by Joanna Bell
"What? A blow –"
"Never mind!" She cried, rolling over and showing me her back again. "I'm tired. And I'm not hungry. Leave me alone and let me sleep."
"You're not a good liar," I shot back. "You've had all day to sleep, and I know you haven't eaten a thing. Stop acting like a child and –"
I caught her hand in the air before she could bring it down on my face, and then the other one when she tried that, too.
"It's not funny!" She yelled, when she saw that I was smiling – admittedly mostly from the ale.
"It's a little funny," I told her, because truthfully part of me was enjoying punishing her even more. And even as I smiled and laughed, it was undergirded still by my anger from that morning, when she had refused to admit her feelings for me.
"NO!" She screeched. "It really isn't! I want to leave and you're keeping me prisoner! How funny would it be if you were kept against your will, Ragnar? Would you be laughing then? How is it that you tell me you love me in one breath and then in the next order your guards to keep me here all day? Is that what it means to love someone to you? Because if it is I want you to know I don't want –"
All the mirth was gone out of me by then. I yanked Emma towards me and pulled her face right down close to mine so she couldn't turn away.
"No, you infuriating little thorn in my heel," I whispered sharply, "that is not what I mean by love! You know damn well what I mean by love, and don't pretend otherwise! It means I think of you every waking moment, and then I dream of you when I sleep. It means I feel a weakness to you alone, Emma, a concern for your thoughts about me unlike my concern for anyone else's thoughts. It means this morning, when you refused to say what I know you feel back to me, it felt as if you had pushed a dagger into my heart, without regret or remorse."
We sat, each of our shoulders rising and falling with emotion. When some of the anger seemed to have passed I spoke again, more quietly and slowly and with my head bowed slightly. "I don't understand you, girl. Everything about you tells me how you regard me. The way you reach for me, the way you need me, the look in your eyes when we lie together. I feel it in your touch – I feel it in everything but your words. And then I become angry, because it seems as if you torment me deliberately, as if you toy with me just to show me that you can."
"That's what men always think," she replied, not leaning into my arms like I ached for her to do but lying back on the furs and looking away from me, still wearing that expression of betrayal. "It would be funny if it weren't so predictable. Men always think it's about them. As if we have no other lives except the parts that revolve around you. I thought you might be different. You know, being a Vik – being a Northman – and everything. But you're not. Not at all."
I wanted to shake her. My hands itched to snatch her up by her shoulders and shake her, hard, until all the difficulty was gone out of her. It was a simple matter, as far as I could see. She loved me, and she refused to say it. All she needed to do was explain why. Instead she spoke in that womanly way, as cryptic as a gothi, all insinuations and slippery, indirect points. I thought it might drive me mad if I was forced to listen to too much more of it.
"Everything you say is to avoid answering the one question I want answered," I told her, willing my breath to come slowly. "I ask why you torment me and you speak of other men rather than giving a straight answer. I grow very weary of it, Emma."
She rolled over on her belly, then, and brought her pale fist down on the furs. When she responded, her back was to me again. I thought of telling her that any normal Jarl, any Jarl who had not fallen under her spell, would have had her whipped for her behavior – but I knew it would somehow just make her believe I was an even bigger monster than she already thought.
"What if I'm not trying to torment you?" She asked, still not looking at me. "What if that's not what I'm trying to do at all? What if the way you look after I make you come makes me happy like nothing else ever has in my life, Ragnar? What if for the first time ever for me it feels like I might be beginning to understand that idea of another person's contentment being my own? And what if I'm as tormented as you are by – circumstances?"
Her voice was soft, tired. I reached out and put my hand on the generous curve of her hip, and she didn't flinch away that time. "If that's true, then I'm truly sorry for being such an ox," I told her. "But Emma, please understand that you won't even tell me what these circumstances are. You mean to leave, if I understand you right, if what Eirik said was true. But I don't see why it has to be that way. I am a Jarl. I have a force of strong men under my command. I also have Jarl Eirik and his men – I know he would fight with me – if it came to that – with whoever it is who pulls you away from me. Is that what you ask of me? Who would take you from me? Who has such power over you, girl?"
Emma was silent for some time. And then she rolled over, putting her hand over mine, and I saw that her eyes shone with emotion. "My family," she said. "My friends. My whole life. They wonder where I am, Ragnar. They drive themselves crazy with worry, they imagine the worst fates for me. I can't leave them to the rest of their lives like that."
The temptation to anger flashed through me again – did this arrogant girl think that the rest of us didn't miss our families? that our families didn't worry for us? – but I let it pass. "It is as it is," I told her gently, drawing a faint smile onto her rosy lips. "My mother and father worry for me, too. All the mothers and fathers and families of my people worry for their sons and daughters abroad. How –"
"But my family don't know I'm abroad," she said insistently. "They don't have any idea where I am. They'll be thinking I just disappeared, and assuming the worst – that I've been kidnapped, raped – murdered. I can't just leave them to live out the rest of their lives in torment – real torment – can I?"
I sat back a little, baffled, trying to figure out if it was really that simple. "Is that it?" I asked her. "You need to get word to your family? I can send word. I can send a man – men – south, wherever you direct, to bring word to your mother and father. I can even send you, if you wish to tell them yourself. That will require men, as the distance and way are unsafe for a woman alone, but if it's what you ask of me then I will see it done. Why did you say nothing before this, Emma? If it's such a straightforward thing –"
"It's not," she whispered. "It's not straightforward at all, unfortunately. I wish it was. You can't send men to protect me. You can't come with me. And if I go, I don't know that I can come back. I think I might not be allowed, it might not be possible. And even if –"
I held up one of my hands to stop her. She was doing it again. She was making nonsensical statements. "How is that?" I asked, desperately trying to maintain a tone of calm. "What place is there on earth where you can go, and my men and horses and ships cannot? That I cannot? Emma, know that I try not to become angry with you again, but you must see that I do not understand you. If you must go home, my men – and I – will go with you. We have ships, horses, we have fearless hearts. Where is it that you can go but not us?"
One of my girl's soft hands found its way to my cheek just as a tear slid down her own. "I can't tell you, Ragnar. You'll get upset with me again for saying it – there, I see it on your face now, the way your eyes narrow when you're angry. But it's true – I can't tell you. You would think I was crazy."
"I don't think it's true," I replied, as the urge to speak harshly rose in my chest and I pushed it back down. "I think it's an excuse, a way for you to make it my fault that you refuse to –"
"Alright!" She said, sitting up and pulling one of the furs over her shoulders. "Fine. OK, Ragnar. You can't come – and your men can't come – because where I'm from is not the place you think of as this place – as the earth, now. You can't ride your horse to where I'm from, and you can't sail your ships. You could spend your lifetime looking and never find it, even if I described it to you in great detail, even if drew you a map."
She wasn't crazy, I knew that. People who have lost themselves that
way – who speak of things that aren't there and imagine persecutions that don't exist – don't behave the way Emma was behaving. She did not seem to see enemies where those who loved her stood. And yet what she was saying – I didn't understand it at all."
"Are you dead?" I asked her, finally. "Have you lost your way to one of the other realms?" I squeezed her hip. "You don't appear a spirit, Emma. You appear a woman, a living woman, as real as me. I know of the other worlds, but not of anyone like us – a man or a woman, living and breathing – who can visit them."
"Yes," she said – and gods help me she was telling the truth, there was no deception in her eyes. "I come from another world. It's the same as this one, in some ways. Would it be too confusing to tell you I didn't even grow up far from here? Less than a half-day's ride, I believe. But it wasn't – well it was here. We shouldn't even be talking about location. It's not about that. It's about time. I grew up in a different time."
"A different – time?" I spoke haltingly, almost completely uncomprehending. "Didn't we all grow up in a different time, Emma? Isn't that what it is to grow up – the passage of time?"
She crawled on top of me then and looked me direct in the eyes. A strange recklessness seemed to have come over her – she was even smiling a little. "I don't mean it like that," she said. "I don't mean ten winters ago or ten and ten winters ago. I mean a thousand winters. More than a thousand – and not 'ago' – not in the past, but the opposite – in the future."
"A thousand winters?" I asked, not even hearing the part about the past or the future, because my mind had stopped itself at 'a thousand winters.'
"More than a thousand," she replied, working her hips down against me now and sighing as she felt me growing ready against her. "More than a – than a –"
There's something about the fear of loss that heightens passion. We had spoken of it without rancor for the first time, broached the possibility of her leaving, perhaps forever, and it put my whole self into a conquering mindset. If I could not keep Emma as a prisoner, I would have to make her mine in another way, to show her where she belonged – and who she belonged with. I flipped her over onto her belly and pushed her under-dress up over her smooth thighs and the firm, fleshy hillocks of her rear. She moved underneath me, trying to push herself up, to lift her hips off the furs.
"No," I told her, my voice suddenly hoarse and rough as I held her down. "No, Emma."
A current like lightning passed between us as her sweet struggles brought out an aggression that lurked within me, and an answering yielding within Emma. She cried out when I opened her thighs from behind and entered her desire-slickened sex in one movement, with my hand clasped around the back of her neck to keep her in her place.
I took her like that, squirming underneath me, seeming to protest at first but then giving way, whispering my name, crying my name, giving me what I wanted. I was not too eager as I had been after the early Yuletide period, my balls not so full as to be spilling over, it gave me the time to enjoy Emma's body in the way it called out for.
She put her hands on the bed and turned her head to the side when the rush started to come over her.
"Ragnar," she breathed, trying again to push her hips up, to get more of me for herself. "Ragnar, I –"
I bent down over her and gave it to her harder, deeper, moaning at the feeling of her soft ass against my belly, her perfect warmth enveloping me as if that part of her, her femininity itself, had been made for me alone.
When I felt the threshold approaching, I bent down over her, growling into her ear and thrusting into her hard and fast until the explosion came. And when it did, it was as if my very soul was leaving my body along with my seed, unspooling itself into her warmth.
Emma tightened as I roared my pleasure into the back of her neck, and I felt the little spasms around myself then, drawing the last of me out as she gasped and moaned and cried underneath me. And even as it happened, as I was conscious of nothing but the acute pleasure ringing through me, I was thinking on some other level of myself that this was what I needed in life. More than water or bread, more than conquest or power. All of it paled in comparison to what it felt for that girl, that troublesome girl, to give herself to me.
When we lay on the fur afterwards, contented and sleepy, it was almost as if the conversation about the place she was from – and her need to get back there – had never happened. But it had happened. And as sure as I knew that keeping her in the westerly roundhouse – or in any roundhouse – was not a solution, I also knew it was not going to be so simple as letting her go. I glanced down at her face as she dozed on my chest and knew, in that moment, that it was definitely not going to be as simple as that.
19
Emma
Jarl Ragnar allowed me to leave the roundhouse the next day. Alone. I checked behind me to see if any of his men were following me, but no one was there. Had he heard what I was telling him? Even apart from the details of where I was from, and why I needed to return – which I obviously could not blame him for not fully grasping – did he realize that I told the truth when I said that keeping me captive would make me hate him?
I took a meal at mid-morning, alone in the feasting hall, and wondered briefly why it was I felt so sad. Even sadder than I had the night before, when I was kept away from the feast. I got through two of the smoked, kipper-like fish before the reason occurred to me. In the light of day, and no longer held by my hot-headed, possessive Jarl, I no longer had the distraction of my own indignant anger. If I was free to go – and it did feel like he signaling as much – then as soon as we returned to Ragnar's camp I would, with Paige's instructions, find the tree and return to the future.
The future. As I sat chewing heavily buttered bread in the hall, the light from one of the fire-pits flickering in my peripheral vision and the smell of camp all around me, it was almost enough to believe that my previous life had been a kind of dream. How was it possible that in a few days I could be thousands of feet in the air, looking down at the Atlantic on my way back to the place where I now was? How was I to return to the world of mobile phones and the internet and next-day delivery after I'd been with the Vikings?
And even more importantly, what was I going to say when I got there? To my parents, my friends? To the media, who surely had been driven into an even more intense frenzy by my sudden disappearance – which so perfectly mimicked Paige's? To the FBI, who must have themselves been wondering if alien abduction was sounding quite as implausible as they'd first assumed?
I slumped down a little over the table, running one of my fingers through the intricate, swirling pattern that had been carved into its surface and fatigued by the mere thought of what lay ahead of me. And even then, part of me knew that all thoughts of the media and the trip home and the police were, in their own way, just an avoidance of the one thought that stood above all the others: what was I going to do without Ragnar?
It was easy, the previous night, to use my righteous fury at being held in the roundhouse to think of Ragnar as the one whose professed love was leading him to do silly things. He'd said the words aloud, that he loved me. I hadn't. And the reason I hadn't is that I'd got it into my stupid head that that somehow left me with the option of not loving him. Which it didn't, of course. It doesn't matter if one speaks the truth or bites one's tongue against it. The sky is blue, whether it's stated aloud or not. The truth is the truth, and the truth was that I loved him back.
He knew it, too. He told me he knew it. So now I wasn't just going home anymore. Now I was leaving Ragnar. I would have started sniveling over my food right there if Hildy hadn't come bursting in and immediately started eyeballing me.
"Has anyone ever told you it's possible to slow down?" I asked her, coughing at the sound of a small wobble in my voice.
"What's that?" She bellowed, raising her chin so she could gaze at me haughtily, as if from a height.
"You never just walk into a place, do you?" I continued. "Like a normal person. No, that's not you. You
burst in. You rush in. You appear suddenly, like some kind of sitcom sidekick."
"I'm sure I have no idea what you speak of, you mad girl," Hildy responded casually, tossing another log onto the fire. "Now get out of here, we need to prepare it for the Yule feast tonight. Perhaps you should be softer, then maybe your Jarl would allow you to attend?"
"That's funny," I shot back, getting to my feet and heading to the door where she waited, stamping her foot with impatience. "I mean the part where you're advising me to be softer. That's hilarious. I mean you of all people – I bet your poor husband doesn't get a moment's –"
"OUT!" She shouted, shoving me through the door and then, for good measure, actually kicking me in the butt. I was about to whirl around and – I don't know – tackle her to the ground? – when a male voice interrupted.
"That's enough, Hildy. I won't have any allies left if you beat up all their women."
Jarl Eirik. I turned to face him and we regarded each other with a well-intentioned, wary kind of curiosity. I was Paige's best friend, and he was her husband. I was from the same place she was from, the mysterious country that neither of us quite knew how to speak of or explain, and that had once had a claim on her heart. I could see that the Jarl hadn't quite figured out whether I was a threat to the order of his marriage or not. But I could also see a kindness in his eyes, like maybe he had some idea what difficulties I was going through.
"Jarl Ragnar says you'll sit with us at the high table tonight," he said. "You'll enjoy the Yule feast, it's –"
"Oh does he?" I responded, too loudly and before Eirik was finished. I've always done that, my whole life, when I felt awkward. It was one of the first things Paige noticed about me when we met. You don't seem very English, she'd said, after observing my tendency to become a verbal bull in a china shop.
"Er, yes," Eirik replied, not bothering to hide his mild irritation. "Paige was happy to hear it, as was I. And then after we eat we'll light the wreaths."
