BRENIN/ Chapter 1/ Part 1

A.D. 1103

He was born into blood.

The girl’s screams could be heard around the village.

"Ilsa," Gayde's age worn face showed every bit of her 52 years as she urged on the laboring girl. "You must push, now."

"I cannot," the girl breathed and looked up at Gayde with weary violet eyes. Ilsabata was no more than 16 and tiny, so the birth had been a difficult one for her. The large size of the baby was no help, and now there was some bleeding. Gayde rubbed the girl's matted black waist length hair and wiped the sweat from her pale face with a damp rag.

"You MUST." Gayde helped the girl sit up and forced her to push.

Ilsa must not die, Gayde thought this for purely selfish reasons.   Ilsabata was all Gayde had after the death of her own son and husband in a raid 22 years hence. Gayde released the girl to rest a moment and then forced her up again. Gayde felt Ilsabata's belly and frowned at the knot there. This would not be easy. The baby was sideways.

She worried.  Gayde had taken the girl on as her daughter since she had been brought to their land 2 years ago.  She remembered the first time she'd seen the girl.

Gayde has seen Ilsabata on the docks, fighting the sailors tooth and nail, not cowed and quiet like the others they’d stolen.   She watched as the girl clawed the face of a man after he’d back-handed her, a hit that should have knocked the small  girl out, but she’d kept struggling, even as the men tied her flailing hands and ankles together.

Ilsa had been 15. Small and lonely and beautiful, she stood on the dock with ropes tied to her ankles and wrists, and with her head held high.  She wore rags, but rags of such a golden fabric Gayde had never seen the likes before.

Gayde noticed that the men seemed to keep their distance and avoid her eyes even as they roughly handled her through the village. Ilsabata did not protest, but she did not cower either. Gayde had found herself smiling at the spectacle. The girl certainly had backbone. From the bruises on several of the sailor's cheeks, the girl had given them a hard time. Hah! They probably deserved it.  Gayde was still somewhat bitter about being stolen from her own lands as a child, though she could barely remember it.

As the girl and her rough escorts passed Gayde on the street, Ilsa suddenly turned to pierce Gayde with the strangest eyes she'd ever seen. Large, violet, and intense, those eyes seemed to know everything. They saw straight into your heart and knew your deepest secrets; things you'd kept from yourself.  Gayde felt drawn in, as if she was drowning in a pool of warm violet.  It was at that point, Gayde understood why the men avoided her gaze.  Those eyes held power.

Then, even as the sailors pulled her towards Hrrolf's home, --the place where she was sure to be repeatedly raped before being given to the other men to finish--, Ilsa smiled. A tiny lift at the left corner of her lip. This girl might have been captured, but she was no slave.

Gayde watched the men haul the girl up the street. That little girl would have hated it had she known, but the time spent in the girl's eyes had allowed Gayde to see something which had touched her own life much; fear. Gayde had seen into the girl’s soul as well and found fear and a deep well of sadness. It was then Gayde had made her own way up to the Laird's home.  

She would be there for the girl when she was released.