"Gone? ... And ... did he not tell you more?" Bere did not expect an answer. She asked simply to keep the conversation lively and ongoing. She held a piece of bread in her fingers and glanced to where the babe slept.
     Asta, now solidly launched on her dearest words to speak, spoke without letup, with just a nod from her mother to encourage the recital. Bere let her own mind wander, smiled at her daughter, nodded, and allowed snatches of her past to flash into memory.
     A short time after Brand had struck her, disfiguring her face, she requested that this cavern be made into a home for her alone. She had spent much time hidden away in it, watching the restful fjord waters below. Her wound slowly healed, and her shaken emotions for Brand settled nearer to the love a sister should have for a brother. So much time had she spent in the cave, that soon she never left it, could not be made to do so.
     Her half-brother seemed eager to comply with any request, she made of him; his stricken heart and conscience troubled him greatly over the injury he had done her. He saw that the cold stone walls were hung with thick, wool hangings, one from his own bedchamber, and the floor covered thick with animal pelts: sable, squirrel, beaver, bear, just a few of the many, with and without fur, making the large room a comfortable and luxurious home for her. The deep-shadowed natural stone ceiling was lowered with thick oak planks. On the south wall Odin's own World Tree was reproduced in iron, holding several oil lamps nestled in heavily veined, silver-inlaid leaves. It was as high as a large man and just as wie. In the sunless days of darkest winter, when the tree was set alight, the cavern took on an otherworldly aura--easily launching one's imaginings to a blissful afterlife.
(To be continued. Keep watching for it. Again you have been reading an excerpt from Forced Blood The Norseman by Linda Newton-Perry and Christopher Perry. The novel is to be read slowly, to savor!)