Oath of the Longest Night

The snow came down out of a sky the color of a drawn blade, and Ingirid Halfdansdottir rode into it with her back straight because there was nothing else left that was hers to keep straight.

They had taken the rest by degrees. Her father's men had taken her name from her mouth three days south, when the last of them stopped calling her lady and began calling her the payment, low, between themselves, thinking the wind carried it away from her. The horse under her was not hers; it had been chosen for its plainness, a shaggy dun mare that would not shame the escort by looking like a gift worth grieving. Her cloak was good wool but travel-filthy, and she had refused to let them clean it at the last steading. Let the north see the road on her. Let them understand she had been carried here like a barrel of salt fish, and drawn her own conclusions about the man who had ordered it.

The fjord opened below them at the trail's last turning, black water pinched between white shoulders of mountain, and at its head the hall. It was longer than she had let herself imagine. Turf-roofed, humped with snow already, smoke standing straight up from the roof-hole into the still air the way smoke did only in the hardest cold. Firelight leaked yellow through the seams of the great door. Around it the yard was full of men, and the men were watching the trail, and every one of them had known she was coming since the first rider crested the pass.

Do not slow, she told herself. Do not let the mare feel your hands change.

She did not slow.

Her father's captain, Steinar, rode up level with her at the gate-posts, and for a breath she thought he might say something to her — some word to carry south to Halfdan, some rough decency at the end. He did not look at her. He looked past her at the jarl's men and lifted his empty hand to show it empty, and said, loud, in the flat voice of a man reading a tally, "Halfdan Ketilsson keeps the peace. Here is the pledge of it, given whole and unharmed, as was sworn."

Given. As though she had been a thing set down on a table.

They halted her in the middle of the yard where the trampled snow had gone to grey slush and then frozen again in ruts, and a thrall came to take the mare's bridle, and there was nothing to do then but get down. She got down. Her legs had been in the cold so long they buckled at the first weight and she caught herself on the saddle-bow and made the movement look like it had always meant to be that, straightening her cloak, and did not let her face move at all. A woman who stumbled would be a woman who was frightened. She was frightened. That was precisely why no one in this yard would be permitted to see it.

The men parted, and the jarl came out from the hall.

She had built him in her mind on the ride north, the way one builds an enemy — thick, red, loud, a mouth full of ale and appetite, a conqueror's leer already halfway to his lips. The man who came down the two worn steps from the threshold was none of it. He was tall, yes, and broad through the shoulders under a dark fur-collared coat, but there was nothing loud in him. He moved the way her father's oldest hound had moved in its last years, unhurried, certain, spending no motion it did not need. His beard was dark going grey at the jaw. His eyes went over her once — over the filthy cloak, the frozen ruts of her stumble, the set of her chin — and she felt herself read the way a trader reads a coin, weighed, tested against the teeth, and she hated that she could not tell what he had decided.

"Ingirid Halfdansdottir," he said. Not a question. He set her name down plainly, whole, the way it had not been said in three days, and she was furious at how much that steadied her.

"Jarl Eirik," she said. "Blood-Axe." She let the byname sit in the cold air between them. If he wanted her afraid, she would make him say why.

The line of his mouth did not change, but something behind his eyes sharpened. "You know the name."

"My father's men used it often. Never kindly."

"No," Eirik agreed. "I don't suppose they did." He turned his head a fraction toward Steinar without taking his eyes off her, and said, "It is witnessed. The pledge is delivered. Tell Halfdan his hall is safe from mine while she is under my roof, as was sworn, and that I keep my word longer than most men keep their fear." It was dismissal, and Steinar took it as one; she heard the escort's horses turn behind her, heard the wet crunch of them going, and did not look back at the last of the south leaving her in the snow. She had decided, somewhere on the pass, that she would not give them that.

"You'll want the terms," Eirik said to her, "before you want the fire. I can see it in you."

She had not expected that either. "Say them."

"Winter under my roof. You are unharmed and you stay unharmed; any man of mine who forgets that answers to me, and I am not a forgiving master to my own." He said it flatly, a thing already decided, not a courtesy offered for thanks. "When the thaw opens the pass, your father may ransom you back, or we make the pledge a marriage and the peace a thing of blood instead of coin. That is for the spring to settle. Not for tonight, and not for you to answer now."

Ransom or marriage. Her worth measured out in two directions, both of them running through the hands of men — her father's purse, or this man's bed — and neither of them once passing through her own. She kept her face still. She had had long practice at keeping her face still.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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