Maybe if I had the chance then I would have cried, let my knees go and sunk into his arms. Taken full advantage of feeling sorry for myself.
But the danger is too much. I know we can’t stay, so instead I take him by the hand and lead him back to the place where I know Ysulte is waiting. My instinct leads me through the hallways - I know exactly where I need to go. I know exactly the desolate path we’ll need to stroll through. It’s on my way there that something changes. The air is thicker. It’s harder to breathe. My body is crushed between the majestic bark of an oak tree and the more than majestic torso of Eirik.
“I don’t know when we’ll see each other again.” He whispers the words against my lips. “And I can’t let you leave without tasting you first. While we’re alone. While I have you to myself.”
I don’t need to voice how much I want this. No words could ever be as loud as the moisture between my thighs or the gasps that leave my lips as he kisses me senseless. With one hand, Eirik gathers the end of my skirt. The cool air brushes over my limbs, a welcomed tameness to the heat that has surrounded me. Eyes closed, I kiss him as though from memory, my tongue working his just as hard as his is working mine. Until he’s not there anymore. Until he’s out of sight. Disappeared between my thighs, tasting the juices that flow from pleasure. Licking and stroking and teasing and taunting. His tongue glides over my clitoris, slips between my folds and I scratch at the tree bark, holding on for dear life.
“I’ve missed you so much, dróttning,” he says. The vibrations of his voice send me spiraling. I reach forward and grip his hair between trembling fingers, wanting more and less all at the same time.
The fact that someone could see us, that Shar or perhaps the version of myself that lives between these castle walls, could stroll by at any moment is just an afterthought. After the first orgasm wrecks my body, Eirik returns to my lips, sharing the sweetness of my moisture with me. I kiss him like the rotation of earth depends on it, grinding myself against his erection. The hardness of him puts me on another cliff and I reach forward, wanting to release his erection from the confines of his pants.
“If I fuck you now, dróttning,” he says, there’s no way you’ll be strong enough to make it back to the others. His words are both a warning and a dare and I swallow hard, nervous and hot and more bothered than I’ve been in my entire life. A rustling in the bushes pulls my attention away from him for a second and before I know it, he’s stepped in front of me already heading back to Ysulte.
“I thought…” I start to say, but then stop, knowing that the other words will sound like nothing less than begging. Not that it should matter. But somehow it does.
“You’ll beat her.” Eirik smiles, spitting the words out with so much confidence that even I believe them. “And when you do, I’ll take you wherever and whenever I can.”
When we get back Ysulte is waiting for us in the orchard. She looks at me, her face full of resignation, and I know immediately that I don’t need to tell her what has happened.
“I’m sorry, my queen,” she says, grasping my hand briefly before we hurry back out of the walled garden and down the steps towards the sea. “I knew that Shar was not to be reasoned with, but I am afraid that you needed to see that for yourself.
I bite back a furious response because as furious as I am at not getting through to Shar, my mind is more consumed with Eirik. With the taste of sex on my tongue. The taste of him on my lips. I try to reel myself in. Focus more on the task ahead.
When we arrive on the rough shingle of the beach, Ysulte grasps my hands briefly in hers. “Now you see for yourself what your sister is,” she says to me, looking at my directly with her piercing eyes. “Now you will have to decide a different path.”
knowing in my heart that she’s right, I nod. She takes my hand in one of hers, Eirik’s hand in the other.
“I will send you both back to the forest, where we came from. You’ll be safe there. I will join you again at daylight.”
I nod tightly. Ysulte screws up her face in concentration, and her grip on our hands intensifies. The flames fill my vision again, and then we are gone.
We land back on the cool soft turf of the grassy hill where we had been before. The other three Warriors are here too, Ysulte is not. It’s cold, but before it even occurs to me, Haki drapes a fur cloak over my shoulders.
“I will make a fire for us, my queen,” he Johan says, “the nights are cold.”
I nod, and wordlessly sink onto the ground, wrapping my arms around my shins and resting my chin on my knees. There’s only starlight to see by - far more stars than I’d ever seen before in my life - and I can see nothing for miles from the hill, apart from swathes of what looks like forest. I suddenly realize that it’s been a long, long time since I slept. A different lifetime, in fact. But there’s a part of me that’s not willing to give in to any form of exhaustion. Perhaps I am afraid that if I close my eyes or even blink, the warriors will disappear. That this is all just a dream. The other part of me is concerned with my sister. Concerned with all the things I don’t know. With all the things I might not be able to fic.
I’ve barely stopped to take a breath since the moment in the woods with Ysulte - a whole different world away - and already the life I have always known is starting to fade, just as Ysulte says. I’ve started to feel like that life, the one in which I was a medium fraud trying to scratch out a living, was the real dream. This has always been where I really belonged, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel about it. I have nothing here - no home, no friends, no family apart from a psychopathic, power-crazed sister and a father that I know won’t be around for long.
“Karsi, Johan, Eirik, Haki” I say quietly, and in an instant he’s at my side. The muscles of his arms are lit in the starlight as he carefully, methodically starts to build the branches he’s gathered into a fire.
“My queen.” They say this in unison, their expressions all the same as though they know just what it is I am going to say. And I know that they don’t blame me, that they will not blame me if I don’t succeed. However, that doesn’t dull the anxiety of knowing that if I fail I will disappoint them. That I will disappoint a lot of people.
“I’m sorry that I’ve failed you,” I say. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t get Shar to change her mind.”
Eirik’s face remains impassive. “I know you will find a way, dróttning.” Then he pauses, and a shade of that grin that I’d seen before returns. “Besides, it is far better to serve you in exile than to obey orders from your sister, however many thrones she may steal.”
“Why me, though, Eirik?” It’s the question that has been sitting quietly inside me all day, biding its time for a chance to slip out. “I don’t understand why all this is riding on me. I don’t even know if I would be a good queen.”
“Of course you would,” Karsi says immediately, with so little room for doubt that I almost believe him. “It is fated. Just as it is fated that I should serve you. It does no good to ask why we receive our destiny, dróttning. All we can do is to do our best to follow wherever that destiny leads us.”
I nod. I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to take from his words, but he says them with such conviction that I have to accept them.
“I’m scared,” I say.
They don’t tell me not to be scared. They don’t try to comfort me, either. They simply nod into the fire that’s growing underneath his hands.
“What’s it like? Having my sister rule the lands?” I ask the question carefully, though words tend to slip out all at once.
There’s a bit of laughter that circulates amongst the men.
“Nothing less than horrible,” Haki says and they all nod.
Johan looks to Eirik who starts to explain the starvation and suffering going on in the land. But it is Karsi who really gets me to understand. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out something that can only be described as dust and throws it into the fire. Scenes play in the flames. Scenes of women, thin as threads, carrying the bodi
es of their young to be buried. Scenes of men being beaten, of blood and torture, pure and utter cruelty. Of suffering amongst the old and the young. Of a woman, a blonde haired queen, sitting on a throne of gold, sipping wine and plucking grapes from their vines.
“This isn’t really….” I start to say, but not that there’s no need to ask the question. It is happening. And if things aren’t restored to the way they were it will continue to happen.
“She’s not all evil, Haki” says. “It isn’t as though this is what she wants. And the part of her that opens her eyes every once in a while to see that there are horrible things happening exists.”
“The problem is,” Johan chips in, “that she’d rather be queen than save the people.”
“Why is…? How? I just… I’m not sure I understand.”
Karsi takes my hand in his, stroking the back of it with his thumb. When he looks at me, I can see that they’re glistening with sadness. “The land needs you. Only with our true queen will the land live the way it should. The plants, the sun, the air, they all need you. We need you,” he says and my gaze hangs on to his for as long as possible.
“But we can’t have you now.” Johan steals my attention and all joy is sucked from the space around us. I knew that we couldn’t stay here, just the five of us. I knew that this was just the calm before the storm, but I needed it to last longer.
When Johan stands, the other men follow his lead. “You have all the strength you need to defeat Shar,” Haki says. And though there is a world of confidence in his words, my brain doesn’t know just how much to believe them.
Then they start to fade. Translucent again, the way they were before.
“Back to servitude,” one of them whispers quietly. “Back to your sister.” It is both a warning and an apology.
Then they are gone, and I’m left alone.
I’m usually so good at being alone. I’ve been alone one way or another most of my life - most of that life, I mean - yet in this world I feel the loneliness clawing into me almost immediately. I feel in my heart that in this world the Warriors should be at my side, that I need them as much as they seem to need me.
I stretch out on the cold dewy grass. Haki’s cloak has vanished from my shoulders like the rest of him, and the cold cuts through my light dress and into my skin.
I sort of sleep. My body’s so drained that I can’t keep alert exactly, but I wouldn’t call it proper sleep. It passes over me like a mist, leaving me feeling less drained, but far from rested.
At daylight Ysulte appears, like she said she would. She doesn’t materialize in a puff of smoke. She just walks over the brow of the hill with her slow, stiff gait, nodding at me as she comes.
“Dróttning.” She greets me with a bow of her head.
I’m getting sick of the dróttning thing. I want someone to call me Rhea, to look me in the eye as an equal. The only person who’s done that so far has been Shar. It’s left me feeling so lonely.
My mood is awful. I feel like having the Warriors around has kept me trying to think like a queen, but with them gone I feel tense and snappy.
“Why did you let me go to Shar, hmm? When you knew it wouldn’t do any good?”
She regards me impassively.
“If you’re so wise, why do you let me go and do pointless things that only leave me feeling more lost, huh?”
“It was not pointless.” She starts digging around in the embers of the fire that the men lit for me. The only remaining evidence that they were ever here.
“How do you know that?” I challenge her. I don’t know why I’m turning on her, other than I’m feeling angry and it feels good to admit it to myself. “How do you know that this isn’t all just a waste of time?”
I think of the four Warriors and my chest twists in shame. They’ve gone back to their own time, to the world where they’re so miserable serving my sister.
“I trust, dróttning,” she says.
“In what?” I shoot back.
She straightens up from the fire to look me in the eye. “In you,” she says simply.
That takes the wind out of my sails. I drop down next to the fire and stare into its smoky remains.
“So what do we do now?” I ask flatly. Maybe my mistake last time was in not asking for advice - just rushing ahead with the first plan that came to mind. I don’t want to do it again, not this time.
“I cannot tell you what to do,” she says. “It is your destiny to make things right, not mine.”
“But you can advise me, right?” I coax. “Rulers have advisers, right? And you seem to have a much better idea of what’s going on than I do. So help me. What would you do if you were me?”
Ysulte nods slowly and furrows her brow, staring off into the distance as if the horizon was a map that she’s trying to read.
“You’ve tried reasoning with your sister not to banish you,” she says slowly. “That did not work.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“But there are other forces at play in your banishment.”
“Maybe those are the things I should try to change,” I say slowly, putting together the implications of what she’s saying. “So that means… what? Try and stop her from learning how to banish me at all?”
Ysulte nods. I can see that she’s hiding a smile. She must be feeling like the student is starting to become the master. I wonder for an awful second if she might be implying something really awful, and cut in sharply.
“I won’t kill my own sister, Ysulte. No matter what. No way.”
She nods.
“I understand, dróttning.” She sighs. “One of the ancient traits of our rulers is that they always choose the things that is right over what might seem easy. I understand that you could no more kill your own sister than you could cut off your own arm. It must be so.” She nods, as if to herself. “Yes, it must be so.”
She kneels down slowly by the fire, and does not look me in the eye the next time she speaks. Her voice is full of regret.
“I cannot summon your Warriors to go with you to the next place - or rather - to the next time. My magic is waning, there is only so much strength I have left.”
I nod. I don’t want it to be true. I want the feeling of safety that I had in that castle, with Eirik covering my back. But I understand what she’s saying.
“But you can come with me, right?” I feel like a kid asking, and my voice sounds childish to my own ears - please don’t leave me alone.
She looks up at me and nods, a gentle smile forming across her face.
“No, I will not leave you alone, my queen. Not yet. There is still much that we have to learn together.”
She says nothing more, but simply reaches out her hand for mine. I take it, and the fire covers my eyes once again.
The place is completely different from the comfort of the grassy hill. All around us, jagged rocks rear up into the sky, cloaking the narrow valley where we stand in shadow. Caves yawn out of the surface of the grey rock like mouths, and overhead a scattering of crows circle, jeering down at us. The wind feels like it’s cutting straight to my bones.
I look down and realize that a cloak of soft fur has materialized around my shoulders. It doesn’t keep out the cold completely, but it’s certainly better than just the light dress that I was wearing before.
“Where are we?” I ask Ysulte.
“The north of the kingdom,” she replies, raising her voice to be heard over the howl of the wind as it rushes through the narrow valley.
“Why did you bring us here?” I ask. I still want her to tell me what to do, where to go, what to say. She just blinks back at me.
“I didn’t bring us here, my queen. You did.”
I stare at her for a second, but the wind is too fierce for me to dwell on what she’s saying for too long. Instead I grab her hand and pull her inside one of the caves in the rock face. It’s cold and damp in the cave, but at least I can hear myself think without the wind filling my ears.
“So w
e’ve come North,” I say, half thinking out loud. “To the place where Shar learned… you know… the stuff she needed to know to be able to banish me.”
Ysulte doesn’t say anything, but just keeps making eye contact, like a teacher insisting that you know the answer if you’d only think hard enough.
“So you brought us here… I mean, I brought us here…” I correct myself. I’ve got no idea what she meant by that, but now doesn’t feel like the time to get into some kind of philosophical debate. “I brought us here to try and stop her from ever learning the Dark Arts in the first place?”
Ysulte’s face breaks out into a smile.
“That would be the strategy of a queen,” she acknowledges. “To stop the rot before it has chance to flourish.”
I bat away the compliment, because the truth is that although I might know why we’re here, I’ve got absolutely no idea how we’re going to go about stopping Shar from finding out what she wants to know.
“So… What now?”
Ysulte gestures further down the narrow valley, to a place where the dim daylight doesn’t even seem to reach. “The Dark Haven is little further down that road. That is the place where the Dark Sages gather. Their hiding place is secret, and the way is sealed.”
“So could we somehow stop Shar from finding their hiding place?” I ask.
“Or perhaps, my queen, we could stop her from being able to enter at all. The entrance is closed, governed by a series of codes with the keys to the code all scattered across the valley. If we can find these codes and destroy them, then Shar will be unable to reach the Dark Ones.”
“And then what?” I ask doubtfully. “You think if she can’t get in she’ll just give up and go home?”
“Shar is capricious, my queen, and easily frustrated.”
I nod, remembering how sharply she pinched me when we were children, how in moments of frustration she’d lean in and scream directly into my face.
“So you think she might give up?”
“Not give up on her designs on your throne, my queen.” Ysulte looks up at me intently. “But if we can stop her from banishing you then you at least have a chance to face her in battle. And if you face her, you will win. It is your destiny to rule, after all. She cannot gain victory over destiny itself.”
Viking Queen Page 6
