There was a strangeness in the air, even though the morning drenched the land with bright sunlight that chased the shadows away. The spirits often crossed the divide between the living and the dead on this evening, but… not during the day.
Still, something seemed amiss. I just wasn’t sure what. Perhaps Hodor’s dream had rooted itself in my mind.
I tried my best to forget his words and the vision they’d painted, sorry I asked him to reveal more of it to me. Neither of us needed any distractions today. Tonight, Hodor would fight Father and I would fight Mother. We would have to be ferocious if we were to earn our shields.
If we didn’t best them, we would be no better than our youngest siblings, considered little more than babes. And that wasn’t enough, now that I could smell freedom as clearly as I could the dung on the ground, the scent of salt and change on the air.
Mother was a shield maiden and she wanted me to sail to new lands and fight with other warriors. To make my own name and place in this world, blade by blood-soaked blade. Father, on the other hand, wanted me to marry. He hoped to fetch a handsome prize for my hand.
My mother’s vision for my future frightened me at the same time it thrilled me. I’d never left Amrok Village. I’d barely swum farther in the fjord than my toes could reach the bottom.
But Father’s plans made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to be given to someone for a herd of goats. Not even a wagon full of gold and riches would be enough for me to marry someone I didn’t know and probably would hate.
Mother’s laugh entangled with Father’s from inside our home as the sun burned the thin frost from the grass and left the ground soft and loamy. I sat on an overturned bucket and slid another under the teats of our best milking goat and began to draw out the milk, slowly filling it. We were to provide loaves of bread and fresh butter for the celebration tonight.
A flock of blackbirds pecked across the grass beside me, keeping careful distance as I lost myself in thought and repetition, only startling back to the present when the birds took flight, weaving across the sky as if they were one and not hundreds.
The goat chewed on the tuft of hay I lay before her and stood still for me until my chore was complete. A brittle wind lifted hairs from my braid. I brushed them back, looking up at the sound of happy squeals and shouts.
My youngest brother and sisters chased each other along the fjord’s rocky beach, brandishing wooden swords and stabbing and slashing at each other mercilessly. Gunnar somehow held his own against the girls, but Ingrid and Solvi fought him together, sisters to the end, always wanting to best the boy amongst them. Sometimes Hodor would join the fight just to even the odds, but it wasn’t long until the girls pulled me into their sparring matches and the children shrank away as Hodor and I squared off.
I smiled at their carefree giggles and the sound of the blunt swords they thwacked and jabbed at one another. It was easy to fight without thought and not hold back when you knew no one would get hurt, that no blood would spill and no life would be severed by your blade. It was also easy not to hold back when you could see your enemy’s blade and their intention to kill you in their eyes, when that blade sliced toward your throat.
My youngest sister’s shrill squeal startled our goat. I ran my hand down her back to calm her again and fed her another tuft of hay by hand. She ground the hay with her row of teeth and settled, and I continued drawing milk from her.
I watched my younger siblings play over the coarse but soft, beige fur of her back, hoping they’d never see battle but knowing they would. Odin wouldn’t spare them from it. Not when he coveted a good fight the way grown men coveted mead.
Father said that I’d fought well four years ago when our enemy snuck into our village in the middle of the night. Considering that I survived, I had to agree. But I hadn’t come out unscathed. My skin wasn’t flayed. My limbs hadn’t been cleaved away. But the battle left a scar I desperately and constantly tried to hide, leaving shameful fear in its wake.
I was supposed to want my brother and sisters to charge into battle, to wield axe and sword and spear and shield alongside their peers. I was supposed to want them to die honorably. But I couldn’t bring myself to wish anything but peace upon them. Perhaps that alone would bar me from Valhalla in the end.
Even so, I couldn’t change my heart any more than I could change the stars.
Whenever I thought about the attack, all I could see was the glint of metal in the moonlight. All I could feel was the wavering of the muscles in my forearm as I held my play shield and hoped the woman attacking me didn’t hack off my arm as she used her sword to cut through the thin wooden slats piece by piece. I remembered the sound of my teeth gritting, my heartbeat pounding a staccato rhythm in my ear, and the feeling of my tiny hand curling around the handle of the red-hot poker with which I ran her through.
I could still hear the sound of clashing steel and smell the sickening mixture of blood and sweat. I remembered the cries of men and the deafening silence that followed.
That was why Hodor’s dream bothered me. Because it foretold of another attack, one none of us would survive.
You want to know how the dream ended, Liv? We all died in the end. None of us survived. None.
I finished milking two more nannies, trying to forget the morning but unable to do so.
Trying to focus on the fight I would have to win this evening… unable to do that, either.
When I finished, I brought the bucket of goat milk inside. Mother’s eyes flicked from me to the two freshly made shields, unpainted and unadorned. Waiting for us to put our marks upon them once earned.
Father made them, cutting the wood and hammering the steel that held the boards together. It took him almost a week to make them both. Despite the fact that each day was shorter than the last and we still had much to do to prepare for the winter ahead, he took his time on them. The shields would not break. They wouldn’t bend or yield. Father was much better with steel and wood than he was with his children.
Outside, Gunnar let out a battle cry and charged the tow-headed girls while throwing his play shield up to dodge blows the girls dealt in retaliation.
Fighting is in our blood, Father would say, ruffling my hair when I was their age. It was what made a warrior feel alive. It was the air we breathed. The pride that swelled our chests.
“They’re excited about tonight. So excited, they started battling inside before the porridge was cooked through, which is why I shooed them outside. But it’s ready now; call them in,” Mother said, “and you come, too.” She looked toward the near mountain, her eyes turning frosty. She knew Hodor was there, had probably heard the thing he said to Father, but I wasn’t sure how she felt about the matter. She’d said worse to Father at one time or another. At others, she defended him fiercely. I wondered whose side she would settle on today.
I yelled for the children to come and eat, watching their battle continue as their tiny legs brought them closer to the house.