Page 1 of Dalla's Royal Guards
Prologue
Norway: 832 A.D.
Dalla Bogadottir laughed as she danced around her two younger sisters and little brother. Runa and Olaf were playing with a set of wooden swords, their epic battle ensuring that they would be loudly and gleefully underfoot. Aesa shook her head and adjusted the basket of freshly laundered linens on her hip. Dalla carried a matching basket, though hers was filled with vegetables from her mother’s garden.
“Watch this, Dalla!” Olaf shouted.
Of the four of them, Dalla was the most skilled at fighting, her specialty hand-to-hand combat, the longbow, and the sword. Runa was nearly as good—especially with the short bow and blade, but this time, little Olaf, only ten and one years old, twisted under Runa’s outstretched arm and slid his sword between her arm and her body.
Runa groaned, dropped her sword, and twirled in a graceful circle before she crumpled to the ground in a dramatic defeat worthy of the thespians who had visited their small community.Dalla and Aesa laughed as Olaf strutted like a gander around Runa before she caught him by the ankle and tripped him. In seconds, she was sitting on top of Olaf, tickling his sides as he begged for help.
“What is all this noise?” Asta, their mother, called from the door to the longhouse.
“Runa has defeated Thor!” Aesa shouted in answer.
“Nev… never!” Olaf laughed.
“Runa, give your brother mercy and come help me prepare dinner,” their mother shouted back.
Runa made a face and rolled off Olaf. “She knows I hate cooking.”
“Not as much as we hate eating it,” Dalla retorted with a laugh, dancing out of the way when Runa picked up her wooden sword and swung it playfully in her direction.
Dalla turned to Aesa, her eyes bright with mirth, but her smile slowly faded as she noticed the thoughtful, uneasy expression on her sister’s face.
“You need to work with Olaf more, Dalla,” Aesa quietly reflected as Runa and Olaf ran off. “Runa defeated him far too easily.”
“He did well,” Dalla replied. “He simply forgot that an opponent who is mortally wounded on the ground could still be dangerous.”
“Ja… but he should not forget that,” Aesa insisted.
Dalla frowned and touched her sister’s arm. Aesa looked away from her questioning gaze, and her stomach clenched with alarm.
“Did you have another vision?” she asked.
Aesa swallowed before she reluctantly nodded. Dalla pulled back with a low hiss and waited.
As far as she knew, only she and their mother knew of Aesa’s gift. The visions had begun after Aesa had almost drowned two years earlier. Dalla would always remember Aesa’s still, unbreathing form on the sand, her face pale and cold. Aesa had visited the gates of Valhalla for a moment before their mother had brought her back. Since then, Aesa could ‘see’ some things before they happened, sometimes in her dreams at night, other times during the day when she was awake.
Dalla had learned of it when Aesa asked her to return to the spot of her death two days after the event. She hadn’t understood why Aesa would want to return there so quickly, but it soon became clear.
Two years earlier:
“Tell me how it happened, Dalla,” Aesa quietly requested.
Dalla stopped where the water, now at low tide, left a line in the sand. She curled her toes in the cold, moist sand and stared out at the breaking waves, wrapping her arms around her waist as she remembered the shock of the freezing water when she dove in after Aesa. The waves had tumbled the sisters against the coarse bottom, and Dalla had struggled to escape the current that swept them toward the rocks.
“You had your back to the water and didn’t see the wave when it struck you. It happened so fast. One moment you were there, thenext you had disappeared, as if Njord had reached his hand out of the ocean and wrapped it around you.”
Aesa stared out at the water. Dalla was surprised by the serene expression on her sister’s face. Two days before, Aesa had been dead. Dalla’s screams of anguish, captured on the wind and delivered to their mother, had brought Asta down the treacherous path as if carried by Meili, the god of travel. Their mother had the healing touch, a gift Aesa had inherited. Asta had drawn the water from Aesa’s lungs and delivered air in a kiss of life only a mother could give.
“I saw a vision whilst I was dead,” Aesa confessed.
“A vision? Have you told mother?” Dalla asked.
Aesa shook her head. “Nei. The vision was not for her. It was for you.”
Trepidation filled Dalla. Visions were seldom a good omen. Most of the visions that she had heard of spoke of…
