Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  Their mugs were empty, and Dunstan waved the innkeeper’s wife over. She, in turn, waved someone else over, someone standing behind part of a wall.

  The innkeeper’s daughter, it seemed. A buxom, curvaceous young woman with a mountain of flaming curls came to the table, carrying the pitcher of ale. She gave Dunstan a feline smile and bent low to fill his mug, showing ample cleavage spilling from a dress immodestly too small for her.

  Leofric got a similar show as she filled his mug, but her effect on him was scant. Dunstan, however, appeared to be in actual pain.

  When the girl walked away, she rolled her hips dramatically with each step, and Dunstan groaned.

  “We should have captured the other savage woman as well. One for each of us.”

  Leofric found no humor in his friend’s jest. “You had a point to make.”

  Dunstan blinked stupidly for a moment. “Ah. May I blaspheme, Your Grace?”

  Curious, not particularly concerned about blasphemy, and understanding that the question had been made at least partially with irony, Leofric nodded.

  “Need she give up her gods in truth? So much of what we do at court is pretense. Appearance. You and I know that as well as most—not so very long ago, if we’d confessed all we’d done during the week, we’d never have had a chance to sin. We’d have been on our knees all day, every day. Even your father understands, or he would not have turned a blind eye to your arrangement with Astrid now. If it’s not Francis, but another priest who puts her under the water, will she allow herself to simply bathe?”

  “To swear an oath and not mean it?”

  “Are you truly repentant for every chambermaid and kitchen wench you’ve speared? Every bawd’s house you’ve visited? Every game of chance you’ve played? I am not repentant for any. And yet we say the words. We do our penance. And we go out and do it all over again.” He chuckled. “Well, we did. The words aren’t our faith. They’re the appearance of faith. They’re a show.”

  “You are a cynic, my friend.”

  “And you are not? Is not Astrid a cynic regarding our faith? If she makes the show, she can believe what she will. Would you disapprove?”

  He loved Astrid as she was. He would give her a sword and a shield if he could—no, he’d give her an axe. That had been her weapon. Her gods interested him. They were so very many, and so very different from his singular Lord. “No, I would not.”

  “Then there’s your solution. Don’t attempt to persuade her to give up her faith and adopt one she hates. Persuade her to have a bathe and say some words in a tongue that’s foreign to her anyway.”

  Would Astrid make a vow that was a lie? Perhaps, when it was so clearly the best of her options. He nodded, mulling over the question.

  Dunstan laughed. “There’s your problem sorted. I’m going to have a go at the wench.” He grabbed his breeches between his thighs. “It’s going to rot off if it doesn’t get some use soon.”

  With a chuckle, Leofric waved his friend off to find his pleasure. He sat at the table and called over another mug of ale.

  Would she do it? Was it so simple as a lie?

  ~oOo~

  When he went to her room at dusk that evening, she was awake, sitting at the table near the windows and poking indifferently at a meat pie. As he closed the door, she set her spoon down and watched him cross the room to her.

  He kissed her cheek, and she gave him a wan smile he disliked. She was terrible at hiding her emotions and making a good show—which could be a complication to Dunstan’s idea. That idea had become a plan in Leofric’s mind. Their best option, one that solved most of the problems between them.

  Her supper had only been picked at, and he could tell by looking that it had gone cold. He pulled a chair close to hers and sat. “You must eat, my love. You’ll not be well by starving yourself.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “The smell is bad.” Pointing to a small, empty plate, she added, “I eat bread with…fruit soup?”

  “Jam?”

  “Ja. Cham. I eat that.”

  Not nearly enough. She was surviving on bread and milk of late, and Elfleda insisted that she needed meat as well. But he had one fight between them already in mind, so he would not start a second over food.

  “Astrid, we must speak.”

  Her eyes narrowed until they were barely slits, glittering blue lines between her long, fair lashes. “No bishop talk. No more.”

  “If I have a solution?”

  “What is ‘solution’?”

  He thought about how he could explain that word. “A way…a way out of the problem.”

  She frowned. He tried again. “A way to make the problem go away.”

  “Ah. Ja?”

  “Ja—Yes. Perhaps. Will you listen?”

  She nodded.

  He took her hands in his. Her hands were not lovely; they showed the way she’d lived her life. Noblewomen had soft, pale, languid hands; it was a mark of wealth and status for a woman’s hands to show no wear at all. Holding a noblewoman’s hand was like holding a dead fish. Astrid’s hands had wielded an axe and held a shield, and every battle seemed to show on them. They were scarred and coarse and darker at the knuckles. Her nails were ridged and flat. Holding her hands was like holding life itself.

  People at court often remarked that Astrid would have been a spectacularly beautiful woman if not for all her scars. Leofric thought she was a spectacularly beautiful woman because of them.

  “Much of what happens at court is done to be seen. Do you understand what I mean?”

  She considered him. “You mean people are two faces. They make pretty one for king, but ugly one real.”

  He was impressed. Her grasp not only of their language but of their figurative ideas was solid, even if her speech wasn’t quite fluent. “Yes. At court, for the most part, the pretty one is the one that matters.”

  Her response to that was a derisive snort.

  “Wait. Perhaps that will work for us. Do you love me, Astrid?”

  Now she was suspicious. “Why?”

  “Do you?”

  “Ja. I love you.”

  She rarely said it, and when she did, the words seemed to feel more foreign to her than any other, but he believed they were true. She wouldn’t say them otherwise.

  Which was also a complication to his plan. Lying had a bitter taste to her.

  “And I you. Would you be my wife?”

  Her frown turned into a scowl. “No bishop.”

  “If not for that, would you be my wife?”

  He’d surprised the frown off her face. She stared at him, her eyes peering deeply into his. “No”—she made a gesture he didn’t grasp—“No water?”

  Ah. Baptism. It was time for the difficult part of this discussion. But first he wanted an answer to his question. “If there were nothing else between us, would you wed with me?”

  “Ja.”

  Heartened by the scantiness of her hesitation, he pushed on. “Would you agree to be baptized if you didn’t have to change what you believe?”

  “No understand.”

  As strong as her comprehension had become, sometimes finding ways to say important things in words she could understand seemed almost beyond his skill. “Would you say the words for show and keep your gods in truth?”

  “Swear a lie?”

  “Yes.”

  “If lies so easy, how you know any word true?”

  An excellent question, but he had an answer. “Trust. You know the truth of those you trust, and you keep your trust close.”

  She stood up and walked away, to the far window, and stared out at the deepening dark. Leofric stayed where he was and waited for her to say or do something.

  “You take from me all. Home. Freedom. Strongness. Now you take truth.”

  Her words might as well have been shards of glass, for how deeply they cut. “Not I, Astrid.”

  “Father. Same as son.”

  Now he stood and went to her, but when she folded her arms across her
chest, he didn’t touch her. “I’m trying to let you keep what I can. The past cannot be undone, unjust as it was. This is your home now. You’re free. You’re alive, and you’re with me. And, Astrid, there are other ways to be strong. Not only fighting. The women here are strong, too, even if they don’t wield weapons. My mother was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, and she was gentle. You wallow in your hate. That seems like a weakness to me. It takes will and might to let go of vengeance. Forgiveness is a strength.”

  He unwound her arms and pulled her close. She didn’t resist him, though her expression was hardly welcoming. “Say the words, my love. You can keep your gods. I like them. There will be trust and truth between you and me always, and that is all that matters. My father will send Francis away, never to return, if you will say the words and make a show for the people.”

  “He goes?”

  “He goes.”

  “If I lie.”

  “What better choice do you have?”

  She thought about that for a long time, staring at his chest. He held her and waited. At last, her breast swelled with a deep breath, and then deflated as she let the air out.

  “No choice,” she muttered. “Ever.”

  Astrid had taken part in only two weddings before her own: those of Brenna God’s-Eye and Vali Storm-Wolf, in Estland, and of Leif and Olga in Geitland. Both had been rituals of her own people, and she had understood the purpose of each part.

  Beyond the ritual of the baptism, which had been accomplished in a stream near the castle, with Astrid, dressed in a gown like a heavy sleeping shift, submerged by a priest she didn’t know, the rituals of the wedding seemed nearly nonexistent, at least on the parts of the people being married. Leofric had told her that the ceremony would be mainly in yet another language, and that they would kneel and listen for most of it.

  Kneel before a priest. And swear empty vows to their god. Again.

  If she could make her vows to Leofric alone, she could speak true. She loved him. He was all in this world that made sense to her. In his presence, the ground settled under her feet. In his arms, she knew herself.

  Because all she was now was what he made of her.

  Away from him on the day of their wedding, in the room that would no longer be hers after this day, while Elfleda wound her hair into artful braids, Astrid stared into the glass and tried to know this woman she’d become. A mother. A duchess. A woman of silks and jewels and leisure. Who bore the scars in body, mind, and spirit of another woman altogether.

  Standing behind her, Elfleda patted her shoulder and leaned down to smile sweetly into the glass. “There now. You’re lovely. Up with you, dearie, and let’s get that gown on. Pray you haven’t grown again since the last fitting.”

  Astrid stood and swept her hands over her breasts and belly, her palms skimming the soft linen of her underdress. Though she had no swelling belly yet, her body had changed with the babe growing inside her—and had done so almost daily in the two weeks that she’d been free of illness. The changes so far were in her breasts and hips, which were larger and rounder. They’d occurred mainly while her gown had been designed and fitted, and had harried the seamstresses to no end.

  There were other changes, too, though not to her size. To touch—her skin felt different. More sensitive everywhere, and especially in her places of pleasure. Those changes, only Leofric knew about.

  In one place, no change had yet occurred: her heart. Or perhaps it was her mind. She felt nothing for what was happening inside her. The debilitating malaise she’d experienced while the babe had made her ill had given way to an indifferent numbness. When she was away from Leofric, the strongest feeling she ever had for her own child, and that only rarely, was curiosity. Was this how her mother had felt, carrying her?

  If so, Astrid knew she would have little to offer this child.

  When Leofric was with her, she felt something good and real stir inside her for the babe. In her love for him, in his love for her, and in his devotion to, and wonder for, the life inside her, she could feel something like hope. Seeing him happy with the babe inside her eased her heart and made her want to feel the same.

  Perhaps her love for the father would create love in her for their child.

  Astrid sighed, and Elfleda clucked behind her. “Be still, dearie.” She drew the lacings of the gown tight.

  The gown fit as it should. It wasn’t comfortable or easy to move in, but it was beautiful, and women here had only two roles: beauty and breeding. Astrid was no match for the women around her in beauty, but she could wear a pretty gown.

  This one was, even to her skeptical eye, more than pretty. Made of silk in the palest blue she’d ever seen, and the creamiest white, it fit her body snugly across the chest and then fell gracefully away, skimming her sides and flaring out to pool at her feet and trail some distance behind her. The neckline was wide, just catching her shoulders, and the two-part sleeves fit her arms all the way to her hands and also flared wide to drape like wings at her sides. The neckline, bodice, and sleeves were accented by wide, intricate stitching in silver thread, and a braided belt made of silver thread looped around her waist and rested on her hips, trailing down the full length of the front.

  The width and dip of the neckline showed several of her scars, back and front, most of which were remnants of wounds that had come in the black place. The seamstresses had been dismayed and ashamed at the first trial of the design, when they’d realized that fact. They’d bowed and fussed and promised a new design that would hide the scars.

  But Astrid didn’t want them hidden. She’d have wed in nothing but her skin, if she’d thought the wedding would occur while she was in that state. None of her scars were her shame. They were either her honor, earned in battle, or they were the king’s shame, afflicted on her in the black place. She bore them all as one who’d survived.

  She would wear these flowing silks as a mark of her survival as well.

  There was no room for breeches and boots under such a gown. Astrid lifted her feet and let one of her army of maids help her into a pair of flimsy shoes in creamy leather.

  When she was dressed, Elfleda stepped back and gave her a critical eye. She clapped. “Ah me, you’re lovely, dearie. A proper duchess. Next we meet, I’ll be droppin’ a curtsey to you.”

  The thought appalled Astrid. “No, Elfleda.”

  “Aye. You’ll be the Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Orenshire, and you’ll be due all the courtesies of the royal family.”

  A sharp rap on the door curtailed Astrid’s protest. Elfleda went to open it. When she did, she dropped to the floor in a curtsey deeper than Astrid would have thought the old woman capable of. She bowed her head. “Your Majesty.”

  The door opened wide, and the king himself stood there, dressed in sparkling regalia. The three girls who’d been helping Astrid and Elfleda with the preparations dropped to the floor.

  For her part, Astrid curtsied, too, though not so deeply. She had yet to perfect the movement. She tipped her head downward.

  “Yes, very well. As you were.” Everyone stood and went back to work, keeping their eyes from the king. He came straight to Astrid with a smile on his face. “I come to escort you to the chapel, if you’ll take my arm.”

  The susurration of gasps around the room told Astrid that the king’s offer was highly unusual and a great honor.

  Leofric had spoken to her of the strength in forgiveness, and he’d made her see that perhaps she could be strong in a different way. If so, she hadn’t gained the strength she needed to forgive the king. He’d ordered her to suffer the most horrific torments daily, for weeks, and for no purpose other than the torment itself. He hadn’t wanted information. He hadn’t taken all the raiders or any others. He hadn’t wanted her death. He’d wanted only her pain. Her pain specifically. Only hers. For no reason. She had no way to understand that, thus she had no way to forgive it.

  He was Leofric’s father and the ruler of this realm. He would hold her life
in his hands as long as they both had life, and she had no recourse against him. So she had found a way to be in his company and be calm. And he’d treated her kindly since Leofric had claimed her, especially since she carried the child. Though she meant to withhold forgiveness always, a tiny fissure had emerged in her intentions to hold hate for him in her heart all her days.

  “I will.”

  His smile at her answer was warm, and she felt moved despite herself. “First, I have for you a gift.” He snapped his fingers, and a boy in regalia came in carrying a leather-covered box on a velvet cushion. At the king’s nod, the boy opened the lid.