Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  Including Astrid herself. She didn’t want any of this. But what choice did she have? She could live as one of them—as one of the royal family—or she could die as a barbarian captive. There was nothing else.

  The guards dismissed, Leofric opened the door. She was sitting near the fire, and she stood at once, her posture tense and defensive. She was still dressed in the clothes he’d had made for her, still stunning in that blue, like a warrior queen in the leather corset and the breeches peeking from under the skirt. She, or someone, had cleaned the blood from her face and tended her wound.

  He went to her, and reached out to touch the bruise around the cut. She flinched lightly as his fingertips grazed the swollen flesh. Her eyes flashed with stoic interest.

  “I die now,” she said, as if it had always been her fate. There was no fear in the words, only certainty.

  “No, my love. You are safe.”

  She frowned. “Safe?”

  “Safe.” He leaned in to kiss her, but she tipped her head back.

  “No understand.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to think how he could explain in the few words they shared. When he lifted his lids again, she was still staring hard at him, as if she’d been trying to see through him to his thoughts.

  “Be with me, Astrid. No more…” He tried to remember the word she’d used earlier in the day. Her own word. He’d only guessed at its meaning, but she’d said it with a tight fist. It meant something violent. Retribution, he thought. “No more hämnd. Live. Be with me.”

  She shook her head and began a string of her words. Then she cut it off with a frustrated huff and said, “Took me. Hurt me. Made me…” She faded out, and he saw her mind working, scrabbling through the words she had for one that would fit. Obviously, she didn’t have one, so instead she made a gesture with both her hands, bringing them together, as loose fists, and then bursting them open and apart.

  He understood. She was telling him that they’d made her nothing.

  “No, my love. Not nothing. Everything. I love you, and I will keep you safe. If you allow it.”

  “In my place”—she tapped her chest sharply—“keep me own safe.”

  She’d kept herself safe in her own world. “I know. I’m sorry. Please, Astrid.”

  After a long moment of quiet, she asked, “Love?”

  “Yes. Love.” He put her hand to his chest and covered it with both of his. “Love.”

  She nodded. “Love.”

  It was the first time he’d considered that she might love him as well. He swept her into his arms. When he leaned down to kiss her this time, she was ready and waiting.

  ~oOo~

  That night Leofric woke well before dawn, chilled to the bone and shivering. A strong, cold breeze blew over the bed, and he shrugged down under the furs and reached out to find Astrid’s body. She always moved away from him at some point in the night, usually curling up with her back to him, but if he woke and moved to her, she didn’t resist his embrace.

  But she was not in the bed at all; the linens were cold with her absence. He sat up, the breeze becoming a wind in his face. On this night, winter shook the windows and announced its arrival. He grabbed a fur and heaved it over his bare shoulders.

  The room was awash in the bright, limpid gleam of full moonlight. Astrid was at one of the windows; she’d flung it wide open, and she stood before it, as bare as she’d been when they’d fallen off to sleep. Her pale hair was loose, and waved back from her face with every gust. Her eyes were closed, her face tipped up into the wind and the moon, and her arms were stretched out along her sides, her palms up and her fingers splayed.

  She seemed as if she were praying to the wind itself. Offering herself up to the elements. Leofric could only sit and stare at first, uncomprehending but enchanted.

  In the moonlight, she seemed more than human. Lustrous and pale and wild, like a nymph of the night. Even her scars seemed to have faded away.

  But the room was freezing, and the fire had dwindled to little more than a red glow. With the fur clutched around him, he went to her. Her nipples were tight knots, and her body prickled with the cold. He tried to wrap her up with him in the fur, but she shrugged free.

  “Astrid, are you well?”

  She turned her head slightly, not quite enough to look back at him, but enough to show that she’d heard him. “Lonely. For cold.” Her hair blew across her face, but she gave it no mind. She simply turned to the window again, and it flew back with the next gust of angry wind.

  Of course. Her people were from the North. It would be colder there. He wondered how much. He’d heard stories from traders of winters that lasted most of the year, snows as deep as a man was tall, and nights that lasted for days. Was she from such a place? What must she think of this place, where it rarely snowed and winter was only a colder, blander version of every other season?

  Homesick. She was homesick. Of course she was.

  He wanted to ask her, to talk to her about her loneliness, to ease it, but as he searched for a way to do it that she would understand, she spoke again.

  “I…prisoner here.”

  Did she believe the king still meant to hold her for her attack on the bishop? “No, Astrid. No longer. Nevermore.”

  “Ja,” she countered. “Always.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder and tugged lightly. She turned to face him without resistance. Her eyes were clear but sad.

  “You are not a prisoner. You may come and go as you like. Wherever you like. With me, or on your own.”

  “Not home. Not go there.”

  “No. I’m sorry. But this can be your home now. With me.” He pulled her close. “Let me make you with child. We will make a family, and you will see that this is your home.” He set his hand on her flat belly to be sure she understood. “Please.”

  As usual, she’d made him withdraw from her earlier in the night; she did not want to be seeded. He wanted to be sure that she had been; any reservations his father might later raise about Astrid’s fitness as a mate could be set aside at the thought of an heir—a legitimate heir. Moreover, he believed what he’d just told her: if she had a child, she could begin to grow roots here. It would calm her and open her to the truth of her life.

  Also, he simply wanted her to bear his child.

  But she shook her head. “No child. Prisoner.”

  “No, Astrid, you are not.”

  Her smile was sad and resolute. “Ja.”

  She rested her head on his chest.

  His heart aching, Leofric wrapped her up in his arms, under the fur, and set the matter aside. As long as she continued to learn their language and their ways, as long as she was his, and if she would agree to be baptized into the Faith, then it might even be preferable to wait until after they were wed to get her with child. In any event, she wasn’t ready for that step. So if he hadn’t already seeded her, he would spend his time making her ready.

  He would help her see that she was home.

  “Come back to bed, love.” He felt her nod on his chest, and he reached up to close the window, but she caught his arm.

  “Keep. Please.”

  “Open?”

  “Ja.”

  He smiled down at her and brushed silken blonde strands from her eyes. “Will you keep me warm?”

  The smile she gave him was loving and real and eased his worry a bit. She slid her hand over his chest, down his belly, and took firm hold of his sex, which swelled full at her touch.

  “Ja. Make hot.”

  He lifted her, and she hooked her legs around his waist. The fur fell from his shoulders, but there were others on the bed—and his woman was wrapped around him. They’d make their own heat.

  He laid her down and tucked them both under cover, and as the new winter wind blew over them, Leofric set out to make her feel free.

  Leofric preferred to sleep with his body around hers, their limbs wound together, but Astrid had rarely slept so close with anyone before. Moreover, since the
black place—he called it the Black Walls, and it was apt, but she would never think of it as anything but the black place—she couldn’t rest when she felt restrained.

  So on those nights when he slept with her—which was nearly always, now that she had a room in the guest quarters, nearer his own—she lay until he fell asleep in the tangle that gave him ease, and then she loosed herself from his embrace and found ease of her own.

  Often, in the wee hours, he found her again and wrapped her up, and she let him draw her close again, even if it meant that sleep for her was finished.

  In her life before, when she had been a shieldmaiden, she never would have thought to give a man such consideration. Now, she barely had the thought to deny him.

  Did love always change a person so completely? Or had she been changed already, in the black place, and simply loved the man who’d saved her from it? She’d never felt love before, and she understood the feeling less than she understood the world she’d been abandoned to. Both seemed to control her in ways beyond her ken.

  Leofric spoke often about her safety—that she was safe, that he would keep her safe, that he swore it on his own life—as if that were his duty. He had saved her, so of course he would believe he always must. In this world, he was right. In this world, Astrid couldn’t save herself. With no axe or shield, no friend but he, no standing of her own, she was only safe so long as he was there to protect her.

  She loved him, but she hated that.

  And she abhorred this place.

  Winter had come, and with it chill northern winds and a loneliness that frosted her heart. Astrid had never known its like before. Not even in the black place had she missed home so very much. Then, she’d cleaved to hope that she’d see Geitland again someday. Now, she knew she never would.

  There was no snow here. No blanketing of the world in brilliant, pure quiet. No snug fire in a longhouse pit, everyone gathered together to make warm merry, with mead and meat and laughter. Here, people hunkered down into their colorless clothes against the misting rain and drear, and they shambled about their day, then closed themselves up alone with only their blood families in the night.

  When she’d raided in this world, she’d marveled at the dense foliage and the riot of different greens. She’d thought it beautiful. But all that color faded into nothingness when north winds blew.

  The winter of home was dazzling white and blue, and the night sky often danced with wild color. Here, winter was simply grey. Grey and damp and dead.

  Thinking those thoughts as she lay in bed and watched an indifferent dawn grey the windows, Astrid sighed.

  This was the world she lived in now, and if she would live, then she must learn to do it here. This world had no place for shieldmaidens, so she would have to become something else. Find a new strength.

  Leofric wanted to wed her. He wanted to make her with child and put a crown on her head. For him, it was the answer to everything.

  He’d been disappointed when her blood had come, showing that his seed hadn’t taken root that first night. Astrid had been relieved. She could think of no circumstance more telling of her lost self than making a child. All her years as a shieldmaiden, she had never wanted to bear a child. That had been the most clear truth to her: one could not be both shieldmaiden and mother.

  Brenna God’s-Eye was both, it seemed, or at the least had tried to be both. Perhaps if she had been raiding with them for the years she’d stayed home mothering, perhaps if she and Vali had not been protective of each other as parents of their children, they would have been stronger fighters against Leofric’s father’s soldiers.

  A shieldmaiden voyaged in the world. A mother was bound to the hearth. A woman who tried to be both was split in twain.

  But Astrid could not be a shieldmaiden in this place. Should she then be a mother? Was it less a prison if there was no other option? She lived in a world now where women were only slaves and broodmares.

  No, it was no less a prison. But there truly was no other option—she would wed Leofric, or she would die.

  Would she know how to show a child love? Or even tenderness? Or would she be a mother like her own?

  She looked down at the strong hand resting over her belly. He had such good hands. Not the soft hands of one who’d known no work or strife. A warrior’s hands. Scarred and rough and big. But also beautifully formed, and they touched her with love and tenderness the like of which she’d never before experienced.

  He would know how to be loving and tender with a child. Perhaps she could learn from him, as she was learning everything else about this world.

  Perhaps he could show her how to be content in a life here.

  Warm and snug under the furs and in his arms, Astrid rolled to face him. He stirred and sighed but didn’t wake, and she tucked her head under his chin, feeling the dark hair on his chest tickling her cheek.

  His heart thumped its strong, steady beat. Steady. Strong. Leofric was these things. He seemed to know his mind and act without questioning his choices. She had been the same, in her own world.

  He’d chosen her and hadn’t wavered. He understood her; even when they’d had no words shared between them, he’d seemed to understand. He’d given her what she’d needed. He’d saved her and healed her and loved her. Now he wanted to give her a crown.

  If only she could have taken those things for herself instead. In the way of her people.

  Who had left her behind.

  She sent a word to Skaði, goddess of strength and of winter, who had given Odin many children: Skaði, I beseech you. Show me my strength. Let me see my way in this place.

  She kissed Leofric’s strong chest, letting her tongue out to trail over the tickling hair until she found his nipple. As her hand slid downward, over his hip, across his belly, she sucked his nipple into her mouth and flicked her tongue over it.

  He shuddered and flexed, and when she took hold of his sex, he was already hard. His hand came up and clutched the back of her head, holding her firmly, his fingers snagging in her hair.

  “Astrid,” he groaned, her name rumbling against her lips. His hand in her hair became a fist, and he pulled, bringing her head up to his. As she worked his sex, dragging her tight fist along his length, he claimed her mouth.

  Before Leofric, Astrid had been indifferent on the topic of kissing. She’d found that more men were terrible at it than not, thrusting fat tongues far back in her mouth, leaving slobber all over her face. Kissing a man had been a way to lock in his attention and to signal her intentions, nothing more. Rarely had she truly enjoyed a man’s mouth on her own.

  A man’s mouth elsewhere on her body was another matter. In those ways, she’d found ample pleasure.

  Whether it was because of her feelings for Leofric or because he was simply more deft at the act, his kisses brought up all manner of sensations in her. He could bring her to great, writhing need simply with his lips on hers, his beard brushing her skin, his tongue meeting hers.

  And the way he held her when his kissed her. It was claiming, it was possession, and yet nothing in her wished to resist it. There were times, when their bodies were so entwined, that Astrid felt as if she would crawl inside him if she could.

  He tore his mouth from hers with a growl and rolled to his back, bringing her with him. “Mount me, love. I want to feel you have your way.”

  She did. Pushing the furs away so she could feel the cold, Astrid straddled him and settled onto his hot, thick sex, letting her head fall back with a moan as he filled her. He answered with one of his own, rough with need, and his hands clenched around her thighs.

  She moved slowly at first, savoring the slide of him against her slick walls. Lifting up until only the tip of his sex was still inside her, she sat down slowly, tensing her legs, so that she could feel all of him, each vein and ridge, every inch, all the way in. Again and again, she moved in that determined fashion, twisting her hips slightly as she drew him in and out. The molten heat began to coil around her joints, and in her
belly, and still she moved slowly, each exclamation of pained need from Leofric only focusing her more on her steady pace.

  And then the liquid fire filled her too full to heed anything but on her own need, and she began to move with more speed, more force. She bent forward and clawed her hands into his chest as she drove herself onto him, harder and harder, feeling need throb into a flower of painful fire bursting at her core. Then Leofric filled his hands with her breasts and pinched her nipples, and she released, all at once, grunting out her surprise at the speed of it slamming through her after so much slow build.

  When she could think and see again, she saw Leofric beneath her, his face a rictus of restrained need. He was trying not to release until she was done—until she could pull away and be free of his seed.