“We have a witch with us now,” Eirik said. “She’ll handle it. I wish to enjoy some peace while I can.”
This was met with grumbling, but no one argued.
“You’re not going to tell him?” Oddny mumbled to Gunnhild. “That you can’t—”
“If it comes to it, you can sing for me,” she replied in kind.
“But the witches! It could be dangerous for you—”
“That’s the price for saving Signy. I’ll gladly risk it.”
Oddny had nothing to say to that.
The men took out a large tent canvas from below the deck and ran the ropes necessary to set it up, after which a sack of stockfish was passed around for supper. One of the ship’s cats, the tortoiseshell, came up to Gunnhild and complained until Gunnhild gave her a scrap of food. The two creatures had taken a liking to her, and she could tell it irritated Eirik, so she made sure to give the cats extra attention.
“The black one is Hnoss and this one is Gersemi,” Arinbjorn said as he came up and gave the tortoiseshell a scratch behind the ears.
After Freyja’s daughters, Gunnhild thought with a smile, though she was a bit perplexed; no one in the hird seemed particularly devoted to the goddess. “Who named them?”
“Eirik. They’re his, after all,” Arinbjorn replied. “This is the original Hnoss, but we’re on—what—the third or fourth Gersemi? Their mother keeps having kittens in the stables at Alreksstadir, and it seems there’s a new one that looks exactly like the last Gersemi every time we lose her. Hnoss is smart, which is how she stays alive. Gersemi, not so much.”
“She’s the fifth Gersemi,” Eirik said from a bit farther down the ship. Hnoss perched on his shoulder, making valiant attempts to steal a piece of his stockfish.
“Why not come up with new names?” Gunnhild asked.
Eirik looked at her as if this were the most preposterous suggestion he’d ever heard. “What else am I supposed to call a companion to Hnoss? They go together. Like Ask and Embla, Sol and Mani, Hugin and Munin . . .”
“How unoriginal.” Gunnhild rolled her eyes. “Next you’ll tell me your axes are named Geri and Freki after Odin’s wolves.”
The tips of Eirik’s ears went pink and he stared at her for so long and with such furious irritation that she thought the vein at his temple was going to burst.
“I can name my things whatever I want,” he barked, several beats too late.
Gunnhild made a face. “That’s just as well, but it took you that long to come up with such a dismal retort?”
Eirik turned on his heel and stalked to the other side of the ship without another word. Arinbjorn’s shoulders shook with silent laughter as he followed.
“I didn’t know his axes had names,” Oddny said from beside her, and when Gunnhild nudged her shoulder they both burst into giggles.
At night, Oddny and Gunnhild slept in the tent on bedrolls placed atop the oars to keep them dry. The men took turns sleeping around them, those on watch using the stars to keep their bearings when it was too dark to make out the shape of the coast in the distance.
Halldor proved to be a better sailor than the other five prospective hirdsmen who had accompanied the hird from Ozur’s farm. He worked without complaint, always volunteered for first watch, and seemed to sleep just about as little as Eirik did. Often when Gunnhild got up to relieve herself in the night, she’d spot Halldor and Eirik keeping watch in what seemed like companionable silence.
“He’s good,” Gunnhild heard Arinbjorn say to Eirik over their breakfast of stockfish on the second morning. “Experienced—he told me he’s been raiding for nine summers. The rest of them can sail, but he’s a sailor. And he can fight. You’d better give him an arm ring before he decides to swear himself to someone else, brother.”
Eirik cast a look to where Halldor sat talking quietly with Svein and the steersman, but he said nothing except, “Then all he has left to prove is his loyalty.” A pause. “And his footwork can use some improvement.”
“Looks like things are going well for Halldor,” Gunnhild said to Oddny after she’d relayed what she’d heard. “He’ll have paid off his debt to you in no time. And now that I’m here, you can keep it—we’ll have Signy back before he’s managed to earn that twelve marks anyway.”
Oddny took her hand and squeezed, and the look of hope on her face was almost too much for Gunnhild to bear. She leaned her shoulder against Oddny’s and let out a long sigh, confident that the worst was behind them.
The last day of their trip dawned bright and clear, and the mood was cheerful: They were to reach Alreksstadir well before nightfall, maybe even by suppertime. The men lounged on their ship boxes, playing dice games and talking among themselves while the cats moved from person to person to pilfer scraps of food, eventually settling down near where Eirik and Arinbjorn sat near the bow, Eirik staring out over the water and Arinbjorn patching a hole in the side of his shoe with an awl and sinew. Nearby, Svein and Thorolf played tafl, neither of them speaking with the king or his foster brother. Halldor sat with them, observing the game as he sharpened his seax with a whetstone.
But Svein was facing the women, and Gunnhild saw him exchange troubled looks with Arinbjorn every now and then, which the other man returned. She appreciated that the skald was trying to keep Thorolf distracted, but she couldn’t help but wonder how things stood between Thorolf and Eirik. Eirik had known they’d shared a bed, but had he known that Thorolf had proposed to Gunnhild first?
In hushed tones she told Oddny of the situation, and all Oddny had to say was, “I think Eirik did know. I overheard him and Arinbjorn talking about it. Eirik seemed remorseful because he knew Thorolf would be upset, but they decided it was for the greater good.”
That threw Gunnhild for a moment, but she supposed it made sense—for all his faults, Eirik was protective of his hird. But it frustrated her that she couldn’t quite parse him, this man she’d at first taken for nothing more than a violent brute. When the hird had stopped with the jarl, Gunnhild had witnessed their host bending over backward to please Eirik, and watched the same thing happen again at her father’s. Eirik had seemed to expect and even appreciate the attention. But when they departed each time, he seemed to cave in on himself, no longer the self-important, posturing king, but once more the brooding, taciturn creature she’d first met on the beach in Finnmark.
Perhaps he was just tired from the long summer, or the expectations of his status affected him more than he was letting on. Gunnhild felt no pity for him either way.
It was midday when something in the air shifted, and suddenly the ship tilted violently to one side, causing the men to fall off their boxes. Gunnhild, who’d been looking out over the horizon, careened into Oddny, knocking her over and sending them both sprawling. As the sailors picked themselves up, wind came at them from all directions as the sky darkened at a supernatural speed. The waves began to churn, spraying water over the side of the deck, threatening to flood the ship.
“Not again,” Svein moaned. Several of the other men echoed this response.
Ice flooded Gunnhild’s veins. A few moments ago there hadn’t been a single cloud in the sky, the sun high and bright, but now—