by Joanna Bell
"King's daughter," Brona piped up. "She acts as a king's daughter would. I half think she is one."
Magnus chuckled. "Aye, the thought has crossed my mind too. Now," he looked at me pointedly, and then at Brona. "Am I safe to leave the two of you here, without worrying that you'll spend the rest of the afternoon scrapping and leave the peas unpicked?"
"She was the one who stopped picking –" Brona started, but all it took was a hard look from Magnus to shut her up.
I didn't understand it, her subservience to him when she'd just been such a bitch to me. Was it just because he was a man? When Magnus left us, without my promise that I would behave as he wanted me to behave – because why did I owe him any promises about how I would behave? – I turned to Brona as she picked peas a few feet away.
"Why did you do that?" I asked, letting a handful of waxy peapods slip into my basket and deciding that it was better to be friendly than standoffish after the fight, so there was someone to talk to during the boring pea-picking. "Why did you let him talk to you like that? Like you're a child?"
Brona looked up at me for a few seconds before replying, as if trying to figure me out. "Did you not see he had me by the back of the neck? Did you not see how much bigger he is than either of us? I did not want to be beaten, girl – and if you don't want to be beaten you'll speak to him with more respect."
"He's not going to beat me!" I laughed, but I saw that Brona looked skeptical.
"I barely knew you a morning and you drove me to violent temper," she commented, popping a peapod into her mouth before grinning at me. "And he's a Northman, I reckon he won't be as slow as myself in –"
"Hey!" I cut in, realizing what I'd just seen. "You said we weren't supposed to –"
She handed me a couple of peapods and held her finger conspiratorially to her lips. "Shhhh. Don't tell the lord!"
I ate them quickly, feeling a little better after her small gesture of kindness, and then we got back to picking.
We arrived back inside the estate walls just before the sun slipped below the horizon, and my back was so stiff I could barely stand upright. Still, after a whole day of picking peas I had a pretty generous portion for myself and Magnus. Before Brona bid me goodnight, she took me by the wrist and started dragging me somewhere.
"Where are we going?" I asked weakly, desperate to get some food into my belly. "Brona, where –"
"Just come with me!' She urged, pulling me along to an open area beside the lord's stone hall. A large fire pit sat in the center of a cleared space, with two other, smaller fire-pits nearby, each with an iron pot bubbling away over it. The smell of cooking food hanging in the air was so much I actually had to wipe a trail of drool off my chin.
Brona left me to go and talk to one of the women who tended the pots, and then a short while later as I stood transfixed by the smell of meat, she returned with a little cloth sack, which she handed to me.
"Use it for the pottage," she said. "It's not much, but it'll make it taste better."
I opened the sack and looked inside to see a couple of bones, the meat almost entirely scraped off them, along with a couple of things that looked like fat, beige-colored carrots and a bunch of fragrant green herbs I didn't recognize.
"Brona," I whispered, almost emotional at her kind gesture. "You didn't have to –"
"Go on," she smiled, pushing me back in the direction of my hut. "Take these back to your Northman. Perhaps he won't beat you if you feed him something half-decent? I'll come for you in the morning, Eltha."
I didn't bother correcting her. Instead I thanked her one more time and hurried back to the hut, where I found a fire already lit and a little cauldron filled with what looked like oatmeal simmering away over the coals. I also noticed that there was a better table now, and two chairs, and a pile of fresh straw placed against one of the walls. There was no Magnus, though. He arrived a few minutes later, to find me adding the goodies from the sack to the cooking pot.
"Bones?" He asked. "That'll give it some flavor! And potherbs! Where did you get these things, girl?"
"Brona gave them to me."
"Ah," he replied, kneeling down beside me to inspect the stew and leaning in to kiss my neck. "So you two are friends again?"
"I guess," I told him, taking the crudely carved wooden spoon he handed to me and stirring the stew. "What are potherbs?"
"The sneeps – and the greens. Anything that goes into the pot that isn't meat or grain is a potherb."
"Sneeps?" I asked.
"Sneeps, yes – the little pale roots, they'll grow almost anywhere."
The stew took a long time to cook. It took so long that we ate some of it before it was ready, when the oats and the 'sneeps' were not quite soft enough. It was still the best thing I'd ever tasted in my life. We ate until out bellies ached, and then we ate a little more. And when we could not possibly fit another bite of food in, we lay on the straw beside the fire and Magnus ran his fingers through my hair.
"Do you know what?" I asked, as we watched the flames dancing.
"What is it, girl?"
"I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life. Not this kind of tired – like, tired from actual work, you know? Don't laugh at me – I've worked before, I worked at home. But not like it was today, picking peas. At home when I'm working I'm mostly sitting down, and chatting to customers."
"What kind of work is it that can be done sitting down?" Magnus asked. "I'm starting to think it might be true that you come from a high family."
"I promise you I don't," I smiled, leaning against his shoulder. "It's just a different kind of work where I come from."
I don't know why I thought the day spent picking peas with Brona was going to be a one-off. Perhaps it was because I was used to work having an end-point. Need to pick all the peas? Serve all the customers? That's a finite task, and when you're done, you can relax – at least for a little while. Right? Wrong. Oh so very wrong. Because on the Haesting estate, as finite as the tasks were, there was always another one to be attended to. After the day spent picking peas, one that made me ache like an old woman, there were plums – small, squishy, sweet plums – to be picked, and then dark berries and then seaweed to be collected from the seashore and carried in sacks back to the small fields that surrounded the estate, where it had to be mixed and turned into the earth with long, rake-like implements that made your arms burn. Errant pigs needed to be found in thick undergrowth and dragged, struggling and squealing, back to their pens. Animals needed to be fed. And on one particularly unpleasant day, rats needed to be killed.
The Angles kept their grain in storehouses, and I was told it was a constant battle to prevent these stores from being eaten by vermin. Brona appeared at the well one morning, as I filled a bucket of water to take back to the hut for the night's pottage, and told me to join her at the grain storehouse when I was done. In her hand she held a curved stick that was thicker at one end than the other. When I met her, she handed one of the sticks to me and told me to stand by the door. So I stood by the door, waiting for the next instruction. But there was no next instruction. Brona went to the crates, made of wood and woven tightly with grasses so no grain spilled out, and began to slap them and lift them up before letting them fall back down to the ground.
"Out!" She yelled. "Out, out!"
And before I could enquire as to what the hell it was she was doing, it suddenly became clear to me in the form of a wave of rats scurrying out from amongst the crates and fleeing towards the door – towards me.
I'm not one of those girls who gets squeamish about rodents – even as a child I'd always thought they were kind of cute. But upwards of twenty-five of them running towards me?
"Ahh!" I screeched, clutching at the doorframe and trying to life my feet off the ground. But the storehouse was not built sturdily and one side of it sagged and swayed under my weight and even began to crack before I let go and screamed as the rats began to run over my feet. It probably only took a few seconds – it felt like
a lot longer. But when I could no longer feel furry bodies brushing against my ankles I slowly let my eyes open again.
Brona was standing beside the grain-crates, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide. It had been a few days by then, and I didn't have to ask what her expression meant. I knew what it meant. It meant 'why have I been cursed to babysit this complete moron?'
"What –" she said, still staring at me. "Eltha, what –"
But instead of finishing her sentence she just bent down and rested her forehead on the edge of one of the crates like I was too idiotic to even comment on.
"What was I supposed to do?" I asked, trying not to get heated so I wouldn't get slapped again. "Brona, you didn't even tell me what you wanted me to –"
"You know what those beasts were, though, don't you?" She cut me off, her voice dripping with condescension.
"Rats."
"And you know, Eltha, that rats eat grain – do you not?"
"Uh," I said. "Yeah. Yes. I know rats eat grain."
Brona stood up straight, then, and looked me in the eye. "WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK I WANTED YOU TO DO, THEN?!"
I looked down at the wooden club in my hand and sighed. "Kill them. You wanted me to kill them."
"YES! What's wrong with you, girl? Are you sure you didn't take a knock on the head along with the Northman?! I'd have better luck with one of the children!"
I was already beginning to recognize my daytime companion's moods. She seemed to get frustrated easily – very easily – but after she'd vented, yelled at me, smacked me on the back of one hand, she usually cooled down fairly quickly. So I just took her lecture, because truthfully I was almost beginning to understand where it came from. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Sometimes, when Brona raised her eyebrows at me and gave me that look like she was surprised I hadn't yet managed to drown myself in a puddle, I tried to imagine what it would be like to teach her how to work at the Grocery King in River Falls. I tried to imagine teaching her how the till worked and how to cash out at the end of the day. She'd be just as lost in River Falls as I was in Haesting. Not that that helped me in Haesting. No – in Haesting I was just the dummy she'd been saddled with.
"I wouldn't have known how to kill them anyway," I whispered sheepishly in the grain-house that day under her withering gaze. "I – I wouldn't have been fast enough."
And then, right in front of us, a single rat darted out from under one of the crates and Brona leapt forward, bringing her club down onto the creature and killing it with a single blow.
I turned away at the sound of the death-squeak, and then, when I dared to look back at the tiny, broken body at my feet, I surprised even myself by bursting into sudden, gulping tears.
"Oh my God," I gasped, embarrassed, turning away so Brona couldn't see my face. But the tears kept coming. They kept coming until I was almost doubled over, sobbing at the sight of the poor little dead rat who had, to my soft city heart, only been trying to feed her rat-family.
Thankfully I didn't have to bear Brona's horrified disapproval for too long before she stomped out, disgusted, and left me to my rodent-based grief.
That's where Magnus found me about ten minutes later, perched on one of the grain crates and feeling lower than I had since I'd come to the new place. He took one look at me and I saw his expression change from one that had seemed ready to deliver a stern lecture to one of compassion.
"I don't like it here," I cried, getting emotional again just to see him. "I thought I would – because you were here, I thought I would. But I don't! Brona is horrible, and I never see you during the day – and then at night we're too tired to even talk to each other! And –"
"Shhh," he whispered, kissing the top of my head and wrapping one of his burly arms – arms that seemed so much more suited to that world than my own – around my shoulders. "Shhh, Heather. Come on, girl. Come on, tell me – is it true what Brona says? Do you weep over a dead rat? Must I take you to the healer to have her mix up a cure for madness?"
He was trying to make me laugh. And I did, a little. But there was something more to it, something more than a dead rat. I think he knew it, too.
"We won't stay here for long," he told me, tucking my hair behind one ear – a familiar gesture from him already, and one that made me feel especially cared for. "We're not prisoners. I just need to come up with a real plan for going south – winter will be here soon, you know. You won't have to put up with Brona for that much longer."
Before he left, he kissed my cheeks – both of them, as the one that had been bruised and swollen was healing fast – and promised to see me in the hut, just as soon as he was finished helping some of the other men harvest one of the fields.
He scooped up the dead rat as he left, sensing that I did not want to look at it any longer, and almost made me cry again with his kindness.
Chapter Twelve
Magnus
I worried about Heather, in those early days on the estate. She was not used to labor, that much was clear – but even in the first half-moon I saw her stamina growing, I watched her go from whining over an hour's work in the woods gathering plums to almost being better at it than the other fruit pickers, who did not have her advantage of robust health.
It was not, however, her stamina that concerned me. It was her heart. She started to become emotional very easily, and prone to fits of tears. It was not that I scorned her tears – if anything her softness just attached me more tightly to her side – but they worried me for the winter ahead, when I knew things would not be any easier than they were during that first sunny autumn.
After the incident with the rats I went to the man who was in charge of the harvest and asked for a small bag of barley, instead of the usual half a loaf of bread and fist-sized chunk of cheese that was my payment for a day's work in the fields. And when I got back to our hut, I gave the bag to Heather and told her it was hers, that we could boil the barley in our pottage and fill our bellies a little fuller for as long as it lasted.
And deliberately, although it hurt me to do so, I did not instruct her on how to store it properly. Sure enough, the next morning there were little holes chewed into the corner of the sack, and some of the barley had been taken.
"Do you think it was rats?" She asked, giving me cause once again to marvel at her naiveté.
"It could be, girl," I told her, although I knew very well it was.
"They only took a little," she observed. "Maybe that's enough for them? I don't mind sharing with them if they only take a little."
And of course, the rats did not take only a little. The next morning, the sack was empty, and Heather's eyes flashed with anger.
"Fuck!" She yelled, slamming her fist down on our table. "Goddamnit, Magnus! It's gone – it's all gone! Now we don't have enough to make pottage!"
That day, when Brona took her back to the storehouse to kill rats, she was no longer hesitant to wield the club. And when she returned in the evening with a new bag of barley, she settled into my lap as I sat at the table cracking hazelnuts and kissed my cheek.
"Lesson learned," she whispered in my ear. "Even if I feel a little patronized that you and Brona are devising lessons for me like I'm a child. You could have just told me –"
"Ah," I stopped her before she could finish. "But is it truly so? Would you have listened to myself or Brona if we'd told you? Or does the pain of losing your barley teach the lesson far better than any words could have?"
For a moment, I sensed she was about to argue. But then she just nestled into my chest and laughed. "You're right. I guess I do need to learn things the hard way sometimes. The problem is I only ever realize it after I've learned it the hard way."
I slid my hand under her tunic and ran it slowly over her smooth belly. "Such a beautiful girl," I teased, as she squirmed gratifyingly under my touch. "Such a shame you have the character of an ox."
"Magnus!" She scolded, sitting up and moving to smack my shoulder even as she giggled. She wasn't quick enough, though, and I ca
ught her hand before she could land the blow. "I do not have the character of an ox!"
"Oh yes you do," I told her, slipping my hand up further, cupping one of her breasts until I saw her eyelids flutter just a little. "Exactly the character of an ox. You're lucky to have met a man so tolerant as myself, girl. Any other would surely have sent you on your way by now."
"Oh really?" She replied. Heather was always asking me that question over the table, with one eyebrow raised and her chin angled haughtily towards me. Oh really, Magnus? Oh realllly? It was charming. It was more than charming.
"Yes," I smiled, not wanting to show her just yet what her little sighs and shudders were doing to me. "The other harvestmen laugh at me in the fields, girl, to hear of your disobedience. Some of them say the time will come to teach you a lesson."
"A lesson?" She smiled, reaching down to the hem of her tunic and suddenly pulling it right off over her head so her nakedness was revealed to me all at once. She'd done it on purpose, to shake my resolve, and she grinned to see her success etched on my face.
"Gods, girl," I whispered, without even intending the words to be spoken aloud.
My cock thickened against my thigh as she leaned back, showing herself to me, and a sweet, slow wave of desire began to tug me away from my senses.
"What was that you were saying?" She asked, still trying to play along as if nothing was having an effect on her, even as I heard the breathlessness creeping into her voice. "You were talking about teaching me a lesson, is that it?"
And before I could answer, she slid one hand down from her breasts, over her belly, and between her pale thighs so I could hear the wetness when she touched herself. She knew already that seeing her give herself pleasure turned me into a little more than a mindless, slavering wolf.
Still, I was not about to concede – not when I could see that she, too, was already close to the end of her patience. I took her wrist in my hand, running my thumb along the inside where her heartbeat pulsed against the skin, and then down, following her own fingers, down further until her breath caught in her throat.
