Gunnhild frowned at this. In her determination to get to Oddny and rescue Signy, she hadn’t considered her own prospects. Next summer, Heid had meant to take Gunnhild around Norway and introduce her as her successor. After that, Gunnhild would have taken the name Heid and let her mentor retire to the woods for good.
But for all that Eirik had overreacted when she’d first walked into the camp, he’d had a point: She was nobody. She had no reputation. Her own family thought her dead. Without Heid’s endorsement of her skills, who would consider her prophecies trustworthy? And because she had no social standing as a seeress, her father would be well within his legal rights to take control of her life the moment she walked back through his door.
Thorolf was still waiting for her to go on, and when she didn’t speak, he squeezed her hand again.
“If you came with me, I wouldn’t leave Iceland again,” he said. “Not even on the raids. Iceland is not an easy place for many, but it’s what you make of it. I’ve earned enough by now to give us a comfortable life. My family would be glad to see me stay—my father especially. And I haven’t seen my brother since he was very small.” A pause. “I mean, since he was very young. I can’t say he was ever small.”
For a moment Gunnhild allowed herself to imagine a life with him. She didn’t think it would be a bad one by any means—but she hadn’t given half her life to learning witchcraft only to become a housewife. She didn’t know the first thing about running a household, and it had been more than a decade since she’d touched a spindle, let alone a loom.
And what’s more, her friends needed her. She wouldn’t give up on them.
“I can’t accept,” she said. Before he could argue, she took his hand and pressed his fingertips to the scar on her palm from her blood oath with Oddny and Signy. “I swore to my friends a long time ago that we would always be there for each other. They’re in trouble and it may be my fault. It would be so easy for me to say yes to you and to forget them, but I’m no oath-breaker.”
“I don’t understand. You’ve been gone twelve winters. How could anything that happened to them be your fault?”
She told him everything. About the circumstances that drove her away from home, her mother’s cruelty, and the solace she took in her friends and the oath they swore the night of Heid’s ritual; about her stealing away, learning witchcraft, spying, and being present for the raid; of the witches, of Heid’s death; and finally, of what she had learned from Eirik and of the details of their conversation.
When she was finished, Thorolf said, “But shouldn’t you and Eirik work together against your common enemy?”
Gunnhild felt a spark of anger—he said it so plainly, as if it were the obvious choice—but extinguished it. Despite Thorolf’s admitting the king’s failings, she suspected he was too fond of Eirik to understand why she would find it impossible to work with him, and she was too tired to defend her choice.
“No. After the terms of our deal are fulfilled, I hope to never see him again.” She tucked her head into the crook of his neck and shoulder and pressed her body against his. “I don’t refuse your offer because I don’t care for you. Ask me again when my sworn sisters are safe and Thorbjorg and her friends have answered for their crimes. Until then, can we not enjoy this while it lasts?”
He tightened his arm around her. “I’ve heard worse ideas.”
12
ODDNY WAS WORKING IN the cookhouse when she heard a long horn burst from outside, signaling an approaching ship, then a shorter burst to indicate that it was friendly.
“That’ll be the king’s men,” said Vigdis. “They’ll be a ways out yet if the watchmen have only just spotted them.” Still, she wasted no time giving the girls their tasks to prepare for the feast. Oddny chopped turnips and parsnips for the stew until Vigdis told her to go see if Ulfrun needed any help in the hall, so she wiped her knife on the hem of her dress and sheathed it, then slipped out into the brisk air and hurried into the longhouse to find it a hive of activity as Ulfrun delegated tasks.
“Would you be a dear and make me more of that tea?” she said when Oddny asked how she could help. Ulfrun, like many of the older women Oddny knew, had terrible pain in her hands, wrists, and elbows from years of textile work.
Oddny went to the bunk room, where she now kept her supplies inside Gunnhild’s old chest. She grabbed a linen bag of dried herbs and walked back into the larger room belonging to Ozur and his wife. Solveig was asleep and did not stir at the noise from the hall, nor at Oddny’s footsteps.
Oddny built up the fire in the chamber, boiled some water, and brewed the tea. As she waited for it to steep, she looked at Solveig and grimaced. The woman’s condition had gotten worse again since the day Oddny had arrived, but she’d checked her mother’s runes and found no fault with them, so she wasn’t sure what else she could do. And even if there was something . . . she thought of Gunnhild, her proud and stubborn friend who was cowed only by her fearsome mother, and found she couldn’t summon much pity for Solveig.
By the time the tea was done, the noise on the other side of the wall had picked up. Oddny’s hand tightened on the steaming clay cup as she stood.
She emerged back into the hall to find it full of men, their faces vaguely familiar from when she’d served them at the beginning of summer. Each flitted in and out of her vision as she made her way through the crowd. When she finally found Ulfrun, she was standing near Ozur, in his best tunic and arm rings, and Eirik, who said something and nodded at the door.
Oddny, Ozur, and Ulfrun turned as the last few people from the ship filed in. A large, dark-haired, bearded man took off his sea-cloak and gave it to the servant collecting the hird’s outerwear at the door, then moved aside as the person behind him tugged off their own cloak and handed it over.
Before Oddny even realized this person was a woman, she saw the hair: tossed over one shoulder, a thick red braid glowing orange in the lanternlight.
The servant holding the sea-cloaks gasped at the sight of the woman’s face. Ulfrun gasped as well and held one shaking liver-spotted hand over her mouth. Ozur dropped his cane, which clattered to the floor.
The woman turned at the sound.
And when her eyes met Oddny’s from across the hall, the cup slipped from Oddny’s grip and shattered into a thousand pieces, hot liquid splashing her shoes.
The scar on her palm burned.
Oddny moved forward, weaving through the throng as the other woman did the same, and Oddny’s face was already wet with tears when they crashed into each other and sank to the floor in a tight embrace. She sobbed freely and loudly into the shoulder of Gunnhild’s kaftan and didn’t care who saw or heard.
“Shh,” said her friend, petting her hair. “It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here now. Oh, Oddny, I’m so, so sorry. I did everything I could, but I couldn’t stop them.”
Oddny was beside herself. Gods, Gunnhild was real and solid and here—but how was she here? And she couldn’t stop them . . . Could she mean—？
“How . . .?” Oddny pulled away long enough to look her in the face—a face she remembered so well, a face she’d thought she’d never see again, pale and spotted here and there with freckles, keen eyes the deep blue of the ocean framed by hair the dark coppery red of dried blood. But there were differences, too: Gunnhild had lost the round cheeks of her childhood, for one. She had become something starker, hungrier, fiercer than the child Oddny remembered. It was in her face, her eyes, the very set of her shoulders: Whatever had happened to Gunnhild, wherever she’d been these past twelve winters, it had sharpened her like a blade.