Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Elizabeth Rolls

  All this had she discerned the night before, while she’d quietly helped the village women prepare and serve all the men, the village’s own hardy male folk and the warriors who had come with the king.

  An honor, is it? muttered one of the women, old and round with years and clearly in charge of what went on around the hearth in the village’s central hall. We are fair lousy with kings, we are.

  All the women had fallen silent, sneaking looks at Aelfwynn out of the corner of their eyes at words that could have been considered treasonous when there was only one king about at present.

  Kings are only men, are they not? Aelfwynn had asked mildly as she’d stirred the stew in the great pot. She had looked at no one, as if she hadn’t noticed the possible harm in the older woman’s words. And what man does not wish to imagine he is the only one?

  The other women had laughed loud at that, their manner notably warming. Leaving Aelfwynn to wonder how she’d done without this for all her years. For there had always been a separation between her and the rest of the women. How could there not be, no matter the grace in her manner or her willingness to help? She was like them, yet not. She helped as she could, as all women must, but all had been far too aware that she was only ever a moment away from being called to her mother’s side. Or in the last six-month or so, too busy fending off all her would-be advisors and swains.

  But here she was naught but another pair of hands.

  It was in that spirit, still full to bursting with all that happy anonymity she had never before tasted, that she smiled politely enough at the man who waited for her outside the tent.

  “Come,” he ordered her, severely.

  Aelfwynn placed him as one of Ragnall’s men. He had been there when Thorbrand had first brought her before his king. He had stood to one side of Ragnall’s great chair and the way he had looked at her had in no way been friendly. But this hardly distinguished him from the rest. She had dismissed him—as all of them—as yet one more Northman, and certainly not the one she most feared.

  Because there was only one Northman she truly feared, and for all his authority and might, it was not Ragnall. It was the one who claimed he would marry her. Today.

  And it was as if, after spending a lifetime learning how to choose decorum above all else, Aelfwynn had completely forgot how on earth she had ever done such things. How she could possibly keep her feelings contained when it seemed far more likely they would eat her whole, like a fearsome monster from one of the old tales the skalds told on cold winter nights in her mother’s halls.

  It would have been easier to fight a monster. Aelfwynn knew not how she could fight herself.

  She followed the man willingly enough. He led her away from the sounds of men’s cries and the clash and clamor of their swords, the rough music that made the world into elegies sung around mournful hearths and ever would. They walked back to the far boundary of the village, then set off across a frigid field toward the ever-waiting wood.

  The trees stood like ghosts, cold branches bare and braced against the morning sky with its low light in the distance.

  “Where do you take me?” she asked of her silent companion, who stalked through the chilly dawn with such grim intent.

  “Thorbrand might encourage your tongue,” was his growled reply. “I do not.”

  Aelfwynn could admit a few misgivings, then. But surely this would have something to do with Thorbrand’s king. Perhaps she had misread Ragnall yesterday. Or had underestimated the fragility of his temper. It was possible he wished to address the way she’d spoken to him...but his choosing to do that off on his own rather than shaming her in front of his whole company was a worry.

  When they started into the woods, making a new path across the frozen earth where none had gone before them, her misgivings shifted into something else. Something far sharper.

  “We have surely gone too far from the village—” she began, stopping still.

  But it was too late. The Northman wrenched her arm, gripping her hard and propelling her in front of him, making it clear he was prepared to drag her through these woods if necessary.

  Aelfwynn did not ask where he was taking her again, though her mind raced. For she was suddenly put in the position of having to compare and contrast between kidnappings.

  There had been Thorbrand, standing calmly in the middle of the old road, snow all around, quietly letting her know her options. All of them unpleasant. She still shuddered when she thought of it, though not from anything like fear.

  And then there was this man, who had a pallor to his sunken cheeks and sour breath. Unlike the rest of the Northmen here, he looked as if he did not spend as much time bathing as they all did. His tunic looked as if he’d used it to catch the better part of his dinner and more, as if he’d slept in it for weeks.

  Why should one of Ragnall’s men take her? His most slovenly man, for that matter?

  But the further away they got from the village, marching through the grim wood, the more her captor began to talk.

  “Ragnall is a fool,” he seethed at her, his grip harder on her arm as he spoke. “Sending you away when it would be far better to use you now, while your mother’s memory still shines bright in Mercia.”

  No reply from Aelfwynn was necessary, and she thought it a good thing. For what was there to say when his hands were on her? He kept moving, swift and furious, so that she was forced to run to keep up with his bone-rattling pace.

  “Your uncle has a Northman problem and we are not going away,” the man told her. Or told the trees. Or better still, himself, for he seemed to need no reply from Aelfwynn. “Not in this life. Yet why should Thorbrand get the glory, a kingdom, and an uppity Saxon bride to bear him sons? What has he done that I have not? What, damn you?”

  And when Aelfwynn did not answer that, either, his grip tightened, so hard that she could not keep back a yelp. Then, horribly, he shook her—a violent jolt, so hard she fair expected it to separate her head from her neck.

  She nearly bit her tongue in half. Pain bloomed from her nape to the top of her head. And it was all she could do to keep her expression, if not mild, blank enough when he hauled her around to stare down into her face, his sour breath washing over her and making her stomach curdle.

  “Answer me that, woman!” he snarled.

  “I cannot,” she replied calmly. And oh, how it cost her to sound thus. She took the pain and used it. She gazed back at him as if this were any quiet talk in a warm hall, friends and protectors on all sides. “For I do not know you. Tell me your name and your deeds, that I might make a better reckoning.”

  She realized something else then, there in another cold and inhospitable wood with another man holding her fast. Her lifetime of training had been sound. Mildrithe and her mother had prepared her well. The man who loomed over her now was no different than all the men who had crowded into Tamworth after her mother’s death in June. The men who had grabbed her thus, or worse, pretended to support her in public so that she might let her guard down when they came upon her in a quiet corner.

  In all cases, she had acquitted herself magnificently, no matter what hopes the Mercians might have had for her that she had dashed. She had exuded calm and carried on saying her prayers, repeat as necessary, until the threat passed her by.

  Yet Thorbrand had been different. Because Thorbrand had not made her want to scream. He had seen her, whatever else his aims might have been. He had spoken to her, not thundered on about his own dreams of Mercian domination or his plans to unseat or cajole her uncle. He had seen her far too clearly, out in that cold night, and had made her choose.

  She had been far too besotted with him from the start.

  There had been no call to weave her peace when she had wanted nothing more than to lose herself in the sheer heat of his midnight gaze, the glory of his hard hands, and the marvel of his kiss.

  With this new, lesse
r Northman, it was easy enough to adopt her old, familiar posture. Half penitent, half saint. Aelfwynn folded her hands together before her, no matter how awkwardly he held her, so that he could not mistake the evidence of her serene piety even if he preferred his pagan gods to hers. She even gazed back at him, soothingly, and watched as her determined calmness did its work.

  Too well did she know that a woman’s tears did not always bring out the best in men. Far too many men fed off those tears. Some used them to commit even more desperate acts.

  “I am Bjørn,” the man told her, pride and rage laced through his voice and the wild gaze he pinned on her. “I fought with Ragnall in Waterford. Have I not followed him since? Have I not slain all manner of enemies? Should my name not be sung? Such was my might at Corbridge last year that some have had it that I won the day.”

  Aelfwynn’s own recollection was that no one knew quite what had happened at the Battle of Corbridge last year. Her mother had claimed victory. But so too had everyone else, particularly Ragnall.

  “Why should Thorbrand gather all the spoils because he has known Ragnall the longer?” Bjørn demanded.

  “Are they not kin?”

  This was clearly the wrong question to ask.

  Bjørn scowled at her, his thick blond brows meeting over his eyes. “Thorbrand’s father is dead. He has no sons. If he fell tomorrow, who would sing his name were it not for Ragnall’s favor? Who?”

  Aelfwynn discovered something else, then. She did not wish for Thorbrand to fall. She did not wish for the faintest harm to come to him. Even speaking of it so casually made everything in her go rigid, though she knew a warrior such as he would not thank her for such consideration when battle lived in his blood. When it had made him who he was.

  Besotted, a voice inside whispered.

  She tried to take proper heed of the threat before her. “I will tell you, Bjørn, what I have told Thorbrand already. And indeed your king himself. My uncle considers me no treasure, of this you can be certain. For all the reasons your king wants me in his hands, my uncle wishes me gone forever and, indeed, acted to make it thus. My resurrection will not please him.” She considered the man before her, his face mottled and his blond-brown beard in snarls. “I do not think I would wish to be the man who delivers that unsought message to him.”

  “You speak of politics,” Bjørn scoffed. “But what matters is blood. Your blood. And I think it more than likely that Edward of Wessex would take it amiss if his niece were paraded through Mercia at the end of a chain. Stripped naked and beaten bloody for all to see. What say you, princess?”

  He did not say that word, princess, the way Thorbrand did. Aelfwynn did not care for it at all—particularly as she had never been a princess. Funny, was it not, that the accuracy of the term had not concerned her overmuch when it was in Thorbrand’s mouth.

  But it was better not to think about his mouth. Not here in these ghostly woods, where she couldn’t say she was overfond of the way this Bjørn was staring fixedly at hers.

  “Indeed he would look ill upon it,” Aelfwynn managed to say in the same mild, unassuming manner, though her pulse crowed loud in her ears. “As would any good man who gazed upon a woman treated in so callous a manner, I would hope.” Her captor did naught but glare at her, the corners of his mouth wetter than before, and she did not like it at all. She bowed her head. “Let us pray, Bjørn. It is all that sustains me in these darkest days.”

  Bjørn, unsurprisingly, did not choose to pray with her. He started walking again, shoving her before him as he went. At least that meant he had released his vicious grip on her arm. Aelfwynn advised herself to be grateful for what she could.

  And she could not have said how long this went on. When her walking speed was not to Bjørn’s taste, he pushed her again—and not gently. Almost as if he wished for her to fall to the cold earth, for reasons she preferred not to consider. Instead, she took it upon herself to pray, loudly.

  Yet her melodious Latin only seemed to make Bjørn’s muttering sound more and more unhinged the longer they walked away from the village.

  The cold morning sun rose as they walked. First it shone through the trees, then it began to filter in from an angle, making the bare branches glow. And Aelfwynn could not allow herself to wonder what it was Thorbrand was doing now. Searching for her, she hoped—

  But then, despite all the ways their bodies had become one last night, she had not said she would marry him, had she? She had not reacted at all well to the notion.

  He had asked her for her hand, again and again, in their tent last night. Though it had not been so much of an asking, in truth. It had been more a part of the rhythm in the way he had thundered between her thighs, wringing her inside out, and then tossing her straight back into the flames.

  Over and over, until they were both worn thin with pleasure...

  Aelfwynn could not bear the idea that he might think she had left him of her own volition. But she cast that aside even as she thought it. Because he might well believe that, but why should that change a thing for him? Thorbrand had treated her as he had not because he intended to make her a slave, as she had thought he did. But because this was how he intended to take her to wife.

  She didn’t know how long she walked on, dodging Bjørn’s mean-spirited shoves, as she struggled to full take in the meaning of that.

  It had been a surprise to her yesterday to discover he wished to marry her. More than simply a surprise—it had made her something like dizzy. Yet it hadn’t been a surprise to him. He had known all along. He had planned to wed her from the start.

  And suddenly everything made a different kind of sense.

  The way Thorbrand had handled her from the beginning. How he had slowly gentled her to his touch, night after night on the road. First the way he had rubbed her down when she ached, then how he had kissed her. How he had draped her over his chest and let her sleep there. And had not, until recently, ever taken her beneath him as he could so easily have done at any point, for she had claimed she disliked it. She thought of the pool where she had given him her maidenhead. More, that he had already been to the cottage before he’d found her on the old road south of Tamworth. He had already known the pool was there—had he waited to rid her of her innocence until they reached it?

  Aelfwynn was no fool and now no innocent, either. And thus she knew that he could have taken her at any time and not concerned himself much with her pleasure while he was about it. For she understood now, in retrospect, the women’s talk she’d overheard before. Words she had heard and thought little of meant different things to her now that she, too, was as delightfully sinful as anyone else.

  She remembered, at the start, fearing that Thorbrand might simply take what he wanted from her. She had worried he would glut himself and then give her to his brother and cousin. And she could not have said when it was she had stopped worrying about those things, only that she had—and that before they had arrived at the cottage. Because all along, Thorbrand had kept her safe. He had fed her. He had warmed her. He had cared for her—rubbing out the aches in her body and claiming only kisses in return.

  Kisses. She stumbled over an up-thrust root on the forest floor and caught herself, darting a glance back to see the way Bjørn lunged forward—then stopped when she remained upright.

  No, indeed, she told herself stoutly. I shall not fall.

  Aelfwynn kept on, though her mind still raced. How had she possibly imagined that the way Thorbrand had treated her was how a man treated a slave? One he might choose to sell or brutalize or both? A concubine he could do with as he wished, including have her sacrificed upon his death, if she had heard the stories true?

  Even when he had chased off her men and swung up behind her on that poor old nag, it had been a far kinder, respectful affair than this. She knew well that even a properly chosen bride sent off to a new house with every promise made, from the handgeld give
n in payment to the bride’s family to the price of the brýdgifu a woman took with her and kept as her own even should her husband perish—all hammered out to the satisfaction of the two families involved in the customary way—might not fare as well as she had done with a Northman who’d laid in wait for her in the road. For there were many things supposedly frowned upon inside the walls of a warm hall where all was pleasant and bright, but that did not prevent them happening. Sometimes right outside the walls. Sometimes in the shadows there within.

  And she knew, in the part of her deep inside that had always wanted to fight like her mother, that Bjørn had no intention of treating her with anything like the steel-tipped kindness Thorbrand had showed her. Rather the opposite—and she was glad of it that he walked behind her so he could not see how she failed to keep her countenance smooth and untroubled in that moment.

  Aelfwynn tried to quiet her mind. She marched on and on, the ground beneath her feet either frozen solid where the woods were thick, or muddy when the sun’s light shone through. She was cold and her belly was empty, but on she marched.

  Deep within, she believed that Thorbrand would search for her. That did not mean he would find her. And even if he did, he might not do so before she was forced to suffer through any number of indignities at this Bjørn’s hands.

  Aelfwynn was pleased, then, that this morning before she’d exited the tent she had opened the pouches she’d taken with her from Tamworth and found the dagger that Thorbrand had confiscated. The first time he had pulled her underdress to her waist and put his hands on her body as he pleased, their second night together. She could not have said what, exactly, had inspired her to seek out the dagger when she had not thought of it since he’d taken it from her. A mixture of uncertainty and temper, were she honest with herself. Uncertainty about what her future held, whether as a wife to Northman or even as a bride in this village where there were only strangers and none of her family or friends. And temper because Thorbrand’s announcement that he intended to marry her had infuriated her. It had wrecked her. It had made her feel too many things she had not the words to describe.