by Aileen Adams
He would watch his horse, the flick of his ears, as good as any sentry at detecting scents that he couldn't.
His sword close to hand, he closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and drifted into a semi-wakeful state, allowing the memories of years past to meander through his brain.
2
In less than three days, Hugh had completed his initial repairs to the hut. He'd patched the roof, not waterproof against a deluge, but good enough for a moderate rain. He'd chopped down two small trees deeper in the woods and used the smaller branches for a stack of firewood, its sturdier portions to brace the wall from inside. He had constructed a lean-to that would shelter his horse between two close-growing trees to the side of the hut. It was visible from the doorway, which would be adequate to protect the horse from the north winds.
He had even fashioned a small corral, using the natural thickness of the undergrowth, clearing some brush away, and constructing a framework of other small saplings that he had chopped to contain the gelding.
The gelding wouldn't run off; he wasn't concerned about that, but was more interested in providing a bit of protection for his horse against not only the elements, which could change at a moment's notice, but wild animals.
The morning following his arrival he'd carefully walked around the area, looking for any trace of fresh animal or human tracks close to the hut. He found none. The few animal signs he spied had been left earlier in the spring. Still, he knew enough not to take the lack of animal sign tracks for granted. His and his horse's scent would carry for miles on the wind, and sooner or later, wild things would come to investigate; perhaps a wolf or two, maybe even a boar.
By the third day, he was satisfied that the shelter was sturdy enough to provide him adequate shelter for a couple of months.
He had run out of supplies. The previous evening, he had snared a rabbit for supper, but he also knew that he needed to venture to the village on the coast for the additional supplies he would need for his short stay.
The following morning, he would ride east toward the coast, toward the small village that he remembered from his and his brother's stay. The village was named something like Argyll or Agryl. He would load up on supplies and perhaps even stay long enough to enjoy an ale or two.
Maybe, he would even ask around, see if anybody had heard of his brother. Unlikely, as he remembered that the village was very small. But, it was situated on the coast and enjoyed a small harbor, and news and gossip traveled fast in sea towns.
It was one of the reasons why he'd come. Maybe he would be able to find his brother, but if he couldn't, well, he would have to be satisfied that he'd tried.
3
No! This couldn't be happening!
It must have been the hundredth, maybe even the thousandth time, that Dalla had told herself that from the moment it had happened, but every day brought something new—some new anxiety, a new fear, a new heart-pounding dread.
A rope tied four or five of them together, she wasn't sure how many exactly, the short distance between each keeping them clustered together. Blindfolded, her hands were tied behind her back with another, shorter piece of rope, much like the others. Her wrists were chaffed, blistered, and throbbed with pain. Since they’d disembarked a ship earlier in the morning, she and her unfortunate companions had been kept in a storeroom of some type of small business. It sounded like a tavern.
The room smelled like ale, mold, and rotten straw, which she felt on the floor through her thin, soft-soled shoes made of leather.
Several of the women in the room wept softly, their voices ravaged from their screams, wails of protest until they had no voices left.
Dalla was afraid as well, but tried not to allow herself to give in to her growing anxiety. If she started crying or screaming, she feared she would never stop.
The smell of dead and rotting fish, accompanied by the shouts and ear-blistering curses of sailors, and the odor of the brackish sea invaded her nostrils. They had come by sea, kept locked in a small, nearly airless room in the keel of a ship as it rode the rugged seas of her beloved homeland of Norway and made its way toward the Scottish coastline. The room had soon grown vile with the stench of human waste, urine, and vomit.
Despite her fear of the coming hours and days, she had heaved a sigh of relief when they'd been released from the ship's hold and allowed topside. Even the ill odors wafting upward from the harbor waters were a blessed relief from the stench of their holding cell.
From the deck of the ship, they had been led up a cobble-stoned path to a wooden structure. She smelled the damp wood, felt the rough-hewn boards scrape against her arm as they'd been roughly shoved into a door from what she thought was an alley. At least it smelled like an alley, not much better than the hold of the ship where they'd spent the last several days.
A little while ago, a man who smelled even worse than the storeroom in which they were held had come to get them. They emerged from the structure and into the warm sunshine.
Oh, how good it felt on her face! Never again would she take the sunshine for granted.
All about them, she heard the sounds of activity; carts pulled across cobblestones, the scruff of boots on boardwalks, the hoots, hollers, and more than a few vulgar suggestions shouted in their direction.
Bloody Scots!
Her heart pounded, and she stumbled, wincing as her toe caught the edge of a stone beneath her foot, but she held back a wince and concentrated on maintaining her balance. If she or one of the other women fell, they would take the others with them.
How long had it been? It seemed like forever, but she knew it was just days ago that she had been kidnapped. She constantly worried about her companion Megan, and prayed that she was safe. It still seemed impossible that this had happened, but she had to accept it.
Hands tied behind her back, that dirty, smelly rag tied around her eyes, she stumbled along with a number of other young women, probably looking much the same as they; faces pale, dresses dirty and smudged, perhaps even torn. Her hair was probably as tangled his theirs, but she bit her lip to prevent it from trembling with fear.
Every second since that awful moment when she had been grabbed, slugged across the jaw, and tossed over the shoulder of some big brute of a man, pounding ineffectually on his back, she had gone through the incident in her mind over and over again.
Since that moment, her eyes had been covered, but she still had her ears. She listened, desperate to learn why this had happened… why had she been kidnapped.
She strained to recognize a sound, a voice that would provide her with some clue. She sought to distinguish the smells of the men around her, their captors.
She and her companion had been attacked just before twilight, walking along one of the many meandering paths that wound their way through the massive gardens of her family's estate in southwestern Norway.
She had never, not once, worried about her safety on their estate, not as a member of the royal family. Her mother’s side was linked to the royal lineage, not terribly close to the throne, but enough so that she could be considered part of the inner circle, though she preferred to stay on the outside of that circle.
She only attended court when her presence was demanded, perhaps twice, maybe thrice a year. She thrived in the rural environment, not particularly comfortable, nor content with how those closer to the throne spent their days, dealing with politics, making bargains, and on more than one occasion, betrayal.
No, for her court life was the epitome of boredom, at least for women. How utterly wasteful were the days spent fussing over wardrobes and hairstyles, the needlework, the soirees and gatherings that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. No wonder some of her compatriots laid abed until the early afternoon!
Not the life for Dalla. No, she loved to be up with the sun, roaming through the forests surrounding her father's estate. Riding the horses during the occasional fox hunt, or just riding through the countryside enjoying the beautiful vistas and brisk
air.
She had spent most of her life living at the estate in the countryside, at her father’s rural residence in a low and secluded valley not far from the western shores of the southwestern peninsula in the lowlands between Stavanger and Kristiansand. It was a land of towering, steep mountains interspersed with fjords, all of them wild and beautiful. Throughout her ordeal, she had kept the images of them in her mind, terrified that she might never see them again.
If she had been closer to the throne, she might've worried about her safety, but surely, her position in the royal family wasn't enough to put her in danger. She'd been mistaken. Why else would she have been kidnapped and thrown into the hold of a ship with other unfortunate female captives. What would happen to them, she didn't even want to contemplate. Still, if she'd been kidnapped for political reasons; perhaps for ransom, she surely would have been kept isolated in a castle somewhere, not bound and tossed, blindfolded, into the hold of a ship that she discovered was bound for northern Scotland. But if not political, then what? It was no secret that her father, Alfred Jorstad had made many enemies in his lifetime. Revenge? His brother, Amund Jorstad, had also been involved in numerous, somewhat questionable dealings with not only his fellow Norwegians, also the English, and the French, and scandalously enough, with the Scots themselves.
Unfortunately, Dalla had no way of knowing if anybody even realized she was gone, especially if Megan had not survived the attack. Poor Megan. She spent much of the time at the countryside estate with her companion and the house staff, her father and uncle often gone to Oslo to deal with business, royal obligations, and so forth. She rarely paid attention to their comings and goings.
With no love lost between herself, her father, or her uncle, and not for lack of trying on her part, she doubted that they would even display much concern over her sudden disappearance. Her father had never shown any affection toward her. As she grew older, she realized that he blamed her for his wife's death during childbirth. When Dalla was a young child, he'd often left her to her own devices, which perhaps was the reason she'd grown up with the reputation of being a wild child, often disappearing for hours on end in the meadows and forests surrounding the estate.
It was only when she had her tenth birthday that he hired a companion for her, to teach her how to be a lady, to read and write, learn English and French, and of course, to groom her for her eventual marriage. It was when she'd turned fourteen years old that she learned that her father had betrothed her to Manfried Gundersen, a man thrice her age, of German ancestry. Some type of business deal, she was sure. She had met the man once, had been immediately wary of him; the way he looked at her, his dark green eyes roaming speculatively over her blossoming body. She had mentioned her unease to Megan, who confided in her that Gundersen had already lost two wives to illness, and that he was a notorious rake.
By the time she was sixteen, her father had insisted that she marry the man, but thank the heavens, he had died falling from a horse a month before the deed was to have been done. After that, her father had tried to push her toward one man or another, but she'd purposely behaved so badly that none of them wanted her. Why, what decent man would want to marry such a willful woman; one who thought nothing of riding bareback, one who eschewed the gentler arts of cooking and needlework for digging in a garden or tending the falcons with the falconer, down to cleaning their cages.
Scandalous. That's what her father called her behavior.
By the time she'd turned nineteen years old, well past marriageable age, he'd put his foot down. He'd arranged yet another marriage, this time to a distant member of the royal family from the paternal line; one who lived far away from the court on one of the hundreds of small islands dotting the northern coastline of Norway.
She and her father had gotten into a terrible argument about that, and she'd refused. As a result, he threatened her with sending her to a convent. Dalla had considered running away, but run away to where? With what? She had no access to her inheritance, if there was any left of it, and she certainly couldn't go running to the court.
Dalla had ultimately decided that living in a convent was preferable to being forced into a loveless marriage with any of her father's choices for a husband.
She was to have been sent away to a convent in northern France at the end of the month, but she'd been kidnapped just days before her departure. And what about Megan? Had she survived the attack? Dalla’s heart grew heavy, thinking about her companion and friend, a woman barely ten years older than herself. Though Megan had been hired to fulfill her position as part governess and part teacher, she and Megan had soon grown into fast friends, so close that Dalla looked at her as a beloved older sister.
What if she—
They were roughly guided down several wooden steps into a room. A room filled with men who now hooted, whistled, and made rude, vulgar comments. Was that all these Scots could do?
At the women’s appearance, the room full of boisterous, rough voices rose, along with the clanking of tankards, both wood and pewter, by her ears, against wooden tabletops, more crude suggestions, and rumbles of laughter.
“Get over there, against the wall!”
Dalla understood English well though it was obvious her fellow captives did not. She tried to obey, but the women stood clustered in confusion, bound and sightless.
A rough shove against her shoulder propelled her forward. She gasped and stumbled with the others until she walked into a wall. Reaching behind her with her fingers, she felt its surface. Rough-hewn wood planking. Beside her, she heard one of the other captives weeping.
“Hush,” she soothed, speaking in a low, soft tones. “Don't let them see you afraid. It will only amuse them.”
She stood as tall as possible, ignoring the empty, churning feeling roiling her stomach, making her want to vomit. She disregarded the buzzing in her head, the myriad of questions racing through it. She could not think about the future and what would happen to her. She had to concentrate on here and now.
Her heart pounded so hard in her chest she was amazed it didn't burst. Blood pulsed in the vein in her neck as she stubbornly lifted her chin and turned her face toward the crowd. If she hadn't been blindfolded, she swore she would have stared at them, pretending a calm bravery that she didn't feel deep inside.
Vile Scotsmen!
There was no love lost between the Norwegians and the Scots. They had been at war for years, longer than she could remember. At that moment, fear engulfed her. She wanted to cry, to scream, and to rail against her circumstances. More than anything, she wanted to feel Megan's comforting arms wrapped around her.
She had no one else to yearn for. Not her father, who barely tolerated her existence. She—
“All right, here's the first one!”
Another roar ensued.
She heard a woman's stifled scream from nearby. Her heart sank, even though she had suspected they were to be sold to the highest bidder. The abject reality of the situation caused a new ripple of fear to race up her spine. They were Norwegian captives. For sale to the uncouth, vulgar, and wild Scots. Behind her blindfold, she briefly closed her eyes, uttered a prayer for strength.
Amidst the woman's terrified attempt to cry out, she heard a slap; a hand against a cheek, which stifled the woman's scream but failed to smother her weeping.
“She's got all her teeth! Fine figure of a woman, ain't she?”
Another yelp from the woman and she could just imagine the animal pinching her. If he laid a hand on Dalla like that, she would thrust upward with her knee and hope that she caught him in the groin with it. She might be beaten for her insolence, but no one was going to—
She heard the clinking of coins and money was exchanged.
Ale-addled voices, one bidder trying to top another, elicited a cacophony of sound that soon grew into a steady thrum. She tried to remember. Was she the third or fourth woman in the line?
It took every ounce of strength she had to keep her expression calm, to not start scr
eaming in panic as each woman ahead of her was eventually bought, cut loose from the ropes, and, from what she could hear, literally pushed into the crowd amidst the raucous laughter of men, accompanied by the shrieks and cries of the women.
A rough hand grabbed Dalla’s upper arm and shook her.
Her heart dropped, and her stomach balled into a tight knot of dread.
Her turn.
She fought back the urge to shriek and bit her lips to prevent it. Her heart thundered now, her pulse racing so fast she was surprised she didn't faint.
“And here's a lovely lass. She's got all her teeth too, and look at that hair! Cuts a fine figure of a woman, she's got to be—
The room again erupted with the sound of bidding.
Tankards slammed loudly onto wooden table tops.
She heard the shuffling of feet.
The place stank of body odor, vomit, ale, and leather. In the midst of the voices barraging her ears, she, as well as others in the room, took note of the deep, booming, voice.
“She's mine.”
The words had been spoken loud enough to be heard among the rabble, but with a tone that immediately silenced the room.
She swallowed.
The room suddenly grew quiet.
She heard the sound of movement, feet moving forward, not boots, but leather against wood. And then she felt a man's presence only a short distance from her. His scent wafted toward her. He smelled of horse, pine, and, oddly enough, the earth. She wanted to back away but stood her ground.
Nevertheless, her ears rang so loud now, her head swimming with wordless terror, her heart pumping so hard, she barely managed to hear the quiet words the man spoke to the one holding so tightly onto her arm.
She felt another hand reach out for her other arm, not terribly harsh, but oh, that hand was so large, easily wrapping around her forearm.
She shuddered.
Again, money was quickly exchanged, evident from the clinking of coins.