The Rival in Her Furs

The hall stank of the dying. Solveig knew the smell from a hundred beaches and byres — the sweetish rot beneath the tallow-smoke, the sourness of a body that had begun to let go of itself — but it was worse in a house, where the walls held it, where the hearth-fire could not carry it off up into a clean grey sky. She stood a moment inside the door with the cold of the fjord night still on her cloak, and made herself breathe it, and did not let it show on her face.

She had come to be named. That was the shape of the evening as she had carried it down the strand-path in the dark, past the boat sheds and the black water sucking at the shingle. Ten years. Ten years of the oar and the shield-wall and the winter drills in the walled fold before dawn, ten years of being the coldest, cleanest blade in Hrafnkel's household, and tonight the old man would open his hand and name what he had never once said aloud in health: which of his two best oars stood above the other. Which of them had earned the high place. It was owed her the way silver was owed, weighed and counted, and she had come to collect it with her hair braided back for the oar as though she might be asked to prove it on the spot.

The bed-closet was a box of shadow at the hall's warm end, its carved posts furred with soot. Hrafnkel the Old lay in it small. That was the thing that stopped her breath, more than the smell — how small he had gone. She remembered him filling a longship's stern like a figurehead, remembered the hand that could crack a man's helm coming down light as a blessing on the crown of her head when she was a half-grown thing with more temper than reach. Now the hand lay on the fur outside the blanket, knotted, spotted, the tendons standing like ship's rope under the skin, and it did not lift when she came to the closet's edge and knelt.

"Solveig," he said. His voice had gravel in it but it was still his. "Ash-fair. You came fast."

"You sent fast." She took the knotted hand between both of hers. Her palms were rope-scarred, hard; his was colder than hers, and that told her how little of the night was left to him. "I would have run the whole strand if the boy had said run."

"I know it." Something moved at the corner of his mouth that had been a smile once. "You would run through a wall if I named the wall the enemy. That was always the trouble with you."

She did not answer that. Across the dim of the closet, at the other side of the dying man, someone else knelt in the shadow, and Solveig had known she was there since the door — had known it the way you know a sword is drawn behind you before you turn. She turned. Ingirun Black-Braid met her eyes over the old man's sunken chest.

The eastern silver was at her ears, catching the one thread of hearth-light, small rings the trader-mother had left her. Her single heavy braid lay black over one shoulder. Her broad strong-boned face gave Solveig nothing at all, which was itself a kind of answer, because Ingirun's face gave most people plenty — she was quick and warm-mouthed when it suited her, and the crew laughed at her jokes at the oar in a way they never laughed at Solveig's cold silences. But not now. Now she had put her face away behind her eyes and was waiting, braced, the way she waited before every fight and before every winter that Solveig had ever watched her weather in this hall that tolerated her Gardariki blood and had never once, in a decade, offered her a seat.

So. They had both been sent for. They had both come to be named. Of course they had.

"You brought her here for this," Solveig said to the old man, and heard the edge come into it before she could file it down.

"I did." Hrafnkel's eyes were the last strong thing in him, pale and sharp, moving from one of them to the other and back. "Ten years I have watched you two circle each other like a pair of hounds too well-matched to settle it. You, Ingirun — the best hand at a steering-oar I have trained since I could hold one myself, and no man's fool at a bargain, and the only one of my household who ever reads the sea a whole heartbeat before it moves. And you, Solveig — the discipline of you, the cold of you, the way a shield-wall firms when you set your feet in it. I have loved you both past reason." He stopped to find breath. The finding took a long time. "And I will not break one of you to raise the other. I am too old to be that cruel, and too fond, and I have not the days left to be sorry for it."

Something in Solveig went very still and very careful, the way it did on a lee shore with rocks under the surf. "Then name it plainly, foster-father. Whatever it is."

"Sæhrafn," he said.

The name of the ship. The Sea-Raven, his prize longship, thirty oars and a raven at her prow, drawn up now in the boathouse with a winter's worth of northern furs and walrus ivory heaped in the shed beside her, waiting to be stowed against the southern voyage he would not live to make. The best ship on the fjord and everyone's envy the length of the district. Solveig felt her heart lift in spite of the deathbed, in spite of everything, a treacherous hot lift — he is giving me the ship — and hated herself for the lift even as it happened, because she saw in the same instant that his eyes had gone to Ingirun as he said it, and to her, and to Ingirun again. Weighing them level. Always level.

"She sails south on the tide, debt and cargo both," Hrafnkel said. "To the trading-post in the Danish sounds, to sell what's in her belly and pay what's owed against her hull. She needs a captain." The gravel of his voice thickened. "She has two."

"No," said Ingirun. It was the first word she had spoken. It came out low and flat.

"Two captains," the old man went on, as though she had not spoken, as though he had heard the no a hundred times already in the long hours of his dying and had set it aside. "Joint over Sæhrafn, the pair of you, sworn on this voyage south and home again. Share her command. Share her oar-bench. Share —" and here the pale eyes glinted, and Solveig understood that the cruelty and the fondness in the man had never been two things but one — "share the one captain's bed-closet in her stern, for there is only the one, and I'll not have my two best oars sulking in the bilge over which gets the dry berth. You will give no order that the other has not agreed. You will stand level, both of you, or you will stand not at all."

The hall was very quiet. Out past the closet Solveig could hear the crew of the household, gathered at the long benches for the dying, not speaking — Steinar the steersman somewhere in the dark, and Yrsa with the ship's tally-stick, and the rest — all of them listening, all of them witness. That was the trap of it, and she saw the trap close even as her whole body strained against it. A dying man's word, spoken before his household, was law. It was oath already, half-sworn by the hearing of it. To refuse it was to spit on the last wish of the man who had raised her from a temper and a pair of fists into the blade she was. There was no honor left standing on the far side of that refusal.

He had not raised her above Ingirun. He had bound her to Ingirun — to the one person in the world she had spent ten years measuring herself against, tied wrist to wrist and made to call it winning.

"This is not a gift," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "This is a wager. You have set us on a board and you mean to watch from wherever the dead watch to see which of us breaks first."

"Maybe," Hrafnkel breathed. "Maybe it is that. An old man is allowed one last game." The knotted hand turned in hers and gripped, with the last of his strength, and it was not much strength but it was enough that she felt it in the bone. "Or maybe I know something the pair of you are too proud to have learned yet. Swear it, Solveig Ravnsdottir. On Sæhrafn and on my going. Swear you'll share her."

She looked across the failing body at Ingirun. Ingirun looked back at her, and for one bare instant the guard came down, and Solveig saw her own face reflected in the other woman — the same cornered fury, the same understanding of exactly how the snare was built, the same knowledge that neither of them could be the one to refuse a dying man and walk out with her name intact. Whichever of them balked first handed the other the whole hall's good opinion and lost the only fight that had ever mattered between them. It was, Solveig thought, with a cold savage clarity, the cleverest cruelty the old man had ever done, and the last, and he had done it out of love, which made it worse.

"I swear it," Ingirun said first — got it out first, of course she did, undeniable to the end — her low voice roughened. "On Sæhrafn and on your going, Hrafnkel Foster-father. I'll share her." Her dark eyes cut to Solveig, and there was a challenge in them older than tonight. Now you. Or lose.

"I swear it," Solveig said, through her teeth, before the breath was well out of the other woman. "On Sæhrafn and on your going. I'll share her command, and her bench, and her — berth." The last word cost her. "One voyage, south and home."

"Level," Hrafnkel insisted, the pale eyes already dimming. "Say it. Level."

"Level," they said together, the two of them, in the same breath, and the sound of their two voices striking the one word at the same instant went through Solveig like cold water — a thing she had never once in ten years done, agreed with Ingirun Black-Braid on anything at all, in the same heartbeat, out loud.

The old man heard it. That was the mercy of the timing, and she would think of it after, on the water: that he lived just long enough to hear the two of them say the one word as one. The grip on her hand eased. The sharp pale eyes went from her face to Ingirun's face, unhurried, satisfied, the look of a man who has stowed the last of the cargo and can feel the tide beginning to make under the keel.

"Good," Hrafnkel the Old said. "Good. Sail her level, my hounds, and don't wreck her on each other."

Then the breath went out of him and did not come back for another, and the knotted hand in Solveig's two scarred ones went from cold to something past cold, and the smell she had made herself breathe at the door filled the whole of the bed-closet as the small body let go the last of itself into the dark.

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

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