God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) (4 page)

That man wore a gleaming chain across his chest and a crimson cloak, and he’d been protected by their best archer. He was important.

And he fell dead from his black horse just as the archers, too close now for attack, pulled off and let the swordsmen through.

“VALI!” he heard Erik call. Knowing why his friend would hail him at such a time, Vali glanced back just quickly enough to set his aim and then held out his hand. Erik threw a second axe, and Vali caught it.

And now he was ready. As the first wave of mounted swordsmen came upon them, he bellowed and raised both of his axes.

Scores of riders had descended on the camp. When fighting on foot against riders, unseating them was vitally important—without killing the horse, if possible, but sometimes killing the horse was the most expedient path, and then that horse was meat.

The raiders were outnumbered, and expediency was crucial. So Vali went for the nearest horse first, burying an axe into its leg. When it came down, shrieking, he swung the other axe and separated the rider from his sword arm. Like the soldiers earlier in the day, these men wore mail tunics, so as the man fell, Vali sank his axe into his neck for the killing blow, and a great gout of hot blood sprayed Vali in the face.

He shook the blood from his eyes, and, with the preternatural sense that came with battle rage, spun just as an Estlander had raised his sword. Vali blocked him with one axe and buried the other in his exposed side.

In the efficient style he had learned and honed since he’d first begun training, Vali charged and spun, hacking and slicing his way through four more men, his throat roughening with his war cries, and no foe dealing him more than the most glancing blow.

Bloodlust, battle rage—these were the ways his fellows described the sing of their blood through their bodies, the heat of the fight in their minds, and Vali understood these. But for him it was more than that. He became something else, something other than human. Every impact of his axe gave him more power, not less, as if he took his foe’s life force into his own body. It fed a bestial hunger that heightened his senses and shrank his focus. Nothing existed but the fight.

And yet, today, he found himself sparing a glance every now and then for Brenna. His eyes seemed always to find her at once, as if he had already known where she was without seeking her out. She fought with fire and fury, using shield and sword with precision and might greater than one woman’s body should hold.

He didn’t allow himself the luxury of admiration, not then. He sought her, saw her, understood that she needed no assistance, then focused his senses again on his own fight.

Soon he’d created a pocket of quiet in the chaos, killing all those near him. His focus flared outward, seeking more fight. The horse he’d hobbled, nearly severing its foreleg, screamed its suffering. Before he moved on into the battle, meaning to join Brenna, Vali took the time to open the horse’s throat and give it ease.

An Estlander fell on him while he was still pulling his axe through the horse’s neck. Vali had just time to duck from the blow, which sliced into his back, opening him, but did not cleave his head from his body. Too drunk on the fight to feel pain, he saw his chance for a killing blow and tried to lift his dominant arm, but he found that it weighed much more than it should have. The axe that hand held fell to the ground, sinking into the earth made sodden by the horse’s ocean of blood.

He had never lost his axe. In all his years of fighting, no man had ever disarmed him. Few had ever wounded him.

He was confused by that for just a moment, and then he remembered he had a weapon and an arm left. But when he raised that arm to block the next blow from his enemy, the impact knocked the axe from his hand as well.

The Estlander smiled. He had blackened his teeth, surely in an effort to terrify. But Vali was a berserker. His greatest weapon was his fearlessness, and even as death stood before him, he saw only a man with black teeth.

And then an otherworldly shriek lanced through Vali’s head, and a spirit glowing with bright fire rose up above the Estlander and brought a mighty sword down. The Estlander’s head dropped heavily from his shoulders and rolled downhill, losing its helm along the way. His body crumpled, first to its knees, and then dropped forward.

Vali’s body mirrored it. He fell to his knees and then forward, into the deepening, still-hot pool of horse’s blood. His face sank in, and he knew enough to hold his breath—though why he bothered, he wasn’t sure.

Brenna, his glowing spirit, caught him by the arm and dragged him out of the blood. Ignoring the battle around them, she crouched near his head and peered into his face. With one hand, she roughly wiped the blood from his eyes and nose.

She wasn’t gentle, and her hand had been coarsened by war and work. But Vali felt nothing but pleasure in the touch.

“It seems we’re fated to save each other, Brenna God’s-Eye.”

He didn’t know whether he’d given those words voice or had merely thought them, and he doubted that she had saved him from anything but a speedier death than he now faced, but she gave him a brusque nod and then leapt up and rejoined the fight.

Vali lay with his face in the bloody mud and waited for the Valkyries to carry him away.

Blood had so soaked the earth that Brenna’s boots sank to her ankles with every step. Then, of a sudden, while the raiders separated their dead and wounded from the remains of their vanquished foes, the twilight sky went near full dark and opened up, driving sheets of frigid rain down, as if the gods sought to cleanse the earth themselves.

Torches guttered out in the torrent, and the raiders finished their work in the dark, leaving the dead soldiers to the elements and bringing their own close. They had lost seven more, five men and two women. Of the shieldmaidens on this raid, only Brenna and one other yet survived. Twelve raiders lost in all, and six wounded gravely. Brenna couldn’t recall a raid when they’d lost so many.

Among the gravely wounded was the berserker Vali, who seemed to wish friendship with her, for reasons she had not yet discerned. His back had been opened, rending his woolen tunic nearly in two. The gash was deep and long, from his shoulder to nearly his waist. When she had pulled him out of the deep pool of blood, she had seen the white gleam of ribs. She didn’t believe any man could survive such a wound.

With their dead as well tended as they could be in the storm, Brenna went to the healer’s tent and ducked inside. Candlelight flickered with a near blinding brightness after the deep dark of the night storm outside.

The healer and his two helpers—one of them a captive woman, Brenna noticed—looked over as she entered. The healer and the raider both nodded without meeting her eyes. The captive woman, though, let her glance linger, her brow furrowing as she noticed Brenna’s right eye. And then she looked away.

But there had been something different in that woman’s glance. Though she was a captive, and rightly anxious, still there had been something more normal in her curiosity. It gave Brenna a moment’s pause.

Then she saw Vali, lying on his stomach, his bare back exposed. The healer was sewing the gash closed with a bone needle, making large, rough stitches with coarse black thread. Brenna’s own flesh tightened as she imagined the pain.

If the healer were taking such care, though, then there was a chance Vali would live.

“How is he?” she asked, surprising herself and the healer, too. He looked up at her in shock, his eyes lifting no higher than her mouth.

“There is no offal in his blood. He might yet live if the bleeding stops.”

Healers tasted the blood in a wounded torso to determine the severity of a wound. The taste of offal meant that vital workings had been rent, and there was little a healer could do in such a case. Vali had been fortunate, then.

“See, Brenna God’s-Eye?” Vali gasped from the ground, his voice weak and hoarse. “We are fated to save each other.”

She hadn’t known he was awake. It would have been a mercy had he not been, as the healer speared his ravaged flesh and pulled the rough-spun thread through again and again, sealing the long wound. The pain must have been enormous. Brenna knew something like it; she bore a savage scar on one thigh and another across one shoulder, and both of the wounds that had caused the scars had been sewn together. She, though, had been made to sleep by the healer both times and knew only the pain upon waking.

And yet, with his face turned toward her and away from the healer, still covered in a dark mask of blood, he smiled. “Will you sit?”

Brenna turned and considered the opening of the tent. The rain was too heavy and the night too dark for Calder to call the raiders together to discuss the next move. But she wasn’t sure what she would do in here, sitting in the way of the healer.

Yet she couldn’t make herself refuse him. She sat at his shoulder. The healer paused his sewing, his mouth agape. When he started again, Vali groaned.

“Is the pain very bad?” she asked, fighting a sudden urge to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.

His smile grew, and his eyes met hers. “It was. And then you sat with me.”

With that, he closed his eyes. Brenna sat quietly while the healer sewed. Then she noticed that each time the needle pierced his skin, Vali’s hand twitched. Following an impulse she didn’t understand, she leaned forward and set her hand in his, wrapping her fingers around the hard, broad mass as best she could. His fingers closed over hers, and he was still.

Brenna felt deeply confused.

~oOo~

“To have such a force arrive in the same day, the seat of this lord must be very close.” Calder turned to Leif, his closest advisor. “None of them will speak yet?”

Leif shook his head. “Four died in the night. Two are near death. Only three might speak, and they are staunchly silent.”

Calder shook his head. “And no word of the scouts?”

“No.” Leif took a deep breath and let it out. “We can assume they’re dead.”

One of the scouts was Leif’s own son, Einar, only fourteen and on his first raid. Both were young, barely men, but Halvar, the other, was at the end of his third raiding season.

The morning had broken bright and clear, and those raiders who could were seated in the middle of camp, planning their next move. Brenna sat on the edge of the group, but close to Calder. She knew her place as protector—and as talisman. She had once saved Calder’s stepmother and younger siblings, and he didn’t like her far from him on a raid.

He had never said as much. Calder, like all the others, kept personal distance and rarely spoke directly to her except to issue an order. But he called her close when he needed her, and he sought her, even met her eyes, when he had a problem to solve.

He did so now. As always, she simply gazed steadily back and let him take from that whatever he needed. Whatever mystical power she had came from the people who projected it onto her from their own superstitions, their own needs.

Such was her role and her fate, she’d come to understand: to be the proxy for the fears and desires of others.

Taking what he needed from Brenna’s fixed gaze, he turned back to the group. “We need to know who the cloaked man was. He was important. We might have learned much from him, had Vali been temperate.”

“Because he fell so quickly, the soldiers lost focus. They were on horseback. We were greatly outnumbered, and we were weary already. We might well have been overrun if Vali hadn’t taken down their leader.”

Brenna turned to the speaker—a short, bull-necked man pledged to Jarl Snorri, with close-cropped, flaming red hair and a full beard. Brenna had seen him talking with Vali, but she didn’t know his name.

“Erik speaks true,” said another, answering the question Brenna hadn’t asked. “We owe our victory to Vali’s spear.”

Calder seemed irritated by the dispute of his own opinion, but he let it stand. He turned back to Leif. “We need to know, or we lose this chance. We cannot take the time to send more scouts. Our time is now. How many soldiers have we slain?”

“Two hundred and twenty,” came the answer.

“Two hundred and twenty,” Calder repeated. “We have been outnumbered at every turn and yet victorious. The gods are with us, and we must take what they’ve offered us. We must strike before the lord here can gather allies and reinforcements. Make the soldiers talk.”

He turned and stormed off toward his tent.

Brenna wondered why they would strike. They had raided well the day before, taking much plunder, and they had vanquished two attacks as well. That would afford them the space to refresh and recuperate. They should pull in, bury their dead, protect the camp until their wounded could sail, and then return home.

Moreover, the summer neared its end. They needed to be home.

Instead, Leif stood. “Knut, Oluf, come. The rest of you, take the time to make yourselves ready. We have not seen the last of blood here.”

Brenna watched the three men walk toward the captive soldiers.

She didn’t like not understanding, and on this raid, it seemed she understood very little.

~oOo~

Vali was asleep when Brenna went into the healer’s tent after the meeting. She had stayed long the night before, well after his back had been closed, until his hand relaxed and freed hers. They hadn’t spoken again.

She had found peace, sitting there quietly as he rested, holding his hand.

Another of the wounded had died while the raiders met, and the healer was preparing his body for removal as Brenna crouched at Vali’s side and laid her hand on his brow. He was warm. Too warm.

When the body had been carried out, Brenna turned to the healer. “He’s hot.”

Without looking at her, the healer nodded. “Yes. Corruption in the wound. I’ll prepare a poultice, but he is in the gods’ hands.” He stopped and met her eyes directly. “If he matters to you, you might use your influence.”

She had none. But it was pointless to say. So she simply turned back to Vali and watched as her hand, without her intention, smoothed over the stubbled skin of his shorn scalp. Her fingertips combed lightly through his long hair. It was stiff with blood.

He stirred and groaned at her touch, and his eyes blinked open. “Brenna…” he rasped, seeing her. “Are you real?”

It was rare that she heard her given name only, without the addendum that made her both less and more than she truly was. Something fluttered in her belly. Hearing only ‘Brenna,’ she felt for a moment like the girl she knew she was. She felt real.

“I am.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. Brenna sat with him, watching the healer make his poultice and listening to the screams of the soldier Leif and his men had chosen to make speak.

~oOo~

Brenna sat with Vali while the poultice was applied and held his hand as the hot, acrid-smelling cloths made him tense and moan. She didn’t understand the draw she felt toward him. It was physical, something deep inside her that knew ease when he was close. His pain pained her. The thought that he was dying made her chest feel tight.

She knew him not at all, and yet she was comforted by his presence, and by the idea that her presence comforted him.

Perhaps it was only that no one else in years had spoken to her as simply another person. No one else in years had sought her company. Not since she’d left her parents’ home in the thick of night.

When the healer was done with him, Vali slept again, his breathing harsh and irregular. It seemed to Brenna that his color was wrong, but she didn’t know, and she couldn’t find the will to ask. She knew nothing of healing and wished she knew less than she did, so she put her trust in the man who knew.

The blow of a horn pulled her attention from the man sleeping before her. Two short blows and a long. An envoy approached.

Before Brenna stood, she leaned forward, realizing only at the last chance that she had meant to kiss Vali’s cheek. Pulling back abruptly, shocked at herself, she stood and hurried to the tent opening. The captive woman stood near the open flaps, and their eyes met. Strangely, the woman gave Brenna a kind smile. Brenna hurried past without returning it. She wasn’t sure she remembered how to smile.