by Jianne Carlo
“Why are you here, Viking?” She trusted him not. Though she knew his reason for being on the isle, she had a stomach-pitted need to hear him utter the words.
He scowled, reached over, and lifted her to standing. His fingers bit into her shoulders. “You will answer my questions. Who are you?”
Mayhap the king had not told him of their betrothal. Did it matter? For though Da had deeded her Castle Caerleah, without a warrior at the helm she could ne’er hold the keep. And if she gained King Kenneth’s displeasure he could disinherit her and give her lands to another, mayhap even her mule of an uncle.
“I am Nyssa, daughter of Earl Rurari, King of Moray, and the goddess, Rán.”
His mouth opened. Snapping his teeth together, he released his grip on her arms. “Nay. I know one who has seen the Lady Nyssa. She is not as tall as a warrior, nor stout. She is petite, comely, and womanly.”
Nyssa chewed the inside of her cheeks, turned her back to him, and squatted next to the fire-pit. The insult bit her to the quick. Fighting the tears welling in her eyes, she blinked and stared at the smoldering fire.
She knew the all of her female faults. Aye, she stood head and shoulders over most men, and she had not an ounce of spare flesh on her body. The loose robe she wore served to cover the bags of gold siphoned from the siren’s treasure hordes, but made her appear square and thick from neck to chest. Gold coin needed to restore Castle Caerleah to its former glory. Gold coin to free her from marriage to any man, including this one.
“Believe what you may, Viking. I am who I am and naught will change my name or my lineage.” She blew on the stacked timber and the dying embers glowed and burst into a flicker of a flame.
Once again he picked her up, turned her around, and brought them face to face. His eyes glittered like chips of frozen loch ice, deep blue and fathomless, and his lips thinned to a stubborn, grim line. “Lie to me and you will regret every breath you take for the rest of your life. I ask again, who are you?”
She lifted her chin and met his stare. “I am the Lady Nyssa, heiress to Castle Caerleah, daughter of Rán and Rurari. Do not test me, Viking, for not only am I of warrior size, I have the strength of my jötunn mother.”
His gaze flickered from her shorn hair to the coarse garb “borrowed” from a sleeping priest, to the tattered leggings, and her shoddy boots. “Though you be tall, you have not the height for the daughter of a giantess.”
Nyssa sneered. “How many jötunn goddesses know you?”
His jaw worked back and forth. He tightened his grip on her arms, and she bit back a protest. “You will cease answering a question with a question.”
She did not bother to hide her grin. “Pray tell, what question did you ask?”
“By Odin, you are insolent,” he murmured so softly she had to strain to hear him. All at once the fierce frown he wore lifted and his lips curved.
Dread slithered across her nape.
“I have heard of a mark stamped on the Lady Nyssa.”
Her throat and face heated. “I have such a mark.”
“I will see it.” He carried her to the cave’s wall and pushed her back against the cold stone.
“Nay.” She could barely think for the shame scalding her flesh and the musk-laden male scent of him filling her nose. “’Tis not your right to view.”
“If you are who you say you are, then you are my betrothed, and I have such a right. Show me the mark. I tell you this once and once only.” He dropped his hold on her and crossed his arms.
Where was Mús when she needed him? But Nyssa knew well Mús would not interfere in matters ’tween male and female. The cat was infuriatingly dominant and believed women were born to submit.
“So be it.” He grasped the neck of her robe, and before she could regain her senses enough to thwart him, he ripped it open from neck to frayed hem.
Nyssa shuttered her eyes when she heard his swift indrawn breath. Gold, she had learned, turned saints into sinners and a godly man into the devil himself.
“Take them off.”
Her stare met his.
The Viking waved at the sacks tied around her waist.
“’Tis my gold.”
“I care not for your coin. I will see the mark.”
He stood so close to her his warm breath tickled the jagged ends of her hair. For a moment panic welded her feet to the ground even though every instinct told her flee, race, and never stop.
“Needs I do the deed myself, woman?”
Fingers trembling, she fumbled to unstrap the burlap bags and let them fall to the ground. The coins never clinked for she had packed them in the fine sand from the sirens’ enchanted beach. The four sacks thudded to the dirt-packed pebbled floor, one after the other.
The first thwack echoed. The second amplified the sound into a wallop. The third ratcheted around and around. The fourth blared into a continuous thunder.
“Show me.”
She didn’t register his words or meaning for long moments. Beads of sweat coated and cooled the skin above her upper lip.
The ripped tunic revealed the tightly wrapped cloths binding her breasts. She tried to swallow but humiliation had lodged thick and hard in her throat. Jutting her jaw just so, and though her beating heart and shaking hands blared her cowardice, she lifted her hands and began to unbind the coarse wool.
Concentrating on a crescent-shaped swath of black-green moss staining the wall to the left, Nyssa peeled away each layer and repressed a shiver when the cool air in the cavern slithered over her bared breasts.
“Lady Nyssa.”
She had not noticed the rich deep gruffness of his voice afore, but refused to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging her abject mortification and kept her focus on the black spindly spider traversing the smoky fungus carpet. He flicked a finger across her cheek.
His touch made her jump and when she noticed what he did, she could not draw a single breath.
She clamped her palms over her breasts.
“Why do you disrobe?” Her squeak akin to that of a pig fleeing slaughter.
“I have ruined your garments, such as they were. You cannot travel to Castle Caerleah with bared bosom.” He threaded his tunic over her head. “Lift your arms, lady.”
Lady? No longer girl or woman? Had he accepted her as the Lady Nyssa?
She complied with his request in silence, keeping her eyes averted from his, preferring his wrath and shouting to this quiet, gentle care of her. Nyssa inserted her arms into the sleeves of the fine linen, tugged the soft cloth over her head, and smoothed the fabric over her hips.
Heat threaded through the cavern, pulsating from his tanned flesh.
Fisting her hands behind her back, she jammed her shoulders into the cave’s rough wall in a futile hope of preventing her knees from buckling. Ne’er had she seen such masculine beauty, nigh too painful for unveiled eyes.
He had a massive chest, unmarked by scars and heavy with muscle and sinew. Swarms of bees buzzed her insides blazing warmth to every pore. Drawn taught as a fishing line about to pop, she could not pry her stare from his dusky, flat nipple. Her mouth watered. She yearned to run her tongue over the tight peak. What madness this? She had ne’er lusted after a man afore. And since the curse, the notion of e’en a man’s caress coated her tongue with a foul bitterness.
Yet though the cave closed in on her, no bile gushed up her throat, and she could not swallow away the urge to touch him. A raw need to escape his fierce scrutiny over powered her rising, panicky terror.
“Your weapons and trunk and the other possessions of yours we salvaged are at the back of the cave behind the large rock shaped like an arrow.” She offered a prayer the babbled words had been said in Norse.
When he uttered nary a response, but nodded and stalked into the shadows, she rested her head on the uneven wall and wished her stepmother still lived. Mama, for she had never laid eyes on the goddess who birthed her, had always known the right choice for any situation.
“
What do I now, Mama? I cannot regain Caerleah without taking him husband and once we are wed, he will know all my secrets.”
The cat loped through the cavern’s entrance. Her fervent whisper had reached Mús’s extraordinary hearing. He ambled over to her and rubbed his massive head on her thigh.
“Now you come? Did you not hear the Viking ripping my tunic?”
In answer, Mús reared onto his haunches and raised a brow. His tawny eyes gleamed with the emerald halo of the forest from which he had just emerged. For long moments they stared at each other. She knew Mús welcomed the arrival of the Viking, for the old healer and magik woman of Castle Caerleah, Elsa, had predicted the warrior known as Death Blow would save her from burning at the stake. Mús believed the tales, but Nyssa did not.
“Did you see any sign of Bagan One-Eye and his men?”
The beast gave a slight shake of his head.
“We will stick to the plan, then. Travel by night and rest by day. I am sore weary. These two morns and eves I have slept in fits and starts. Healing the Viking has drained me. But my belly is empty, and I needs fill it soon.” The notion of the long trek to the beach to gather cockles and seaweed did not appeal.
“The lion does not answer, yet you speak as if he has.”
Nyssa flinched. For such a large man, the Viking moved with the quiet of a snake. She scowled at Mús. Why had he not warned her of Konáll’s approach? “Mús speaks, but not aloud.”
The Viking wore a new tunic, one dyed to match the brilliant blue of his eyes. His golden hair brushed wide shoulders and made her aware of the ragged state of her locks and clothes save for his borrowed garb.
“I will see to filling our bellies, lady mine. Cat, guard your mistress.”
It took some moments after the Viking vanished for Nyssa to work her jaw back into place. How dare Konáll claim her? She belonged to no man and never would. Not unless the warrior knew how to break Aegir’s curse.
Weariness slowed the blood coursing through her veins, and her knees wobbled. She settled on the floor her back to the wall in the shadows.
Mús paced a circle and a deep rumble echoed around the cavern.
“You have not hunted. Go. Fill your belly. You saw no sign of Bagan One-Eye and I am safe enough.”
The cat growled and his golden mane quivered.
“Be gone with you, Mús. I am too tired to argue.” She shuttered her eyes and kept a careful watch until the lion reluctantly left the secluded cave.
’Twas at least midmorn, she decided. The air warmed under the rays streaking through the cave’s entrance. A welcome breeze curled around her neck and took the chill from the tip of her nose. She blew out a long sigh.
It had been a long journey fraught with close escapes. Twice she had faced rape, thrice burning at the stake, and once, capture by Saracen slavers. Over a sennight with sparse sleep, meager rations, and none to guard her back until Mús had found her washed up on the beach. Her eyelids grew heavier than a ship’s anchor. She could no longer force her eyes to stay open.
A few moments of rest was all she needed.
The bliss of the tension seeping out of her knotted muscles gathered her exhaustion into a thick cozy blanket. Images of long evenings in front of the hearth in Castle Caerleah’s great hall filled her head, and she smiled.
Nyssa recalled Mama laughing at one of Da’s witty remarks. Felt the happiness of her people as they bustled about and prepared pallets for the coming eve. Saliva coated her tongue as she remembered the taste of Elsa’s sweet syllabub and healing potion served before the skald began his evening tale. She envisioned the raised brows and pinkened cheeks of the children gathered at the storyteller’s feet.
Slowly, Nyssa succumbed to the heady pleasure of half-slumber.
A plethora of features painted her dreams, the Viking Konáll’s full rosy lips, Mama’s dimpled smile, Da’s boyish grin, her weak-livered uncle’s sly smirk, and his spiteful trio of daughters’ false giggles. In less than four seasons, her father’s stepbrother, Ánáton, and his cruel wife had turned Castle Caerleah from a pristine, joyful holding into one where terror and torture held sway.
She had to save her people.
Nyssa tossed and turned. She bumped her forehead on a piece of jagged stone. The pain jerked her half-awake.
Fierce, cruel fingernails gnawed into her arms.
She opened her eyes.
Bit her tongue to prevent a howl of sheer terror.
Bagan One-Eye’s broken nose nigh rubbed hers.
He grinned.
She shuddered.
Half his upper teeth were missing. Black slime covered two cracked and chipped canines. Dried blood caked his gums.
Where was Mús?
How had the Pict snuck up on her?
Bitterness coated her mouth when she took a deep inhale and Bagan One-Eye’s foul breath and the stink of his unwashed body attacked her nostrils.
“I have ye now, goddess bitch.”
Chapter Two
Konáll massaged his sore neck and scrutinized the tiny cove.
Bounded on two sides by high cliffs, a narrow strip of coarse sand in the middle of an oval bay skirmished bleached, jagged boulders standing straight and tall and packed tighter than an invading army. The hairs on his nape lifted. He worked his shoulders, but the tension in his bunched muscles didn’t abate. What was it about this beach that caused his unease?
A shimmering, hazy cloak of tawny dust undulated across the cove. For a moment, the spiked stones appeared to advance. A frisson of alarm slithered up his spine. Narrowing his eyes, he scanned from one promontory to another. Naught but the slivery gleam of rippling waves in sight.
He loved the sea, the ocean, any wide swath of turbulent, salty water. Naught pleased him more than the scent of brine, drying seaweed, and rocks baking under the sun god Dagr’s brilliant heat. When Odin gave Dagr the steed Skinfaxi and a golden chariot to rule the day, the god had not erred.
’Twas a fine morn. The sun ruled a cloudless sky.
Why then did his skin prickle? Mayhap because he did not recall the bay, the strange rocks, or the thick, creamy foam sweeping the shore.
A squalling wind scattered fine particles of sand over his boots. But the ebullience of the roaring waves thundering on the massive rocks did little to alleviate his increasing disquiet.
Where were his men? And their steeds? How had he come to this place? Who had cracked his head?
For his last memory was saying farewell to his friend and ally, Thōrfin the Skullsplitter, and setting sail on his langskip to claim the female King Kenneth of Scotland had given him in exchange for gold coin aplenty.
Nyssa, his betrothed, was not what he had expected. Konáll snatched a large stone and hurled it high, venting the edge off his anger. He could not allow the contrary female to distract him.
Danger barbed the very air coating the salt in the quarreling crosswinds. A foul stink, akin to the odor of rotted eggs, crept across the bay.
Some evil scheme was afoot.
For ’twas not fortune’s chance Nyssa had happened upon him. Nay. He grabbed a handful of smooth pebbles and tossed them one by one into the peaks of cresting waves. The rhythm of the action calmed his frenzied thoughts.
“We found you on this beach.”
Konáll stumbled and then whipped about.
Mús lazed on a flat, round rock not an arm’s length away.
Not moments afore, Konáll had seen jagged pillars on that very spot. Had he? Had the injury affected his vision? Or mayhap his mind?
The lion’s large head rested on crossed paws. He yawned, revealing a fine set of carved, pointed teeth.
“Your weapons and chest were strewn ’tween the rocks. Exhausted though she was, after Nyssa healed you, she insisted we retrieve them.”
The creature spoke? Konáll shook his head like a soaked dog, hoping against hope he was dreaming or that ’twas but a strange trick of light.
“You are not addled, Viking. I am spea
king to you.”
Konáll choked back the bellow building in his throat and opened his eyes. The beast appeared to be smiling.
“How is it you speak without uttering a sound?” Hand gripping the hilt of his axe, Konáll surreptitiously eyed the deserted cove out of the corners of his eyes.
“Aegir turned me into a mountain lion and would have cast out all of man from my memories and skills, but Rán interceded. Though I am a mountain lion in form, I have not yet succumbed to the beast. I can still think like the warrior I once was. Some can communicate with me. Nyssa. One other. Now you.”
Forsooth, he was in Niflheim. How else could he converse with a creature and not say a word aloud?
“I understand it not either, Viking.”
“The sea god Aegir cursed you? You were once as I am?”
“Aye.”
The desolation in the lion’s amber eyes set all the hairs on Konáll’s body to stand at attention.
“How did you incur Aegir’s wrath?” Konáll could scarce process all that had happened since he awoke in the cave. These new revelations seemed more a dream than reality.
“I championed Nyssa.” The beast stared at the horizon for long moments. “Sit, Viking. ’Tis a long tale.”
Konáll found a rock with a flat top and rested his hip on the cool surface. He gestured. “Begin.”
“Nyssa’s father, Lord Rurari, was saved from drowning by the goddess Rán during a storm. She fell in lust with him, kept him in her ocean lair for some time, and begat a daughter from their union.”
“Nyssa.”
“Aye. ’Twas kept secret and when she birthed the babe. Rán gave her to Lord Rurari for safekeeping. For nigh on ten and seven summers, none knew Nyssa was born of a jötunn goddesses.”
“Lord Rurari’s wife accepted Nyssa?” Konáll knew of many women who would have refused a bastard child.
“With joy. Lady Gwen had ne’er conceived a child in the ten winters she was married.” The lion bowed his head. “Last spring, King Kenneth summoned Lord Rurari and Lady Gwen to his court. They left the day after Beltane. ’Twas not until that winter that all seemed to know Rán was Nyssa’s mother. None could determine how or who had learned the secret and spread the gossip.”
