“Daughter,” Jarl St?rr said. He looked at her, a long and appraising look. Elvar felt like he was reading the secrets of her soul. “You should not have left,” he said into the silence.
Elvar curled her lip as she felt her anger building, a shapeless, bile-filled thing. She drew in a breath, trying to control it. Trying to break the patterns of her childhood where her father would admonish her and she would rage back at him, achieving nothing, always walking away feeling useless, and angry with herself, that she could not master her emotions and speak the truth of her heart.
“I do not regret leaving,” she eventually said. “I have earned my reputation, my battle-fame.”
“Battle-fame? In the employ of some merchant,” Jarl St?rr said.
“Agnar and the Battle-Grim are great warriors, famed throughout all Vigrie, and in the wide world beyond. Places you have never set foot. Places where your name is not known,” Elvar said.
Her father sniffed. “He might be a capable warrior, but that does not change the fact that he makes his coin by dealing in flesh and blood. He is nothing more than a nieing merchant, a whore who will lie down for whoever shows him the most coin.”
Elvar felt her blood race, anger bubbling at the insults thrown at her chief. Again, she took a moment to master it and bite back the words that formed on her tongue like the first spears hurled in a battle.
“You are happy enough to pay him,” Elvar said instead. “What does that make you?”
“Sensible,” her father said with a shrug, “if he is selling something I want. But enough of Agnar and his band of mercenaries. I have come here to talk about you. About your kin, about your future.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “When you left, the way you did: it brought shame on me. You made people doubt me. The whisperers revelled in it. If he cannot control his own daughter, they said, how can he control the future of Snakavik?” He sighed. “I had to spill blood to regain my control of this realm. A lot of blood.”
“This is where you do not understand me,” Elvar said. “You do not control me. No one does, or ever will.”
“You are a jarl’s daughter,” her elder brother, Thorun exclaimed. “Father gave you everything, and in return you have responsibilities.”
“What, to be a pawn in his politics?” Elvar snapped. “To be traded, to be sold like some thrall-whore to a worthy husband for a piece of land? To lie back and be ploughed like a field, to have their seed sown in my belly and spend my life rearing little piglets like a fat sow?”
Thorun sucked in an angry breath.
“Yes,” he said, “if that is what Father wants.”
“I wonder if you would be so quick to agree if it were you that were being bartered, if it were you that would have to be humped by some sweating pig and turned into a brood bitch.”
“I would be happy to obey my father, whatever he asked,” Thorun snapped.
“Well, then you can wed Helka’s piglet and have a good humping, and I’ll lead the warband,” Elvar said.
Grend snorted, the closest he came to laughing, and Thorun frowned.
Jarl St?rr gave a thin smile.
“Ahhh,” he sighed, leaning back in his chair, “it is harder managing my children than the rest of Snakavik and all my realm combined.” He shook his head. “I want you back with me, daughter. With us. It is where you should be.”
“I will not wed Hakon, just to spread your border a little wider.”
“A little?” Thorun said. “Father’s realm and Helka’s combined would cover more than half of all Vigrie.”
“I do not care,” Elvar shrugged. “I am born for the battle-storm and shield wall. I will make my own reputation, not be wed into someone else’s.”
“Reputation?” Thorun sneered. “You? More likely you are riding on Grend’s reputation. He stands at your shoulder in every conflict, I do not doubt, to protect you. He was ever mother’s hound, and now he is yours.”
Without realising it, Elvar was on her feet, her fist wrapping around her sword hilt.
“I will show you the sharp edge of my reputation, brother, and Grend can stay here sitting on his arse,” she said.
Thorun flushed red.
I had just seen my seventeenth name-day when I saw you last. You used to enjoy humiliating me in the practice court then. It would be different, now.
“Elvar fights her own battles,” Grend’s voice grated through the tension. “She has won her own renown, and is a name to be respected, and feared.”