Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Elizabeth Rolls

  They did not look at her. As if she was incidental to their decision.

  “My uncle is a powerful man and Mercia is now his,” she reminded them, hoping the formidable giant before them would take heed as well. “Do you dare cross him?”

  The warrior regarded her steadily as if the night did not thicken around them. As if he had yet to notice the snow.

  As if he already knew how this would end.

  “Better to ask yourself if you dare to cross me,” he said in a deep, foreboding rumble.

  Aelfwynn found she was holding her breath, a strange tumult within her. She did not know if he spoke to her uncle’s fearful men—or, more worryingly, to her.

  She prayed truly and silently then, that others might come along this way and put a stop to this as her uncle’s men could not. Though she knew too well only fools and monsters would be out in this weather, so far from shelter on a night like this. And it was all too apparent there were both on this lonely stretch of ancient road, herself the greatest fool of all for imagining she might escape the grief and chaos of this darkest year unscathed.

  In truth, she should not have been surprised when the two men—still without so much as a glance in her direction—turned their mounts around in a flurry of kicks and cries, then galloped back the way they’d come. Cowards to the end.

  Aelfwynn hastily cast off her shroud of meekness, kicking her poor old nag—

  But he was there, the great giant of a Northman, without seeming to move at all. He took the reins from her—and control of her useless mount—that easily. And then he waited, gazing at her with that same darkly fierce calm, very much as if he was daring her to fight him when her men had not.

  She had a knife strapped at her thigh, the bands digging into the hose she wore on her legs. But how could she reach it with him right there? She doubted he would stand idly by as she dug beneath her outer woolen cloak and the under cloak beneath it, trimmed in fur. Much less her pretty dress with its embroidery and the necklaces that had been her mother’s, or the linen underdress against her skin—all before she could access her knife while seated high on her horse.

  He was too big, too close. He would stop her as he’d stopped her useless horse, and there was a gleam in his dark gaze that made her wonder if he knew not only that she carried a knife, but precisely where she had secreted it on her person before she’d left Tamworth this morn. It only made her that much more aware of how powerful and dangerous he was, even without the weapons she could now glimpse beneath his cloak.

  “Release me now,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage when her hands shook. “And I promise, no harm will come to you.”

  He considered her. “But what are your promises worth when you cannot defend them? Nor yourself?”

  Aelfwynn folded her hand into the folds of her thick outer cloak so the Northman could not see her shake. She longed to draw the drapery of her headdress over her face but dared not. She knew too well how fear enflamed men’s darker passions and knew better than to fan those flames herself. She thought of her mother, battle-ready and ever cool, and inclined her head.

  It made her belly twist a bit, deep inside, that he was so much bigger and taller than most men and she did not need to look too far down to meet his gaze.

  “It is as my men told you. My uncle is Edward, King of Wessex.” She waited for some expression of awe or fear, in case he had missed both the banner her men had carried with its golden dragon and her uncle’s name. No awe or fear appeared on the warrior’s countenance, like carved stone. “He is of late in Tamworth, almost a full day’s ride from here, and he will not look favorably upon it should I come to harm.”

  “Is that so?” He sounded almost amused, though there was little hint of it on his harsh face. His attention never wavered. “Your uncle does not look upon you with favor, Lady Aelfwynn. Or he would not have stripped you of your birthright and taken Mercia for his own, would he?”

  She went cold, then hot. Terror made her lips numb, no matter how she tried to tell herself it was the snow. “How is it you know me?”

  “Who does not know you?” the Northman asked with a certain quiet menace, a gleam in his dark eyes that she could not read. But she could feel it as if he’d set his hands upon her flesh. “You possess a greater claim to Mercia than the man who calls it his, yet live.”

  She knew she did not imagine the hard emphasis he put on those last two words.

  Aelfwynn held herself still, trying not to panic. She wished she dared fling herself from the back of the horse he held placid and docile, as if both it and she were his. If she risked the jump and the landing, she could run off and take her chances in the looming woods. But the Northman had not been wrong about this lonely place. These roads were dangerous even in the bright light of a summer’s day. But tonight it was three weeks before midwinter. She would find nothing in these stark, watchful trees save a choice of brutal deaths.

  In the distance, a wolf howled, and Aelfwynn could not contain the shudder that moved through her at the desolate sound.

  “You would do well to question what your uncle had planned for you,” the warrior told her. He indicated the woods, the road. The last of the pale light that hovered low in the trees, a grim warning. “The night comes, yet you are nowhere near shelter. If you had been set upon, what defense could your men have offered? I ran them off without so much as drawing a weapon.”

  I have been set upon, she thought while her heart pounded. By a Northman.

  What manner of man was this, to offer her calm words and strange riddles when he could so easily cut her down instead? When she could see the dark havoc in his gaze and knew him for what he was—a man as unlike the two who had abandoned her here as it was possible to be. A man who could take on the woods, the wolves, and any other threat he pleased.

  A savage Northman who would not hesitate to spill blood, claim spoils, and pillage as he wished.

  “What good is it to tell every truth,” Aelfwynn managed to murmur, wishing the old words her mother had always said brought a better comfort this night. But the cold and her panic and his pitiless gaze were taking hold no matter how she tried to fight it.

  “A fine saying.” The Northman’s hard mouth curved and she felt it scald her insides, a fire and a shout at once. “Will it save you, do you think?”

  Aelfwynn searched his face, his punishing and steady gaze, for a mercy that wasn’t there. This close, she could not help but notice details about him that seemed to lodge themselves beneath her skin. That his hair was dark beneath the snow, fixed in braids that kept it from his face. His beard was the same rich shade, threaded through with more snow that he appeared to notice not at all. His gaze was dark too, and stirring, though his eyes had the look of midnight—a deep, rich blue. He was a harsh warrior, this much was evident, but he was regrettably not as hideously brutish as Aelfwynn might have liked.

  On the contrary, he was hard to look away from. He had moved so swiftly, despite his size. And he held himself in the way some men did, as if they were a thing that happened to the earth and not the opposite.

  He was as magnificent as he was terrifying, and Aelfwynn was entirely within his power.

  Her mother had been raised on military tactics handed down by her own father, King Alfred, who had routed the scourge of Northmen, Norse, and Danes aplenty in his day. Aethelflaed had always expected she would one day command armies and had prepared for it, in study and action, including her infamous decree that having borne her husband a single child a near decade into their union, she would risk herself in childbirth no more.

  She would have advised her daughter to plot, not panic.

  Aelfwynn missed her grievously.

  But her uneasy months of politics and pretense were behind her now. There was only this man and the woods, the song of the wolves, and a reckoning here in the coming cold night whether she wanted it or
did not. She could not pray it away. She could not outrun it.

  He had captured her without unsheathing his sword. That was her shame to bear.

  And bear it she would, if only she lived, out in the dark with a knife she couldn’t reach to wield on a horse that would not run, her uncle’s men long gone, and safety a mere story told around fires in the halls of her youth. She had left all she knew behind and what remained was...herself.

  Only and ever herself.

  Something shifted in her, then. A plot, perhaps. Not that blind panic that made her feel as frozen as the old road below her.

  I am my mother’s daughter, Aelfwynn told herself. Whether I look it or not.

  And to prove it, she did not shrink from the man who watched her so closely, his gaze too knowing, too bold.

  Instead, she smiled.

  “I doubt you are lingering in a darkened wood, covered in snow while the weather worsens, to play the savior. You will save me or kill me as it pleases you, I dare say, and well do both of us and the wolves themselves know it.”

  She sounded cool and disinterested when inside, Aelfwynn felt lit on fire. But she did not let her smile drop, for hers was the blood of kings and queens of old, and she too would fight.

  In the only way she could.

  The Northman’s midnight eyes blazed.

  Aelfwynn did not look away. “Yet you need only tell me what I must do to stay your hand, and I will do it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eigi fellr tré við it fyrsta högg.

  A tree does not fall with the first blow.

  —Njáls Saga, common usage

  She was not what he’d expected.

  Thorbrand had spent the last half of this long year working toward this day. He, his brother Ulfric and their cousin Leif had been tasked with this undertaking by none other than the mighty Ragnall, their king long hated and feared by these Mercians. The three of them had been little more than untried youths when the Irish kings had expelled their people from Dublin. They had grown into fierce and loyal men together, forged in the wicked fire of one battle after another throughout these long and bloody seasons. They were kin, good friends, and battle-honed brothers. Feared and fearsome warriors in their own right, they had fought for glory, honor, and territory at Ragnall’s side from the Isle of Man into Northumbria, back to Ireland to reclaim what had been taken some fifteen years ago, then back to this bitter island and straight into border skirmishes with the vicious Scots earlier this year.

  That last battle at Corbridge had whetted Ragnall’s appetite for deception, as he’d led the column that had laid in wait until the Scots thought they’d defeated the rest, only to surge forth and claim their victory. Ragnall had started thinking less of what he could smash with his fists or cut down with his axe, and more of the other games he could play to achieve his ends.

  And which among his loyal men could be best trusted to bring his cleverest schemes to life.

  It was nothing less than an honor, Thorbrand had reminded himself throughout this long season of planning and plotting, to serve his king in this plot made of waiting. Not in the sharp fire of a straightforward battle, all sword heft and might, but in this deeper plot that would test Thorbrand’s skills in new ways.

  Yet the gods knew well that in his heart, he had not felt honored by this assignment.

  Then again, he had expected the Lady Aelfwynn to cower and mewl as these Saxon noblewomen did, sending up their frantic prayers to their Christian god and fainting into the mud when their prayers went unanswered.

  Better to have a selection of gods, Thorbrand had always thought. Lest one alone prove uninterested in providing aid, as the fickle gods so often did.

  Aelfwynn had prayed with her old Roman words, but he had seen no cowering. Instead, she looked at him directly. The challenge of it stirred his blood. Thorbrand was a warrior, not a weakling, and he hungered for the bold, strong warrior women his people bred. Not these grim, cold Christians with their bloodless piety.

  And yet this woman, this Mercian princess he was tasked to take no matter what he thought of her, begged a second look.

  She almost reminded him—

  But he cast such thoughts aside. His past could have no purpose here. What was done could not be altered with memories. Well did Thorbrand know this.

  “Do you offer yourself to me?” His question was little more than a dark scrape of sound. He kept his gaze trained on her lovely face beneath the headwrap and hood she wore against the cold night, searching for the fear he’d expected to see there. But did not.

  Not that she wasn’t fearful, alone in the dark here with a man she would likely think a monster. He was close enough now that he could see the way she trembled slightly, though her eyes—eyes that gleamed gold, and what man was not partial to whatever gold he could hoard?—did not leave his.

  She is brave, Thorbrand thought then, pleased.

  And it was far too tempting to imagine what an offering might look like. How it might feel to find his ease deep between her thighs.

  “Can a woman offer what has already been claimed by the threat of force in the middle of a dark wood?” Aelfwynn asked, a trace of wry humor in her voice.

  Surprising Thorbrand anew. And with that surprise came a new surge of heat. “A woman can always offer. Who does not like a gift freely given?”

  “I will confess a certain wariness when it comes to gifts,” she replied, her gaze still steady. She sat straight and tall before him, nothing like the woman he’d seen at first. The one who had bowed her head, then meekly murmured her prayers. Thorbrand found himself more intrigued by the moment and his blood answered that fascination by coursing through him like a newly kindled fire. “I find that the greater the gift, the more obligation expected in return. Is that not so?”

  She reminded him of similar words he’d heard spoken in the longhouses of his childhood. It was unsettling. He had not expected she would be anything like him, this almost-queen who was more valuable for what she represented than anything else. She had been stripped of her lands, her people. She had been shunted off from her uncle’s court and could easily have faded off into obscurity in a nunnery, a tale seldom told. Absent from songs and stories evermore, no threat to anyone. He had not expected her to be anything but female goods he would carry off to faraway shores and find a way to live with, eventually. In some or other peace, gods willing—but live with her he would, peace or no.

  Not that Thorbrand knew much of peace. Or would recognize it if it fell upon him like a battle-ax.

  “The way of the world is unlikely to be changed here in this wood,” he said gruffly.

  But he was speaking to himself as much as to her. He could not forget himself here, even if she compelled him more than he’d ever imagined she would. Even if she somehow prodded at memories he had done his best to banish. He knew what business he had with this woman—and would have had even if she’d toppled from her horse in a fright and had cringed about before him in the frozen dirt at his feet.

  His orders had to do with his king’s desires, not his own. Never his own.

  He should not have tarried while carrying out this errand, yet Thorbrand did not move. He stayed where he was, gazing at her as she sat before him. Almost proudly, he thought, like the queen she might have been. And nearly had been, these last six months, to her uncle’s fury. “Tell me, Aelfwynn, what will you offer me for your life?”

  “Is it I who determines what my life is worth?” She inclined her head but slightly. “Or is it he who would take it?”

  Thorbrand knew these games. And misliked them. Words like swords, the lifeblood of a royal court, where whispers could poison and rumors could kill. It was good to remember that she had these weapons, little as he might value them. Not when he could measure the world by the swing of his sword.

  And did.

  “Such philosoph
ical words, lady.” He saw her jaw firm even as she trembled and told himself it was good. Better she should fear him than imagine she could tie him in knots with pretty words. “And yet the snow still falls. The wolves yet howl. And where, do you think, might you lay your head this night?”

  Aelfwynn laughed and it startled him, when he was a man so hardened he would have sworn to the gods themselves that there was naught on this dark, doomed earth that could catch him unawares. It was her laughter. That she dared laugh in the first place, and more, the sound of it. It put him in mind of a crisp, cold stream, tumbling from the mountains in the new land called Ísland—that place far to the west he had first seen this summer and now carried in him, as if those mountains like slumbering dragons and black rock beaches had claimed him that quickly.

  When he intended to do the claiming.

  Because sooner or later, all men needed land.

  Trouble was, all the land Thorbrand had ever known was soaked in blood. Battled over, taken again and again, no sword mighty enough to beat back those who would challenge a man’s right to settle. No war ever truly over, no truce anything but uneasy though even a hundred years might pass. Or more.

  Thorbrand had never had a home he was not called upon to defend with his body, his sword, the strength in his arms and the will in his heart.

  And too well did he know the things a man could lose when his strength was outmatched, his sword overpowered, his will not enough. Well did he remember that bloody morning in Dublin when he had failed.

  Gods, how he had failed.

  Too vividly did he recall the look on his mother’s face when she had fallen that day. When he had not protected her as he should have done. When the enemy had tossed him aside like a child when he had been a man of fifteen, then cut her down while he had watched and had done nothing.

  The shame of that haunted him still.

  His mother had been brave and bold, beautiful and clever. She had given his father sons and had feared little. When other women might have begged to be spared, his mother had gone at her attacker as if she’d intended to take his eyes out.