Miriel nodded. “Maybe.”
Helen gave them a dubious frown. “Is it still standing?”
Deirdre shrugged and shook her head.
“Has your Hallie been there before?” Miriel asked Deirdre. “Could she have led them there?”
“I never showed it to her,” Deirdre said. “But she’s a curious lass. She may have found it on her own.”
Miriel furrowed her brows. “’Tis been years since my last visit. Do you remember how to get—”
“I do,” Helena said, charging past them. “Follow me.”
Their hopes buoyed, the sisters set out at a brisk pace to find their daughters.
A few wrong turns tested Helena’s temper.
The light onset of snowflakes made Miriel frown in concern at the sky.
Deirdre, unable to shake the feeling that this was all her fault, felt an ache start in her tightly clenched jaw.
Finally, they found the moldering hovel. It was much as they’d left it seven years ago. Nearly collapsed and covered with so many vines it was almost invisible. But even before Helena yelled out the lasses’ names, Deirdre could tell they weren’t inside.
Ivy had grown over the door. When Helena burst through it, tearing vines and shredding cobwebs, it made a grating screech of protest and sagged on its hinges.
For a moment, they gazed in silence at the damningly empty interior. It was much as Deirdre remembered it. Dirt-floored. Stone-hearthed. Sparsely furnished with a bed and a rickety stool that seemed ready to splinter apart. A few rusty pots and pans.
“Curse the Fates,” Helena muttered.
Deirdre and Miriel sighed behind her. They’d been so sure they’d find the lasses here.
In the ensuing silence, Deirdre suddenly heard something she’d never heard before from Helena. A sniffle.
“Hel?”
Helena scowled at her own gathering tears. “Loki’s ballocks,” she cursed. “I’m so bloody mawkish when I’m breeding.”
Miriel gasped. “You’re breeding?”
“Aye. I meant to tell Colin right after we… But then…”
“But I’m breeding as well!” Miriel cried.
Helena squeaked, “What?”
“Impossible,” Deirdre informed them. “You can’t both be breeding.” They looked at her as if she were mad. “I’m breeding.”
“Nay!” Helena barked.
“Aye.”
At that revelation, the still air was stirred to life by cheers of congratulations. They exchanged teary-eyed smiles and sisterly hugs.
Gradually, however, their mirth subsided, and they sobered.
“I intended to give Pagan the happy news last night,” Deirdre said, “before we were…distracted.”
“I haven’t told Rand yet either,” Miriel said. “But what kind of news will it be if we’ve lost our daughters?”
They silenced as the unthinkable possibility descended upon them like a heavy shroud.
Deirdre steeled her jaw. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t ruin the best Christmas gift of all—three new Rivenloch babes—by paying for it with their precious daughters’ lives. She would find the lasses.
Motioning her sisters out of the cottage, she wrenched the door shut again and clapped snow dust from her gloves.
“Look. We’ve raised our daughters to be independent, aye?”
Her sisters nodded.
“Then we shouldn’t be surprised when they exert that independence. We’ll find them. We just have to think like they do.”
“Like they do?” Miriel said.
“With hearts full of adventure and spirits full of courage,” Deirdre said, “like we used to be.”
Helena lifted a skeptical brow. “Used to be?”
Miriel snorted. “Deirdre, you may have engaged your husband in your bedchamber last night. But Hel and I are still trysting in secret tunnels and stacks of hay.”
Deirdre smiled at that. She didn’t need to tell her sisters, but there probably wasn’t a wild spot in Rivenloch where she and Pagan hadn’t knocked their sabatons together.
Helena sniffed and smeared the rogue tears from her cheeks. “So where to next?”
“Let’s try the burn,” Deirdre suggested. “Hallie knows to follow the current if she’s lost.”
A few tiny snowflakes began to filter down through the pine canopy as the maids hurried through the trees.
The silvery stream they sought wound through the wood, ultimately emptying into the double lake for which Rivenloch was named. If the young lasses were clever enough to follow it, they’d end up not far from the keep.
The sisters were only halfway to the burn when Miriel suddenly halted.
“Wait. Do you smell that?”
Deirdre and Helena sniffed the air. The scent was faint. “Fire.”
“That has to be them,” Helena breathed. She started to call out, “Jene—”
Miriel clapped a quick palm over Helena’s mouth. Helena frowned in irritation and would have burst free. But Deirdre held her hand up for silence.
Of the three sisters, Helena was the least cautious. She preferred to dive headfirst into trouble and come out with her blade swinging.
Deirdre and Miriel, however, knew the benefit of stealth. Fire could mean anything. It might have been started by the lasses…or by outlaw captors.
Deirdre whispered, “Let’s follow the scent.”
Chastened but still scowling, Helena swatted Miriel’s hand away from her mouth. Miriel glanced skyward and shook her head.
Deirdre carefully unsheathed and beckoned her sisters follow her. The three of them stole through the woods, as quiet as wolves on the hunt.
When Deirdre first detected the orange glow through the trees, she could see it was from a blaze much larger than a simple cooking fire. For an instant, she feared it might be a wildfire. But only a single broad column of white smoke, salted with bright sparks, rose up through the evergreens.
They approached in silence through the trees until Deirdre could hear the crackle and snap of pine pitch. In the clearing beyond, the golden flames of a great bonfire licked at the falling flakes of snow.
As she watched, three dark, devilish figures began cavorting before the fire like wee demons of hell. And reigning over their impish dance like the Viking god Hel himself was…
“Da?” Helena mouthed.
Miriel blinked in surprise.
Relief mingled with rage as Deirdre studied the macabre scene before her. The wee lasses were covered in blood, doubtless the blood of the goat that lay in grisly sacrifice before the fire.
While the sisters stared on in mute wonder, Laird Gellir hoisted a horn of beer in salute. “To Odin!” he shouted.
“To Odin!” the wee lasses echoed, tipping back their own horns to drain the contents.
Deirdre knew at once what this was about. Her father had brought the lasses into the woods to celebrate the Viking rites of Jul.
It was an innocent enough gesture. He obviously wanted to share his traditions with his granddaughters.
But she couldn’t let him believe it was acceptable to abscond with the heirs of Rivenloch without a word to any of their mothers.
Before the laird could refill their horns and further intoxicate the wee lasses, Deirdre had to intervene.
As she sheathed her blade, her eye was caught briefly by its inscription, Amor Vincit Omnia. No matter how upset she was, it served to remind her that love conquered all.
“Come on,” she murmured to her sisters.
The sisters pushed through the brush into the clearing, startling the celebrants.
Deirdre had never seen three guiltier-looking lasses. That guilt appeared to last about five heartbeats, at which point the spirited cousins grabbed hands to face their mothers in defiant solidarity. Deirdre couldn’t decide if they were adorable or infuriating.
Before Deirdre could choose diplomatic words to chide their father, headstrong Helena shouldered her way past.
“Wh
at the devil are you doing, Da?”
Laird Gellir’s blood-streaked face was menacing as he rose to his full height, fixing her with an icy blue gaze.
“Do you not know?” he growled. He narrowed his eyes. “I knew it. I knew you’d forgotten.”
Miriel scolded Helena with a scowl. “’Tisn’t true, Da.”
The laird’s blood-spattered white beard quivered as he proudly raised his chin. “You’ve forgotten the old ways of your forefathers.”
“Oh, Da,” Deirdre’s voice broke over the words, “we’d never forget.”
She saw now that her father was hurt. In his mind, their Norman husbands had usurped his beloved Jul, replacing it with their foreign Christmas rites.
Laird Gellir shook his head. “How is it that my own granddaughters know nothing about Thor’s battle with the frost giants of Jotunheim? About keeping Midgard from Fimbulwinter? About Odin leading the Asgårdsreien to keep the dead from the living?”
Deirdre stood in stunned silence. Was that true? She may have neglected some of the old rites. But every year she recounted the story to her children. She was certain her sisters did as well to their offspring. Were the lasses simply too young to remember the tales from year to year?
It turned out they were not. And it was the wee lasses themselves who brought comfort to all.
“Ach, I know, Grandda,” Jenefer announced with pride, flipping her golden braid over her shoulder. “Ma tells me the story every Jul.”
“Me as well,” sweet, dark-haired Feiyan said. “We put gifts on the trees and burn a Jul log on the fire and have boar for supper.”
“Aye, Grandda, we know,” willowy, blonde Hallie gently assured him. “We just like the way you tell the story.”
When all three lasses nodded in agreement, Deirdre’s heart melted.
Beaming with pride, Laird Gellir straightened to his full height, looking like the mighty Viking warrior he’d once been.
Deirdre had never felt prouder of her Hallie. A lump lodged in her throat, making it impossible to speak.
Miriel pressed a hand to her bosom and gazed at her Feiyan with watery eyes.
Helena took one look at her Jenefer and burst out sobbing.
Deirdre took her sisters’ hands. She shook her head. They were definitely breeding. Only pregnancy could make the fierce warrior maids so weepy.
Without another word, she pulled her sisters toward the bonfire. Crouching beside the slain goat, they painted their faces with blood. Laird Gellir poured beer into the wee lasses’ horns, which they passed to their mothers.
“To Odin,” Feiyan prompted in a whisper.
“To Odin!” the warrior maids called out together.
To Deirdre’s amusement, the beer was so heavily watered, the lasses could have toasted every Viking god in Valhalla and still not have gotten drunk.
Draining the horns, all six maids squeezed onto a fallen log near the bonfire. Then Laird Gellir recounted the Jul story in all its splendor—with dramatic scowls, confiding whispers, triumphant laughter, and a wild waving of arms.
Of course, the tale culminated in his riveting rendition of the Asgårdsreien, the wild hunt.
He described the violence of the stormy night. The ferocity of Odin, mounted upon his eight-legged steed. The beauty and bravery of the Valkyries. He spoke of the fearsome horde of black horses, snapping hounds, and the terrifying specters of the underworld that loomed behind a frail curtain on this darkest day of the year. He praised the power of Odin, who drove the beasts across the sky, protecting the living from the dead.
By the end, even Deirdre was waiting breathlessly to see if the sun would once again triumph over the darkness.
As he finished the tale with an upraised fist and an affirmation of victory, Deirdre decided Hallie was right. No one told the story as well as Laird Gellir.
After a moment of quiet reflection, wee Jenefer jumped up abruptly with glee and cried, “Now the sunwheel!”
“The sunwheel!” the three lasses cheered. “The sunwheel!”
How her father had managed to build a sunwheel without her knowledge, Deirdre didn’t know. He must have started it weeks ago. The thing was enormous, a great circle woven of wattle, with a heavy log cross that formed spokes in the middle. A hole was bored in the center of the cross, through which a long pole extended so it could be rolled.
The sunwheel was an earthly representation of the chariot Sol drove across the heavens. It was meant to mark the return of the sun after a long winter, the promise of life and birth and renewal. It was the culmination of the Jul celebration.
Studying the great wheel, Deirdre decided it was fortunate she and her sisters had come along when they did. Rolling the huge thing would have been dangerous and nearly impossible for one old man and three tiny lasses.
She quickly tasked the wee cousins with carrying the burning brands from the bonfire that would ultimately set the thing on fire. The three sisters would transport the wheel.
As it turned out, it was a challenge, even for the warrior maids. The wobbling wheel was hard to control and difficult to maneuver across the snow. But somehow they managed to steer the thing through the forest, finally emerging at the rise before Rivenloch.
Far below, Deirdre could see most of the clan had returned from their search. The search parties were gathered before the gates. Colin, Rand, and Pagan stood together before the crowd, addressing them.
“Wait.” Miriel touched Deirdre’s forearm. “Shouldn’t we—”
“What?” Helena smirked. “Give them a warning?”
Before Deirdre could alert anyone, Laird Gellir plunged ahead. He touched his brand to the sunwheel, instantly igniting the dead wood. The wee lasses mimicked him. In a matter of moments, the whole thing was blazing. The flames leaped so high they licked the lower branches of the trees, threatening to devour them.
The warrior maids had no choice then but to begin rolling it down the hill.
In a thunderous charge, with loud cries and shrieks of triumph, they bolted down the slope.
Their husbands, seeing what appeared at first to be bloody savages rolling a fiery weapon toward the castle, froze in stunned wonder. The clan folk cried out in alarm and scattered out of the way. There was one awful moment when Deirdre wondered if Pagan would order the archers to fire upon them.
But soon enough everyone recognized the warrior maids, despite their macabre appearance. Cheers erupted from the clan.
The wheel slowed at the bottom of the hill, wobbling wildly on the pole. The sisters let it topple onto its side, where it hissed in the snow like a fallen dragon. A few defiant flames burned a while longer, sending white ash up to mingle with the thickly falling snowflakes.
But the sunwheel was already forgotten when the three lasses ran past it, tumbling over themselves to share their excitement with their fathers.
“Da!” Hallie called, her blue eyes alight. “Da! We had a big fire in the woods!”
“And Grandda told us the story of Thor and the Frost Giants!” Jenefer added, swinging an imaginary sword.
Feiyan gushed, “We drank beer to Odin!”
“And we danced,” said Hallie, “to honor the Valkyries!”
“Grandda killed a goat!” Jenefer crowed.
Feiyan assured her frowning father, “Don’t worry, Da. ’Tisn’t our blood. ’Tis the goat’s.”
“And now we’ve brought the sunwheel,” Hallie declared, “so summer can come back.”
Breathless from the long run down the hill, yet still grinning at the husbands’ baffled faces, Deirdre held up her hand. “Let’s all go inside now, out of the weather.”
As they made their way through the gates of Rivenloch, the lasses were still chattering to their fathers about the morn’s adventures. Laird Gellir hadn’t looked so proud and happy in weeks. As for Helena and Miriel, they wavered between smiles of smug pride and sobs of overwrought joy.
After everyone washed the blood from their faces, Deirdre ordered the servants to bri
ng forth breakfast. The clan gathered by the fire in the great hall. A blissful peace fell over her as she gazed at their merry faces.
The spirit of Christmas and Jul was evident in everything around her.
The holly decking the tables.
The Jul log burning on the hearth.
The mistletoe hung over every door.
The sunwheel spent and smoldering in the snow.
The toasty Scots oatcakes.
The warm Norman wassail.
The mummers reenacting the birth of Jesus.
The laird telling the tale of Odin’s hunt.
All of it was part of the same bright spirit of rebirth and renewal.
Deirdre lifted her hand and waited for silence. Once the hall was quiet and everyone had a drink at hand, she addressed the clan.
“I wish you all Joyeux Noël and Gud Jul,” she said, “because the true meaning of the season is not one or the other, but a weaving together of both. Like the links in chain mail, our two traditions are stronger when they are joined.”
She raised her cup and beamed at the gathering of her loved ones.
“To kith and kin. To love and light. To the end of darkness and the promise of new life.”
The clan cheered and joined her in the toast.
Deirdre then called her sisters to her side, taking them by the hand. Her lips curved up in a secret smile as she gazed at her handsome husband, whom she was about to make very happy indeed.
“And speaking of new life…”
The End
More Historical Romances by Glynnis Campbell
The Warrior Maids of Rivenloch
THE SHIPWRECK (a novella)
A YULETIDE KISS (a short story)
LADY DANGER
CAPTIVE HEART
KNIGHT’S PRIZE
The Knights of de Ware
THE HANDFASTING (a novella)
MY CHAMPION
MY WARRIOR
MY HERO
Medieval Outlaws
THE REIVER (a novella)
DANGER’S KISS
PASSION’S EXILE
DESIRE’S RANSOM
Scottish Lasses
THE OUTCAST (a novella)
MacFARLAND’S LASS
MacADAM’S LASS
MacKENZIE’S LASS
A Rivenloch Christmas: A Wee Holiday Tale (The Warrior Daughters of Rivenloch Book 0) Page 4