Erinsong

by Mia Marlowe

  “She can’t,” Jorand said wearily. “But I can.” He’d hoped to avoid this, to let his past sink back into forgetfulness, but if there was a God, as Brenna insisted, He seemed unwilling to let Jorand get away with it.

  “How can ye do that?” Father Ambrose asked.

  “Because I know the man who took it. His name is Kolgrim,” Jorand said.

  “Ye remembered.” Brenna gaped at him.

  “Ja, I remembered his name,” Jorand said, hoping that much would satisfy her for now. He couldn’t bear to tell her more.

  Murtaugh glared at him, probably suspecting he was somehow involved with the sacking of Clonmacnoise, but the abbot was quick to jump at the chance to have his treasure restored.

  “Ye may indeed know the villain, of that I’ve no doubt,” Father Ambrose said. “But the world is wide. How will ye find him?”

  Jorand felt an invisible noose tighten around his neck. “I know his homeport. I know where he’ll be.”

  “Then by all means, go. God’s blessing on ye and the worthy task ye have set for yourself.” The abbot seemed to forget Jorand’s unfortunate heritage for a moment and sketched a benediction with his right hand.

  “Keep your blessings to yourself. All I want is your word,” Jorand demanded. “The truth about the child’s whereabouts for the book. Agreed?”

  Father Ambrose hesitated for only a moment, then nodded solemnly. “I’ll tell Brenna about the child.”

  Jorand wheeled around and stomped away, furious to be forced to this untenable position, but unable to run from it. He heard Brenna’s light footfalls pattering behind him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked when she caught up with him.

  ‘“We are going nowhere,” he said without much hope. “You’re staying here and I’m bound to retrieve that damned book.”

  “No, please, ye can’t leave me,” Brenna said, clinging to his arm. “Will ye be in harm’s way?”

  “Probably.”

  She had no idea how much.

  “This concerns me, too. Ye’re only doing this so I can find Sinead’s child. If ye are going into danger because of me... I’m your wife, Jorand. I must needs be at your side.”

  He stopped. He knew he should just keep going, but he couldn’t bear to tear his arm away from her. Then he made the mistake of looking at her. Her hair was flying out in all directions, her face grimy from the smoke, but her soul shone shining clear and pure from her silver-gray eyes. She didn’t have a clue what she was asking.

  “Brenna,” he said, cupping her cheek in his palm. “If you come with me, it’ll be hard.”

  “When has it been easy for the likes of us?” She smiled at him, the little crooked smile that made his insides melt. So trusting. When she looked at him like that he wanted to slay dragons for her.

  How would she feel when she discovered he was the dragon?

  “Please,” she said, worrying her lower lip with her little white teeth. “I cannot bear to see ye go alone.”

  Utterly conquered, he folded her into his arms and hugged her fiercely. “And I can’t bear to leave you.”

  He kissed her hard, wanting to fall into the oblivion he found in her loving. But she was not so easily distracted and pulled back from him, fixing him with a determined gaze.

  “So where are we bound?” she asked.

  To Hell, most like, he wanted to answer. Instead he just said, “Dublin.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The trip back down the Shannon and out to sea passed by in a blur for Jorand. If only he’d told her immediately, right when his memory came back, perhaps then she’d have understood.

  Coward!

  He cursed himself regularly. Each day he told himself now was the time. Brenna needed to know the whole truth. But then she’d say something about her hopes and plans that made it impossible for him to speak.

  He concentrated on navigation, on trimming the sail more often than it needed, anything to keep his mind off what waited for them in the Norse enclave on the banks of the river Liffey. And each night, as Brenna curled against him, he found himself unable to keep from reaching for her.

  He made love to her with as much tenderness as he could, all the while feeling so desperate it was all he could do not to take her like a rutting beast. To claim her as his own, finally and forever.

  Then morning would dawn and they’d be one day nearer to Dublin. One day nearer to the truth.

  “Look ye, yonder there,” Brenna said from the prow. “Smoke. Could your Dublin be burning?”

  “No,” he said morosely. “That’s just cooking fires.”

  “But, are there so many?”

  He grimaced. “I’d forgotten. You’ve never been to a town before. There are many people in Dublin. Probably more than five hundred souls.”

  He glanced down into the dark brown river, thick with sediment from its peat bed, and would have known the settlement was near even without the fires. This silt-laden river was as familiar to him as the curve of Brenna’s waist, but without any of the sweetness. He dropped the woolen sail and stepped nimbly to the steering oar, turning the prow toward the grassy bank.

  “We’ll camp here tonight,” he announced.

  “But we’re so close, and there’s yet some daylight to travel by. The sooner we get to Dublin, the sooner we learn if the man we seek is there. Then we’ll take the Skellig-Michael Codex back from him and be done with the cursed place.”

  “As easy as that, you think?”

  She sighed. “Probably not.”

  “Certainly not,” he assured her. “Something you need to understand about Northmen is that we don’t believe in turning the other cheek. What a man has, he must hold. The monks at Clonmacnoise didn’t fight to keep the book. Kolgrim believes the Codex is his by right. Even if he’s in Dublin, he’ll not part with it willingly.”

  “I know. I just keep hoping that somehow, something will turn out easy for us.”

  A small pang streaked through his chest at the way her shoulders sagged. He felt her weariness as if it were a stone around his own neck.

  “Besides, I was looking forward to a hot bath and more of a roof over me head than a fir bough.” Brenna shot one more wistful glance upstream. “We’ve come so far and ‘tis only a little way farther.”

  That was precisely what he was afraid of.

  “Brenna,” he said, his tone commanding enough that she jerked her gaze toward him sharply. “We need to camp here tonight. I’ll explain it all to you, but for now and for the next few days, I’m asking you to trust me.”

  “I think I know what ye’re trying to say. ‘Tis going to be difficult for me, being in Dublin amongst ... your people.”

  “I just want to be sure you understand a few things.” The hull of his boat grated against the river bottom when the prow nosed its way up the bank. “First, very few of my countrymen speak your tongue. Our customs are different. You may find them a bit rough, but don’t be afraid. You’re my wife. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Ye make it sound as if we’re entering a bear cave.”

  “In some ways, we are.” He stepped over the side of the boat and splashed to shore, tugging on the end of the coracle’s tether. “This particular bear’s name is Thorkill. Five years ago he led a force of sixty long-ships up the Liffey. He’s the founder of Dublin, a strong leader, and not one to delay either judgment or punishment.”

  He tied off the boat and went back to lift Brenna out and carry her to shore. No need for both of them to have wet feet. She was as light as a child in his arms, but as his hand brushed the soft underside of one of her breasts, he knew she was all woman.

  “But how do you know so much about this Thorkill?” A sudden light dawned in her eyes. “Oh! Ye remembered.”

  “I did.”

  She hugged his neck hard before he set her lightly down. “Has it all come back to ye then?”

  “Ja, I think so.” His gut twisted in knots.

  “But that’s wonderful. Ye
must tell me everything,” she said as she began to cut slices of peat for their small fire. “Why is it ye are looking so glum?”

  He sank down on a gray-speckled rock and avoided meeting her gaze, studying instead his own long-fingered hands. “Because it’s not all good.”

  “And how does that make ye different from anyone else?” Brenna ruffled his hair with one hand, then stooped to brush her lips across his forehead. Her small palm cupped his chin, and he looked up at her. He saw at once the strain behind her smile and realized that despite her forced cheer, she was afraid. “Start at the beginning and when it gets difficult, perhaps the stew will be fit to eat by then and ye can take a rest.”

  The beginning. That was at least safe.

  “I was born in Sognefjord,” he said. He told her the hazy memory of his parents’ death at sea when he was barely old enough to heft a water bucket. Jorand’s older brother Eirick took him in for a season, but Eirick’s wife didn’t like the thought of a rival heir to the family holding of tillable acreage so close at hand. So Jorand was fostered out to the jarl, the acknowledged leader of the fjord.

  “Harald and his lady were good to me,” he said. “Seems Orn, my father, had saved Harald’s life in battle, so I was treated like family, more or less.”

  In fact, Jorand had thrived under the slightly negligent care of the jarl, growing up wild as a wolf cub in the great longhouse. Gunnar, eldest son of Harald and heir to all of Sogna, couldn’t be bothered with a twig of a fosterling except to play sly, cruel tricks on Jorand as often as he could. Bjorn, the jarl’s younger son, was only a few years Jorand’s senior, but he stood solidly with the bewildered child and protected him as much as he was able. Bjorn immediately became the principal god in young Jorand’s private pantheon.

  “Bjorn was brother to me in ways my own kin never were,” Jorand said. “When we came of age to go to sea, he became my captain. Bjorn was a natural leader. I’d have followed him to Hel with a light heart.”

  “Then ye have gone viking, haven’t ye?”

  “Ja,” he said, fixing his mouth in a hard line. “I have been on raids of neighboring fjords. Usually in retaliation for an encroachment on their part, but sometimes not.”

  She waited, a question in her eyes as she added a bit of wild celery and onion to the cooking pot hanging over the smoky fire. His stomach growled at the aroma, even as his nerves balled his innards in knots.

  “Then ye ... ye have done as was done to me sister,” she choked the words out.

  “No, never that,” he protested. “I never forced a woman, or killed one either. Though I have killed my share of men on raids. The northlands are beautiful but unforgiving. The growing season is short and farmable land scarce. Second sons have no other choice but to sell their blades and pledge to one jarl or another. By going viking, we earn our place with the wealth we can hold and bring back to the fjord.”

  She sighed. “When ye put that face on it, I suppose ‘tis not unlike the cattle rustling me Da and the Connacht regularly practice on each other’s borders. Still, Father Michael would likely name it a sin.”

  “Most likely,” he agreed. Funny how he’d never thought of viking as wrong. It was just the way of his world. People needed to eat and the fjord could only provide so much. If he brought back a hoard of silver or a bony kine or a sow heavy with a litter of piglets, he was a hero. He helped his settlement survive the harsh northern winter. That was as right as it got.

  “But my life wasn’t all raiding.” He went on to tell her of walrus hunts in the frostlands and learning the shipwright’s trade. Her gray eyes sparkled when he told her of his wild trip down the rivers of the continent to the Black Sea and the fabulous city of Miklagard straddling the narrow opening to Middle Earth’s great inland sea.

  “Miklagard? Oh, ye mean Byzantium surely,” she said with a rush of understanding. “I’ve read tales of that great city, but never believed the half of it. Oh, to see it, truly. What a wonderment.”

  The wonder of it was that they ever escaped with their skins intact, but Jorand wouldn’t burst her illusions.

  “So how, after traveling the wide, wide world, did ye ever end up on the beach of Donegal Bay?”

  Now they were on boggier footing and Jorand felt the grasping undertow sucking him down. He was about to be lost and he knew it.

  “Is the stew done yet?” He sniffed at it.

  “Aye,” she said, ladling up a bowlful and handing it to him. “And ye can have it, but only if ye can eat and talk at the self-same time.”

  His appetite fled, but he forced himself to swallow a mouthful and make appreciative noises.

  “When Bjorn was settled in Sognefjord, I realized I didn’t want to stay put. After all my travels, it didn’t seem like home anymore. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the jarlhof in Sogna wasn’t my home. Would never truly be my home. Even the family who raised me wasn’t really my family. So I left my friend with his new wife and went in search of a place of my own.”

  Brenna rested a hand on his knee. “And have ye found it, then?”

  He put down the wooden bowl and cupped her face with both hands. “I never knew what home was till I met you, Brenna. But I think something inside me knew the first time you called me Keefe Murphy that you’d help me find myself and my place in the world. You are my snug harbor.” He kissed her deeply. “And I hope never to go viking again.”

  “Never tell a woman that, man,” a voice said from the darkness. “At least not until you’re so old your pecker’s ready to fall off.”

  Jorand leaped to his feet, knife to hand. He shoved Brenna behind him and crouched to meet the newcomer who’d crept up on them.

  Idiot!

  This close to Dublin, he should have expected an outlying patrol. Why had he not been on guard?

  There were four of them, all fully his match for weight and height, and bristling with weaponry. When they stepped into the circle of light, Jorand realized with a start that he knew the leader.

  The big man wielded a hobnailed club, brandishing it over his head. He made a sound, a cross between a growl and an evil-sounding chuckle, then stopped and blinked twice. Suddenly, he let the club drop.

  “Loki strike me blind!” he swore. “It is you, Jorand. We thought you dead.”

  “Not yet,” Jorand said grimly.

  The leader strode forward, baring his teeth in a wolfish grin and clasped forearms with Jorand.

  “Welcome home,” the man said, then turned his attention to Brenna. Even in the flickering firelight, Jorand saw she’d gone white as a fish belly. “Who’ve you brought with you?”

  “This is my wife, Brenna,” Jorand said evenly. “Brenna, this is Thorkill. My father-in-law.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Brenna released the breath she’d been holding since the four Northmen invaded their camp. She shook her head, certain lack of air had led her to imagine things. The sweet green night stole into her lungs.

  “Your what?” Her tongue felt thick as a sausage in her mouth. “What did ye say?”

  “Thorkill is my father-in-law,” Jorand repeated evenly. “His daughter Solveig is my wife.”

  The words pierced her ears and swirled around her brain, nonsense sounds to which she was unable to attach any meaning. Then the truth jolted through her. Swift as an arrow, it impaled her heart.

  Thorkill appraised her frankly, his gaze raking her form, as if she were no more than a new brood mare Jorand had added to his herd. Then the older man’s ice blue eyes took on a lascivious gleam. It was a look she’d seen on a Northman’s face before. Her gut churned, but she didn’t feel fear.

  She didn’t feel anything.

  It was like the day old Seamus had his leg severed in a battle with the Connacht. Armed with a rare Spanish sword, his opponent had sliced off the limb cleanly in a blinding moment. Men who’d seen it happen said Seamus himself didn’t realize the leg was gone till he lost his balance and fell.

  Her father a
nd his men had rushed Seamus back to the keep, a strap of leather cinched tight to the bleeding stump. The shock of the injury numbed Seamus so he didn’t feel a thing until the spurting wound was cauterized. Then he’d howled like a demon, shrieking and raving.

  Now her heart was numb, just like Seamus’s leg. At any moment, the burning would come. She forced herself to inhale again, and along with the cool, moist air, pain flooded her chest.

  When she looked at Jorand, a stranger peered back at her through his damnably beautiful eyes.

  “Brenna?”

  How could his voice sound so unchanged, as if nothing had happened? As if the whole world hadn’t just collapsed around her?

  She scrambled upright and bolted from the circle of light cast by their campfire. Her feet flew toward the boat. In the moonlight, she groped for the knot tethering the coracle to an overhanging hawthorn. Bile rose in the back of her throat, but she forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly. The last thing she wanted to do was disgrace herself further by being sick. She heard Jorand thrashing through the undergrowth after her, but didn’t look up till he grasped her elbow.

  “Brenna, say something.”

  “And what would ye have me say?” She jerked her arm away, taking refuge in anger to avoid feeling pain, and turned her attention back to the double-clove hitch. The knot firmly resisted her fumbling efforts. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Thorkill, Master of Dublin. Oh, by the by, I’m your son-in-law’s new bed warmer.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  If only she could shoot lightning from her eyes. She’d reduce him to a smoldering pile in an instant.

  “Suppose ye be after telling me how it is then?” Brenna finally worked the tether free and flung it into the boat, satisfied by the resounding thud of the heavy rope on the hull.