The White Raven Read Free Page B

right and I knew it. 'I was thinking you meant it when you hand-fasted to her — is she as easy to leave as the chickens?'
    Kvasir made a wry face. 'As I said — she will have to learn to like the sea.'
    I was astonished. Was he telling me he would take her with us, all the way to the lands of the Slavs and the wild empty of the Grass Sea?
    'Just so,' he answered and that left me speechless and numbed. If he was so determined, then I had failed
    — the tap-tap of the adze and axes drifting faintly from the shore was almost a mockery. It was nearly done, this new Fjord Elk, the latest in a long line. When it was finished . . .
    'When it is finished,' Kvasir said, as if reading my thoughts, 'you will have to decide, Orm. The oath keeps us patient —well, all but Finn — but it won't keep us that way forever. You will have to decide.'
    I was spared the need to reply as the door was flung wide and Gizur trooped in with Onund Hnufa, followed by Finn and Runolf Harelip. Botolf and Ingrid had moved to each other, murmuring softly.
    'If you plane the front strakes any thinner,' Gizur was saying to Onund, who was shipwrighting the Elk, 'it will leak like a sieve.'
    The hunchbacked Onund climbed out of the great sealskin coat that made him look like a sea-monster and said nothing, for he was a tight-lipped Icelander at the best of times and especially when it came to explaining what he was doing with ship wood. He sat silently, his hump-shoulder towering over one ear like a mountain.
    They all jostled, looking for places to hang cloaks so that they would not drip on someone else and yet be close enough to the fire to dry. The door banged open again, bringing in a blast of cold, wet air and Red Njal, stamping mud off his boots and suffering withering scorn for it from Thorgunna.
    'The worst of wounds come from a woman's lips, as my granny used to say,' he growled, shouldering into her black look.
    Ingrid unlocked herself from Botolf to slam it shut. Botolf, grinning, stumped to the fire and sat, while the children swarmed him, demanding stories and he protesting feebly, swamped by them.
    'I would give in,' Red Njal said cheerfully. 'Little wolves can bring down the biggest bear, as my granny used to say.'
    'Pretty scene,' growled a voice in my ear. Finn hunkered down at my elbow in the smoke-pearled dimness of the hall. 'As like what you see in a still fjord on a sunny day, eh, Orm? All that seems real, written on water.'
    I glanced from him to Kvasir and back. Like twin prows on either side of my high seat, I thought blackly.
    Like ravens on my shoulders. I stared, unseeing, at the hilt of the sabre as I turned it in my fingers, the point cutting the hole at my feet even deeper.
    Finn stroked the head of the blissful deerhound and kept looking at this pretty scene, so that I saw only part of his face, red-gleamed by the fire. His beard, I saw, threw back some silver lights in the tar-black of it; where his left ear should have been was only a puckered red scar. He had lost it in Serkland, on that gods-cursed mountain where we had fought our own, those who had broken their Oath and worse.
    There were few left of those I had sailed off with from Bjornshafen six years ago. As I had said to Kvasir
    — hardly enough to crew a knarr.
    'Keep looking,' I said sourly to Finn. 'Raise your hopes and eyes a little — written on water below, real enough above.'
    'Real as dreams, Orm,' he said, waving a hand to the throng round the pitfire. 'You are over-young to be looking for a hearthfire and partitioning a hall. Anyway — I know how much you had and how much you have laid out and your purse is wind-thin now, I am thinking. This dream feeds on silver.'

    'Perhaps — but this steading will make all our fortunes in the end if you let it. And the silver itch is not on me,' I answered, annoyed at this reference to my dwindling fortunes and to dividing my hall up into private places, rather than an open feasting space for raiding men.
    He