But she would savor every moment of her beautiful, impossible life until then.
38
GUNNHILD LOWERED THE HORN and let it dangle from its cord over her shoulder, her other hand tightly clasping Signy’s. They stood there and watched as the ship’s yellow sail grew smaller in the distance.
“Thank you, Signy,” she said at length. “For staying.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Signy replied lightly. “We haven’t seen each other for half our lives. How do you know I’m not going to be terribly annoying? Besides, I mean, you married the most hated man in Norway. It seems to me you’ll need all the help you can get.”
“You have no idea how much I missed you,” Gunnhild said with feeling.
Signy’s smile remained in place, but her green eyes lost a bit of their sparkle. Gunnhild squeezed her hand tighter. For all that Signy seemed much like her old self, some wounds could not be treated with Gunnhild’s spells or Oddny’s tinctures. She couldn’t begin to fathom what Signy had been through. Just because she’d been rescued didn’t mean she’d healed. She had a long journey ahead of her, and Gunnhild intended to be there for her every step of the way.
“Signy!” Runfrid shouted, for she, Arinbjorn, and Ulla were heading back up the hill. “Come! We’re going to go bother Hrafnhild for breakfast!”
“But we’re not going to bother her too much. She’s injured,” said Ulla fretfully.
“Oh, Oddny patched her up well enough to boil some eggs,” said Arinbjorn, and then they were out of earshot.
Signy looked to Gunnhild.
“Go,” said Gunnhild, releasing her hand. “I’ll see you later, troublemaker.”
Signy grinned at the old nickname and offered one of her own: “I’ll see you later, O Future Most Powerful Woman in All of Norway.” She laughed as she turned to go. “Ha! Who’s the seeress now?”
Gunnhild smiled at that, but sobered when Eirik moved in beside her a few moments later. The two of them turned just in time to see Oddny’s ship reach the open sea. The wind was carrying her sworn sister away, but one day it would carry her back. And maybe, by then, the two of them would have healed enough to trust each other again.
The king and queen stood there in silence, looking out over the water. At length Eirik said, “If you’re well enough, I’d like to spend the rest of the summer making the royal progress, and Bard of Atloy has been asking me to visit for Winternights for a long time. He gave us the polar bear pelt for our wedding, and loyalty should always be rewarded.” He grimaced. “Judging by the size of Olaf’s fleet, it seems to be in short supply.”
Gunnhild agreed. Thorbjorg might be gone, but their troubles were far from over—she’d seen it in Olaf’s eyes, and in Tryggvi’s. And that wasn’t to mention Halfdan and the host of other Haraldssons who would wait to oppose Eirik until his father was in the ground or otherwise unable to stop them. News of the battle at Alreksstadir would travel just as news of the duel had, and lines would be drawn as the people of this young country of Norway chose sides. She was well aware that not all would choose theirs.
She took his hand. “Then we’ll have to earn it back. Show them who we really are. We’re only getting started. Now come. Let’s save our worries for tomorrow.”
“This peace may be brief,” Eirik said as she led him up the hill.
“Then let’s enjoy it while it lasts,” Gunnhild replied. This had been a victory, one worthy of committing to the tapestry Queen Gyda had tasked her with creating, but she knew that there would be many more battles ahead for them.
“When it’s over . . . when you’ve left nothing but blood and terror in your wake . . . all the worlds . . . will know your greatness . . .”
In due course they would make their enemies a sacrifice to the gods, and when their own time came, Odin and Freyja would welcome them into their halls with honor. Eirik and Gunnhild, with their loyal friends at their sides, would continue to fight until that day arrived.
But today they had each other, and the future could wait.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
IN HIS 2020 BOOK Children of Ash and Elm, Viking Age scholar Neil Price says that “History is . . . sometimes akin to a sort of speculative fiction of the past.” I took this idea further by making The Weaver and the Witch Queen a work of historical fantasy instead of historical fiction, but there are a few things I want to mention in regard to what historians know versus what I filled in or created to fit my narrative.
Although the medieval Icelandic sagas that inspired this novel do a good job of making us feel like they are “real” history, minus some amusing and unbelievable supernatural occurrences, they’re largely fictional accounts, though many of the characters who feature in them probably did exist. These sagas, and most other literary sources we have on the Viking Age, were written down hundreds of years after the Viking Age by the Christian descendants of the people who lived the tales, and are probably a more accurate reflection of the values and biases of the time in which they were written than of the time during which they are supposed to have taken place.
With that said, many sources detail the life of Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, and her depictions are largely negative and often contradictory. The one thing that most agree on is that she was a powerful and influential woman in her time, for better or worse. Although it’s generally agreed that Gunnhild was most likely a Danish princess, for the purposes of this story I chose to follow the origin stories that describe Gunnhild as a Halogalander and a sorceress.
Since many of the sources are often in direct conflict with one another, I had to be careful in choosing which ones I would draw from. I ended up relying most heavily on two medieval Icelandic works, Egil’s Saga and Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, although these two often contradict each other, too. However, they both corroborate the same origin story for Gunnhild, and I personally enjoy her depiction in Egil’s Saga as the lifelong antagonist to the title character, Thorolf’s brother Egil, who is mentioned in this novel （though not by name）。 Heimskringla tends to jump around in time, making it difficult to establish a chronology. Likewise, Egil’s Saga fudges the dates of certain historical events attested more reliably elsewhere, and both diverge from mainland sources in a variety of ways, tweaking events to fit the story the author was trying to tell. I did much the same in the writing of this book. For example, I made Gunnhild’s magic teacher an old woman named Heid, not the “Finnish wizards” （that is, Sámi noaidi） from Heimskringla. In Heimskringla’s version of the tale, the two wizards both wish to marry her, so Gunnhild conspires to kill them with the assistance of the Norsemen who come to “rescue” her. Archaeological evidence indicates that cultural exchange and cooperation between the Sámi and the Norse peoples during this time were more prevalent than later sources like Heimskringla would have us believe, and some of the changes I made to the story are meant to reflect this.
From the archaeological evidence we have, it is impossible to say for certain whether Vikings were tattooed. Only the writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a tenth-century travel writer from Baghdad, may have described tattoos in encounters with Rus （eastern Vikings） along the Volga River during the Viking Age. Thus, the tattoos described in this novel, along with the hairstyles, don’t have a completely solid basis in history, although evidence of tattooing culture all around Europe dating back thousands of years means tattooing was not impossible among the Vikings.