by Joni Sensel
“I’m sorry,” she told him, her voice fluttery. “I don’t know what you think, but I won’t lift my skirts for you. Even knowing what dawn may bring us. I—I am just not ready to do that.”
Aidan gaped, as amazed by her frank words as by the refusal they carried. Then confusion swirled through him.
“What are we doing, then?” he asked, low. Surely she felt at least some of the force that kept knocking him, breathless, to None. He knew she did: Lana’s hands had been on him as well.
Her eyes darted from side to side as though she hoped someone else would appear to answer his question.
“Kissing?” Her voice rose uncertainly at the end.
Aidan ran a hand through his hair. His fist clenched in it, pulling, and he exhaled hard. Their exchange had seemed like quite a bit more than just kissing to him. His entire body throbbed.
She tried to smile. “It wouldn’t matter, anyway. The hawthorn would stop you if I didn’t.”
At his bewildered look, she giggled and patted the pocket of the mantle nearby. Aidan remembered, fuzzily, that she’d slipped a hawthorn twig there.
“Doors are not the only things hawthorn will guard,” she explained. “Mothers put hawthorn beneath daughters’ beds to make sure they remain virgins. ’Tis in my pocket, not under my bed, but …” Her wry grin spreading, she raised her palms and dropped them helplessly.
Her gentle humor worked in reverse. A flash of frustration seared through Aidan at her lighthearted tone. He did not catch his tongue before he’d snapped, “I thought your virginity was already stolen.”
She recoiled as if she’d been slapped. “That doesn’t count,” she whispered, turning away and hiding her face in her shoulder.
Aidan felt her wave of hurt and shame like a lash across his chest. Drawing a wobbly breath through that sting, he kneaded one clenched hand with the other, unsure how to regain control of his body, let alone soothe the pain he’d dealt her. After several moments of feeling his heart slow and listening to the misery warbling through her eleven, he reached to touch her shoulder. She jerked from beneath his hand. He gritted his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I should never have said that, and I’m behaving like a dog. You’re just so … you tempt me something fierce.”
Lana kept her back to him, hugging herself.
Sighing, he repeated, “I’m sorry. I’ll go.” He did not want to leave her, and he feared what she’d said about the yew, but he didn’t know what else to offer.
When she did not contradict him, he picked himself up to his feet.
“Don’t,” she pleaded then. “Please.” She turned halfway back toward him, though she didn’t even try to meet his eyes. The night breeze gusted between them and rested again before she added, “The moon isn’t down yet.”
Aidan tried to interpret those words against what had just happened between them. Without much sense of success, he ventured, “You still want to help me?”
“Aidan,” she replied, sounding anguished, “sometimes I think you are stupid on purpose.”
With no good answer to that, he stood looking out at the misshapen eye of the moon. It leered through the trees, sinking almost visibly toward the western horizon. His feet wanted to pace, if not escape altogether, but a wave of weariness rolled through his shoulders and back. He let his legs fold again, sitting carefully more than an arm’s length from Lana, with his back mostly to her.
After a long time filled only with the murmur of trees, she asked, “How could you say such a thing? I know I made you angry, but … still.”
“Not angry,” he sighed, heartily wishing he’d listened to Michael and sat now by the forge. “Just …” He hunted for the right words. Those that came to mind first weren’t any he wanted to say to a girl. “Just confused. But you have every right to be angry with me.”
“Not angry,” she echoed. “Just hurt.”
He told her again he was sorry. Afraid more words would make matters worse, but unable to bear the painful chasm between them much longer, Aidan bit his lip and added, “I really did not mean to say that someone else’s offense gave me any right to—”
“Stop! I did not share that with you so I could be reminded of it!”
Chastised, he only nodded. He wondered, though, why she had shared it at all.
Lana added, “I so hoped you would be different.”
He winced. Then a scab of resentment formed over the sting. After considering and rejecting a great many replies, he gave up and accepted the punishing silence.
She broke it herself. “No, I take that back, Aidan. That was unfair.”
He had been thinking the same thing, but the regret in her voice drew out his own once again. He replied, “What I said before wasn’t fair, either. I would take it back if I could.”
She did not respond with words, but Aidan could hear her subdued eleven gradually lift to a more ethereal tone. His heart wanted to follow that rise and bask once more in her favor, so he took a deep breath and a chance.
“I am not sorry to have had you in my arms, though,” he added. “My next embrace may come from a shroud.”
Lana made a choked sound he could not interpret, and he feared he had erred yet again. Then she spoke.
“Couldn’t we … couldn’t you just hold me and that’s all?”
For an instant, Aidan rejoiced: She seemed to have forgiven him. Then the question itself took firmer shape in his mind. He blew out a breath weighted with equal parts of frustration and despair. He longed to give her the answer she wanted, but he feared it might be a lie.
“I don’t know if I can do that, Lana.” He made the mistake of looking over his shoulder at her. Just the shape of her form in the gloom and the prospect of feeling her body against his once more sent a tingle along his skin.
A hopeful smile flicked onto her lips, not sure it should stay. “I can slap hands that travel too far.”
Glad the wounded creature had slipped back out of sight, he replied gently, “I’m serious. I don’t think I can. You are too overwhelming that close. Better if I stay a short distance away.” He rubbed his face. “Especially if I expect to ever return to the abbey.”
“Do you?” she asked, after a moment.
“I don’t know.” He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know what I’m worried about. I probably won’t get the chance. I suppose if God spares me past dawn, I should take that as a sign of His will.”
Lana didn’t reply.
As they watched the moon sink, however, she began talking again, almost to herself. “I know how much power I will be holding in my hands when we go to the alehouse,” she said, “but I would be lying if I said I knew without doubt I could wield it. Are you afraid to die, Aidan?”
He considered well before answering, the day’s images crowding his head. “I am more afraid of a meaningless life. The end can be sudden and rude, and I would rather need God’s correction for trying too hard than earn His disdain for squandering His gifts.” He hesitated. “Including you. Which is why I wish you would—”
“It would be easier for me to believe in your God,” she overrode him, “if Christians could agree on more things. They can’t even agree on the tree that Christ’s cross was made from. I’ve asked the priest and at least twenty pilgrims. That’s how I got the idea in the first place—to sell pieces, I mean. Nobody seems to know surely. It doesn’t say in the Gospels, does it?”
Surprised, Aidan said, “I don’t think so.”
“Do you know them by heart?” she wondered.
“No. But I have read all four, and heard them spoken aloud many times.”
“Some say poplar,” she told him, “and that’s why the tree shakes so—it trembles when it remembers how it served. Father Niall told me elder wood formed the cross, and elders have been stunted ever since. It is a powerful wood in matters of death, and a fickle one if you don’t respect it enough. But I’ve never met someone who has been to the Holy Land to find out if poplar or elder grows th
ere. I’ve heard that the weather is hot, not like here, so I’m not sure they would. Does either appear in the Gospels?”
Aidan shook his head, disarmed by the depth of her thoughts on the topic. He’d spent many hours of prayer with the crucifix in his mind and never once wondered where the wood had come from before it became a burden for Christ.
“The only other tree in any Scripture story I’ve ever heard was an olive,” she mused. “I don’t even know what an olive tree looks like.”
“There’s a story about Christ and a fig tree,” Aidan told her. “He was hungry but the tree didn’t have any figs.”
“What’s a fig?”
“I don’t know. I just know you can eat them.”
“Not even the Romans would cut down a fruit tree for a crucifix, though. That would be stupid.”
“There are lots of other trees in the books of the Bible, though.” At her look of surprise, he continued, “Chestnuts and willows and plenty I’ve never heard of. But most are just mentioned, or the prophets are really talking about powerful people or times of plenty—not the actual trees.”
Lana grumbled, “You would think with all that talk about trees they would have said what kind of wood formed the cross.”
“Does it matter?” he said. “I mean—”
“It matters to me,” she declared. “The kind of tree mattered in Eden, too, didn’t it?”
The smile that had crept to Aidan’s lips faded. “In man’s fall, you mean? I suppose you are right.”
“The Tree of Life said to be there could be the rowan. Or the oak. They’re both called that. But the yew is the tree of life and of death, so I think that might have been it. And since they live almost forever, the cross could have been cut from the same yew. Because Christ died on it, but he rose again to bring eternal life to God’s chosen. Life and death and then life.”
“The Tree of Life in the garden is the Tree of Life Everlasting,” Aidan said. “Not life and death.”
“It is? Life Everlasting?”
“That’s why Adam and Eve were not to eat of that tree. Only God can bestow life everlasting.”
She frowned. “You know that part of the Bible, too?”
“I’ve read it. In Latin, though, not Greek or Hebrew.”
“Hebrew?”
“From the Jews,” he explained. “Most of the oldest books were first put down in Hebrew.”
Her face fell. “Learning to read Latin won’t do me much good then, will it? I never thought of that.”
“’Tis God’s Word, whatever the language,” he ventured.
“But details change or get lost between one teller and the next.” She sighed. “Maybe you could read the tree bits to me sometime, anyhow.”
Aidan tried to keep his thoughts off his face. Given their plans and the now barren abbey, reading to her seemed even less likely than teaching her to read for herself. He meant it, though, when he said simply, “I’d like that.”
She smiled, but her words revealed the unease in her heart. “If we do not stand before the Tree of Life Everlasting itself before then.”
Resisting the desire to spew false reassurance, he said, “Heaven will decide.”
She gazed into the sky. “Heaven and the powers of earth,” she replied. “The moon has gone down. We’d better get the holly and go.”
XX
The holly branch Lana had chosen was large enough that she had trouble breaking it off. Having already warned him to silence during the taking, she gestured at Aidan for help. Stepping alongside, he put his hands in place of hers, then twisted and ripped until the shrub let the branch go.
Lana grimaced at the struggle. When the branch finally came loose, she reached over Aidan’s head to remove her rowan charm from his neck, hanging it instead on the torn, white stump of the branch. Collecting the yew bough and her mantle as well as the lamp, the pair set off in silence back toward the smithy.
Once out of sight of the holly, Lana spoke. “We can talk again now. The holly did not much want to help us. I hope I haven’t made a mistake.”
Aidan tried not to feel the lump that formed in his throat at her words. Instead he scanned the eastern horizon for hints of dawn. Though he saw none as yet, he said, “We should hurry. I don’t want them to think I’m not coming.” His mind clung to that small, comfortable fear rather than face a much greater dread.
With the moon down, speed proved a challenge, and they both tripped more than once. After they’d emerged from the woods, the way became easier. Aidan and Lana worked out a rough plan on their way across the fields. She would do no more than hint at what she intended to work with her boughs. She listened carefully, though, when he recalled what he could, from some years ago, about the placement of the alehouse door and the furnishings around its central hearth. She had been inside, too, but now the details could be important to them both.
“’Tis not that big, not for what might be a score of men,” he said. “We may be within reach of their weapons right from the doorway.” He glanced at her beside him. With her form overlaid by the images in his mind, his nearest arm rose involuntarily to shield her. It was all he could do to push it back down, rather than curling it around her and drawing her far away from raiders and cold blades and blood.
“Aidan,” she said, unaware of his struggle, “once we’re inside, will you be able to hear which of them is their leader? They must have one, wouldn’t you think?”
Afraid of the path her questions were taking, he hedged, “I don’t think they speak Latin.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She cast him a sharp look. “I mean your numbers.”
Reluctance, invisible but heavy, dragged at his feet. He struggled to keep trudging through the meadow grass.
“Do all powerful men hum the same?” Lana continued, when he did not respond. “What I do will work best if I can deliver it to the one in charge. ‘Enthrall the trunk to enthrall the branches,’ so they say.”
“Strike the head and Goliath falls,” he murmured. She had a point. Unfortunately, it stabbed straight at him.
“Can you?” she pressed.
The easier answer, and the one that would leave him less culpable—no—perched on his lips. Holding it back, he searched his mind and his heart for the truth. Given enough time to observe them, he thought he could probably pick out the Viking leader simply by watching. He would not, however, have much time at all for using his eyes.
His sense of numbers flowed immediately, when he was paying attention, but nothing had ever depended on it. Recalling the wounded man at the beekeeper’s cottage, he worried that all Norsemen might hum of three. Even if a few sounded of the same fives and sevens and eights common in the dominant men Aidan knew, that knowledge might not be enough. The volume and power and harmonics of any one hum revealed a lot. Those details also took focus and calm to be heard. The pressure to catch and interpret individual sounds in a chaos of strange people and danger daunted Aidan completely.
“I’m not sure,” he murmured finally. “I might be able to make a pretty good guess. But it would not be certain, and even if it were, I wouldn’t want to count on that, Lana.”
Feeling her eyes gauging him, he expected her to encourage or cajole him. He could have more easily discounted either than the response she gave.
“You are counting on my skills,” she said quietly. “I will be counting on yours.”
Appalled, he shook his head. “I don’t want to risk it.” He didn’t add that it was mostly her life he felt he was risking. He already rued drawing her into such danger. If he made a mistake that directly led to her slaughter, the only comfort would be his own death, and the sooner the better.
“We’ll be risking more,” she countered, “if you can’t help me with that. Find some way to point him out to me. Quiclcly.”
His windpipe tightened around the air trying to flow through it. It cut off the breath he needed to argue. Only the unwavering will in the sound of eleven beside him kept him moving.
<
br /> A few strides later, he managed to say, “I’ll try.”
By the time they reached the cluster of trees near the brewster’s where Liam had suggested they meet, the sky had shifted from onyx to slate. A dozen men waited with sharpened sickles and scythes, a few burning torches held low, and more ready to blaze.
At the sight of Lana alongside him, the men fidgeted and murmured among themselves. Some gave her knowing looks, but most regarded her with startled suspicion. Only Liam hurried to greet them.
“I’d nearly given up,” he whispered. His eyes flicked to Lana. Surely he recognized her; the community was too small to harbor anyone unfamiliar by sight, and Lana’s bastard status had earned her more notoriety than most. But if her identity mattered to Liam, he didn’t show it. Nor did he take any notice of the branches in her arms, although Aidan thought it considerably less likely that his brother knew anything of their significance.
“This will be no place for a woman not practiced as a warrior, Aidan,” Liam said. “Have you changed your mind?”
“Not.”
“No one will think less of you if you have.”
Aidan looked past the guttering glow of his nearly exhausted lamp to survey the dark faces of the men who awaited. Both Kyle and Michael stood among them. He supposed Liam was right, but he saw enough grim anticipation to know the makeshift mob would be disappointed if they lost their chance to teach a few Vikings a lesson.
Liam added, “And I would be much relieved to have one less grave to dig once the sun comes up.”
Unable to bear his brother’s heartfelt doubt, Aidan took refuge in jest. “Put me on a pyre with the Norsemen you kill, then.”
Liam did not smile.
“Worry about staying out of your own grave,” Aidan added gently. “I am going to do this.”
Liam blew a long breath and looked back at Lana. “Send your friend on to the smithy, then.”
“If she would listen to me, Liam, I might do that. But she won’t. Lana is my … my wood-witch and she insists on going in with me.”
