by Connie Mason
This was no time for the babe to make a problem of herself. Not until Katla had a chance to convince Brandr they should raise her as their own. She scooped her up and headed for the door.
She paused for a moment, thinking to snuff out the lamp, but it flared briefly and then puffed out before she put her hand to it. In the darkness, she heard a soft snore.
Brandr had put out the lamp before he winked out himself.
Being a fire mage does have its uses. She pushed past the heavy door and closed it softly behind her. Linnea still fussed as Katla walked along the corridor, dodging servants with trays piled with meat or planks to set up as tables in the great hall. She’d seen so few servants earlier she could only surmise that Hilde had recruited some of the villagers. Judging from snippets of overheard conversation, the night meal was going to be a celebratory dinner welcoming the jarl’s brother.
She was glad Brandr was receiving his due.
But no one gives a plum for the jarl’s brother’s wife and child. She pressed up against the wall while the servants hurried by, oblivious that Katla jiggled a crying babe and could use some assistance. She tried patting Linnea’s back and rocking her while she hummed a tuneless little ditty.
Nothing helped.
“The child is hungry,” came a wobbly voice from behind her. The thump of a cane on the slate floor punctuated her words.
Katla turned to see an old woman weaving toward her. She patted Linnea’s bottom, trying to shush her, but the babe launched into a full-blown wail. “How can you tell?”
“Lots and lots of practice,” the old woman said, stopping before them.
The woman peeled back enough of the swaddling to peer down at Linnea, making a soft noise like a dove settling on her eggs. The babe quieted, looking intently at the new face for a moment before she seemed to remember her empty belly. Her lower lip started to quiver, and she cried afresh.
“Well, aren’t you going to take the babe to her nurse?” the woman asked. “Naught else will satisfy her.”
It irritated Katla that this stranger should be so presumptuous. “I think I know what’s best for my own child.”
“Mayhap that would be true if she were your own.”
Katla’s gaze jerked to the woman’s face. She didn’t have the sly, calculating air of a seid-woman who looks to make her living selling potions and runic charms, but she spoke with such conviction, Katla couldn’t help asking, “Why do you think she’s not mine?”
“Prove me wrong. Fetch out your breast and give her suck then.”
“Women sometimes lose their milk, you know,” she said defensively.
“Ja, but that’s not the case here, is it?” The old woman made a clicking noise with her tongue and teeth that distracted the babe long enough for her to stop fussing. “There’s not a thing of either you or Brandr in the babe, though I have great hopes for her in your care.”
“Thank you,” she said with a doubtful tone. Slightly mollified, Katla took Linnea to Una’s door and left her with the wet nurse.
“Do not fret that you cannot meet the child’s every need,” the old woman said, following behind them with her rhythmic, shuffle-clump gait. “No one can ever satisfy all of another person’s needs.”
Katla raised a wry brow. Obviously she couldn’t satisfy Osvald’s, or he’d never have taken a thrall to his bed. As soon as it appeared in her mind, she swatted away the notion, as if it were a pesky fly. Where had the thought even come from? She was married to Brandr now. Her life with Osvald was done, and there was no need to give it another thought.
The old woman pressed closer, so Katla was forced to take a step back. “No one will think the less of you for admitting you’re not the child’s natural mother.”
“’Tis not something I need to noise about.”
“And not something to be ashamed of either. There are children of the body and children of the heart. I was blessed with both. And both were a mix of joy and disappointment to me, but I loved them all.” When the woman smiled, Katla was drawn to her, despite her interfering bossiness. “I am Dalla. Your husband is one of my heart sons.”
“Not the one who disappointed you, I hope.”
“Not yet,” Dalla said with a quick grin that deepened her wrinkles so, her pale eyes nearly disappeared. “And you must be his bride, Katla the Black. Hush, child, ’tis no seid craft. I have ears, and all of Jondal is abuzz with your arrival. May I take your hand?”
Katla thought she needed assistance and offered her arm, but the woman snaked out a bony fist and grasped Katla’s hand in hers tightly. Dalla closed her eyes and made a low humming noise in the back of her throat. The old woman’s hand warmed in Katla’s like a glowing coal, but she couldn’t pull free. Dalla’s eyelids twitched for several heartbeats. Then they opened, and she smiled.
“I stand corrected,” Dalla said. “You are the child’s mother. In all the ways that matter, at any rate. I sense a heart connection between you and the child, a strong one.” Her eyelids fluttered closed again and then reopened. “Forged in…fire, it was. How appropriate, given the nature of your husband.”
“You know about Brandr’s…gift?”
“Know about it? Who do you think kept him from burning this place to the ground when he was a child?”
Katla shared a laugh with Dalla and linked elbows with her as she made her way down the corridor to the jarlhof doors.
“Open the door, dearie. These old arms aren’t as strong as they used to be.”
“Where are we going?” she asked after she did as Dalla requested.
“Someplace where the walls aren’t listening.” Dalla stomped determinedly toward a cleared space not too far removed from the torchlight surrounding the jarlhof, where the rocky bones of the mountain pierced its thin skin of dirt. Dalla chose one of the granite seats and settled onto it.
Katla didn’t sit. She was too busy trying to take it all in. The fjord spread out below them, a ribbon of black sprinkled with the reflection of stars. The vault of heaven above her sparked with the fire of Freya’s Brisingamen necklace.
For years, Katla’s whole world had been her small steading on Tysnes. Now she was reminded that the world was a much wider place than she supposed. Sheltering in a tiny corner of it was no true safety from the dangers that might lurk beyond her narrow confines.
“Brandr thinks war is coming,” Katla said. Dalla had moved them out of the jarlhof so they wouldn’t be overheard. May as well say what was on her mind. “His brother doesn’t want to prepare.”
“All true,” Dalla said.
“Whatever Brandr needs to do to protect the people of Hardanger Fjord, I will support him in it.”
“Support is not the same as love.”
How had they somersaulted so quickly from war to love? “What do you know of love, Dalla?”
The old woman cackled. “Oh, you youngsters! Always thinking love is your own invention and it’s never been done before. No cock’s ever been harder. No ache was ever so fierce. And the sun rises and sets on your lover’s arse!” Dalla swiped away tears of mirth from her creased cheeks and then settled to eye Katla with all seriousness. “In truth, then. For nearly three score of years, my man and I knew the joy of inn matki munr. Do I know enough of love for you?”
Katla hurried over to sit beside her. “How did you know it was the mighty passion?”
“How did I know I breathed?”
Katla frowned. “That’s not very helpful.”
“Mayhap not, but it’s true,” Dalla said. “Love isn’t something you have to wonder about. It simply is, and when it is, you know it clear to your bones.”
“Then you and your husband were able to…”
“Speak to each other without words, oh ja. Though to be honest, there were times in the beginning when we wished we could not. T
ruly, are there not some times when you are glad to be able to keep your own counsel lest your thoughts wound someone else?”
“Ja, I suppose there are,” Katla allowed. “Could you divine everything he thought?”
“No, thank the gods. Or all we’d have accomplished that first year was fighting and making up, which I’ll admit has its charms,” Dalla said. “With time, we learned how to open our minds only when we wished and how to draw the curtain and have a spot of privacy by common consent. It took practice. But in extreme circumstances, no amount of shielding will work. Our minds were completely bare to each other.”
Dalla’s face darkened for a moment. “Some things, like the moment of birth and death, are not meant to be shared. Do not think the mighty passion is all maidensongs and bellflowers. Knowing someone that deeply and still loving them, is not for the faint of heart. Why are you so interested in inn matki munr?”
“Well, I think Brandr and I have something like that.” She stood, not sure she was ready to share her experience with Dalla but wanting her advice about it desperately, since she seemed to know so much.
“You can hear his thoughts?”
“Only sometimes,” she admitted. “They come unbidden. Never when I wish them to.”
“And he can hear yours?”
Katla shook her head.
“Not once?”
“No.”
“Hmph.” Dalla’s face screwed into a puzzled frown.
“What?”
“Well, offhand, I’d say it means my boy loves you, but you haven’t quite made up your mind to love him back yet.”
“No, that can’t be right,” Katla said. Against all expectation, she did love her husband. Her chest ached with love for Brandr.
But she hadn’t told him how she felt.
Dalla took her hand and closed her eyes. “Keep still now.”
Soft as the flutter of a butterfly wing, the old woman’s mind brush hers, probing gently.
Katla stiffened.
“Tight as a pig’s arse. You’re very young to be this closed off,” Dalla said. “I’m thinking, mayhap, sometime past, someone who should have loved you hurt you.”
Katla pulled her hand away. “Ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
Katla’s shoulders sagged a bit. Dalla skewered her soul with a piercing gaze.
“I was married before. The first time my woman’s moon came, my husband took a bed slave. Our honeymoon wasn’t even up yet. And every month after that, Osvald brought his concubine into our bed, and I was forced to sleep elsewhere.”
The shame of rejection made her insides shake. She balled her fingers into fists without being aware she did so.
“I kept thinking, if only I would quicken with child, he’d have no cause to leave me.”
“But he never got you with child?”
“No.”
“So now you hold back a portion of yourself, tucked away so deep no one can reach it. No one can ever hurt you, unless you reveal that deep part,” Dalla said, leaning toward her. “Brandr can’t hurt you.”
“I don’t think he intends to,” Katla said.
“Mayhap your first husband didn’t mean to either,” Dalla suggested. “Did you tell him you didn’t want him to take a bed slave?”
She started to broach the subject once, but Osvald had flown into such a rage, she never tried to talk to him about it again. “He said it was not my business. It had nothing to do with us.”
But it did.
She realized how she’d hardened into the perfect Norse matron after that. She’d become someone so ruthlessly efficient, had run her household with such tight control, she couldn’t be bothered by a little thing like her husband’s bed slave. She couldn’t be touched by anything at all.
“Do you think Brandr will take a bed slave?” Dalla asked.
Panic knotted her belly. “I haven’t had my first moon since our wedding. I don’t know.”
“Brandr already loves you so much that his mind is open to you. I’ll warrant you never heard your first husband’s voice inside your head.”
“No, I didn’t.” But she could guess Osvald’s thoughts right enough every time she caught him glancing Inga’s way.
Katla stood abruptly. “I need to return. Linnea is surely finished nursing by now.”
“You brandish that child like a shield to keep from feeling your own need. Will you use her as a buffer between you and Brandr as well?” Katla started to protest, but Dalla waved her off and went on. “A babe is helpless and needy. If you devote yourself to the child, you think it will love you back with the same unconditional fervor.” The old woman shook her head. “If you love her, you won’t use her so. No bairn needs that sort of weight on it.”
“I’m not using her. I saved Linnea’s life. Brandr and I did,” she hastily amended.
“I’m sure. And now you expect that little one to return the favor.”
Katla flinched as though Dalla had slapped her.
“Man.” Dalla drew a curved line in the dirt with the tip of her cane. “Woman.” She etched a reflective curve next to the first, making them connected top and bottom in a perfect disc. “A child cannot complete the circle. A child’s place is in the center of the circle.” She made a small dot in the middle of the dirt drawing. “Sheltered equally by both adults.”
“That’s part of the problem.” Katla sank back down. “I don’t know if Brandr is willing to put Linnea in our circle. I half-expect him to send her away if she so much as cries too loudly.”
“That doesn’t sound like my Brandr. Still, the circle of two is complete whether or not a child rests inside it,” Dalla said. “But you’re avoiding the main problem. Do you wish to have inn matki munr?”
Yes, with her whole heart. She longed for that deep connection with Brandr, to feel his voice echo in her soul and send hers to mingle with his. To breathe one breath, share one heartbeat. To know and be known. She ached for that close bond.
“I do.”
“Then you must stop holding back. You must risk letting him hurt you,” Dalla said, rising when the bell tolled to call them to night meal. “You can never truly love my Brandr or let him love you until you do.”
Chapter 32
Brandr slept through his welcome-home night meal. Katla tried to wake him, but it was rather like poking a bear, so she let him sleep. He needed rest more than food and drink. Even his friends were forced to drink to his health roundly without him till the wee hours of the morning.
Brandr slept past the cockcrow. He slept past the sun peeking through the overhead smoke hole. He kept sleeping when Katla wiggled out from under the bedding, dressed, and took Linnea to Una for her breakfast. Then Katla made her way to the latrine.
And discovered her woman’s moon had arrived a full two weeks early.
All the horrible memories of that first time with Osvald rushed back into her. He’d been dismissive when she told him she couldn’t welcome him to their bed. It was a small matter, he’d said, and ordered Inga to join him in their chamber. Katla was welcome to stay if she wished. She could watch. It might be instructive.
A piece of her soul had crumpled and died that day.
She slipped back into the chamber she shared with Brandr and stealthily found the cloths and lint she needed to keep from soiling her clothes. She was just smoothing down her underdress again when Brandr rolled over and smiled lazily at her.
“Come back to bed.”
“I can’t,” she said quickly. “Linnea is probably done nursing.”
“Una will bring her back when she’s done,” Brandr said, lifting the bed covering in invitation. His beautiful cock was fully engorged and ready, and the sight of it alone made Katla’s belly clench. “A morning swive never takes long, and I can’t think of
a better way to start the day.”
“I can’t give you a morning swive.”
“Don’t want it quick? If you want a longer loving, that’s fine too. I expect we’ve already missed breakfast.”
“No, I mean, I want to, but I…can’t.”
Gradual understanding shaped his mouth into a silent oh. “No matter, then. But come back to bed, in any case. Once this day starts in earnest, it’s like to be a long one, and I’ve a mind to hold my wife for a bit before the world rushes in on us.”
A knot of caring surged in her chest, and she hurried to his side. He lay back and snugged her close so her head rested on his shoulder and her leg twined over his.
“I expect you’re hungrier than I,” she said. “You missed a fine welcome meal last night. Your brother clearly meant to do you honor.”
“No doubt Arn will have something to say about my missing it,” Brandr said, running his hand up and down her spine in a slow caress. “And the meal was Hilde’s doing, not his. Even so, my brother will undoubtedly take offense.”
“I don’t think so.” She snuggled deeper into his embrace. “Once I explained that you’d been awake for two days, and during that time you’d abducted your bride, lost your bride, tracked and fought three men, acquired a daughter, and still managed to find your way home—well, after all that, your attachment to your bed was easily understood. Your friend Harald seemed to think the adventure was as good as any skald’s tale.”
“That’s because the one who told it is far prettier than most skalds.” He dropped a casual kiss on her forehead. “Actually, it was more like three days awake if you consider that I didn’t get much sleep on our wedding night either.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“Never.” He tipped her face up to his and kissed her, slow and tender.
When he released her, she looked up at him, wishing with all her heart this was a time when she was privy to his thoughts.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
“Is this about trying to get me to hear you inside my head again?” he asked with a slight frown. “Because you were under duress when you thought you heard my voice, and I’m willing to bet that it was just your imagination and—”
