The Viking’s Sacrifice by Julia Knight Read Free Book Online Page A

Agnar’s age. She had the wrinkles of someone who laughs often and smiles more, and the kind, patient eyes of someone who had seen a lot and come to terms with what life had given her.
    Many a lady takes a man to bed she don’t love. True enough. Farmers’ daughters married men for a roof and a bed, to help out with the smallholding. Merchants married their children to each other to strengthen trade alliances. Love was something the bards sang of, but practicality made it a nonsense. Survival was more important. It was the way of things and always had been. Yet she had loved Bayen, after time. Not as the bards sang, but he was a good God-fearing man who’d treated her with sombre kindness, and she’d felt a quiet kind of love grow from that.
    Now Bayen was gone, murdered by these savages, and she was no longer the lady of the house, of the estate, no longer Lady Wilda but a slave. That was what she had to deal with, and she would. You got what God saw fit to give you and made the best of it. God had His reasons, must have even for this. She looked up at Agnar, at the way his eyes were worried, how he chewed his lip. Bebba was maybe right about him. Even if she wasn’t, Wilda just had to get on with it until she could escape or buy her freedom. There was nothing else to be done.
    “Where do we start?” she said.
    Bebba laughed and stood up. “Oh, you’ll do, my lady. You’ll do.”

Chapter Four
    Never a whit should one blame another, whom love hath brought into bonds .
    Havamal: 93
    By the time Toki had steered the horse down the twisting paths to the village, grateful once again for Einar’s sureness on the slush and ice where his halt leg was not, the snow had thickened. Clouds drew down around the mountain, obscuring their tops. Toki could only barely make out Odin’s Helm, the rocky outcrop that watched over the village, made it a lucky place. So they’d said once, but Raven’s Home didn’t seem so lucky to Toki and hadn’t for years. The wyrd of the village was blackened to his eyes, had become a poisoned thing. As his wyrd was, his fate twisted by one night, one moment.
    He found a place for Einar and left him in the fuggy warmth rising from the cows. He hesitated in the doorway and peered across to the feasting house at the centre of Bausi’s group of buildings. It was far larger then the rest, more than forty fathoms long. Smoke puttered out of three holes in the turf roof, and the smell of roasting beef and pork made Toki’s stomach cramp. The entrance was a bustle of activity as the women and thralls and karls got ready for the feast. A celebration for the safe return of the raiders, who would already be warming themselves by the great fire, drinking ale and vying to tell the best tales of their exploits.
    They might not even notice him, if he were lucky. If he was unlucky, then he would brave it out for the chance to see Gudrun. They taunted his outside, the limp, the silence. They could not reach his inside, where still he dreamed of one day being able to stand tall and strong and say, “I am Einar, and not a coward.”
    He limped his careful way across the snowy yard, through the doorway carved in intricate detail of the World Tree and on into the feasting hall. A karl looked at him sideways with a hint of sneer, but he didn’t bar Toki’s way.
    The hall was hot and smoky inside. All the paraphernalia of the day’s work, the women’s weaving and sewing and the men’s carving and armour-work, had been cleared away. The benches down either side were fronted with boards over trestles and covered with platters of steaming meat and vegetables. Kettles hung over the long fire pit that ran almost the length of the hall, and the smell of beef filled Toki’s mouth with spit. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had beef. Maybe last Winter Nights feast. He’d managed to sneak in at the end, when everyone was too drunk to notice him. Almost a year. He’d face anything for another taste.
    That