“I don’t care,” she replied. She held their forearms together, then she gazed up at him. “I don’t want to wait for our daughters and sons to come, Thorbrand. The only blood that matters is ours. Here, now, we have made ourselves one.”
“Aelfwynn,” he ground out. “I love you.”
“As I love you, Thorbrand,” she whispered back.
This time, he took her with him down to the ground. He laid upon his cloak, but settled her above and astride him. So that her cloak could keep them warm as, there on the forest floor with winter all around, he made her his wife.
He showed her his love, as she showed him hers, their gazes locked together as if they had been blind until this moment.
No hiding. No fighting.
No wars or kings or games. Just the two of them made one, at last.
They whispered words of forever as Aelfwynn took Thorbrand inside her once again. And then slowly, their fingers linked and their eyes full of only and ever each other, she married him in every way that mattered, there on the forest floor.
With only winter as witness.
And a love so bright it felt to them like spring.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ful oft wit beotedan þæt unc ne gedælde nemne deað ana, owiht elles.
Very often we two vowed that we would not be parted except by death alone, nothing else.
—from The Wife’s Lament,
translated by Eleanor Parker
But the magic they’d made together in the woods was only the first wedding that day.
“Weddings require preparation,” Aelfwynn argued. They had dressed anew, and Thorbrand had yet lingered. He’d settled Aelfwynn before him and tended to her hair, combing it out with his fingers and then braiding it back so that no trace of wildness or the woods remained. “Negotiations between families take time.”
“Sweeting.” He turned her to look at him again, his midnight gaze bright with laughter. “Our negotiations are well and truly concluded.”
“It is winter. No one marries in winter—for how can the families make such a long trip when the weather—?”
“Aelfwynn. If your family came to this wedding it would be a war.”
She blinked at that, then took a deep, shaky breath. “Indeed. Indeed, it would.”
And she knew his face so well it might as well have been carved into her heart. Yet still did she sigh a little at what she saw on it then, a tenderness she knew well was only hers.
Only and ever hers.
He smoothed a hand over the hair he had fixed to his liking, then smiled.
And her worries eased.
Because the wedding they would have today was for the world. For the benefit of kings. Their truth was here. In these cold woods so like the forest where they had met. Where wolves might howl and snow threaten, but Thorbrand would keep them safe. And she would weave love and laughter all around them, and make them whole.
Over and over again, no matter what they were called to do.
They made it back to the village while the sun was still high. Thorbrand marched Bjørn before him, so that all might know his misdeeds and witness his punishment as he led him back to face Ragnall’s harsh justice.
But such justice was to remain the province of Ragnall and his men, for Aelfwynn was immediately taken in hand by the village women she had befriended the day before. They chattered to her of the mead they had prepared, the honey brought from Ragnall’s own stores, just as he had provided the beasts for feasting and sacrifice. And Aelfwynn wanted to find the customs they spoke of so easily horrifying unto her soul, but in truth, she did not. For had she not moved without thought in the woods earlier? Had she not performed what Thorbrand had called blood magic?
She had listened to dour priests the whole of her life and none of her prayers had warded off the Northman she would marry this day. None of her piety had saved her, and her sacrifice—the sin her priests would have called a stain upon her soul—had brought her a greater joy than any she had ever known. More than simply joy, it had given her the purpose she had always desired. Thorbrand had seemed to her a demon sent to plague her at first, yet had become more dear to her than her own heart, and in so doing had answered all of her prayers. Each and every one, and then some. How could she think it anything but God’s will?
Her spiritual concerns assuaged thus, she permitted the village women to treat her like one of them. They drew her a bath and spoke to her of what went on between a man and a woman, not simply in bed, but in life. The older woman from the day before met her gaze frankly, answering questions without waiting for Aelfwynn to ask them. The other women rinsed her with herb-scented water, then helped her dress in a new gown that announced to all that she was not the same woman who had come to this village. For she was to leave it again as Thorbrand’s wife.
“Inn mátki munr,” the women murmured approvingly. The great passion.
Love, Aelfwynn thought as they led her outside again, where Ragnall himself waited to play the part of her family in the wedding ritual. Love had made them one. Love would protect and keep them. Love, not war.
Whatever came next, she and Thorbrand would do it together.
“Are you ready, sweeting?” Thorbrand asked quietly when she reached his side, the whole world in his gaze.
She smiled at him, bold and bright and recklessly smitten, and cared not who saw it or what they might think of her. All that mattered was that he love her, and he did. “I cannot wait.”
After the feasting and the wedding night, they returned to their little, remote cottage with the ceremonial gifts they had given each other, swords for their sons and the coronet Aelfwynn had worn at the wedding for their daughters, and a month’s supply of the mead that they must drink with attendant formality until it were gone.
“I did not think to see this place again,” Aelfwynn said softly in the sweet heat of the spring-fed pool, wrapped up in Thorbrand’s arms. “I had resigned myself to its loss.”
Thorbrand smiled down at her, his face open and intent in that manner that still set Aelfwynn’s heart to beating, hard and fast, for it was only for her. He had taken his time with her hair here, combing it out with his fingers as he liked to do, taking it down from the braids wrapped around her head that showed she was a married woman at a glance. Her long hair, now, was for his eyes alone.
She found she liked well all these ways that she belonged to him.
Thorbrand held her aloft in the warm water and tucked a heavy coil of her wet hair behind her ear. “They say, do they not, that it is a good thing indeed to love what good things you can.”
“If it is your heart’s desire,” Aelfwynn replied, for she too knew this wisdom.
“You are more than my heart’s desire, sweeting,” he said, his voice rough with the emotion she knew well he showed only her. And so would she cherish it, and him. “You are my very heart.”
“And you mine, Thorbrand.”
He took her there, the way he had taken her first. Her cries echoed back to her from the hills. His arms held her as he moved within her, slick and deep.
Until they made themselves one, just as they most desired it.
They waited for spring in the cottage, safely out of reach of the designs of kings and armies. And when winter released its grip on the land and the earth began to thaw, they left the cottage that would always be their first home, to Aelfwynn’s mind, one last time. This time they rode into York, where Ragnall now ruled undisputed and a ship waited to take them to the land far west.
Aelfwynn knew she was already thickening as she climbed onboard the vessel built to carry settlers and cargo alike that day, a secret she suspected her husband already knew, so well did he know her curves. She felt sure their baby would come after summer passed, when the weather turned cold once more, and they would become a family, far away on foreign shores.
; A better family than the one she left behind, she could not help but think.
For I will fight for you, she promised the small life inside her. Not for land or glory. And I am the daughter of kings and queens. I promise you, I will win.
They set out on a pretty spring day, leaving behind the clatter of York to make their way along the River Ouse and to the cold North Sea. She and Thorbrand would welcome their first child—a son, she knew, though she could not have said how she knew it—in a place she’d not yet seen. They would live a life she did not yet know, certain to be different than the many versions of a life she left here.
Yet she had Thorbrand, and that was all that mattered. For because of him, the idea of an uncertain future did not unsettle her. Not anymore. She knew well that whatever happened, and whatever came, they would face it together. The caprice of kings, the ravages of weather and time, all of this was as nothing as long as they had each other.
So it was that Aelfwynn, only daughter of Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, settled in for her voyage away from the ancestral lands of her people with salt on her face and the wind at their back.
And did not look behind her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gammel kjærleik rustar ikkje.
Old love does not corrode.
—Old Norse Proverb
Iceland, 922
Three years later, a stranger came to the small, coastal settlement on the great island called Ísland where Thorbrand and Aelfwynn had made their home. And better yet, had started their own farm.
“You are the man I seek,” the stranger said when Thorbrand, having seen him coming from a distance, invited the man inside the longhouse he had built with the help of his far-flung neighbors in the hope that one day, more of his kin would find their way here. “I come with news of Ragnall.”
Aelfwynn tended to the central hearth, their hall warm against the remnants of fog without, and Thorbrand could tell by the demure way she kept her gaze averted that she was as stricken by the stranger’s words as he was.
For they had always known this day would come.
They had prepared for this, Thorbrand thought. And yet, somehow, he felt as wholly unprepared as if he was green and young and had faced an Irish warrior he’d never had a hope of besting. When he was none of those things, not any longer.
Ever mindful of his place in this dark, brutal world and the promises he had made, Thorbrand had not allowed his training to desert him here. He had made a vow to his king and so would he keep it, and that meant he must be ready to fight when called. Thorbrand knew how to keep his sword blade sharp and his fighting instincts honed. He knew how to keep himself a warrior.
Even if, as season followed season and winter sat heavier still than it had in the other places he’d lived, he considered himself less and less a warrior. And more and more a man who planted and plowed and honored the land he’d claimed.
He and Aelfwynn had made a very different life than any he could have imagined when he had been a small boy with his father’s storied deeds in his ears and a heart for what battle might bring him, gold and glory alike. They had spent their first summer building on the land he’d claimed and preparing for the winter that was never too far off on this cold island. She had given him a son that first fall, another a year later, and was yet thick again. There could be no doubt that the gods had blessed them, and well.
And here, where there were black sand beaches and gods in the mountainsides, the two of them worked together, woven into one. She worked a kind of magic, his Saxon princess, who sounded less and less Mercian with every year. Aelfwynn laughed when she told him how her stitches had failed her as a girl in a royal court, when her hardy sewing, capable weaving, and all the mending she did suited their life here perfectly. Simple and stalwart, as so too was she.
Each of his sons had been born into his hands. Each had chosen to fight his way into the world in the middle of a snowstorm. Thorbrand had no doubt that the next would be the same, a bright red howl on a cold night, Aelfwynn made of gold and valor as she labored and then nursed these children they had made.
He could not understand why there were no songs of these battles women fought, each dangerous and beautiful. Thorbrand had already loved her. But with each day, each season, each birth, he only loved her the more.
And he had expected the work. He had longed for the quiet. He had expected his beautiful nights with his wife, and hungered for any other time he could get his hands on her, for his need of her only grew. Many a night they would sit near the fire and he would play with her hair while she rocked their babes to sleep. Or better yet, once she succeeded, he would play the games he liked best. After their time in the cottage in Northumbria, he had known well that their life together was a pleasure, and the hard work they did only made the pleasure greater.
What he had not expected was the laughter. He had not expected to watch her nurse his son at her breast, then meet her gaze and know in that moment that the whole of the world, all its blood and its battles, its conquerors and kings, were nothing compared to this.
To the love that ran in him, more powerful than all the seas he had crossed.
And now this stranger stood before him, bearing the standard of the man he called his king. Thorbrand had no interest at all in returning to the life he’d left behind him. Everything in him rebelled. He had given no thought to territorial disputes across the sea while he had beaten out a life here. He had trained, but he had allowed himself to think of his own land, for a change.
Not the land he could only and ever hold at Ragnall’s pleasure.
But he had made his vows long ago. And he was a man of honor or he was no man.
There was only one possible response.
For surely it mattered not what a man felt in his heart, only what actions he took. How he honored his promises. How he served his king.
“Then you are come to me a friend,” Thorbrand said to the stranger. “I await Ragnall’s commands with gladness.”
Aelfwynn lifted her head from her work then, her hands stilling over her stitching. Yet he could see the flash of her gold gaze from across the room. His prize far greater than coins. His hoard far better than any dragon’s.
She did not need to speak. She would not. Yet he knew her heart as well as he did his own.
It was as she had promised him long ago. They were who they were. She was the daughter of Aethelflaed, heir to Mercia whether her uncle liked it or did not. He was sworn to his king’s side, come what might.
They had always agreed, since that day in the cold wood where they’d bound themselves in blood, that when the time came they would do what they must. He might not have failed his parents as he’d imagined all these years, and he would not do so now. Honor was all, or they were nothing, and how could he raise his sons to be good, strong men if he shirked his?
Yet he could admit to himself that he had wished for more time.
He braced himself.
“Is my sad duty to inform you that Ragnall, King of Jorvik, has died,” the stranger told him, his voice formal. “His cousin Sitric has taken his place and though Edward of Wessex advances, there is no need for you to make good on the vows you made.”
Thorbrand signaled Aelfwynn for ale, and sat with his visitor. And was moved, as ever, to watch the graceful way his wife moved. To watch as she filled their cups, all that was feminine and lovely, making it clear without a word that this was a fine home and Thorbrand a powerful leader in his own right, or how could he boast such a woman as Aelfwynn?
He had grown more and more attuned to the work women did, here in this remote place where no act was ever unseen. And vowed that someday, he would make certain that he and his sons, at the least, sang Aelfwynn the songs she deserved.
Songs that might die with them, belonging only to their family, for there were some secrets that must never be told—and what had h
appened to Aethelflaed’s daughter must always be one of them.
Thorbrand sat with his visitor for some time, as the messenger told him the story of Ragnall, his death, and the rest of the news from lands across the sea that Thorbrand did not intend to see again. Not in this life.
Much later, when the stranger had gone out to relieve himself, Thorbrand sat, his gaze on his cup, when he felt his wife’s touch.
“You loved him well,” she said softly at his ear, her arms around his shoulders. “This is a blow.”
And Thorbrand knew he would grieve this loss in the days and years to come. Ragnall had been more to him than a king or even a surrogate father. He had guided him, molded him. Thorbrand would tell his sons many stories about the battles Ragnall had fought. He would teach them what a king was, using Ragnall as his example, for Ragnall had made Thorbrand the man he was.
A man who recognized what he had, and deeply appreciated what was lost, but did not mourn the dead at the cost of the living.
Because there was only so much life a man had, and it mattered not how he fought or what he wished, for only fate knew when it ended.
Thorbrand had no intention of wasting a moment of this life he’d built. Not one single moment, and especially not now his life was finally his.
He tumbled Aelfwynn into his lap and laughed at the little sound she made. Then he smiled at her, drinking in her eyes of the finest gold even as his hands moved to mold themselves over her fuller breasts and the mound of her belly where his son yet grew.
“Sweeting,” he said, as if it were a prayer. “My love. Did you not hear? We are free.”
“Silly man,” she said quietly, melting into him the way she always did. The way she always would. “Since the moment you first saw me, then took me, then neglected to mention I was not your slave.”
“It is easily reversed, this marriage,” he teased her, as he often did. “If a slave is what you would prefer to be for me.”
“Thorbrand,” Aelfwynn said, putting her hand over his mouth and laughing when he kissed it. “We have ever been free. Together we can never be anything else.”
Harlequin Historical May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Page 46