It was, for them, perfect.
“But I still owe you ten marks of silver,” said Halldor with a grin. “Right?”
“Stop that,” said Oddny, and kissed him.
* * *
—
WEEKS PASSED BEFORE ODDNY deemed Halldor fit to travel. She’d cut new runes to hasten his healing, and before long he was able to walk with minimal assistance and had taken to doing short, light drills with Svein in the yard. When Oddny argued that he was pushing himself too far again, he said, “If I stay still, it will heal that way, won’t it? It’ll scar and stiffen. I need it to bend if I’m ever to fight again.”
Svein had taken up lodgings at the hillfort, where he performed poems to earn some silver. He came by each day asking when they were going to set off for Courland.
“We leave first thing tomorrow,” Oddny told him a little less than a moon after they’d first arrived. She and Halldor had been going down to the docks for the past several days, and the afternoon before, they’d found a ship to take them across the Eastern Sea.
Cheered by the news, Svein and Oddny went to the market for a last look around while Halldor rested. Once she’d returned from collecting the ingredients for her moon tea, Oddny found the skald speaking with two men dressed in strange garments. This was not unusual in itself—Birka was a trading hub and saw visitors from all around the known world—but she was surprised to hear Svein speaking to them in another tongue, one she’d never heard before. He gave them a small, flat parcel and some silver and parted with them before rejoining Oddny.
“I was sending word to my father of what happened at Vestfold. He’s a chronicler for the caliph in Baghdad,” Svein explained as they walked back to the cottage.
“Really?” Oddny asked, surprised. “But I remembered you mentioning once that your mother was Norwegian.”
“She is,” Svein replied. “My father met my mother on a trip through Norway when they were assigned as drinking partners at a feast. Drinking isn’t part of his culture, and at first my mother was insulted that he declined to share her cup, but they ended up falling in love and he married her before he left. He came back as often as he could until she died. By then I was grown and part of the hird. I was born and raised in Norway, but spent many summers in the south as a child.”
“I had no idea,” Oddny said. “I’ve never heard you speak of this before.”
“Well, we haven’t gotten much of a chance to talk until recently, have we?” Svein stopped walking. “Do you have everything you need?”
“I think so.” Oddny peered into the basket looped around her elbow. “Wait. I’m missing angelica for my tea. I’ll be right back.”
She headed back to the herbalist’s stall, cursing herself as a stab of pain sliced through her abdomen, a harbinger of what was to come. Over the winter, as she and Halldor had grown close and she began to spend more time with him than anyone else, their cycles had begun shifting to coincide, so she never knew when to expect her blood. This time, with the stress of all that had happened, she’d been unprepared.
Many languages floated around her, though the main one was that of the Svear, which she could understand, although the cadence of their speech sounded more like that of singing to her ears. But as she rounded the corner to the next row of booths, she heard snatches of a conversation in Norse, and in a familiar accent at that—Halogalanders? Curious, she followed the voices to find two red-haired men arguing in front of a stall stocked with fine silk scarves.
“—get back as soon as possible. We don’t have time for this. It doesn’t matter what she looks like—we did what we were asked to do—”
“Gods, Eyvind, we need to at least get her something to cover her head. People keep asking me if she’s for sale.”
“But she’s wearing that knife I gave her, and a sword, for Thor’s sake. How can they not realize she’s a free woman?”
“I know, but earlier a man tried to grab her—”
“The one you gave a black eye? Good. He deserved it. Vultures. Gunna will kill us if anything happens to her—”
“Alf? Eyvind?” Oddny said, and Gunnhild’s brothers turned. She hadn’t seen them in nearly a decade, and by the startled looks on their faces, it seemed to be taking them a moment to place her. “What are you doing here?”
At the sound of her voice, a third person pushed between the twins and then stopped in her tracks at the sight of Oddny, whose arms went limp at her sides, the basket sliding from her elbow to spill on the ground.
The woman who approached her was familiar and alien at once. The hem and cuffs of her faded copper-colored wool dress were ragged, the neckline and armpits stained, her linen underdress missing. On her feet was a pair of flimsy birch bark shoes. Her pale face with its splash of freckles was gaunt, her brown hair clumsily shorn to the scalp. Her green eyes were the same, but their mischief was gone now, replaced with something darker, something hunted, something Oddny could not begin to understand. She wore a belt with a sword and a bone-handled knife hanging from it, and the sword was familiar, too—it had belonged to their father.
And when she approached Oddny with tentative steps, Oddny remained exactly where she stood, too overcome to move, to breathe, to speak. Tears had gathered in her eyes but she was afraid to blink, afraid that the slightest movement would scare this apparition away.
Signy stopped just before her sister, face slack with disbelief.
“This is a dream,” she said. She looked over her shoulder at Alf and Eyvind. “You almost had me believing it wasn’t. Fate’s cruelty is boundless, isn’t it?” Before Oddny could speak, Signy yanked her tattered sleeve up and pinched the meat of her forearm hard enough to draw blood with her broken fingernails. “Wake up. Wake up—”
Oddny lunged forward and grabbed her wrist. “Stop that! Look at me, Signy. Look.”
Signy peered at the hand around her wrist, then slowly raised her head to meet her sister’s eyes.
“Oddny?” she whispered, and then Oddny’s arms were around her. “Could it really be . . .?”
Oddny felt the moment her sister accepted that she was truly saved, felt her whole body relax for what was probably the first time since that horrible day. Then Signy let out a keening sob and her knees buckled as she returned the embrace, dragging Oddny to the ground with her. And Oddny didn’t care that the wood-planked streets were muddy from yesterday’s rain, that her fallen ingredients were ruined, that her dress was dirty, that people were staring at them.
Signy was here.
And Oddny was never going to let her go again.
34
THEY CONVENED IN THE cottage soon after: Alf, Svein, and Halldor sat on benches at the table, Signy and Oddny sat holding hands on the bed, and Eyvind sat on a stool and tended the stew pot over the hearth. Introductions made, Alf and Eyvind told their story first.
“Gunnhild had some sort of . . . vision.” Alf gestured helplessly. “It told her where to find Signy, so she sent us to Courland with the fastest ship they had at Alreksstadir. Gunna was able to tell us every landmark in detail. It was absolutely bizarre.”