The sun had dipped low on the horizon by the time Leif slowed Sleipnir to a walk. Though it disturbed me to admit it, there were many times when I’d been lulled by Sleipnir’s smooth gait, and had relaxed against Leif’s chest . . . only to awake each time with a start, forcing my spine as straight as a sword. Leif never commented on it, despite the obvious chance to mock me.
With his endurance at its limit, Sleipnir’s chest was heavily lathered with sweat. I leaned forward and patted his neck, whispering to him that we would soon stop. As though Godsent, a river snaked through the rock, beckoning us with its cool waters.
“We will make camp here, near the river,” Leif said.
I gazed out over the vast landscape, interspersed with boulders and thick copses of trees. Anything could be hiding just out of our sight, and the water was a prime location for dangerous creatures. Stopping briefly to refresh ourselves was one thing; making camp was another. We’d been lucky before. We might not be lucky again.
“We risk the notice of things better left alone if we sleep near the river,” I said, still warily scanning the area. “We should sleep with the rocks to our backs, so we’ll know what is lurking nearby.”
Leif scoffed and dismounted. He held out his arms to me to help me down, but I ignored him and dismounted on my own. Free of his burdens at last, Sleipnir shook himself and walked down to the water’s edge.
“éirinn has many dangers,” I said. “We’ll live longer if we’re cautious.”
His light eyebrows rose. “You think the northern lands are free from creatures who wish us harm?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters are the creatures of this land.”
I was on the verge of throwing up my hands and telling him he could make camp wherever he damn well pleased, but instead of continuing to argue, he strode away from the shore, back toward several boulders at the foot of a hill. He started on a fire, his broad hands making quick work of the difficult task. I joined Sleipnir at the water’s edge to hide my satisfaction that he had listened to me for once.
The river water was once again cold and refreshing, and as I cleaned myself of the dust from our travels, it occurred to me that I would soon be required to bed down for the night. With a Northman.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d slept with my hand wrapped around my dagger.
“I’ll hunt us hare to eat tonight,” Leif said, coming up behind me with surprisingly light footsteps. He unstrapped my sword from his back and handed it to me. “So you won’t be unarmed,” he said in response to my questioning look.
“How will you catch anything without a weapon?” Not that a broadsword was particularly helpful in catching a hare, but it was better than bare hands.
He grinned, a flash of teeth really. “I have other means.”
Too tired to contemplate how he thought he would chase down and kill a hare with his bare hands, I nodded and made myself comfortable by the fire. We still had bread and cheese, so we wouldn’t starve tonight. I watched him as he followed the river farther south, struck by how agile he was despite his large size, like a lion instead of a man.
Sleipnir grazed on the long green grass by the river’s edge, and I relaxed against the cool stone. Alone with my thoughts, a sort of melancholy homesickness descended upon me. My mother and sisters were surely home by now, and a knife’s twist of pain began in my stomach. My absence would undoubtedly worry them, and though my regret over such a thing was palpable, I had to remind myself I had no other choice. Had they spoken to áthair? What would Máthair say when she learned what I’d done? I winced as I imagined her reaction—disgust? Fear? Worse was how my sisters might react. Would they tell them the truth? That I’d attacked our father and been exiled?
I forced such thoughts from my head. I knew I would do everything exactly the same if given another chance. My flesh still crawled with what the Morrigan had shown me. There could be no doubt it would come to pass, and if forming an alliance with my enemy was the only way to stop it, then I would make my bed beside him.
But my father . . . áthair’s anger and disappointment would be as terrible as dragon’s fire when he discovered that I had joined forces with our enemy. Even if I was successful in driving giants out of éirinn, I wasn’t sure that would change the way my father saw me: as a monster instead of a daughter. In my mind, I saw my family side by side, their blond hair, light eyes, and heart-shaped faces seeming to say that the possibility I was a changeling was not so difficult to believe after all.
“I leave for only a few minutes,” Leif said, returning with a brace of rabbits, “and you look as though you may cry. Did you think I had abandoned you?”
“If only,” I said, my eyes narrowed at his smirk. Unperturbed by my acidic tone, he sat down across from me and pulled out a small blade to skin the rabbits. “Where did you get the knife?”
He continued skinning the rabbit, but he spared me a moment’s glance. “I’ve had it all along,” he said. “Your men didn’t search me well enough. Useless as those chains.” A flash of teeth. “You didn’t really think they’d hold me, did you?”
I had, actually, but of course I’d never admit that. My hand tightened on the grip of my sword when I thought about how easily he had escaped. His profile was to me, his nose as straight as a blade, his entire face as though it was chiseled from the rock itself, though his lips were surprisingly full. He was beautiful, a dangerous beauty, and again I thought of my earlier comparison to a lion. “If the chains were so ineffective, then why didn’t you leave sooner?”
He quickly and efficiently finished skinning one rabbit and moved on to the next. “I wanted to hear what you had to say. And,” he added with a grin, “if you’ll recall, I had recently suffered a blow to my head.”
He could have left at any time. A flush of embarrassment sneaked up my neck. “I could have killed you instead,” I snapped, “though I suppose you would have liked that better, since you Northmen are all so eager to die.”
“Not just die,” Leif corrected. “Die in battle.”
I scoffed. “Either way, you’d be dead.”
He slid the rabbits onto two sticks and held them over the fire. “Would you have me explain to you about our afterworld, then? About Valhalla’s golden halls overflowing with ale and mead—where we can fight all day and feast all night.”
“How is that any different from what you do on earth?”
Amusement touched the edges of his mouth. “Because in Valhalla, we will never tire or grow old.”
I shifted my gaze from the fire to his face. “And just how old are you? You can’t be much older than I am.”
He turned the rabbits expertly over the flames. “Old enough to have earned the right to sail my own longship, to lead my own men.” I shook my head over his cryptic answer, but then he added, “I have seen eighteen years.”
As I’d thought, only a year older than I was. But as I had learned long ago: power aged you. “Will you tell me more of the enemy we face?”
“That depends. How much do you know of our gods?”
“Nothing.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. I knew a little; it was hard not to, when the Northmen had infiltrated so many of our cities, intermarrying with my own people, bringing their strange gods with them. I knew that Odin was the father of the gods, and the god of war. His most famous son was Thor, the thunder god. “You said the giants wanted to overthrow the gods. Why do they want to do that?”
“The gods and j?tnar may be descended from the same being, but they’ve been in a struggle against each other over control of the realms since the beginning of time. The j?tnar are gluttons of all: gold, women, power, flesh. More than anything, they desire control over mankind—to be worshipped as the gods have been. Because of this, the gods banished them to their own realm: J?tunheimr. The j?tnar have forever tried to break free of their realm, but we’ve always trusted the gods to keep them in check. Until the most powerful of them, led by Fenris, escaped.”
My father would have immediately dismissed everything Leif had said as heretical pagan nonsense, and part of me wanted to do the same, but there was a powerful ring of truth in his words. They raised the hair on the back of my neck.