God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) (3 page)

A friend, then. Or at least an ally. Brenna relaxed and moved downriver again, leaving space for privacy. He was no threat to her.

As she washed, stretching out on the grass and pushing her face and then her head into the chill current, she took a long draught of the fresh water. She could feel the fire leaching from her sinews, bringing her calm. A sharp sting reminded her that she had cut her forehead on a soldier’s mouth. It was her only injury, and for that she counted herself fortunate. Five raiders had gone to Valhalla in the fighting with the soldiers.

She pulled back, throwing her head to clear the water from her face, and then sat up, cross-legged, setting her sword and shield at her side.

“You bleed still.”

Brenna jumped and grabbed her sword at the voice so near. Standing a few feet away and behind her was the berserker who’d saved her life. It had been he under the frigid waterfall. He was clean and dripping water, his hair and beard nearly black with wet, and his leather breeches soaked. In one hand was the undyed wool of a rough tunic; in the other, his axe.

Their people were not small people, but this man was nearly a giant. He was tall and broad, muscles like boulders swelling his arms, his chest, his neck, his shoulders. His beard was dark, long, and thick. His head was shorn at the sides, leaving the top to grow long. It had been tightly braided earlier, but now it lay in a loose, wet hank down his back. The skin across his chest and over his shoulders was decorated in elaborate tattoos.

He glanced at her sword hand, gripping the hilt. “I am no threat to you, Brenna God’s-Eye.”

Although she had found a kind of camaraderie among her fellow raiders, people rarely spoke to her one on one, except to give orders, make requests, or negotiate for trade. She spent her winters alone. Brenna didn’t know how to keep company. Not knowing what to say next, she said nothing. She dropped her hand from her sword and turned back to the river, expecting him to walk on.

He did not. Instead, he sat down at her side. “I can make a paste that will stop the blood and make the scar less. The herbs here are not so different from home.”

She was about to protest that the wound was not so bad, when blood dripped from her brow and landed low on her cheek. The river water had opened it again. She wiped the blood away and said nothing.

Undeterred by her reticence, he opened the bundle of his tunic, in which he had a collection of mosses and flowers. Brenna recognized some, but she knew little of healing. She had diligently avoided learning any of that, always fearing that she’d somehow end up the crone in the woods her mother had meant her to be.

He tore pieces of some and then scooped up mud from the bank and mashed it all together, softening it with water. When he turned and brought his hands toward her face, meaning to touch her, Brenna flinched back, and he paused. But he did not drop his hands.

“I mean you no harm. Did I not save your life today?”

He had. With a deep breath for calm, she remained still and let him smooth the paste on her forehead. It was cool and soothing, and she closed her eyes, trying to remember when she’d last been touched so gently. She could not.

“You saved me once,” he said, close enough that she felt the breath of his words on her face.

Brenna opened her eyes and met his. She was sure that she had never raided with him before, and she was sure she had not saved him today. She furrowed the brow that he was tending.

“I think not.”

He smiled. And then he stuck his tongue out at her.

She was about to pull away, offended, when she saw a small nick in the side of his tongue.

The boy in the woods, all those years ago. The first time she’d ever felt the fire of battle rage. That, she remembered, and remembering, she recognized his bright blue eyes.

But he had been like all the others—fearful, even as she gave him aid.

“You were afraid of me.”

His ministrations completed, he sat back, then leaned to the river and washed his hands in the clear water. “I was young and stupid and under the thumb of a stupider man. I’m sorry for that.”

“Why? Everyone is afraid. I am Brenna God’s-Eye.”

“You are. And a magnificent eye it is. Why be afraid of a gift like that? It seems to me a great honor.”

Again, Brenna looked away, turning her attention to the water before them. She didn’t want it to be true. It wasn’t true. She was nothing special, and she didn’t want to be. They said her valor as a shieldmaiden came from her eye. It did not. It came from her heart. She wasn’t magical; she was strong.

But none of that mattered. People believed what they wanted to believe. Brenna sighed. There had been a moment, just a flash, when she’d felt something new with this man. He’d treated her like a person. But he was the same as the rest, even if he no longer feared her.

A small fish jumped out of the current, flipped, and fell back. She had a thought that she would go back to camp for a fishing spear.

“You saved me. More than my tongue. I left that day and never returned, and my life has honor it would never have known had I stayed. I wanted you to know that. I wanted to give you thanks. I am Vali, and I am at your service.”

With that, he stood, picked up his bundle and his axe, and headed back to camp.

Vali returned to camp and brought his bundle of gathered herbs and mosses to Sven, a raider whose mother, like Vali’s, had been a healer, and who tended to their wounded. Then he pulled his tunic on over his head, fixed his belt and axe over it, and sought a place to rest. The camp was made and reinforced. Other than the guards stationed around the perimeter and the scouts still away, the raiders were at their leisure to refresh themselves.

A newly dressed deer was spitted over the main fire. After days of drinking only rationed water and eating salt cod and leiv bread on the boat, the thought of meat and mead made Vali’s stomach rumble. He wasn’t the only one; the whole camp was calmer than when he’d walked off to find a place to wash, and many of his fellows were sitting watching the animal roast, as if it were entertainment.

The captive women, bound with rope by their necks and hands, had been tied together at a stake and were cowering in a cluster. Several were barely dressed any longer, and the summer season was aging into winter chill, so they huddled for warmth, he guessed, as much as comfort. But they had been left alone, the men distracted by the promise of hot, heavy food. Vali was glad.

He didn’t like this Jarl Åke, or his son Calder, who was leading this raid. Both men were brutal leaders and had fostered brutality among their clan. Jarl Snorri, to whom Vali had long ago sworn fealty, would not have allowed the savagery that had gone on today. He would have taken the captives, yes. He would have taken all the survivors captive, in fact, not slaughtered women, children, and old ones and left them to rot in the dirt. Snorri would have taken them as slaves for trade. And he would have made the women work. He would not have left them to the violent whims of men drunk on bloodlust.

But Snorri had allied with Jarl Åke for this raid, and Åke’s son had been made leader over all the raiders. Vali hadn’t understood the alliance, but once they’d arrived and had moved so far inland, and now that they were camped and scouting for the castle of the ruler of this place, he thought he understood better. This was no mere raid. More was happening.

He knew not what, and it wasn’t his place to know. He followed his jarl. Freemen had a voice, and often a vote, in clan decisions, including raids, but to go against the jarl was dangerous business. Vali had never seen a reason to take a risk like that.

There had been one reason he had been glad to know they were allying with Jarl Åke: Brenna God’s-Eye fought for him. She had changed Vali’s life, and he had thanked the gods for the chance to tell her so.

Her name was known far and wide. The shieldmaiden who bore the eye of the Allfather, the girl who had sold herself into slavery and then had been freed when she’d singlehandedly saved the jarl’s wife and children during a failed insurrection.

The stories varied in the details, whether she had fought five men or ten, whether she had fought them off with one of their own swords or with a spit from the cooking fire. But the stories all said that she fought with the power of all the gods. They said she glowed. They said she rose up like a giant above her foes and drove them to the ground.

He knew the stories to be true. He remembered the small girl who had saved him, who had faced his beast of a father down and sent him skittering away with only the power of her voice and her fantastic eye.

And now, with his own two unremarkable eyes, he had seen her fight. She did glow. She did rise up above her enemies and smite them down. But not with magic.

With inner fire. With will. With spirit.

Such a marvelous creature she was.

Vali had watched her these days since the two parties had become one at Geitland. When they’d been gathered in Åke’s great hall, and then when they’d embarked in their longships, he’d kept her in his sight as much as he could.

It wasn’t difficult to do. She was always off on her own, along the edges of the group. Jarl Åke had named her personally as he’d spoken his words to send them off in the good will of the gods, and Vali had seen her drop her head at that.

People no longer tried to ward her away, but no one made any attempt to speak directly to her, either. She was treated as an icon of reverence, someone too powerful to touch. She moved through and around those near her as if she were invisible, when the opposite was true. Everyone noticed her, but no one made eye contact with her if they could avoid it.

She rarely spoke. She never smiled.

No—once, he thought, she had. On the sea, on a bright day of good wind after a hard night of storms, their ships had regained proximity with each other and sailed nearly side by side. Vali saw her at the prow, her arms around the carved dragon head, her fair hair blowing loose from its plaits. He thought he saw her smile then, turned away from all those she knew and facing the adventure ahead.

Whether she had truly smiled then or not, it was the first time he’d known he wanted more than merely the chance to thank her. He wanted the chance to know her.

She had been cold to him at the bank of the stream, but he wasn’t deterred. He owed her his life. His father might not have killed him that day in the woods; he might only have rendered him mute. But he would likely have killed him in short time.

It was more than simply his breathing body he owed the shieldmaiden, however. He was a man of honor, a warrior with renown of his own, and he would not have been had not the courage of a small girl with a strange eye shaken him to his toes.

His friend Erik sat at his side and handed him a horn of mead. As Vali nodded his thanks and took a long draught, Erik elbowed him, grinning amiably.

“Your sorceress returns.”

Erik nodded toward the far edge of camp, and Vali turned and saw Brenna walk in, past the spitted deer, and to a basket of leiv bread. She picked up two flat, round loaves and walked back the way she’d come, her full skin of water rocking at her hip, still dripping. She must have filled it at the stream. As always, people stepped out of her way, as if a force around her pushed them all two or three steps back.

Bread and water. While the air was redolent of roasting meat, and sweet mead flowed freely.

“Be careful, my friend,” Erik said at his ear as Vali swiveled his head to watch Brenna walk just out of camp and settle herself alone at the base of a tree. “She is beautiful, but many women are beautiful, and no other poses such a risk. Who knows how she might bewitch you. That is no mere shieldmaiden. That eye.” He shuddered. “If not the gift of Odin, then the judgment of Mimir. In any case, a man could be unmanned. I would not risk so much.”

Vali thought her eye lovely, not fearsome. Bestowed by the gods or not, it made her more beautiful to him. The eye no one noticed was lovely, too: a blue clear like summer sky.

She
was
beautiful, with a long, graceful neck, high cheekbones, and full red lips. Her fair hair was long and wild. On the day they’d left Geitland, the mass had been tidily trained in elaborate braids, but the ensuing days, with a rough sail and a tough fight, had loosened strands and left a halo of pale fire around her head. When the sun shone behind her, she did seem to glow indeed.

Though she had been small when he’d first seen her, now she was tall and strong, the power of her body obvious in the snug confines of her boiled leather breeches and tunic. She carried herself straight as a sword. She was magnificent.

Erik had gibed at him relentlessly since they’d first stood in Jarl Åke’s hall and Vali had laid eyes on Brenna. He supposed he hadn’t been subtle, drawn as he was to keeping her in sight, even as others looked away.

“Then I am more man than you,” he said with a grin and stood, taking Erik’s horn from him. Ignoring the protest of his friend, Vali went and refilled both horns and then carried them through the camp to the tree where Brenna sat.

As he approached, she looked up and glared at him with her bewitching eyes. The paste he’d made to heal her wound had hardened and paled, and it cracked slightly with her scowl.

She was among the raiders who painted their faces before battle, and she had landed on the beach that morning with her eyes lined heavily in black, the lines radiating from her storied right eye like rays of dark light. The effect had been eerie and had heightened the sense that it, that she, was more than human.

But her wash in the stream had cleansed most of that away, leaving smudges of grey that made her appear weary.

“Water is a paltry quench after a fight like today’s.” He crouched before her and held out a horn.

She didn’t take it. “You need not serve me,” she said, her hands in her lap.

Still holding out the horn of mead, he sat. “I’m not. I would like to join you.”

She frowned. “Why? What is it you want?”

“Only your company. Need you no friend, Brenna God’s-Eye?”

“No.”

Vali disbelieved that strenuously. Perhaps no one in all the worlds needed a friend so much as this girl sitting here. Having experience with that feeling himself, he smiled. “Well, I do. Drink with me.”

Though she still glared, she finally took the horn, casting a suspicious grimace into its contents before taking an experimental sip. As if he might have poisoned the mead.

After a moment’s quiet, she said, “If you seek a boon—”

“I do not. Except, as I said, your company. Perhaps some conversation.”

At that, she stared, her suspicion replaced by something that looked more like alarm.

But she was saved from the ordeal of talking to him by the sound of an actual alarm: the blow of a horn that meant the enemy approached—at a charge. They both stood, and Vali, in a move of instinct and habit, put his body in front of hers.

She scoffed loudly and stepped around him, her sword and shield already in hand. He pulled his axe from its ring on his belt as the horn blew again.

Their people were people of war and battle, and the camp before them had shifted from leisure to readiness fluidly and nearly instantly. As warriors and shieldmaidens abandoned their rest and prepared to fight, Brenna stalked forward, toward the heart of the camp. Vali kept step with her, picking up a racked spear as he passed it, without breaking stride.

There was no enemy in sight yet, but they could hear the thunder of galloping hooves. On horseback, then. No shield wall could withstand an onslaught of riders.

As if to answer the drumming hooves, raiders began to beat their axes and swords on their shields. Brenna did not. She took her place just behind Calder, and she bent her head forward and was perfectly still, staring ahead, shield and sword at the ready. Those around her made extra space, and she seemed to radiate focus and menace.

Vali, the biggest of them all, stood at her side. He carried no shield, but he drummed the spear into the ground in time with the beat that had taken over the camp, so heavy and loud that the air shook.

Horses broke through the trees, bearing archers at the front, firing as they cleared the tree line. Arrows began to rain down on the camp, and shields went up. Vali crouched for cover and scanned the scene, looking for his first target.

The archer at the center was clearly their most skilled shot. He’d gotten three arrows off and had already nocked a fourth when Vali stepped out from the cover of the shields and charged forward, setting his feet and then hurling the spear with all his might. It sailed past the line of archers and impaled the man riding behind the center. The man he’d aimed for.