Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

more lucrative bounty: a Dutch noble’s ship, on a honeymoon journey from Norway to the New World. Kidnapping and ransom had long been traditional upon the high seas; typically, the hostages walked away alive and the kidnappers sailed away richer.
    It all might have happened exactly as the smugglers had planned if Hanna, who’d been forced into a marriage with a prince’s son, hadn’t risked her life to free the Englishwomen chained in the ship’s hold—and if the ironship hadn’t sailed out of range of the Horde’s controlling tower in the same hour. The signal that had stifled thewomen’s emotions for decades had abruptly disappeared, overwhelming them with the strength of their own unfamiliar feelings. Led by Hanna, the ensuing revolt left everyone else on the ship dead, including her husband—who, it was said, had been the last man killed, and who had been locked in a cabin during the fighting.
    After assuming command of the ironship, Hanna had taken the women to Iceland, abandoned only a few years before, and where no one would seek justice for the murder. There she helped them build a village of their own, and told them the stories that would give them a new history and shape their new lives—stories that were still repeated to their daughters.
    Nine months after the revolt, seven children had been born; whether they’d been conceived before or after the women had been unleashed and their emotions hot upon them, Annika never knew. All of the babies had been girls, and it had been considered a sign from the gods that only women should ever populate the village. A community couldn’t continue without children, however, so some women left to lie with men, and returned with a girl—or empty-handed, if the baby had been a boy that they left with his father. Some of the women remained away, choosing to stay with their sons. Others, like Annika’s mother, took in a child stolen from Horde territories or the New World.
    It had been Hanna’s idea to use the old legends of the hidden folk to keep outsiders away. Through the years, Hannasvik had remained secret—and all the while, they’d prepared for discovery and to defend themselves. Some, like Källa, were called shieldmaidens, armed and trained to fight, and on whose shoulders the safety of their village rested most heavily. Annika had been taught to drive and maintain one of the trolls that they used to travel long distances and to haul back surturbrand, the brown coal used in their furnaces.
    The day Annika had built the fire, she’d only recently returned from one of those exhausting trips. Leaving her troll at the village,she’d hiked down the rocky hills that shielded Hannasvik from view of the sea, and across the barren flats to a beach not far from the terns’ nesting fields. She’d spent the early afternoon collecting feathers to fill in her troll’s ragged ruff, and when her stomach had begun to growl, kindled a small fire in the shelter of a wind-scraped boulder to cook the fish she’d netted in one of the tidal pools. Belly full, she’d stared out over the sea and begun to daydream. She hadn’t noticed the ship in the distance or twilight falling, turning her small fire into a beacon, until Källa had rushed up and stamped out the flames. Together, they’d hidden as four men rowed to shore and trampled around the beach, discovering the remains. Annika and Källa waited through the night as the men made camp on the rocky flats, not daring to flee lest they lead the strangers back to their village—and not daring to kill them, lest their deaths brought more outsiders to investigate. Annika lived the next day in an agony of unrelenting dread as the men walked near the cliffs of the same hills that concealed Hannasvik; they would only have to climb the peaks to discover it. Källa’s sword had been at ready, and Annika had been preparing to race back to the village to retrieve her troll when the men had decided to abandon their search and return to their ship.
    Annika hadn’t immediately known that Källa had taken responsibility for the fire. Such matters were handled among the elders and in privacy. That Källa was a shieldmaiden, whose duty it was to protect, made the punishment more severe—as had Källa’s temper. A terrible argument had erupted between her and the elders, Källa calling them all stupid hags for dreaming that they could continue to hide. The result had been exile.
    Källa hadn’t come to Annika after the