Astrid stood at the window and looked out on the castle grounds. People were at their work—farmers and craftsmen bringing supplies into the yard and driving empty carts from it; workwomen carrying baskets and buckets; stable boys and kennel boys, and all manner of people moving back and forth past her small, distorted view of the world outside.
The windows in this room were tall and narrow, not even the width of her shoulders. She was above the ground some short distance, like the Estland castle but not so high as the room she’d had there. More like the rooms for the servants. If she could jump, she didn’t think the landing would do her unbearable harm.
But these windows were full of some kind of smooth, translucent material, almost like horn, but clearer, and cool like the surface of a looking glass. There was too much of it, and it was too clear, to be any kind of glass she’d ever known. A kind of metal joined pieces that made a pattern. They opened—the woman who tended her, Elfleda, had opened them on several occasions and let fresh air and lively sounds into the room—but Astrid had not sorted out the how of it.
They were too narrow, in any event, she thought. Her body was smaller than it had been, but she wasn’t sure it was small enough to ease through the stone sides and jump to the ground below.
The windows were not a likely means of escape.
Neither was the fireplace—she’d peered up into the stack above and found a black hole. She thought she would have fit, but what would she have done on the roof of the castle, nearly bare, and unarmed? No, that was no use, either.
The door, then. It was the only way. They didn’t lock it, but there was always a guard standing just outside. She’d paid close attention and discerned a pattern. Three guards: one large, almost as tall as Leif, and quite fat, who guarded her during the night; another small, shorter than she by perhaps as much as a head, who was outside her door in the afternoons, and a third, the size of what she supposed was average for these men, about her own height, who stood watch in the mornings.
Always, one of them was there, whenever the door opened. She’d opened it once herself, in the middle of the night, and the big guard had swung silently into the threshold, dropping his weapon, like a metal-shafted spear, across the opening. He hadn’t spoken. He’d simply eyed her, his eyes lingering over her bare body before lifting again to her face, as he’d blocked her way, until she’d closed the door. Through the heavy wood, she’d heard him return to his guarding position.
When it was women coming and going, Astrid often found the guards turning to look through the open door at her bare body. Only when it was women, though.
If she would escape, she would have to neutralize the guard. With the big man on duty during the hours of dark, she would have to do it in the daylight, when one of the smaller guards stood watch.
Assuming that she had the strength to take either of them. She didn’t know. She had no opportunity to test her strength or her skills. No weapons, no training. Nothing but this room.
Her body felt different. Smaller, yes, and frailer, too. More than that—she felt different inside her skin. The way her legs and arms moved, the way her weight felt on her feet—it was as if, somewhere in the black place, they had changed her body to another.
It was a problem greater than her mind, still bleary and unwell, could manage.
She was worried about her mind, in fact. It didn’t work as it once had. She was often confused, and things felt wrong all around her.
Her fear of the dark had returned, for one thing. She was forcing herself to face it, to bear it, to sit up at night in the dark and let the creatures cavort in her mind’s eye, but it wasn’t like the night in the woods, where her terror had found its bottom and then crumbled away. Now there was no bottom. There was only her will, refusing to give in to the fear. But the fear was there, and she despised it.
Fear and weakness was what she knew now, and she despised herself for it.
The door opened, and Astrid turned from the window. Elfleda came in, carrying a new bundle of women’s clothes and shoes. Every few days, she changed out the bundle that Astrid ignored.
She would not wear the clothes of their women, with their heavy skirts and inconvenient sleeves, and the strange covering over their hair. Better she stay bare. These people treated their women like slaves, like beasts of burden and breeding, and they would have to kill her before she would bend to that. Put her in the black place again if they might…
The shudder that went through her cut off the thought, and she slammed her fist into her thigh. She was broken. Gods, she was. After everything she’d endured, they’d still managed to break her.
Because she would wear that blasted dress and be their slave beast if they threatened to put her in that place again. She would stand up to death, but not to that. Not again.
But until they threatened that, she would stand up. They wouldn’t give her men’s clothing, so she refused clothes.
He wouldn’t give her men’s clothing. Leofric.
Except for the tunic she now wore, which he’d brought to her the day after he’d knocked her to the ground and shoved his hard sex against her. He’d brought her that, and she’d agreed to wear it. She wanted boots and breeches and a chestpiece. Or a soft, heavy tunic like those he wore, made of some fabric softer than wool and more robust than linen. But she’d agreed to the white linen tunic.
It skimmed high on her thighs, and the neckline was wide enough to drop from a shoulder when she moved. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be dressed as the warrior she was. But he seemed relieved to have her agree to wear a man’s shirt, at least.
And she’d felt something strange at the smile he’d given her when she’d pulled it over her head. She didn’t understand it, but she’d nearly smiled back at him.
Leofric made her weakest of all, she thought. He’d saved her from the black place. He’d been with her while her blood burned and her skin screamed and she couldn’t find the place that was real. In those days, he’d been the only constant that wasn’t pain and fear.
When she saw him now, and he came every day, there was a part of her, the same part of her that feared the dark again, that wanted to run into his arms and feel them around her again.
She had never run into a man’s arms in her life.
He’d been gentle when she’d forgotten that such a thing existed. He’d made her feel safe when all she’d known was terror and pain. She wanted to know his gentleness, she wanted to feel that safety, again. She wanted him.
She’d never needed such things from anyone but herself, but now she felt them only in Leofric.
And she hated him all the more for it.
Elfleda moved around the room, tidying up, taking away the tray from the morning meal. She didn’t speak, because she knew Astrid wouldn’t. She’d stopped trying days ago. She simply checked the chamber pot, checked the water ewer, fluffed the pillows, switched one bundle of slave clothes for another, collected the tray, and left the room.
Alone and aimless, Astrid sat down on a chair and tried to make her broken mind focus on how she would escape.
~oOo~
Leofric came in after the midday meal, and Astrid despised the trembling in her belly when she saw him. The weak little girl inside her that wanted to go to him.
She knew some words of this place now. A few. And with those few words, she had learned a few things. She knew that Leofric was the king’s son.
That meant that he had power to put her in the black place and power to take her from it at any time. Or to leave her there for all the infinite time she’d been left there.
That meant that he had killed her friends, or ordered them killed, or been involved in that attack in some way.
That meant that he was her enemy. Not only her jailer, and her master, but her enemy in war.
And yet her mouth wanted to smile when he walked into her room. The room in which she was kept under guard. On his orders.
Why did he keep her here? What did he want?
If he
wanted her enslaved, then what was it he wanted her to do? He hadn’t tried to use her, though he seemed to want to, and she’d thought he would when he’d grabbed her.
He hadn’t tried to make her work, even in this room. Others came in and cleaned and tended to her food and other needs. All she did all day was sit—and try to find ways to make her body strong again.
He tried only to talk to her. Every day, he tried. She knew he wanted to teach her his language—and he had, a little. But she had not given him back any of his words. She would not. Where she could assert her will, she would.
She didn’t get up as he came into the room and closed the door. The short guard was on watch, she saw. She could measure time by the guards more easily than by the path of the sun.
When Leofric came to the room, the guards didn’t turn and look at her.
He came and sat in the chair facing her. “Hello,” he said.
She stared.
His eyes moved over her bare legs, and Astrid hated the feeling of embarrassment for how they looked. They looked as they did—skinny and scarred—because of what this man and his father had made happen to her. She had nothing to feel shame for. Not shame. Anger. She should feel anger toward him for the way she looked and the way she felt. But she did feel shame. She hadn’t earned these scars in battle but in captivity. They were not scars of strength but of subjugation. They showed her weakness for all the world to see. And Leofric and his people had made them.
She didn’t think he’d ever been in the black place—she had no memory of it if he had, until the day he’d saved her—but it was him nonetheless, she knew. Him and his father, the king.
And why? What purpose could their cruelty have had? Unless the cruelty was meant to make her malleable to their designs now.
Astrid had tried to think that possibility out, but her mind wouldn’t connect the pieces. She thought of Hnefatafl, the game she played with Leif, and the way he would move to trap her, or to lure her, and then come in behind her and defeat her king. Strategy. Thinking ahead. It wasn’t her strength on her best of days. She tried to imagine the black place being a strategy for something they wanted of her now, and she could not.
He talked at her, a string of words she didn’t understand, but she heard “father” and “brother” and “language” and assumed that he was telling her he wanted her to learn. Possibly that his father wanted her to learn. And that he had a brother. He said something about “time,” but she didn’t know what.
Then he leaned forward and reached for her hands. His hands were big and strong, well shaped, with long fingers. They bore the scars of a warrior. They were good hands, and she knew their touch. She craved it.
She pulled her hands from his reach. If he touched her, that frightened child who wanted him so badly might take over.
“Please,” he said. She knew that word. He said it often. It was like the snälla of her own tongue. He was pleading.
He patted his chest. “Leofric. Leofric.”
He pointed to her and lifted his eyebrows. She knew exactly what he wanted. Her name.
When she kept her mouth closed and simply stared at him, he shook his head.
After a moment spent staring at her hands, he sighed and stood.
At the door, he said, “Forgive me.”
She understood that as well.
There was more she understood. Something about his aspect while he’d been with her for so brief a time made her feel wary. He hadn’t tried very hard today, and he’d seemed different.
He’d given up. And that was important in some way.
It was time to leave. Whether she was strong enough to do it, she didn’t know, but something had changed again, and it was time for her to run. If she wasn’t strong enough to get away, they would kill her. She would make sure of it. She wouldn’t go back to the black place.
A tiny hope fluttered its wings in her heart—that Leif and Vali and Brenna and the rest were still alive, were still in Anglia, that it hadn’t been the years it seemed to have been since she’d been with them. The part of her brain that had sense knew it was a fantasy. But at the least, the camp was the place she knew, a place where she could start, where she might find strength in the spirit of her friends and that small remnant of home.
And perhaps they would still be there after all, waiting for her. Those tiny wings fanned a small fire in her soul, and she knew she would try.
If only she knew how.
~oOo~
It came to her when the girl, Audie, collected the evening tray and spilled the bowl. She’d wiped up the meal that was like skause with part of her slave dress and then torn the stained part away and folded the fabric so that the tear wouldn’t show.
Astrid was reminded how easily these dresses tore.
Once Audie had left, she knew she would be alone for the duration of the evening, and through the night, until the morning tray came.
She needed clothes—not that stupid dress that she had no idea how she would run in. She needed proper clothes. She needed a weapon.
The morning guard, who came on at the dawn. He was about her size. He carried the same weapon the other guards did—the steel spear. She was no good with a spear, and she’d never wielded one of steel, but it was better than her hands.
She knew how she would get it from him. His weapon and his clothes. If she were strong enough.
If she were brave enough.
There was a time when she had been both. She needed only to remember how it had felt to be brave and strong.
She grabbed the bundle of slave clothes and got to work.
~oOo~
She spent the night tearing the dress into strips and braiding them. The fabric was flimsy, so she braided strips and then braided the braids, until she had a length of strong rope about as long as she was tall. Enough to wrap well around her hands.
She rested a little—she would need all the strength she could muster. Even in her short sleep, her mind played out her plan.
It was a terrible plan, based on too many things she could not know. But it was the only thing she could think of.
As the sky lightened toward dawn, she heard the rustle and thump and quiet conversation that meant that the night’s watch was giving over to the morning. The big man far too much for her to handle was going away, and the man about her size was standing outside the door.
The door they never locked.
She waited a few minutes—not too long, because she needed the quiet of dawn, before the castle was busy, to get away, but long enough that the night man had time to leave the corridor.
Astrid knew nothing at all about what was beyond the door. More than three feet from the threshold, all was a mystery, and she was in the hands of the gods.
All night long, she’d prayed to Tyr to help her find her courage and strength, and to know the rightness of her plan.
When she thought the time was right, she stripped the tunic off and tossed it to the bed. She braided her hair in one long, simple braid and used a scrap of dress to tie it off. She picked up the braided rope she’d made of the slave dress and coiled it around her hand, resting that hand on the small of her back.
She went to the door and opened it.
The guard turned, dropping his spear across the door to block her way. She saw his eyes take her body in, and she saw them take on that particular light that meant he was thinking of things he could do to her.
She had intended to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t make one. So she did what she could to be alluring. She stepped slowly backward, toward the bed. Slow, small steps—she didn’t want to be too far from him when he gave in to his urges.
He looked side to side on the other side of the door. What he saw—or didn’t see—satisfied him, and he came into the room and closed the door.
She let him get close. She let him put his hands on her. She lifted one arm, then, carefully, the other, and put them around his neck.
As he leaned close, meaning to kiss her, she unco
iled the rope and looped it quickly around his neck.
Grabbing an end in each hand and coiling them around her fists as quickly as she could, while he fought against her, Astrid pulled, finding more might than she’d thought she had. He struggled and kicked, but she crossed her arms, crossing the rope over his throat, and then feinted and twisted until they were back to back. Planting her legs and bending her knees just right, she bent forward and yanked, as hard and sharply as she could.
The crack was so loud, she had a moment’s unreasonable worry that someone elsewhere in the castle would hear it.
The man had stopped struggling. She dropped him.
He was still breathing. Interesting. She’d broken his neck but not killed him.
Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3) Page 14
