Free The Ice Queen by Bruce MacBain

most people, he had never cared a jot for writing, but suddenly, before this educated girl, he was abashed.
    â€œWhat, can’t you?” she asked with wide-eyed innocence. She wasn’t going to let him off easy.
    â€œI, ah, have not had leisure to master your Rus letters.”
    â€œOh, I know the Roman letters, too, and the Greek ones. Write it any way you please.”
    â€œGospodin,” I broke in, “it’s for just such things that you have a skald. Permit me.”
    â€œYes, dammit, yes, of course!”
    I cut off a sliver from one of the fire logs next to the oven and scratched her name on it in Roman letters (I had amused myself by learning them during my winter in Norway). And then—just to show off, I admit it—wrote it in runes as well.
    â€œWhat a clever fellow you are!” She cocked an eyebrow at me. Up til now she had paid me little attention. “Where did you learn that?”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œToo clever sometimes,” Harald glowered at me and shouldered himself between us. This was his show and I was spoiling it. I smiled and stepped back. How little it took to make him jealous!
    â€œThere’s one or two Northmen here that are always talking about the runes,” Yelisaveta said. “I’ve overheard them. Once I heard one say how they can make a person fall in love against her will. Will they do that to me?”
    She swept back her long hair and tilted up her face to him. There was no mistaking the finely calculated lowering of the eyelids.
    â€œThey will, pretty Elisif,” he answered; “they will indeed. Throw the sliver into the fire now if you would be free of me. Isn’t that the way of it, skald?”
    Thor’s Billy goat! I thought. He’s serious. Does she know that? Surely, with her it’s nothing but a game to provoke her mother. And not only her mother, for I had happened to learn just the day before that it was Eilif Ragnvaldsson to whom she was betrothed. Whether Harald knew this, I was not certain.
    She tucked the sliver carefully inside her bodice, between her small pointed breasts.
    Old Thordis, just then happening to look up and seeing her little pigeon between us two vultures, flew squawking to the rescue and drove us from the kitchen.
    â€œHarald,” I said when we were beyond the door, “can I give you a word of advice?”
    â€œNo.”
    And he walked away.
    And what wise counsel I could have given! Dag himself would not have been more eloquent. We were here, I would have reminded him, to make friends, not enemies; and where we found enemies, not to embitter them more. Money. Troops. An alliance. And then home to Norway! (Or, in my case, Iceland.) These were what we sought; not affairs with betrothed young ladies that could only lead to trouble. Was this a skald’s fate, I wondered morosely, to see clearly and be ignored? An incident that occurred soon afterward made me more worried still.

    Mstislav had introduced to the court a new game which he called by the foreign word shatranj. The board and pieces, together with some notion of the rules he had gotten from an Arab traveler. Many of us younger folk tried to learn it and spent the long nights playing against each other for modest stakes.
    On one particular evening we were all gathered around the board. Harald and I had played to a draw. Volodya had taken on Magnus, when none ofthe others would play with him, and had beaten him—but gracefully and with good manners. (It always impressed me that this boy, who as eldest son might have had the best reason for disliking his mother’s pet, was the only one of Yaroslav’s children to behave at all kindly towards him.)
    Then Yelisaveta challenged Harald.
    They were both good; and they played eagerly, deploying their men swiftly at first; then, with great deliberation, hunching close over the little board until Harald’s lips almost brushed the hair of her head. No