Viking Sword: A Fall of Yellow Fire: The Stranded One (Viking Brothers Saga Book 1) by Màiri Norris Read Free Book Online

find it.”
    Brandr eyed her. “How can you know that?”
    She seemed outwardly restrained, but he sensed a deepening storm gathering beneath the surface. She was nigh to breaking, yet she spoke with apparent composure.
    She glanced at Sindre. “He stands upon it.”
    Sindre frowned and looked at the floor.
    “I will show you.” The fluid grace of her movements intrigued Brandr as she bent over the chest. With every moment in her company, his instincts clamored, and doubt of her servitude grew. No slave, no matter how trusted, would be given knowledge of the master’s secrets. Yet, in her shorn hair, she wore the badge of a thrall. He drew his sax and with a single, precipitous move of the long knife’s blade, sliced open the neck of her cyrtel. She gave a soft cry, and tried to pull away, but he held her with unbreakable grip and jerked down the sleeve to reveal the soft, pale skin of her upper arm. She bore upon her flesh no mark of her ownership.
    “You are no thrall.” His tone accused. “I think you are the thegn’s daughter. Why did you lie?”
    “I did not. You assumed. I but followed your lead.”
    He thought back to their initial encounter and realized she spoke the truth. He had made a hasty assumption. “Why did you shear your hair and wear naught but a cyrtel, instead of the clothing of a woman of status and substance?”
    Her chin rose. “I did these things as a token of mourning. I was alone. There was none to see.”
    She leaned over the broken chest again and slid open a shallow, hidden compartment in a corner of the lid. From inside she retrieved a small key. She stepped back. “Underneath your friend’s feet are loose floorboards. You must pry them up.”
    Within moments, Sindre had several of the panels lying to one side.
    “It is not deeply buried,” she said.
    Sindre’s axe loosened the surface dirt, and uncovered what appeared to be a leather-wrapped box the size of a small chest. He looked up at Brandr, his expression alive with expectancy. His eyes glittered more brightly than had the coins.
    Lissa turned away.
    Brandr’s eyes narrowed. Was she disturbed by the gold-hunger she glimpsed in his uncle?
    She returned to the outer room. Arms wrapped about her middle, she turned in a slow, aching circle, making no effort to avert her eyes from the shattered remains of what had, until that morn, been her home. A sudden vision rose in his mind of Ljotness plundered and his family murdered, of the rage and grief he would know. Did such a thing occur, he would seek vengeance. All those involved would pay with their lives.
    The wish that Lissa had someone to avenge her loss took him by surprise. He felt himself flush and scowled. Witless thought! It was right to take from others what they were too weak to defend. It was the way of the world, and always would be. As well, had events played out differently that morn, it would be himself upon whom he wished retribution!
    He angled his head to follow her movements through the gaps in the wattle screen, and watched her rummage through the mess. She picked up a small, intact earthen flask from the floor, unstoppered it, sniffed and nodded, then stopped at a table, the only furnishing in the room not in pieces. Slender fingertips stroked the rim of a once beautiful bowl of deep yellow hue, richly patterned, now broken and useless, then paused to rub the mesh of a torn reed basket. She lifted it, then uttered a hushed cry as something dropped from inside to land with a tinkle on the table surface. She picked up the object and held it against her lips. Tears crawled over her closed fist to drip onto her bodice before she lowered her hand to rest it against her heart.
    His brows rose as with a furtive glance in his direction, she tucked the article into a fold of her cyrtel.
    She knelt beside a sleeping platform he assumed was hers. From beneath it peeked a battered chest with a broken lid. Pulling it into the open, she removed a green cyrtel, which she