Until the Ice Breaks

Alfdis Thorkelsdottir was being sold to pay for a killing, and the woman who had struck the blow stood guard at the door and did not know it.

The gold was still warm from Hrapp's hands when he set it down in front of her.

It lay on the board between her ale-cup and the trencher of blood-sausage, a neck-ring as thick as two of her fingers, twisted from three rods and finished at each end with a wolf's head biting its own tongue. The firelight ran along the twists as though something were alive inside them. Down both benches the talk dropped away, the way talk does when a hall understands it is meant to be watching.

"From Kolgrim," Hrapp said, "to the woman who will keep his house."

He was a broad, short man with a grey-shot beard combed into points and the patient eyes of someone who had carried a great many gifts to a great many halls and seen what came of them. Kolgrim's steward. He had sat at Ulfar's right hand for three nights now, eating Ulfar's meat at the slaughter-feast, and he had never once looked at Alfdis as though she were a person. He looked at her now the way a man looks at a bale he has been told to see safely loaded.

Alfdis Thorkelsdottir did not touch the ring.

She had been dressed for this since noon. Her uncle's wife had laced her into the madder-red apron-dress herself, tugging the wool close under her breasts and down over her waist until it sat the way a bride's dress ought to sit, so that every man in the district could see what Ulfar Geirfinnsson was giving away. The linen of the shift beneath was fine enough to show the warmth of her skin at the throat. The gilded brooches sat high on her chest with the amber and glass strung between them, three swags of it, catching the fire every time she breathed. They had brushed her hair until it crackled and pushed it back under a band woven in red and gold, and it fell loose down to the small of her back, as an unmarried woman wore it. For a few more months.

She sat straight in all of it. If they meant to sell her in her best, she would not slump in it like a calf at market.

"Thank him for me," she said.

Hrapp inclined his head. "You will thank him yourself. At the spring Thing."

Somebody down the bench laughed. Somebody else lifted a horn and called out Kolgrim's name, and the hall took it up, and the noise came back, ale-loud and relieved. It was Winter Nights. The beasts that could not be fed through the dark had been slaughtered, the blood had been given to the dísir, and there was more meat on the boards than there would be again until spring. Nobody wanted to look too long at the girl and the gold.

Alfdis looked at it a while longer.

Kolgrim was past fifty, people said. A hard man with a hall across three fjords, good land, a long ship and two wives already under mounds behind his byre. One had died in childbed, people said, and one of a coughing winter, and people said that in the same tone they used for weather, and Alfdis had thought until two nights ago that she was being given to him for the same reasons girls were always given to men like him. Land. Alliance. A quarrel smoothed over before it grew teeth.

Then she had gone to the byre after dark.

She had only meant to see to the brindled cow, which had been off its feed since the slaughtering. She had been behind the partition in the dark with her hand on the cow's warm flank when the door at the far end opened and let in a slice of torchlight and two men's voices. Ulfar's she would have known anywhere. The other she had not known then. She knew it now.

"It was no drowning," Hrapp had said. Quietly, without heat, the way a man names the price of a horse. "My jarl knows it. His sister's son went out to your boundary two summers back and did not come home, and you told the district the sea had him. The sea does not leave a cut like that."

Her uncle had said nothing for a long time.

"A hidden killing cannot be paid for in silver," Hrapp had said. "You know the law as well as I do. If it were named, you would owe my jarl a weregild you could weigh out, and that would be the end of it. But you did not name it. You buried it. So it will be paid some other way, or it will be dug up."

"It was my sworn sword's hand," Ulfar had said at last. "In my service, on my boundary. Arnbjorn came at her in the dark. One blow. She did as she was bound to do."

"Then she can do as she is bound to do and keep her mouth shut," Hrapp had said. "My jarl is not a fool. He wants a wife with good blood and good hips, and he wants the matter closed. Give him the girl and the sea can keep Arnbjorn."

Alfdis had stood with her face against the cow's neck until both men were gone and the torchlight with them. Her hands had been shaking. When she had come back into the hall she had gone straight to her bed-closet and drawn the curtain and lain down in her clothes, and she had not slept.

She looked up from the gold now and found the door.

Hallveig stood beside it, where she always stood at a feast. Ulfar's sworn sword did not sit on the benches with the men and drink herself stupid. She stood with her back to the carved post and her wolf-fur cloak thrown back off one shoulder, and she watched the hall. She was a head taller than most of the women there and half the men. The deep blue of her tunic was nearly black in the smoke, and the tablet-woven band at the throat showed a line of gold where the fire touched it. Her hair was dragged back off her face into its short knot at the nape, wheat-pale, and her four silver arm-rings sat heavy on her forearms over the cuffs. She held herself the way she always did, easy and ready at once, as though she might be asked to kill something at any moment and would not mind.

Alfdis had wanted her since she was a girl.

She had wanted her in the plain, stupid, wordless way of a girl watching an older cousin stripped to the waist in the yard with a practice blade, and later she had wanted her in a way that was neither stupid nor wordless and had a great many words in it, all of which Alfdis had kept to herself. She had wanted her at every feast like this one, watching her watch the door. She had wanted her two nights ago, behind the partition, with the cow breathing against her cheek and Hrapp's voice saying one blow, and that was the worst of it. She had wanted her and been sick with anger at her in the same breath.

Hallveig did not know. Alfdis had turned it over all night and was certain of that much. Hallveig had struck a man on a dark boundary because she was sworn to strike, and Ulfar had told her the sea would take the blame, and Hallveig had let him tell her so because she trusted his word as she trusted the ground. She had never asked what it cost. She did not ask things of Ulfar. That was what an oath was, to Hallveig.

And now the bill had come in, and it was Alfdis who would pay it, lying under a man who had buried two wives.

Across the hall, as if the look had weight, Hallveig's eyes came round and met hers. Ice-blue. Steady. A small crease formed between her brows, as though she had seen something on Alfdis's face she could not name.

Alfdis looked away first. She picked up the neck-ring.

It was heavier than she had thought. She stood, and the bench creaked, and the women on either side of her moved their skirts to let her by. She walked up the hall between the long fires with the gold in both hands and the amber clicking softly on her chest, and men turned on the benches to watch her pass, and somebody whistled, and somebody else hushed him.

Ulfar sat in the high seat between the carved pillars, with Hrapp at his right and his wife at his left. He was a heavy man gone grey at the temples, with a farmer's hands and a chieftain's patience, and he watched her come with an expression she had known all her life. It was the look he gave a cow that might calve wrong. Not unkind. Not anything at all.

She stopped in front of him.

"Uncle," she said, low enough that only the high seat would hear it. "I would like to know what I am being given for."

Ulfar's wife drew in a breath. Hrapp did not move.

"You are being given to a good man with a good hall," Ulfar said, equally quiet. "Sit down, Alfdis."

"Kolgrim has a good hall. So do you. So does Thorgeir across the valley, who asked for me last spring, and you sent him away with a horse for his trouble." She held the gold a little higher. "What does this pay for?"

"It pays for nothing. It is a betrothal gift."

"Then tell me why."

"It is a fair match. It ends an old quarrel between his kin and ours."

"What quarrel?"

Ulfar's jaw set. "Kin-business."

"I am kin."

"You are a girl of twenty-six winters with no father, who has been allowed to say no too often," Ulfar said, and now there was an edge in it. "That is my fault, and I am mending it. Sit down."

She did not sit. She felt the hall behind her, the quiet spreading out from the high seat along the benches like cold water under a door. She could feel Hallveig too, at her back, the way you feel a fire you are not facing.

"I want to hear you say it," Alfdis said, and she did not say it quietly. Her voice went up into the rafters and came down again. "I want you to tell me, here, in front of your own hearth, what I am being sold to Kolgrim for."

Nobody in the hall breathed.

Ulfar rose. He was not a tall man, but the high seat was raised a step, and he stood on it and looked down at her.

"You are being sold," he said, "for nothing that is any business of yours. It is kin-business. It has been settled by the head of your kin, as is his right. You will wear that ring, and at the spring Thing you will go to Kolgrim as his wife, and you will thank him for the honour. And if you shame this house again in front of its guests, I will have you kept in your bed-closet until the thaw." He paused. "Do you understand me?"

She could tell them. The words were right there behind her teeth. Arnbjorn did not drown. Ask the man at your right hand. Ask your sworn sword. She could say it in this hall full of the district's men and their horns and their long ears, and by morning it would be across three valleys, and by the spring Thing it would be Hallveig's name in every mouth. Not a killer. A murderer. A woman who struck in the dark and hid it. There was no weregild for that, and there was no coming back from it either. They would outlaw her. They would hunt her like a wolf through the woods, and anyone who sheltered her would be outlawed too.

Alfdis turned her head and looked down the hall.

Hallveig had come off the door-post. She had taken two steps toward the high seat, not more, with one hand loose at her sword-belt. Not drawn. Not threatening. Only ready, the way she was always ready, in case Ulfar should need her. She was looking at Alfdis with that crease between her brows again, and with something else under it that might have been worry. As though Alfdis were the one in danger here. As though Alfdis were the one who might do something that could not be undone.

That was the sword that had made the debt. That was who Alfdis was being sent to pay for. And she could not hate her cleanly, and she could not have her, and she would not hand her to the district to be torn apart, even now. Even for this.

"I understand you," Alfdis said.

She set the neck-ring over her own head. The gold was cold now. It sat on her collarbones above the brooches, heavy, and it pulled at the back of her neck. A few men down the benches banged their cups on the boards in approval, uncertainly, and then more of them, until the hall had decided to be pleased again.

She went back to her place and sat and ate nothing, and she did not look at the door again.

The fires were banked by midnight. Ulfar's household lay in the bed-closets and along the benches under their cloaks, snoring off the ale. A dog grumbled in its sleep by the hearth. Somewhere outside, a cow lowed once and was quiet.

Alfdis lay in the dark with her eyes open and counted breaths until there were only sleeping ones.

She had not undressed. Her aunt had meant to unlace her and she had said she was tired and would do it herself, and her aunt, who had seen the high seat, had not pushed. So she was still in the madder-red with the brooches pinned and the amber strung and the gold heavy at her throat. She could take the ring off. She thought about it, lying there. Then she thought about Hrapp's hand setting it down, and Ulfar's voice saying kin-business, and she left it where it was. Let it go with her. Let somebody have to come and take it back.

She drew the fox-lined cloak round her, pulled the hood up and slipped out between the curtains.

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

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