Having lectured himself sternly, he rose and lit a rushlight by feel, against the darkness. He washed in his basin, thrusting away from him the memories of the bright dream and the woman beside the roundhouse. He put on clean clothes, groaning a little over his bruised ribs, and braided his hair, which had grown wild.
Then he went out into the dark and walked the settlement, quiet in the dead of the night.
By the time dawn broke in the east, he was on the walls again, looking out to sea for a glimpse of danger.
Not Hulda’s sails, he assured himself. She would not return. But any others that could come swooping in like a dark bird above a battlefield, wings spread, looking for death.
All else was fancy and must be thrust away from him. He had been born to defend this place, naught more.
Best make his mind up to it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“It looks veryrough,” Hulda said, narrowing her eyes against the strong morning sunlight. “I did not expect it to be quite so…battered.”
Indeed, the longboat listed a bit to one side, giving the dragon at the prow a lopsided look. Compared to Faðir’s ships—well, therewasno comparison.
She no longer concerned herself with aught her faðir owned. She had moved out of his home four days ago, taking temporary housing where some of the warriors lived, but she did not like it there. They were noisy and crude and not overly clean. But it represented independence.
Following that move, she had gone to Garik and told him ja, she was interested in his offer to go in on a boat of their own. He and his brother, Helje, had brought her to this inlet some distance up shore from Avoldsborg, where the old man, Frode, kept the vessel he wished to sell.
Her first glimpse of it, though, dashed her hopes and made her question herself. A fool, Faðir had called her. Ivor, too. Were they right?
She glanced at Garik. In the morning light, he looked terribly young, too young to sail, though she knew very well he was a fine mariner. His brother, a couple years his elder, did not say much, though he was in on the proposed venture.
Garik met Hulda’s gaze with steady enthusiasm. “She needs an overhaul, ja. It is nothing Frode cannot manage.”
Hulda remembered Frode as a strange old man, elder to even her faðir. He talked to himself and he spat a lot. She had hoped, if she took Garik up on his offer, he would mostly deal with the old man on her behalf. Mayhap he still would.
“I somehow thought work on the vessel would be farther along,” she said, doubtful. “How long will it take to finish?”
“Frode has been working on it. Not much longer. If we want it, we will have to put money in so he can finish.”
“Ah.”
Helje spoke for the first time, his voice deep. “One must start somewhere, Mistress Hulda.”
“I understand that.” She had not expected to start at so low a place as this. If she invested all she had in the longboat—well, it did not appear a hopeful venture.
If she failed—again—she would have nothing. Nothing. And she refused to go crawling back to Faðir.
There had been a terrible argument the day she left, Faðir threatening and Móðir weeping, taking Hulda aside and begging her not to go.
“I have already lost my son. Do not make me lose my dottir also.”
“You are not losing me,” Hulda had assured her. But ja, she could see that she was.
Hulda had held a big vision then of succeeding in this venture, launching a few bold voyages. Making Faðir eat his words about her. Looking at the slightly sad longboat in the narrow inlet, stranded there as if it had come home to die, that vision evaporated.
Was this truly the best she could do?
Frode’s dwelling stood alone above the rocks that fronted the inlet. He had a son whom everyone considered slow, and no wife. The shed out of which he worked had been built just behind there, and he emerged from it now.
Grizzled he was, with a rat’s nest of gray hair spilling down his back and salt-rimed clothing. Hulda had asked Garik how he knew the old man.
“Everyone knows him,” he’d replied. “And a boy must learn the craft of boatbuilding somewhere.”
Garik being a clever lad, she had taken his word for it. There was, so she reminded herself, a price for everything. Associating with the old man might be the price, in part, of her independence.
