Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  Before he could fathom that she would dare do such a thing, she’d opened the carriage door and leapt out.

  His wife, full of his child, had just leapt from a moving carriage. While holding a dagger. In the blink it took him to comprehend that horror, she was already out of sight of the wildly swinging door.

  He pounded on the carriage wall. “HALT! HALT!”

  Before it stopped, he lunged out the door after her, falling hard to his knees. She was running through a field toward the edge of the wood, her gown gathered in her fists and held almost up to her waist.

  He’d never run faster in his life than in that moment. If she got to the wood, she was skilled and wily enough to disappear into the trees.

  “ASTRID! NO!”

  Wild and desperate as she was, her speed and grace was hindered by their child, and Leofric, equally wild and desperate, was able to close the distance between them. He caught up with her just as the shadows of the wood took over the field. She no longer had her dagger; she must have dropped it when she’d jumped from the carriage.

  “Astrid! Please!”

  Her head swung back, and she saw how close he was. She shrieked angrily and redoubled her efforts to elude him, adding inches between them just as he might have reached out and caught her.

  And then she seemed to stumble, but the way was clear before her, as far as Leofric could see. She didn’t fall, and she ran a few more steps, then stumbled again, doubling over with a cry. This time she did fall, and when she landed, she curled into a ball, grabbing her belly with both hands.

  The babe. Oh God, don’t take our child. “Astrid!”

  He dived to his knees at her side, but when he tried to gather her up in his arms, she fought and struggled, trying to crawl from him. Again, a pain beset her, and she collapsed to the ground. This time, rather than cry out, she bit down on her bottom lip. When he took hold of her, she didn’t fight.

  “Is it the babe?” he asked, cradling her at his chest.

  “Ja,” she gasped. “I think.”

  Holding her snugly, he worked his way to his feet. “Don’t fight me, wife. Let me get you home to Elfleda.”

  “No home here,” she said, but she didn’t fight him.

  He went as quickly as he could back to the carriage. Astrid tensed hard in his arms three times more, but she didn’t cry out again. She’d begun to shiver, trembling with such force that her body shook his.

  The footmen ran up as he approached.

  “Blankets! And hurry!” To the driver, he called up, “Make all haste to the castle. Her Grace is injured!”

  He accepted a footman’s help to get her into the carriage, and to wrap her up in light wool blankets. He instructed them to close up the windows.

  Then they were closed into the carriage, alone in the dim.

  She tensed again, and he bent his head to hers. “Forgive me, my love.”

  “No more forgive,” she mumbled. Her eyes were closed, and though she shivered hard, her brow was damp with perspiration. The pain she felt must have been intense. But she was quiet in her torment, as ever. His stoic warrior.

  The carriage rocked and rattled, moving at a speed beyond its usual purpose, and Leofric held onto his wife while she suffered, not knowing what else he could do. Then, when they must have been nearing the castle, she cried out, and her hands clutched at him as her body folded tightly.

  Over his arm and thigh, through his leathers and the blankets, he felt a soaking of warm wet, and soon thereafter, he smelled the coppery tang of blood.

  “Oh, my love,” he murmured, knowing exactly what was happening, “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”

  She didn’t answer. She lay slack in his arms, insensible.

  ~oOo~

  Elfleda curtsied, then backed away, returning to her patient. Leofric sat hard on the chair he’d stood from when she’d come out of Astrid’s bedchamber.

  The babe was gone.

  His father squeezed his shoulder and then left the room.

  “You should go to her, brother,” Eadric said after a while. Leofric had forgotten that he wasn’t alone in the room. He’d been sitting there, staring into nothingness, his mind void of all but a single thought: on this day, he’d lost everything.

  “I cannot. She despises me. All of us. What forgiveness she had for what we did was lost today.”

  While he’d paced and sat and paced and sat, waiting for news of his wife, his father and brother had kept company with him, and they’d made him say as much as he could about the events of the day.

  Eadric sat at his side. “She is your wife. I’ve seen love in her eyes for you, and I know you love her. She is hurting. Abandon her in her pain, and you truly will lose what you had. Your love grew when you comforted her before. Comfort her now. Nurture the love, and another child will come soon enough.”

  Leofric didn’t think the child was Astrid’s most significant hurt. She’d only begun to warm to the idea of being a mother, and not yet in any way she’d spoken of. His grief for the child was, he had no doubt, far more acute than his wife’s. Her pain was in the betrayal she saw.

  “She thinks it all a lie. I cannot offer her comfort because I’ve lost her trust.”

  He should have told her long ago that her people hadn’t abandoned her. He’d never meant to keep it from her. But when that pain had been most acute for her, they’d had no words between them to explain. When she might have understood, there’d been other things to talk about. He’d been focused on making her his wife, helping her accept her present, and she’d been reticent about her past. But how to make her believe that truth now?

  In her mind, he knew, everything that had happened in the Black Walls had happened because she’d been left behind. She’d believed that her people would come for her if they had lived—and she was likely right. Whether they would have succeeded and rescued her or died in the effort, they would have come. It was the very reason they’d made a show of her death. To make it easier to drive the Northmen back. To give her people no reason to stay.

  To give them cause to grieve.

  And her to suffer.

  She’d accepted this world, this life, even in the reluctant way she had, because she believed she’d been abandoned to it. Leofric and his family had made it seem that she had. But she had been mourned.

  She had not lost her home. They had stolen it from her.

  How on earth could she ever forgive that?

  “To think she tried to save Dreda,” Eadric mumbled, almost to himself. “And killed the one who did it.”

  “God!” Overcome with despair, Leofric buried his head in his hands.

  He felt Eadric’s hand on his back. “What can I do, brother?”

  “Nothing. There is nothing.”

  His brother stood up. “Go to her, Leofric. She is your wife now. Don’t let this fester. There is no change we can make to the past, and the future is in the Lord’s hands. Only what you do now is in your own.”

  ~oOo~

  Only two sconces were lit, and the room had a faint golden glow. It was quiet. Elfleda and a young servant girl were gathering up bloody linens into baskets. Leofric averted his eyes from the sight.

  They both curtsied.

  “Your Grace,” Elfleda said, coming over to him. “She sleeps now. I gave her a draught to keep her calm.” The old woman looked up at him, catching his eye boldly. “She was in a state, Your Grace.”

  There was no greater guilt the woman could add; he was feeling all of it already. “I know.” He went to the bed. “She’s pale.”

  “Aye, she is. There is always much blood lost in a thing like this. She’ll need to rest a goodly while and build her blood up. But she’ll be well again, and ripe soon enough for another babe. It’s not so unusual to lose the first. And she had such a hard spell before she was seeded.”

  Elfleda didn’t know how Astrid had come to lose their child. She would soon; he expected that the footmen had carried the story all through the bailey, and it w
ould soon roll through the villages: the barbarian duchess jumping from a moving carriage, running wild and reckless away from her husband.

  “What was it? The child?”

  “Your Grace…”

  With a look, he demanded an answer, and Elfleda dropped her eyes. “A girl.”

  His father might know relief that Astrid hadn’t lost a son, but Leofric could only think of his love for Dreda, the sweet delight she’d brought to them all, and mourn the loss of his daughter. “I want to be alone with her.”

  “Of course, Your Grace. We’ll take these things away, and I’ll be back to see to her later in the night.”

  With that, the servants took their leave.

  Leofric went to her bed. She was nearly as pale as the white linens; her lovely lips seemed grey. Her hair was tangled. But her sleeping shift was clean and crisp, as were the linens she lay on and under. Her hands were at her sides on the sky blue silk coverlet.

  He’d had her rooms made up especially for her as a wedding gift, hoping they would be to her liking. For all the fabrics, he’d chosen varying tones of blue to complement her eyes. He’d selected the Æbbe jewels for her for the same reason: because sapphires reminded him of her eyes.

  This bed was smaller than his own but could still more than comfortably accommodate them both—and had. No step was required to reach the mattress. But Leofric didn’t get into bed with her. He didn’t want to disturb her rest. Instead, he knelt on the floor near the pillows and lifted her hand—cool and dry now—into his own.

  She stirred, her hand coming to life in his hold. When he looked to her face, he saw her eyes.

  They didn’t focus well, but they were on him, and he took the moment he had. “I love you, Astrid. My vow to you is unchanged and unwavering. I will love you all my days, and I will make you happy. What’s between us is more than words.”

  She closed her eyes again without speaking, but her fingers curled around his thumb.

  He hoped that was a sign that there was still love for him in her heart.

  Astrid woke and, before she opened her eyes, she knew she wasn’t alone. In the way of her old life, the life that had been taken from her, she sent out her instincts and tried to understand her surroundings before she showed herself to be aware.

  Her room in the castle. Her bed. No sound out of the ordinary. But the mattress curved with extra weight.

  She opened her eyes. Bright moonlight washed through the windows and made a blue glow and long shadows. Leofric sat on her bed, watching her. His chest was bare, and she scanned down the rest of his body. He wore braies only—a garment he rarely wore under his breeches. She wondered how long he’d sat there.

  “Astrid,” he said, seeing her awake. “Please.”

  In the weeks since they’d gone to the market town and she’d seen Mihkel, since she’d discovered Leofric’s deceit and she’d lost the babe, Astrid had kept to her own company as much as she could, and Leofric had respected her need for distance. His father and brother seemed chastened as well, and didn’t press her hard. So Astrid had been left alone with her thoughts most of each day, sequestered in these rooms that were her ostensibly her own.

  They adjoined Leofric’s, and were located within the royal family’s private residence, so she hadn’t been able to avoid him, or any of his family, all the time. But Leofric had left her, as she wished, to sleep each night alone.

  Until this night.

  He reached out and wrapped his hand around hers. She didn’t pull away. “I miss you. I’m going mad with this between us.”

  She missed him as well. She was lonely and sad, and she felt the loss of the babe more keenly than she’d have believed. In the last days of her carrying, she’d felt movement inside her, little flutters, and the import of what had been happening had flowered in her mind. Another life inside her own. Her body making it and nurturing it. A kind of fascination had dawned in her. She’d found herself talking to her belly when she’d felt movement.

  But that was all gone now, and she was alone again in her body, in this castle, in this world.

  She missed him. She loved him. But she looked on him now and remembered kneeling in the tide, crushed under the knowledge that she’d been abandoned to this horrible place, that her friends hadn’t even tried to come for her.

  Her love for Leofric had grown in that empty space. This new life she had had been built in that empty space. And that space was a lie. She hadn’t been abandoned. The life she’d had was still there, in her true home. Leofric had known all this and kept it from her, pushing her to make a home in this place, within the very same walls where she had been rent apart in body and spirit.

  Rent apart to feed a vengeance she hadn’t deserved. All that she had endured, all that she’d lost, all of it had been taken from her as recompense for an evil she hadn’t committed.

  All these months, she hadn’t understood. The capacity these people had for cruelty transcended anything she could comprehend. Not even Åke had engaged in the kind of purposeless depravity of her time in the black place. Its enormity had been so far beyond her understanding that she’d had to close it away, as far and as deep as she could. But every day, it was with her, in her body and in her mind.

  Now she understood, but understanding brought no sense. Understanding was worse.

  How could she love a man who’d been complicit in it all? How could she be part of his family?

  But she did love him, and she was in his family now. He had let her stay in the black place for so long, but he had saved her from it. He’d been kind and gentle. He loved her. But he’d forced her into this life, let her believe that she’d been abandoned to it. Her mind couldn’t reconcile so many conflicts. It spun and spun and made her feel sick and lost. And so very sad.

  “My love. I will do anything you ask of me to earn your forgiveness.”

  “I not know what to ask. Not know to forgive.”

  For a moment as long as several breaths, they only gazed into each other’s eyes. Astrid believed the pain and regret she saw in his. Forgiveness was a strength, he’d told her once. It seemed to his benefit above all others that he would want her to find such a strength.

  “Will you allow me to hold you?”

  She knew what she would feel in his arms, and she knew he knew as well. Since he’d gathered her up from the floor in the black place, she’d felt safe in his embrace, no matter her mood otherwise. His touch calmed her, and she’d sought it out again and again as she’d struggled to navigate this world.

  She knew she would forgive him if she allowed him to hold her now. She could feel her body yearn for it, her heart crave it, her mind seek the calm he would bring. She could conjure the feeling of her cheek on his chest, her head tucked under his chin, his arms around her. She could smell the warm spice of his male scent. She could remember how calm rolled through her when she was nestled with him.

  She would forgive him and ask nothing of him but that calm. Because she loved him, and love had made her weak.

  She turned the covers back and accepted him into her bed.

  When he was beside her, pulling her close and wrapping her tight, she tucked her head under his chin, felt the hair of his chest on her cheek, breathed deep of his scent. As calm rolled through her like smoke, she forgave.

  ~oOo~

  “I wonder if you’d walk with me in the Pleasaunce after our meal, Duchess?”

  Astrid looked up from her plate, where she’d been vying unsuccessfully with the carcass of some strange bird dressed up in fruit, too small to pull meat from it neatly. She wanted to pick the thing up with her hands, but that wasn’t allowed at the king’s table, not even this one, in the private residence.

  It was the king who’d spoken. Astrid resisted the pull to turn to Leofric and check his reaction. Instead she faced his father straight on.

  In her months living in comfort as his guest, and then in luxury as his family, Astrid’s hatred of the king had cooled and become something akin to a grudgi
ng affection. He’d been kind to her while she’d carried his grandchild, and he’d continued kind—perhaps even more so—since the babe had gone. But she had never forgiven him. It was he who’d ordered her torture. Even knowing that he’d been grieving for his daughter, she couldn’t find the strength in her heart to forgive him for what he’d made happen to her.

  Her hatred hadn’t reflowered, however, since she’d spoken with Mihkel. Only Leofric had felt the heat of her shock and pain. Only he had her love, thus only he had betrayed it.

  “Why?” she asked, and everyone with them at table—Leofric, Eadric, Dunstan, Winifred, and Father Thomas, the new bishop—went still and quiet. She knew the cause of their shock: she hadn’t addressed the king with respect.