Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  “I know. And I think it’s me enough as well. Understand?”

  As had been the case in Estland, much of learning a new language was filling in the gaps between the words she knew with the context of the conversation. So Astrid thought she did understand. He’d found a way for her to be comfortable in his world. In her clothes, if in no other way.

  She nodded, and he held out the boots. As she sat on the bed and slid them on—they were a bit too big, but she didn’t mention it—Leofric sat beside her.

  “I want to take you to my father today. We cannot put it off longer.”

  With one boot on and the other in her hand, she stopped and turned to him. Had he just told her she would see the king today? “Fader? Kung?”

  He squinted, as if he were deciding whether he’d understood her words. “Yes. The king, my father.”

  She shook her head. The king had put her in the black place and left her there for what she now understood had been weeks. She would not meet that man without an axe in her hand.

  Her axe hand hardened into a fist, and she felt Leofric lay his hand over it. “Astrid, yes. We must. For you to be safe, you must go before him. He must see that you are trying. Do you understand?”

  She understood enough. She shook her head.

  He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. “Show him…you.” He pointed to her. “Show him…” He waved a hand over her clothes.

  Had he dressed her up to show her off like a trinket? She lifted the skirt in a clutched fist. “This…him? Not me?”

  “No. For you.” He turned to Elfleda as if seeking help. Astrid looked at the old woman, too. She didn’t understand, and she didn’t like the cold fear she felt again. But Elfleda only shrugged, seeming sorry to do it.

  Leofric turned back to Astrid. “Please. Important. For you.”

  Important for her. How? Because the king still held her life in his hands. Though she couldn’t remember his face, she hated that man above all but one other. “No forgive king. You only. For king…” She didn’t know the word for vengeance in this tongue, so she gave him her own. “Hämnd.” To make her point, she clenched a fist and held it up. “Hämnd.”

  He covered her fist with his hand and brought it down to his lap. “Please. For me. I know your hate. But I need you—I need you safe. Please, Astrid. Snälla. For me.”

  “No forgive.” But yes, she would meet this king, and she would know the face of her enemy. She nodded. “For you.”

  His relief filled the room. “Thank you.”

  ~oOo~

  She’d prepared herself to be led into a great stone hall like the one in the castle in Estland, where Prince Vladimir had attempted an ambush, but Leofric brought her instead to a smaller room—not small, by any measure, but smaller than her mind had conjured, and warmer as well. This room had a fire crackling in the fireplace, and the stone walls were draped with thick fabrics woven with images of people and plants and animals. Some seemed to tell a story.

  The king sat in a massive chair behind a carven table. There were rolls of things arrayed neatly to one side. Seated, he seemed big enough, and well built. His hair was long, the waves curling at his shoulders, and white with dwindling streaks of black. His beard was white and artfully shaved. He had the eyes and nose of a hawk.

  Even in that seat, in his rich clothes, threaded with gold that sparkled, Astrid knew him to be a warrior king. But he was old. He elicited no fear or worry in her. Only hate. Leofric’s father or no, king or no, she wanted him dead at her hand.

  There was a man seated nearby, also regally dressed. He stood when Leofric led her in, holding her hand at his arm. The resemblance between the two younger men was strong, and Astrid knew them to be brothers.

  Leofric walked her to the center of the room, and both men, Leofric’s father and brother, king and prince, one seated and one standing, stared at her. Even in her wonderful new clothes, she felt the sting of their curiosity and their contempt.

  “Father, Eadric, I present to you Astrid, of the Northmen.” He unhooked her hand from his arm and set his hand instead on her lower back. “Astrid, this is my father, Eadric, King of Mercuria, and my brother, Eadric, the Crown Prince.”

  She’d seen men and women dropping nearly to their knees in Leofric’s presence often enough to know she was expected to do the same now. But she did not. She would not. Instead, she squared her shoulders and gave each man a simple nod. “Hallo.”

  The brother returned her nod. The king did not. He stood and came around the table. He was not as tall as his sons, but Astrid had been right—even in his grey age, he had power in his body.

  He walked right up to her and stared into her eyes, nearly scowling with concentration. His regard traveled downward, over her body, all the way to the floor. Then he walked a circle around her, studying her all the while.

  She stood still and let him. Leofric had moved a step or two away to make room. He felt miles from her.

  When he completed his circle and faced her again, the king asked, “How much of our language do you know? If we say you are a savage, do you know what we say?”

  Leofric reacted to that, but she didn’t need to see him in the corner of her sight to know she’d been insulted. Savage was a word she’d heard often in the black place. It was one of the first she’d come to understand.

  “Ja. And know cruel. For you.”

  His eyes flared wide, and Astrid knew triumph. In the corners of her eyes, the younger men reacted to that—one worried and one angry. But after that first rush of surprise, something dark, a shadow, slid through the king’s eyes.

  He turned to his younger son and spoke a long time. Astrid understood little, except, “She can be nothing to you.”

  She turned to Leofric and saw his anger. He spoke a long time back at his father, and then his brother spoke. They were arguing fiercely, and no one was paying her any mind. The words she understood were upsetting—savage, whore, die; all words she’d learned in the black place—so she stopped trying to understand. Instead, she scanned the room for weapons. There were many, including a great broadsword on the wall above the fire. As the men fought, she sidled toward it, wondering how quickly she could get it down if she needed to wield it.

  She would not be returned to the black place.

  The door opened, and she spun in that direction, putting her back to the fire and the sword.

  The man who walked in then made Astrid forget about the quarrel at her side and the sword at her back. He wore a white dress, and his hair was cut strangely, in a ring around his head. He was the one man she hated above the king, and the only face she could remember from her time in the black place. Their seer, who’d stood in the black place and watched all that had been done to her. Watched and enjoyed.

  Without thinking of or seeing anything but the man before her, Astrid let loose her battle cry and leapt for him.

  A shrieking roar split the air, and Leofric wheeled around, grabbing instinctually for a sword he wasn’t wearing, just in time to see Astrid leap—she left her feet and nearly flew—at Father Francis, slamming her full weight into him and bringing him to the floor in a heap.

  “Astrid, NO!”

  As her hands went around the bishop’s fat neck and heaved his head up, then slammed it back to the floor, Leofric ran to her, but not before the guards always stationed outside the door of the king’s solar had crashed into the room and begun trying to pull her off.

  She resisted mightily, shrieking like a wild thing, and Leofric just reached her, shouting “No! No! No!” as one of the guards sent his mailed fist into her face. She fell back, unconscious, and Leofric dropped to the floor and gathered her up.

  A gash on her temple bled freely. He bent his head to her mouth and didn’t breathe until he felt her breath caress his cheek. She lived.

  “Take her to the dungeons,” his father commanded behind him.

  The guards moved at once to obey, and Leofric shrank back, tightening his arms and curling his body
around hers.

  “No! Father, no!”

  Father and son stared hard at each other, and Leofric could feel the guards’ confusion, but he knew that they wouldn’t hesitate for long. “Your Majesty, please. She is only beginning to understand us. You know why she would attack Father Francis.” He dashed a look at the bishop.

  Eadric had helped him to his feet, and now the fat prat was making a show of his injuries.

  He returned his attention to his father and saw that the king had also spared a glance for his spiritual advisor.

  “You know, Father,” Leofric repeated. Again, he held his father’s stony look.

  “Back to her room, then. Under guard. Until we have made a decision about her fate.”

  “Thank you, Father.” Leofric moved to stand with Astrid in his arms.

  “Not you. You shall stay.” The king nodded at the guards, who both moved to wrest her from him.

  He turned from their rough, grasping hands. “Gentle! You’ll carry her gently.”

  Again, the men looked to the king, who, again, nodded. One of the guards, his expression perfectly blank but his eyes full of condemnation, held out his arms, and Leofric laid Astrid’s inert form across them. “Gentle,” he said again.

  He watched as Astrid was carried away. Two new guards had already filled the posts outside the door, and they closed the door when the way was clear.

  Now Leofric was alone with his angry family—and the bishop—and Astrid was alone with angry guards. The next moments could determine everything about her fate, and perhaps his as well.

  With one last, loaded look at Leofric, the king went to the bishop. “Are you well, Father?”

  Francis moaned pitiably and clutched at his head. “You must see, Sire. She is an animal. No amount of care can make her more than that.”

  “She has every cause to hate you, Francis,” Leofric called, standing back from the others. “No one in this room can doubt why she would want to cause you pain. Father, that is what I know you see.”

  The king lowered his head, just a fraction, but enough that Leofric thought his father was feeling afresh the guilt he’d known for Astrid’s suffering.

  The bishop wasn’t finished yet, however. He stopped swooning and sat straight up and glared at Leofric. “I do the Lord’s work, Your Grace. It is not mine, nor yours, to question His ways.”

  “And who is there to question whether what you do is truly the Lord’s work, or rather your own? The king.” Leofric went to his father. “Father, I know you feel the wrongness of it. I knelt with you in the chapel. I stood with you in the Black Walls. You feel it.”

  He knew it was true. He’d seen his father’s guilt and conflict, and it was the only explanation for the leniency he’d shown him until now. The weeks without seeing his captive, allowing himself to be put off again and again—if he’d truly believed in the bishop’s counsel, then Astrid would have been killed, in the Black Walls or on the block, long ago.

  Father Francis knew it was true, as well. His eyes were cold and shadowed under a deeply furrowed brow when he glared again at Leofric, but they softened upon turning to the king. “I speak the Lord’s truth, Sire, and I do the Lord’s work. I’ve given my life to that purpose. And I am telling you that the savage will never be anything but a savage.”

  “But Your Excellency,” Eadric answered, frowning. He’d been observing silently until now. “She is human, is she not? And thus one of us? Is it not the apostle Paul’s directive to bring the Light to the benighted? Would the Lord make any one of us incapable of salvation?”

  Leofric saw a light leading a way out of this sudden darkness. His brother had found the crack in Francis that their father would really see. A break in his holy logic.

  Indeed, the king saw it. “Father, you should have your head seen to.”

  Understanding that he was being dismissed, the bishop sputtered, “I’m fine, Sire, truly. She is feral, but not so strong to harm a man of God.”

  “Leave us.” The king walked away, back to his desk, and gave the bishop no further word or notice.

  It was a greater condemnation than any word might have been, and Father Francis knew it. He paled and gaped, his eyes going to king, prince, and duke in turn. Finally, he gathered up his dignity and bowed. “Your Majesty.”

  He backed from the room, and the family was alone. Leofric’s father turned on him. “The truth remains: you cannot have this woman. She can be nothing to you, and whatever I decide for her, I want you out of it.”

  That was the argument they’d been having when Francis had come into the room. The king, astute about people, had seen today what Leofric knew he’d suspected: he loved Astrid. But the king did not see what Leofric did: the possibility for the match.

  “She trusts no one but me, Father. You saw that yourself. Only I can bring her to our ways. Perhaps she might be baptized into the true Faith.”

  His father sighed. “And what do you think will happen if she is? You cannot marry a barbarian. What good is that alliance to the realm?”

  Leofric took a terrible risk. “She might already be carrying my child.” He didn’t know if it was true; he’d only spent in her once, on that first night, and she’d pulled away before all his seed had been sown. But it was true that she might be. He hoped it was true that she was.

  All air and sound seemed to leave the room in a rush. His father and brother stared at him, their eyes and mouths wide. They obviously didn’t share his hope.

  At last, the king sighed. “Your profligacies must stop, Leofric. You are not a boy. You have responsibilities beyond yourself. And why would you think such news cause to save the savage? Better I end her now, before such a complication can be known.”

  “Father!” Eadric cut in, his tone full of shock. “She might carry the seed of this house. We need an heir.”

  “And you shall provide one—more than one. You are the Crown Prince. We shall find you a princess, and you shall give the realm its heirs.”

  Eadric shook his head. “After burying three brides, no match I might make will be more suitable than Leofric’s wild woman. No father will send his daughter to an alliance that will give him nothing but his daughter’s death. That is what people all over believe of me. We’ve seen it to be true. Why not make a match with the warrior woman and show that she’s been tamed into a lady of the court? Is that not another kind of victory over the barbarians? Does that not give us power over them, should they return?”

  Astrid would despise this talk, if she’d heard and understood it. But in Leofric’s ears and mind, it meant hope. This was what he wanted. Whether it was a victory for his father or not, he wanted Astrid at his side, on his arm, in his bed, wearing his crown. That was his victory, and hers, over everyone else.

  His father railed often against his ‘profligacies,’ and he supposed the censure was merited. But since he’d brought Astrid up from the Black Walls, he had taken no other woman. He’d tried, in the days when she’d been strong enough to hate him, before he’d won her over, but he’d been unable. From the moment she’d curled against him for comfort in that bath, he’d wanted no other woman.

  If he was profligate now, it was only in his extravagant love for that one woman, unlike any other he’d ever known.

  “Father…” he began and then didn’t know how to continue.

  There was no need that he should; Eadric’s argument had been persuasive. The king met Leofric with a different light in his eyes now. “Can she be brought to the right ways? Can she be trusted not to make further attempts on Francis, or on anyone else? On me? Will she renounce her people’s licentious gods and accept the one true God as her Lord and Savior?”

  “Yes,” Leofric asserted, with all the confidence he could muster. “You have my most solemn vow, Father.”

  The king sighed. “If you are wrong, and you cannot control her, then you will both bear the burden of her actions.”

  His father had never made such a threat against him before, but it didn�
�t sway him. “I understand.”

  “Very well. Then go to your woman and control her. And we shall see whether she can be made into a suitable match.”

  ~oOo~

  There were two guards on her door, the same two who’d come in and pulled her from the bishop. When Leofric sent them away, he was forced to assert that the order was from his father before they would go.

  Privy to so many crucial details, castle guards were sworn to absolute secrecy, but those things which seemed especially salacious always managed to leak through. Leofric knew that the whole castle, and in short time the whole kingdom, would know that the barbarian woman he’d been escorting on his arm around the grounds and the wood had tried to kill the bishop of the realm. It was more than his father he’d have to convince of her change. It was everyone.