Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Release Date: July 25, 2023
Publisher: ACE
Source: Publisher
Genre: Historical / Fantasy / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
Oddny and
Gunnhild meet as children in tenth century Norway, and they could not be
more different: Oddny hopes for a quiet life, while Gunnhild burns for
power and longs to escape her cruel mother. But after a visiting
wisewoman makes an ominous prophecy that involves Oddny, her sister
Signy, and Gunnhild, the three girls take a blood oath to help one
another always.
When Oddny’s farm is destroyed and Signy is
kidnapped by Viking raiders, Oddny is set adrift from the life she
imagined but determined to save her sister, no matter the cost.
Gunnhild, who fled her home years ago to learn the ways of a witch in
the far north, is on her way to her exalted destiny. But the bonds—both
enchanted and emotional—that hold them together are strong, and when
they find their way back to each other, these bonds will be tested in
ways they could never have foreseen in this rich, searching novel of
magic, history, and sworn sisterhood
The Weaver and the Witch Queen, by author Genevieve Gornichec, is the story of two women—one desperate to save her missing sister,
the other a witch destined to become queen of Norway—intertwine in this
spellbinding, powerful novel of Viking Age history and myth from the
acclaimed author of The Witch’s Heart. The story itself begins in the year 900 CE Norway in the time of Vikings. The key characters are Gunnhild Ozurardottir and Oddny Ketitsdottir.
Gunnhild, Oddny, and her sister Signy were thicker than thieves in the night when the were around 12 years old. When a seerees named Heid arrives, Gunnhild is told she is not to participate by her own mother who seemingly hates her. But after a visiting wise woman makes an ominous prophecy that involves
Oddny, her sister Signy, and Gunnhild, the three girls take a blood oath
to help each other always. Gunnhild also makes a deal with Heid that she will be her apprentice and learn what it takes to be a powerful witch.
Oddny, her sister Signy, and Gunnhild, the three girls take a blood oath
to help each other always. Gunnhild also makes a deal with Heid that she will be her apprentice and learn what it takes to be a powerful witch.
12 years later, Gunnhild is thought to be dead since nobody has heard from her in years. In reality, Gunnhild has been training with Heid to learn how to shapeshift while also watching over her friends Oddny (who has become a really good healer) and Signy who likes to have her own kind of fun. When raiders storm the sisters village, and Signy is taken, Gunnhild finds herself in a life and death battle with powerful witches and ends up losing the woman who was more of a mother to her than her real mother.
The era that this story takes place is deep in Viking, and Norse mythology with some worshiping Gods like Odin, and Freyja. It is a story of two remarkable women who must rise or fall with the tides as they must decide who they will become. Gunnhild will eventually make a deal with King Eirik and become Queen even though he hates witches as do most of his hoard. A Queen that will, according to history, be called the Mother of Kings. Oddny must walk her own path regardless of the oath she made with Signy and Gunnhild. The only thing that matters to her is getting her sister back and trusting the person that she ends up losing her heart to.
Thoughts: I have the authors previous story but have not yet gotten around to read it. After reading this book, I shall have to go back and dig it out of my pile of books to read. Also, the author does a really good job of letting the readers know that yes, she has done due diligence when it comes to researching the subject of Gunnhild, but history is not kind when it comes to powerful women. There are a lot of ups and downs in this book as each character must do what they need to do in order to find their own destiny while keeping a promise make 12 years ago. Both of the main characters have deep, meaningful romances but they are tested at every angle. This story is filled with magic, intrigue, romance, and not all the battles take place on the battlefield, but in hearts and minds, and words.
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1
A horn sounded across the water in two short bursts.
Upon
hearing it, Gunnhild Ozurardottir dropped her spindle and distaff and
ran, ignoring the admonishments of the serving women she'd been spinning
with under the awning. They would scold her later, but she cared
little.
Her friends were about to arrive. And at such times she found it hard to care about anything else.
Gunnhild
rounded the corner of the longhouse and sprinted up the hill, making
for her father's watchman on the eastern side of the island. He was
stationed on a small platform overlooking the water and always had a
blowing horn on hand.
"One ship!" he called over his shoulder at
the other men milling about, not noticing as Gunnhild hiked up her dress
and scrambled up the platform's short ladder. "It's Ketil's!"
Before
he could protest, Gunnhild grabbed the horn off its peg and blew it
twice. As she lowered it she heard noises of disappointment coming from
the children on the incoming ship, and she pumped a fist in victory.
"Yes!"
"Oi!" the man said, snatching the horn from her. "That's only for emergencies!"
"This
is an emergency," Gunnhild replied with gravity. She pointed to a dark
shape in the water. "As soon as they pass that big rock in the bay, they
blow the horn. And if I don't respond before they dock, I owe them a
trinket. Two blasts for 'hello,' three for 'goodbye.'"
"Aren't you a little old for games, girl?"
"Not
when I know I can win!" With that, Gunnhild scampered back down the
ladder and ran for the shore, leaving the watchman shaking his head.
As
she approached, Gunnhild could see Ketil and his son, Vestein, tying up
their ship at the rickety wooden dock. Three other people disembarked:
Ketil's wife, Yrsa, and their daughters, Oddny and Signy, whom Gunnhild
practically tackled in a hug. Sighing and shifting the bedroll in her
arms, Signy rummaged in her rucksack and handed over a single glass
bead, which Gunnhild snatched up with an air of triumph and stuffed into
the pouch at her belt.
At twelve years old, Gunnhild was exactly
between the sisters in age-Signy a winter older, Oddny a winter
younger-and the girls rarely got to see one another except at
gatherings, which made this day even sweeter.
"You're too fast,"
Signy complained as Gunnhild threw an arm around each of her friends and
herded them up the hill toward her father's hall.
"Or maybe you're not fast enough," Gunnhild said, "because when I visit you I still win. I have a collection to prove it."
Oddny
sniffed and picked at one of the furs in her bedroll, her thin
shoulders hunched, her pinched face looking more so than usual. "Maybe
we'd win every once in a while if Signy ever stopped daydreaming and
paid attention."
"Hush, you. I pay attention," Signy said
lightly, but her green eyes were brimming with mischief. Gunnhild
appreciated that about her: Whether it was stealing oatcakes from the
cookhouse or pulling a well-timed prank on the farmhands, Signy was
always up for a little fun, whereas Oddny was more likely to sit back
from whichever of her chores she was dutifully performing and give them a
disapproving look. Oddny wasn't much fun, but at least she never
tattled on them.
As they entered the longhouse, Gunnhild saw that
preparations were well underway for the ritual and feast taking place
that evening. Near her father's high seat at the far end of the hall, a
small square platform had been raised for the visiting seeress to sit
on, so she could look out over the crowd as she revealed their futures.
It sat just under the wooden statues of the gods Odin, Thor, and Frey,
which loomed beneath the jutting lintel above the entrance to the
antechamber where Gunnhild's family slept.
Gunnhild had never
seen her father's hall looking quite like this: buzzing with activity,
the air charged with excitement. The seeress's impending arrival had
turned the entire household upside down, and Gunnhild considered herself
lucky to have escaped from her spinning in the chaos.
A
knee-high platform ran the length of the hall on each side, where guests
would feast and then sleep. By day, light streamed in through the holes
in the roof above the two center hearths; by night, the longhouse would
be dim and smoky, lit only by the hearth fires and by the lines of oil
braziers hanging from the posts that ran down either side of the hall
and divided the seating areas into sections.
"Where is our family sitting?" Oddny asked her as they neared the center of the hall.
"My mother assigned the seats," Gunnhild said. "We can ask-"
As
if on cue the woman in question came out of the antechamber, already
dressed to welcome the guests in her finest brooches and beads, and with
a gauzy linen head scarf knotted at the nape of her neck. Before
Gunnhild could so much as speak, her mother was upon them.
"What
mischief have you been up to, Gunnhild?" Solveig demanded. "Why aren't
you spinning with Ulfrun and the others? They're supposed to be keeping
you out of the way."
They didn't tell on me, Gunnhild thought
with short-lived relief, for the look on her mother's face was nothing
short of hostile.
Oddny and Signy moved in fractionally closer on
either side of Gunnhild, Signy's arm tightening around her friend's
back, and even Oddny-a paragon of submitting to parental
authority-stiffened as if bracing for an attack. Solveig would never
dare strike her daughter in front of guests, but that didn't mean she
hadn't done so in private, and both Ketilsdottirs knew this. They had
seen the proof more than once.
"I-I heard the horns," Gunnhild
said at last, her friends' presence giving her strength, helping her
find her voice. "I had to win."
"Not this silly game again,"
Solveig said scathingly, and she echoed the watchman's earlier
sentiment: "Aren't you girls a little old for this?"
"It's only a
game." Gunnhild raised her chin. As she stared her mother down, Oddny
and Signy held their ground beside her until their own mother entered
the hall.
"Hello, Solveig," said Yrsa with forced politeness. "Are my daughters causing trouble already? We've only just arrived."
Solveig
plastered a look of equally strained courtesy onto her face. "Not so. I
only suspect that mine is, as always, up to no good."
Yrsa's voice turned cold. "Gunnhild just came down to the dock to escort us to the hall. Why does this offend you?"
"I
feel compelled to remind you, Yrsa, that you are a guest in my home,"
Solveig said stiffly. "I don't recall asking for your opinion on the way
I choose to deal with my own daughter."
"Of course." Yrsa's eyes
narrowed, but she gave her host an insipid smile. "Before we get
settled in, is there anyone in need of my services?" There was usually
no shortage of sick or injured people on any given farm, and Yrsa was a
skilled healer.
"Not that I know of. Please, make yourselves
comfortable." Solveig gestured to the section of the platform two spaces
down from the high seat, then looked to Gunnhild. "Clean yourself up
and get ready at once." She made to breeze past them but stopped to hiss
in her daughter's ear, "And do not embarrass me tonight."
Then she was gone, and Gunnhild could breathe again.
Yrsa's
keen eyes followed Solveig as the woman went to greet the next guests.
"Oddny, Signy-why don't you help Gunnhild get ready?"
The sisters
dumped their bedrolls and scurried off with Gunnhild to the
antechamber. Her parents slept on the right side, and behind a curtain
on the left side were two wooden bunks with thin straw mattresses atop
them.
Gunnhild had once shared this room with her sisters, but as
they were much older and had long since been married off, she now
bunked with Solveig's most trusted serving women, and she was glad to
see that none of her aged roommates were present. Besides the bunks, the
only other fixtures were a few small chests, one of which was
Gunnhild's. She opened it and added the bead Signy had given her to the
little pouch full of smooth skipping stones, seashells, and other
baubles she'd won over time from the Ketilsdottirs. Then she took out a
bone comb and began to assault her thick dark red hair.
Gunnhild's
feast clothing was already spread out on her bunk: a linen dress soft
from years of use; a woolen apron-dress, faded and threadbare but woven
in a fine diamond pattern; and a pair of tarnished oval brooches with a
simple string of beads. All had been handed down to Gunnhild from her
older sisters.
"Mother asked to foster you again at the midsummer
feast, last time we were all together," Signy said as she sat down on
the bunk with the clothing on it, the beads clinking together at the
movement. "Your mother refused."
"She said you were too old now." Oddny sat down on the opposite bunk. "As if she hasn't been asking forever."
Gunnhild
grimaced, but this came as no surprise; she knew there was no escape
for her. She'd tried to run away once or twice, slipping out during the
commotion of a feast after stealing some finery from her parents' chests
to pay her way to . . . Where? If not to Ketil's farm-the first place
they would look for her-where could she possibly go? Each time, she'd
ended up returning in the dead of night, putting her parents' things
back where she'd found them, unpacking her bag, and slipping into bed.
She had thought that nothing would frighten her more than Solveig, but it turned out that the unknown was more terrifying still.
"Of
course she refused," Gunnhild said hollowly. She loves to deny me
anything I could possibly want. "And on top of everything else, I'm not
allowed to have my fate told tonight."
Signy had been running her
hand enviously over the diamond twill of the apron dress on the bed,
but her head snapped up at this. "What do you mean, you're not allowed
to have your fate told?"
"My mother decided it." And, as usual,
she hadn't offered an explanation besides because I said so. Her father,
however, had been a bit more willing to talk after a few drinks and a
prolonged exposure to Gunnhild's whining. "But Papa said it's because I
had my fate told when the last seeress came through."
"But you
were three when the last one was here," Oddny said with a frown. "That's
not fair. You can't possibly remember what she said."
"Of course I don't." Gunnhild crossed her arms. "And no one will tell me!"
"For
once, I agree with Oddny Coal-brow," Signy said, and her sister hmphed
at the nickname, earned because Oddny's thin eyebrows were a much darker
brown than her fine, mousy hair. "What if you just came with us when
our mother calls us forward? Solveig can't make you sit back down
without embarrassing you both. People would want an explanation."
"She'll
make my life even more miserable this winter if I disobey her,"
Gunnhild said glumly, and neither of her friends disagreed.
Gunnhild
braided her hair into a thick plait, donned her dresses, and pinned her
beads and brooches in place. When she was done, Signy gave a sigh of
admiration and Oddny gave a nod of approval. Neither of the sisters
owned a set of brooches. The two wore faded woolen gowns-red for Signy
and dull yellow for Oddny-and Gunnhild knew Oddny's was a hand-me-down,
for the younger girl had it tightly cinched at the waist with a thin
overlong leather belt.
Nevertheless, their dresses were free of
stains and didn't show any obvious signs of mending or patching, so
Gunnhild knew that these were likely the best garments her friends had;
even their mother's weren't much better. And yet, though the family had
so little to their name, Yrsa was still adamant about bringing their
neighbor's mistreated daughter into their home.
Gunnhild swallowed the lump in her throat and sat down beside Oddny. "Let's stay out of the way until the ritual starts."
"Otherwise
Mother might put us to work," Signy said, disgusted, as she flopped
onto her back on the bed. "I want to go one single day without picking
up a spindle. Is that too much to ask?"
"Just because you pick up
a spindle doesn't mean that you get anything accomplished with it,"
Oddny said under her breath, and Signy stuck out her tongue.
To
keep themselves busy, they decided to rebraid Oddny's and Signy's hair,
which had become windswept during the crossing. By the time Gunnhild had
fixed Oddny's twin plaits and Oddny had done the same to Signy's, they
could hear more and more voices coming from the main hall.
"I
suppose we should go before our mothers come looking for us," Gunnhild
said at last, standing. The ritual would begin at dusk, and by now the
sunlight outside was spent; the start of winter was almost upon them,
and the days were getting shorter. Soon the sun would barely rise at
all, and she'd be trapped inside this hall, weaving and sewing by
firelight, completely under her mother's thumb.
But not yet. Tonight, she had her friends by her side, and the future awaited.
The
hall was full and the braziers had been lit, and the seeress herself
was the last to arrive, borne north by King Harald’s tax collector and
his retinue.
Along with the neighboring farmers, Gunnhild's
father's friends among the Sámi had been invited to attend. They
clustered together at the back of the hall, although Gunnhild saw that a
few of the women had wandered over to chat with Yrsa in Norse. Ketil
and Ozur had stopped to talk with the Sámi in their language, and
Gunnhild heard Ketil's roaring laugh from across the room as the largest
of the men clapped him on the back with a grin.
Gunnhild would
have to go sit with her parents once the feast began, but for now she
sat with Signy and Oddny, content to watch their fathers conversing in a
tongue the girls didn't understand.
"I wonder what they're talking about," Signy said.
"I
wonder what the Sámi will think of the seeress," Oddny replied. "Did
you know Papa said their men are more likely to be seers instead of the
other way around? I'll bet their rituals are much different, too-"
Signy batted her sister's arm. "Shh. It's starting!"
A
hush came over the hall as the seeress finally appeared. The old woman
was frail and peculiar, from her lambskin cap and gloves to the
multitude of mysterious pouches at her belt. But what drew Gunnhild's
eye most of all was her iron staff, twisted at the top, its brass
fittings gleaming in the firelight.
A horn sounded across the water in two short bursts.
Upon
hearing it, Gunnhild Ozurardottir dropped her spindle and distaff and
ran, ignoring the admonishments of the serving women she'd been spinning
with under the awning. They would scold her later, but she cared
little.
Her friends were about to arrive. And at such times she found it hard to care about anything else.
Gunnhild
rounded the corner of the longhouse and sprinted up the hill, making
for her father's watchman on the eastern side of the island. He was
stationed on a small platform overlooking the water and always had a
blowing horn on hand.
"One ship!" he called over his shoulder at
the other men milling about, not noticing as Gunnhild hiked up her dress
and scrambled up the platform's short ladder. "It's Ketil's!"
Before
he could protest, Gunnhild grabbed the horn off its peg and blew it
twice. As she lowered it she heard noises of disappointment coming from
the children on the incoming ship, and she pumped a fist in victory.
"Yes!"
"Oi!" the man said, snatching the horn from her. "That's only for emergencies!"
"This
is an emergency," Gunnhild replied with gravity. She pointed to a dark
shape in the water. "As soon as they pass that big rock in the bay, they
blow the horn. And if I don't respond before they dock, I owe them a
trinket. Two blasts for 'hello,' three for 'goodbye.'"
"Aren't you a little old for games, girl?"
"Not
when I know I can win!" With that, Gunnhild scampered back down the
ladder and ran for the shore, leaving the watchman shaking his head.
As
she approached, Gunnhild could see Ketil and his son, Vestein, tying up
their ship at the rickety wooden dock. Three other people disembarked:
Ketil's wife, Yrsa, and their daughters, Oddny and Signy, whom Gunnhild
practically tackled in a hug. Sighing and shifting the bedroll in her
arms, Signy rummaged in her rucksack and handed over a single glass
bead, which Gunnhild snatched up with an air of triumph and stuffed into
the pouch at her belt.
At twelve years old, Gunnhild was exactly
between the sisters in age-Signy a winter older, Oddny a winter
younger-and the girls rarely got to see one another except at
gatherings, which made this day even sweeter.
"You're too fast,"
Signy complained as Gunnhild threw an arm around each of her friends and
herded them up the hill toward her father's hall.
"Or maybe you're not fast enough," Gunnhild said, "because when I visit you I still win. I have a collection to prove it."
Oddny
sniffed and picked at one of the furs in her bedroll, her thin
shoulders hunched, her pinched face looking more so than usual. "Maybe
we'd win every once in a while if Signy ever stopped daydreaming and
paid attention."
"Hush, you. I pay attention," Signy said
lightly, but her green eyes were brimming with mischief. Gunnhild
appreciated that about her: Whether it was stealing oatcakes from the
cookhouse or pulling a well-timed prank on the farmhands, Signy was
always up for a little fun, whereas Oddny was more likely to sit back
from whichever of her chores she was dutifully performing and give them a
disapproving look. Oddny wasn't much fun, but at least she never
tattled on them.
As they entered the longhouse, Gunnhild saw that
preparations were well underway for the ritual and feast taking place
that evening. Near her father's high seat at the far end of the hall, a
small square platform had been raised for the visiting seeress to sit
on, so she could look out over the crowd as she revealed their futures.
It sat just under the wooden statues of the gods Odin, Thor, and Frey,
which loomed beneath the jutting lintel above the entrance to the
antechamber where Gunnhild's family slept.
Gunnhild had never
seen her father's hall looking quite like this: buzzing with activity,
the air charged with excitement. The seeress's impending arrival had
turned the entire household upside down, and Gunnhild considered herself
lucky to have escaped from her spinning in the chaos.
A
knee-high platform ran the length of the hall on each side, where guests
would feast and then sleep. By day, light streamed in through the holes
in the roof above the two center hearths; by night, the longhouse would
be dim and smoky, lit only by the hearth fires and by the lines of oil
braziers hanging from the posts that ran down either side of the hall
and divided the seating areas into sections.
"Where is our family sitting?" Oddny asked her as they neared the center of the hall.
"My mother assigned the seats," Gunnhild said. "We can ask-"
As
if on cue the woman in question came out of the antechamber, already
dressed to welcome the guests in her finest brooches and beads, and with
a gauzy linen head scarf knotted at the nape of her neck. Before
Gunnhild could so much as speak, her mother was upon them.
"What
mischief have you been up to, Gunnhild?" Solveig demanded. "Why aren't
you spinning with Ulfrun and the others? They're supposed to be keeping
you out of the way."
They didn't tell on me, Gunnhild thought
with short-lived relief, for the look on her mother's face was nothing
short of hostile.
Oddny and Signy moved in fractionally closer on
either side of Gunnhild, Signy's arm tightening around her friend's
back, and even Oddny-a paragon of submitting to parental
authority-stiffened as if bracing for an attack. Solveig would never
dare strike her daughter in front of guests, but that didn't mean she
hadn't done so in private, and both Ketilsdottirs knew this. They had
seen the proof more than once.
"I-I heard the horns," Gunnhild
said at last, her friends' presence giving her strength, helping her
find her voice. "I had to win."
"Not this silly game again,"
Solveig said scathingly, and she echoed the watchman's earlier
sentiment: "Aren't you girls a little old for this?"
"It's only a
game." Gunnhild raised her chin. As she stared her mother down, Oddny
and Signy held their ground beside her until their own mother entered
the hall.
"Hello, Solveig," said Yrsa with forced politeness. "Are my daughters causing trouble already? We've only just arrived."
Solveig
plastered a look of equally strained courtesy onto her face. "Not so. I
only suspect that mine is, as always, up to no good."
Yrsa's voice turned cold. "Gunnhild just came down to the dock to escort us to the hall. Why does this offend you?"
"I
feel compelled to remind you, Yrsa, that you are a guest in my home,"
Solveig said stiffly. "I don't recall asking for your opinion on the way
I choose to deal with my own daughter."
"Of course." Yrsa's eyes
narrowed, but she gave her host an insipid smile. "Before we get
settled in, is there anyone in need of my services?" There was usually
no shortage of sick or injured people on any given farm, and Yrsa was a
skilled healer.
"Not that I know of. Please, make yourselves
comfortable." Solveig gestured to the section of the platform two spaces
down from the high seat, then looked to Gunnhild. "Clean yourself up
and get ready at once." She made to breeze past them but stopped to hiss
in her daughter's ear, "And do not embarrass me tonight."
Then she was gone, and Gunnhild could breathe again.
Yrsa's
keen eyes followed Solveig as the woman went to greet the next guests.
"Oddny, Signy-why don't you help Gunnhild get ready?"
The sisters
dumped their bedrolls and scurried off with Gunnhild to the
antechamber. Her parents slept on the right side, and behind a curtain
on the left side were two wooden bunks with thin straw mattresses atop
them.
Gunnhild had once shared this room with her sisters, but as
they were much older and had long since been married off, she now
bunked with Solveig's most trusted serving women, and she was glad to
see that none of her aged roommates were present. Besides the bunks, the
only other fixtures were a few small chests, one of which was
Gunnhild's. She opened it and added the bead Signy had given her to the
little pouch full of smooth skipping stones, seashells, and other
baubles she'd won over time from the Ketilsdottirs. Then she took out a
bone comb and began to assault her thick dark red hair.
Gunnhild's
feast clothing was already spread out on her bunk: a linen dress soft
from years of use; a woolen apron-dress, faded and threadbare but woven
in a fine diamond pattern; and a pair of tarnished oval brooches with a
simple string of beads. All had been handed down to Gunnhild from her
older sisters.
"Mother asked to foster you again at the midsummer
feast, last time we were all together," Signy said as she sat down on
the bunk with the clothing on it, the beads clinking together at the
movement. "Your mother refused."
"She said you were too old now." Oddny sat down on the opposite bunk. "As if she hasn't been asking forever."
Gunnhild
grimaced, but this came as no surprise; she knew there was no escape
for her. She'd tried to run away once or twice, slipping out during the
commotion of a feast after stealing some finery from her parents' chests
to pay her way to . . . Where? If not to Ketil's farm-the first place
they would look for her-where could she possibly go? Each time, she'd
ended up returning in the dead of night, putting her parents' things
back where she'd found them, unpacking her bag, and slipping into bed.
She had thought that nothing would frighten her more than Solveig, but it turned out that the unknown was more terrifying still.
"Of
course she refused," Gunnhild said hollowly. She loves to deny me
anything I could possibly want. "And on top of everything else, I'm not
allowed to have my fate told tonight."
Signy had been running her
hand enviously over the diamond twill of the apron dress on the bed,
but her head snapped up at this. "What do you mean, you're not allowed
to have your fate told?"
"My mother decided it." And, as usual,
she hadn't offered an explanation besides because I said so. Her father,
however, had been a bit more willing to talk after a few drinks and a
prolonged exposure to Gunnhild's whining. "But Papa said it's because I
had my fate told when the last seeress came through."
"But you
were three when the last one was here," Oddny said with a frown. "That's
not fair. You can't possibly remember what she said."
"Of course I don't." Gunnhild crossed her arms. "And no one will tell me!"
"For
once, I agree with Oddny Coal-brow," Signy said, and her sister hmphed
at the nickname, earned because Oddny's thin eyebrows were a much darker
brown than her fine, mousy hair. "What if you just came with us when
our mother calls us forward? Solveig can't make you sit back down
without embarrassing you both. People would want an explanation."
"She'll
make my life even more miserable this winter if I disobey her,"
Gunnhild said glumly, and neither of her friends disagreed.
Gunnhild
braided her hair into a thick plait, donned her dresses, and pinned her
beads and brooches in place. When she was done, Signy gave a sigh of
admiration and Oddny gave a nod of approval. Neither of the sisters
owned a set of brooches. The two wore faded woolen gowns-red for Signy
and dull yellow for Oddny-and Gunnhild knew Oddny's was a hand-me-down,
for the younger girl had it tightly cinched at the waist with a thin
overlong leather belt.
Nevertheless, their dresses were free of
stains and didn't show any obvious signs of mending or patching, so
Gunnhild knew that these were likely the best garments her friends had;
even their mother's weren't much better. And yet, though the family had
so little to their name, Yrsa was still adamant about bringing their
neighbor's mistreated daughter into their home.
Gunnhild swallowed the lump in her throat and sat down beside Oddny. "Let's stay out of the way until the ritual starts."
"Otherwise
Mother might put us to work," Signy said, disgusted, as she flopped
onto her back on the bed. "I want to go one single day without picking
up a spindle. Is that too much to ask?"
"Just because you pick up
a spindle doesn't mean that you get anything accomplished with it,"
Oddny said under her breath, and Signy stuck out her tongue.
To
keep themselves busy, they decided to rebraid Oddny's and Signy's hair,
which had become windswept during the crossing. By the time Gunnhild had
fixed Oddny's twin plaits and Oddny had done the same to Signy's, they
could hear more and more voices coming from the main hall.
"I
suppose we should go before our mothers come looking for us," Gunnhild
said at last, standing. The ritual would begin at dusk, and by now the
sunlight outside was spent; the start of winter was almost upon them,
and the days were getting shorter. Soon the sun would barely rise at
all, and she'd be trapped inside this hall, weaving and sewing by
firelight, completely under her mother's thumb.
But not yet. Tonight, she had her friends by her side, and the future awaited.
The
hall was full and the braziers had been lit, and the seeress herself
was the last to arrive, borne north by King Harald’s tax collector and
his retinue.
Along with the neighboring farmers, Gunnhild's
father's friends among the Sámi had been invited to attend. They
clustered together at the back of the hall, although Gunnhild saw that a
few of the women had wandered over to chat with Yrsa in Norse. Ketil
and Ozur had stopped to talk with the Sámi in their language, and
Gunnhild heard Ketil's roaring laugh from across the room as the largest
of the men clapped him on the back with a grin.
Gunnhild would
have to go sit with her parents once the feast began, but for now she
sat with Signy and Oddny, content to watch their fathers conversing in a
tongue the girls didn't understand.
"I wonder what they're talking about," Signy said.
"I
wonder what the Sámi will think of the seeress," Oddny replied. "Did
you know Papa said their men are more likely to be seers instead of the
other way around? I'll bet their rituals are much different, too-"
Signy batted her sister's arm. "Shh. It's starting!"
A
hush came over the hall as the seeress finally appeared. The old woman
was frail and peculiar, from her lambskin cap and gloves to the
multitude of mysterious pouches at her belt. But what drew Gunnhild's
eye most of all was her iron staff, twisted at the top, its brass
fittings gleaming in the firelight.
