Bracelet of Bones Read Free Page B

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.”

3

    W hen winter closes its fist, when the ice age cracks its bones and the wolf age moans, you cannot follow, you cannot lead, you cannot stray far from your own hearth. All you can do is scratch the half-frozen earth for blighted turnips and carrots, and water your goats and cattle and bleating sheep, and feed them with hay, and drill holes through the ice and let down a baited line for pike or herring or mackerel; all you can do is drink ale, and chew dried meal, and gnaw your chilblains, and wait.
    Days became shorter, though sometimes they were so dazzling that they stuck little pins into Solveig’s eyes. Nights became longer.
    On some mornings, Kalf worked in the little smithy. He stoked the furnace, then he smelted the block of iron he and Halfdan had brought back from Trondheim and began to hammer out a new cooking cauldron. Not only this. Kalf put new edges on all the knives and axes, even Solveig’s carving knife, and a new edge, too, on the blade of his tongue. He never missed a chance to cut his stepsister with a keen word.
    Bright-eyed Blubba worked alongside his brother. Whistling and singing snatches of song, he worked long strips of iron, winding them around their old milk vat where it was coming apart at the seams, and secured them with iron nails. And once, with Solveig, he walked over the hill to the birch copse, and the two of them axed a tree and together dragged it back to the farm. On sunny mornings, Solveig went down to the jetty with a basketful of filthy clothing and washed it all with soap stinking of mutton fat, gritty with wood ash. Then she laid the clothes out to dry from one end of the jetty to the other, weighted with stones, but by the time she went back to collect them, they were all stiff as boards.
    “Our old sail,” said Asta. “More holes than fabric. It’s like a colander.”
    “It’s all right,” Solveig said.
    “It’s not,” retorted Asta.
    It wasn’t so much