Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (14 page)

Making his voice carry over the grounds, he said, “Like you, I am sworn to Åke. He is my jarl, and I have no other allegiance. The Storm-Wolf is dead. You can join him, or you can be true to your oath and live.” He swung his sword.

Knut blocked him, his expression shifting to hostile intent. Leif was the stronger warrior and the better swordsman, but he traded blows and blocks, drawing out the fight, making a show of it. From their side, the unearthly shriek of Astrid’s battle cry resounded in the night, and Leif swept his eyes in that direction to see her coming right at him, her shield up and her axe raised. She was blocked by Oluf, who ran at her and took her down. Leif saw the axe fly from her hand as she landed in the dirt.

Then everywhere around him was fighting.

~oOo~

It didn’t last long. All of Snorri’s men resisted Åke, as well as most of the village men who had been at the feast. Some of Åke’s warriors, Astrid and Knut among them, resisted, too. But not many. Not nearly enough to tip the scales.

Tried though he had to keep friends whole, the instinct for self-preservation had taken over in the thick of the battle, and he had killed three who had been Snorri’s men. He might also have killed Knut, though he had left him breathing at the time. Astrid was down as well. And Orm, with his face split open, lying near the castle door. And so many more. All who had resisted Åke, dead or assumed as such.

Leif thought Orm had moved. He hoped so.

The ground was littered with bodies. The stench of bloodied earth filled the air. And it was yet full dark.

“Where is the body of Vali Storm-Wolf?” Åke asked at Leif’s side. “I should like to piss on it, as I did his beloved jarl.”

Too tired and disheartened to put on a show, Leif sighed and tried to think of the right answer to this next problem.

“I saw him,” called someone from behind them. “He was cleaved clear in twain! Over there!”

Åke and Leif both turned toward the sound, but no one stood forward, and Leif hadn’t recognized the voice. He didn’t know if it was someone who meant to distract Åke, or who simply wanted to have his hand in the story that would be told.

In any case, that call was a help to him.

Just then Calder came out with Brenna over his shoulder. She was bound, gagged, and blindfolded, wearing only her thin sleeping gown. Calder dropped her to the ground near Leif’s feet, and she grunted.

Calder stalked to his father. “She wakes. Already she tries to fight.”

“Then put her down again. I don’t want her awake until we are at sea,” Åke barked at his son, and Calder came back and kicked her in the head. After that, she was quiet and still.

Åke scanned the benighted grounds. “Burn it!”

Yet more Leif had to think quickly to save. Fatigue screamed in his skull. “Jarl. A fire will draw the villagers here.”

“So? You think farmers are a threat to us?”

“No. But they will slow us, and we’re ready to be off. Why not leave the bodies to rot?”

He hated the proud grin on Åke’s face. “Yes. We will leave the bodies. And we will leave this puny place and return to make our destiny.”

As they mounted, Leif looked around the grounds. So many bodies. People he cared about. People who had trusted him.

He hoped that some had survived, but had enough to be of any real help to Vali? That was the only hope, the reason he had done this rather than take his stand here, side by side with Vali and Brenna: to keep the people he most cared about alive. To make a chance to fight another day, when there was a hope to win. To see beyond this one moment to the day when Åke would meet justice.

He had not seen Olga since he had glimpsed her across the hall, just after the feast. He would never see her again. He didn’t even know if she had lived or died.

Gods, what if he had made a terrible mistake? What if he had given up everything and gained nothing?

~oOo~

The sun had risen on a clear, bright, summer morning when the ships left the coast of Estland. The wind was brisk and friendly, and the air had the kind of glassy chill that came on a summer morning at the sea. That chill would deepen as they moved to the open sea, even if they held good weather for all the voyage.

Leif stood near the stern and watched the land drift away toward the horizon.

He had struggled as hard as he knew how to save his friends, but all he’d left behind was blood and betrayal. He didn’t know if Vali or Olga or anyone were still alive in the castle. Brenna lay behind him, bound and beaten, and left to the elements.

If he had simply sunk his blade into Åke’s soft belly, at least the jarl would also be dead.

He had failed.

He turned from the last view of the land of his love, his true home, and focused on Brenna. All he could do now was all he could for her.

They were both warriors, so they would fight on. He would keep her alive. And he would keep hope alive in them both that Vali still lived as well.

“Will he live? We need him.”

Olga paused in her stitching of Vali’s scalp and looked over her shoulder and up at Orm. “The blow was hard, and the swelling is great. But there’s no break in his skull, and that is good. I cannot say if he’ll live, but it seems killing this giant of a man is nigh impossible.”

Orm made a stunted chuckle and rearranged the clumsy bandage over his face. His own wound was serious, too, and under that awkward wrapping, nearly half his face flapped loosely, but the old man wouldn’t take any care until Vali had been found. When he was found alive, he became the entire castle’s priority.

Vali was, by a notable margin, the tallest of any man in the castle—any man Olga had ever seen. Even among the generally tall raiders, few neared his own height. Leif was among the few who did. Such a sharp blow, straight across the side of Vali’s head—Olga had tended many wounds in her days as a healer, wounds of violence as well as of accident. She had learned the ways they were made. She thought someone nearly as tall as Vali himself had made this wound.

Leif. In her heart, she knew it was Leif who had tried to kill Vali.

With her own eyes, she had seen him fighting her friends—his own friends. She had seen him spill onto the castle grounds the entrails of Toke, who was a young man not much older than Anton, and whom she had seen Leif laughing with many a time in the hall.

Bodies were piled up against the walls outside. The earth was yet soft with blood. Nearly all the raiders were dead or gone. Only seven remained—assuming that she could heal all those who still drew breath, because not a single one of them had gone unscathed.

Not even she. Not unscathed at all. While a battle raged in the night outside, some of the new raiders ran through the castle, ransacking the rooms, taking what was of value. Olga had done as Leif had bid and sent away as many as she could of the women who worked the castle. But for those who stayed, the night became a raid like any other, and the raiders behaved as they would.

It was the way of things.

Olga, who had run from the sight of Leif slashing his way through their friends, had been caught in the kitchen and shoved against the stone face of the fireplace. As before, she could hear the cries of the other women, but this time, she didn’t call out and offer comfort. The large hand driving her head into the rough stone as she was taken had made it impossible to speak.

Now her mouth was swollen and split, her body was abused yet again, and her heart was broken.

When the raider was called away and had left her, she’d found a place to hide until there was quiet in the castle. When she came out, the silence was of death. Bodies lay everywhere. The stench of blood and gore and waste hung heavy in the air.

As those few who could move began to do so, the story filled in among them. They found Vali, bound and insensible in the stable. Brenna was gone, taken by the terrible jarl and his terrible men.

And Leif had been among those terrible men.

Anton was right. She was a silly woman who’d been hoodwinked by a handsome, powerful man.

Caught in a cloud of love, Olga had forgotten the way of things, but she remembered now. And she would not forget again.

Finishing her stitching, she cut the dark thread. “He is the most gravely wounded of those who live. Call in some of the strongest from the village and have them take him up to his own bed. When he wakes, it should be as gentle a waking as we can make it.”

Work on the village had paused as many men and women returned to the aid of those who had been assailed. The men took on the dark work of carrying bodies of friends to the sacred woods, and piling the bodies of enemies for disposal. The women helped Olga, or they packed up what goods and gear were left. They meant to abandon the castle as soon as the wounded were well enough to travel.

She stood and gave Orm a steady look. “And then I will put your face back together.”

Her heart was broken, but her spirit was not. She would not mourn a loss that had never been what she’d thought it was. She had given freely of herself for the first time, and Leif had crumpled up the gift in his fist, but she would not be crushed.

Not even a golden giant could take her from herself.

~oOo~

Vali’s fury and grief upon waking was her undoing, however.

In the face of his desperate rage, the horror in his still-unfocused eyes as he tried to make his injured head understand all that had happened, all that was lost, and that Leif had been the chief agent of their destruction, Olga’s spirit collapsed.

When the huge bear of a man, that indomitable, indestructible legend, fell to his knees, bellowing his wife’s name, Olga felt in his howls the vicious depth of her own grief. She knelt at his side and tried to embrace him, to comfort him, to share in his feeling, but he shoved her away.

Their grief was their own, then.

~oOo~

The world kept its balance.

In all things, the world would ever keep its balance.

It was the way of things.

It was the way of things.

It was the way of things.

Olga sat up in the night, alone in a narrow bed, in the village hut she now shared with her brothers, and she said those words over and over like a litany. An incantation to ward the dark away.

There were no incantations in her world, no ghosts or ghouls, no gods or giants. There was no magic. There was power. Power in the elements themselves: earth, air, water, fire. To know their power and their influence, to respect their pull and sway, was to know the world in its fullness, to see the balance in all things and to know that when the world tipped too much one way, there would be a tipping in the opposite way. Always a sway, but always a balance. A world in motion.

Day and night. Sun and moon. Summer and winter. Sowing and reaping. Life and death. All of it bound by the tangible, tactile, present world. Earth, air, water, fire.

There was spirit, too, but it was not an otherworldly thing. It was will and soul; it was the thing that drove the mind and the heart. It was the thing that could only be given.

Olga had a talent for healing not simply because her ken was great for the properties of plants. The strength of her healing came in her elemental understanding of their world. She saw the balance. She knew the way of things. The knowing opened her mind and steadied her hand. Made her calm—a powerful calm that moved through her, into her medicines, into her touch.

To know the way of things was to know the way.

Olga had known shock in her life. She had known horror and sorrow. She had known pain. But she had never known fear. Fear came from not knowing the way, not seeing the balance, and Olga knew. She saw. So she had not feared.

Until now.

Now, Olga feared everything with an intensity far beyond her ken. She feared the dark. Sleep and its dreams. The uncertainty of the future. The truth of the past. She feared what she didn’t know, and what she did.

She could not find the balance. She had lost her way. She had lost herself.

~oOo~

Kalju came into the hut and held out a large bunch of mouse-ear. “For you. To make your healing tea. There’s a large bed of it on the far side of the field.”

She smiled and took the bundle from him. “Thank you.”

“You look tired, sister,” Kalju said as he washed his hands in the bowl.

She was tired. She was weary. A week had passed since she had lost her way. The world was finding its balance again, but she was not.

The villagers were back at work building, and planting a small crop at this end of the sowing time. The few raiders who were left had come to the village as well.

They had no ship that could sail the sea, so they were settling.

All but Vali. Determined to get to Brenna, he had stayed at the castle, alone, and was building a seaworthy vessel with his own hands. He seemed to have gone mad with need—the need to save Brenna, the need for vengeance, the need for action.

She set a bowl of hearty stew on the table with a hunk of fresh bread, and she smiled as her young brother sat. “Not so tired,
kullake
. Was Anton behind you?” She picked up another bowl and prepared to fill it.

Kalju grinned and pointed toward the window. “I don’t think he’ll join us this meal. Anna was in the circle.”

“Anna?” The girl was a great help to her and was learning the healing arts. Olga had not known that Anton had paid her any notice, however.

She went to the window and looked out on the circle. There were some buildings still being constructed, and some spaces yet to be built, but the village was already becoming a town.

And there her brother stood, at the well, leaning close to sweet Anna in a way that made Olga’s heart ache. She now knew what it was to have a man pay that kind of tender attention.

Her brother was courting. Well, he was well old enough to take a wife. To start a family of his own.

It was the way of things. Life moved forward. The world found its balance.

But she did not.

Olga stood at the window and watched life move forward for her brother. Anton smiled at something Anna said and then stepped back. With a shy tip of her head, the girl turned and headed toward her parents’ hut. Anton watched her walk away.

He was halfway to the hut he shared with Olga and Kalju when Harald, once a raider and now a settler, rode hard into town from the north, his horse lathered and foaming—he’d ridden long at that pace. He had been out with Astrid and Dan, riding a patrol.

“Soldiers!” he shouted, riding through the town. “They ride for us! Gather what weapons you can! We fight or we die!”

Anton turned and started in the direction Anna had taken, then stopped and ran for his sister and brother instead.

~oOo~

Some of the people in the new town had shields and swords and axes; they had trained with the raiders over the long, hard winter, and their smith had forged them tools for their new skills, as he’d forged the weapons of Vladimir’s soldiers in the world before.

Olga and her brothers had no such weapons. After the raid on Ivan’s castle and the death of their father, Anton had wanted no more part in war-making. But he ran into the hut now and grabbed the pitchfork off the wall and threw it at Kalju, and he took the scythe down for himself.

He pushed Olga back. “Stay hidden!” he shouted, then turned to Kalju. “Protect her!”

Without waiting to gain agreement from either of them, Anton ran out, just as the thunder of many horses’ hooves began to fill the air and shake the ground.