Daughter of the Wind Read Online Free Page B

his skull.
    And he knew nothing.

Five
    The fire started in the hours before dawn.
    Hallgerd heard it in her sleep, the sputter of far-off flames, and the airy roar as the timbers of the great hall began to blaze. In her half-dream the jarl’s daughter thought it was the sound of wind, or a rough surf.
    She woke.
    The ruddy gleam of distant firelight worked under the cracks of the shuttered window. For an instant she thought the village fighting men must have all returned from voyaging, having loaded freight ships with grain and horses. They were all dancing around a great fire, her beloved Lidsmod among them.
    She flung open her shutters. Her father’s house was one of the few in the village with windows, three of them. As noble leader of the town, a jarl’s dwelling was often distinctive. Hallgerd was proud of these openings in the timbered walls, and always hoped that her neighbors would observe her leaning out and enjoying the view. Now, as the predawn chill breathed into the house, she was certain she heard the crackling of fire overhead, too, on the roof of her family dwelling.
    She cocked her head and heard nothing more, only the distant shouts of neighbors, spreading the alarm that the alehouse was alight. Some errant whisper caught her further attention, a sound from above. It was possible for someone to hide on a longhouse roof—the wooden eaves and occasional turf coverings easily camouflaged a leather-clad figure. People still told the story of Egil the Stout hoisting himself on a roof to surprise his wife, and falling asleep. A raven had awakened him, one of Odin’s sly, sacred birds perching on his forehead, and people still chuckled over the great hunter’s embarrassment.
    But the roof above her made no further creak. Already figures were racing to the burning hall, veteran sailors and sheepmen, all of them accustomed to shipboard crises and sudden bad weather. Birch wood buckets already splashed from hand to fire, men and women stumbling from their dwellings, hurrying toward the great hall.
    Her father put a hand on her shoulder in the half-dark of the longhouse and said, “Help Astrid with the ewes.”
    Hallgerd fastened her cloak as she ran, pinning it at one shoulder with the amber clasp that had belonged to her grandmother.
    A pen full of bawling sheep struggled, kicking and jumping in the darkness. The creatures were so close to the blaze that the firelight danced in their panicked eyes. Livestock were often held in one common pen in the village. It pleased Hallgerd to consider that soon, thanks to riches won by the three fighting ships, freight-knorrs—heavy-timbered cargo vessels—would arrive with new breeding ewes, fatter and healthier than these tough, long-legged sheep.
    Hallgerd had been trained to be proud of her family—but not too proud to attend livestock. She could lance a boil on a sow and keep a gander from biting by hissing right back at him, but she knew that a noble young woman of seventeen was expected to display a degree of dignity, clapping her hands to drive the sheep uphill through the village rather than kicking them and bawling like her friend Astrid, or whooping like the young boys who joined them.
    Hallgerd used the low, steadying tone her mother had taught her, a no-nonsense sound the sheep responded to as they streamed through the village longhouses. The small herd flowed up into the dark meadow beyond as sparks from the fire descended all around them through the darkness.
    Hallgerd caught the scent of the blaze, and turned.
    As the flames consumed the seasoned spruce and pine the conflagration did not smell right. Fire was an endemic danger in such a timbered village, and stories were told of entire wooden towns burning, every roof down to every threshold, because of an errant spark.
    A few gray-bearded men were hurrying back to their cottages and returning, strapping on swords. Hallgerd had been warned since childhood: Young women