by Sandra Hill
By thunder! It was only a welcome-home dinner … and a subdued one at that because of their king’s illness. Still, there were more than eight types of fish, including baked sea trout stuffed with onions and mushrooms, an enormous whole cod that had been roasted over hot coals, creamed and salt herring, pickled eels, salmon in dill sauce, a cod and leek soup, several dozen baked brown trout, and hákarl, or cured shark. Most Norsemen would be satisfied with plain fish, dried or raw, smeared with butter.
Aside from the fish, there were an entire reindeer pit-roasted in hot coals; pork and leek stew slow-simmered with carrots, onions, celery, and barley; a stringy goat pottage; a large goose stuffed with hard-boiled eggs; and that ever popular hrútspungur, or ram’s testicles pickled in whey and pressed into a cake. Bowls of butter accompanied huge platters of flatbread, along with pots of horseradish and mustard. An array of hard and soft cheeses included the Norse favorite skyr, a creamy curd cheese often flavored with fruit.
And vegetables! Blessed Freyja! There were cabbages, field beans, peas, carrots, and turnips. For the sweet palate, the traditional haverbread or oatcakes, plus stewed prunes, cinnamon apples, hazelnut tarts, and fresh berries with cream.
It was a veritable feast fit for a king, but the everyday fare at Stoneheim. If Ingrith didn’t wed soon, she was going to turn them all into milksops. Or fat Vikings.
With a long sigh, Tyra put her face in her hands and wondered how she was going to survive this night … and the next day. And food was the least of her troubles, she realized as Adam came up and sat down beside her.
He smelled of clean soap and warm male. He smelled good enough to eat.
CHAPTER SIX
He was pure knightly temptation …
“Why are you so sad?” Adam asked.
Without being invited, he had sat down in the chair next to her, which must have become empty when Rafn went to the garderobe. Not that being invited ever seemed necessary for this rogue.
“I’m not sad, really. Just somber, thinking about everything to be done on the morrow. Worrying about my father.”
He nodded his understanding. Looking about the massive hall, he must be noticing that despite the hum of conversation and laughter, the same air of sobriety had settled in like an impending storm cloud. Tension lay in the background of all that her people said and did. They were all waiting for the next day and the outcome of the medical procedure on their king.
“So, what do you think of Stoneheim?” she asked
He arched his brows and grinned. “Not what I expected.”
She arched her brows back at him.
He thought for a bit while a serving maid poured him a wooden goblet of mead. He took a deep draught before leaning back in his chair and answering her. “After forcefeeding all of us that disgusting gammelost aboard ship, I thought there would be more of the same here.”
“I left Stoneheim in a hurry. There was no time to gather tasty provisions from Ingrith’s larder,” Tyra told him before she realized how defensive she sounded. “You thought we ate stinksome cheese all the time at home?”
He nodded … and grinned some more.
She punched him in the arm, hard, and he flinched. Well, not hard enough for him to flinch. He was teasing her again.
“Actually, I thought you in particular dined on sour crabapples and prickly pears and tough-as-hide boar meat. They go better with your disposition than”—he glanced down at some of the platters being placed before them—“sweet cream and late strawberries.” He stretched out a hand and dipped his fingers into the cream, plucking out a plump berry. “Here,” he said, offering it to her with his fingers.
“Nay … I do not want … oh, you lout …” She opened her mouth for his offering because cream was dripping from his fingers onto the table, making a mess. Unfortunately, he did not immediately remove his fingers from her mouth and made her lick off the cream before he drew back.
As she munched on the sweet berry, he dipped his fingers in a bowl of water and wiped them on a linen cloth. The whole time, he watched her chew. “My God!” he said finally. “You have the most amazing mouth.”
Tyra wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but she sensed it was a compliment. Bloody hell, she knew it was a compliment. How could it be anything else when he was staring at her so hotly?
“My mouth is too big, and you well know it,” she snapped.
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “It’s just the right size.”
“For eating?”
He laughed. “Not for eating.”
“My sisters …” she said, grasping for some subject of conversation to make him stop staring at her. “What think you of my sisters? They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
At first a slight smile tugged at his lips, as if he recognized her evasive tactics. Then he looked about the hall, searching out each of her sisters. First Ingrith, a Norse-woman through and through. Tall, slim, and ever so efficient, with her blond hair hanging in long braids down over her crisp blue, open-sided apron, worn over a sky-blue gunna. She glanced up from where she was instructing a kitchen carl on proper methods of ladling beer into mugs from a big wooden barrel, noticed Adam’s scrutiny, and smiled at him.
Tyra’s heart sank at Ingrith’s interest in the man, and his apparent return of interest. And she cringed at her own attire, compared to Ingrith’s. She wore a brown belted tunic and brown leather braies. They were clean and of fine fabric, but not at all feminine. This was how she wished to be attired … as an example to her men. Leastways, that was what she told herself.
While her mind wandered, Adam’s gaze had moved to Vana, who came into view then, bustling about the tables, wiping up the spill from one Viking’s ale horn, shooing a dog out the door—none were permitted indoors during meals—or chastising another Viking for some loathsome act … probably wiping his greasy fingers on one of the cloths that adorned the upper tables. Vana would have been considered merely pestsome because of her prissiness, but her cool Icelandic good looks made up for any nuisance caused by her cleanliness passion.
Rafn snagged Vana as she bustled by, backing her up against a far wall. Rafn was a fierce fighter in battle, Tyra’s right hand in a fight to the death, but he was pudding in Vana’s hands and always had been. Right now he had one arm braced on the wall behind her and was twirling a loose strand of her white-blond hair in the forefinger of his free hand. Vana was laughing at something he said. If by some miracle Tyra ever married, Vana and Rafn would be married in the next instant, so much in love were they.
Then there was Breanne, who had just entered the hall. When engaged in her carpentry and building work, Breanne often wore men’s attire, but at other times, like now, she adorned herself as the pure woman she was. Right now her curly red hair was pulled back off her face with a gold circlet, and she wore a gown of amber silk in the Frankish style, without the usual Viking apron. Breanne was gorgeous, and any man in the room would be glad to have her.
Drifa came up to them at the high table, swinging her hips in a saucy way. Drifa’s black hair had gained silver highlights in the flickering light of soapstone candles and wall torches. Drifa had always been people-shy, and she raised her eyes demurely as one of the soldiers, clearly impressed with her beauty, asked her a question. Her eyes, a light shade of jade, matched the green apron and shift she wore. When she got to their place at the high table, Drifa made a great fuss about arranging a bowl of flowers on their table, and she saw Adam’s eyes twinkle with merriment at her transparency. All the men adored Drifa with her exotic blend of Eastern and Norse blood. She was a tiny creature, but womanly and sweet-natured … all the things Tyra was not. Adam would probably adore her, too.
She looked to him to see if that was so, but his eyes had already wandered to a young Norsewoman far below who had begun to strum a lute. While Tyra’s burly Viking comrades much preferred a louder, more vulgar form of entertainment, Adam seemed impressed. In fact, he tilted his head to the side, and a whimsi
cal expression crossed his face.
Finally, when his attention came back to her, she couldn’t help asking, “You like the pretty lady’s music?”
He shrugged. “My sister Adela used to play the lute. It just reminded me of a time …” He shrugged again. “It just reminded me,” he said with a sigh.
“And so, what do you think of my sisters?”
His gaze swept over her then, bemused. Taking in her manly attire, no doubt. And her bigness.
She raised her chin. She would not bow under any man’s condemnation. She was who she was. So there!
Grasping one of her braids in his hand, he tugged her closer. “Your sisters are beautiful … each and every one of them in her own way.”
She blinked, hoping her disappointment did not show. What was wrong with her? Of course he considered her sisters beautiful. Everyone did. Why had she even asked? Why had she invited the comparison?
He tugged more on her braid till she was forced to lean forward from her chair, till she was so close she could smell the soft soap on his skin and the mead on his breath.
“If you are asking, however, which one I would choose to share my bed furs for a night … if I could renegotiate our pact …”
She wanted to protest and tell him that that wasn’t what she’d meant at all, but it was. It was, may the gods have pity on her pathetic soul.
He brushed his lips against hers … a whisper of a kiss, but so powerful she nigh shook from the aftereffects. Like fire it was. Sweet fire.
And then he finished his statement.
“… I would still choose you.”
It was only a kiss…
Adam’s bedchamber door swung open two hours later without anyone having knocked. At first he thought it might be Alrek and his brood back again, wanting to do him another unwanted, disaster-ending favor, like the recent hose laundering in which his hose had become food for several hunting dogs. But, nay, it was Tyra this time.
He looked up from his book, which he was reading by candle light … a copy of Hippocrates’s journal outlining head wounds and how they might be treated by trepanation.
“You kissed me,” Tyra charged. She was wearing some kind of sleepwear … a voluminous chemise of white linen, which probably belonged to one of her sisters because the sleeves were too short and the hem fell about mid-calf. Her pale blond hair was loose and wild about her enraged face.
She was beautiful.
Nay, not beautiful.
Different?
Sensual?
Spectacular?
He couldn’t quite come up with the proper word to describe her. She was not pretty, by any definition, but she was definitely attractive … to him, leastways.
In answer to her kissing charge, though, he merely said, “Yea, I did.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“Why?”
“Because … because that’s not what I agreed to.”
He tapped a forefinger against his lips, which were pressed together to avoid smiling. “Methinks kissing would be good practice for nude snuggling in the bed furs. Don’t you?”
“Oh … oh … oh!” she sputtered.
He was willing to wager that she rarely, if ever, sputtered in front of her fighting men. That must mean he was different in her mind. That could be a good thing. Like her being different was a good thing to him.
“Wouldst like to try again? Practice-kissing, I mean,” he offered in his most conciliatory tone, as if he were offering to do her a big favor, when in fact he would be the one most favored by such an act. The woman, despite all her manly attributes, did have the most irresistible, kis-some lips. “In truth, that barely counted as a kiss. ‘Twas a mere brush of skin against skin. A true kiss betwixt a man and woman should last much longer.”
“How much longer?” He could tell she immediately regretted her hastily blurted question.
He waved a hand airily. “Oh, five minutes or so. And tongues should be involved, of course.”
Her jaw dropped open, and her eyes went huge, before she gasped out, “Five minutes? Tongues? Are you mocking me?”
“Nay,” he replied. Then, “Well, mayhap a little.”
“Lackwit,” she snapped and stormed out of the bedchamber.
Adam went back to his journal, but he was smiling now.
If kisses could talk, there would be some story!…
Moments later, Rashid announced cheerily, “He kissed you.”
Tyra was leaning her forehead against the corridor wall outside Adam’s bedchamber, trying to slow her heartbeat and make sense of the knave’s effect on her. Thus far, she could find no sense in it … just nonsense. ‘Twas naught more than teasing, of course. But she’d been teased before, and her heart did not go boom, boom, boom, boom like a battle drum.
And now the Arab wanted to discuss the ignominious subject.
“Yea, the teasing toad kissed me. But ‘twas just a jest on his part. Do not make a big thing of this, Rashid.”
“Big thing? Big thing? How can I not make a big thing of it when my master has remained chaste for two years? And now he has kissed a fair maiden.”
“I am not a fair maiden.” She thought a moment. “Did he kiss some other woman, too? A fair maiden?” Disappointment rippled through her at the idea. Was it one of her sisters? Or a serving maid? Perchance one of her soldiers’ ladies?
“Nay, just you.” Rashid was smiling from ear to ear.
Elation such as she’d never experienced before replaced the disappointment.
“Next step will be a harem … you wait and see,” he said. “Praise be to Allah! I will be home afore springtime, I wager. And we have you to thank, my lady Viking.”
“A harem? Are you saying that this kiss was a ploy to get me to join some gaggle of quacking sex-women?”
“Well, I cannot speak for my master, but, yea, kisses can be tools of seduction. And women can be seduced into joining harems. That is not to say that Master Adam—”
Tyra stomped off before he could finish.
‘Twas all much ado about a kiss.
Starting now, she was going to stop thinking about the kiss. For some reason, though, she couldn’t stop touching her lips.
Why is everybody always picking on him? …
“You kissed her,” Rashid charged Adam and grinned as if praising a wee child.
“Bloody hell! Why is everyone making such ado about a single kiss?” Adam set aside his book and glared at his assistant.
“You’ve heard that old Arab proverb about kisses, haven’t you?”
“Nay, I have not,” Adam admitted, knowing he was going to hear the proverb whether he wanted to or not.
“A wise man once said, ‘First comes a kiss. Next come the harem veils.’”
“You bloody fraud! You made that up. There is no proverb that says any such thing.”
Rashid ducked his head. “Well, there should be.”
Adam shook his head at Rashid and his never-ending attempts to put together a harem for him. “Help me gather together the instruments for tomorrow’s operation.”
Rashid nodded. A short time later, while they examined the tools laid out on linen cloth, he tried once again. “I think she is melting.”
“Who?” Adam asked … as if he didn’t know who.
“The warrior princess. I mentioned a kiss being the first step in the seduction process leading to a harem, and—”
“You told her that?”
“Yea.”
“Now she will think I kissed her with ill purpose … to gain some end.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Nay, I did not. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. And ‘twas no big thing, Rashid. Do not make it so.”
“Hmmm.”
“What does that hmmm mean?”
“Just that she had the same response. Told me in no uncertain words not to make much of nothing. But me-thinks she protested too much. Methinks it was a big ado to her. In fact, methinks—”
“Dost
know what I think, Rashid? Methinks you think too bloody damn much. Stop interfering in my life.” Adam closed his precious journal and was about to put it away in its leather case; it was obvious he would have no more opportunity to study it this evening. He couldn’t stop himself from asking the next question, though. “So, what was Tyra’s reaction to your telling her that kisses lead to harems?”
“She stomped away.”
“Aaahh,” he said, and would have liked to do the same.
But there was a knock at the door. A series of knocks, actually. Four of them.
Adam looked at Rashid, and Rashid looked at him.
“Enter,” he called out.
And in came Tyra’s four sisters, all wearing voluminous night shifts, like the one Tyra had had on. He had thought all women slept naked, as their menfolk did.
“You kissed her,” they all charged as one, smiling their congratulations at him.
He pushed a path through the women and did what he should have done before. He stomped down the corridor.
Aaarrgh! he wailed inside. When did my life become such a nightmare? When did I revert to such youthling impulses? When did I let a woman turn my brain to mush?
He promised himself not to repeat the mistake.
Unless there were tongues involved.
Or bed furs.
Aaarrgh!
The physician began to heal himself…
Adam was preparing to operate on the unconscious king.
They had slipped some of the strong, amber-colored, Scottish brew, uisge-beatha, between Thorvald’s lips to help dull the pain and make his sleep deeper, as well as a small amount of poppy juice, though henbane or mandrake might have served as well if they had been available. It would not do for him to awaken in the midst of this procedure.