Shield Maiden

by Sharon Emmerichs

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

Shield Maiden is a lush fantasy that is both epic and intimate. Refocusing the narrative on a fierce young woman reclaiming her power, it will upend everything you think you know about Beowulf.
Fryda has grown up hearing tales of her uncle, King Beowulf, and his spectacular defeat of the monstrous Grendel. Her one desire is to become a shield maiden in her own right, but a terrible accident during her childhood has thwarted this dream. Yet still, somehow, she feels an uncontrollable power begin to rise within herself.
The last thing Fryda wants is to be forced into a political marriage, especially as her heart belongs to her lifelong friend, Theow. However, as foreign kings and chieftains descend upon her home to celebrate Beowulf's fifty years as the king of Geatland, the partnership begins to seem inevitable.
That is, until, amidst the lavish gifts and drunken revelry, a discovery is made that threatens the safety of Fryda's entire clan – and her own life. Incensed by this betrayal, Fryda resolves to fight for her people no matter the cost. As a queen should. As a shield maiden would.
And as the perilous situation worsens, Fryda's powers seem only to grow stronger. But she is not the only one to feel the effects of her new-found battle-magic. For, buried deep in her gilded lair, a dragon is drawn to Fryda's untamed power, and is slowly awakening from a long, cursed sleep...

Release date: October 3, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 452

Sample

On the morning of her thirteenth birthday, Fryda of Clan Waegmunding—daughter of Weohstan and jewel of King Beowulf’s eye—wanted only one good kill. She wished for a sturdy arrow shot straight and true, the rending of flesh under her knife, and the tang of hot blood sending curls of steam into the chill air.

In the pre-dawn darkness, she wriggled her way into trousers pilfered from the laundry the day before. The icy glimmer of stars peeped through the smoke-hole cut into the roof as she pulled on a roughspun tunic and fastened a leather belt around her childishly slim waist. Good, she thought. No one else in the household would stir for another hour at least.

She gathered her wild, butter-coloured curls into thick braids and wound them around her head, hoping the pins would hold, and slid a short seax—a sharp, tapered hunting dagger—under her belt. For a moment she considered fetching Theow from his pallet in the kitchens and asking if he wanted to come with her.

As Theow’s name hovered in her mind, she felt a small frisson shimmer up her spine. Her breath quickened, the hairs on her arms stood up, and her young body woke in ways she did not entirely understand. She nearly surrendered to the rush of temptation that tugged her towards the kitchens, but did not want to risk Theow receiving credit for her hunt. A warrior gets credit for his kills.

Her kills, she thought. Or at least, one kill to prove her prowess at the hunt. One wolf pelt to hang in the mead-hall and call her own.

She grabbed her bow and a quiver of arrows from her wooden chest and crept from the building, trying to be as silent as possible. In the early morning hush, every step, every breath sounded unnaturally loud, and she startled at each rustle and distant birdcall. Her breath misted in the late autumn air, but the nights were not yet cold enough to freeze the dew that pearled on the grass, making everything smell fresh and green.

Fryda made her way towards the western wall, stealing through the burh as quietly as she could. In the hovering darkness of the far-northern autumn, the structures resembled a sprawling village rather than a walled estate. Warm, reddish earthen walls rose in square and rectangular blocks, adorned by thatched, timbered roofs and arched windows set with real glass, sparkling like gemstones. Wooden structures hunkered in rows around an ancient standing stone. The air smelled like salt and brine, and she could hear the distant thunder of waves crashing against the rocky shore.

She nodded to the guards stationed at the gate and they let her pass without question. She had no doubt they would report her early morning exit from the burh to her father, but by that time—she hoped—she would have a fine wolf pelt to placate him.

Fryda padded through a wooded grove outside the stronghold wall, avoiding rustling leaves and noisy twigs. Soon her boots were soaked through and a chill pebbled her skin, but she did not think about turning back. Shield maidens did not stop fighting because of damp feet.

She scanned the ground as she moved, alert for any sign of the beast that had plagued the burh’s hunters since summer’s end. After several cold, breathless moments she spotted the paw prints of an enormous wolf in some soft mud and steadily tracked them westward. They led her out of the woods to the bare, wind-ravaged meadows along the edge of the cliff. Elation filled her, making her feel as if she floated above the ground. She was going to find the wolf. She would find it and kill it and her father would finally see her as a worthy shield maiden. He would finally let her…

Her thoughts rattled out of her head as the earth beneath her shuddered and jerked. Fryda gasped as she staggered, trying to keep her feet. A terrifying roar filled her ears—a sound so monumental she thought Woden himself must have made it. Certainly no wolf could produce such a clamour.

The ground shifted sideways and violently flung her into the grass. A sharp report echoed across the sky, as if the very fabric of the air cracked and tore. The meadow undulated beneath her as though suddenly turned to water, and Fryda clutched the long grass in her fists. The coarse blades tore in her grip as the earth tried to shake her off, like a flea in a dog’s fur.

The great cracks and rumblings became deafening, and Fryda sobbed in terror. The ground lurched, and then… disappeared.

For one breath she lay on solid, if tumultuous, ground and the next she plummeted downwards. A scream tore from her throat and she clawed with frantic hands for anything to break her fall.

Something grabbed her by the wrist, and for one breathless moment she thought Woden had indeed stretched out a hand to save her. But when a lightning bolt of pain shot from her hand down to her shoulder, Fryda understood why the clan revered the All-Father as the god of madness as well as death. She screamed again as her hand became fire and flames licked through her arm, her shoulder, and into her chest. She blinked against the sparks dancing across her vision and wondered if disobedience to her father had truly brought about the end of the world.

The violence of the earthquake had hollowed out a deep, deep chasm in the earth and she’d managed to jam her hand into a narrow crack in the wall. Fryda stared at the shards of white bone jutting from her ruined skin, the wells of shocking red blood running down her arm. It dripped from her fingers onto her neck, her face, into her clothing, and fear rushed to fill the spaces of her body left empty by leaking blood and protruding bone. She clutched the wall with her good hand while her feet scrabbled against the rock, trying to find purchase. But every movement caused great flowers of pain to bloom in her hand and chest, and she realized the fall had separated the bones of her arm completely from her shoulder.

Time began acting strangely. She had no idea how long she hung there, drowning in agony and hoping she would soon die. Eventually the darkness of night crept into her bones. Her throat burned with thirst and screams. Her eyes grew dim; her body shook with cold and weakness. Her arm and shoulder had gone numb hours before, but her hand seethed with pain from the bones piercing her skin and from the rock that kept her trapped like a rabbit in a snare. She screamed again, her voice feeble and wounded, and heard an answering music rise from the bottom of the chasm, a tinkling like bells or chimes.

It wasn’t real, of course. She knew that now. Once night had claimed the land, she had fallen into a kind of delirium wherein she heard and saw things from the wrong side of reality. Strange phantasms from her life that could not possibly exist in this place and time hovered around her, like the scent of Hild’s delicious mushroom soup, or the tang of the ground galls the hunters used for tanning skins. Perhaps the visions, the scents, the music were heralds of her death. If so, she welcomed them.

The torment from her trapped hand writhed through her body like a living thing. The hours since the earthquake had not acted as a balm for her pain. She thought, as she had a thousand times since she fell, about the hunting knife tucked in her belt.

She whimpered. Her hand, with all its torn flesh and broken bones, had swollen so rapidly she could not budge it from its rocky prison. But she could wrap her belt around her arm; tighten it. Take the knife and…

A gust of wind from the sea snaked through the chasm and buffeted her against the cliff wall.

Fryda screamed in earnest as her broken wrist twisted and the bones ground together. She fumbled for the seax at her waist, but her fingers faltered as the darkness closed in on her, and she gratefully succumbed to her fate.

Deep in her cave, buried under a massive pile of treasure, Fýrdraca, Fire-Dragon, shifts. She feels the touch of gold and silver slide against her scales. For a moment she almost wakes, but something catches her and drags her back down into nightmare, like a drowning victim caught in an intractable undertow.

Not a nameless something. An ancient curse.

Fýrdraca struggles against the dark magic that binds her and the earth trembles at her strength and power.

The gold and treasure are her prison as well as her saviour. She reaches out, longing again to be free, to stretch her wings and fly. From her nightmares she lashes out at the barrier keeping her from the winds and clouds, and the ground shakes again. A sound like a thunderclap reverberates through the cave and this time the land cracks, fractures into long, deep fissures of jagged rock and stone. The earth-barrier between her precious gold and the sky breaks, splits, and for the first time in centuries the sun reaches in with gentle, trailing fingers and caresses her blighted treasure, like the touch from a long-lost lover. It brings warmth and light and… a noise. A sound never before heard from within her nightmare prison. Something small and insignificant. Not of gold or silver, no, nor of gems or pearls, but of flesh and bone and blood. Something scared. Something hurt.

Something human. A girl-child.

The pitiful sound diverts the flow of her memories. She remembers the Lone Survivor standing upon the promontory, clutching a large and ancient goblet in both hands and keening, anguish twisting his face into something monstrous. The goblet seemed forged from legend, crafted in gold and silver and myth. Intricately embossed hunting scenes curved around the bowl and stem, and gems glowed in the raging firelight, reflecting the charred corpses of the Lone Survivor’s kin, strewn across the land while the remains of his stronghold burned behind him. Fýrdraca again feels his heart shrivel and tear in his chest, where it seeps pain like a suppurated wound. His body curls around it, as if to protect a malignant birth that would forever curse him… and her.

“Arms up! Keep your stance strong!”

Fryda awkwardly lifted her elbows, and the practice spear she wielded wobbled in her tenuous grip. She couldn’t get her clawed, twisted fingers all the way around the shaft, but she attacked anyway. Hild blocked it and the force of the blow knocked Fryda off balance, and onto her behind. The crude spear fell from her hand.

Instantly her dress and shift were soaked with early morning dew.

Bollocks.

She looked at Hild, with her bare feet and her old kitchen work tunic, and could not suppress a smile. Hild stood with her stave still raised, her expression worried and her dark brown skin a sharp contrast to the knee-high yellow grasses in the meadow behind the forge where they held their secret practices. The field stretched to the edge of the cliff that dropped to meet the shore and the sea, and a narrow set of steps carved into the cliff face wound down to Weohstan’s fleet of longships. The field hosted the clan’s festivals and ceremonial rituals, weddings, and competitions. The clanspeople burned their dead and paid homage to their gods, Woden and Frige, there—but for most of the year the wild expanse of grass lay empty and fallow.

A perfect place for forbidden fighting practice.

From her very first memory, Fryda had wanted only one thing. When she was four years old, she announced to her family she planned to become a shield maiden when she grew up.

Her father said no and told her to never speak such nonsense again.

On her tenth birthday, Weohstan caught Fryda and Theow—his own slave, no less—sparring in the field behind the forge. Her father’s canny eye had immediately noted the smoothness of her movements and the dancing lightness of her feet—indications that this was far from the first time they had practised with the rough wooden swords the blacksmith had carved for them. Incandescent with rage, her father had burned the blades, forbidden her friendship with Theow, and shut her in her room for the rest of the day. She had cried, alone and hungry, while the people of Eċeweall celebrated her birth with a grand feast in the mead-hall.

Her thoughts dodged around her disastrous attempt at a hunt when she was thirteen and, without thinking, she pulled the sleeve of her tunic over the ruin that used to be her left hand.

Now, at twenty years of age, she had learned discretion, if not obedience. Her dream of becoming a shield maiden had died that night in the chasm, but she could not seem to stop working towards it anyway.

“Are you all right, my lady?” Hild asked, her chest heaving. Her black hair fell in long braids to her waist and her too-thin frame was sleek and well muscled. Fryda frowned at Hild’s bony wrists and prominent collarbones and vowed to speak again to Moire about increasing food rations for the entire kitchen staff.

“What did I say about your stance, Sunbeam?”

Fryda looked up to see Bryce standing over her, his arms crossed over his massive chest and his braided beard quivering with annoyance. She drew her mangled hand against her body and couldn’t quite meet Bryce’s gaze.

“I can’t get a good grip on it,” she mumbled.

Hild lowered her wooden stave and Fryda flinched away from her sympathetic look.

Bryce helped her to her feet. His blacksmith’s hands, rough with old burns and scars, caught on the nap of her tunic. “Look,” he said as he reached out to peel the sleeve from her hand. Fryda shuddered at the sight of her canted wrist and twisted fingers. She never looked at her hand if she could avoid it. “You don’t have to grip it with both hands. Use your right hand for force and your left for direction and balance.”

He handed her the practice spear. Bryce’s face had no doubt been handsome in his youth, but age and experience had etched deep lines and grooves into his skin, and something or someone had broken his nose at least once. Fryda squinted at it. Probably twice. Though years had turned his hair the colour of iron, his physique had never diminished. The man’s thighs were tree trunks, and half a lifetime of working the hammer and anvil had corded his arms with hard, curved muscle.

“Like this.” Bryce positioned her right hand around the spear and gently moved her left so her twisted fingers anchored the weapon rather than gripped it. To her surprise, it felt a great deal more stable.

“I’m sorry about that, my lady,” Hild said, and Fryda huffed. In all the years they had been friends, she had not convinced Hild to address her informally. Fryda was the lord’s daughter and Hild an indentured servant in her father’s household. It would be dangerous, Hild had once told her, to forget that.

“Not your fault, Hild,” Fryda said. Bryce gave her hip one last nudge and she finally adjusted her stance.

“Try that,” he told her.

Hild again raised her spear. This time when their weapons clashed, Fryda maintained her grip and deflected Hild’s blow without mishap.

“That’s more like it!” Bryce bellowed. His broad grin made the early summer sun seem suddenly brighter. “You’re learning now. Once more, but this time you attack and Hild defends.”

Fryda readied her spear, taking care to position both hands correctly, and looked at her friend. Hild nodded, and Fryda leapt.

As she reached the apex of her jump, arms held high and a warrior shout in her throat, an odd sensation shivered through her body, as if hot blood were replaced by a trickle of cool water. Her breath seemed to fill her entire body and her senses sharpened to crystalline clarity. The trickle suddenly swelled into a flood and she gasped, for the water carried strength within it. Her muscles became smooth and supple and her body obeyed her every command. Without thinking, she tucked the spear under her left arm, holding it with her right hand and pinning it against her side, and twisted her body. The spear, aimed at Hild’s chest, cut through the air with deadly precision.

Hild managed to raise her own weapon to divert the blow, but it knocked her off her feet and flung her backwards into the tall grass. Fryda landed with perfect balance, spun the wooden stave with a flourish, and drove it into the ground.

Bryce and Hild stared at her, mouths open. The chirps of birds and shrill song of insects sounded loud in their silence. Fryda blinked.

“What?” she asked.

Before they could answer, her newfound strength deserted her. “Whoop,” she said, suddenly dizzy and disoriented. She staggered to one side, her limbs heavy and her head floating, as if stuffed full of fledgling goose feathers. Her left hand cramped and the old, familiar ache flooded her wrist once more.

Hild got to her feet as Bryce ran to Fryda. “Are you all right, my lady?” she asked, sounding breathless.

“I’m… oop… I’m fine,” Fryda said as Bryce put a steadying arm around her shoulders. Her legs trembled and her entire body hummed, as if a thousand tiny wings fluttered under her skin. “That felt so strange. Are you all right? I didn’t mean to hit you so hard.”

“I’m fine.” Hild dropped her spear and shook out her hands. “That was quite a wallop you gave me, though.”

“It was indeed.” Bryce took Fryda’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length, his eyes roving over her for signs of injury. She submitted to his inspection without complaint. The feathers and tiny wings were slowly dissipating, leaving behind nothing more than fatigue and confusion. “How did you do that?” Bryce asked, finally convinced she wasn’t hurt.

Fryda shrugged. How could she possibly describe what had happened or what she’d felt? Bryce and Hild would think her mind touched.

“I guess I had the best teacher,” she said, a bit of cheek creeping into her tone.

“Mmm.” Bryce let her go. He slanted a glance at the sky. The sun, which rose early in the summer, had climbed above the horizon. “Best get back now, loves. The hall will be stirring soon.”

Hild groaned. “Moire will have us working all day and all through the night, what with the king’s feast beginning tonight.” She scrubbed a hand through her thick, braided hair.

“Thank you for coming out this morning,” Fryda said, clasping Hild’s forearm. “Especially with…” She gestured to Hild’s torso, which she had nearly bludgeoned. Woden’s beard. What had got into her?

Hild gave her a sardonic look. “These mornings are the only way I can get through my days sometimes,” she said. “I still have sixteen years of service before I gain my freedom, and Moire is going to squeeze every last bit of work out of me she can.”

“Sixteen?” Bryce looked confused. “I thought your parents were indentured for only eight years when they came here. And that was fifteen years ago.”

Fryda’s mouth twisted as she released Hild’s arm. “When they died, my father added twelve years to Hild’s indenture, in addition to the original contract.”

“That’s… why did he do that?”

Hild crossed her arms. “He said it was compensation for the cost of raising me. I was just a child, after all.”

“Raising you.” Fryda wanted to spit. “My father dumped you in the kitchen when you were four years old and never thought about you again. And since when do we expect payment for helping raise a child?”

“To raise clan children, no.” Hild gave her a level look. “But we were outsiders, and indentured as well.”

Fryda flushed. Only at times like this did she realize how sheltered her whole life had been. Her father and brother kept from her the ugly truths and realities of life, and she ended up looking foolish and ignorant as a result. She had worked hard in recent years to shed her naivety, but moments like this showed how far she had yet to go.

“It’s outrageous. I still hope to find a way to help you buy your freedom.” Fryda wiped her sweaty face on her dress and pulled her sleeve over her hand again.

Hild made a dismissive noise. “Don’t fuss yourself about it, my lady,” she said. “After all, my family started out as Roman slaves, but my parents managed to buy and work their own land. I plan to honour them and do the same once I’ve worked off my debt.”

Bryce picked up the training spears and rested them on his shoulder. “I remember your parents,” he told Hild. “Good people. And they loved you.” He tapped a finger under Hild’s chin. “They would be so proud of you now.”

“Yes, and imagine when you become a shield maiden,” Fryda said with a smile.

Hild rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, your father will definitely allow an African kitchen servant to join his elite band of warrior women.”

“Ah. No need to worry about that,” Fryda told her, bouncing up and down on her toes. “He doesn’t choose or approve the shield maidens. The warriors are Olaf’s responsibility, and once I’m established as lady of the house, he will listen to my recommendations.”

“And will you be recommending yourself to him?” Bryce asked. His eyes were sombre as he regarded her.

Fryda yanked on her sleeve.

“I will not,” she said, and she could hear the flat, expressionless tenor of her voice.

“But Fryda.” Hild uncrossed her arms and touched Fryda’s shoulder. “It’s always been your dream.”

Fryda looked at her left hand, still hidden from view in her sleeve. She remembered her father’s mocking laughter seven years before as she’d lain in her bed, weak from pain and fever, and told him she still wished to be a shield maiden.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d said. For the first time in her thirteen-year-old memory he looked pale and shaken.

A healer-woman had tipped a cup to her lips and Fryda reflexively swallowed. The dwale had a bitter taste that even the added honey and verbena couldn’t cover, but the potion quickly calmed the unbearable throbbing in her hand and shoulder. Her vision grew fuzzy, though her father’s anger remained starkly sharp and clear.

“Not ’diculous,” she’d murmured, her words as slurred as her mind. “Gonna be a warrior. Shield maiden.”

Weohstan glared down at her, and despite the potent pain medication, Fryda knew she would never forget his cruel words.

“I think your… deformity… puts to rest any lingering notions you might still have about that.”

She’d even wondered more than once since then if Weohstan had directed the healers to let her hand heal wrong to put an end to her dreaming.

“Dreams can change,” she told Hild, coming back to the present.

Bryce looked as if he wanted to argue with her, but Hild stepped forward and nodded towards the longhouse. “Theow’s coming,” she said.

Fryda’s undisciplined heart lurched as she turned to look. A jewel on display, the longhouse sat at the highest point on the great hill and was the centre of all life in the stronghold. At the front and back of the thickly thatched roof, intricate carvings of fantastical creatures—dragons, griffons, sea monsters—graced the wooden supports. Ivy grew up around the walls, curling green tendrils making intricate designs. The main door, set into an elaborately carved arch, was fashioned from hardwood planks and stood over twenty feet high. A tall man with flame-red hair had emerged through the doorway and strode towards them.

Theow was the only person other than Bryce and Hild who knew about Fryda’s early morning training sessions, so it was not fear that made her breath catch and her blood rush. Hild looked sideways at her and smirked. Theow came around the corner of the forge and jogged up to join them.

He had a slender and wiry build—all bone and sinew and ropy strength, earned through years of toil and labour. His shock of thick red hair made him seem crafted of fire, but his face could have been chiselled from pure, white marble. His features were all planes and shadows, fine lines and hollows. A scattering of freckles dusted his nose and cheeks, and she wondered—not for the first time—if he had them anywhere else on his body.

Looking at him, she realized she seldom noticed the twisted red and white scar that marked his face from his right eye to the patch of bare scalp over his ear. He’d clearly suffered a terrible burn as a child, though she knew he could not remember how it had happened. Her chest ached as she thought about how much the wound must have pained him, but her mouth went dry as she studied him—a riot of beauty caressed by the fingers of dawn.

Fryda became uncomfortably aware of her own fingers, twisted and bent at strange angles, the odd angle of her wrist, the bulge of bone at the base of her thumb. She did not want Theow to look at her deformity, though she knew he’d seen it many times before.

She couldn’t remember much about her rescue from the gorge, or the painful days of healing that followed, but she vividly remembered Theow’s reaction when he saw the mangled, bloody mess that used to be her hand and wrist.

“Fryda,” he’d said. “Your hand. Your hand. Your poor hand.” Over and over, like a prayer to the gods. She had taken one glance at her hand and turned her head away, unable to look at the twisted mess of blood and bone. Theow, however, had stayed with her as the healers had tried to piece her back together, like one of the wooden puzzles Bryce made for the clan’s children.

Even so, as Theow approached her now from the longhouse, she slid her left hand under her right arm, hiding it from view.

Theow’s eyes flicked down at the movement, and then back up to her eyes. His glances were always full of stories, untold and secret, and she wondered if he would ever share them with her again. When they had been children and they could laugh and play together without censure, he would sometimes tell her stories, but she often could not catch their meanings. Half his words came out in his native language, which she remembered as lilting and lovely and sounding like music, and the other half in her own harsh, Geatish tongue.

But as time passed, the stories stopped. They dried up like the language of his forgotten childhood, and if he ever crafted new ones in his adopted tongue, he kept them locked behind those eyes.

Theow nodded to Bryce and Hild, but focused on Fryda. “A messenger just arrived,” he said. “The king is on his way and should arrive later this morning.”

Hild’s eyes became huge. “Oh no,” she said, and broke into a run towards the kitchens.

“Don’t worry,” Theow assured Fryda. “Moire hasn’t noticed her absence yet. We got word in the kitchens the king was expected soon, and she roused everyone and has been in a frenzy ever since.”

“What about you?” Fryda asked. “Won’t Moire notice you’re gone?”

Theow smiled. “She sent some boys to the storage cave to fetch mead and supplies,” he said. “I snuck out with them and came right here. If she wants to know where I was, I’ll tell her I went to the cave with the others.”

“The stronghold will be in an uproar,” Fryda said, her good hand fluttering. “We’ve been waiting for the king’s arrival for days. I was starting to worry he’d miss his own feast tonight.”

Theow chuckled. “I doubt that would interrupt the festivities.”

“Did you see Wiglaf, or my father?”

“No. I’ve seen no one else.”

“Good. Then I haven’t been missed, either.” She huffed. “Not that I ever am, really, but I’ll have a lot to do today.”

Theow frowned and looked as if he wanted to disagree with her, but did not speak. He just gazed at her with those eyes full of stories.

“I… um.”

Theow blinked. “What?”

Fryda groaned to herself. Why must I be so awkward around him? From the corner of her eye, she saw Bryce shake his head and look at the ground. She had the distinct impression he was trying not to laugh.

Fryda cleared her throat as her cheeks burned. “I wanted to ask if instead of working in the kitchens, you’d rather serve in the mead-hall tonight? To see the king?”

Theow was silent for a long moment—long enough for Fryda to wish for another crevice to open underneath her and swallow her whole.

“I would be happy to serve,” he said at last. He leaned towards her a few inches. “But not so I can see the king.”

Fryda swallowed. “You’ll need clothes,” she blurted.

Theow raised his eyebrows. “I… usually wear clothes.”

Bryce rubbed his forehead with one hand.

Fryda coughed. “Sorry. I mean, you’ll need to see Eadith for some new clothes. Father won’t want to see holes and patches.” She looked at Bryce, then back to Theow. “Well. I’ll see you tonight.”

And she fled.

Theow watched Fryda walk away with her determined little steps, her back straight and clinging to what was left of her dignity. He smiled.

She wanted him in the mead-hall tonight. With her.

He heard Bryce clear his throat as the blacksmith came to stand beside him. “You’ll be needing a belt and something to fasten it with to go with your fancy new clothes. Come on. I’ve got what you need at the forge.”

“Yes,” Theow said absently, still watching Fryda. “Yes. Belt.”

Bryce snorted and gave Theow a shove towards the forge. “Woden’s beard, lad,” he muttered. “Your head is stuffed with straw today.”

Theow could not deny the charge.

“Do they never feed you in those kitchens, lad?” the blacksmith asked a short time later. “I could wrap this belt around you twice and still have enough leather left over to cover an axe handle.”

“Not enough, Bryce.” Theow laughed. “Never enough.”

The forge was one of Theow’s favourite places and the huge, grizzled blacksmith one of his few friends. Theow could not remember his real father, the man who had sired him and presumably cared for him before he was stolen and sold into slavery, but over the years he