Two Ravens by Cecelia Holland Read Free Book Online Page B

their longships and sailed away to fight the Bishop. Ulf and Swan did not come back.
    Every day Bjarni walked around the mill turning the millstone. Every night he tried to move the anvil. For seven days his strength was nothing to the weight of the anvil, but on the eighth night, when he heaved against it, he felt it move.
    When he thought of his brothers, he clenched his fists around the spoke of the millstone; he set his shoulders and ground his anger with the oats and rye. He thought much of Hiyke, in Hrafnfell, his father’s wife.
    She was not really Hoskuld’s wife. She had come to live with them four years before. Hoskuld’s second wife had been long dead; at Hrafnfell they were used to being bachelors, although Bjarni knew that his father was blanket-wise with a woman beyond the mountains. Then one spring she came across the pass to Hrafnfell, leading her black-haired boy by the hand. In the summer, she miscarried. She and Hoskuld never married.
    As he trudged behind the spoke of the millstone, he tried to make poems of her. He made one for his father.
     
    Odinn slew  
    The son of Loki  
    Made ropes of his guts  
    To bind his father  
    Would you were Loki  
    I would lust for death
     
    He had no words for Hiyke.
    On the fifteenth night, he moved the anvil five feet across the forge to the hearth.
    He laid the chain in the coals and pumped the bellows. When the links began to glow, he stretched them across the anvil. He knew some charms for smiths and said them, although he could not hammer the links for fear of bringing down the Christians; he wrapped his hands around the cooler part of the chain and pulled, heated the links and pulled them until the stretching iron broke.
    Dawn was coming. He found a knife and an axe in the forge and took them down to the shore. The cove was deserted. It looked much wider with the longships gone. Three or four smaller boats were drawn up on the beach.
    He found oars in one, sails in another, and put the oars into the boat with the sails. All the while he considered what he might do to avenge himself on Sigurd. He could fire some of the buildings, but that would waken the people in the place just as he was trying to steal away. He would have to wait for his revenge. Bjarni filled a bucket with fresh water from the rainbarrel and stowed it into the boat. In the silent dawn he rowed out of the cove.
    When he left the lee of the island, the wind freshened, and he stepped the mast and raised the sail. The boat flew before the wind. The islands shrank in the distance and slid below the horizon. The rigging sang like harps. The rudder worked in his hands. Until well into the day he let the boat go where the wind blew.
    His wrists were still locked up to the chain. He wrapped the dangling lengths of the chain around his arms and tied them to keep them out of his way. In a locker under the stern thwart there were line and hooks of fishbone. He stabbed his finger with the hook to bloody it and cast the line out behind his boat.
    The wind was out of the north. Dark cloudbanks lay along the horizon. He put the boat on a broad reach, running to the east. In the afternoon he caught two stockfish. While he was boning them with his knife the humps of a mountainous island rose out of the sea to the east. He took the sail down and ran out the oars.
    He spent the night on the shore. In the morning the wind was foul and he rowed the boat northward. Islands dotted the water. His fishing line snagged on hidden rocks. He kept watch for reefs. The wind was so cold he could not sleep all that night; he rowed to keep warm. In the sunlit morning he landed on a little island and slept.
    Clouds covered the sun. The wind veered around to the southwest. Bjarni raised his sail. The boat ran north over rising waves. The water chuckled past the rudder. Rain began to fall. Bjarni was reluctant to give up the fair wind; he did not run into the shelter of an island.
    The wind rose. The boat began to buck and shy