Outrage flamed through her, but Alea remembered their game and went to kneel in front of her new master, unlacing, his boots.
Birin’s hand cracked across her cheek. “I did not give you leave to stop sweeping, slut!”
Anger almost got the better of her then, but Alea rose and took the broom again.
Vigran leaned back and swung a kick into her buttocks. “You’ve only unlaced the one!”
Alea lurched into the wall. Anger spread a red haze over the room as the teens’ laughter rocked around her. She pushed herself away from the wall and swung the broomstick at Vigran.
It took him by surprise, cracking across his pate—but the other three roared in anger, and Silig leaped forward, slamming a fist into her belly, then another into her cheek. Yalas was there an instant later to slap her left cheek, then Birin her right. By that time, Vigran recovered and surged to his feet, bellowing in anger and swinging a huge fist to strike again and again.
So the day went. She could do nothing right, of course, and try as she would, they managed to goad her to anger twice more, beating her each time. The last time, Birin told Silig, “Tie her hands to the post!”
“No!”Alea screamed, panic tearing within, but father and son dragged her kicking to the pillar that held up the ceiling beam, and Vigran held her hands fast, chuckling, while Silig bound them.
“Bare her back, Yalas,” Birin directed. “You men look away!”
They didn’t, of course; they watched with hungry eyes as Yalas tore open the black dress, the only good dress Alea was ever likely to have again. Pain tore into Alea’s back with a smack; she cried out once in sheer surprise, then clamped her jaw shut and refused to let out a sound as the willow wand struck again and again, and the men’s laughter gained a hungry note. Her very silence must have angered Birin even further, for the blows became sharper and sharper. When they finally ceased, Birin panted, “Loose her!”
They did. Gasping to keep down her sobs, Alea turned to see Birin’s right arm hanging while she massaged it with her left, glaring at Alea as though the pain of so much swinging of the willow wand was her fault.
She swept until the floors were spotless, she peeled and chopped in the kitchens, she drew water from the well and hauled it to the kitchen, she cooked their dinner and served it in spite of their carping and criticizing of every mouthful—though Alea knew it was better than Birin could do!
Then she had to scour, wash, put away, be scolded for doing it wrong and be beaten once again. She had to haul the scraps to the hogs and was allowed to brew a little gruel for herself.
Finally, tottering with fatigue, she went out to the barn, as Birin had told her to go sleep there. Despite the pain in her back, belly, and face, she managed to climb the ladder and collapsed into the haymow to let the sobbing begin.
The sobs grew louder and louder until she was almost howling with grief and hurt. How could her parents have left her to this! How could her father have dared die and leave her! And why, oh why, had the Norns spun such a doom as this for her? Why had they let her be born, if this was all she was for?
Alea bit her lip and tried to force back her tears, force her body to be pliant and unprotesting. If this was what the Norns willed, if this was her doom, then she could only submit to it without complaint, accept it without protest. She would try, she would really try…
But she knew she would fail, that she would scream protests, even fight. A brief, lurid vision flashed in front of her, of Vigran grinning all the wider because of her resistance. She forced the picture away, shuddering and sobbing, ashamed and angry at herself for being so willful, so contrary, willing herself to accept without complaint what the next night might bring—but the anger at her father blazed up, for dying and leaving her to this!
It was a blaze that subsided to ashes in minutes, though, for she remembered how worried he and Mama had been that she had no suitors, was not married. She remembered how impatient she had become with them for insisting that she should accept whatever match they could make for her. She’d thought they had been cruel at the time, but now, now she understood and, understanding, cried herself to sleep.
The Wentods made her cook all the meals, sweep and dust, beat the carpets, feed the livestock, even hoe the kitchen garden. The worst was having to go with them to help spread lurid lavender paint over the lovely wood panelling of her parents’ house, the same paneling that she and her mother had so lovingly waxed every month. The only blessing was that Birin didn’t want to move into their new house until she had redecorated it to her own taste, every bit of which screamed offense inside Alea.
Birin stayed to supervise, so Silig and Vigran couldn’t do anything there, and Alea began to realize why the woman had made her go sleep in the hayloft, instead of an ash-filled corner on the hard tiles of the kitchen hearth.
She still couldn’t accept her fate meekly. She broke down and screamed protest at Yalas and Birin, even struck at them. She knocked them down of course, for she was so much bigger and stronger—but their cries of fright were enough to bring both men, and she couldn’t beat off all four of them.
So she tried to do as she was ordered in silence, for the gods and for fear of their blows—but try as she might, grit her teeth as she might, she knew she couldn’t simply lie there and let it happen, not the next night, or the next. She decided that she’d rather be dead.
So when dusk fell and she went out of the house, she didn’t go to the hayloft, only ducked around the barn and, with it between herself and the house, went out across the barnyard, forcing herself to run as well as she could in spite of the aching of her bruises, trying to ignore her weariness. The trees along the stream seemed to open their branches to embrace her, and she fled into their shadows. There she had to slow down, to pick her way through the darkness, but she waded the stream till it led her into the wood, and her first night of freedom.
When the world began to glimmer with the coming dawn, she was able to find a cave under the roots of an oak, and pulled herself in to munch the handfuls of berries she had gathered as she went. Soaked and shivering, she curled herself into a ball and prayed for death. But she blessed the Norns for her birth near the border; one more night and, with good fortune, she would be out of Midgard and into the strip of wasteland that separated her birthland from Jotunheim.
She knew she should have submitted to the fate the Norns had measured out to her, and fell asleep praying apologies to them for her failure—but she knew she couldn’t even try any longer. If she’d been born the daughter of a whore, it might have been a different matter; she might have grown up knowing that lot in life and able to accept it. But she had been the treasured daughter of a loving couple, and the sudden plunge into humiliation and degradation was more than she could bear. Even now she felt dim traces of outrage through her exhaustion, but they didn’t last, for she fell asleep.
“I shall never be a shield-maiden in the hall of the gods now,” she told Gar bitterly. “If my soul survives this life at all, it will go only to torment and misery.”
“I can’t believe that,” Gar told her, “and I can’t believe your doom could be so far from your weird.”
Alea lifted her head, incensed. “What do you know of my weird?”
“I know that you’re a woman of spirit, daring, and courage,” Gar told her, “and those qualities do not fit a doom of meekness, and submission to the cruelty of others.”
She stared at him with wondering eyes. “You cannot mean the Norns had another doom in mind for me!”
“I mean exactly that,” Gar answered. “If you have read your weird at all, you have read it badly.”
“Oh, have I indeed!” Alea exclaimed. “What weird would you read for me, then?”