Page 1 of A Shield Maiden's Earl
Prologue
Freya
11 February 1243
Storskog, Kingdom of Norway
Norwegian-Russian border
“Do you seeit?” Tucking a curl behind my ear, I squinted through the driving snow as my sisters, Astrid and Tove, and I trudged through the deepening drifts toward home. I spotted something small and dark moving up ahead and was surprised when I recognized what it was. “Just ahead in the woodland,” I gasped. “’Tis a gray wolf pup.”
Although I should have been frightened, since a wolf pup was bound to have a mother nearby, I felt no such fear. Instead, as the frigid wind gusted and towering oak and spruce trees creaked and groaned overhead, I was drawn to it, sensing it was here to deliver a message.
“We should not approach it,” cautioned Astrid, the youngest of us. Her unruly mass of honey blond locks blew every which way, and her pale blue eyes rounded with worry. “Father would not like it.”
“Yet Father is not here,” reminded my older sister, Tove, always the most daring.
“No, he’s not,” I agreed, swearing I caught a glint of metal near the pup. Edging closer, we remained watchful of oursurroundings lest a larger wolf appear. “I think it has something in its mouth.”
“Ja.” Astrid’s eyes grew wider still. “’Tis ablade.”
As if responding to her words, the wolf dropped the dagger and trotted off. More curious than ever, we pulled our furs tightly around us to ward off the wind’s chill and approached the area.
“There’s nothing there,” Astrid exclaimed once we reached the location.
“Yet there is,” Tove said softly, crouching where an impression of a blade dented the snow. She ignored her thick, blue-black hair whipping in the wind and reached down with her gloved hand, her usual fearless self. Furrowing her brow in concentration, she felt around in the snow until she found what she was looking for and then lifted out the most magnificent dagger we had ever seen.
“’Tis of the gods,” she whispered, awestruck at the Nordic designs aglow along its well-forged steel. Gifted in the way of ancient seers, her eyes hazed with a mystical darkness, and her voice took on the octave of our shield-maiden ancestors. “’Tis of the Valkyries and our destinies. Of our great purpose, warrior spirits, and fates we must follow to distant shores and o marriages that will divide us, yet things wemustsee through.”
“But we are too young to marry,” Astrid whispered, as if she didn’t want to say it too loudly and offend the gods.
“Right now,” I murmured, feeling my inner seer stir. “But someday we will be old enough and ’twill be time.”
“And how will we know when that is?” Astrid cocked her head. “Is it not Father’s role to see us married?”
“’Tis and ’twill be,” Tove said, feeling the same stirring as I when the wind whipped around us. As if the gods spoke to her, she lowered the blade beneath the snow again. When she lifted her hand, the blade had morphed into three small stonesattached to leather strings. “Yet these talismans will be at the root of it.”
After urging us to duck behind a boulder out of the wind, she hung a dark blue stone around my neck, a dark green stone around Astrid’s, and a dark purplish black stone around her own neck.
As the years passed, Tove’s predictions proved accurate, and we embarked on our journeys through life. Ones that would indeed take us to distant shores and mark the beginning of significant change coming for both Vikings and Scots alike.
Chapter One
Freya
13 May 1263
Moskenesøya Isle, Norway
“Ican dothis,” I told myself under my breath. “I have no choice.”
Now was not the time for weakness but strength, as I approached Tove’s cottage. I knew I should only ever be strong when dealing with my eldest sister, or, for that matter, our father. Yet still, when I entered my sister’s cottage to spend these last few hours together before the Norns ripped us apart, it wasn’t easy. It was heart-wrenching.
Even so, such emotions had no room in these precious few moments. Any more than they had when we spent our last few hours with our sister, Astrid, before she’d departed for Scotland the previous year.
Practicing the foreign tongue of English, because, like my sisters, I knew it would become more common where we traveled, I forced a smile, somehow managing to keep my tears at bay. “Hello, Tove.”
My sister had braided her thick, black hair. Her pale, sea-green eyes were impossible to read. Nodding hello curtly from where she sat in front of a crackling fire at the center of her cottage, she gestured that I shut the door behind me, then didthe last thing I expected. She left her chair and quickly closed the distance to embrace me tightly.
