Edin's embrace (9 page)

Thoryn partially released the maiden. Keeping her arm, he said in her language, "Come with me!"

He started along the path with her, stopping only when they were hidden from both the shipyard and the steading above. Inga had tacked up the path like a sailboat before the wind, and she and the thralls were just disappearing over the lip of the valley. For the first time Thoryn was completely alone with the lovely thrall.

He released her arm. She faced him, as she always did, squarely, though she could hardly know what to expect from him. He hardly knew what to expect from himself. He stared for a long moment at her heavy, handsome hair. Ripples of water frisked around the banks of the fjord almost at their feet, but he didn't notice that. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Hers was a pure beauty. Her eyes were true sea-maiden eyes. He felt an edgy thrill, like being at the brink of a cliff and gripped by the irrational, wanton urge to
jump
!

He had to break this silence! He said, "Tell me — " His voice came out two tones deeper than he'd expected. He tried again: "Tell me why I pander to you and protect you and give you special consideration, Saxon, when you're never anything but trouble to me!"

"I-I don't know. I wish you wouldn't." A gust of emotion seemed to unsettle her. "I wish you'd
never
concerned yourself with me!"

"If it hadn't been for me, you'd have been raped and gutted and left to burn—"

"If it hadn't been for you, Viking—"

"Do you dare talk back to me? Are you
stupid
? Do you truly not understand your position yet? Or mine? Whether you acknowledge it or not, I have the right — and the strength —to do whatever I like with you. I could have you whipped. I could take your head off. I could strangle you with that hair I just told them to let you keep!"

He stopped raging and steadied himself, fighting against feelings that seemed as powerful and mysterious as the tides.

When he spoke again, he was more sober: "Why do you bring yourself to my attention?"

"I don't!"

"What was it you just did then, running straight to me?"

"I had no idea you were down here! I-I just didn't want to lose my hair, too."

Too. He noted the word and all it meant. He said, self-righteously, "I don't know why not —it sticks out like hay in a rick. In truth, Saxon, keep that hair, for if such a prize were lost, Norway might never see its like again."

"I shall try, Viking!"

But despite her attempt to appear brave, she was gripping her hands together, staring steadfastly at his tunic buttons and visibly trembling. In a smaller, almost tearful voice, her head half-hanging, she said, "It wouldn't look like hay if I had a comb."

His nostrils dilated as he breathed in hugely. "Are you saying you are ill-cared for?"

She wouldn't look at him; her hands gripped one another.

"Answer me!"

She said at last, "No."

And he knew that for the first time she had just told him a thing she believed to be patently untrue. Of course she was being ill-cared for—tormented! She was being singled out by Inga, and clearly some of the thralls disliked her —simply because she was what she was, a gentlewoman pulled down to their own level. His men taunted her with their coarse badinage and loutish jokes. He himself had neglected —avoided —her these past days. Oh, he'd been watchful and protective in ways she couldn't know, yet he'd heartlessly left her to accustom herself as best she could to her new condition.

And he would have to be blind not to notice how poorly she was doing: her dazed service at the meals, her lack of expression, her growing despondency.

I did this. I put a seal of midnight on her morning. It's wrong.

How small she was, how vulnerable. And how beautiful, even in that sack. He remembered holding her folded against him —he knew something of what was beneath the gross drapes of that garment. And he had a sudden strong sense of what it might be like to slide up inside her small body. It made him shudder. His eyes focused on the strange lilt of her mouth, and he found himself irresistibly drawn. Before he could stop himself, he reached out and took her arms.

The gentleness of his touch seemed to surprise her, enough so that she allowed him to pull her toward him. When she looked up into his face to see what he was up to, he lowered his mouth surely.

He took her completely by surprise. a Oh!" she said at the touch of his lips on hers, giving him the opportunity to invade her opened mouth and taste her inner sweetness. He was blind and deaf to all but her, could smell nothing but the scent of her, knew nothing but the warm round litheness of her.

Then she jerked her head aside. He buried his face in her throat, and she pressed her hands against his chest.

When he lifted his head, she looked at him as if she saw something primitive and terrifying in his eyes. Though she strained to be released, evidently she didn't really expect to succeed, for she stumbled back when he abruptly let go. She would have fallen if he hadn't caught her waist. She slid her hands up his arms, trying to cling to the very object that was destroying her balance.

For an instant he was strongly tempted to take her to the ground, to force open her legs, not simply to rob her of the only thing she had left for him to take, but to conquer her.

He felt her body's recoiling response to this unspoken thought, and he steeled himself and set her firmly on her feet. His hands dropped from her waist. "You see what a thrall-woman can expect from her master when she brings herself to his attention too often?" He went on, rather stiffly, trying to rein in his galloping emotions. "If you tempt me sorely enough, you may find I am but a man."

He felt he wasn't being very convincing —so often she seemed beyond his authority! —so he turned to action. He unfastened the silver buckle of his tunic belt and whipped it off. Before she could know what he was up to, he wrapped it around her —it took two turns around her waist —then gathered her hair and stuffed it under the leather at the small of her back.

"There! That should keep the hay out of the soup pot! Now be off before I change my mind and shorten your hair myself—or shorten you by a head's-worth!"

Keeping her gaze on him, she backed up the path. Not until she was safely out of the range of his arms did she utter the smallest cry and turn and flee.

Yet the feel of her in his arms stayed with him. An impression seemed dented upon his chest, his thighs, hollows that only her body could fill. Like a man in a dream, he started after her —and came face to face with Rolf. He felt his face heat.

"What's been going on?"

"The thrall . . ."

"Aye, she passed me like Odin himself was after her —but I see it was only the Hammer of Dainjerfjord." He laughed. "I can almost see the smoke of your chimney curling out from under your tunic, brother. What have you been up to?"

"I . . . she needed a lesson."

"She needs many lessons, and you're just the man to teach her."

Thoryn swung slowly and drunkenly around. The fjord winked in the sunlight; now he heard the patient lapping water. He said, "As my father taught his Saxon?"

"Kirkyn has been in Valhdll these fifteen years," Rolf answered gruffly.

Thoryn turned a hard face to him. "Not Valholl. A man murdered contemptibly by his thrall goes to Hel."

"Bah! That's Inga talking. Her and her tales! I sometimes think she deliberately takes her revenge on the son of the man who spurned her. She sets you to gnawing at yourself until you remind me of a fox caught in a trap and obliged to bite off his own leg. I tell you, part of her mind is rotten, Thoryn—"

"It is my mother you speak of," he said quietly.

"Aye, your mother." Rolf heaved a sigh. "Listen to her, brother, and you'll die with blue loins and many regrets. I've seen you eyeing that girl when you think nobody is looking. You want her, and you're afraid that in a shaky moment you'll — "

"That's enough!"

"You want her."

He wanted ... a woman to fill his arms in bed and banish the emptiness within him.

He wanted ... a woman with amber hair and sea-green eyes.

He wanted . . . her.

***

The only people Sweyn Elendsson saw while he recovered from his wound were Inga, Olga, and sometimes Hagna, the medicine woman. Hagna was a great hand with herbs. Some she mashed in a little copper caldron and then packed around Sweyn's wounded shoulder. Others she boiled with water and told him to drink this "broth." If he'd swilled brewed dragon's brains it couldn't taste worse. However, the swelling in his shoulder went down, and the flesh lost its redness, as the old woman promised.

He wasn't grateful to her, though, for it was Hagna who told him bluntly that he would never have the use of his right arm again, that he'd never go a'viking again, never forage about the world's seas and rivers anymore; and looking up from his wall-bed at the woman's wrinkled and age-spotted neck, he knew he would never be able to get both his hands around it to throttle her.

Sweyn had no visitors. He was a cripple now, and he understood that no whole man knew what to say to him. He was an oath-breaker. He'd ignored an edict from his jarl to whom he'd sworn obedience. He'd dishonored himself. In his mind, it had been just as dishonorable for the jarl to leave him crippled instead of dead, however. Over and over he heard those little pleading, foreign words from the woman, words he hadn't understood —but the jarl had. Those words had robbed him of his rightful death.

Today, thin, pale-faced, slit-lipped, he stumbled outside to sit in the sun and mayhap begin to regain some of his strength. He emerged from the dark longhouse amazed, dizzy, awed by the light. The most brilliant summer weather had ruled lately. Above the lance-shaped fir trees on the heights, the sky shone the deepest blue, without even a dappling of clouds, and the air was filled with that pensive sound of cowbells coming from the cattle that wandered the slopes cropping the short meadow grass.

Sweyn dozed with his back against the longhouse. When he woke, he saw Edin and Dessa hanging laundry on bushes to whiten and dry. Dessa was sporting a new haircut, but not Edin. He'd heard the gossip, of course, laying in his wall-bed with only a cloth curtain separating him from the talk in the hall. Yesterday, Jarl Thoryn had forbade the cutting of the Saxon's hair.

Was the woman a witch? Had she thrown a spell over the jarl? If it hadn't been for her, Sweyn would be a whole man yet —or drinking to Odin's health in Valholl right now.

That night he joined the men at dinner. Everyone pretended not to see him. No one spoke to him, or mentioned his limp and useless arm. They were all seated by the time he made his slow way to the tables. He found that his former place near the jarl was filled. There was nowhere for him to sit but at the end of a bench, the place where people of the least importance sat.

When Edin passed by him, he saw that her long amber hair was tucked into a man's belt. That silver buckle was the jarl's. The thrall had been given a present, while Sweyn had been left to live a cripple's life. It was biting. He sat staring at her, his good left hand rubbing at his wound.

Edin had gone about for days unaware of the depth of feeling she stirred up all around her, the feelings of the jarl, Inga, Sweyn, the Vikings in the longhouse, even her fellow thralls. She hadn't even realized. Part of her declined to live through the passing days, had kept distant, had retreated to a sanctuary of denial.

As it turned out, preserving her heart contributed to her downfall. It meant she'd made no friends and was more sequestered than she ought to have been. The loneliness was crushing. Her separation of part of herself from the reality of the thrall's shared circumstances was noticed immediately —and in return she was shunned and disliked. When they sat to eat together that night, she found she was excluded. She was shunted to a bench-end, the seat farthest away from the light and heat of the fire, farthest way from whatever conversation and laughter there was among them.

Meanwhile, the Vikings, sensing her weakness, had subtly begun to seduce her. Though she'd tried to stay out of their way, she saw now that they seemed to idle in places where they knew she could catch her alone. They didn't touch her or kiss her, they didn't leer or lunge; yet their apparently wayward paths crossed hers constantly, and being something more than ordinary men, they frightened and bewildered her.

Sweyn, who was now able to get about a little, often watched her and, while he did, rubbed his shoulder.

The day after the jarl kissed her, she was left alone in the hall with the task of making a batch of the flat, tasteless bread the Vikings were so fond of. Sweyn came to sit at the table where she was working. He was wearing a soiled tunic of rough blue cloth. He had his right arm bound against his body, probably to keep it from swinging against things. A panting, slat-sided, tawny dog wandered over and sprawled at his feet. He ignored it and went on watching Edin in silence. Her awareness newly awakened, she sensed his enmity and continued to work the dough in the wooden kneading bowl — but after a while she realized she was trembling. He got up and came so near that she raised her shoulder toward him, to protect herself. He saw this, and gave her a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, then murmured something in Norse.

The other Vikings tried to talk with her sometimes, but she hadn't learned enough Norse to understand. Even when they spoke slowly, even when they grew impatient and spoke very slowly, clipping each word, she didn't understand. Most of the time she had to resort to gestures —and felt impenetrably stupid.

She looked up into Sweyn's grey invalid's face and shook her head. "I don't understand," she said.

His blond hair hung lank. He was not the man who had raised his deadly broad-axe over her head. But near as he stood, he was still very large. His shoulders were as wide as a byre-beam. His smile remained, and now he raised his good left hand. Before her face he clenched it into a fist. She understood that. That much Norse she'd learned.

After a moment, he turned away and wobbled outside. The tawny dog followed him, as did Edin's eyes.

***

Thoryn lounged in his high-seat, drinking another cup with his men. Though it had been a bonny summer day, the late evening was chill now, with rag ends of mist wafting and wrapping about the longhouse. His shieldmen stayed near the fire, leisurely shelling and eating boiled shrimp, washing them down with ale, and playing chess or checkers. Try as he might to concentrate on the games, Thoryn couldn't dismiss the distraction of the maiden. The sheer intensity of his want had grown by degrees until it seemed unbearably huge.

Her shining hair had come free of the belt around her waist and fell over her shoulders, gloriously untidy, framing her breathtakingly beautiful face. He already regretted letting her keep that mane of hair. He could spot it too easily, and when his eyes found her, a feeling so strong as to be painful gripped him. It was sexual, yes, but not simply a feeling of the body. It seemed his whole being lusted for the woman. He sensed that she might touch him, fulfill him, satisfy him in some way he'd never been satisfied before. He sensed the potential power she could have over him.

Inga had sent the other thralls to their beds before going off to her own, leaving the maiden with the trying task of serving the late-drinking men. The men she passed followed her with their eyes. Jamsgar Copper-eye sniffed the air after her and got a laugh from his brother Starkad. Nothing they did could be specifically objected to, yet Thoryn grew more and more irritated.

He was also irritated to discover Rolf had been watching him watch her.

"Oath-brother, will you sleep alone again tonight? You've abstained so long, I wager you're stiff enough for anything, even a solid-gold maidenhead."

At that moment, the Saxon passed by carrying yet another pitcher of ale. Rolf reached out and patted her behind with a huge callused paw, his grin downright wolfish. Her rabbitlike scamper made everyone laugh. They had all wanted to do that, yet none had dared. The reaction was now immediate. Rolf exchanged looks with some of them. Something unspoken was decided upon. The men grinned at Thoryn, their faces positively lit with merriment —and suddenly the maiden was kept busier than ever. As soon as she filled a cup at the table to Thoryn's left, a man at the far side of the table to his right called for her to fill his. Back and forth she went, back and forth before Thoryn's chair, back and forth, looking so lost and vulnerable, so lonely and in need of a protector.

The talk turned bawdy. It was of conquests and whores and orgies. Every man had a tale he seemed eager to share with Thoryn, and every tale seemed meant to inflame. Stares began to go from the maiden to him and back again.

He saw that she felt the looks and the laughter. He sensed her bafflement. Now Hauk Haakonsson dared to reach out and pat her behind. "Here is fine treasure, Jarl!" he said with his lazy white smile.

She stepped back, away from Hauk, away from the tables. She raked her hair back with one hand, and found Thoryn. Silent and brooding, he met the winking arrows of firelight in her eyes. She didn't understand why, yet she knew she was being used.

The smith, Eric No-breeches, called out, "Here, pussy, pussy!" The others began to mew like cats. She stood aghast in the din, a rabbit hemmed round by wolves. Her face was pale, her shoulders so stiff and straight that Thoryn could almost feel her painful effort to hold herself erect, to try to hold on to her dignity.

The entire household crackled with tension. So forceful was the aura, Thoryn could no longer resist it. He spoke.

He went unheard; but several had seen his lips move, and a bolt of expectation shot through the hall, breaking off conversations and choking down laughter.

Edin had seen his lips move, but with all the noise in the pent hall. . . . Now everyone fell abruptly silent, and from his high-seat he spoke again: "My cup is empty." He said it in Saxon, with a calmness that was frightening. He raised his cup slightly, without taking his eyes from her.

She started for his chair, questions splintering in her mind, her heart pounding in her ears. She felt the eyes watching her —but then she was always watched; rarely was she allowed any freedom from those male eyes that marked her out and unsettled her. Still, this was the worst it had ever been. Someone she passed jeered at her in Norse. She tried hard to understand the words, did understand a few of them, but not enough to catch the sense of what he'd said. Someone else gave her a little shove, so that she stumbled. Her cheeks felt hot.
I am the Lady Edin, the Lady Edin of Fair Hope Manor . . .

. . . reduced to serving Vikings their ale.

The jarl's shadowed image seemed to flicker in the firelight. His face was set, his eyes flinty. He looked as if he hated her more than ever, as if he had every intention of hurting her. And no one would stop him. He owned her and could do with her as he liked.

The distance across the hall was easily four miles. Her whole body was trembling by the time she drew near the virulent force of him.
What have I done? What does this mean?
He didn't move as she began to fill his cup, and the menace of his immobility made her tremble more. She slopped a few drops on his hand. He still didn't move. Feeling ridiculously clumsy, she tried to brush away the drops with her fingertips.

Her touch seemed to galvanize him. He stood slowly and stepped off his dais. Someone — Rolf, she thought it was —reached to take her pitcher from her. Freed of it, she stepped backward. But not soon enough. The jarl reached for her and got her by one arm, slowly pulling her forward again. His grip was painful, but she didn't dare struggle. He was too big, too forbidding, too strangely compelling.

The men stood as a group and began to shout in their awful language, which sounded like something they'd learned from seals and walruses and gulls, she thought wildly. All the jarl said was "Aye." There was no translation for that; it was just a noise a man made, involuntarily, as he suffered some pain that couldn't be helped.

She tried to move her arm, to loosen his hold so that she might slip free, but his fingers remained iron steady. Her mind was a blur. Only small details, useless details, seemed to come to her with any kind of clarity: She noticed that his eyebrows were light, so sandy-light who could see them unless she got close, very close, too close?

Suddenly he moved, with such speed she didn't have time to react. He bent and placed his shoulder to her waist. Then, with the quickness and determination of a man utterly resolved, he stood — lifting her right off her feet. One of his arms held her legs to his chest, the other pressed her bottom against his shoulder. She toppled forward, face first into his back; her hair came completely free of her belt and streamed down, nearly brushing the rushes on the floor. The Vikings roared.

She felt the blood rush to her head. The man's shoulder was broad and well-padded with muscle, yet the position was uncomfortable in the extreme, especially with that oversized belt buckle digging into her stomach. The pain intensified when he began to walk. She drew a ragged breath.

Yet truly the physical pain was the least of it.

She couldn't see where he was taking her. Kicking was uselss —he had her legs pinned. She slapped at his back once, then gave up to use her forearm to pull her hair away from her eyes.

He turned around the end of a table, and the hall spun —upside-down. Faces bobbed, upside-down. She felt giddy; her eyes filled with bright, bouncing specks. His shoulder continued to grind into her stomach and she let go of her hair to brace herself against his back.

She saw a doorframe. They were leaving the hall.

She was swung dizzily as he turned to slam the door behind him.

And then the noise of the cheering was distant, and she was alone with the Viking.

Another reeling turn —she whimpered —then he bent forward and pulled her off his shoulder. She fell onto her back, into something feather-soft.

It was completely dark, except for a few coals glowing in a small brazier. She sat up. She surmised she was in his bedchamber, on his bed. She heard him fumbling elsewhere, and she slipped her bare feet to the floor. Tiny cracks of light indicated the door, and she crossed to it. The rushes rustled beneath her feet.

By feel she discovered the door was made of thick wood with hide strapping holding the planks together. She also found that it was secured with a heavy crossbar. Her hands felt in the darkness to find how to lift it.

"Think, Saxon"

His voice came so suddenly, she spun, placing her back to the wood.

He continued, in that same matter-of-fact tone, "It would do you no good to go out there. There are eight men out there, all of them eager for me —or someone — to bed you. You wouldn't get a dozen paces before you were caught, and then you might be hurt."

A flame kindled; he was bent over the bronze brazier, holding a coal with tongs against the end of a rush. When the straw was well lit, he touched the flame to a wick immersed in a dish of oil. The lamp flickered, throwing a dim and unstable light up into his face. He set it down; its faint and smokey glow grew and spread.

The room now illuminated was not at all what Edin had expected. He seemed to read her thoughts. "Welcome to the dragon's den, Saxon." His voice dripped fire.

She'd known this was his sleeping chamber, of course, but she'd never so much as peeked into it; so she was shocked to find that not only was it larger than Inga's but more opulent, stiflingly rich, fitted to he point of luxury. Everything—the clothing chest at the foot of the bed, the small wooden stand supporting a washbowl and pitcher, the bed itself with its dragonhead posts —was richly carved. Her eyes skimmed over details: a carved whalebone hair comb, an ornate drinking cup, a fleecy sheepskin thrown over the floor, down cushions on the bed, a bearskin tossed across the footboard. The bed was huge, meant for a huge man . . . with room for one other.

Her fingernails pressed into her palms. She looked back at him and, in the urgency of her terror, said, "You plan to sell me!"

His face was fierce. "Aye, I do. But since you won't be a virgin, I'll have to bring my price down."

When he started toward her, she turned for the door again, her hands seeking the crossbar. He took hold of her arm and spun her around so hard she clattered against the wall. She flattened herself, ready to leap in whichever direction seemed most prudent. When she saw his face, saw how furious he was—
Why?
—her heart plummeted. "Please . . ."

His face changed, closed down to ferocity. He hissed, "No more of your 'pleases'! If I hear 'please' from you again, I may well run berserk myself!"

She was stung by the sharp accusation in his voice. He seemed a giant looming over her, angry with her —
for what?
—and she felt all her femininity and fragility.

Thoryn was angry, enraged. She'd tempted him until he'd made a fool of himself. Now the regular, established order of his life was shattered. He wanted to strike out, to break something —or someone.

Luckily for her, she didn't move. She shrank into the tapestry that covered the wall, her amber hair all tousled around her face and her eyes staring through it, like a green-eyed rabbit staring out of tangled grass. He slowly backed away, giving them both space to breathe.