The sun had set by the time Freyga stumbled into her workshop. She bore the usual from the building site—hazel-twigs and oak-chips knotting her unkempt braids; a fresh snag in her tunic, caught on a nail; and fatigue. She plopped onto the mattress she had woven from burlap and straw, its surface speckled with scorch-marks from the fire. She opened her sack to see what was left from foraging: berries from the hawthorn tree she had stumbled on and kept a secret from the other homesteaders. Her mother would have made them into jam or wild vinegar, but Freyga’s work was better saved for shaping timber. She picked the ruddy pearls off the branch she had snapped from the tree’s low limbs.
Step-mother. Her thoughts corrected themselves without her effort, but the slip made her pause. She winced. A berry, too sweet, had stung her tooth.
Freyga had not thought of the woman in years, but her lessons had been kept, even subconsciously. The one she no longer called mother had been frugal beyond necessity. She fed the children scraps from the fine meals her husband had ordered his kitchens serve. When he had ham, they had kipper. When he had his cooks layer dough and butter, reed-thin, over and over, until the pastry it made was as soft as pudding, she and her brothers had stone-ground bread. The woman planted, nurtured, and picked their own roots and greens, even as her husband spent a fortune on preserved lemon from the south.
Freyga hadn’t cared for sweets as a girl, save that they were contraband, and she had made a game of stealing the sauces and jams that were stacked by the wine in the cellar. Until she had found something else buried behind the barrels, something forbidden. Then, there were no more games. Then, she lost the taste for luxury.
Freyga shook her head to clear the past that had crept back in, a cold wind under a closed door. She stuffed her greedy mouth with berries, washed down with watered honey-wine. She was tired, though, too tired to keep her thoughts from drifting back.
She remembered little of the night after the mead she’d drunk at Imbolc, but her mind wouldn’t let her lose a feature from that day: the unveiling of the bard’s sword. Famed in songs she had herself learned, embellished, and passed on, it was like an oracle, like a relic. It proved a story that had been turned into myth in her own mind. She had come north to find the missing pieces of the tales from her childhood, but since spending every coin to her name for the scrap of forest in Middleham, she had begun to wonder if the stories had ever been real. Every day without food, every bruise from a bad fall, a broken finger, a deep splinter...all the little warnings that her ambition for a hall in the north was hopeless...they reminded her. She wasn’t special. She wasn’t the heir of a dynasty of legend. Her stories were just that. Stories. Made up. Fairy tales. She was just a vagrant, like any of them, despite her graspings at grandeur.
But Heartbreaker. It was real. She had held it. Hearing the name had been both a song in her heart and a snag in her blood. If it was real, then its wielder was. If he was real, then who knew what else could be?
Her thoughts carried on past the point of caring that hawthorn-juice and wine had slipped down her sullied chin and stained the blankets. She looked around her workshop. The earthen floor was strewn with wood-flakes and dust. She remembered running barefoot over woven carpets, away from her step-father’s scolding or after her brothers, trying to corner them into rooms where all of them knew they weren’t allowed. The windows in the shed she would sleep in were paneless, just holes in the wall with shutters that made the wind whistle. She remembered her step-father, for his wedding, shipping an image in the most beautiful colored glass from the eastern ports and raising it in the bedroom he was too proper to share with his new bride. It shone its colors to the world during the day, but at night, during storms when even Freyga wasn’t brave enough but to crawl into her mother’s bed, it let its colors drift in, layered like a quilt over the sheets. Qais’ curls had tickled, grown in after a poor attempt on her part to cut them in his sleep. She had earned a strapping for that. Filisk had stared at the window, where he heard the most thunder, even though she knew his blind eyes could barely catch the lightning.
Step-mother, she corrected again, and bit down on a sac of berries.
Freyga had always longed for whispers of the past. Was it because her step-father had forbidden them? Or because she had learned to cherish the trips to Rambroke to hear Haeneth tell her tales, nibbling on oats and honey-cakes as the wolfhounds slept in a ring around her? It didn’t matter, really. It was in her blood.
She wanted every single person’s story to weave them into one strong rope of truth. But now they were slipping in outside her control. These weren’t river-gems she had unearthed with her own digging. These were leaks in the roof, or a stubborn cough that returned, having thought to be healed winters ago. She had wanted them to march in the form of helms and hauberks. She had wanted to sing of the strength of the shield wall or the tall burial pyre. She hadn’t asked for echoes of her step-father’s roar down the hall when he’d found a vase broken in a room in which no one should have been. She hadn’t looked for the memory of what she had found in the cellar. She didn’t want to remember why she had run away.
Sleep. It would cure those haunted wounds. She wiped her mouth and kicked off her boots. Her belt was hung on the nail in the wall, the sheathed seax in her reach. She crawled into the mess of blankets and turned away from the brightness of the forge-hearth. The morning would bring more work, more splinters, more risk of a broken limb if she didn’t cling tightly to the hall’s timber frame as she nailed in the beams. It would distract from the whispers, and she could hope for songs of helms and hauberks instead.
She slept. The hawthorn branch, stripped of berries, tossed in the fire with the sawdust and onion skins, would be ash well before dawn.
