None of Solvi’s men, except perhaps his captains, seemed to know his plans at any time, nor did that bother them. The trust his men gave him told her something admirable about him, although she could not quite decide what. Some feared him, some loved him. Some only seemed tolerant of him, yet obeyed him anyway.
At least during the day she had the joy of life here, on the ocean. Boys as young as ten sailed with them. They used small hatchets as axes, and climbed like squirrels to the tops of the masts. The men found them entertaining, trained them or teased them, and pitted them against each other in mock fights. The boys were useful shipboard, these little wind-sprites who could climb the slickest mast in any weather. They loved Svanhild. They told her stories of battle and triumph, even sometimes, in the evening, their small fears.
“You will coddle them and make them weak,” said Ulfarr one night, after the boy Vigulf had cried on her. He had broken his wrist and was frightened that the other boys would grow stronger than him while it healed.
“They are brave boys,” said Svanhild. She still did not like Ulfarr, though he had behaved well enough to her since the ribald teasing of her wedding night. When he noticed her at all, it was almost as Solvi did, at least during the day—impersonal.
“Who is braver, the boy who says he has no fear, or the boy who has a fear and masters it?” Svanhild asked Ulfarr. She looked at him until he turned away.
“I have no fears,” he muttered.
Svanhild wondered if that was true. The gods frowned on liars, and she did not think the gods would have made a man with no fear. Ulfarr, she decided, feared things he could not control, and so he stayed far away from her after that.
Though the ships tracked south, the days grew shorter with the waning year. Svanhild clung to Solvi at night to share warmth. More than once he spoke in his sleep, words of fear and muffled cries of pain. He seemed sometimes, in sleep, to be that child who had fallen into a fire, the child who had lingered near death for days. Tryggulf had told her about that too, how he had refused to die, and then refused to be a cripple.
Every time he came to her in the night, she thought to use Vigdis’s coquettish arts to win him to her, but when he rolled off her, she could not make herself flirt and banter, not when he might reject it. He did not try to kiss her, not after that first time. Whenever she caught him looking at her, he looked away. She kept up her friendship with Tryggulf, in hopes that it might make him jealous, and then he might treat her better, or at least say a few words to her, but he did not.
Ten days into their journey, Solvi stopped a trading ship, the first they had passed. Svanhild sat in her tent with her head poking out while the ships maneuvered in the breeze to surround the vessel. Solvi’s three ships were like a small wolf pack, herding, playing, and skimming over the waves, making tight turns to cut the merchant ship off.
The trading ship reminded her of Solmund’s, though the men on board were not a family but a company of dark-skinned merchants, too different of face to be brothers. When they drew alongside, Ulfarr threw a grappling hook across and lashed Solvi’s ship to theirs, then leapt lightly across. The wind carried their voices away from her, but she could see what was happening, and imagine Solvi’s side of the conversation. His men returned shipboard with a bag of oatcakes and several bolts of cloth.
“My lady,” Solvi said to Svanhild, in high spirits. “Which of this cloth would you like for a dress?”
Svanhild looked down at her own dress, which was stained from days at sea. She had not had time after her wedding to make herself a new one, and must look a slattern. The cloth was all fine, and her fingers cried out to touch it.
“The red,” she said. “And I will need a needle and some thread, if they have it.”
He nodded and stepped across, back to the other ship. When he returned with supplies, silk thread, and a small needle of iron, rather than bone, the like of which Svanhild had never seen before, he placed it at her feet with a triumphant bow.
“Thank you, my lord,” said Svanhild. “This fabric is very beautiful. Too beautiful for shipboard. I would also make myself trousers and a leather coat like your sailors wear, so I could be more comfortable. I fear my dress will trip me.”
She was sitting at his feet, and he stood over her. She looked up at him—she was not trying to look particularly beseeching, but she realized that it must look like that, as though she played one of Vigdis’s tricks, and she dropped her eyes.
“As you see fit,” she said when he did not answer. After so many days of silent fighting, of nightly surrender, she did not want to wheedle him.
“You shall have what you need,” he said. “We will see what we can find along the way. In the meantime, Vigulf’s mother has overprovisioned him with clothes that are too large for him. My men would have stolen them long ago, but they are not that large.” He laughed, and Svanhild smiled hesitantly along with him. “Though I suppose they might fit me. I will get you the garments you require.”
Vigulf did not seem to mind parting with them. Indeed, he gave Svanhild little looks of pride, glad to do something for her. When next they camped on a beach, Svanhild washed her soiled dress in boiling seawater and let it lay out, spread over the sea grass that grew on the island. It dried with whorls of sea salt in it, and she spent the next day scraping these out with a rock, while the ships continued southward.
*
“We cross to Frisia tomorrow,” Solvi told her the next evening, while they rested at a rocky campsite, eating salt cod stewed with leeks and drinking fresh water from a rain pool Svanhild had found on the island.
“Frisia,” said Svanhild. She had heard of it from Ragnvald and travelers who came to Ardal. “How long will that take?”
“A day or two,” said Solvi. “We may have to sleep on the open ocean,” he added, a thread of tension in his voice. Even the best sailors did not like to pass too much time out of view of land. “With a good wind, the crossing is quick, and we will see the delta of the Rhine River. But if we are calmed, or there is a storm . . .”
Svanhild whispered a charm to gain the goddess Ran’s favor and then asked, “What is in Frisia?”
Solvi smiled, darting a glance at her. “The land north of the Germans. Our friend Rorik rules in Dorestad. We need friends now.”
“Because of Harald,” said Svanhild evenly.
“My father does not believe in his threat,” he said. He traced patterns in the sand with the tip of his dagger, little furrows that seemed to paint a picture until too many passes made them all chaos again. “He thinks that nothing will change, that our land will always be a place of warring, petty kings and raiders. But you do not, do you? You think he will do it, this Harald?”