Sólmánuður
The Sun’s Month
July
The day before Jarl Haakon’s raiders came, I had visited the beach with my brother, Lief, and our cousin, Yarra. I had wanted to spend the day dueling with Astra under the mountain—and maybe kissing, our limbs entwined, concealed by gorse and shadow—but Mama had needed me to keep the young ones away from the stable. She had planned to give Lief a foal for his name day, and the mare carrying it was due to give birth. Mama hadn’t wanted my brother to have any inkling of the colt’s arrival until his name day came.
Lief already knew about the foal, but he was staying silent for Mama’s sake. He’d seen the new harness in my stepfather’s tanning workshop. It was emblazoned with his name in costly green thread and had long, soft suede reins. When I was seven, I would have rushed to tell Mama what I knew, but Lief had a quiet, sensitive wisdom that I’d never possessed. He had wanted Mama to have her surprise.
The foal was meant to grow up with him. Mama had given me a foal when I was six. Fjara had been a dark bay filly, almost black, with a tiny, white snip on her muzzle. I’d spent my childhood brushing her, leading her to pasture, and feeding her scraps of carrot salvaged from our stew. By the time I’d been big enough to reach the stirrup and mount alone, Fjara had been strong enough to carry me. Now she was a warhorse, and her coat had faded to the murky white of a wave’s crest.
Mama worried that the new foal was backward. She expected a long labor for the mare. The colt was late, but Innella was a huge mare—her shoulder stood higher than my head—and she was young. Still, Mama didn’t want to take any chances. It was the only foal she’d bred that season, and Lief should have had a horse already.
Yarra waded knee-deep into the sea while Lief and I sparred. Lief patiently held up a wooden target for me to strike. My wooden practice sword raised, I stalked toward him. He planted his feet in the sand, braced himself for impact, and fixed his eyes on the ground.
I struck the target in the center. He staggered back a step, then dropped the target, letting it fall into the sand. “You win,” he said.
“That’s not the point!” I exclaimed. “I’m meant to be practicing. How can I get good enough to travel to Jarl Ivargar’s hall if I don’t build up my strength?”
Lief shrugged and nudged the target with his bare toe. I rolled my eyes and tossed the practice sword down.
At seven, Lief stood as high as my nose already, but he had no interest in becoming a warrior, despite his promised size. While Fjara and I tore through the hills, looking for caves to explore and abandoned meadows to gallop, Lief preferred to stay near home. He liked to assist my stepfather in his workshop or venture across the courtyard to help our uncle shoe horses. Sometimes I would catch him whittling in his bed, shaping animals and tiny axes long after his candle should have been snuffed out. He liked to say, without jealousy or malice, that I would be a warrior and he would make my armor.
Yarra trotted through the sand toward us. Her beige wool dress was soaked and stained with kelp. She stopped next to Lief and tugged on one of his dark braids. They were only a year apart, but couldn’t have been more different. While Lief was tall with deep-brown hair and a dreamer’s soft, blue eyes, Yarra looked like a miniature version of me. She had a slight build, all angles, that people who didn’t know her called delicate. She wore her white-blonde hair shaved on one side and braided tightly on the other. We had the same warm, brown eyes.
Yarra picked up the practice sword and spun it in her deft, small hands. She pursed her lips and whistled. A few seconds later, a high-pitched whinny answered. His head held high, a golden stallion cantered toward us.
She’d called him Mjolnir, for the thunder god’s hammer, and already the horse was living up to his fearsome namesake. He stopped in front of us and pawed the beach before pinning back his ears and squealing at Lief. My brother stumbled back, but Yarra stepped forward and stroked Mjolnir’s black muzzle. She had raised him from a colt and now she was the only human who could touch him without fear of his teeth.
“Boost me up,” she commanded Lief, who obeyed the little tyrant without delay. She settled onto Mjolnir’s back and pointed the practice sword at me. “See if you can hit us,” she dared. “That’s real practice.”
“I’m not going to hit you, Yarra,” I began, thinking of what Mama would say if she ran home crying, but then she smacked me across the arm with the wood, hard enough to leave a red, stinging welt. I growled. Mjolnir sprinted away, carrying the sound of Yarra’s laughter with him.
I knelt and rummaged through my pack until I found two more wooden staves. Gripping one in each hand, I sank into a fighting crouch. Yarra whirled Mjolnir around. She circled me, and I lunged for her, but the horse pivoted as if born to battle, always keeping Yarra just beyond my reach. My cousin rode as if Mjolnir were an extension of her own body. I never saw her hands or legs move, but the stallion danced for her. It was as if the warhorse and the little girl conspired in a silent language the rest of us weren’t invited to understand.
A flutter of jealousy rose in my chest. No matter how I tried, I would never ride like that. If Yarra had wanted to train as a warrior, no jarl would have refused her after they watched her ride.
After ten minutes of sparring, I dropped to the beach in exhaustion; my face was red and sticky. Lief knelt by my side and pressed my waterskin to my lips. I drank greedily, then announced, “She’s killed me.”
Two black hooves stopped beside me. Yarra dismounted and handed over the practice sword. She smiled widely, revealing a gap where her front teeth were missing. “A worthy battle,” she said formally, then tackled Lief into the sand.
When the sun had disappeared, I’d brought Yarra home to my uncle’s cottage. Uncle Bjorn had shaken his head at the sand in her hair and Mjolnir’s sweat-streaked coat, but I could see the smile twitch behind his pursed lips. “The two of you,” he said to me as he smoothed a broad hand over Yarra’s head. “Such a pair. Poor Lief.”
He gave me a basket of salted herring and a loaf of brown bread. “For your breakfast. Your mother’s been in the barn all day.”
“I’m sure she’ll be grateful for the food,” I said.
Bjorn ruffled Lief’s hair, then said to me, “I saw you practicing with Astra the other day. If you come by the forge tomorrow afternoon, I’ll give you some pointers on your grip.”
Lief and I trotted across the courtyard that separated Uncle Bjorn’s cottage from our larger house. Inside, the house was already quiet; the candles had been extinguished. Sun-drained, I stumbled to my room and fell into my bed.
It was strange to sleep alone. Until a month ago, I had shared a sleeping space with my sister. But she had accepted a marriage proposal and had moved into her new husband’s house down the road. The room was still filled with the echoes of our laughter. I drew the wool blanket up to my chin.
I was sound asleep when a thin scream pierced the night. My first thought was to turn over. Lief often had night terrors, but Mama always went to him. I lay in the dark, staring at the thatched ceiling and waiting for the sound of Mama’s footsteps in the hall. When they didn’t come, I sighed and grabbed the flickering candle from my bedside table. The air tasted faintly of smoke. Uncle Bjorn must have started early in the forge. My legs shook from sparring in the sand, and I wished that, just once, Lief could comfort himself.
Another scream came, half-muffled, as if Lief held his pillow to his face. He was sometimes embarrassed by being scared, and I felt ashamed for begrudging him. I sped down the hall. Papa often slept through loud noises, but Mama had to be exhausted not to hear Lief’s screams. She’d been asleep already when we’d returned from the beach. I’d left Uncle Bjorn’s basket of food on the kitchen table, ready for her whenever she awoke.
When I reached Lief’s room, firelight flooded in through his open window. I covered my mouth with my sleeve as smoke reached into the room like a clawed hand.
“Lief?” I called, striding across the room and fanning smoke.
My brother was missing. Turning on my heel, I raced for my parents’ bedchamber. But a hand reached from the shadows to grab me and cover my mouth. A sword, dripping with blood, pressed against my belly. My candle dropped, extinguished when it hit the ground.
“Roll up her sleeve,” a gruff voice barked.
My captor pulled me tighter against his chest and ripped the sleeve of my wool nightdress. His breath smelled of ale and teeth rotting from scurvy. Another sailor, gray-bearded and wearing a blood-red tunic, stepped in front of me. A few months ago, a man wearing the same livery had come to buy a horse from Mama. I recognized it as belonging to Haakon, Jarl of Bjornstad.
The man seized my arm. His eyes traveled the shifting blue navigator’s marks on my forearm. A slow, feral grin spread across his face. “Finally. Take her.”
“Where is my brother?” I demanded, struggling as the sailor hoisted me over his shoulder. The blood on the sword… I suppressed a cry. They’d come from my parents’ chamber. That was why Mama hadn’t come. Numbness spread from my stomach up my throat, making it hard to breathe. My parents were gone. They had to be, or my stepfather would be flying at these invaders, his hammer raised. But I hadn’t seen any blood in Lief’s room. It might not be too late for him. I couldn’t leave him behind, alone.
The sailor wiped his sword on his trousers. “Our orders were to take the young ones who showed the marks. Kill the rest.”
Lief had been born without the moving, magical tattoos that covered most of my torso and arms. The magic travelled in families, linking back to the god, Heimdallr, or so we were taught. My magic had come from my mother’s side, inherited from a distant relative that Mama never wanted to talk about. The outside world was dangerous for the gods-touched, and my grandmother had left the city behind when my Uncle Tor had been born with the marks, hoping to keep her children hidden, safe.
I’d never met Tor. He had been a styrimaðr and had left the village, despite my grandmother’s protestations. He had been a great captain—the leader of a hundred men and five ships—until the sea claimed him. Mama never forgot his death, and whenever I talked about leaving the village and joining a jarl’s household to fight, it hovered in the space between us.
No one knew why the power showed up in some and lay dormant in others. None of my cousins showed any sign of the navigator’s marks either, though Papa often said that Yarra’s will was a force all its own.
“It doesn’t show up in everyone at first!” I twisted in my captor’s hold and tried to scratch his face. “Some people don’t show until they’re adults!”
It was a lie, small and desperate. The markings showed up in our first weeks of life or not at all. I had been born with small blue storm clouds on my arms; the clouds had birthed continents in the succeeding weeks. Lief was good at hiding. Maybe he had screamed when the men had first come in but run while they attacked our parents. He could be in the stable now. My uncle’s cottage was just a stone’s throw from the barn. Lief could have reached it. He could have warned them. Uncle Bjorn worked the forge all day. He had muscles like a bear and could wield a war-axe better than any man in the village. He had taught me to fight, against my mother’s wishes. They might all be safe.
The warrior’s hard eyes took on a thoughtful glow. Jerking his head toward the door, he said to his companion, “Get this one on the ship. Change of plans. I’ll get the others to round up the rest of the children.”
“My brother?” My stomach lurched.
“Too late for him.” The man’s hold around my waist tightened. “Don’t worry. We made it painless.”
I jabbed my thumbs into his eye-sockets. He dropped me with a howl; his hands flew to his face. As blood poured down his cheeks, I ran from my house and into the stable courtyard. I thought of Astra, stirring the dwindling embers of a cookfire in her grandmother’s battered cottage by the sea, and of Yarra, sleeping in her bed, unaware of what might be coming. I swallowed hard. It would be too late for Astra. Her cottage was the closest dwelling to the docks. I had to warn Uncle Bjorn. I thought of Yarra meeting the same fate as Lief and grief took away the ache in my legs. I sprinted.
Beyond the wall of our stable courtyard, more men in the same dark red tunics scurried like rats from house to house. They moved silently, never giving the occupants time to wake. They carried war-axes and greatswords, crusted in blood. A few people reached the streets. They tried to shout warnings, but were cut down as they fled their burning houses.
“Uncle Bjorn!” I screamed. Ahead, the cottage was dark, with no light seeping under the door. Scrap metal and stones cut my bare feet; the smoke rising from our neighbors’ roofs made me gasp. The horses in the barn squealed and kicked at the boards of their stalls as fire lit the hay around them.
Strong hands seized my arms and hair. I had no weapon, so I bit and clawed. Two warriors dragged me between them, through the streets of my blazing town, to the dark warship that bobbed in our once-quiet harbor.