by Connie Mason
“I would if there was one to hand,” Brandr said through clenched teeth. “I’ll settle for killing you instead.”
He sucked in a deep breath then loosed his rage in a fierce berserkr howl before he charged. His blade sang a death song as it flashed in glittering arcs. His strength waned. This blistering attack would be his last.
Only death would stop him.
***
Katla pried Aldis and her child from the corner mere heartbeats before that part of the roof would have caved in on them. Sparks filled the air, and the woman collapsed in a coughing fit as the black smoke grew thicker.
“Come,” Katla urged, crouching down. “Stay low. The air is better here. We must get to the door.”
The other women were obscured by dense smoke, but she could hear them still clawing at the locked portal. Perhaps there was a way to dislodge the hinges.
“It makes no difference,” Aldis wailed. “Here or there. We die anyway.”
“Do you want the child to die too?”
The woman’s face crumpled, and she thrust the babe into Katla’s arms. “Take Linnea. Take her. I can’t bear to watch when death comes for her.”
Katla clutched the squirming babe to her chest and crawled one-handed toward the door. Aldis keened behind her but didn’t follow.
“Keep moving. Only the dead deserve rest.”
Brandr’s last message jerked her from hopeless stupor and filled her with determination. Katla wouldn’t give up. Not so long as she could draw breath.
A fiery beam crashed to earth behind her, burying Aldis behind a wall of flame. The keening stopped abruptly, the sound snipped off mid-wail.
Katla kept moving.
The child stopped struggling and went limp in her arms. She passed the bucket by the central fire pit and splashed a handful of water over the babe’s face. Linnea sputtered, gave a weak cry, and began rooting against Katla’s breast. Katla swallowed back a sob and poured the last of the water over both of them to protect them from burning ash. Then she continued to crawl toward the door.
As she neared it, the smoke parted, swept away as if by an invisible hand. Overhead, there was a loud whoosh, and the fire was suddenly snuffed out. The opening to the sethus swung wide, and a man was framed in the doorway, his face in shadow.
The other women pushed past him, squealing with relief.
He strode into the sethus and knelt beside Katla long enough to scoop her into his arms.
“Brandr.”
With a grunt, he rose, carrying her and the baby out into the night. Once they cleared the doorway, Brandr set her down a safe distance away. She sank onto the stubbled grass, dragging in breaths and coughing out the smoky air trapped in her lungs. The sickly sweet scent of roasting meat made Katla want to retch.
There was no sign of the other women. Katla assumed they’d taken to their heels without stopping to see who’d won the fight.
“Is there anyone else inside?” Brandr asked.
The child’s mother was dead. She shook her head and clutched the snuffling baby tighter.
“It’s dangerous to leave the sethus like this then,” Brandr said, “Only half-destroyed. It might fall down on someone.”
Then as Katla watched in amazement, a blue flame bloomed in the center of Brandr’s palm. He tossed the ball of fire to the charred roof and rib cage of beams, where it caught and blazed up into an inferno almost instantly.
Katla gasped. “What did you…what are you?”
Her vision wavered for a moment, then darkness gathered at the edges. Finally she winked out as completely as a pinched-off candle.
***
Brandr lifted the baby from Katla’s arms and set the squalling mass off to the side.
As long as the brat’s making enough noise to wake the dead, there’s nothing truly wrong with it, Brandr reasoned.
Katla, on the other hand, was pale and drawn, her eyes open and unseeing. He checked her for injury and found none. He laid his head between her breasts and was relieved to hear her heart beating, though it was thready and rapid.
“Princess.” He gave her shoulders a slight shake and tried to wipe the black soot from her face with his sleeve. Panic clawed at his gut like a cornered badger. “Katla. Love. Come back.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed, and she coughed twice.
She sat up, her body racked by another bout of hacking. He wished he had a water gourd to offer her. She lifted her arms to him, and he gathered her close, rocking her slightly.
“You’re alive,” she whispered. “We’re both alive.” Then she pulled away and cocked her head at him. “Why is the baby crying?”
“Because it’s a baby, I expect,” Brandr said with a grin. Always looking out for someone else, his princess was back.
“She. Not it. And her name is Linnea. She’s not hurt, is she?” Katla snatched her up and examined her down to counting her toes. The child quieted and tucked its tiny thumb between a pair of rosebud lips.
Brandr sank down beside her. Of the three of them, only he was bleeding, but that’s how he’d have ordered matters if he’d been given a choice. He’d already decided the wound on his leg wasn’t serious. Blood had matted his trousers to his flesh, and it would bleed again when the wound was cleaned, but there was no major damage.
“What did you…before I…” Katla began. “I saw you and…there was…”
“What did you see?” He’d known this was coming, but he’d hoped to break the truth to her in a gentler way. Of course, there was nothing gentle about what he was.
“You were holding fire,” she whispered.
“Ja.” He blew on his palm. “Like this?”
The blue flame sparked to cheerful life. He’d almost forgotten how good it felt to summon fire. As if his life had turned a perfect circle. Complete.
Katla scooted away from him, her eyes round as an owlet’s. “Are you a…seid-man?”
Brandr snorted. “What do you take me for? I dabble not in magick. You’ve been in my bed, and you’ve seen me fight. Do I seem the weak-wristed type who takes power by dark methods?”
“No, but…how else could you do that?”
One shoulder lifted in a shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve always been able to call the fire. I set any number of accidental ones when I was a boy, and was whipped for it more often than I like to remember. Mayhap if I’d told my father the truth of how the fires happened, he’d have seen the matter differently, but I doubt it.”
She leaned forward to peer at the tiny flames licking his palm but not raising so much as a blister.
“Some are gifted with prodigious memory. Others can sing the stars from the sky. I was given control of the fire.” He snuffed out the flame between his palms. “At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“What does that mean?”
“I didn’t understand it myself until I met a sorcerer in Byzantium and sat under his tutelage. According to him, there are four elements—earth, air, water, and fire. Once in a great age, someone is born with the ability to call a particular element to them, to shape and control it.”
“And you’re one of them?”
He grimaced at her. “I’m a fire mage, Katla. I don’t know how I do it, any more than I know everything involved in drawing a breath. It’s just part of who I am.”
“I see.” She stared at the burning sethus as the back wall collapsed in a shower of sparks.
“To control flame takes concentration,” he said as he rose and retrieved his sword. It was still implanted deeply in the big man’s chest. “I wasn’t able to stop the fire right away because…well, I was a little distracted.”
He pulled out the sword and cleaned the blade on the grass. “Did that worthless piece of shite harm you?” He shot her a piercing gaze.
/> “No, once I told him you’d be coming, he decided to wait until he’d dealt with you,” she said with a sigh. “Thank the gods.”
“It wouldn’t have been your fault.”
“Nothing happened.” She shook with delayed tremors but managed to settle herself. Then she asked in a small voice, “Did you start that fire?”
“No, not on the house, at any rate.” He shoved his sword back into the shoulder baldric. He pointed to the mound of cooling meat that used to be a man splayed on the ground. “That was his doing.”
“Oh.”
“I’m very careful about how and when I use my…ability.”
Brandr noticed a bulge beneath his slain enemy’s belt. He bent and fished it out. It was a small figurine of a pregnant female. He’d never seen its like, but the way his palm tingled, he sensed it was a thing of power.
“The return of the Old Ones and the Old Ways,” the man he’d killed had said.
Could this image have anything to do with that?
He secreted it away in the leather pouch at his waist. When he reached home, he’d ask someone with a much wiser head about the figurine and the power he felt emanating from it.
Silence drew out between him and Katla, a wall of separation growing higher as the moments slipped by. He turned and looked back at the sethus. The last of the roof had collapsed into the main room, and the charred walls began to sag inward.
Say something.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
He turned back to her. Had she heard his thoughts? No, that was fanciful in the extreme. Katla was many things, but fanciful was not one of them. She was the practical sort. If she had an ability to hear another’s thoughts, she’d have used it on him long before now.
“Say you understand,” he suggested.
“How can I? You don’t even understand it.”
He had to give her that one.
His leg was starting to throb. He swallowed back a foul curse.
“There’s no need to be vulgar,” she said primly.
“Wait. Are you telling me you heard that?” He hurried back to her and settled by her side.
“I’m not deaf. Of course I did.”
“But I didn’t say anything,” Brandr said. “I only thought it.”
A smile burst over her face. “Oh, then I didn’t imagine it. I heard you, your thoughts, in my mind when I was trapped in that awful place.”
“You did? What did I say?”
“Encouraging things mostly,” she said. “Things to give me hope.”
“Can you hear my thoughts now?” he asked, imagining her on his bed of furs in Jondal with a whole night of loving before them and nothing of this sorry night in their heads.
She studied him for a moment then shook her head.
“Pity,” he said with a waggle of his brows. “You’d have enjoyed it.”
She gave his chest a playful swat.
“Maybe it works only under duress.” Katla frowned, tapping her front teeth with her fingernail. “While I was in the house, I tried to send my thoughts to you as well. I told you how many men were in the house and to be careful. Did you hear my voice in your mind?”
She looked so hopeful he wished he could say yes. If she had a special gift, perhaps she’d be more inclined to accept his.
But truth would serve him better than hope at present.
“No, I didn’t hear your voice,” he admitted, “but as I said, I was distracted at the time.”
“But not too distracted to make fire out of thin air.”
“No, I set the cattle byre ablaze before those two came out of the house.”
That was how his gift worked. He needed to be able to empty himself of all fury, all feeling. A double-minded mage is mute to his element. The fire wouldn’t be able to hear him. If he’d been able to control his emotions, he’d have put the fire out before he engaged in swordplay. But with Katla in danger and armed men between them, there was no use seeking that dispassionate, calm center he needed to draw the flames out or make them dance to his will.
And he certainly didn’t need to go into a long, drawn-out explanation of how his gift meshed with the secret of Greek fire.
“So,” she said with a sigh, “I’m married to a fire mage.”
“Ja, you are. Any regrets?”
She shook her head and gave him a quick kiss. “At least it’s a useful oddity. We’ll never have to worry about having tinder and flint.”
Chapter 28
“You should have told me you were injured,” Katla scolded once they were back aboard the coracle and she discovered Brandr’s trouser leg was stiff with blood. She settled the sleeping baby into the center of a coil of rope and tended to her husband’s wounds. The short Scandinavian night ended, and the sun peeped over the mountaintops.
Brandr submitted to her nursing with grumbles and complaints, but she suspected he enjoyed the attention.
“I wouldn’t have made you catch that stray nanny so I could milk her if I’d known you were bleeding,” she said.
“Ja, you would, and we both know it,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t mind. The last thing I want is to listen to a hungry babe crying all the way to Jondal.”
He hadn’t complained when she insisted they bring the baby with them. He’d been concerned only about how she’d feed it. Once they rounded up the goat, Katla was able to fill a skin with its milk. Then she dipped her sleeve into the rich liquid and let Linnea suck the linen. It was a slow process, but it seemed to work for now.
When the babe curled her tiny fingers around Katla’s, she thought her heart would burst with the tender sweetness of it. She decided then and there. Linnea was hers as surely as if she’d borne her inside her body for nine months.
Brandr had carried the baby down the steep goat track to the coracle. He actually seemed to like her a little.
Of course, Katla hadn’t told him she intended to keep the child yet. That was a talk best saved for smoother waters and a full night’s sleep.
“There,” she said as she tied off the bandage on his thigh. He had such beautiful thighs; it was a great pity one would be marred with a slashing scar now. She ran her hands up and down his legs, reveling in the light dusting of hair and corded muscle beneath his skin. His tunic rose, and she knew his cock had come to life beneath it. After all they’d been through during the night, his body still roused to her.
Men were so delightfully simple sometimes.
He pulled her down for a long, deep kiss. Desire stirred in her belly, but she tamped it down.
“I can’t,” she said as she broke off their kiss. “I mean I want to…” Judging from the raging ache that leaped to life in her groin, she wanted to desperately. Evidently her body was just as delightfully simple as his. “But I’m filthy. Covered with soot and reeking. And on a boat? How can you even think it?”
Brandr laughed. “You’re alive and here, and I want you. You’d be surprised how little that part of me cares about such niceties as cleanliness or a steady foundation. But if you feel that strongly about it, then we should at least have a bath.”
“Where?”
“In the fjord, of course,” he said with a shrug as he stood to pull his tunic over his head, leaving him gloriously naked.
But she didn’t have long to admire him. He dove off the port bow, drenching Katla with spray. The water was so cold her throat closed off, and she gasped for breath. Brandr’s sleek head emerged from the dark blue water.
“Oof! I’d forgotten how cold this water is.” He shook his head, and droplets scattered around him, sparkling like silver. Then he windmilled his arms and cut across the surface back toward the coracle and climbed aboard. The small craft dipped to one side, but he was quick enough that no water washed over the gunwale ex
cept the rivulets that streamed down his body and puddled along the bottom of the hull.
“With water that cold, that’s enough. Your turn,” he said with a grin as he settled back on the seat by the tiller to let the rising sun dry him. The quick dip had melted his erection, but he was still so beautiful to look upon, Katla’s eyes hurt.
“I can’t swim, remember? And I don’t much care for a salty bath.”
“The water’s brackish this far into the fjord. Enough fresh water pours in from rivers and streams to cut the seawater.”
Sure enough, no briny crystals clung to Brandr’s skin.
“I still can’t swim, but I think I could make do with a sponge bath,” Katla said cautiously. “Turn around.”
“Why?”
“It’s not like the laug at home,” she said. “I’ll be naked.”
“I’ve seen you naked,” he said, his body obviously warming to the idea again. “And not just in the bath house.”
“Not in broad daylight.”
“Katla, I’m your husband. Did you not promise to please me in our wedding vows?” He folded his arms across his chest. “It pleases me to look at you. All of you. Besides, if you dally much longer, there may be more ship traffic, and I won’t be the only one who gets a peek.”
He leaned back and stretched out his long legs, clearly enjoying the sun’s kiss on his skin. His clean skin.
Katla couldn’t bear the smoky reek of her underdress for another heartbeat. She wiggled out of it and leaned over the side of the boat to dunk her long hair into the water.
***
Brandr’s breath hissed over his teeth.
There was his wife, bare arse to the sky, breasts falling forward. She grasped the gunwale with one hand and rinsed her hair out with the other, setting the boat rocking. He was treated to quick peeks of her pink slit that appeared and disappeared as the angle of the deck changed.
Either she had no idea how erotically alluring that position was, or she was trying to kill him.
Then she washed off her sooty face and rose up, tossing her head, her long hair slapping her back wetly. “Oh, that’s cold!”
