Bracelet of Bones Read Online Free Page A

family along this fjord who didn’t lose a father, a son, a brother,” added Old Sven.
    “What I don’t understand,” Solveig said to the priest, “is how the way of the White Christ can be carpeted with blood. You keep saying he’s the Prince of Peace, but King Olaf and his army whirled their battle-axes. How can you forgive and wreak vengeance at the same time?”
    The young priest, Peter, gave Solveig a pitying smile. “We forgive those who are willing to be baptized; those who are not, we must strike down.”
    “Most of the families living along our fjord have been baptized,” Asta retorted, “but they still worship Odin and the other gods as well.”
    The young priest shook his head. “I will pray for you,” he said, “and visit you again.”
    On another day, Blubba asked Solveig why her father had left them and sailed away.
    “He’s gone because he promised to,” Solveig told him. “He’s honoring his promise.”
    Blubba frowned.
    “He promised Harald Sigurdsson that he would follow him. Can you remember him?”
    “Not really.”
    “He was even taller than my father.”
    “I remember that.”
    “And he had a loud voice and a loud laugh.”
    “Yes, I remember.”
    “When he fought with my father at Stiklestad, he was fifteen and you were only four,” Solveig told Blubba, and then she sat him down beside her. “He was born to be a leader, Harald was, and you can be sure he and my father will come back and avenge King Olaf’s death.”
    “When?” asked Blubba.
    “Do you know,” Solveig went on, “when Harald was just three, he told his half brother—King Olaf, that is—that what he wanted most was warships? Not food, not board games, not weapons. Warships!”
    “I wish Halfdan would come back,” announced Blubba.
    Solveig swallowed loudly. “What about you?” she asked Blubba. “What would you choose? What do you want most?”
    Blubba gazed at his stepsister seriously.
    “Well?” she asked.
    “You used to be happy,” Blubba said. “And smiling . . . and laughing. I want . . . your days to be all like that again.”
    “Oh, Blubba!” cried Solveig. Tears sprang to her eyes, and roughly she drew Blubba to her, and then she sniffed and pummeled his back.
    Not a day passed without Solveig thinking about what her father had said, and not said. Without wondering where he was and whether she could follow and find him.
    She had never been farther away from her home than the market at Trondheim, and even then not on her own. But home isn’t home, she thought. Not any longer. There’s food and shelter here, I know, but such sadness, such pain.
    Even the wolves, she thought, even they would be better than this.
    Solveig inscribed the runes, so that the point of her awl bit into the oval of walrus bone: “SOLVEIG THE SUN-STRONG FOLLOWED . . .”
    “Solveig!” rasped Asta. “Will you stop that? You’re scouring my skull! Stop all this scratching and scraping before you drive me mad.”
    Solveig stayed her hand.
    “Or else work outside. The days are lengthening, aren’t they?”
    Praise be, thought Solveig. Praise Odin and Freyja and Thor and all my gods. Praise the White Christ, even. Yes, the days are getting longer.
    My winter’s almost over.
    The ice is breaking up.
    The morning before she left, Solveig told Asta that spring was on the doorstep.
    “There are many false springs,” Asta replied.
    “Can’t you feel it?”
    “And it’s better not to think about it,” Asta warned her. “Otherwise you won’t be able to think of anything else.”
    Then Solveig blithely announced, seeing as spring was in the air, it was high time the little shed beside the jetty was mucked out. “And as my father’s not here,” she went on, “I’ll do it for him.”
    “As you please,” said Asta in a dry voice.
    So her stepmother suspected nothing when Solveig walked down to the jetty, five hundred paces away, three times that day. But each time she went, Solveig was carrying