Viking Bride Read Free

is chief of this village. He sought a
bride. Someone that would elevate him in the eyes of the Gods.”
    “But why me?” Eliza whispered.
    “You’ll learn. In time. Come. I must prepare
you.” She led Eliza deeper into the longhouse. The chief went back
outside.
    “What do you mean prepare me? He intends to
lay with, yes?”
    “Of course. But you must be purified.” She
pointed to a bench near the fire. “Raise your dress.”
    Eliza stared at her, unwilling.
    “Girl, you’ll do it or you’ll suffer.” She
threw a handful of herbs into the fire, causing a great cloud of
smoke to rise. Instead of flowing up and out of the hole, it hung
in the air, billowing before the woman. It twisted, shapes writhing
within it. Stags and dragons and demons. They crawled through the
air, circled Eliza’s head.
    “What are they doing?” Tiny voices whispered
in her ear. Snippets of the Viking tongue, snippets of her own. She
thought she heard her father’s voice, pleading to the gods to
return his only daughter. “Make it stop.”
    “The dress.” The witch’s voice was hard.
    Eliza peeled off her dress. The smoke rose
above her, but the shapes kept circling, as if they were waiting
for her to disobey again. The witch came back with a stick daubed
with paint. She pressed it to Eliza’s chest.
    “Ouch!” Eliza said. It burned something
fierce, though she’d hardly said the words and it turned bitterly
cold.
    “Quiet.” The witch painted elaborate shapes
over her chest and back, making her rise to paint them across her
rump and her legs. She took special care to inscribe delicate lines
around Eliza’s woman parts. It tickled in a way that wasn’t at all
disagreeable.
    “What are these?”
    “Runes. You must please Kelnar.”
    “And if I don’t?”
    “You die. Painfully.” She looked into Eliza’s
eyes. “At the hands--and cock--of every man in the village.”
    Eliza snapped her mouth shut. Better to
please one man then. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know how…”
    “You’ve never lain with a man before?”
    “No.”
    The witch stepped back, frowning. “You have
the chest of a woman. Did you have no husband?”
    “My father was a fisherman. I had not taken a
man yet.”
    “I see.” She turned, rummaged in her basket.
She started adding herbs to a small pot, then poured water on top.
“Drink this. It will help.”
    Eliza looked at her, dubious.
    “Drink. It.”
    Eliza took the pot, tested it for heat, then
sipped the liquid. It was worse than undercooked fish. Bitter and
slimy and cold. The clouds over her swirled down, a dragon dancing
before her face.
    She swallowed the liquid, nearly gagging in
the process.
    “Good.” The witch touched the paint on
Eliza’s chest. “You are ready. Don your dress and wait here.”
    “I don’t know…”
    “Eliza, you must do this if you wish to
survive here. Your father would be disappointed if you threw your
life away.”
    Thoughts of her father nearly knocked her to
her rump. She had no way to know if he’d survived the Vikings
passing on the river, or how he’d reacted when he’d returned to the
village. She blinked back the tears that threated to overwhelm her.
There was no time for self-pity. Not when she’d seen what had
happened to Aldith and Cordith, and knew what the alternative
was.
    Satisfy the chief, or satisfy the village.
Only one of those ended with her sanity still intact.
    “Very well,” Eliza said, at last.
    The witch nodded, satisfied. She left, then
returned a few minutes later with the chief.
    Kelnar stopped before her and said something
to the witch that Eliza couldn’t understand. One hand gripped her
shoulder. The older woman bowed her head, then slipped past
them.
    She stopped at the door. “Please him
well.”
    Kelnar guided her around the fire and on to a
bed the size of the hut Eliza had left behind on the banks of the
Seine. The carved heads of strange beasts rose from each corner,
curling down back on to the posts.