ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One

by Julie Harvey Delcourt

  The air was clean and cold and she knew she loved wherever she happened to be but felt trapped in a cloud of fear as if she stood upon those walls searching for some sign of impending doom. Something was coming, she wished would stay away. It always ended by her turning her head to see a raven, radiating malignance, peering at her from its perch along the stone wall. Its eyes gleamed with a knowing intelligence and it was at this moment she always woke on a choked gasp of fear as a women’s voice screamed what sounded like a dire warning in a language she could not understand.

  She was certain she had never been to this place she dreamed of and she wondered why her mind conjured the image, this moment, night after night for years. It reminded her of her mother’s descriptions of Celtica but the voice was not speaking Caelig. The dream was disturbing and the feelings it stirred left her unsettled. Asleep it seemed so imperative she heed the voice and understood what was coming. She would have to remind herself as she lay shaking and awake that it was just a dream and nothing more.

  What she could not know was that it wasn’t so much a dream as one woman’s attempt to reach out across the ages to save another...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Thousand Years Ago…Freya’s Story

  The priests had come to the holding of Earl Harald. Freya, made herself scarce as quickly and quietly as possible. The milking shed was a good place to hide and she liked the simple company of the goats. She had caught a glimpse of Olav the high priest and, as always, he terrified her. She could not understand why her family was so in thrall to the man. It was difficult to even think of him as a man with his scarred face, one eye and the blue tattooed lips. His hands were often in the sleeves of his robes, but she had seen them; fingers like spiders with blackened tips.

  All the Gooar Odin had the same dead white skin and blue lips but Olav was different. He radiated a power and presence that cast a shadow in the most sunny or fire lit spaces. It was as if light itself shunned him. She knew the whispers, that the Gooar Odin’s practices were so twisted and extreme that they had been denied entrance to Uppsala. While theirs was a world that heralded, admired sacrifice and understood the gods could only at times be appeased with blood, this priest had gone beyond what was accepted. The priests of their world were shades who came forth when called, if they so desired, or were visited to have the bones and auguries read. They did not tell the warriors, and certainly not the Earls what to do; but this one did.

  Before they had even left their own lands across the cold sea the Gooar had their hooks in her family and her people. While Earls, like the great Ragnar, certainly revered the All Father Odin, they believed and practiced as did all the other clans. Odin gave signs, one prayed to Odin, but to Freya it seemed her family looked only for signs from and prayed to Olav. He stood firmly between them and the great halls of the gods. Olav had even been known to deny Valhalla to those he suspected did not respect his authority. This powerful priest had convinced her father that all the other Viking clans and their leaders were wrong. It was wrong to negotiate with the Saxons, to allow any to follow this new one god or to marry the Saxons in England. Any who did any of these acts within their own clan was cursed and killed.

  While many Viking families alleged they were descended from one of the gods, Olav had convinced her father and older brothers that they were the chosen bloodline of Odin. They all now fervently believed it was to dishonor the All Father to corrupt their blood with allowing it to be mixed, diluted, weakened and possibly lost by not keeping it pure. Freya was, like all her people, a girl of the earth, the sea as well as spirit. She looked about at the numbers they could count of their blood and wondered, no knew, with a sick feeling there was only one way to keep the blood as pure as Olav demanded. This in itself was enough to convince her the man was evil and not the voice of Odin or any other of the gods, unless maybe Loki. Everyone knew incest was not just a sin, but a sign of Ragnarok and she feared what this priest would, could bring upon them all.

  So, she stayed in the warmth, the peace and company of the animals. Now that she was fifteen and had truly bloomed she was scared. She could wish to be marred, or too thin, weak or sickly. She had seen the way the men now looked at her, had begun to look at her for years now, like waiting for a prize animal to be ready for breeding. Her breasts were large and high, waist small, hips a full curve and she was tall and strong. She had long white, fair hair, a good complexion and large blue eyes that tilted long and large with thick dark lashes.

  Her good looks were obvious and unwanted when she saw her reflection in her mother’s beaten bronze mirror. The family was proud of her beauty, but she hated it. She wanted to be ignored and unwanted. She was troubled to admit why. It was a difficult thing to not only not trust one’s own family but their plans for how they would use her. Please let Olav leave soon, she prayed as she laid her face against a nanny goat, please.

  By the time the sun was setting the evil priest was still there and one of her father’s slaves found her in the shed. She was taken to be bathed and dressed, her hair combed and left free down her back. She pressed shaking hands together and her stomach quivered with sickness. Olav himself wanted to see her. She was led from the women’s chamber to the great hall and looked first to her father, who sat in his big wolf skin covered chair, and then to her mother in the chair next to him. She could see her mother’s ringed hands fisted in the fur that edged her deep red cloak. She would not meet Freya’s eyes and then she heard Olav speak from where he stood by the great center hearth.

  “Come here child of Odin. The All Father would see you clearly and decide if you are indeed the chosen he has shown to me. I am his voice, and his hands in this world.” His voice had the sibilance of snake and the depth of a cave, seeming to echo around the hall without effort.

  With slow steps she walked to the hearth and stood before him, head down, unwilling to meet that one strangely black eye that was so dark one couldn’t even discern the pupil. A long white finger grazed slowly down her cheek and then lifted a long strand of her heavy hair. She tried not to flinch away as she knew this would earn a beating from her father. They must all show deference to this man. When his hands slid under her breasts and lifted them, fingers feeling the size of her nipples through the wool of her fine dress, she felt her gorge rise up.

  “Turn around girl, slowly, so I may see all of you,” he ordered.

  So she turned slowly head still down, simply glad those cold, dead seeming hands had stopped fondling her.

  “Take off her gown,” he ordered the slave who had brought her out. This elicited a barely suppressed gasp of breath from her mother and a few of the other women in the hall. She could feel the rise of interest like an unsavory wave from the men. The laces of her gown were pulled apart quickly and the girl, Brigit, who served her pulled her the gown down so that it pooled at her feet. She felt her entire body go cold and then hot with shame. While nudity was not shameful, for an Earl’s daughter to stand naked this way in the hall was unheard of and she wanted nothing more than to disappear.

  Olav walked around her naked form, assessing, occasionally pinching and stroking. It startled her when he fisted her long hair in his hand and jerked her head back to meet his eye. He towered over her. When those blue lips peeled back in a smile she knew she was indeed doomed. He was pleased and nothing good ever pleased this priest. He released her as quickly as he had grabbed her and with a swirl of his robes and cloak turned to address the room. She watched him reach into a pouch and pull out a handful of herbs he tossed onto the fire. Billowing smoke filled the room, and she recognized the scent and feeling. She watched everyone’s eyes, as even her own, dilated.

  “Behold people of Harald. The girl before you, revere her body, revel in her naked flesh, for this is your saving. Odin has chosen,” and she heard his horrible hrafn call out loud and clear as it flew down from the rafters like a black spirit to settle on his shoulder. “This is the vessel that shall preserve and strengthen the divine blood. Between he
r legs is the key to our own kingdom,” and she heard as if from miles away and yet washing all around her like a sea, the sigh of relief and triumph that the people voiced. Before she passed out from the fumes, the last words she heard where from her father as he stood up unsteadily from his chair.

  “Freya, daughter, you are chosen and blessed above all others.” And so her nightmare truly began.

  Over the next weeks Freya learned that ‘chosen’ and ‘blessed’ actually meant cursed and that she would never be allowed in any of the god’s halls for the crimes she was being trained to commit. She had been right to surmise that incest would be the Gooar’s answer to keeping the bloodline pure. The whispers she had heard of an island kingdom to the west were true. The place that even the Saxons still spoke of was real.

  The mystical land where the great King of the Britons had been taken, mortally wounded hundreds of years ago, was not within England itself but west across the sea, beyond yet another island known as Eire. The Gooar now knew that a great royal house called Llyr ruled this island and that is was protected by Celtic priestesses known as the Ladies of Rhiannon.

  Olav had succeeded all too easily in convincing her father to undertake the quest to make this kingdom their own, the safe haven for their blood. Olav had dangled a crown and her father had jumped, even at the price of sacrificing his children’s afterlife. The priestesses protected the island with powerful magic.

  Watching and listening to Olav she realized their power must surpass his own.

  She could see the anger and the hunger in him. This would not be the usual Viking raid to take land, but a treacherous strategy using her as the bait. The priestesses, so legend said, where dedicated to preserving life.

  Though no force of arms could penetrate the mists that surrounded and protected the kingdom, possibly to save the life of an innocent, those mists could be parted. The priests had finally found someone who had been to the Celtic

  Kingdom (some called it Avalon) and there was a prince not much older than

  Freya herself. This prince was to be her target if the priestesses let her through.

  A scald and comfort slaves were sent to visit Freya and train her. She learned not only how to please a man sexually, how to entice him to her bed, but how to prevent a child taking seed. She was to capture the love of the prince, marry him, but not bear his children. She was taught potions and small spells to bind a man’s heart. As she was trained, the priests and her people prepared. She would be put into a boat outside the wall of mist and set adrift, waiting for rescue. At one point she determined she would resist this horrendous plan, that she would not be the tool to destroy this kingdom. After being beaten, starved and frozen for days on end she broke. Though her mind said she would rather die, her body yet determined to live.

  When the time came, when Olav saw her skin was healed from the beatings, when he watched as her brother Falk eyed her like a hungry dog, he had her put in a small boat from her father’s great long boat. The wall of mist was indeed impenetrable, rising as high as the tops of the mountains. He gave her a cup of foul black and inky liquid to drink and then had the oarsmen shove her boat away into the current toward the island. She watched her people sail away as the world went dark around her, sure that Olav had killed her and the Ladies of this land would not rescue her. Blackness consumed her and she knew no more.

  When next she woke she was in a luxurious bed, in a room of surpassing splendor. She had never imagined a place could be made of such stone, so perfectly smooth and fitted, that ceilings could be so high and a strange clear substance covered the windows letting in bright sunlight. Though she sensed other people in the room his was the only face she saw. The kindest eyes, the color of the sea smiled at her and she knew Olav’s scheme had indeed worked.

  She lived and the prince was already half in love with her.

  He called her his gift from the sea and she repaid him and the kind ladies who saved her by asking for one gift on their wedding day; to let her people come to live in the kingdom. Her brief ideal, where she fantasized that she could just stay here among these gentle and kind people, these amazingly civilized people, was over. Olav’s last words to her before she drank had been to tell her he would see the halls of the afterlife closed to her entire family, mother, baby sister, all, if she did not follow his instructions. He promised to kill them all with his black Hel fire.

  As was the tradition of royal weddings on Celtica, the bride could request a boon of her new family and willing to grant their son’s new bride anything, the royal family had the mists parted for Freya’s family. So, the bloodline of Harald entered Celtica without a blow struck in war, but in love. Olav and his priests did not want to cause alarm and so bided their time. They planned to come later when the islands defenses were truly down, when the prince believed she carried his child. Instead she took the herbs every night after being loved by her prince to prevent a babe and then put the sleeping potion in his ale. Her heart came to adore him and, as time passed, the less she wanted to live. To have been loved so tenderly, so thoroughly by her prince and then allow her brother to have his way with her immediately after was wrenching.

  Falk’s awful pawing, his panting lust as he drove into her were a foulness so heinous she would find herself wandering far away in her mind. It was the only escape from the disgust it became more and more difficult to hide. When she finally found herself with child she devised a plan of her own. While she could not stop the priests from coming here now, she had already asked that her own religious leader be allowed to be there for the birth, she could do something to stop their final plan.

  She could see to it that her child of incest did not take the throne, that the Llyr family would not be murdered, she could see her brother dead as she had wished him every night. It might mean her own death, but so be it. Unknown to Olav, Freya had gone to the Lady of Rhiannon with the truth and so a plan had been formed. When Freya had been allowed to enter the temple of Rhiannon something miraculous had happened. The Lady of Rhiannon had been filled by the goddess, infused with her spirit, channeling awesome power.

  Freya had heard stories of such things but, to witness the unearthly light and hear the true voice of prophecy spoken was almost beyond what the human mind could bear. The very air and land had trembled. Freya and all the priestesses had fallen to their knees before the High Priestess as Rhiannon spoke through her.

  Rhiannon herself told Freya she would birth the child, but with the help of the Viking woman they would charm, she would be thought to birth twins, only the other child would be of an older and greater bloodline. Olav would believe that both children were of Harald’s bloodline. The second babe would be sent to England to be raised while one would stay in the kingdom. There was no way to rid the kingdom of the Vikings now without untold bloodshed but, according to the prophecy of the goddess, Freya would be the key to one day unifying the island and defeating the Gooar. The Lady, once the goddess had left her, held her hand and looked deeply into her eyes with great and gentle sympathy. It was clear the priestess was exhausted from the experience.

  “Love is the reason we make the greatest sacrifices of all. You sacrificed your own body and honor for your loved ones, and now you will sacrifice again for the man who has your heart. Know this Freya Haraldsdotter, what you will do has the power to one day save this kingdom and destroy the man who did this to us all. Your sacrifice will see your spirit saved and walk among the halls of your gods. I promise you, you will not be forsaken.”

  So, Freya allowed herself to be caught with her brother in bed. She had torn the heart of her beloved prince nearly from his body in his grief. Her brother had been slain but she allowed to live as she was with child. She was thrown from the castle, repudiated, her name destroyed as she grew large with child. The prince, she heard, went nearly mad in his pain and burned everything that had been hers on a great bonfire. Oh, how her heart wept. Olav and his priests watched over her night and day as she increased.

 
Though the plan to take the kingdom had been thwarted, she would birth the purest blood of Harald and offer another path Olav believed would lead to eventual triumph. As Freya lay dying after childbirth, the child of the third bloodline was slipped past the be-spelled priests, the Viking midwife swearing Freya birthed twins. Under the charm work of the Celtic priestesses the Viking midwife brought in the herbs for which Freya asked. She knew that the same herbs that could cause one to lose a babe could also cause a woman to bleed to death if taken immediately after child birth.

  She would not be used again by another brother or by her own father. This would be her last act and, hopefully sacrifice enough, to allow her admittance to the great halls beyond. Maybe her namesake herself would take her in to her own great hall of Sessrumnir. Freya slowly bled to her death after watching both children taken away.

  Olav took the two infants with a look of deep gratification despite not getting the crown for his earl. This kingdom, he thought, had been too stupid and weak to try and expel them. He would see it a pure blood Viking land one day. He did not see the young mother, with her last sight and breathe, smile at him with her own satisfaction.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jessamy’s first thought on waking was of the Earl of Redsayle. She had lain awake last night not seeing the canopy of her bed but a starry sky on a summer night eight years ago. Sebastian had shown up at her window very late to beg her to come and watch the stars fall. It had been like the heavens were putting on a fireworks display just for them. They had sat on the roof of the treehouse he had built for her.