Soul's Fire (The Northwomen Sagas Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  Astrid was serving as interpreter, which was a task beyond her comfort. Her understanding of Leofric’s language was sufficient for her needs of use, but to translate between two tongues took skill she didn’t really have. She was doing the best she could, however, and she thought she’d conveyed the king’s words to her people well enough.

  But Leif frowned at Astrid. “I don’t understand. Does your prince not understand that we would have left today with nothing?”

  She’d told Leofric she was staying with him. He’d seen the struck camp. “He understands. It doesn’t seem to matter.”

  Vali slammed his cup down and leaned forward. “It’s a trick, then. They mean to lure us in and cut us down while our backs are turned. This is how they fight. Not face to face but underhand.” His lip turned sharply up, and he growled at the king.

  “They see trick,” she translated for Leofric and the king. “They think you attack again when people not can fight.”

  The king nodded and leveled his eyes on Vali. “We understand why you would be wary of giving us trust. We have been enemies, and we have dealt each other grave losses. Our eldest son lies in the chapel now, awaiting his vigil. Our young daughter was killed by one of your men last year. And yet we offer you this, because you have something we value deeply. Someone. You came to our shores last year with the intent to wrest land from our realm. From you, instead, we wrested Astrid of the North.”

  His eyes shifted and held Astrid. “We would that she stay with us, as one of us. We have grown to love her, and she, we believe, loves us. But you are her people, and it pains her to be torn from you again. We owe her a debt, and we seek her forgiveness. You wish to settle, and we wish peace in our realm and across Anglia. So we offer you a stake. Five thousand arable acres along the northwestern coast of Mercuria. You will be part of the realm, with all the protections and obligations of such, and we will welcome a new duke at our court. In return, you will assist us and our allies in the fight against further incursions from the people of the North. There is no trick here. There is unity.”

  Her head spinning, Astrid attempted to translate all that and hoped she at least preserved the heart of it—she hoped she understood the heart of it. It confused her when the king spoke as he had, saying we rather than I. It was the second time he’d made the offer, and she hoped she wasn’t mangling what she understood it to be.

  They had first come to Mercuria with the intent to claim land here. The king was offering them the thing which had brought them to his shores in the first place. Astrid had the sense of a circle closing.

  Tollak spoke first, after she was finished. “So we would be subject to this Christian king? Usch! We are freemen! We don’t need his gift—we will take what we want!” He pounded his fist on the table.

  “A settlement we claimed by force would be vulnerable to attack from any neighboring kings,” Leif mused. “This would be protection for our settlers—farmers and families. Vali?”

  Vali turned to Astrid. “What is your judgment of this king? I have no cause to trust him. Do you?”

  She studied the king for a moment, then put her eyes on her husband. He nodded. She trusted Leofric completely. Her shock at the deceit about her taking had struck so painfully because her trust in him ran deep. But it hadn’t been his deceit. He hadn’t taken her. He hadn’t tortured her. He’d saved her. He’d loved her. He’d given her what she’d needed.

  “They wish they can trust you. They ask do I trust. I trust you. If you say the king be trusted, I believe.”

  Leofric gave her a small smile and turned to his father.

  The king reached across the table and took her hand. “I swear this oath before God, Astrid of the North. I mean this to be my atonement to you. If you can forgive me, settle your people here and make us all strong.”

  Astrid pulled her hand back and considered the king, then turned to Leofric again. In his eyes, she saw a future. Here, in this castle, with his love. In the king’s offer, she saw a chance for her divided self to be whole. She knew Leif and Vali would never stay and settle, but if the two worlds of her life were allied, then she would not lose either part of herself.

  She trusted her husband, and he trusted his father. Astrid realized that she trusted the king herself. She had forgiven him. Even before this offer, she had.

  She turned to Leif and Vali. “He is true. We can trust him. I swear it on my life.”

  The leaders of the Northmen returned to their camp that night to discuss with the others the king’s offer. Astrid stayed with Leofric. When she’d said goodbye to their friends and they retired to the private residence, the king was waiting for them in the common rooms.

  He held out his arms to Astrid, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she allowed him to embrace her.

  “Thank you, daughter,” Leofric’s father said as he set her back. “You fill me with hope. Do you remember what I told you, about Dreda giving me light in a dark time?”

  “Ja. I remember.”

  “You are my light now. We put Eadric to rest on the morrow. I’ve lost two children with the passing of only a single year. Yet I hold hope and gladness inside my sorrow. I can see a future now. You give me that light.”

  Her eyes found Leofric’s, and he saw in them uncertainty and discomfort. He smiled. She wasn’t used to such effusions of emotion. From the king, indeed, Leofric wasn’t, either. Only Dreda had known such pure softness from their staid father.

  With a lift of her hand for a kiss, the king bid them good night and retired to his own rooms.

  Leofric pulled his wife into his arms. “You were magnificent today.”

  “How? I only make bad talk in two tongues.”

  “No, you did much more than that. You brought two worlds together. Because neither could stand to lose you.”

  “If others say they want it.”

  “Will they?”

  She played with the top fastenings of his black doublet. Her fingertips brushing across his throat left hot tremors behind them. “Leif make good talk. Vali also. They sway Gunnar and Tollak. So I think ja. They will.” Her eyes came to his. “I stay if they want land, or if they not. With you, I stay.”

  He groaned and grabbed her hands, holding them against his chest. “Ah, Astrid. How I’ve prayed to hear that. To know that you love me, and that you would want to make your home with me. To hope that you might forgive us all.”

  “Forgive is done. No more past. Now we make future.” She pulled on his hand and led him to his own room.

  ~oOo~

  Once they’d shed their clothes, while Astrid climbed up into his bed, Leofric closed the heavy drapes around it—not for privacy, they wouldn’t be disturbed on this night, but for the illusion of isolation. He wanted the world to fall away; he wanted to exist only with his beloved.

  When he parted the drapes and joined her, she was lying back, propped on her elbows, the pearly tips of her breasts jutting forward like twin offerings. He crawled across the silks and loomed over her, taking one into his mouth and letting it pop free as he went for the other. She arched with pleasure, her head dropping back, as he suckled her, but when his hand went to the scant patch of silky gold between her thighs, she twisted and shoved, and he was on his back before he could do anything to resist.

  She straddled him, and he groaned. “Yes. Ride me. Mercy, yes.”

  But she didn’t take him into herself. Instead, she leaned down and sucked at his throat, then moved downward, over his chest, sucking his flesh into her mouth and nipping at him, tiny bites causing no pain but leaving a zinging that lasted well after she’d moved on. She suckled each of his nipples until they had gone tight and aching. She nuzzled her nose through the hair across his chest. She drew a line with her pointed tongue down the center of his belly, around his navel, and farther down, licking him like he was a sweet. With each touch of her tongue, each nip of her teeth, each brush of her nose or her lips or her breasts, skimming over his skin, Leofric felt a fresh flood of the heat pooli
ng deep inside him. All of his muscles had hardened into rock, and he struggled to draw enough breath to feed the blood that rushed through him.

  He needed to be inside her, but when he tried to take over, to grab her, to bring her hips back to his, she knocked him away and carried on with her playful enticements.

  One of her breasts brushed the head of his sex, and he thought he’d release right then. She did it again, intentionally this time, liking the feel of it, and then she took him in hand and dragged him back and forth over her nipple. Leofric lifted his head to watch, and the sight of her own pleasure—her eyes closed, her teeth biting down on her lip—was more than he could bear. He dropped his head back to the mattress with a groan of desperate ecstasy.

  “Please. Astrid, please.”

  She answered by sucking his sex into her mouth. She tongued his head and sucked him deep, back and forth, pulling away each time his hips rose up as his finish surged forth. On the fourth, or fifth, time—he’d lost count—that she refused him his release, he groaned in loud frustration, “Astrid!”

  She laughed—and the sound of it would never grow old. “Not like this. Inside me. Soon.”

  He lifted his head again. She was nestled between his thighs, smiling up at him, her hands around his sex and that sweet, rare smile tantalizingly near his tip.

  Someday, he would no longer think of her smiles or her laughs as rare treats. Someday, she would know such joy that all would know the music of her laughter. He knew that to be true, because now they had a lifetime of somedays to share.

  “A child?” he asked. “You wish another child now?”

  She nodded. “I raise her to be warrior.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at that, but she wasn’t dissuaded.

  “I think I change this place like this place change me. Our childs be warriors. Boys and girls.”

  He thought of Dreda, his young, sweet, wild sister, who’d wanted to be a pirate, whose untrammeled curiosity and enthusiasm had charmed his heart every day of her life. He thought of the daughter he and Astrid had lost and wondered if she would have had her mother’s pale hair and sharp temper. Whether she would, as he did, and as Dreda had, have had his mother’s eyes. He imagined a tiny Astrid, her brow drawn in ferocious concentration, wielding a wooden sword and learning the fighting arts as he had when a boy.

  The image nearly impelled him to cry out with joy.

  He sat up and caught Astrid’s head in his hands, raising her up to face him. “I like that thought very much. They’ll be brave and strong and fierce like their mother.”

  “And have kindness and honor like father.”

  He took her hips in his hands and drew her forward. Understanding him, she shifted, bringing her legs forward and around him, so she could sit on his lap. When he lifted her up, she took hold of his sex and guided him into her while he settled her back down as slowly as he could. They both gasped as he slid into her wet sheath and filled her.

  “From this day,” he murmured, tucking his face against her throat and breathing deep the alluring, natural scent of her. “From this day, we are one.”

  “Ja,” she whispered back, pressing her lips to his cheek. “Åh, ja.”

  ~oOo~

  The land his father had offered the Northmen—Leofric was making an effort now to stop thinking of them as raiders—was excellent land for farming. Most of the western edge of the kingdom was cliffs, so the usable shoreline of this holding was slight, but enough for them to land two, or possibly three of the ships like the warships they’d sailed here. The design of their ships fascinated Leofric. He knew little about them, but he did know that a ship that could sail shallow waters as easily as it sailed the open sea was an unusual thing indeed. Except, apparently, in the North.

  Their ships were a substantial reason for the raid—the Northmen’s success across Anglia, and elsewhere, most likely. They could pilot those beasts from the ocean straight up into the rivers feeding into it, and do so quietly, so they’d been able to invade far inland and surprise peasants and royalty alike.

  And then, of course, they’d fought like nothing Leofric’s people had ever seen before them. None of them feared death. In fact, they sought it. Now, he understood that their people believed that the true life came after a valiant death, when they would be welcomed into the hall of their gods.

  Their Valhalla seemed not so different from God’s Heaven in that respect. In other respects, they could not be more different. An eternity in Heaven was a time of peace. Valhalla seemed little different from life, except for the company.

  He stood back now with his father and watched the Northmen leaders. Vali was the giant, Leif was the blond one too close to Leofric’s wife, Gunnar and Tollak were the other two, who seemed less comfortable leading and looked to Vali and Leif for guidance. Bjarke—that name felt strange on Leofric’s tongue—was clearly allied with Vali. All five stood talking with Astrid, on a hill overlooking most of the land they’d agreed to take.

  Astrid’s people had agreed to the alliance. They would make a settlement. This new duchy would be called Norshire, and Bjarke would be its first duke. He was staying behind, and Leif and the others would bring his family as well as settlers to build a village either later during this summer, if they could manage it before the weather turned, or at first chance when warmth returned.

  Leofric would have to practice saying the man’s name. While Bjarke practiced being a duke at court.

  The nobles at court had had a great deal to say about a Northman being elevated all the way to the title of duke, eclipsing many of their own titles. Even Dunstan, the Earl of Tarrin, had raised a wan brow at that. But the king was firm. And he was right. This alliance would work because the Northmen would have power in the realm and the ear of the king.

  A breeze blew up, catching the skirt of Astrid’s sedate black gown and showing her leathers underneath. Leofric’s breath caught at the sight of her, standing on that hill, her gown blowing back, her legs locked and strong.

  That was his woman, and she was, finally, truly his. She had chosen their life together.

  The group seemed to have come to a conclusion, and they all walked back to Leofric and his father. Leif came forward, straight to the king. Vali and Astrid were right behind him.

  Leofric and his father both had to look up to meet the man eye to eye. “Land good green,” Leif said.

  Leofric remembered that Leif had been the one who’d been able to understand them when they’d thrown the governess’s head at them and told them it was Astrid’s.

  “Yes,” agreed the king. “I mean this as a true alliance. Not a trick. This land is good for farming.”

  Leif turned to Astrid, and she spoke in her language. After she was done, Leif nodded and turned back to the king. He held out his hand. “Friend.”

  The king clasped his arm in the way of warriors. “Friend.”

  Leofric looked to his wife, who was smiling. Yes, someday—someday soon—that would not be such a surprise.

  ~oOo~

  The raiders sailed away a few days later, after Eadric had been buried and the alliance had been feted.

  The loss of his brother wore a raw spot on his heart. They’d never been remarkably close, they had been too different in temperament and outlook for a deep bond, but neither had they been at odds much since their boyhood. Eadric had been a good man, they had spent their lives together, and Leofric would feel the loss of him always.

  Yet his happy relief and ease in having Astrid with him truly, without reservation, for no other reason than her love of him, had blunted the pain of Eadric’s death. He searched deep within himself and tried to find guilt for not grieving more acutely, but there was no guilt. He had too much peace for guilt.

  He loved his brother. His brother had been a good man, a godly man. He was saved and with the Lord now. With their mother and sister and with his brides, the first of whom he’d married for love, and who had died with their son trapped inside her.

  Leofric wou
ld miss him, but he could not mourn him.

  He stood now at the top of the steep, reed-strewn rise below which were the Northmen’s ships, fully laded and ready to sail. Astrid and Bjarke stood with their friends, saying their farewells. Leofric hadn’t joined them; he had no place in their parting.

  Astrid clasped arms with many of the men and women; whatever tension had been between them had been forgotten, it seemed. Her last and longest embrace was for Leif, and Leofric couldn’t help the surge of jealousy he felt as he observed that lingering union and its reluctant end. Her love had been so hard to win; he wanted it all for himself.