The Enchantment (30 page)

As she washed and tended his wounds, she discovered a number of garish white marks on the sun-bronzed skin of his back and shoulders. They were like Father Serrick's body marks . . . battle-scars. Her fingers drifted wonderingly over them, tracing the lingering paths of the blades that had cut him. Then she feathered a touch along the fiery new tracks in his skin, wounds he had taken in defense of her. And she felt as if everything in her middle were melting and sliding toward her knees.

He had come after her and had seen the wolves stalking her. And when he saw she was in danger, he had taken their full fury upon himself.

He had just killed three full-grown wolves with his bare hands. It was an act of courage that left her speechless. Jorund Borgerson had proved beyond all doubt that he was no coward. And from the old blade-marks on his body, it was clear that he had seen battle and been wounded more than once.
He was no woman-heart!
The certainty sang through her veins.

Then why was he so loathe to fight?

She knelt by his feet, trembling as she tore strips of linen from the spare tunic and wrapped his bleeding hands. As she worked, she felt him watching her and looked up to find his face troubled, his eyes dark and turbulent. When the last knot was tied, she let her hands rest gently on his and lifted her face to him.

“There are few men alive who could do what you just did.” Her voice was warm, but her words melted none of the tension in his countenance. “And you have fought . . . have been wounded before. Then why do you let your brothers and the others call you a ‘woman-heart'?”

The instant she said it, she bit her tongue, wishing to take it back. His face reddened and he flung her hands from his with a low throat-sound that was some part growl and some part groan. Shoving to his feet, he towered above her. Then he lurched for the open door and stormed out.

When his senses finally cleared, he found himself in the place where he always sought solace: the clifftop overlooking his meadow and stream. The cold air slowly purged the angry heat from his body, and time and distance from the wolf-battle restored a semblance of control in his mind and emotions. He collapsed in the tall grasses and lay staring up at the wispy mares' tails fanned across the sky, trying not to think.

He didn't want to relive the look on her face as she stared at his body and didn't want to hear again the awed hush in her voice as she spoke of his scars. She had truly believed him a coward, and for some reason that realization was fresh and wounding to him. She had honestly meant every blustering insult she had hurled at him.

Why do you let them call you a “woman-heart”?
It echoed in his head and in the deepest hollows of his heart.
Why?
How could he tell her—she who had never known the horrors of battle, she who spoke so glowingly of honor and battle-glory?

He closed his eyes and tried not to let the old images invade his mind. Desperately, he fastened his mind on other inner sights—an image strong enough to counter those haunting visions. He conjured a memory, a woman.

The bee meadow . . . tawny eyes . . . soft breasts beneath his chest . . . hard thighs against his loins . . . Aaren rose up inside him, lush and sensual, seeping through his beleaguered mind and ravaged senses. The feel of her skin recurred in his fingertips, the sweetness of her mouth materialized on his tongue, and the depth of her erotic response surged through his blood. As he dwelled on those sensations, his anxiety was slowly channeled into the more familiar, more productive tension of desire. Finally, the strain of wanting also faded and he was left with a poignant sense of release.

It was some time before he began to feel the scratchiness of the dried grasses beneath his bare back and the chill of the cold breeze on his naked chest. He sat up and looked at the linen bindings on his hands, then at the angry red scratches on his shoulders. It was not so bad, considering there had been three of them, he thought, pushing to his feet.

He stood for a while gazing off into the blue-shrouded mountains beyond his little valley. There was no reason to hurry back to what he was certain would be an empty lodge. If he had thought clearly enough, he would have given her her blade for protection on her journey back to the village. His thoughts focused on the possibility of spending the winter in these high, forbidding reaches . . . of what work it would involve and what solace it would provide . . . He descended the rocky slope to his lodge.

FOURTEEN

J
ORUND WAS
so intent on his dark musings that he did not notice the small plume of smoke curling from the smoke hole in his lodge, or that both horses were grazing in the meadow, or that the door was standing partway open.

When he ducked inside and straightened, he stopped dead, staring at a crackling fire on the hearth. His gaze drifted to his wet tunic, thrown across a makeshift line of rope strung between the rafters, near the blaze. A movement by the storage box in the corner startled him and he jerked around to find Aaren clutching a drinking horn and a full ale skin to her breast. He stared at the things in her hands and worked his way up to her face, which was reddening.

She was still here!

His lungs swelled unexpectedly in his chest, crowding his heart. He glanced back at the fire and his freshly washed tunic . . . and saw that his furs had been moved to the sleeping shelf nearest the hearth. Each was a sign that she intended to stay. Relief poured through his chilled frame like trickles of warm, sweet ale and he turned to her with a searching look.

“You washed my tunic.” It was half statement, half question.

“It was all bloody, Borgerson,” she said with a wince. “And you wear your only other garment on your hands.” She glanced at the wound-bindings she had fashioned from his spare tunic. “It was either burn the thing and watch you go naked . . . or wash it and spare myself the constant sight of your—” She pursed her lips, scowling. But she didn't need to finish for him to know that she found the sight of his bare body disturbing or for him to guess the reason why. When she looked up, he was grinning.

“That was most helpful of you, Long-legs.” He rubbed his chest slowly and watched as her widening eyes followed his bandaged hand, then darted away.

She shifted the things she was holding and flushed. “I . . . owed you a debt, Borgerson,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “You may have saved my life.” When he said nothing, but continued to stare at her, her color deepened. “You probably saved my life.” When he still said nothing, she frowned and cast a wary glance at him. “Very well—you
did
save my life. And I am . . . grateful.”

He broke into an irresistibly mischievous smile.

“Just how grateful are you, Long-legs? Thank-filled enough to prepare something to eat? I am ravenous.” He held up his hand-bindings. “I will have trouble doing hearth-work with these.”

She raised her chin and studied him through narrowed eyes, deciding. “I suppose I could do the hearth-work.” When she saw the pleasure her offer produced in him, she jammed her fists on her hips and glowered, admonishing: “But—it is only what one warrior would do for another who was injured.”

Setting the ale skin and drinking horn on the side of the hearth, she set about preparing something to eat. Jorund ambled over to his sleeping shelf and lowered his aching body stiffly onto his furs, watching her movements, bemused by her new tractability. She wouldn't cook for him as a woman . . . but she would as a fellow warrior. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was probably progress.

How much progress, he would have been delighted to know. In the terrifying fury of a few violent moments, Aaren's whole notion of Jorund Borgerson was changed. He was a fighter, she had learned . . . a man of courage and strength, a man whose heart did not quail at personal danger, a man who would spend his own blood protecting others. And that new vision had inflicted grave damage on her inner defenses. It had taken her desire for him from the realm of the impossible to the possible, and had freed the hope and the longings she tried to isolate within her.

She located a soapstone crock in the storage box and set it into the coals, then stood chewing the inner corner of her mouth.

“There is salt pork and dried beans and barley in the box,” he said, smiling wryly. “If you put a bit of water in the crock and add the beans and a bit of salt . . . then cut up the pork . . .”

“I know what to do, Borgerson.” She bristled as she turned back to the storage box, and her curt motions said she was both aware and annoyed that he was watching her every movement.

When the crock was bubbling, she returned to the provisions for flour and oil and the flat stone griddle. She carried them to the hearth, setting the griddle into the edge of the coals, and knelt beside them, trying not to reveal her indecision.

“For the bread, you take a double handful of the flour to a single handful of water . . . put it into the bowl . . .” His voice sallied forth from the shelf again.

“I can make flatbread, Borgerson,” she declared tautly, without looking at him. She poured oil onto the bowl, then onto the heating stone. “I'm not a thick-wit.” But for some reason she was behaving like one, she realized. Preparing food was a simple life-task and the meal would be hers as well as his. But in the villages, hearth-tending was known to be woman-work and her desire for the food to be tasty and pleasing seemed to be a particularly womanly sort of feeling. Despite her bluster about doing it as one warrior for another . . . it had the curious feel of a woman doing it for a man . . . of
her
doing it for
her man.
It was yet more evidence of her growing feeling for him and of the changes in her innermost heart.

The softening of her resolve was devastating to her, but she could not shrink from him again and live with herself. She understood all too clearly that it took more courage to stay and face him and the unknown, unexplored part of her than it took to leave.

When the food was prepared, Jorund ate with relish and rolled his eyes appreciatively. Later that night, when he insisted on giving her part of his furs for warmth, she did not refuse. They passed the night on opposite sides of the fire . . . but no longer on opposite sides of understanding.

The next day, Aaren threw herself into the tasks of providing food and care for him while the scratches on his hands and arms healed. She cut wood with an axe, carried out the old ashes, and laid a new fire. She hunted for meat and took a young buck, which she cleaned and dressed, and hung to cure. Then she prepared a stew of meat, leeks, and dried peas in the soapstone crock, and she ground barley and precious wheat together to make flour. And it seemed that whenever she looked up from her tasks, Jorund's eyes were on her.

“You make fine bread,” he teased, soaking up the last of his stew with bread. “Where does a battle-maiden learn to do woman-work so well?”

She felt the red rising into her cheeks, as it often did of late, and leaned back against the stones near the hearth, shifting her bowl awkwardly in her hands. “From Father Serrick. He knew many things.” She sighed and glanced across the fire at him, feeling a need to tell him more and unsure if it was wise to do so. In the end, she surrendered to the combined force of his irresistible interest and her own need to reach out to him.

“We lived high in the mountains and had only one another. When there are only four of you there is no such thing as men's work and women's work . . . there is only
work,
which is needed to survive. I had no choice but to learn ways that belong to both men and women.”

Jorund felt a sweet ache spreading in his chest as he studied her solemn face. Those few words had explained more about her than she knew.

“You were
forced
to learn both. And I
chose
to learn both,” he said quietly. When her eyes met his across the fire, they were filled with wonder at his observation. “What a curious pair we make.”

They sat for a long moment, looking into each other's eyes. His words somehow gave substance to the bond that had grown between them from that first moment in the circle of torchlight, outside the women's house. Their size, their passions, their single-mindedness . . . they did indeed make a pair. But such an odd pair: one fierce and one gentle; one proud and fiery, and the other even-tempered to a fault; one with a warrior's view of life and the other with a woman's. Longing, uncertainty, pleasure, pain . . . each read a tangle of feelings in the other's eyes. And long-checked desire threatened to erupt between them.

Aaren broke that disturbing visual connection and set her bowl aside, starting for the door. The sound of her name made her pause and look back. He was smiling, back to his old, teasing self as he raised his bandaged hands.

“Give me a few more days and I'll make bread for you.”

She ducked outside and when the door was shut behind her, her eyes began to sting. She knew she had to get away for a while.

W
HEN
J
ORUND WENT
to look for her later, he found her gone . . . along with his bow and quiver of arrows and one of the horses. His first reaction was that she had left him again, but on second thought, he wasn't so sure. He groaned, staring at his battered hands, then jolted into the shed for his horse, determined to ride out after her no matter how difficult it might prove. But before he got a halter over his horse's head, he glimpsed her emerging from the trees, leading her mount. As he ran down the slope from the shed, he recognized the cargo slung across her horse: three fresh wolf skins. He stared at her wind-blushed cheeks, then at the savage bounty she carried, and his jaw went slack.

“You went back after them?” he said. “After the pelts?”

“Of course,” she answered with a wary look. “I guessed that the cold would have kept them well, if the kites and great mountain cats had not yet found them. And there they were, just waiting to be skinned and cured. I decided you should have a prize to show for your effort, Borgerson.” Her eyes twinkled. “Think how the children's eyes will widen when they see the pelts and hear the tale of your great wolf-slaying.”

“And just how would they hear such a tale?” he said, crossing his bandaged arms over his chest and looking bewildered as she led the horse past him and untied the skins, dumping them onto the woodpile at the side of the lodge.

“Well, I thought
I
would do the telling . . . unless you insist on doing it yourself.” She cocked a teasing look at him as she spread them out. “After all, you got to kill all three of the wolves.” She sniffed with a mock-injured air. “A bit greedy of you, I thought . . . snatching all the glory for yourself. You might have saved that last one for me. I would have done the same for you.” She laughed at his astonishment and set about stretching the first pelt upon the side of the lodge, to prepare it for scraping.

He stood watching her, speechless. She had almost been savaged and eaten by wolves; he had risked life and limb to save her . . . now she was already calculating how to make the most of such a harrowing adventure around the winter hearths once they returned to the village!

She baffled him. She hunted and blade-fought and brandished her pride like a warrior. She valued fighting and honor, the protecting of womenfolk and children, and the sacredness of a vow . . . just like a warrior. Her words struck him square between the eyes:
She would have done the same for him.
And he knew in the depths of his marrow, it was no boast. She would have withstood a wolf attack, would have risked her life to save his. In fact, she had
tried
to do it . . . that day in the forest with Rika!

She
was
a warrior! It poured through him like molten iron: a warrior with all the courage and skill, all the honor and pride a warrior could possess.

The realization stunned him, as did the fact that it was so obvious . . . and had been from the beginning, if he had but opened his stubborn male mind to it. A flush of chagrin rose up his neck, then into his ears and face. Every crass, demeaning remark, each low, sexual taunt he had ever flung at her now came stinging back to him, piercing his inflated male pride. He had seen her as a desirable body, a curiosity, a conquest, then finally as a person. But until this moment, he had not seen all of her. Nor, he realized, had he wanted to.