who stood in the room and always watched. She could see only darkness in the space, however, when she could see anything at all.
It was never one thing they did to her, and she never had any idea how long they would press her before they tired of their games for the moment and returned her to her cell.
Sometimes, after the leering men left the room, another man would come in, and it would be only him. One man and the seer, always standing at the door, watching. Those times were the worst. That one man, dressed all in black, knew of ways to make hurt that would have impressed Astrid had she been standing at his side and not strapped naked before him.
There was a kind of device made of many strands of soft hide. At the end of each strand was a metal barb. The man in black would raise his arm and strike down, sending all those barbed strands over her bare flesh, sometimes over her front, and sometimes over her back. Again and again and again he would strike, and Astrid would feel the blood oozing over her skin. Then he would rub a kind of ointment into the wounds, but not a healing salve. Something that turned her flesh to fire.
There were times when the man in black would use the leather strands on her for days in a row, each lash over already devastated flesh digging that much more deeply into her abyss of pain.
There was a thin, pale switch, little more than a twig. Sometimes, she would be strapped face-down on the table, and that switch would sing out over her flesh. Other times, he would strike the bottoms of her feet only.
That was the worst pain but for one other.
The very worst times were when they hung her by her wrists in iron shackles and walked away. They’d leave her there for a timeless eternity. As she dangled over the floor, every wound they’d made, every muscle they’d bruised, every joint they’d strained would scream in agony. Wounds that had managed a tentative healing would break open.
Astrid knew that if she broke, it would be while she hung from the shackles. That was the time her mind could not go away, could only stay and feel every pain.
She tried to focus on Leif and Vali. Though she could no longer mark time—she spent too much of it unconscious, and when she was being hurt, she worked too hard to turn her mind away—she told herself that it hadn’t been as long as it seemed. Pain and loneliness had a way of making all time endless. She remembered that infinite night in the woods, when hours had seemed years, and she told herself that when she was free, this time would be but a blink in her life.
Leif and Vali would come. If they could come, they would come. And if they couldn’t, if they’d been killed, then she would see them in Valhalla, as long as she died with honor. As long as she didn’t break.
When she was young, just about the time she’d had her first blood, Jarl Åke had executed a traitor. The man had been a valiant warrior and an ally chieftain. He’d been well loved in his clan and in Geitland as well, until his treachery. In light of the honor the man had known for most of his life, Åke had performed the Blood Eagle.
In that manner of execution, the condemned’s back was opened with a sharp blade. His ribs were then hacked free of his spine and splayed outward. From the opening, his lungs were pulled and draped over his shoulders. Death came after all that had been done, while the lungs struggled to fill with air until they could do so no longer. It was an exquisitely painful and gory way to die, and a man who could withstand it without crying out would retain his honor and his seat in Valhalla.
The chieftain had barely flinched. Astrid, standing between her mother and her father, had watched carefully, seeking any sign that he felt pain. All he’d ever done was, occasionally, take long blinks. When his lungs had finally stopped, he’d dropped his head. His body hadn’t even sagged.
To Astrid, that had always been the epitome of an honorable death. Although he’d betrayed his friend’s trust, no one could ever say that he was anything less than a true and valorous warrior.
If that man could withstand pain of such magnitude, then Astrid could, she told herself, withstand the petty trials these ignorant Christians could devise.
So she never screamed. A true shieldmaiden closed her mouth against her pain.
When they came to take her, she always fought until they knocked her senseless, but still, each day, she had less fight left in her bones. She was weak, and she was ill. Corruption had settled into her wounds, and her body was failing her. She would not be able to fight forever.
But she would not be broken.
In the weeks following Dreda’s death, especially after her vigil, everything around the castle seemed to turn grey.
Grief was taking the king’s sense. He refused to dine even in the company of his sons, and Leofric thought that he was eating very little in any event. He barely allowed himself to be dressed for each day, and he could hardly countenance the presence of anyone with him.
Beyond the necessary servants, only those closest to the king had seen him since Dreda’s body had been put into the earth. Those closest, and the keepers of the dungeon. The men who worked in the deeps of the castle saw the king every day.
He spent the great bulk of his day dividing his time between two places: the chapel and the dungeon.
Most of the nobles had left court, as there was little reason to stay. The barbarians had been repelled, so there was no need for noblemen to don their armor. Moreover, the king had not offered his audience since the day his daughter had been killed, and the royal table was empty at dinner, so there was no gain to be had in being seen at court.
Even Dunstan had left, drawn home to prepare for his marriage.
Prince Eadric had taken on the managing of affairs that couldn’t be avoided. There wasn’t much; as all activities but the basic business of daily life ground to a halt, the people had little need of the royal family. So the family were left to themselves and their sorrow.
Leofric and his brother spent most of their time in the private residence. Their father wanted nothing to do with them or with anyone else, but neither Leofric nor Eadric sought solitude. They didn’t want the company of servants or sycophants, but in these weeks, they gravitated to each other more strongly than they had since their boyhood.
While Eadric saw to those royal obligations that couldn’t be deferred, Leofric wandered the halls and rooms of the residence, alone and lonely, more a ghost in
the space than their sister was. He often sat in Dreda’s rooms, untouched since the governess had been arrested. He’d hold something of his sister’s and try to conjure her to sit with him.
The scent of her was everywhere still, and the feel of her. In her pretty dolls and faulty needlework. In her golden hairbrushes and pearl-tipped pins. In the hide rocking horse that still stood near her bed, though she’d been well past the age to ride it. She’d adored that horse.
Such a perfect young lass she’d been. So much promise. Beauty and poise and spirit. A lively mind and an open heart.
He understood his father’s poisonous rage. He felt it in his own heart. But with each passing day, Leofric saw more clearly what his father could not see at all—that the poison had infected them, was crippling them, and when they fell, so too would Mercuria.
~oOo~
“Of course he’s unhappy. Dreda was more than his daughter to him, and you know it. She was our mother’s spirit. You cannot expect him already to have made his peace with the loss of her.” Eadric slammed his knife down and picked up his goblet. They were dining alone, as usual, the table ponderous for the empty places at it. Their father had not joined them for any meal since Dreda’s death. Leofric wasn’t sure that he’d eaten at all since then.
“He is more than unhappy,” Leofric countered. “This is more than grief. This is an evil.”
Eadric’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Watch your words, brother. Our father’s will cannot be evil, and you risk treason to say so.”
Knowing how fine was the line he walked, Leofric took another step anyway. “How can this be a godly thing, to allow a woman to be treated in this way?”
Eadric chose not to answer that question. “She’s a savage. What do you care of her?”
“I care nothing of her. I care deeply for the king. Our father is losing his way. What’s happening to the prisoner is vengeance, and vengeance is not ours. Eadric, you are the one of us who best understands these things. You know your spirit. You feel God in you. Search your heart. Is it right, is it righteous, what we do?”
Eadric had lost his way, too. Leofric’s contemplative, careful brother had absented himself entirely from the happenings in the Black Walls. He couldn’t abide to think on it, but in that distance, he’d found a way to accept it. He had carried their sister’s body to their father, and he had a taste for barbarian suffering, too.
Only Leofric had qualms. He was the more rash brother, the one more likely to fight and to play, to sin without care, but it was his conscience that had been pricked in the Black Walls. He saw the work of the sin on their father. Eadric saw only the work of grief.
But Leofric had been in the Black Walls. He had seen. If Eadric would sully his boots to descend the dungeon steps, he might also see, in that dark, more clearly.
~oOo~
Something had to be done. Eadric was wrong; they could wait no longer for the Lord’s intervention on their father’s misery. Convinced that he had to do something, that the weeks trapped in this dead grief were only killing them all, Leofric went in search of his father.
He knew where he would find him.
In the midst of a bright, warm day, Leofric left the residence and strode through the castle.
The stone walls echoed against the silence. The castle itself had become a crypt.
The only time in a day that his father showed liveliness or interest was when he went to the dungeon. He would stand at the cell door within the Black Walls, sometimes for hours, and watch what was done to the captive woman. Occasionally, he would call the jailer to him and command them to do something specific to her.
The king was obsessed. Something deep and primal inside him fed on the strange woman’s pain.
But he knew it was wrong. How else to explain why he would leave the dungeon, pale and sweating, and go to the chapel and kneel on the stone floor, before the altar, beneath the cross, for hours?
Leofric had sought him out in the Black Walls often. He’d stood in the shadows, reeling with shock and dismay, and watched his father, King of Mercuria, peering through the cell door like a wayward boy peeping into a lady’s chamber.
When he’d tried to call him away, he’d been ignored or dismissed.
Leofric was obsessed as well, with his father’s precipitous decline. His own grief had been supplanted by his worry and his powerlessness. He didn’t know what he could do to bring his father’s focus back to the living.
And the bishop? The man in whom the king put his greatest trust, who might ease his heart and mind? He spent most of his days in the cell with the captive, under the guise of ‘overseeing’ the torments they subjected her to.
Leofric, who’d sinned well and often himself and traveled in the places to find all manner of them, knew Father Francis to be slave to a variety of sins, and he could see the bishop’s venal interest in the woman. With his own sick fascination at the fore, Francis wasn’t available to counsel or comfort a king who’d sought neither.
Even were the bishop to turn from his own depravity and do his duty to his king, Leofric didn’t believe that there were hours enough left in the day or the night for his father to pray his way to rightness with what had happened in the wood, or what was happening within the Black Walls.
It sickened Leofric, what they were doing to the woman. Never before in his life had he known a prisoner to be treated thus. Even those two men who’d been locked in the Black Walls before hadn’t known such constant, inexplicable torments, and for those two, there had been cause to what they’d been subjected to. The tortures had had a goal beyond the pain itself. Information or correction, there had been a reason and, thus, an ending.
If the goal for what was happening to the woman were truly to ease the king’s broken heart, to cleanse his grief, as he’d said himself, then it could not have been less effective. Each day, the king dwindled more, pulled more deeply into a black caul of sorrow so heavy it sapped his sense.
And the woman—Leofric had never known of any like her. Through everything they did to her, every abasement, every agony, she was silent. He’d observed it himself, though he only rarely looked through that window and could not bear to look long.
He needn’t see to know. The Black Walls rang out with the sounds of the lash or the cane or the cat o’ nine tails, and the effortful grunts of the men on her, but she was silent. The men spoke of it, were frustrated by their inability to make her scream, and each time they tried something to break through her steely resolve.
Only in senselessness would she make a sound. When she lost her senses during a pressing, or when she’d been left in her cell and could sleep, then she moaned.
That was the window Leofric found himself peering into, though the black inside it was nearly impenetrable: her cell, when she had been left to herself. The unconscious sounds of her suffering made him ill, made him furious, but he felt admiration, too, or something greater even than that.
Awe. He felt awe.
Not for the men who’d done her so much damage, but for the woman who had taken so much and not lost her will. In those sounds she made only when she couldn’t control them, Leofric heard tremendous suffering, exquisite agony. Pain that would break the strongest men he knew. That would have broken him long before.
But when she woke, she went instantly silent and made no sound again as long as she could lock her jaws.
They no longer bound her in her cell; after weeks, she had lost the strength to fight them. Her body was failing her. But her will was not.
Leofric had never known anyone, man or woman, with such strength. To break her, who was, as all were, God’s creation, seemed a most grievous sin. She hadn’t—she could not have—done to Dreda what had obviously been done to her. She was paying for another’s crime.
She was an enemy, yes. A barbarian, a heathen, who had stormed their shore and trampled a town, so she was not innocent. She was a vanquished enemy. That earned her a death.
Not this atrocity, this endless evil
.
After weeks of standing quietly by while his father settled into depraved madness and the bishop allowed it to happen, Leofric descended into the Black Walls, expecting to find his father there.
He did not. But before he could turn and climb back to the light to seek him in the chapel, the door of the torture cell opened, and Father Francis stepped out. Behind him came the warden, and then the executioner, whose assigned tasks extended well beyond beheadings and hangings. He carried the captive slung over his shoulder. She was senseless, and her body shook and swayed with his steps.
Leofric had not seen the woman clearly in weeks, and he was shocked into wooden silence. Her blonde hair was black with grime. Her face was discolored and misshapen with bruising. Her skin was smeared with blood and filth. Her sleek, wondrous muscles had wasted away. She was little more than a hide-wrapped skeleton.
Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3) Page 10
