Chapter 32: The Shield Maiden I

The wide grey sky. The smell of wet grass. The rustling of leaves swaying. Salt on the wind off the sea, the small endless noise of a forest going about its morning.

It always began with that.

Long grass, wet at the ankle, and the cold light of that day.

The pool at the bottom lying flat as a plate. The sound of hundreds of people breathing behind her, and the creak of leather as somebody shifted their grip on a haft.

The blur, too distant to make out, standing between them and it.

She could never read his lips. She could never make out one word of it.

That was how she knew where she was. Standing in the middle of a crowd with her ears full of wool, straining, and there were never any words at all.

Then the sound.

The whir it made as it came through the air and landed flat and heavy, the scream of a maul coming down on a skull.

Then the impact, and that one was wet.

Then the terrible shriek that came out of him.

Then the blood.

She blinked.

The grass was gone.

The whole floor of that hollow had become a pond of it. It- Wall to wall, all red and still, right up to the rock, deep enough it could reach her knees.

It had happened in the time it took her eyelids to close and open, how? How-?

How was it dripping off her hands.

Off her fingers, in fat unhurried drops, into the pond. One after another after another. It was up past her wrists. It was warm and going sticky in the creases of her knuckles.

She shrieked and tried get it off her but it refused. She couldn't wash away the blood.

Her screams turned desperate and mad.

The scream tore out of her from somewhere below the ribs, raw and animal and endless. The sound a person makes when they have seen a truth too enormous to shallow.

It went on and on in that hollow while nobody- none of the men and women standing behind her turned round or heard a single note of it.

She woke on her back with her mouth open.

No sound came out.

There never was one.

She had not made a noise in her sleep since she was a child. Her body seemed to have decided somewhere along to always keep the screaming on the other side.

On her nightmares.

She lay in the dark with her heart hammering and her jaw aching from being clenched, and counted to ten, which was the arrangement she had made with herself.

Then she got up.

Outside it was dark and freezing. It was a long few hours before anybody sensible would be awake. Which was perfect.

It was just what she needed, in fact.

She took her axe off the wall and strode to the tree line.

The first strike was never practice.

THUNK

It went into the oak with everything she had behind it, shoulder and hip and both heels, and the shock of it went up her arms and into her teeth.

She wrenched the head free with a kick and a pull and again.

And again.

And again.

This was not practicing. Not yet.

This was just everything- payback. It was everything she had to endure, everything- she had to blow, THUNK.

Kick, scream, curse.

Again hitting the stupid lump of wood, breathing through her nose in hard flat bursts, hauling the blade out of the splintered mess she left and ramming it straight back in.

Somewhere around the hundredth she got hold of herself.

Fucking. Stupid. Bastard.

She shook her head, biting her teeth in anger.

It would still be hours until the sound rose. She knew she would not be getting any more sleep, so she would be putting her time to use.

She let out a long exhausted breath.

Then after a few minutes she was back to the forms.

In order, and then out of order, by the thousand and fiftieth or so strike her shoulders were burning and her palms stung and her hands had finally stopped shaking.

That was the whole point of it.

By the time the light came up she was washed and back at her mother's table eating barley porridge.

She said good morning with her usual enthusiasm, sat dawn and ate. She asked about some things, the usual small talk she held with her family. They talked something about the netting that morning, she didn't remember.

It was good her mother had stopped asking questions about the morning practice about a year and a half ago.

That was the trick of it. That was how the whole thing worked.

Because awake, Astrid never thought about him.

It was not that she had forgotten. It was that she simply would not do it. She refused to do it.

And yet every time she was done with it, every time she'd made peace with her actions, every single time, that cursed nightmare would come back.

The thought of him would be walking out of sleep with her, and with the thought would come the remorse, and the guilt, and the pain, and so she would have to take it by the neck and strangle it in the crib with her own two bloody hands.

Do it all over again.

Only, it did not seem to matter how many times she did it.

Two years. It had been two long years of killing that thought every single time it opened its twisted eyes, and the nightmare came anyway.

It did not care that she had got good at this.

It did not care that she was seventeen now, it did not care she was the best axe on the island, it did not care she had not said his name out loud ever since his funeral.

It was always the same. It came when it wished. There was nothing she could do to it.

Astrid Hofferson couldn't argue nightmares down and couldn't out-think them. But she could put a hundred and fifty strikes into a lump of oak, and by the end of it her fears would go quiet, and her hands steady, and she can at least go about the rest of her day like a person.

That was her whole method.

The reason it kept coming back was simple. She had worked it out not long after he died.

It was hers.

Not the axe.

Spitelout threw the axe, and Spitelout could answer for that crime to whatever gods were still keeping count.

So not the axe, everything else.

That whole terrible morning that had been hunting her for two years had been set rolling by Astrid Hofferson and by nobody else in the world.

Because she followed him into the woods to prove a point.

There was no dressing it up.

Not after all the time she'd had to think things through.

He had been sneaking off in the into the forests for weeks, getting better in the ring for no reason anybody could see, and she had not been able to stand it.

She remembered, it again.

Those days, they almost seemed a lifetime ago. Gods, in hindsight, what a small, miserable, petty point it had been.

She followed him to prove a point, not because he was in danger, not because she suspected anything, no, she had suspected nothing at all.

Not from him.

Truth is, she could not stand it because it was unfair.

That was it.

At fifteen she trained until her hands split and bled, and wrapped them, and trained again, and she was the best. Being the best was the only thing she had ever been sure of about herself.

Except all of a sudden the Chief's useless son started walking into that ring and doing it better than her without even appearing to try. Some part of her had simply refused to accept that the world could be arranged that way.

So she went up that hill with her jaw set, to catch him out.

Not to help him. Not to warn him.

Just to win.

To win an imaginary contest.

Some game that existed only inside her head. Her baddest attempt to outplay a boy too clueless to know what he'd taken from her.

She found the cove. She found the dragon.

And then she ran.

She went up the ridge, down through the village without stopping, and shouted it into the first faces she saw, and inside a quarter of an hour half the village was going back up with axes in their hands.

Astrid had been over it enough times to know where it had gone wrong.

She should have walked.

That was all.

She should have walked down that hill instead of running, and gone to the chief's house, and told Stoick alone, in a room, with the door shut.

The boy's own father.

Stoick would have gone up there and roared the trees down and dragged him home by the collar, and there would have been a beating, or a shaming, or a year locked in the house.

The dragon would have been driven off or hunted.

The boy would have hated her for the rest of his life and made bitter little remarks about her at every opportunity.

But he would have had a rest of his life to do it in.

Her face hardened.

Because no matter what the what-ifs were worth, that was not what happened.

Because she brought a mob instead. She ran down treeline with the clean hot feeling of being so completely right, and handed a crowd of terrified Vikings a target to put their fear into. Everything that came after grew out of a decision she made in the time it takes to blink.

It was unfair. It was unfair to her.

She shook her head and once more she grit her teeth.

There was the other thing too.

The one she would never say, the one she was sure she would take to her grave. It would have to be so.