1
SKARO, DANELAND
Torunn winced as the healer’s apprentice pierced her flesh with the bone needle again, but she didn’t move. It was her own fault that she’d been injured.
Her head throbbed, and she hadn’t slept, but she was waiting for Iri to come careening through the door and demand that she be somewhere. That was all he was good for.
She barely turned as the door of her father’s house slammed open and Iri stomped in. “What happened to you?”
“You’re getting mud on the floor,” she said mildly.
“Answer the question!”
Torunn sighed heavily and shrugged. A mistake.
The apprentice hissed something she couldn’t make out and she grimaced as the young man yanked on the thread he was using to stitch the wound on her shoulder.
“You’re wounded!”
“I know.”
“What happened?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she snarled. “I wasn’t quick enough.”
Her father’s youngest advisor pressed a hand to his forehead briefly and glared at her. “You should not be acting like this?”
Torunn stared at him. “Like what?”
He gestured wildly. “Like… this! Drinking. Fighting. Every night! Your father left you in charge—”
“He should have taken me with him.”
Iri snorted and shook his head. “You’re late.”
Torunn winced again as the healer tugged on the needle and then tied a deft knot in the stitches he’d made. She hated asking for help, and would have stitched it herself if she could have reached it, but the wound had been in an awkward spot, and she couldn’t just leave it to fester.
The healer pulled a small stone vial from his satchel and smoothed some salve onto the cut. “You’re lucky it wasn’t deeper,” the man grunted.
“So is Halle,” she said with a wry smile.
“Torunn!”
She nodded to the healer and stood up. “Late for what?”
Iri stared at her but she made no move to pull her tunic back up over her breasts. She knew what he was staring at, but she didn’t care. They had grown up together, wrestling in the mud, fighting in the river… She wasn’t any kind of sacred relic; she was tired, her head ached, the cut on her shoulder burned, and she was annoyed.
The healer packed his bag and slipped past Iri who frowned in annoyance as he passed. “There are people waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Waiting for you,” he said. His voice had taken on a desperate edge, and Torunn shook her head.
Of course they were.
She turned her back on him to gather her clothes. She needed a bath, but that would have to wait. Where was her knife? She abandoned her search of the pile of clothing she had been sitting on and reached under her pillow.
“Get out,” she said and then smiled as her hand closed around the braided leather that wrapped the hilt of the knife her father had given her so many years ago.
“But, Torunn, you cannot—”
In a smooth motion, she straightened, pulled the knife from under the pillow and whipped the blade out of its sheath. The edge of the blade touched the quivering flesh of Iri’s throat before he could back away. His bright blue eyes were wide with surprise—perhaps even a hint of fear.
That was more like it.
“I said, get out.”
She lifted the knife away from Iri’s throat for just a moment and smiled at him. His eyes strayed down over her body before he looked away, and she suppressed the urge to drive the blade into his guts. Luckily for him, Iri knew better than to linger in her bedchamber uninvited.
The heavy wooden door of her father’s lodge creaked open and then slammed shut as he fled. Torunn slid the knife back into its sheath and secured it to her hip. Iri had always been so easy to intimidate. He had been a timid, watchful boy when they were children. Always following behind, always worried they would be caught and thrashed for their games and rule breaking. He’d never learned to lie properly, either, which usually landed Torunn and her brothers in more trouble than they had expected.
As the noise of the village filtered through the fog of her headache, Torunn rubbed a hand over her face and pulled her tunic over her shoulders. The wound throbbed and burned and she gritted her teeth. Halle would pay for that.
Geese nattered outside the walls of the lodge, mingling with the shouts of the menfolk that had remained in the village and the squalling of children echoed loudly as her head throbbed.
If her father had listened to her pleading demands and taken her raiding with him, everything would be different.
But he hadn’t, and now she was stuck in the middle of a dreary autumn that would turn to winter any day. She dressed with deliberate slowness—knowing that the people were waiting for her did not make her want to hurry.
In her father’s absence, it was Torunn who had been tasked with the responsibility of sitting in his great wooden chair to listen to the complaints of villagers who were worried about the coming winter and the fact that her father’s raiding party had not yet returned to Skaro’s shores.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” she muttered. She gasped as the cold water she splashed over her face ran down her naked spine.
She should have been in Jovik with her brothers as they raided the shrines of the terrified monks and their impotent god. She should have been there.
The bitterness of her thoughts was sharp on her tongue, and she spat into the washing water to drive the taste from her mouth.
She wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and took a moment, as she always did, to rub her fingers over the silver fur that tickled her cheek. She had killed the wolf herself last winter—a large she-wolf that had threatened their flocks under the cold winter moon. A small victory, to be sure, but if the village’s wizened healer was to be believed, it was a symbolic one.
Torunn’s brothers had sneered, but Iarund had taken the skin and tanned it himself to be sewn across the shoulders of the fine wool cloak she had brought back from her first raid abroad. She had ripped the dark garment off the shoulders of a noble man with pale, pockmarked skin, an ugly nose, and a very pretty horse.
Properly dressed for the cold, and armed to match her mood, Torunn gritted her teeth and strode through her father’s lodge with a purpose she didn’t entirely feel. She didn’t want to be there, and the people didn’t want her there either; at least, not in her father’s place.
They wanted their Jarl to come home and answer their disputes; they didn’t want to speak to his daughter.
She pushed open the door Iri had slammed behind him and squinted at the grey sunlight that filtered through the late autumn clouds. The snow would be flying soon, and if the ice closed over, her father and brothers would be trapped beyond their borders until the spring thaw came. She vowed to sacrifice to Freja every day to keep that from happening.
“—Torunn Arndottir sits upon her father’s throne in his absence from Skaro,” Iri said solemnly as the door creaked open. His voice echoed over the silent courtyard in front of my father’s house, and she stifled a groan as all eyes turned to her. “Bring her your disputes to be judged fairly and wisely”