Page 24 of Heart of Fire
The first signsomething was not right at her home started when she saw all of the ewes huddled in their stone pen together, big eyes wide with fright. The bleating set her nerves on edge, but she couldn’t see anything to cause suchdistress.
Leading Hanna up the lane, Freyja frowned. “What has my ladies in such a dither?” She couldn’t resist scanning the skies. Evening fell like a curtain of inky shadows from the east, with paler golden tones lingering in the west where the sun took its time to descend. A few stars sparkled in the nightsky.
But nodreki.
A shiver ran through her as she put her new ram and Hanna away, tending the sweet mare and slipping her a slice of dried apple she carried in her pocket. She had the same feeling in her stomach that she’d felt in Akureyri when she bid adieu toRurik.
Fate, he whispered in hermemories.
“Foolishness,” Freyja muttered, and shut the stable door behindHanna.
Wrapping her shawl around her shoulders, she scurried toward her father’s house with her basket of goods. Night had finally vanquished day, but light glared from the kitchen window and the small sitting room next to it. What was her father thinking? They barely had enough kerosene to spare, and she hoarded it like thedrekiin Krafla protected hisgold.
“Father?” she called, pulling the door shut behind her and dragging her shawl off her shoulders. The heat inside the house enveloped her like a warm cloud. Good grief, he had the fire blazing as well. The dwindling woodpile in the corner of the kitchen looked alarmingly low. “Father, where areyou?”
“Through here, Freyja,” he called from the sitting room, and her heart skittered a beat at how well hesounded.
Thank goodness. Freyja squeezed her eyes shut, then let out the breath she’d been holding. Leaving him alone for a time was always aworry.
“Have you had dinner?” She could smell the lamb stew she’d left in the cool room simmering in a pot on the stove. “I’ve bought fresh bread all the way from Akureyri, and a wheel ofcheese.”
“Ah, leave all that!” her father called, “and come in here. I have a guest who is waiting to meetyou.”
Freyja set her basket of produce on the table, and crept toward the sitting room. Who would be visiting them out here? Benedikt and his father were in the village, as well as Haakon and his men. There were few others who would willingly step foot in her household, even with the iron horseshoe nailed upside down over thelintel.
“Aguest?”
The chair creaked as her father levered out of it, and she caught sight of his shadow on the wall. Another shape shifted beside it, a tall man sitting in the armchair by the window, by the look ofit.
Freyja stopped dead as she entered the room. “Rurik?”
What was he doinghere?
Rurik sprawled in her father’s second-favorite armchair, balancing an old chipped teacup in his hands with feigned nonchalance. Everything about his posture screamed he intended to pose no threat, but his eyes flared amber the second he saw her, and everything in her body screamed at her torun.
“Mistress Freyja,” he purred. “I was just telling your father here about our meeting in Akureyri. He has some interesting stories aboutdreki, which I am collecting for my book, if youremember?”
Book? He hadn’t said a blasted thing about abook.
“What are you really doing here?”shemouthed.
“Freyja!” Her father looked up from the small platter of honey cakes he’d been destroying. Those filmy eyes turned vaguely in her direction, and hesmiled.
He lookedwell.
Freyja scurried to his side, pressing a kiss to his brow in a surreptitious way to measure his temperature. “Where did you get the cakefrom?”
“Master Rurik bought it in the village as a gift.” Her father hugged her. “He intends to do some research in this area, and someone directed him to my door.” Pride swelled his chest. “He wants to learn about the localdreki, and I know all of your mother’s stories. I offered her books to him, and offered him board for a fewweeks.”
Weeks?
“You shouldn’t have,” she murmured to Rurik, embarrassed he’d noticed their poor plight enough to bring a gift of food with him. The little house no doubt looked like a hovel in his eyes, with its thatch of grassed roof, and the bare necessities were all that remained of their furniture. The house was spotless, and the furniture gleamed with beeswax she’d lovingly rubbed into it, but she’d been forced to sell pieces of it over the years, and empty spaces gaped where stuffed chairs had once stood. Even her mother’s precious books had thinned out over the years as one catastrophe after another—their crops failing, or the fence breaking and precious lambs going missing—had struck their little farmstead. She’d never even told her father she’d sold some of them, and he’d clearly notnoticed.
It would have broken hisheart.
“We don’t have a spare room,” she told himbluntly.
Her father sucked in a sharp breath. “Freyja—”
