The Einhjorn
Arreana
Episode One of
The Relics of Asgard
Copyright © 2012 Arreana Krueger
All rights reserved.
To my Grandpa Claude for teaching me the importance of thinking for myself. Thank you for sharing your love for history with me.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About the Einhjorn
Also by Arreana
Acknowledgements
A Sneak Peek: Umbra
Chapter One
Saldis Sigurdsdatter clung desperately to the terrycloth.
Hidden at the edge of the hall, the men could not see her languishing in the shadows, but she could see them. The orange and yellow glow coming off the long fires made their blond and red and brown beards glimmer like flames. Their greasy, sodden heads glistened with sweat. Their rain-soaked clothing and mud-caked boots lent a humidity to the hall that, when combined with the smoke rolling off the long fires, made the space almost too stuffy and hot to tolerate.
Not that her father’s men minded. Here the mead flowed freely and the fires burned brightly. The men that had toiled all day in their barley fields and at their fishing nets could sag against the wooden tables, spread out their legs, and share their exhaustion with their fellow man.
Tonight they celebrated the arrival of a noble to their seaside city, and in amongst the boisterous farmers and somber fishermen, the noble’s viking companions drank and cajoled as loudly as the rest of them.
The journey that had brought the party to her father’s city had left them hungry and thirsty and tired. They should have been subdued by their weariness, but the mead, meat, and fires were too tempting not to enjoy. The cots the jarl provided them were forgotten in preference for the hard benches and ale.
The noble sat above the rest of them at the head table. It was him that Disa watched. He chewed, he scratched his beard, he pushed the sodden fringe from his eyes.
“Disa! Don’t just stand there, you useless ninny. Take the prince his towel!” Her mother barked from the cookfire, wiping sweat and steam from her ash-streaked cheeks. Lady Bergljot shoved a stray hair back beneath her shawl and shooed her daughter with a wave of her hand. “Go!”
So Disa stepped into the hall, her cheeks flaming with a heat she could not solely attribute to the fires.
She folded the terrycloth over her hands to hide their trembling as her father’s laymen first registered her presence.
“Lady Disa! How fare thee, fair one?” called a farmer, his beard stuck through with clods of dirt.
“Daughter Disa, where’s my towel?” lamented another.
She had grown used to their teases, but she resented their crowing laughs. A party of men slapped the table and whistled, and another group took up that familiar chant, “Hair like honey, skin like snow, eyes like glass. Guard your hearth, lord jarl, lest the wolves steal your lass!”
The prince’s men laughed, drumming the table and keeping time as her father’s men slurred their way through the rest of the obscene tune. They guffawed to see the young lady’s blush and congratulated each other with a clanking toast.
By the time she had traversed the length of the hall, her blush had spread up to her ears and down to her collar. Her hands, still hidden beneath the terrycloth, now clung at the folds with an emotion very much like anger.
At the head table, her father offered her a wan smile and rubbed his bald and shining head. If they teased her, it was his fault. She was sixteen and still unwed, still virginal. Four years ago her arrival would have inspired the men’s reverence, but her father’s protectiveness had made her into a joke. Thirteen proposals of marriage her father had rejected. How else were the spurned suitors to soothe their damaged egos but by harassing her?
She frowned at her father and cast her gaze away from the guest sitting at his side. Seated on her father’s left, her brother tried admirably to put the men in their place.
“That’s enough!”
This only elicited uproarious laughter from the jarl’s men. The young jarl-to-be had yet to sprout a single chin hair.
She stepped up on the dais, shuffled to the appropriate seat, and thrust her offering towards the prince. “A towel, my lord,” she muttered.
Her eyes locked upon her leather slippers, Disa was alarmed when his fingers grazed her own. The prince, beautiful with his orange hair and burgundy tunic, accepted the terrycloth. His fingers lingered upon hers.
“Thank you, my lady.”
“That will be all, Disa. Return to your mother,” said her father.
But as Disa sidled backwards, the fingers beneath the terrycloth snapped forward to encircle her palm. His hand was larger than hers, but softer than her father’s.
The terrycloth fell to the prince’s lap. The men saw their clasped hands and the raging blush radiating across the lady’s face. With a chorus of hooting laughter, they banged their ceramic cups against the table.
“The prince has caught himself a doe!” roared one of the land-owning farmers.
A viking nearby sneered. “Hold tight, my lord!”
Her rabbit’s heart pounding, Disa forced herself to meet the prince’s eyes. “My lord, what…?”
His eyes were like the water; dark and deep and moist. His dark eyebrows hung low upon his tall forehead. His cheekbones cast sharp shadows upon his face. His straight nose bore a hooking scar over one nostril. She hadn’t noticed it when she had admired him from the kitchen doorway. It was an imperfection that was only ever visible to those he allowed close.
She stared at the scar. The prince spoke, but she missed it in her daze.
“Wh-what was that?” she stuttered. She hated that she stuttered. She must have looked such the fool.
“Did you not hear me, my lady? I was asking you to stay.”
“What? Stay?” Her hands were sweaty; she hoped he had not noticed.
She glanced furtively at her brother and father, but the former only moped, and the latter shrugged.
Her father tugged upon his red beard. A dark, rich red, unlike the prince’s carefully bleached and dyed locks. “Stay if you wish, my dear. I dare say your mother can afford to do without you.”
This satisfied the prince, and he stood to withdraw the chair on his left. He was not particularly tall—not like her father and his warriors—but he was wide of body. He smelled of mud and campfires, and his grin was modest and earnest as he guided her to her seat.
She dropped numbly into the chair and clung to the table as the prince pushed her flush against it. There was no place set for her and the food was collected further down the table, but then she had already eaten. Besides, her nerves would make it difficult to keep down any more.
“Thank you for the towel, my lady.” The prince reclaimed his chair and rubbed the terrycloth through his sodden, shoulder-length locks.
The way his knees pointed towards her, the way his body twisted to face her, made the space between them seem all the smaller and more intimate. His proximity filled her with a sensation of both glee and embarrassment.
The prince didn’t mind her silence, or her open-mouthed staring. He dried his hair, lowered the towel, and grinned at her as if having just returned from a long voyage.
He swung the terrycloth around his shoulders. Steam rose from the towel as he rubbed it along the back of his neck.
“What is your name,
my lady?”
“Di—Saldis Sigurdsdatter.”
“And you are Jarl Sigurd’s daughter?”
“Aye, my lord,” she mumbled.
“Your father treats you well. These brooches are really quite marvelous.” He reached forward to stroke the tortoiseshell brooches pinned to her chest. His index finger traced the design carved into the right brooch, and so he did not see her mouth twitch when he leaned in close.
The moment stretched into eternity, but at last he straightened to look her in the eye again. He was still smiling, and Disa’s blush burned. “They’re fine indeed.”
“A gift for her birthday,” her father replied, tearing a pannekaken and using it to wipe the grease from his beard.
The prince flashed her father his toothy smile. His blue eyes were so solemn, and yet his mouth was so expressive. It was pleasant to watch his mouth move as he spoke. It was charming the way his trimmed beard quivered when he laughed.
“How will her suitors ever hope to compete with you?” The prince whirled on Disa. In a softer tone, but with no less animation, he said, “What could a suitor present you that your father has not already provided?”
He jested and the jarl laughed appreciatively, but Disa was nervous. She failed to register the sly turn of his lip and answered earnestly, “A quilted jacket.”
A lesser man might have balked at her honesty, but the prince gave no pause. He slapped the table and feigned shock as he said to her father, “No jacket, Jarl Sigurd? Your daughter will freeze for sure!”
Jarl Sigurd’s tone revealed some of his impatience, “It’s no fault of mine that she grows so quickly.”
The prince waved away the jarl’s annoyance. “No matter! If she should find herself chilled tonight, she need only scoot a little closer.” However, Prince Eric, eldest son of First King Harald, seemed serious when he added in a whisper, “I shall keep you warm, fair one.”
Disa, having never received such sweet and patient overtures, clutched her wool dress and feared that her heart might burst from her throbbing chest. It was not just the way he spoke or helped her from her chair at bedtime that gave her such flutterings. No, it was the way his hand lingered upon hers, the way he stared at her as if seeing someone beneath the honey-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes.
Was it possible, Disa wondered, to fall in love with a stranger? And as her thrall brushed her hair and collected her dirty clothes, she found herself wishing she had someone to ask.
Her mother would tell her never to hope. He was a prince, after all, and she was just a pretty-faced dullard.
Her brother would be sullen and silent. His sister would be high queen when he would only ever be a jarl.
Her father would refuse his permission. Disa was his first child, his only daughter.
Even so, she went to bed that night not thinking of the impossibilities, but of the way the prince’s dark eyelashes brushed his tanned cheeks. She thought of how he had stroked the carvings of her brooch, and she felt, for perhaps the first time, a stirring within her.
Chapter Two