God's Eye (The Northwomen Sagas #1) (9 page)

With everyone’s attention on her, Olga met Leif’s eyes. “Will you make war south?”

Leif glanced around the table, then shook his head. “No. I believe Sigvalde meant that Prince Ivan is no threat to us, not that we should raid his lands. We respect the winter, and our task is to strengthen this holding for our people.”

Olga’s smile at that was so full of relief that Brenna cocked her head, curious.

“Our plan remains the same, then,” Vali said. “Use the winter to prepare for trouble. We should stay alert, but perhaps we can enjoy some peace.” With those words he brought his eyes to Brenna and smiled.

He always looked her in the eyes. It made her feel restless and hot. She wasn’t so naïve that she didn’t know why her body felt as it did, or why her mind brought him to the fore in such vivid detail when she was alone. But she didn’t understand why she was drawn to him. She didn’t understand what it would mean if she gave in to those feelings, if she gave him what he seemed to want, what
she
seemed to want. She didn’t understand why he wanted it. Wanted her. She didn’t understand how to be wanted. She hated not understanding.

So she got up and left the table. If they could enjoy some peace, then she would do so. She would ride—away from the cold stone castle and away from Vali and things she didn’t understand.

~oOo~

It was the first time she’d ridden off alone here. They had agreed to stay in pairs when they left the castle grounds until they understood the extent of any threat against them. Now they had the knowledge they’d needed. They were safe. So she could finally get away and be alone out of doors.

Since Jarl Åke had freed her and she had become a shieldmaiden, Brenna had always left Geitland for the winter. The close crush of people there during the dead months had made her feel more of an outsider. So she had spent her winters in a small hut in the woods, not too far from her jarl, but far enough to be spared so many people, all of whom dropped their eyes or flinched back when she approached.

She had never gone back home. Geitland was far from Halsgrof, but she had the resources, should she have desired to make the journey. She had not.

She missed home. Always. Never again in her life had she truly had a home. But she had gotten word of her father’s death the year after she’d left. Only her mother was alive, the mother who had wanted to make her even more of an outcast than she was. The mother who had feared so much to lose her last child that she had forced that child to run. The competing emotions of shame and anger had kept Brenna far away.

Riding out now, alone, focused only on her thoughts and the world around her, Brenna felt the pull of homesickness more strongly than she had in years. This world, this tiny farming village, was the world of her childhood. The sights and smells and sounds were familiar and beloved.

She sat astride Freya at the top of a gentle rise and scanned the huts and reaped fields of the village. She could smell the wood smoke that wafted from chimneys and the aromas of meals being prepared in those fires. The people here had plenty for the first time in ages, because the raiders had opened the stores.

There was food left at the castle, beyond what Brenna’s people had held back for themselves. No one had taken more than they’d needed. They had been orderly, even shy. A few had come back, asking for a bit more. None had been denied. In this way, they had made the villagers allies, even though the story of their brutal sacking of the coastal village was well known here.

Nudging Freya forward, Brenna moved through the village, nodding at those who were outside at their work. She had come out to find peace, but instead, she’d found an ache she’d thought had been healed. So she urged Freya into a trot and rode on, headed to the river.

Here, far upstream from their camp, the river was wider and deeper, its current steady and smooth. She dismounted and turned Freya loose to graze at what was left of the grasses, and she sat under a tree on the bank. Its leaves had turned a rich, fiery red and fluttered steadily to the ground with every breeze.

Alone was something Brenna understood. Her parents had loved her, and she’d been happy in their home, but she had known of her difference from a young age, and she had felt her otherness keenly since. As she’d grown, as she’d begun to understand why people kept apart from her, she’d only felt it more keenly. Eventually, she had embraced it, deciding that she preferred her own company to any other. She had learned how to use others’ fear or awe to her advantage. She held solitude before her like a shield.

Here in Estland, that was changing, and she didn’t understand why. She felt lonely now. Vali was part of it, she knew that much. He had stoked a fire in her that she’d smothered long ago. But he wasn’t all of it. It was this place, too. These people. So much like home and so different, as well.

The Estlanders noticed her strange eye but didn’t fear it. There was nothing in their traditions, she guessed, that made her especially remarkable. When they wouldn’t meet her eyes, it was simple respect, not reverence. They didn’t meet Leif’s eyes, or Vali’s, either. Unless they had been addressed directly.

Oddly, these people’s lack of fear made Brenna feel more lost. Her own people, for her whole life, had treated her like something beyond human, to be feared or to be revered, but not to be known. Only to these people, these strangers, was she just a woman. Powerful, but human.

She’d been wrong. It couldn’t be homesickness she felt.

She had no home at all.

When Brenna had been gone long enough that the sun had moved into the western sky, Vali couldn’t hold back any longer. He hadn’t liked her riding off alone, no matter if the castle was free from threat for the time being, and no matter that she was a famed shieldmaiden and the God’s-Eye.

She was a woman, and here, in this place, she was only that. These people did not feel the reverence for her that kept her free from trouble at home. They did not know the stories here. And if she’d ridden out farther than the village, then she was only a woman alone.

He prepared his horse and rode out after her. With no true sense of where she might have been headed, he followed a hunch. He had noticed in her an especial affinity for the water, greater even than most coast-dwelling seafarers, such as they were. She would grow still, for just a moment, even at a water barrel. So he set out for the river beyond the village.

Although she’d been with him for long stretches of each day that he’d been trapped in bed, as soon as he was on his feet, she’d made it her daily mission to find somewhere to be that was away from him. It had been days since they’d been alone together.

He was vexed beyond measure. While she’d sat at his sick bed, he’d gotten her to talk a bit. Nothing he’d learned about her had abated his fascination. Quite the opposite. In fact, it was wrong to think of what he felt as fascination. The pull he felt toward her came from a deeper place than that.

She’d spoken about her time in Geitland, and with every sliver of information she’d shared, the legend of the God’s-Eye reconciled more with the truth of Brenna, the woman. He knew that she felt much like he did when she fought: like she was swallowed up by something bigger than herself. He knew her versions of battles she’d fought. And he knew her version of how she’d been made free, the night that raiders had beset the town and she, a slave girl tasked with care of the jarl’s children, had saved them and their mother.

Vali thought of it as ‘her version’ rather than the truth, because he suspected that, as the legend had embellished the stories, she had dimmed them overmuch. The truth lay in the dark space between. Brenna was a bold and brave warrior, and he’d come to know her as an intelligent and thoughtful strategist, and as a compassionate person. But as a woman, she was shy and self-effacing.

What she wouldn’t talk about was her family or how she’d become a slave. The stories said that she had given herself over to slavery, and she had confirmed that much. Beyond that, she had only offered stony silence.

He knew that that was at the core of her avoidance of him now. They had, in her mind, exhausted the story she had of her life with Jarl Åke. He had pushed too hard to know about the child he’d once met, and now she was running from him again.

But he was well enough now to chase her.

~oOo~

His hunch had been correct; he found her standing under a tree at the riverbank, watching him approach. She had her horse by the reins and her hand on the hilt of her shortsword, but when she saw it was him, she released them both and crossed her arms.

The aging afternoon had turned brisk with a sharp breeze coming from the north, and Brenna’s thick blonde hair was blowing loose from her braids in wispy strands. Her cheeks were rosy with the chill. He noticed that she had not brought a fur with her. She had walked straight out of the hall and to the stable, apparently.

She watched him silently as he rode to her and dismounted. As his feet hit the ground, the still-weak muscles in his back tightened sharply, and he clenched his jaw, trying not to react otherwise. She must have noticed, because she gave him a cocked eyebrow.

“If there were trouble at the castle, you would have sent someone else for me, so why are you here?”

He tied off the reins and freed his horse to graze with hers. The beasts bumped noses and wandered off together a short distance.

“To be sure you were safe. You should not ride alone, even now.”

She scoffed. She had a way of making a simple exhale of breath sound like a terrible insult. “You think I’d fall prey to a farmer?”

“I think even the great God’s-Eye can only fight so many farmers at once, and farmers often know how to fight. Many of our own warriors are farmers.”

He’d intentionally used the name she hated; he was irritated and tired of sparring with her. Her expression went dark, and she turned back to the river without answering him.

Closing the distance between them, he stood at her side. “I believed we were becoming closer, but you avoid me again. Have I been wrong about how you feel?” He knew he hadn’t. He’d caught her eyes often enough, even as she skittered away, to know she still felt that pull. But he wanted her to say it.

She sighed. “I don’t understand—”

Impatient, he cut her off. “Yes, I know. You say it again and again. I would help you understand me. But you seem to want to know nothing about me. Yet I know, I can see, that there is something between us. I feel it, and I see you feel it. Tell me that I am wrong, tell me to leave you alone, and I will. If not, Brenna, then tell me what you want of me.”

She walked a few steps closer to the bank, so that her boots were just at the edge of the water. Crouching down, she put her hands into the current and pulled out a fistful of shining, rounded pebbles. Then she threw them all in so that they rained lightly into the stream, the ripples swirling in the moving water.

“My parents were farmers. We lived in a tiny settlement near Halsgrof.”

He had assumed that much; they had first met in the woods outside Halsgrof. But she was speaking about her childhood, and he stayed silent and let her speak as she would.

“My father told me once that I was born with my eyes open, facing the world, and the midwife nearly dropped me when she saw my face. She wouldn’t stay to help my mother finish with the birth, so my father took care of me and her. Before night had fallen on that first day, our neighbors all knew I bore the Eye of the Allfather.

“My parents had four sons before me. The first three died in battle, and the fourth died of fever. I came later, the way that I am. Some people said I was a gift from the gods, and some, their judgment.”

She stood and turned, her eyes burning into his. “Do you know what I am, Vali? I am a person. I was a little girl, and now I am a woman, and that is all that I am.”

He took a step toward her. “I know that.”

“Why? Why do you know it when no one else has ever known it? Even my parents believed it. My mother wanted to apprentice me to a völva, someone who could ‘teach’ me to use my ‘gifts’ while she taught me the healing arts. She had made the arrangements. She thought I belonged in the woods, a crone, telling prophesy. That is why I left home in the middle of the night. I was thirteen. Åke took me into his home as a slave because he believes the gods gave me to him. But it’s not true. All I have ever seen out of either of my eyes is the world before me. The same world you see. And no one has ever seen me that way.”

“I do. Brenna, I do. I see you.” He took two more steps. She hadn’t backed away, and he was close enough that he could catch her if he reached out.

“Why?
That
is what I do not understand. What I
cannot
understand. Why would you see me, and no other?”

He did reach out, and he did catch her, wrapping her wrists in his hands. “Because I love you.”

The sound she made was one of pain and disbelief, and she twisted her arms in his grip, but he held on. “Brenna, hold. The girl who saved me in the woods all those years ago did so with courage. It was your heart, not your eye, that made you stand up and call him off.”

“He ran from my eye. So did you.” She pulled again, and this time, he pulled back, bringing her close.

“I was young and did not know better. He was an ignorant fool. But that is no matter. What matters is why you stood up. I don’t believe that Odin pulled you up and threw you before my father. You did that. The little girl with the big heart.”

She stared up at him, the eyes in question wide and gleaming. Her hair danced in the breeze, kissing her face and flying away, then back again. Vali released one of her arms and brought up his hand to cradle her jaw in it. With his eyes locked with hers, he said, “Brenna. Tell me what you want of me. If it’s in my power to give it, it’s yours.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t understand how to know.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” He thought he knew the answer. He hoped he did. But the silence after his question grew. “Brenna?”

She blinked and shook her head. “I do not.”

“Then I will help you understand.” He bent his head and kissed her.

Her lips were full and soft, pliable under his own, and at first he let the kiss be simply that: the touch of lips to lips. Brenna did not respond at all, except that he could feel her pulse quicken against his hand, which still cupped her face.

He moved his mouth over hers, as his body reacted to the silk and sweet of her, to the knowledge that she did want him, even as she remained still. Sliding his other hand over her hip and around to rest on the small of her back, he brought her tightly to him. She came stiffly, almost reluctantly, and Vali began to doubt her interest after all. Perhaps she did not like the feel of him.

But her breath came in quick, shaky bursts against his cheek, and she made a tiny moan that sounded like pleasure, small though it was.

He opened his mouth and brushed her lips with the tip of his tongue, testing her response.

She gasped and jumped from his embrace, and put her hand over her mouth. Vali, stunned, thought he might know where the trouble lay. He caught her hand and pulled her close again, noting the way her chest heaved, the way her eyes had flared wide.

Replacing her hand with his own over her mouth, he caressed the velvety skin with his fingertips. “Brenna. Are you a maid?” Rather than answer, she dropped her eyes from his and tried to free her head from his hold. He didn’t let her go.

He had thought her a thrall in all things to Jarl Åke. He had tortured himself with images of her coupling with the old man. As she had snubbed him of late, he had added to his torment the image of her enjoying that coupling. If she was yet a maid? Still innocent of any touch but his own—not even kissed before, as her reaction would seem to suggest?

Ah, then she would be truly his, and he would never let her go.

“Brenna, tell me. Have you never?”

Still she would not meet his eyes, but she shook her head. “No. Who would want me?”

He would. Forever. He wanted her right then.

But they were out in the growing cold, the rocky earth hard and unyielding under their feet, the horses less than a stone’s throw away. Vali cupped her face in both of his hands and kissed her forehead, on the small pink scar of the wound he’d treated the first time they’d spoken.

“We should return to the castle.”

Perhaps he was drunk with the revelation that she was his, unknown to any other, but he had not anticipated her reaction to his simple statement. He wanted to get her back to the castle, to a warm fire and a soft bed covered in furs. He wanted to honor her, to love her properly. But she gasped as though he’d slapped her, and she knocked his hands free of her. Then she turned on her heel and stalked to her horse, with such fierce intent that the mare shied a little, tossing her head, before settling again and preparing to take her rider.