Legend of the Mist Read Online Free PDF

I reckon it will take that long to get good and trained up.”
    “Garrett,” she gasped, clutching at his hand again. “Ye’ll be gone a matter of years ? Ye didna say!”
    “I’m saying now.”
    “But—but what training can the Campbells give ye that ye canna get wi’ the Vikings? Ye heard Father say they’ll be here after the harvest to train the clan in their style.”
    “I dinna want to ken the Viking way, and I dinna want to be here when they are!” he asserted, thumping his fist into the dirt at his side.
    Norah bit her lip, trying not to burst into a fit of sobs . “Ye canna leave me,” she said quietly.
    Garrett hung his head. “I am sorry. I must.”
    His words rang with finality. She lowered her own head, chastened. When Garrett leaned over to embrace her, she could say nothing.
    “Ye take care, Norah. Ye hear? Take care of yerself.”
    She nodded and buried her head in his shoulder, holding onto him, memorizing him as if she might never see him again. She might not, after all. Who knew what the years ahead would bring?
    Later that morning, as she stood on the edge of the cliff watching his ship sail off to the Scottish mainland, Norah considered how long a matter of years was. Garrett had always been there to talk to, to laugh with, to look up to. In two, three years he would be a full grown man when he returned, crossing the threshold from youth to adulthood in a distant land away from his people. If he were gone more than two or three years ...
    She’d never felt so alone as she watched the birlinn drift farther and farther away. The whistle of the wind that whipped her hair in its seaborne breeze taunted her, echoing her loneliness.
    * * *
    “Torsten,” called an exuberant, high pitched voice from the door of the tavern. “Einarr is home!”
    Torsten glanced towards the flood of light that penetrated the smoky gloom within. The patrons who also looked to see who had interrupted their drinking squinted against the sudden glare of the late summer day.
    In the middle of the doorway stood Siri, Torsten’s younger sister. She leaned with one hand braced against the wooden frame and her other hand plunked on her hip which was draped in a rose coloured gown of Byzantine silk. That gown, he recalled, had been captured in one of the previous summers’ raids.
    “Well?” she demanded when Torsten continued to stare blankly at her. “Are you coming?”
    Torsten scowled at the slip of a girl. Only fourteen summers had she seen and already she was barging into taverns and handing out orders like she was the lady of the land. Revisiting his goblet of mead, he raised the rim to his lips and tossed down the remainder with a loud swallow.
    “My friends,” he said, nodding to the men with whom he had been partaking of the tavern’s refreshments for the past hour, “I am being summoned.”
    Torsten’s companions chuckled amongst themselves in response, clucking their tongues at the typically brash behaviour of the jarl’s daughter.
    Stalking across the rush-strewn floor, Torsten grabbed her arm and spun her away from the door. “I thought I told you to stay away from this part of the village,” he clipped, his eyes narrowed with displeasure.
    Siri was not chastened in the least by her brother’s tone. Instead she flashed the winsome smile for which she was known and rolled her eyes. That smile had, time after time, won over even the most hardened Viking in the port village of Hvaleyrr, and once again, Torsten found himself unable to stay angry with her.
    “You worry too much, brother,” she retorted. “I have known these men all my life. They would not hurt me.”
    “They would not when they’re sober,” he countered. “But the men in there have more mead and ale in them than blood by now.”
    “I saw that Gnud staring after you as you left,” Siri said, changing the subject. “What a horrible woman she is. I hope you have not been encouraging her attentions.”
    “Not that it is any of