Bound by the Viking, Part 3: Consumed by Delilah Fawkes

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    Bound by the Viking, Part 3: Consumed
     
    By Delilah Fawkes
     
     
     
    Fear twisted in Aislin’s stomach at the look in the woman’s eyes. So far she’d heard their whispers and taken Bersa’s sharp rebukes over her clumsiness, but one woman’s eyes held something in them that chilled her more than the ice crystals clinging to her hair. There was a knowledge in them, a deep, terrible knowledge that cut through to the bone whenever Aislin met her gaze.
    The woman was thinner than the others, her hair darker, and for the first time, Aislin wondered if she was like her. If she’d been ripped from her home many years ago, just as she and her sister had been, her family slain. Perhaps she was noble, her soft hands turned rough with the work of a thrall, her youthful face made hard with suffering, her eyes sharpened and aged by the things she’d seen. The things she’d been made to endure.
    There was knowledge in that gaze, certainly, and behind it all, a glimmer of pity floating in a black pool of certainty. She was resigned, her eyes begged Aislin to follow her to that firmer place. The place where hope died and a hardening began. She understood then, that for this woman, there was peace in despair. When you gave up searching for a way out, the numbness came after. And from there, one could continue to live.
    Day by day, she could live.
    At least there was that.
    Curse you , Aislin thought. Curse your eyes, and damn your pity!
    There was no peace for her in that, no rest to be had by giving herself over to her situation, her life as a captive, as a slave. As a whore.
    There would only be peace when she was free again, and freedom came at the end of a blade, not at the edge of that black pool filling that poor woman’s eyes. Filling her heart and dulling it until its beats were hollow and grey, as lifeless as a rock hitting a bucket, not the pumping, pulsing beat of someone truly alive, free and full of heat and color and rage…
    The heart of an O’Byrne.
    She turned her gaze away, her jaw set and her temper flaring. She filled the bucket with water from the barrel and hurried back to the cook fires where Bersa waited, her mind reeling and her palms itching.
    In just two short days it would be what the chief called Freya’s Day, and on that day, he’d threatened to wed and bed her, binding her to him in these cold lands as his bride. She had but two days to find a way out of this cursed village, but with the snow blinding her as she stumbled toward the light of her master’s hall, and the black waves lapping at the ships dragged onto the icy shore, she knew she would perish if she did not think things through.
    She’d heard men talking behind the stables as she gathered wood for the fire, men with swords on their hips and steel in their eyes. One of the words they used stopped her mid-motion— karfi —a word she remembere d from her time bound in the ship that carried her here, and another, ey . The man who uttered the second held a piece of silver in his hand and showed it to the other, a grin spreading over his face beneath his unkempt beard.
    Aislin’s hands tightened on the branches she held until her knuckles whitened. The glinting green gem on the silver gave away what it was he held. A brooch, made of four knots twisted together, the stone nestled between them. The workmanship was simple, but the design intricate, the skill familiar as well as the symbol.
    That design was worn by the Cavanaghs, a family that dwealt on her father’s land. The last time she’d seen a brooch like that, it held the shawl of the old woman who’d made the poultice that cured her sister’s fever. The last time she’d seen the Cavanagh’s grouping of shacks, they were