Excerpt from The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then Inga eyes me, "Hush!" and bids me, "Come."

"If only I might sit," I beg, "lay my head across my knees, or simply rest my limbs upon the deck."

Inga takes my hand and, with Torgrim in her arm, guides me gently to a place beneath the bow she's guarded quietly for me.

"Here." She holds a well-soaked rag. I squeeze what I can and drink, then Inga presses the dampness to my brow, all the while blocking the mistress' view with her own son's drowsing body. "If Mistress Grima knew, she would lash us thrice apiece that we should take their precious water before we've even left the home fjord," Inga hisses in a whisper, but with her touch she helps me calm.

Beyond the harbor rocks, Einar calls to raise the mast and then the sail. With its steady pull, at last I grow used to the rolling waves. The open water takes us. Inga helps me stand to see beyond the deck. There - the ocean, thick and black as an endless slab of obsidian, but fluid, cresting white to the very seam of the sky. I squeeze her hand and meet her amber eyes perched above her freckled cheeks, but we hear again the mistress calling, "Inga!"

"Likely Torunn has to piss over the side." Inga rolls her eyes as she runs away to the mistress' shout. Yet I am almost well now, beginning to enjoy the waves. I thrust my face into the wind, so hard and fast my ears ache from it, but I do not care. I feel almost that I am flying.

Then a hand falls on my arm. I do not turn. I hear his voice. "So, is this lovely Freya standing here?"

I keep my eyes toward the sea. "You think it wise to match the goddess with a slave?"

With his thick, coarse hand, Einar's eldest son, Torvard, turns me roughly. "Katla, with name so hot, why are you so cold?"

He grips my chin with such a force I have to look at him: at his slack, grizzled cheeks and his weak, small mouth with its breath smelling thick and putrid. Torvard holds me, smiling. I am not sure what he wants, if he might bite my face or try to kiss me. He works his fleshy fingers harder and harder into my jaw.

"Torvard, come!" Einar shouts from the high-seat plank. "Leave the girl alone!"

My heart is pounding. Torvard glances toward his father, then groans and lets me go. But before he leaves, he raises up my amulet. "'Einar owns me,'" he reads the runes with a vicious lilt. Then he whispers, "Remember, one day it will be me."

My face throbs in all the places he's touched me. I bend to the rail, feeling the cord choking at my neck. Against the metal of the closest shield I press my cheeks. Still I know they watch me, these others, as they always do: the thralls in condemnation, the young freemen with their blood between their legs, and the freeborn women in jealous rage at Torvard's lust for me. Every farmer's daughter to the very highest rank seems to strive to steal his attentions away; while I would gladly give them, gladly be rid of Torvard, with his foul breath and his rime of sweat and his stench of urine and mead. But he is the master's son. For a freewoman with ambitions there could hardly be made a finer match. All the families know it. Yet what have they to fear from me? I am but a thrall, a reluctant toy for a man who is but a boy, filled with his new-grown strength and all too eager to shrug his father's binding fingers from his thickened neck.

He is but nineteen. He will not marry till he's twenty. In another year. How I wait for that day! Though I know well enough it will not save me. If Torvard willed, he could take me to his loins right here and now, and ever after, whether I wished to linger there or not. Only his father contends to protect me while he can, for my mother's sake; I know she begged it of him often. She knew, as Einar does too well, that Torvard is neither wise nor gentle nor loving, as he himself was to my mother.

With our lot it is all the worse to be pretty, and I am fair, fairer than I would choose. I am tall like my mother, and shapely, with her long copper hair that curls with the damp. Some have said I might rival even the fairest maids of the finest houses if it weren't that I'm a thrall. But I do not know, having never really seen myself save in the mistress' own silver bowl, which, when I rub it hard until it shines, still shows me but a strange, distorted vision.

Excerpted from The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh. Copyright © 2006 by Judith Lindbergh. Excerpted by permission of Plume, a division of Penguin Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.