Authors: Delle Jacobs
As they returned along the path by the churning brown waters, Arienh saw Mildread bending over in the field beyond Arienh's stone cottage, her brown braids nearly touching the ground. Mildread straightened, holding the Viking's sword, retrieved from the spot where the man had dropped it the night before. With a hand gripped on the hilt, she awaited them.
"The Viking," said Mildread, almost impatiently. The furrow in the middle of her brow echoed the concern in her voice. "Where is he? Did you not say you killed him?"
"He is not dead, but I think he soon will be," Arienh replied. Mildread was not going to like this. "He found his way to the cottage last night."
"You let him in?"
"Nay. He did that himself. I had naught to say about it. But he is very weak now."
"Not so weak as he ought to be." Mildread's brown eyes darkened with accusation. "And you have left him with Birgit."
"Aye. I do not think he can harm her."
"Why did you not finish him?"
"He is weak. But he could still be dangerous when he holds a knife in his hand. He is best appeased for now. It was not right to let a man die in the cold rain, Mildread."
"They are animals, not men."
"But we are not animals. Give me the sword. We must hide it in case he should recover and try to take it back."
"We should throw it in the river."
"Then we would not have it for our own protection later. Nay, let us hide it in the thatch at the eave by the sheepfold."
Mildread's skeptical brown eyes narrowed, but with a glower, she handed the weapon to Arienh as they walked to the cottage.
"You will regret it when he kills you," Mildread grumbled.
"The ladder, Liam," Arienh said, ignoring the impossibility of Mildread's warning, and she watched the boy fetch and raise the wooden ladder to the stone wall. Arienh climbed the ladder and wove the sword into the thatch near the eave. She leaned back to survey the thatch, and, satisfied, climbed down.
"I do not think he meant to kill anyone, Mildread." She stepped off the ladder. "He did chase me, but he never did unsheathe his sword. He only meant to stop me from raising the alarm, I think."
Liam tugged on Mildread's skirt. "I saw the ship, Aunt Mildread. It sailed away and left him."
Dark anger lurked in Mildread's brown eyes, the hatred all Celts harbored toward Vikings. "I do not like this, Arienh. Father Hewil would tell you to kill him. I have heard he is coming. If he tells you to kill the Viking, you must."
With a clipped nod of her head to drive her point home, Mildread walked away from the sheepfold to the muddy path that led down toward the river. Arienh noted Mildread had made no mention of doing the task herself. Mildread had always been good at knowing what others should do.
Arienh turned back to the cottage. Ahead of her, Liam's bright hair gleamed like polished brass in the sunshine as he bounded through the door and ran to his mother.
"Mama, I saw it– The Viking ship! It had a big red sail, and it was going down the river to the sea."
Arienh, directly behind the boy, nodded. "You were right," she told the Viking grimly, for she knew what it must mean to him to be left behind. "They have gone. We watched them sail away."
***
For two days, the Viking lay on her raised bed where she had moved him, with a fever raging through him. He mumbled strange things in his foreign tongue, threw off the blankets, tossed like waves pounding the sea cliffs in a storm. He called her name, begged her not to let him go.
Then he slept, so quietly, so still that she returned again and again to his side to reassure herself he still breathed.
Now and then, she got a few spoonfuls of water or broth past his lips. Sometimes he took enough of the willow bark tea that the fever seemed to subside. Then it would rise again.
For nearly a day now, the fever had seemed not quite so fiery hot. Yet it had continued, and he was running out of strength to fight. She could do nothing.
"Perhaps I should not have stitched it."
"Why?" Birgit asked her. "How could it have harmed him? You can see the wound heals, despite the fever. How can you care, Arienh? If he dies, he dies. You have one less burden."
Arienh shrugged and mopped beads of sweat from the Viking's brow with a dampened rag. "But he did so much better before. I should have left it alone, as I first meant to do."
"You blame yourself too much. That he has lived at all is
beyond belief. He improves even now, despite my prayers."
She understood Birgit's hatred, but her own rage mingled with a memory from long ago, of a scrawny, ragged boy who had come with the Vikings, yet had hidden her away from his own kind.
It had happened too fast for her to remember much. When the horde had poured into their village, she had been too far away to escape to the cavern, so she ran up into the hills. While her attention was on the hulking Viking chasing her, the boy surprised her. She glimpsed only his light hair and a flash of blue eyes as he pushed her into a small hole hidden by boulders. With a quick, hard hiss to hush her, surely a sound understood in any language, he ran off, luring the marauder away. Her pursuer never found her.
Though this man's hair was far darker, his Viking eyes reminded her of the scrawny lad. She could not give him up until he breathed his last. She could never care for his sort, but she owed him that much.
"I will watch him," said Birgit. A strange flatness tinged her voice. Yet her pale eyes reflected the concern she felt for her exhausted sister. "Take Liam with you to the paddock."
"It is not your duty."
"You must tend the new lambs. I will watch the Viking."
"And give him the willow bark?"
"Perhaps I will do it better than you. Go. You have been inside too long, and so has Liam."
Arienh bit her lip, but it was best. She needed to walk in the sunshine. "Come, Liam, let us see to the lambs."
The bright sunlight stung her eyes as Arienh stepped outside the door, Liam's hand in hers. Clean air swept into her lungs, as delicious as fresh red meat.
Birgit was right, Arienh did need a distraction for a while from her obsession with the Viking's wound and her own guilt, for though her fear might excuse her, it was still her doing that he was wounded. And she couldn't get over the feeling that his wound would not have festered if she hadn't stitched it. The wound was healing and the fever was not as intense, but he was so weak that soon he would not have the strength to continue his struggle.
Mildread and Elli stood by the path, waiting. Arienh shooed Liam off to the paddock.
"Well, is he gone yet?" asked Mildread, with balled fists planted firmly on her hips. Elli placed hers exactly the same way.
"Nay, he lingers."
"You must kill him, Arienh," said Elli. Grim hatred gleamed like ice in her eyes, as cold as Mildread's brown eyes were furiously hot. "His kind are vermin."
Irritation flared in her. Every day they had said this, and she was weary of it. "Well, he is lying in there on the bed, helpless as a new kitten, Elli. If you want him dead, you may go do it yourself. Here, I will loan you my knife."
Elli's eyebrows shot upward.
"Not you? Mildread, then? Here, it is not so hard. Just hold it thus and stab downwards. He may find the strength to fight back and kill you, but I doubt it."
"You should never have let him live, Arienh," said Mildread. "It is your fault, and you should end it."
Arienh smiled with narrowed eyes. "But I chose not to do that. If you want it otherwise, you must change it yourselves."
Mildread spun away angrily and strode down the path. Elli followed, glancing back with a frown.
She could not blame them. Elli could not forget her father's death. Mildread's husband had been crippled in a raid and eventually died of the melancholy, leaving her to raise two daughters alone. And none of them would forgive what had been done to Birgit. But like herself, neither Mildread nor Elli could raise a blade to the Viking.
Arienh forced her thoughts away from them, back to her task, for she had too much to do as it was. Since the flood, the pasture beyond the untilled fields had begun to green, sprouts popping up faster than the flock could nibble them away. She counted the lambs, grateful that none had been lost. Some of them had better survive, for after this hard winter, there was not a single ram left in the valley.
Liam trotted beside her like a herd dog, prattling eager questions about the lambs, about how much they had grown since their winter births. Arienh picked up a lamb to show him how to inspect hooves and bodies for sores or disease.
The sudden blare of Mildread's horn sliced through the air. Her heart lurched and she nearly dropped the tiny lamb she held as she scanned the valley's lower end.
Running women screamed and fled up the valley toward the cavern in the hill beyond. Others, too far from the cavern, scattered up the nearest slopes that lined the valley's outlet.
Vikings. Vikings afoot, a score or more of them.
Yet no hideous howls for blood, no racing hordes in pursuit, not even weapons raised for the slaughter. The marauders strode up the valley as if they owned it, their metal clanging, leather squealing, feet tromping-the sounds of a moving army.
From the day the Viking had appeared, she had feared this. His people had come for him.
CHAPTER
FOUR
"Go to the house, Liam. Do what your mother says."
"Without you? Not to the cavern?"
"Go without me. Now."
Liam's bright curls shimmered in the quick turn before he ran. Her heart lurched. She would do anything to protect him.
They did not come as Vikings usually came, a screaming rush of berserkers. They merely walked, a brisk, purposeful pace, as if they knew exactly what they planned to do. And there were enough of them that, whatever they planned, they would do it.
How much did they know? Had they been watching from the high hills that surrounded the valley, as she suspected her Viking had been doing the day she encountered him?
Only she stood between them and her family. Gulping down her fear, Arienh strode to the sheepfold, climbed the ladder, and removed the sword from its hiding place in the thatch. She threw the long belt over her shoulder, but still the immense scabbard almost dragged the ground.
The Vikings stopped on the far bank of the stream when one man signaled to the others. He bounded effortlessly over the stepping stones and stood, stance set wide, barely a man's length away from her. Arienh squared her shoulders and glared directly up into the man's bright blue eyes.
Eyes like her Viking's.
This Viking was the tallest man she had ever seen, and stocky as a great oak, even larger than the man inside her cottage. His flowing, straw-colored beard and hair decorated with braids, and the evil sparkle in his eyes gave him a look of maturity, yet she guessed he was quite young, perhaps only a short time into his manhood.
The man pointed to the weapon that dangled from her waist. "That is my brother's sword."