“I hope it will,” she said.
They exchanged a long, silent look, then he settled back down beside her. She leaned over and placed her lips gently on his. It was a sweet kiss, but she could tell he was keeping it that way, holding himself back. In part she wished he wouldn’t, that he would let go of his emotions again. Another twig snapped and she looked up to see the ravens fly off together.
“You are the only one who has ever wanted me,” she said, turning her attention back to him.
He smiled. “I will always want you.”
“I was worried that you didn’t. That it was the reason you didn’t want to have a child with me.”
He tensed. “I will welcome all the children we have together.” He smiled again and her heart lightened just a little.
“You do not need to send Einar away because of me.”
There was a long pause and she thought for a minute he hadn’t heard her.
“I’m not,” he said finally.
“But, I thought… you said.”
“I’m not. Arne will look after Einar well. He does not… resent him the way I do.” Tormod laughed bitterly. “Perhaps he should, he has more reason to. Come, we will speak more of this later.”
She knew he wouldn’t tell her any more of the story. Not now, anyway. She let him help her to her feet and they walked side by side, hand in hand, along the forest path back to the village. When they reached it, Einar and Elisedd were still sparring, although Arne had stopped teaching the boys and was sitting with Ulf and Björn next to the fire. All had horns of mead in their hands and were laughing together. Aoife smiled at the sight.
As they approached, however, Ulf drained his horn and stood. Tormod stiffened.
“Arne says Einar is to live with him now, that he will train both him and the Briton as warriors,” Ulf said.
“That’s right,” Tormod replied.
“Is this an admission the boy is not yours?” Ulf took a step closer to Tormod. There was a pause, and it was as if for a moment the world stopped, for it seemed to Aoife no birds sang, the waves stilled and around them everything held its breath, waiting for Tormod’s response.
“No, it is not,” Tormod said. “But Arne has offered him a future as a warrior, rather than as jarl and I have decided that Einar will accept this. It is the best solution for all concerned.”
Ulf snorted. Tormod grabbed him by the kirtle and yanked him towards him. For a few seconds Ulf struggled, then Arne stepped in and pulled them apart.
“Enough!” Arne turned to the two boys, who had stopped sparring. Einar’s face was deathly pale and Aoife worried he was going to faint. “None of this is the boy’s fault. I will not see him suffer any more for his parents’ sins. I will train both Einar and Elisedd as warriors and that will be the end of it. What happened in the past is over. Finished. It is time for us all to move on.”
Ulf started to open his mouth, but an angry glance from Arne stopped him. He looked his brother in the eye.
“What happened was no one’s fault, but those who betrayed us,” Arne said. “I do not want you to argue over this again. Tormod is our jarl, and you will either accept this or leave.”
“And if I choose to leave?” Ulf asked. “Would you really choose the man whose foolishness caused you such harm over your brother?”
“Tormod has led us wisely ever since. I will not hold one decision against him,” Arne replied. “After all, if I did that then perhaps you would not fare so well, Ulf. You have not always made the wisest of choices yourself.”
“But I am not jarl.”
“No, you are not. And before you say anything else, consider who those words will harm the most.”
Ulf glanced over to where the two boys stood watching the confrontation. “And what of the problems now? Do you not see the same thing happening again? Tormod allows strangers to live amongst us, strangers who may wish us harm.”
Tormod started to speak, but Aoife interrupted him. “Neither Elisedd nor myself wish you harm. Elisedd has already stood trial under your own laws and been proved innocent. Do you not accept the rulings of your own people?”
“You have not faced something similar, though,” Ulf replied. “And Tormod’s choice of wife in the past nearly killed my brother.”
Aoife frowned, trying to work out how that could be true. “When my father’s men attacked the village, they were instructed not to hesitate to kill me. What loyalty do you think I owe them after that?”
Ulf glared at her, then sighed. Then he marched off towards the hall. Tormod moved to follow him, but Arne put a hand on his arm.
“Let him go,” Arne said. “He will come around. He is torn between wanting to avenge me and wanting to remain loyal to you. Perhaps in defending this village, defending your wife, he will be reconciled with the past.”
Chapter Eleven
Aoife walked with Tormod back to their room. They entered, then stared at one another. She tried to gauge his mood, difficult when he just stood there leaning against the door.
He was lost in thought, but at least he didn’t appear to be angry.
“So, the village will accept Einar even though he is not your son, so long as he does not become jarl?”
Tormod walked over and sat down heavily on the bed.
“Yes,” Tormod replied. “I have always acknowledged him as my own. Perhaps that was a mistake. But after what happened to Arne, and his mother’s death… well, he was young. He had done nothing wrong. Even if his mother had betrayed us all.”
“All of you?” Aoife asked, frowning. “But I thought it was Arne…”
The silence in the room grew heavy. Twice Tormod started to speak, but no words came out. Then his shoulders slumped and he began.
“When I first met Ingrid… I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met,” he finally said. “I was young, eager to prove myself a mighty warrior, to go and seek out my fortune in other lands, but Ingrid… Ingrid obsessed me. I grew to believe I couldn’t live without her.” He sighed and moved back to sit on the edge of the bed. Aoife joined him and tried to put an arm around him. He shook it off. “I do not deserve your sympathy. And I do not want your pity.”
“It hurts you to tell me this story. I only want to comfort you,” she said, placing a palm on the side of his face. “No sympathy, certainly no pity. You don’t seem to be a man who needs pity, Tormod.”
“Arne is the one who deserves pity. He is the one who…” Tormod looked at her, then took her hands in his. His touch was cold and she wished she could warm him.
“Ingrid’s father lived across the fjord. Her family were not well-liked, always ready to accuse their neighbours of stealing or raiding in difficult times,” Tormod said. “We knew better than to trust them, but I thought she was different. I met her, I thought, by chance, one day in late summer. Lost in the forest. I believed her when she said she hated her father, that she wanted to leave her village and be with me. We couldn’t cross the water to see each other without being spotted, so we would ride. We found an abandoned hut to meet in halfway. At the start of winter, she told me she carried my child, so I took her back to my village and we were married. She found it hard to settle and made no friends. Most of the time she fretted about her father finding her and asked me often about how safe the village was.”
This wasn’t really answering her question. “Arne’s scars?” She frowned. “How did he get them?”
“One day my cousins saw her leaving the village and followed her. She returned to the hut where we had met in the summer. When they confronted her there, she said that she was lonely in the village and wanted only to return to the place where we had first met and been happy.”
“And your cousins believed her?”
“No, my cousins did not believe her. A few days later, Ulf followed her again.” He stopped, took a breath. “This time he saw her meeting someone at the hut.”
“Einar’s father?”
“I can only assume so,” Tormod s
aid. “When they told me, I refused to believe them. That night the village was attacked.”
“By Ingrid’s family? Einar’s father?”
“Ingrid’s father and his warriors, certainly. Einar’s father was waiting for her at the hut for her to come to him. The plan was that he would marry her once I was dead.”
“You don’t think he was among the people who attacked the village?”
“No, but he and Ingrid’s father had planned the whole thing together. He wanted Ingrid back and her father wanted our village.”
Tormod stood up and paced to the door. “In the end it was Arne and not me who nearly paid the price.”
“He was with her when her lover found her?”
“Arne saw her sneaking out of the village just as the attack began and followed her. It was all carefully planned.”
“But it did not succeed?”
“No.” For the first time in a while Tormod smiled. “They had not counted on my cousins.” Tormod stopped speaking. “When Arne reached the hut they were waiting for him. They attacked him, thinking he was me. Ingrid didn’t tell them any differently. Just stood and watched what they did to him. They tied him up, then tortured him. Hundreds of shallow cuts on every patch of bare skin, not enough to kill quickly. They wanted him to die a slow, painful death.”
Aoife put her arms around Tormod. He laid his head on her breast and she thought that he might weep, wondered what she would do if he did. He lay against her for a while then he straightened.
“We thought he would die.” His voice was barely more than a whisper. “When I first saw him… there was barely any of his skin that didn’t bleed. It was horrific. Not the way for a warrior to die. Slow, painful. I wondered if I should kill him myself, but I couldn’t even though it was my fault. He lay in a fever dream for weeks.”
“How did you find him?”
He paused for a while and she knew this was getting harder for him to talk about. “When the village was attacked, they got in quickly, did a lot of damage, got through all of our defences. Ingrid’s brother found me in the fighting, challenged me.” He indicated a particularly nasty scar. Aoife laid her lips gently on it and he shuddered. “He paid for that challenge with his life.”
“But you found Arne in time, how?”
“They were outnumbered. They had divided their men by leaving too many at the hut to wait for me. We killed them quickly and when we realised both Arne and Ingrid were missing, the hut was the first place we went.” Tormod refused to meet her gaze, staring instead at a spot on the wall.
“So, you saved him?”
“Yes.”
“Her lover didn’t take her with him?”
“He didn’t leave the hut that night, alive.” Tormod smiled grimly. “We took Ingrid back to face punishment for her crimes. My father and my cousins suspected from then that there had been no difficulties at home. She had been sent from the first as a spy, and the plan was for her return and marry her lover once I was dead. But I refused to believe them.”
“You had thought she cared for you?”
“They had not heard the way she spoke to me, experienced the way she was with me.” He stopped abruptly and pursed his lips then continued, “Somehow Arne survived the night, and then a day and a week and a month.”
“And he recovered.”
“Eventually. Although the scars will never fade.” Tormod smiled sadly. “It was my fault. If I had not met and married Ingrid, her father would not have attacked the village.”
“I doubt that is true,” said Aoife. “And besides, their attack was not successful.”
“Not ultimately, no, but we still lost good warriors that night.” Tormod hung his head. “And villagers, wives, children.”
“If she was a prisoner, how did she come to have your child?”
“When Arne survived, my father freed her,” Tormod said. “He considered banishing her after Einar was born but I... I...” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “As I said, I refused to believe them. She was still my wife.”
“But,” Aoife began and then stopped. “You took her back as your wife? After what she had done.”
“After the attack, and especially after Einar’s birth, she had been very... attentive to me, for a while at least.” He put his head back and sighed. “You begin to see why I was such a fool? I think she thought she would not be killed or sent away if she was pregnant with my child.”
She said nothing, knowing it may well have been true and Ingrid had had few options.
“I thought she was trying to make it up to me for lying about his paternity. She told me her lover had been cruel, her father banished her from the village, and for a while I believed her. Got angry when the others told me she was lying, pointed out the inconsistencies. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had been wrong because then...”
“But it was just another way to get you to trust her,” Aoife said. “So that you would save her.”
“Yes. She had nowhere else to go. Her father and lover had both been killed during the attack. And by the time I was willing to see the truth, she was pregnant. We agreed that she would have the child and then we would divorce.”
“But she died?”
“Yes, the child came early and neither of them survived. Having my child killed her.”
Aoife frowned at him. “You being the father would not have been the deciding factor in whether she lived or died.”
“No, but... I had wished her dead so many times.”
“And you know for sure that you are not Einar’s father?”
“He was born soon after Yule,” Tormod said. “We had only met in late summer.”
“Children can come early.”
He grimaced. “No, the babe was full-grown. It is one thing to not disown him as my son, it is another to allow him to someday inherit everything I have worked for, especially if I have children of my own. And I cannot love Einar as a father should because I am not his father.”
Aoife was silent. The fact that Tormod was unable to love Einar no matter how wonderful the boy was, just because of who his parents were, hurt her. “Why can’t you love him?” she asked quietly. “He is naught but a child, innocent of the sins of his parents—”
“Ingrid deceived me. Made a fool of me in front of the whole village. It nearly cost Arne his life. It nearly cost the lives of everyone in the village.”
Aoife thought back to when Ragna told her that the way Tormod saw the past was not the way others did. “But it didn’t,” she said. “Are you sure that is what people think?”
“What else could they think?”
“That you spared a child and brought him up as your own, even though his mother had betrayed the village. It was not Einar’s fault, after all.”
“It was my fault. I should have seen through her. I should have…”
Aoife saw the expression of shame that crossed his face. Suddenly she understood the root of his anger. “You loved her. You thought she loved you.”
“She lied to me so she would be safe. Fooled me not once, but twice, and everyone knew it.”
Aoife started to speak and then stopped. How could Tormod think like this? The villagers did not feel this way about him, she was sure of it. Why would they have come with him across the sea if they thought he was a weak leader? The blame for all of this lay with Ingrid, her family and her lover. She frowned. Tormod had loved Ingrid and she had betrayed him – a betrayal that had nearly killed his cousin. That must have hurt his pride, but surely he was making it worse than it really was? “But her people, they might have attacked you anyway. And you would not have become jarl if your people had not believed in you.”
“Yes, they could have tried,” Tormod admitted reluctantly. “But she must have told them where the weak spots in our defences were. Without that knowledge, they could never have got so close. Certainly not as quickly as they did.”
“How did she know the weak spots in your defences? If she only lived there a few month
s before the attack then…” she trailed off, a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Tormod sat, silent, tense.
“You told her?”
He looked at her, his eyes hard. “I told you, I was a fool. She said she wanted to know so she would feel safer. Said she was afraid of them attacking the village, but all along she was telling them how to defeat us.”
Aoife placed her hand lightly on his arm and squeezed it in reassurance. “Your wife is dead, but you must tell Einar the truth. He deserves to know.”
“I will but this is not something I can admit publicly,” Tormod said. “If I do, then the village will know I am not fit to be jarl.”
“I thought you said they already knew about the boy.”
“They whisper it behind their hands. None dare say it to my face.”
“Perhaps it does not matter.”
“It should. A man so easily deceived does not deserve to be jarl. And now there is you.”
A cold shiver trailed down her spine. Was he comparing Ingrid’s betrayal of him to her? “Me? I have not betrayed you.”
“Your father fooled me as she did. Making me believe he was willing to form an alliance with us. And yet, it is clear it is your father’s men who have attacked us. He has made a fool of me once again. The villagers may not forgive me twice.”
She couldn’t make her mouth work to say anything. How could she deny it? What he said was true and she should have told him her suspicions as they rode to the village that first day. Ulf had been right.
She buried her face in her hands. “I am sorry. I believe my stepmother has poisoned my father against me. They would be happier if I were dead if you killed me.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and put her head down on her knees.
He said nothing. Eventually she had to lift her head to see if he was even still in the room, he was so silent.
“Aoife.”
She looked at him.
“You have done nothing wrong. It was I who should have seen through your father’s tricks, not you.”
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