Chapter 3
Three
Iwinced as I rummaged through the satchel Viljan had packed. In it were only two sets of battle leathers and a too-warm fur cloak, and while we weren’t a people that dressed up often, I had a feeling the king would expect something a bit more formal for the first night.
“Are you the Sweengards’ heir?”
After whirling, nearly slipping on the blood, I came face-to-face with a pale-haired man, about a head taller than myself, with green eyes that reminded me far too much of my brother’s.
“You must be,” he continued, amusement causing a ripple in his stoic composure. “And let me guess… That’s a karl who tried to come after you?” He swirled his boot around in the blood. “Messy. The thralls aren’t going to be happy with you.”
He was jarl. He had to be. He exuded the same mixture of arrogance and mischief Lika used to, and I gripped the pouch so as not to let my hand fly to my aching chest when the man curiously tilted his head.
As his gaze went up and down my body, across my rumpled tunic and my bare legs and bloodied feet, and he raised a brow, I cleared my throat.
“I’m Elvara Sweengard,” I replied hoarsely as I tried to appear very interested in how the satchel sealed. “Who are you?”
The man opened his mouth, but a furiously high-pitched female voice broke in before he could respond. I jerked when a side door in the longhouse flew open. Wood slammed against wood, drowning out the drums from the main tent.
“She’s the Sweengard heir? Can’t anyone get it right around here?
I thought Lika was supposed to be here!” She tsked, red flaring on her cheeks.
“That damned king’s second. Now I have to run all the way back to my tent to get her proper clothing!
” The woman’s sigh echoed in my bones. “It would be a dishonor to all of us for King Gustief to see her in that.” Her gaze fell to the ground, and her already tense features locked up. “Is that a dead initiate?”
The woman was a maid, although the gilded crown on her dress signaled she was a high-ranking thrall, most likely born within the king’s own house of servants.
The firelight cast a sickly yellow glow over her wrinkled features, but she held her head high as she grumbled at having to get someone to clean this up.
Her lip twisted as if my very presence were a bitter draft she was forced to swallow.
My shoulders pulled in, and when I tried to offer an apologetic smile, she clicked her tongue again.
This definitely was no lowly housekeeper.
While it wasn’t the way I had been brought up, I was familiar with thrall classes and rankings from our travels to other islands and on the few occasions we fought together with other fylkis.
My father hadn’t enforced hierarchy in our village in the same way the other chieftains did.
In other villages, jarls, karls, our classes, and the thralls were entirely separated, forbidden to consort unless in a formal occupational capacity.
In ours, thralls married karls, and we even had a jarl wed a servant last year.
Few brows had lifted as she walked down the aisle to greet him, her smile so bright it drowned whatever muttering there was.
The wrinkled maid hadn’t addressed me directly—the laws of the hall forbade a thrall from speaking until a noble jarl tongue loosened theirs—but pride kept her neck straight, and only someone who slept near the king’s hearth would dare to voice such harsh critique of my state.
“You may speak,” I said softly. “And please, no bother.” I waved the bag. “The festivities have already begun. I’ll wear my best leathers. And I’m sorry about the mess.”
“Sorry? You can be as sorry as you want, but that’s going to stain!
And that?” She waved toward the leathers I’d left on the bed.
“That will not please the king.” The maid scoffed, already turning to head out the side door, onto a path leading to the lake behind the longhouse.
“I will fetch you something appropriate while I get someone to deal with this. I have no desire to also scrub elite blood from the tent’s floor. ”
I grimaced. Making enemies of the servants on the first night wasn’t in my plans.
Don’t underestimate a thrall. They hear and see and know things we don’t.
That’s what my father had once told me when I asked why another chief brought his band of servants to one of our war camps.
My father always taught us that power wasn’t only found in a sharp blade or a divine rune.
It was in the hands that cleaned the hearth and the ears that caught the whispers of the high seat.
A piece of bread or a scrap of leather could be the difference between life and the grave when the tides turned against us.
“It’s all right, Marion. My sister hasn’t arrived yet.” The blond man waved toward me, lips curled with amusement but also a touch of malice that made the hair on my arms rise. “The girl looks about her size. She can borrow one of her dresses.”
“She has a name,” I mumbled. “And as I said, it’s fine. I will shoulder the king’s disappointment.”
Marion ignored me. “Vero won’t mind?”
He shook his head. “She won’t be arriving until the trials begin. She has no need for it tonight.”
The maid turned to me, shaking her head with such disdain, the urge to fold into myself grew hot across my skin.
“I don’t know how much clothing will help,” she muttered, eliciting a chuckle from the man.
“She needs two baths and a full scrubbing. And that hair… it’s so tangled she could be out here all night trying to tame it. ”
My skin blazed. Saltwater and wind and days of constant travel would make anyone unravel, and I’d been too heartsick to braid my hair—or do anything to it apart from getting snot and tears into the crimson disarray falling around my shoulders.
It would probably take more than a night to get the knots out.
The man laughed again. “No need to cry, sweetness. It’s just hair.”
I hadn’t realized a tear had sneaked its way down my cheek, and I cursed to myself when Marion and the man tracked my hand as I wiped at it.
“I’m fine,” I said as the maid stepped forward.
Apparently those words were the only thing I was able to get out at this point.
Marion didn’t believe me, her brows rising as I backed up and used the satchel as a shield between us. But after a deep exhale, she shrugged.
“Ottoh, you head over once you’ve given her the clothing, you hear me?
You’re already late, and the king doesn’t like to wait.
Better he blames only one of you.” With that she threw me a comb that only bounced off my chest and nearly drowned in the blood when I didn’t react fast enough to catch it.
Then she spun on her heel and stalked off toward the rowdy festivities.
The man—Ottoh—turned my way. A vague memory of a male riding a white horse with dark blood running down its side from the enemies he’d taken down brushed my mind as I bent to close my stiff fingers around the comb.
I’d met him before—during my first enemy raid.
This was the Briggen heir, the only son of Klara Briggen, one of the most cunning chieftains, who ruled over the Sjomarks—an area nearly entirely made up of water, where the people lived on their boats because the little land they had was covered by dense, dangerous forest.
My mother had warned Lika about their family.
Not because they were the strongest, or even the best fighters—their rune was the ratt, the rune for targeting and precision, which made their arrows and spears lethally accurate—but because Klara and her father were unpredictable.
They didn’t like to meet at the tings, the regular chieftain meetings that the other chiefs organized, and very few knew what truly went on in Sjomarks.
“Elvara Sweengard.” The way Ottoh said my name sounded like he was testing it out, and a chill whispered down my back.
“I don’t know much about you.” He frowned for a second.
“Did Lika and Chief Sweengard plan this all along? Pretending Lika was the heir to throw us all off as we prepared for the trials?”
Sweat inched its way across my skin. He might have had the voice of calm seas before an epic battle, but there was something sharp behind it that set off every alarm within me.
Ottoh was almost as tall as Viljan, and while he wasn’t necessarily muscular, more lean, there was something about him—something calculated in the way he moved, almost like the lynx that stalked our forests.
His smirk wasn’t much better. “I know you speak. I heard you before.”
I inched backward. His tone was supposed to sound playful, perhaps even inviting, but there was also irritation behind it.
I was unsettling him by being here in my brother’s place, and he was trying to figure out why.
“Where are the clothes you promised?” I asked.
The Hird was already thick with scrutiny; I didn’t need one of the heirs trying to judge me as well. A few minutes of quiet—of collecting myself. That’s what I needed to be able to face the king. Not to be stuck in some kind of stare-off while my opponent tried to read my intentions.
Ottoh’s laugh was abrupt—as agitated as his tone and posture. “That’s how you’re going to be? Everyone else is in that tent right now, bowing and smarming to the king, while I’m here trying to help you. I could leave, you know.”
I drew myself as tall as I could, even though my bare legs mocked my attempt at authority.
I would not give in to any thinly veiled threats. It was better to come into the crown’s tent dirty and upset the king than to give this man an inch. I had a feeling he wouldn’t settle for a bite but would try to swallow me whole.
Ottoh chuckled before turning on his heel and diving into a circle of cots on the other side of the longhouse. My fingers fidgeted with the edge of my tunic as I waited for him to leave. I couldn’t change until I was alone. I wouldn’t forget ever again what my chest now revealed.
The eerie sound from when we rowed into the harbor returned, whispering through the air like the ghosts our elders sometimes told stories of during bonfire nights.
Only now it sent chills over my skin. Only now it felt like a warning.
Music from the king’s tent built across the yellowed field, filtering through the space, and a knot twisted deep within my gut. I might be forced to greet the king for the first time since I was a child, not only without my father but in leathers my own mother wouldn’t have let through her doors.
I filtered air through my lips. Everything about me was already suspicious. Traveling alone with my guard. A complete change of plans for the heir who’d trained for years to partake in the trials and the academy.
Having to enter that tent and bow to the king all dirty and disheveled?
My groan was interrupted by Ottoh returning.
“Here.” He threw me a bundle of something gold and shimmering, the material similar to the white shirt he was wearing.
“You should hurry. Not even that dress will save you from the king’s wrath if you don’t show up soon.
” His eyes darted pointedly to the blood.
“And you should probably not be here alone for too long. The karls can be a bit… hostile.”
“Thank—”
Ottoh stormed off before I had time to finish. I let out an exasperated gust of air as his furious gait disappeared behind the bend of the longhouse.
Clutching the comb and the dress, I listened to the night.
“The heirs are ready to greet you, Your Majesty.” The king’s second’s voice boomed over the field. I slipped out of my tunic again and picked up the dress while he spoke of the history of the five families, as if our parents hadn’t known the king their entire lives.
I sucked my teeth. Our king liked his formalities. And he liked being fawned over. Which was basically this whole trial spectacle: the heirs kneeling to their superior, driven to their breaking point before they entered his Hird as loyal subjects. If they lived.
When my father’s generation attended the Hird, they’d lost all original heirs but one, and even some seconds and thirds—their iron-bound—had been reaped, leaving several new families to take over before the academy officially began.
My father himself had been a second to our old chief’s daughter, and had claimed his position as heir only when she drowned during a practice invasion.
My fingers shook as I pulled on the dress, and I fisted the little fabric there was to calm myself.
Focus on tonight. One day at a time. That’s how I’d gotten through the past few days. That’s how I would get through tonight. That’s how I’d hopefully get through the summer and the years that followed.
Just one day at a time.
I finished wrangling myself into the dress, and my brows bunched when I looked down.
The garment was beautiful, the glittering fabric wrapping tightly around my arms and torso before falling halfway down my thighs in what looked like sparkling tendrils that swayed as I moved. But that was the end of the dress.
No protection for my legs apart from my sturdy boots. No extra padding over the heart or gut, like our tunics and jackets always had, since we never knew when we could be attacked. Not much fabric at all, really. I pulled at the top, making sure the rune was covered.
Our fylkis didn’t really wear dresses—had never done so until we’d invaded nations with different clothing senses and begun trading and donning new styles—but if this was what the king wanted…
I rubbed my arms against the soft evening breeze before half-heartedly working through the top of my messy hair with the comb, hopefully covering the worst of the damp knots that lay against my neck.
As I placed the comb back on the bed, I was glad that the longhouse didn’t come with a mirror.
There would be so many eyes on me when I entered that tent, others who would gladly pick me apart.
Still, self-consciousness dampened my skin as I considered my sword and shield, wondering if I was meant to bring them or leave them behind.
After a look at the severed head that still lay beside my cot, I picked them up. Slinging the sword’s sheath across my back and fastening the shield to its built-in hook, I rushed out, trying to ignore how the weight of the weapons slowed my strides.