by Sandi Layne
Once they were alone in the village square, as the last of Els’s house collapsed to a coal-red pile, Tuirgeis clasped his shoulder.
“So what of your marriage to Elsdottir?”
“You heard our priestess. There will be no marriage,” Agnarr decided aloud.
The sky cleared with a sudden harsh wind, far overhead. It was becoming dark. The men left the square, each in his own thoughts and to his own home.
“Your trell can’t stay here, Agnarr! There’s no room for my trell if yours is here,” Magda said, her tone both tense and wheedling, Charis thought.
Charis paid the girl no heed, but continued to bundle up her few clothes and check to make sure she had her herbs and surgical tools. Knife, thread, and linens to pack and bind wounds. She also cleared out as many of her herbs as she could, hoping to be of use for quite a while in the home of Lord Tuirgeis’s cousin.
“She won’t be here tonight, at any rate, Magda. She is needed elsewhere,” Agnarr’s voice rumbled. “I’ll see to it that she arrives safely. Mother, help Magda and her father find bedding.”
Bran smirked at Charis from behind hands closed in his religious display. The healer felt her stomach turn in revolt just thinking about the rest of the winter spent in his company.
Charis did not wish to be walked across the village square. She did not wish to treat Cowan either. She did not wish for any company whatsoever. All she wanted was to be alone. Solitude, however, was nonexistent during the winter in Nordweg. Everyone huddled together like children afraid of the night. Charis would have preferred to wander on her own, but tales of people lost in the wild white concerned her enough that she remained indoors unless accompanied when the snow fell. So when Agnarr, bundled in a heavy fur and hefting an axe, took her arm to leave the langhús, she went without complaint.
The wind was now silent. No voices marred the blanket-thick quiet in the village. Overhead, the sky was an iron gray. Equally gray clouds and early dark combined to make it seem as if the limitless sky were somehow pressing down upon the world. It was oppressive; it also made Charis long for home, where such heavy skies were able to oddly outline green trees and make them seem eerily of the fabled Otherworld.
In such weather as this, she could believe Achan would appear at the edge of her vision and chide her for dawdling, or encourage her in her struggles.
“I will come for you when Kingson informs me that he no longer needs your healing power,” Agnarr informed her, sounding flat and preoccupied.
“It’s not a power,” Charis informed her temporary husband without looking at him. “It is herbs. And they will soon be gone. Your spring here will be long coming.”
“That’s true enough.” Agnarr sighed then, a deep sound that made Charis look at him at last. He slid her a glance. “I will ask Magda to give up her storyteller. I can do that much.”
Charis nodded slowly in understanding; Agnarr could do no more than what he had said. She waited until their eyes met. “Thank you.”
His eyes warmed briefly before he reminded her of their plans for the night.
She was being compelled to go serve a black-hearted traitor to his own people. Her irritation with Cowan, recently renamed Geirmundr, had festered and taken hold until it was a deep-rooted, bitter herb in her soul. By the time they reached the home of Lord Tuirgeis’s cousin, where Cowan was wintering, Charis’s nostrils flared in antipathy.
“Tuirgeis! I’ve brought the healer!” Agnarr called through the heavy wooden door. Light fanned out around the edges of the door as it was pulled open the width of a handspan. Agnarr brought her forward with one hand on her back, the other pulling her hood off from her head.
The vikingr lord smiled his approval. “Come in, come in, Agnarr. I have warm mead.”
While holding her loosely next to him, Agnarr waved Tuirgeis’s offer away with his axe. “No, but thank you. I must return to my own guests,” he added, a wry edge to his voice.
Lord Tuirgeis barely glanced at Charis as she slid past him into the langhús. She saw Cowan, reclining and drinking what was probably that warm mead mentioned by his host. He was laughing lightly with the lady of the house, and that set Charis’s back to stiffening. She didn’t hear if Agnarr bid her a good evening or not. Likely not; he was in a hurry to return home.
When the door closed behind her, Cowan finally glanced in her direction. His beard had been trimmed and he was wearing a clean overshirt. His wounded leg was propped up on the bench, on top of a pile of furs. The fire crackled comfortably—it was neither too hot for comfort nor too cold for conversation.
Cowan’s laughter died on his lips as he studied her. She let him see her resentment. After all, she was only a slave, but she was his equal for all that. She was the Healer of Ragor still. A kvinn medisin to these barbarians, but she had value. He did not speak to her, though Lord Tuirgeis paced around her to join the men, woman and two children on the far side of the fire. As in Agnarr’s langhús, this one had walls on the bed at the far end of the long, narrow dwelling. Here there were no herbal scents, but there were dried vegetables hanging from the beams in the ceiling, many cloaks draped over the cross-supports near the bed benches, and wooden cups and plates stacked on an otherwise empty bench nearest to the door. The two fires in the langhús lit the home adequately, she thought. Enough that she would not need a new lamp lit to perform surgery on her patient.
Her patient.
She refused to approach him unless he called to her. Stubborn resentment kept her waiting for a command from this new freeman of Balestrand. This new man with the new name would have to do as all the other men of Nordweg had to do. He’d have to order her. Command her. Could he do it?
The tension between them grew as if it were a thick rope. Charis did not care if the weight of Lord Tuirgeis’s gaze was upon her. She ignored him. Her attention was all for Cowan.
He eyed her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Dared he laugh? At her? She clenched her jaw against a string of particularly colorful oaths that Devlin used to use when thwarted in one matter or another.
After what seemed to her to be half the night, Cowan made a small movement. A beckoning gesture.
“Go to him, slave,” the woman called out with mild derision.
Feeling as if iron weighted her limbs, Charis obeyed. “Yes, my lady,” she said, every word sticking in her mouth like old thistles. She crossed the floor to Cowan’s side and knelt near the bench bed. Without a word, she opened her apron and loosened her pouches.
Conversation around the fire picked up a bit as she began the business of healing. Charis didn’t particularly care, but it let her speak to Cowan. To Kingson.
To emphasize her scorn, she spoke in the language of the Northmen. “I heard your wound reopened. If you will remove your trousers, I will clean it for you.”
He flipped back the heavy fur on his lap. “I already did, Eir,” he said, a smile in his voice.
Lifting the edge of his dark green tunic, she tried to focus on the wound. Her craft. Her skills. Not the traitor on whom she practiced them.
Her carefully preserved mint leaves went into a cold water wash, cleansing the opened wound before she turned to boil water over the nearest fire. As the water heated, Charis returned to her patient to remove the remnants of the old stitches. He hissed; she ignored him.
“Charis, lass,” he said eventually, his words tight as he controlled the pain her ministrations had to be causing him. A small shard of sympathy wiggled its way into her heart, but she ignored it and only tugged the last stitch out more vigorously. His hand stopped hers. “Healer. What’s wrong?”
She could not believe he had to ask. “Wrong?” she rasped in their mutual language. “Wrong? You’re sitting here in the land of the barbarians of your own free will and you ask me what’s wrong?” With an abrupt motion, she turned from him to watch over the water. When it boiled, she ladled some into a cup she had prepared with her other herbs and returned to make another cleansing poultice for the wound
.
The hot mixture made her patient grit his teeth audibly. Good. “Now I’m going to clean this again and stitch you back up,” she said in the barbarian tongue. “This time, I would suggest you stay off your legs for a full seven days to allow your flesh time to grow back together.”
He grunted. She stitched.
“You do good work, Healer,” he said, drinking down the pain medicine she prepared for him. “I am not the only one who thinks so.”
Charis shot him a look that she hoped would silence him. She saw him smile instead. “Thank you.”
Charis bowed her head, determined to treat him as the Northman he had become, and proceeded to clean up her herbs and surgical tools. Lord Tuirgeis approached.
“So, kvinn medisin, will he live?” A jest lingered in the rough depth of the lord’s voice.
“Ja, Lord Tuirgeis, if he can keep off his feet for a while and let the flesh take hold,” Charis replied. She had never found resentment in herself for this man, though he had been the one who had led the raid on her homeland. He had not attacked her rath though. He had not been the one who had killed her men. And of course he had never touched her . . . unlike some of the men under his command. Barbarians.
“Good. You are staying here tonight. We have one empty bed, there by the door. My cousin has said you can use it.” Charis nodded her acceptance, and he added, “Unless Geirmundr wishes you to stay with him?” Cowan was visibly startled; Charis saw his leg stiffen with surprise. Lord Tuirgeis chuckled. “I only meant in case you needed more pain medicine in the night.”
Charis did not know what to think, but she was just as happy to be on the empty bed next to the door. “I will have the medicine ready,” she assured the older man.
He left and Charis prepared to do likewise. Her patient stopped her, gripping her dress in determined fingers.
“Charis.”
“Why do you call me that? I’m not Charis. Not here,” she said, glaring at him. “You’re one of them now.”
“It’s not like that,” he whispered under the sounds of the family getting ready to sleep. Children were being tucked into their furs, the last dregs of mead were splashed back into the first hearth, and genial sounds rumbled at the other end of the langhús. “I’m only doing what I think is right, lass.”
She tugged herself away impatiently. “Right for you, maybe, but I hope your father dies before I get back to Éire and tell him of his faithless son!”
“Jesu, help me,” Cowan prayed, over and again as the hearth-fires were banked against the night. Charis’s parting shot had hit him in the heart, more powerfully even than whatever weapons had carved notches into him at the last battle. His adoption into Tuirgeis’s family had come as a surprise, yes, but he believed that God Almighty had provided for him. He was free now. And he hoped to be able to help Charis with his freedom, if he could.
If she would even listen to him now. He had not foreseen the naked hostility she threw at him this evening. Not in the least. He knew well that she was determined to escape, but if she could survive the attempt remained in grave doubt, as far as he was concerned.
He heard her preparing for sleep across the floor on the other side of the house. Bundles tucked in, scraping the wooden wall of her bed, the creaking of the bench with the weight of her body, soft muttering in Gaeilge. The other members of the family had settled in for the night. The children—both boys too young for duties beyond helping herd the goats—were still sharing their own memories of the impossible lightning that had set Els’s house aflame this night. They shared the bed next to Cowan’s own, and he smiled to hear their sleepy, small-boy chatter. It distracted him from his concerns over feelings far more complicated.
But even little boys fall asleep, and Cowan’s mind returned to his problem.
He felt that God had a reason for his being here. For his continual failure at previous escape attempts. For the compulsion to return to Nordweg even though he had been close to home before the snows fell. “Run fast and far,” Tuirgeis had said, in an edged warning.
Yet now, as a free man, did he have to run at all? Could he not leave of his own will and take Charis with him?
Would she even go now?
The night-sounds of the sleeping family settled comfortably around the langhús. Except in the bed closest to the door. A soft chanting floated to him almost unobtrusively. He had heard that sound before, on the boat, across the ocean. Night after night, he had heard it. It had tugged at him then, and it did so now; compelling him to get up and—against her orders—bundle the largest fur around himself to cross the room to her. The crossing was slow and each movement sent knife-edged shivers of pain through him. It did not matter at all.
She was rocking back and forth, singing softly to herself. He sank down to the bench next to her.
“Charis,” he whispered, leaning close to her.
She stiffened. “Go away, Northman.”
“Na, na,” he murmured soothingly. “I can’t leave you like this.”
With a half-strangled sound, she slumped over and he covered her with his arm. “Go away,” she mumbled again.
He shook his head and ignored the pulling stitches as he hitched himself more comfortably beside her. “No. Now listen, lass, I wanted to try to explain myself.”
She sniffled harshly and sat up. “Explain what?” In the almost total darkness, he had to cover her mouth to keep her from waking up the household. She shook him off, but spoke with only a bare amount of sound. “Explain why you turned your back on your own people?”
“I’m going back to them, Charis. I am. As a free man, not a slave.”
“What, so your pride is more important than the land that bore you?”
That stung. “No. Will you listen to me, woman?”
He could see the red glow of the coals through wisps of her hair as she faced him. “Why should I?”
“I’m a free man. I can help you,” he insisted, grabbing her by the shoulders. God help him, he wanted to shake some sense into her. “That’s one reason I was adopted.”
“Help me? Help me what?”
Frustrated, he did shake her. Once. “I can get you away from Agnarr Halvardson.” He had thought, perhaps, that this would be a relief to her. So when she did not answer right away, he was puzzled and dropped his hands. His leg was burning now, but he pushed the pain down.
“Get me away from him? How? By buying me?” He could hear a harsh intake of air. “I am not staying here, Kingson,” she reminded him. “I’m going home.”
“Buy you? No, of course not.” But what was he thinking then? Marrying her? She was already wed, in the manner that she accepted and that he acknowledged as binding, for her anyway. His beliefs would not allow him to interfere in that. Much. But he could do something. “I can help you. I promised to help you escape, remember?”
She snorted derisively. “Escape? Cowan, you couldn’t escape from this house with the door standing wide open.”
He was encouraged that she had used his given name and he smiled into the darkness. “Well, I can fight better than some,” he offered.
Her agreement was slow and silent in the long dip of her head. “I just don’t know if I can trust you to come with me. Lord Tuirgeis will offer you much to stay,” she whispered. He felt a little warning race along his senses at her pronouncement. It was close to the truth—closer than she could possibly know for certain. Was she that astute to have guessed so much or was she . . . could she be . . . the witch that the monk claimed?
No, she could not be. No. He put the doubt from his mind.
“You could escape,” he said at length. “I could help you get away.”
“Cowan . . .”
She said nothing further so he found her chin in the shadows to tilt her face toward him. “You think you can make your way from Balestrand to Ragor on your own? Remember what could have happened to you on the trip here?” He pushed her relentlessly, making her see her need of him for protection, if nothing else. “
You think you’ll survive a journey alone? You think no man will see you?”
She understood and jerked her chin away in the same spirited defiance that had generally characterized her. “I don’t know if I can trust you, now, do I?”
It was his turn to be insulted, but he remembered to keep his voice quiet enough to go no farther than her bed.
“When have I ever touched you like that?”
“Not like that. No. But can I trust a man who would turn his back on his people?” He opened his mouth to say something, but her hand found his lips and she shut them. “No. Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.”
Uncertain, he rose to his feet, stiff with more than the pain of his newly stitched wound. He relaxed only a bit when he heard her commanding whisper: “And stay off your feet.”
At least, he reflected discontentedly, she had spoken in the Gaeilge.
Chapter 24
The walls were closing in on her.
Charis had her back to the other occupants of Agnarr’s home as she worriedly sorted her herbs. Again. There were not many to sort this late in the winter. The healer knew—intimately—how much of each herb she had to draw from for the remainder of the season. It was only that this winter was so much longer that caused her concern about the health of those around her.
Most of those around her, anyway.
“We know, Healer,” Bran said as he sidled up to her. His voice carried his usual snide, ugly undertone.
“Know what?” she asked, glaring at him for daring to interrupt her already limited privacy.
Bran sent a significant glance toward his mistress, Magda. The dark-haired girl was embroidering what Charis would call a léine. The monk watched his lady with appreciative eyes. “We know you mean to use those cursed magics of yours to hurt your master,” he murmured at last.
Charis snorted softly, but she brushed one pale finger over the pouch with the designated herb. Dead Man’s Thimbles would be her chosen weapon. What need did she have for iron? But to defuse Bran’s smirk, she met his eyes. “Agnarr knows I do not wish him well. It is no secret.” Agnarr was, at the moment, sharpening his sword. Work on tools and weapons formed the major occupations for men during winter’s enforced inactivity. It had been the same in Charis’s girlhood and during her marriage.