Heart's Ease (The Northwomen Sagas Book 2) (25 page)

They rode until Karlsa was again out of sight, and Leif thought he would go mad. Every muscle in his body was clenched, and he had one clear intention upon arriving wherever they were going: he was going to punch Vali in the face.

Which he did as soon as they’d dismounted before a small hut. He hit the man so hard that Vali fell into the snow, and then Leif stood ready to defend himself from retaliation. At his side, Ulv put his hand around the grip of his sword.

But Vali only stood and wiped the blood from his mouth. “Perhaps I deserved that. But you won’t get a second. Go. Brenna and Solveig await inside.”

Surprised by Vali’s reaction to his punch and by the words he’d said, Leif cocked his head. “Are you not going in?”

“I handle the dead every day. I will not risk my wife and child.”

Brenna and Solveig were just on the other side of the door they stood before. “How long?

Pain flashed across Vali’s features. “I haven’t touched either of them in more than a month.”

Again, Vali and Brenna had been separated by events beyond themselves. Leif sighed, wondering whether the gods truly favored the God’s-Eye and the Storm-Wolf after all.

The door opened then, and Brenna was there with Solveig in her arms. The babe saw her father and leaned forward, arms outstretched, and cried “BA! BA!”

“Hello, my sun.” Vali grimaced with pain and stepped back, making greater distance, and he and his family stood, in sight of each other but out of reach. The longing between them was so powerful the air seemed to crackle. When her father wouldn’t come to her, Solveig began to cry, and Vali reacted as if he’d taken another physical blow.

Brenna turned and handed her daughter off to someone inside, then turned back.

“You are well?” Brenna asked her husband.

“I am.” He gestured toward Leif and Ulv. “I bring you the guest we hoped for. May we speak out here?”

Brenna nodded and came to Leif with her arms up. Vali backed away even farther as she left the hut.

Leif hugged her long and hard. “I’m glad to see you are well,” he whispered into her hair.

She stepped back and smiled up at him. “Vali would hobble me before he’d let me near the town—or him. I’m not fighting him. I want Solveig safe.” Turning to gesture at the woman in the hut with the crying babe, she added, “This is Åsa.” Leif and the seer nodded at each other.

“We have all the mothers with babes at the breast, and the very young children, moved away from the contagion, and the women who are with child, too…those who didn’t fall early, before we understood.” Vali’s expression changed as he spoke, and Leif couldn’t read it.

“You sent for me long ago. I came immediately, but it’s been weeks. Has she been so ill so long?”

Brenna answered and took Leif’s hand. “No. She wasn’t ill when we sent the message. She fell to it just more than a week ago.”

“I don’t understand. The message said she needed me.” He looked into Brenna’s eyes and was shocked to see them well with tears. “What? What is wrong?”

It was Vali who answered. “She carries your child, my friend. We sent for you for that reason.”

Leif heard Vali call him friend, and if he had uttered any other sentence imaginable, perhaps Leif would have cared more about that signal that his friend was finally thawing toward him. But the sentence that preceded it had Leif’s mind staggered. “I don’t…she can’t…how can this be?” More questions unfolded and spun through his head. “If she is with child, why isn’t she with the others, away from the illness?”

“She didn’t know for a long time,” Brenna said. “When I challenged her, she denied it. She didn’t believe it possible, and she wouldn’t stop helping the ill. I thought she was wrong, and I worried. So I told Vali, and we agreed we should send for you. She doesn’t know we did.”

Leif understood only one thing. “I need to see her. You have the sick in the hall?”

Vali nodded and stepped to his horse. “Yes, but Olga is in her house. I’ll take you to her.”

“I know where her house is.”

“And yet, I will take you to her.”

Arguing only slowed him down, and Leif felt as though his head might burst, so full of worry was it. So he nodded his agreement.

Before Leif could get to his horse, Brenna was on him again, embracing him. “This is the last time I’ll be able to be close with you until the sickness passes. Once you go into town, Vali won’t let you be here.”

The implications finally landed hard on Leif’s shoulders, and he turned to Ulv. “Now, we part. Stay here. If you wish to stay close, then be here. If you wish to return home, I give you leave. But you have no cause to take the risk of the contagion. You know no one here.”

Ulv huffed as if he were offended. “I know you. You are my jarl, and I am here to be at your back. I go where you go. I might be of use in the town.”

Vali regarded Åke’s son seriously. “Or you might take ill and die eight hundred miles from home.”

“Mayhap. I know my duty. And my loyalty. I am not my father, Vali Storm-Wolf.”

“It would seem you are not.” Vali gave Leif a significant look, and Leif, understanding it, nodded. “Very well, then. I am sure you can be of use.”

~oOo~

On the ride into town, Vali told Leif and Ulv that in the weeks that the plague had gripped them, they had lost more than two hundred souls, and nearly that many were yet ill. Half the town’s population had been brought low, or brought down, by this plague.

But the past week had brought only ten newly ill, and Vali called that great progress. He thought perhaps they were reaching the end of their trial—the beginning of its end, at the least. At the rate that the plague had taken the ill thus far, he yet expected to bury another few score more bodies.

Jakob and Hans were both dead. Bjarke and Orm had fallen. Bjarke was well again, but Orm remained ill, caught in a murky place of gravely poor, but no longer worsening, health. Several of the ill were in that place. Vali described it as leaning on the doorway to the next world.

Vali, Jaan, Georg, and Harald all appeared immune. When Leif pointed that out, Vali offered him a tired, humorless chuckle. “I would have said that about Olga not long ago. Until everyone is well, I won’t guess at the whims of this disease. She couldn’t understand it, either. It is like nothing she’s ever seen.”

“How is she, Vali? In truth.”

Vali pulled up his horse and turned to face Leif. “She is poorly. She has been insensible for days now.”

“And the babe?” Leif’s heart gained an extra beat at the question and its thought.

“I don’t know. Beyond my ken. But Brenna’s mother, Dagmar, and Olga’s apprentice, Frida, are in charge of the healing now. And they are worried.”

Leif nudged his horse into a gallop and left Vali and Ulv to catch up. He knew where Olga was.

~oOo~

He frightened young Frida when he stormed into the house, but she recognized him right away, and her expression shifted from shock to something much softer. Relief, perhaps. Without a word, she tipped her head to the back room, through the open doorway, where Olga’s bed was. Leif wasted no time. He heard Vali step into the house behind him, but Vali, at that moment, was irrelevant.

The goats and chickens were gone, and the room was deadly quiet but for the strident rasp of labored breathing. She lay on the bed, under furs, her long hair that he loved so much loose and flowing over the bed. She was propped high on a mound of more furs, and her head lolled to the side.

Her skin was red—bright red, nearly glowing in the candlelight—and her eyes seemed crusted shut. She breathed that rattling, wheezing rasp from her open mouth. The movement of her chest was so erratic and shallow that Leif couldn’t believe air was moving into her body.

She was dying. Anyone who looked could see it.

Looking, he could also see quite clearly, even under the furs, the small but obvious mound of her belly. Their child inside her ill and failing body. The love of his life and his eighth child on the brink of death. Leif wondered what it was he had done to earn such contempt from the gods.

He went to her and crouched at the side of the bed. Digging under the furs, he found her hot, dry hand and closed it in his own. “Olga. I am here, and I am not leaving. I will not go from you again, ever.
Ma armastan sind
.”

He leaned over and kissed her, long and gently, on the mouth.

Olga swam through a fog made of molten iron, and she was drowning. It coursed through and around her, filled her lungs, her brain, and her blood, and she knew nothing but its heat. Any other sensation or impression came at her from a long distance, muffled and distorted by the warp of the searing heat and burning pain.

Sometimes, she would catch a glimpse of something—a touch or a sound or a taste—and she would want to hold onto it, but it was gone before she even understood what it had been. Sometimes, she would think she understood—the sound of a voice she loved, or the press of lips on hers—but they were things that couldn’t be real, and she let them go.

What wouldn’t go was heat and pain.

~oOo~

Olga woke to darkness, a relentless black, and her first thought—the first one she was able to keep hold of in what felt like a very long time—was that she had been wrong, and there was a level of wakefulness after death. She believed that the spirit left with the body, that the body went into the earth to become a part of the circle again, renewed and changed, and that the spirit evanesced. But that first thought, that she had died and woken into a black abyss, frightened her more than she had ever felt fear before.

Then she felt a pull on her eyelids and realized that her eyes were closed and would not be easily opened. At that, she had her first fully coherent thought: the plague. She had fallen ill. The sickness swelled and gummed the chest, eyes, and nose.

Her chest felt both swollen full and crushed flat, and every breath came in like the air was full of metal shards. But she was awake and alive, and she thought that meant that she had survived the illness—or would, at least.

Finding her hands, she brought them to her face—an effort that seemed far beyond her capability—and rubbed until she could open her eyes.

The room, her room, was dim, but not deep dark. Light shone through the closed shutters, enough to tell her that it was day.

She was alone—no, she wasn’t. From the foreroom, she heard low voices and the familiar sounds of a meal being had. When she opened her mouth and tried to speak, nothing would come. Barely even a breath could come.

As soon as she gave up, she began to cough, and she had never known physical pain so intense. She tried to roll to her side, to curl up and find some kind of comfort, but her strength was not sufficient even for movement such as that. She could only lie where she was and let the cough have her.

Then the people of the foreroom were with her, and Olga was too shocked to feel pain. Hunching through the low doorway was a golden giant. Her golden giant. Leif.

He met her eyes and smiled broadly, even as his brow was furrowed with worry. “Olga!” he said and sat at the side of the bed. Without hesitating, as if it were a move he knew well, he pulled her gently forward until she leaned against his chest, and he patted her back. She felt the press of his lips on her head.

When the fit finally eased, she remained resting there, framed within his arms, and his patting changed to a sweeping caress, long ovals up and down her back. After a few moments of quiet, he murmured, “Are you with me?”

Olga was in strident pain, and she was exhausted and confused. She wasn’t sure what he was asking her—if she was still awake? Or if she was with him in a greater sense? In any case, it didn’t matter. Right now, she was so relieved that he was with her that she would have wept, had she had the strength. Whatever he meant by his question, there was one answer.

She nodded.

Leif’s embrace tightened tenderly, and he laid her back on the bed. He brushed her hair back and smiled down at her. “I have no words to say how glad I am to see your beautiful eyes again.”

“You’re here,” she tried to say, but all she could do was shape her lips to the words. No sound left her throat.

He seemed to understand her nonetheless. “I am here. I’m not leaving you. Not ever again. I love you.” He moved one hand and rested it on her belly. “I love you both.”

Olga thought that a very strange thing to say, but the fog was filling her head again, and she shut her eyes.

~oOo~

When she next woke, it was night. The hot, crushing pain still filled her, but it did not seem so much to consume her, and her mind felt more her own. She remembered her last waking as if it had been a dream, but she could make sense of it. Leif was here.

At that thought, she cast her eyes around the dim room. It was dark, but she could make out the shapes of her sparse furniture and see the soft moonlight through the shutters.

And the large, still form lying on the floor at the side of her bed. Leif was
here
.

She moved her hand from under the furs and let it drop off the bed until she could tangle her fingers in his hair. He flinched instantly at her touch—he could not have been deeply asleep—and sat up.

The room was too dark to see him clearly, but what light there was showed his silhouette and a pale gleam at his eyes. She smiled and tried to say his name, but no sound would come forth.

He moved, and she felt his hand on her forehead. “You are cool. Thank the gods. Olga, are you with me?”

Recalling that he’d asked her the same question before, she still wasn’t sure what he meant—and it still didn’t matter. She nodded.

Leif came up from the floor and sat at her side, facing her. He leaned to her little table and poured water into a cup. As he helped her drink, he asked. “How do you feel?”

She couldn’t answer, so after the pleasure of the cool water had ended, she tried to make a shrug, but that hurt.

“Forgive me. I’m relieved to have you awake and getting well. You were very ill, Olga.”

She nodded; she knew. As her mind cleared and hooked its hands around reality, many things she knew emerged from the fog—and many things she wondered. But she had no way to seek answers to her wondering.

After a moment of quiet, Leif laid his hand on her belly—and something else she had known before broke free of the fog. She was with child. She had been, at least. Her hands went to her belly, too, and Leif moved his to make room for her. She was relieved to find the slight roundness still there.

He covered her hand with his own. “Do you know if the child is well? Can you tell?”

She remembered having felt a few flutters just as she had taken ill. She had no understanding of how long ago that had been. In this moment, she lay quietly for a few heartbeats and tried to feel. All she felt was the thick pain in her chest and the sharp pain behind her eyes and in her throat. She shook her head.

So many questions had begun to fill her head. She didn’t know if her child still lived inside her, or if he was well. She didn’t know how or why Leif was here, or how he knew about the child—though she guessed that both of those answers would have to do with Vali and Brenna. She didn’t know what it meant for her, for them, that Leif was here with her. She didn’t know what it changed about all that was between them.

She didn’t know why she was in her own house rather than the hall, where all the sick had been. She didn’t know how many were yet ill, how many had died, whether the end of this struggle was nigh. She didn’t know if Vali and Brenna or any of her other friends still lived, if they were well. She didn’t know, she couldn’t ask, and she was already exhausted again from trying to sort through her thoughts.

All she knew was that she would live, and that Leif was here, holding her hand.

~oOo~

Dagmar held up the silk sleeping shift, the vibrant color of rosebay, that Olga had made for herself in a time that seemed long ago. She shook her head.

Ignoring her completely, Dagmar pulled the silk over Olga’s head and held it up until she slid her arms through. “He has barely left your side, you know. And today is the first time since he arrived that he has stepped out of reach of the front door.”

A week had passed since Olga had first come back to her senses. She was not well yet, but every day brought improvement. Yet her voice remained elusive. The breath she needed to make sound was still too much to spend.

Today, for the first time, Dagmar had helped her wash fully. Not in a bath, but with warm water and a sponge, all over her body. When she had been shy to disrobe before Leif, Dagmar had shooed him away.

Once bare, she had stared long at her belly. It was larger than it had been. Not much, but enough for her to see the difference.

And she could feel the babe move. He, or she, was still alive inside her, and every day he, or she, moved more noticeably.

Leif had been with her when she had first felt stirrings again. Through pantomime, she had managed to tell him what she could feel.

He had kissed her belly and then laid his head on it and wet it with tears.

Olga felt confused by her lack of inner conflict concerning Leif. He had betrayed her, he had caused her horror and pain, and she had lost everything because he had broken her trust. She had sent him away because she knew she could never trust him again, and she had spent months despondent and alone.

And now none of that seemed to matter. It should have mattered, and each day, Olga told herself that it would matter again, when her mind was clearer, when she was stronger, more well. Every day she felt clearer and stronger, and yet every day it mattered not.

She loved him, that had never been in doubt, but she wasn’t sure if she trusted him. How could she? The past was unchanged. Her loss was unchanged. His treachery—unchanged.

Perhaps it was only the babe, their child, pulling his, or her, parents together.

Dagmar took the washbowl and linen away, and Olga heard her moving about in the foreroom. The aroma of a kettle of skause on the fire began to waft into the air. Olga’s belly rumbled—and then fluttered. She smiled and set her hand over the spot. She could not yet feel her child moving against her hand, but inside, the feeling was unmistakable.

When Dagmar came back, she picked up Olga’s comb—an elaborately carved piece that had been a gift from Jakob—and pulled a stool close so she could work the comb through Olga’s tangled mass of hair.

“Frida will come to check on you shortly, and tonight she might make a visit of it. There are only eighteen ill yet in the hall, and most of them are recovering. No new ill for three days. She is going to sleep the whole night tonight in her bed. Though I suppose that her bed won’t be hers for much longer. She was in Amund’s house as Jakob’s wife. She will have to find a new place to live.” Dagmar gave Olga an unnecessarily meaningful look. Olga didn’t need prompting; she would be happy to have Frida living with her again.

She patted her chest lightly and then pointed down at the floor. “She should come here,” she barely whispered.

Dagmar smiled. “I think that would be well, for Frida to be in the healer’s house. She has great skill, that young one. You’ve taught her well.”