Bracelet of Bones (2 page)

“And Harald gave it to you,” said Solveig, wide-eyed.

“And he told me that he’d sail to Kiev, because Yaroslav, king of the Rus, had given shelter to King Olaf and would be sure to welcome him.

“‘And then I may sail south of south,’ Harald told me. ‘South as far as Miklagard itself—the golden city. I may join the Varangian guard—the troop of Vikings serving the emperor. But be sure of one thing, Halfdan: I’ll send for you. Yes, when the time’s right, I will send for you.’

“‘And I will come,’ I promised him. ‘I will come.’

“Solva, my Solva, I can still hear the words Harald Sigurdsson sang before we embraced and he went east and I went west:

“You swore it,” Solveig repeated. “You swore you’d go.”

Halfdan nodded.

“Would you take me?”

Her father smiled. “But you’ll be wanting to marry before long. If I take you, what would I be doing? Stealing your years.”

Solveig frowned.

“Marry, yes, and become a mother.”

“There’s no one here . . .” Solveig began. “Anyhow, not if it means being like Asta.”

“Solva,” her father rebuked her tenderly.

“No one,” Solveig repeated. “None of the boys on the fjord. I’d rather sail with you. Will you swear to take me?”

Halfdan stared gravely at his daughter. “In my heart I will.”

Solveig smiled weakly.

“I swear it, Solva.”

“Your heart swears you will,” Halfdan’s daughter told him. “But not your eyes.”

2

T
he earth moved.

The first day of September. Almost autumn. Almost sunset. Solveig always forgot just how much she loved this between time, and then, instinctive as an animal, she remembered.

“Why don’t you sleep out?” her father had suggested. “You always do that at the start of autumn. Clean under the stars.”

Then Halfdan wrapped his arms as tightly around her as he had at Stiklestad, and for a second time she could feel he was trembling.

“The best time of year for it,” Halfdan said in a husky voice. “The stars—you can almost pick them.”

“Let me go, then,” said Solveig, laughing yet troubled, wrestling free. But what she meant was: “Never let me go.”

“Go on, then, Solva,” her father told her.

Up on the high ground behind her farm, Solveig leaned against a silver birch as slender as she was, and she stared at the fjord, nothing but silver glitter as it snaked its way
north, nothing but orange flame as it wound south and west toward the setting sun.

There were flames up on the hillside too, the flame leaves of the sumac that had already scented autumn. In the springy moss around her, Solveig found plenty of blueberries. Most she dropped into the leather pouch attached to her belt, but some she chewed until her tongue and lips were as blue as a changeling’s.

“That’s what you are,” her stepmother, Asta, sometimes told her, with her mouth full of nails. “A changeling. Your watchful eyes, one gray, one violet. And they’re too wide apart. You’re not young, you’re not old.”

Solveig sighed.

When she pressed one ear to the mossy rock, Solveig could hear it grumbling, as far off as her first memories.

She wasn’t afraid. But she knew something must be happening, maybe down in the dripping caves, home of the greedy dwarfs and their smithies, and maybe much farther, nine days’ ride through freezing mist and darkness, in the world where the dead live.

But when she lay flat as a plank and pressed her other ear to the rock, the earth was slumbering again. Solveig could hear nothing but her own soft breathing and a mosquito whining.

Then she lay back and linked her fingers behind her head. She thought about Stiklestad and how her father was haunted by the battle and always would be and what runes she should carve on the shoulder blade she had found. She watched the bleeding sun slide down
into the water. She shivered and wrapped herself in her sheepskin—the skin of one-eyed Tangl.

Night rode across the sky, and the rime that dropped from her stallion’s mane stiffened Solveig’s sheepskin. The hoarfrost stiffened her limbs too.

Waking in the middle of the night, she lay and wondered at the thousands and thousands of stars.

I know I’m up here on our hillside, she thought, but it’s so strange; I feel as if I’m in every other place as well and here in this time but in every other time too.

Closing her eyes again, Solveig dreamed the story her father had once told her about the bride who vanished on her wedding day. Solveig was the bride, and she had wandered a little way away from the wedding feast and danced with the fairies, supposing they were guests. And then she drank their wine . . .

When Solveig returned to the feast, everything looked different. The farm of her bridegroom’s family had disappeared, and there was no sound of singing or fiddling or laughter.

Then she met an old woman, sitting outside her cottage, and the old woman took one look at her and screeched, “I know who you are. The bride! The bride of my great-great-grandfather’s brother.”

With that, Solveig—the bride who came back—dropped down dead. She dissolved into a heap of dust.

When Solveig woke, it was broad daylight. She stood up and stamped like a colt to be sure she was still flesh and
blood and bone. Then she swung her arms, rubbed the stars out of her eyes, and yawned.

Gazing down, she saw her own farm was still there, all right: the hearth smoke was rising right through the turf roof as usual. Both cows lowed as soon as she greeted them. And Kalf, chopping wood in the yard, ignored her as usual.

Solveig found her stepmother in the little dairy. After her dream, Solveig was even quite pleased to see her.

“Good morning and good morning!” she caroled.

Asta looked up. “Good for nothing,” she grunted.

Solveig frowned.

“Your father’s gone.” Asta smacked her wooden scoop against the side of the churn, and its slender stem snapped. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”

“Gone where?” asked Solveig.

“Hel, for all I care.”

“Trondheim, you mean?”

“They came for him.”

“Came? Who did?”

“Harald’s men. Last night.”

“But he’s . . .” The back of Solveig’s neck was freezing. “But he’s . . .”

“Gone!” cried Asta, and she spit on the marl floor. “Gone to join Harald.”

“Where?”

“How should I know? East to Garthar. South to Kiev and Miklagard. That’s what they kept saying.”

“But . . .” Solveig gasped. “He said . . .”

“Since when,” demanded Asta in an acid voice, “were men and promises close companions?”

He knew, thought Solveig. He knew. That’s why he took me to Stiklestad. That’s why he wanted me to sleep up on the hill.

“How long?” she asked. “I mean, how long?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Solveig was wordless. She felt as if she had dissolved into a pile of dust.

“Still,” said Asta, “I’ll be all right, won’t I? I’ll be just fine with Kalf and Blubba and you, Solveig, you dreamer.”

Solveig walked out of the dairy. She walked away from the farm and down to the fjord. She sat cross-legged at the end of their little wooden jetty.

He’ll send for me, she thought. Just as Harald has sent for him. He swore he’d take me with him. Didn’t he?

But she began to shiver in the broad sunlight.

To begin with, she choked back her tears. But then she began to sob. She sobbed—she couldn’t stop herself—and her tears dripped between the planks of the jetty into the salt water.

All day Solveig kept going over everything her father had told her at Stiklestad. Each word. Each silence and gesture. His trembling.

She understood why her father wanted to follow Harald. But what she couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t told her. All she felt was her own desolation and helplessness.

That night, Solveig could see Asta sitting on her three-legged stool by the fire. Her sweep of copper hair glinted in
the flickering light. Her stepmother moaned, and then she began to pray and redouble her prayers.

Asta prayed to Thor for Halfdan’s safety. She prayed to Freyja to give her strength of mind, strength of heart. She prayed to all the guardian gods for Kalf and Blubba. She even prayed for Solveig, and then she tossed her head, and hawked, and spit into the fire.

Solveig lay as still as a stone seems to lie. Through half-closed eyes she saw her stepmother stretch out on her sleeping bench and heard her sigh as loud and long as a seventh wave breaking.

Then Kalf and Blubba barged in.

“Beware!” proclaimed Kalf in his high-pitched voice. Although he was fifteen, his voice was still breaking, one moment quite gruff, the next squeaky.

“Beware of a creaking bow,” Blubba said.

“And a yawning wolf,” said Kalf.

“Beware of new ice.”

“And a pretty girl’s pillow talk.”

Both boys guffawed.

“Kalf! Blubba!” Their mother’s voice cut through the darkness. “Enough!”

“Beware of a stepfather,” Kalf went on, “a scuttling stepfather. Come on, Blubba!”

But Blubba didn’t join in. He knew what Solveig must be feeling.

“Blubba!”

“Enough!” their mother cautioned them.

Before long, both boys had fallen asleep, and so had their mother. Solveig lay in the thicket of their breathing, their growling and snorting, trapped and unable to escape.

My father, she thought. My father. She moaned like a wolverine, one long, low warbling moan. Then she banged her head against her pillow sack.

In the high skies, stars froze and the moon marbled. Then kind clouds closed the sky lid, and down came the rain.

Solveig was first to wake.

It was still raining. She could feel it without hearing it.

She felt so drained. As if her head were too tired to think and her heart had run out of feeling. Then she remembered all over again. And as soon as she remembered, warm under her sheepskin, she shivered.

Solveig put both arms around her pillow sack, drew it close, and buried her face in it. That was when she felt it. A lump. Hard and edgy, flat almost. She poked her fingers inside the pillow’s woolen casing, then reached in almost up to her elbow, splayed her fingers, and burrowed into the down. There! She had it, and she was almost sure she knew what it was. She closed her right hand around it.

The fire in the hearth was nothing but gray ash. And the last light from the little oil lamp suspended from a rafter was no brighter than elf-fire. Solveig stood up and stepped over to the door. Barefoot, she walked out into the rain.

In the dawn light she opened her fist. She was right. It was the gold brooch. The brooch Harald Sigurdsson had given to her father.

On the back of the brooch there was a fastening pin and the two pairs of runes:
and
.

“HS and HA,” breathed Solveig. Her heart was pumping. You hid it there. Where only I would find it. Though how I slept on it all night without feeling it, I can’t think.

Solveig put the brooch between her teeth and gently bit it.

And you said it was worth more than our farm and all our cattle and goats and sheep. As precious as your own blood.

But why? I mean, am I the child in the boat? In the boat with you? Do you want me to follow you? Or have you . . . have you given it to me for safekeeping? Or because you’ll never come back?

“She’s out here,” said a voice behind her.

At once Solveig closed her right hand around the brooch and thrust her hand inside her woolen shawl.

“Mad,” Kalf called. “Mad and sopping.” But then he stepped up behind Solveig and tweaked her shoulder blades. “I saw you. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar! What is it?”

“I told you,” Solveig insisted.

“I’ll find out,” Kalf told her in his unpleasant voice, and he grabbed Solveig’s arm.

Solveig squeezed the brooch until its corners bit into the palm of her right hand. Then she squeezed again until she drew blood.

“What is it?” Kalf demanded hoarsely.

“Leave me alone!”

“What’s going on?” Asta called out from inside. “Kalf! Stop it!”

Kalf backed off. “I’ll find out,” he threatened her. “Whatever it is.”