by Kris Tualla
***
Grier trudged through the castle yard later that day. Her wood clogs scuffed the shell path and her basket of healing supplies bumped against her tired calf with every step. She was returning from a mid-day call to a fevered sickbed. While she constantly worried that the Death might reappear, this proved only a childhood illness. She crossed herself, this time in gratitude.
Yesterday’s sunny glory was shrouded in mist and interred behind a cloudy cairn. Winds keened across Balnakeil Bay and through the castle ramparts. Heavy and wet, the cool afternoon air pushed against her as if trying to hold her back.
The keep’s front door gaped open. Was aught amiss? She forced her exhausted limbs to stretch a bit farther with each step, hurrying until Rydar appeared in the door’s frame. His countenance brightened when their eyes met, and he waved her forward.
“Come, Grier! Good you here now.”
“Is everything well?” she called to him.
“Good, all is good.” He waited at the doorway, vibrating with impatience. When she reached the steps, he disappeared inside the dusky hallway leaving Grier to follow, unenlightened.
Lady Margoh Henriksen was in the dining room. Grier’s hand went to her battered cheek in a self-conscious reflex. It was bad enough that she felt short and overly rounded beside the tall, slim blond. Worse, Margoh was always perfectly groomed while Grier wore gowns suitable for her work. If the ‘old aunt’ was invited to Durness to help out, why didn’t she ever seem to do so?
Rydar set his crutch aside and lowered himself, wincing, into a chair.
“Are ye hurt?” Grier inquired. She set her basket on the floor and circled the table to kneel at his side.
“No.” He waved dismissively. “I no’ ride long time. Yesterday I ride.” His lopsided grin appeared. “Long time.”
“Oh! Are ye sore?” Grier rested her palm lightly on Rydar’s firmly muscled thigh. “Here?”
Rydar’s cheek twitched. “Aye.” His eyes flicked to hers. Their pale intensity pinned her.
“I—I have a balm,” she stuttered. The heat of his thigh burned past her hand and flowed throughout her frame. Startled, she pulled away, stood and turned aside. “I have it with me. In my basket.”
“Are you going to rub it on him here?” Margoh’s voice intruded.
“Of course not!” Grier welcomed the older woman’s taunt; it cut a path through the confusion that Rydar’s heat generated in her. She dug out a pot of salve and set it on the table.
Rydar reached for it, uncorked it, and sniffed. His nose wrinkled and after two swift inhalations, he loosed a thunderous sneeze.
Grier smiled a bit. “It’s strong.” She flexed her arms to help him understand.
“Aye!” Rydar re-corked the little jug. He set it on the table and rubbed his fingers under his nose. Then he pushed the noxious ointment further away, toward the table’s center.
Margoh leaned forward and frowned at Grier. “What happened to you?”
Grier’s hand went to her temple. “A man tried to take my poppy medicine.”
“How much did he get?”
“None!” she spat, fiercely irritated by Margoh’s assumption.
Margoh leaned back. “So you… fought him off?” she asked, her obvious disbelief a banner flying through the room’s already tense atmosphere.
“I knifed him off!” Grier declared.
Rydar snorted. Grier turned to glare at him. His face was bright red and he bit his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to dam his mirth. Grier’s irritation slowly dissipated. She grinned at him then, taking the wind out of Margoh’s flag of superiority.
After a deliberate pause, Grier considered the older woman. “What occurrence requires that I be here?”
“He has questions.” Margoh gripped her hands together on the table and sighed her blatant irritation.
“Questions?” Grier sank into a chair and glanced between the two. Her stomach clenched; this could prove to be a very awkward session. “About what?”
“I’ll ask.” Margoh turned to Rydar. After a brief exchange in Norse, she faced Grier again. “He wants to know why you were so wroth when Logan stayed away for a night.”
“Oh!” Grier felt her cheeks grow hot. She prayed Margoh would not realize what that absence meant for her reputation; she needed to deflect the conversation and quickly. “I was worrit, is all. After what happened to me, especially. Too many ruffians about.”
Margoh spoke with Rydar again. Then, “Explain about the ruffians.”
Grier shifted her gaze to Rydar. He stared at her, intent and focused. She spoke slowly so Margoh might translate.
“Since the Death, bands of reivers lived off what goods they could scavenge from abandoned crofts. Many died of the plague themselves, sickened by the booty they pilfered. But some survived and grew accustomed to that way of life. The pickings grew slim, though, once the deaths stopped. And the reivers are no’ willing to live honorably. They’ve become bold, attacking travelers at times.”
While Grier talked about the bands of robbers, Rydar’s brow lowered. He listened to Margoh’s translations, but watched Grier with a hard emerald gaze.
“You go today alone,” he accused.
“It was no’ far. And it was daylight,” Grier defended.
“After,” Rydar pointed at her cheek, his gesture finishing the statement. “Why you go alone?”
Margoh raised one haughty brow. “I certainly would not have. You invited disaster by doing so, didn’t you? Was that intentional?” She tilted her head the tiniest bit toward Rydar.
“No!” Grier bristled at the silent insinuation that she was vying for the Norseman’s attention. “My skills have always been available to my tenants.”
“Your tenants?” Margoh scoffed. “More rightly stated they’re Logan’s tenants.”
Her barb landed true, piercing Grier’s façade of confidence. But before she could shoot back, Rydar stood and looked around the room, drawing both women’s slack-jawed notice.
“Hvor er din våpen?”
Margoh translated: “He wants to know where your weapons are.”
The shift confused Grier for the moment. “Why?”
It was Rydar’s turn to startle. He smacked one palm against his chest. “I here, now. I—help Logan. I help you!” His deep accented words bounced through the stone-walled room. “You, woman. I, man. I…” He paused, then a connection was made. His eyes lit with understanding. “I strong. Aye?” He flexed his arms in imitation of Grier.
He looked strong, Grier realized. Eight days of regular meals and ample rest had already changed him. What might the next weeks bring?
“Aye, you’re healing quite well,” she ventured.
Rydar spoke to Margoh.
“Weapons,” she replied.
Rydar fixed Grier with his stare, glowing green embers in the afternoon dusk. “Weapons, Grier. Your weapons. I help you safe. You help me and now I help you.”
She had no reason to deny him. Truth be told, his declamation warmed and soothed her. For a moment, she allowed herself to rest in this amazing stranger’s promise. For a moment she didn’t have to be the one in control. For a brief moment, her way of life was secured.
“Aye. I’ll show you the armory before supper, then,” she replied.
Rydar relaxed some and sat back down in his chair. “You show me—ar-moh-ree—before supper. Aye. Good.” Punctuating the statement with a quick nod, he turned to Margoh. “I learn more speak now.”
***
Rydar concentrated on the language lessons, thankful that this borrowed doublet was long enough to cover his sudden response to Grier’s hand on his thigh. He hadn’t expected her to notice how sore he was and he certainly hadn’t expected her to touch him. Most of all, he hadn’t expected the thrill that snaked through him when she did.
He wasn’t an inexperienced boy after all; he was a fully grown man. He had bedded women many times, though not for several years past. But he hadn’t reacte
d so quickly—or powerfully—since he was fourteen and he touched Gjertrud’s hot, heavy breasts for the first time.
His reaction was very unsettling. He wasn’t the sort of man to seduce a virgin and then sail away to another land. And indeed he would sail away, as soon as he determined how. He needed to get home to Arendal. Nothing else mattered, not even his beautiful, passionate savior.
Enough. He wrestled his concentration back to Margoh and his language lesson.
When Margoh left, Rydar followed Grier to an iron-banded wooden door. Snugged in a corner of the keep’s entry, it opened to the circular tower. Inside the ancient broch, stone steps twisted upward along its walls.
And on those walls hung an array of mortal implements: pikes, axes, swords, arrows. Their lethal steel caught the dim light from above. They gleamed through a layer of dust, poised and eager.
There were wooden longbows measuring six feet from tip to tip, and quivers of barbed iron-tipped arrows. Rydar felt them balance in his tingling palms even before he was close enough to touch them.
He blew a long, low whistle.
“We’ve not been attacked in my lifetime so they’ve no’ been used for a while. Of course they were of no use against the Death. And the ‘ruffians’ are a recent danger. I suppose Logan has been too overdone to care for them as he should have,” Grier explained.
Rydar watched her lips and caught about half of her words. Enough to understand that the weapons had not been recently needed. That was a relief.
She blew dust from an axe handle and scooped her fingers through a cobweb. “I’ll gather these for my basket.” She left the tower’s enclosure.
Rydar limped to the stone steps and tried to climb upward. He balanced his weight on the crutch, rested one steadying hand against the stones, and put his right foot on the first step. He straightened his leg and pondered how to replicate the sequence considering the narrowness of the steps.
He managed, and got as far as the fourth step before a balance-stealing wobble caused him to grab for the stone walls, tearing his nails and bloodying his fingertips.
“Enough of that,” he muttered. He tossed the crutch to the floor below. Its sharp clatter echoed up the curved walls. He lowered himself, grunting over his abused thighs, to sit on a stone step. Pushing with his right leg, Rydar scooted backwards up the staircase on his arse.
The collection of weaponry impressed him. He lifted a longbow from its wall hook, tested it and found the sheepgut had gone hard and brittle. He unstrung the curved wooden stave and dropped it to the tower floor; there was no point in leaving an unusable weapon at the ready. He tested three more and threw two of them after the first.
Reaching higher, he gripped a battle axe. He slipped its leather thong over his wrist and held the violent implement in his right hand. He hefted the handle until it settled, balanced and gleaming with the urge to kill. A steel axe meant death to those it cleaved. There was absolutely no ambiguity in its purpose.
Rydar felt the steel’s power vibrate through his arm. His brow lowered and his breath came faster. He swung it through the empty space in the center of the tower. Again. And again. He lifted it near his face and stared at the razor edge.
“We shall be allies,” he whispered. “Equal partners, eh? Should the need arise.” Rydar scooted down the steps and set the axe at the bottom.
Then he saw the sword.
It leaned, inconspicuous, against the wall behind the door, robed in a scabbard of ornately tooled leather. Above the sheath, brass quillions curved around a walnut handle edged in more brass. His eyes never left the weapon as he fumbled for his crutch and hobbled across the room. He touched it reverently. It held a warmth he couldn’t explain.
Rydar received his first sword in Grønnland when he was fourteen, but the steel was mismade. As the winters grew ever colder, it became brittle. He nearly lost his life when it snapped in half; fortunately for him, the impaled wolf died with the sword’s pointed half buried in it’s chest.
His next sword was crafted from much less elegant iron. Now it lay rusting on the bottom of Balnakeil Bay.
Rydar lifted the leather sheath in his left hand and wrapped his palm around the hilt of this sword. He pulled the steel from its case slowly, like a man after loving his woman, until the shaft was free. He turned it in the dusky daylight and watched light slide along the raised center ridge.
The sword seemed well made. Nearing four feet in length, it felt like an extension of his arm. He tried a few thrusts and parries. It was good. Very good.
A slow smile spread over his countenance.
“You are mine.”
His husky voice rang ominous in the stone enclosure. He swung the blade over his head, spinning on his good leg and dropping to a knee. The weapon reached far in front of him.
“We are one, you and I.”
He stood again and whirled the blade, two-handed, swooping in wide figure eights. Captivated by the feel of it, he couldn’t stop in time.
With a cry Grier dropped her basket of healing supplies and fell to the floor.
Chapter Nine
“Grier!” Rydar bellowed. The cadence of his heart faltered. He scrambled to her side, stepping fully on his left leg but not marking the blade of pain from the broken limb.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and her face devoid of color. He crumpled to his knees beside her.
“I’m aright!” she breathed. She reached for the slit in her sleeve, and pulled away blood-smeared fingers. “It’s no’ deep, thank the saints.”
Rydar couldn’t understand all her words; he could barely hear past his thundering pulse. The realization that he might have killed her sickened him; the spectre of loss as real as if he had known her all his life.
He helped her sit up and tugged at her gown, anxious to see the wound. She shrugged her shoulders and pushed the neckline of her kirtle below the cut. Blood ran down her arm, soaking into her dress, but the gash didn’t penetrate into muscle.
The tower walls seemed to be moving and his field of vision was narrowing. He pulled the hem of his shirt sleeve over his hand and pressed it hard against the wound.
“I no ken you come! I’m sorry!” He slumped against the stone wall, boneless as a worm.
Grier nodded and rested against him. After several minutes, the bleeding stopped. Rydar watched, fascinated, as she fished around one-handed in her basket. She pressed some of the cobweb, along with an aromatic salve he didn’t know, into the cut. He helped her bind her arm with a strip of linen from her basket.
“I’m sorry, Grier,” he said again.
She laid her hand on his cheek and met his distraught gaze. “I ken. You did no’ mean me harm.”
Rydar searched her eyes; streaked in deep blues, pupils dilated, framed by long russet lashes. Her lips parted and she touched them with her tongue. She breathed through her mouth. She hesitated.
She turned away.
His breath left him in a rush. He missed his chance. A chance he wasn’t looking for. Mustn’t look for. Badly wanted, nonetheless.
Skitt.
The two invalids struggled to their feet. Rydar sheathed the sword, but didn’t set it down. Instead, he strapped it at his waist.
“It was my Da’s.” Grier ran one finger over the leather, tracing the design.
“Your pappa, aye,” Rydar confirmed. Then, “My sverd nå.”
“Aye.” Grier looked up at him. “It’s your sword now.” She collected her basket and left the armory. Rydar watched her disappearing back in awe.
She always understands me.
He crutched after her, thanking God repeatedly for staying the blade.
May 23, 1354
“Once again I apologize for our accommodations,” Grier murmured. She set cups of wine in front of Lady Margoh and Rydar and waved toward Rydar’s splinted leg. “The hall is otherwise occupied.”
Rydar shifted in his chair, his face warming, and wondered if Grier considered him an imposition. She hadn’t treate
d him as such. Still, it was all the more reason to heal quickly and continue on his way.
“Yes, of course.” Lady Margoh sipped the wine and glared at Grier over the rim. Rydar had no idea why she wasn’t pleased; the wine was quite delicious.
“What are you working on today?” Grier asked.
“Names of things,” Margoh answered curtly.
“That sounds bonny!” Grier grinned and turned to Rydar. Her bruised eye was healing well. “You say your ‘speak’, too, aye?”
“Aye.” Rydar’s bemused glance bounced between the women. “We begynn?”
Margoh sighed and patted her hand on the polished surface. “Begin. Table.”
“Table,” Rydar responded. “Tabellfør.”
“Tabellfør,” Grier repeated.
Margoh only looked at Rydar. “Chair.”
“Aye. Chair. Stol.”
“Floor.” Margoh tapped her fabric-clad foot.
Rydar countered with his boot. “Floor. Gulv.”
“Wall.”
“Wall. Vegg.”
“This one’s easy,” Margoh purred. “Door.”
Rydar laughed. “Dør!”
Ceiling. Fireplace. Hearth. Hallway. Stairs. Rydar repeated what Margoh said, and Grier repeated after Rydar. The trio worked their way through the keep, naming everything in sight. When they got to the tapestry in the Great Hall, Margoh faltered.
She glanced at Grier. “Sailors.”
“Vikings,” Grier stated.
“Vikinger?” Rydar pointed, confused. Why did she call the men in the boats ‘pirating’?
“Heroes,” Margoh added, still facing Grier, her tone a gauntlet tossed.
“Heroes? Or barbarians?” Grier countered angrily.
“Noble warriors!” Margoh barked.
Rydar hobbled between the women before they descended into their own war. “No. Stop.”