“You were with me.”
“Luck.” Ragnvald opened his eyes again. He felt he was back on a ship, but a ship he could not figure out how to steer, a ship’s deck with no edges. Nowhere he could fall from. “Does your shoulder pain you?” Ragnvald asked. Harald held his arm to his body and shifted uncomfortably at the question. The young god had never been wounded before.
“Some,” said Harald. “It will be a few weeks until I can move it again. I will learn to fight better with my left hand in the meantime.”
“You will be king,” said Ragnvald. “You have luck and skill and strength. You will be injured again, as all warriors are, but it will not stop you.”
Harald looked at him oddly, as though Ragnvald spoke prophecy.
“What will stop you?” Ragnvald asked, in growing bitterness. Harald would live. “You have men and luck and gold, and you cannot be defeated. What stops you at the edges of your conquering? What stops you from being the man you would stop, the man who kills his neighbor and takes his land?”
“Honor,” said Harald. “A king is his land and his people. You know that about your own land, your Ardal, your Sogn. The people who farm the land, who bury their bones in it, a king feels that, in his bones. He defends the land and farms the land and makes the land bring forth beautiful things. I do not conquer for myself.”
“You do,” said Ragnvald. “But I’m glad it is not only for yourself.”
“When I am king, I will gather all of our best artists to a new town, and they will make the ugly hacksilver we take into ornaments for beautiful women. I will bring Frankish sword makers, and they will teach our smiths their craft. There will be no more blood feud, only my justice, my law.”
“And that is why you would be king?”
“Yes,” said Harald. The light behind him made his hair look like a crown, as it should.
“Then I’m glad I saved you. Make sure I die with a sword in my hand. Don’t let them cut it off.” Ragnvald yawned.
“I won’t,” said Harald. “Rest, my friend. We will stand together many times in battle again, I promise you.” He shook Ragnvald, so Ragnvald had to open his eyes again. “Promise me. I want you as one of my warriors, my sworn companions. To fight by my side.”
“I have my land to regain,” Ragnvald said. Sogn. He would rest there if he could, not this strange, southern land.
Harald hardly blinked. “You will be one of my captains, my jarls, then. I will give you a land—and you will hold it for me.”
“I would fight for you,” said Ragnvald. “If I live.”
In Valhalla his sword hand would not burn like this. In Valhalla he would be a better companion to Harald. As he fell asleep, he felt something cold rest against the bandages on his palm. A sword.
24
When Svanhild woke, the bed next to her was still warm from Solvi’s body, but he had risen and left. She was wrung out from her crying, drained in a way that almost felt pleasant until she remembered how she had behaved the night before, drunken and protesting when she should have been welcoming. She had given her word to Solvi and married him. If she wanted to flee, she should have done it before.
She pinned on her overdress with bone pins that had been among her bridal trinkets. Solvi had worn fine gold jewelry last night, worked in whorls of animals devouring each other’s tails. If she had been a better wife to him last night, she might expect her own jewelry from him. Not now, though. He surely had enough of weeping women, being married to Geirny.
She had no wimple, so she put the veil Solvi had given her last night over her hair. In the kitchen she found Solvi sitting and eating a bowl of gruel. The pot hung over the fire, and smelled burned when Svanhild stirred it.
“I trust you slept well, my lady,” he said, inclining his head with exaggerated courtesy.
Svanhild raised her chin. “I did, thank you.” She wanted to say something, to bridge the gap between them, but she did not know him at all. She hoped that he would reach out to her again, but perhaps she had lost the last chance he would give her.
“Who is the housekeeper here?” she asked. Solvi shrugged. “Your father has no living wife,” she said. “Perhaps one of his concubines?”
“I don’t know how the women do their work,” he said shortly. “Ask Geirny, if you must know.”
“Is there anything you would have me do?” At home, Olaf had mostly kept out of Vigdis’s way indoors, but sometimes he had instructions for her.
“No.” He stood and walked outside. She felt deflated when he left. Thralls had come in and out of the kitchen while they talked and would gossip no matter what, all the more because she had asked something of him and he had refused it.
She added more water to the barley cereal and scraped the pot until the burned bits started to come off. A few of Solvi’s men wandered in for breakfast. Svanhild served them, and made small talk with those who seemed inclined to speak. She learned that Solvi would sail out for a few days, probably to harry more merchants. She hoped that he would not run into Ragnvald.
Geirny came in, yawning, after all the men had eaten their fill. She had not put on an overdress. Her shift hung loose on her thin frame.
“I hope my husband did not use you too hard,” she said snappishly as she served herself a bowl of cereal.
“Would you like some?” Svanhild pulled out a pot of honey she had spied and handed it to Geirny. “Who is the housekeeper?”
Geirny yawned. “I have the key to the storeroom,” she said. Which was the honor given to the housekeeper. But if so, she should have been up before the dawn.
“What shall I do today, then?” Svanhild picked up the pile of dirty bowls and started to wipe them clean.
Geirny looked Svanhild up and down and frowned at her. “Make a new dress?”
Svanhild glanced at her clothes. Walking from the hall last night had stained the hem with mud. The dress was made from a fawn-colored homespun, the finest that the farm at Ardal had produced, and a color that suited Svanhild and made her eyes look deep and lively, or so Vigdis had told her. Geirny had worn red silk the day before, a color too bright for her fairness, but which would have looked well on Svanhild.
When she went to the storage building that Geirny had mentioned, it was locked. She would not go ask Geirny for the keys. She could hardly bear this place, and it had been little more than a day. She could not wait nearly another year until the Sogn ting. Let Solvi bring her to Ragnvald at Yrjar, if he did not want her anymore, or as close as he could manage. She had found passage to bring her here; she could throw herself on the fates again.