There had been Thorbrand, standing calmly in the middle of the old road, snow all around, quietly letting her know her options. All of them unpleasant. She still shuddered when she thought of it, though not from anything like fear.
And then there was this man, who had a pallor to his sunken cheeks and sour breath. Unlike the rest of the Northmen here, he looked as if he did not spend as much time bathing as they all did. His tunic looked as if he’d used it to catch the better part of his dinner and more, as if he’d slept in it for weeks.
Why should one of Ragnall’s men take her? His most slovenly man, for that matter?
But the further away they got from the village, marching through the grim wood, the more her captor began to talk.
“Ragnall is a fool,” he seethed at her, his grip harder on her arm as he spoke. “Sending you away when it would be far better to use you now, while your mother’s memory still shines bright in Mercia.”
No reply from Aelfwynn was necessary, and she thought it a good thing. For what was there to say when his hands were on her? He kept moving, swift and furious, so that she was forced to run to keep up with his bone-rattling pace.
“Your uncle has a Northman problem and we are not going away,” the man told her. Or told the trees. Or better still, himself, for he seemed to need no reply from Aelfwynn. “Not in this life. Yet why should Thorbrand get the glory, a kingdom, and an uppity Saxon bride to bear him sons? What has he done that I have not? What, damn you?”
And when Aelfwynn did not answer that, either, his grip tightened, so hard that she could not keep back a yelp. Then, horribly, he shook her—a violent jolt, so hard she fair expected it to separate her head from her neck.
She nearly bit her tongue in half. Pain bloomed from her nape to the top of her head. And it was all she could do to keep her expression, if not mild, blank enough when he hauled her around to stare down into her face, his sour breath washing over her and making her stomach curdle.
“Answer me that, woman!” he snarled.
“I cannot,” she replied calmly. And oh, how it cost her to sound thus. She took the pain and used it. She gazed back at him as if this were any quiet talk in a warm hall, friends and protectors on all sides. “For I do not know you. Tell me your name and your deeds, that I might make a better reckoning.”
She realized something else then, there in another cold and inhospitable wood with another man holding her fast. Her lifetime of training had been sound. Mildrithe and her mother had prepared her well. The man who loomed over her now was no different than all the men who had crowded into Tamworth after her mother’s death in June. The men who had grabbed her thus, or worse, pretended to support her in public so that she might let her guard down when they came upon her in a quiet corner.
In all cases, she had acquitted herself magnificently, no matter what hopes the Mercians might have had for her that she had dashed. She had exuded calm and carried on saying her prayers, repeat as necessary, until the threat passed her by.
Yet Thorbrand had been different. Because Thorbrand had not made her want to scream. He had seen her, whatever else his aims might have been. He had spoken to her, not thundered on about his own dreams of Mercian domination or his plans to unseat or cajole her uncle. He had seen her far too clearly, out in that cold night, and had made her choose.
She had been far too besotted with him from the start.
There had been no call to weave her peace when she had wanted nothing more than to lose herself in the sheer heat of his midnight gaze, the glory of his hard hands, and the marvel of his kiss.
With this new, lesser Northman, it was easy enough to adopt her old, familiar posture. Half penitent, half saint. Aelfwynn folded her hands together before her, no matter how awkwardly he held her, so that he could not mistake the evidence of her serene piety even if he preferred his pagan gods to hers. She even gazed back at him, soothingly, and watched as her determined calmness did its work.
Too well did she know that a woman’s tears did not always bring out the best in men. Far too many men fed off those tears. Some used them to commit even more desperate acts.
“I am Bjørn,” the man told her, pride and rage laced through his voice and the wild gaze he pinned on her. “I fought with Ragnall in Waterford. Have I not followed him since? Have I not slain all manner of enemies? Should my name not be sung? Such was my might at Corbridge last year that some have had it that I won the day.”
Aelfwynn’s own recollection was that no one knew quite what had happened at the Battle of Corbridge last year. Her mother had claimed victory. But so too had everyone else, particularly Ragnall.
“Why should Thorbrand gather all the spoils because he has known Ragnall the longer?” Bjørn demanded.
“Are they not kin?”
This was clearly the wrong question to ask.
Bjørn scowled at her, his thick blond brows meeting over his eyes. “Thorbrand’s father is dead. He has no sons. If he fell tomorrow, who would sing his name were it not for Ragnall’s favor? Who?”
Aelfwynn discovered something else, then. She did not wish for Thorbrand to fall. She did not wish for the faintest harm to come to him. Even speaking of it so casually made everything in her go rigid, though she knew a warrior such as he would not thank her for such consideration when battle lived in his blood. When it had made him who he was.
Besotted, a voice inside whispered.
She tried to take proper heed of the threat before her. “I will tell you, Bjørn, what I have told Thorbrand already. And indeed your king himself. My uncle considers me no treasure, of this you can be certain. For all the reasons your king wants me in his hands, my uncle wishes me gone forever and, indeed, acted to make it thus. My resurrection will not please him.” She considered the man before her, his face mottled and his blond-brown beard in snarls. “I do not think I would wish to be the man who delivers that unsought message to him.”
“You speak of politics,” Bjørn scoffed. “But what matters is blood. Your blood. And I think it more than likely that Edward of Wessex would take it amiss if his niece were paraded through Mercia at the end of a chain. Stripped naked and beaten bloody for all to see. What say you, princess?”
He did not say that word, princess, the way Thorbrand did. Aelfwynn did not care for it at all—particularly as she had never been a princess. Funny, was it not, that the accuracy of the term had not concerned her overmuch when it was in Thorbrand’s mouth.
But it was better not to think about his mouth. Not here in these ghostly woods, where she couldn’t say she was overfond of the way this Bjørn was staring fixedly at hers.
“Indeed he would look ill upon it,” Aelfwynn managed to say in the same mild, unassuming manner, though her pulse crowed loud in her ears. “As would any good man who gazed upon a woman treated in so callous a manner, I would hope.” Her captor did naught but glare at her, the corners of his mouth wetter than before, and she did not like it at all. She bowed her head. “Let us pray, Bjørn. It is all that sustains me in these darkest days.”
Bjørn, unsurprisingly, did not choose to pray with her. He started walking again, shoving her before him as he went. At least that meant he had released his vicious grip on her arm. Aelfwynn advised herself to be grateful for what she could.
And she could not have said how long this went on. When her walking speed was not to Bjørn’s taste, he pushed her again—and not gently. Almost as if he wished for her to fall to the cold earth, for reasons she preferred not to consider. Instead, she took it upon herself to pray, loudly.
Yet her melodious Latin only seemed to make Bjørn’s muttering sound more and more unhinged the longer they walked away from the village.
The cold morning sun rose as they walked. First it shone through the trees, then it began to filter in from an angle, making the bare branches glow. And Aelfwynn could not allow herself to wonder what it was Thorb
rand was doing now. Searching for her, she hoped—
But then, despite all the ways their bodies had become one last night, she had not said she would marry him, had she? She had not reacted at all well to the notion.
He had asked her for her hand, again and again, in their tent last night. Though it had not been so much of an asking, in truth. It had been more a part of the rhythm in the way he had thundered between her thighs, wringing her inside out, and then tossing her straight back into the flames.
Over and over, until they were both worn thin with pleasure...
Aelfwynn could not bear the idea that he might think she had left him of her own volition. But she cast that aside even as she thought it. Because he might well believe that, but why should that change a thing for him? Thorbrand had treated her as he had not because he intended to make her a slave, as she had thought he did. But because this was how he intended to take her to wife.
She didn’t know how long she walked on, dodging Bjørn’s mean-spirited shoves, as she struggled to full take in the meaning of that.
It had been a surprise to her yesterday to discover he wished to marry her. More than simply a surprise—it had made her something like dizzy. Yet it hadn’t been a surprise to him. He had known all along. He had planned to wed her from the start.
And suddenly everything made a different kind of sense.
The way Thorbrand had handled her from the beginning. How he had slowly gentled her to his touch, night after night on the road. First the way he had rubbed her down when she ached, then how he had kissed her. How he had draped her over his chest and let her sleep there. And had not, until recently, ever taken her beneath him as he could so easily have done at any point, for she had claimed she disliked it. She thought of the pool where she had given him her maidenhead. More, that he had already been to the cottage before he’d found her on the old road south of Tamworth. He had already known the pool was there—had he waited to rid her of her innocence until they reached it?
Aelfwynn was no fool and now no innocent, either. And thus she knew that he could have taken her at any time and not concerned himself much with her pleasure while he was about it. For she understood now, in retrospect, the women’s talk she’d overheard before. Words she had heard and thought little of meant different things to her now that she, too, was as delightfully sinful as anyone else.
She remembered, at the start, fearing that Thorbrand might simply take what he wanted from her. She had worried he would glut himself and then give her to his brother and cousin. And she could not have said when it was she had stopped worrying about those things, only that she had—and that before they had arrived at the cottage. Because all along, Thorbrand had kept her safe. He had fed her. He had warmed her. He had cared for her—rubbing out the aches in her body and claiming only kisses in return.
Kisses. She stumbled over an up-thrust root on the forest floor and caught herself, darting a glance back to see the way Bjørn lunged forward—then stopped when she remained upright.
No, indeed, she told herself stoutly. I shall not fall.
Aelfwynn kept on, though her mind still raced. How had she possibly imagined that the way Thorbrand had treated her was how a man treated a slave? One he might choose to sell or brutalize or both? A concubine he could do with as he wished, including have her sacrificed upon his death, if she had heard the stories true?
Even when he had chased off her men and swung up behind her on that poor old nag, it had been a far kinder, respectful affair than this. She knew well that even a properly chosen bride sent off to a new house with every promise made, from the handgeld given in payment to the bride’s family to the price of the brýdgifu a woman took with her and kept as her own even should her husband perish—all hammered out to the satisfaction of the two families involved in the customary way—might not fare as well as she had done with a Northman who’d laid in wait for her in the road. For there were many things supposedly frowned upon inside the walls of a warm hall where all was pleasant and bright, but that did not prevent them happening. Sometimes right outside the walls. Sometimes in the shadows there within.
And she knew, in the part of her deep inside that had always wanted to fight like her mother, that Bjørn had no intention of treating her with anything like the steel-tipped kindness Thorbrand had showed her. Rather the opposite—and she was glad of it that he walked behind her so he could not see how she failed to keep her countenance smooth and untroubled in that moment.
Aelfwynn tried to quiet her mind. She marched on and on, the ground beneath her feet either frozen solid where the woods were thick, or muddy when the sun’s light shone through. She was cold and her belly was empty, but on she marched.
Deep within, she believed that Thorbrand would search for her. That did not mean he would find her. And even if he did, he might not do so before she was forced to suffer through any number of indignities at this Bjørn’s hands.
Aelfwynn was pleased, then, that this morning before she’d exited the tent she had opened the pouches she’d taken with her from Tamworth and found the dagger that Thorbrand had confiscated. The first time he had pulled her underdress to her waist and put his hands on her body as he pleased, their second night together. She could not have said what, exactly, had inspired her to seek out the dagger when she had not thought of it since he’d taken it from her. A mixture of uncertainty and temper, were she honest with herself. Uncertainty about what her future held, whether as a wife to Northman or even as a bride in this village where there were only strangers and none of her family or friends. And temper because Thorbrand’s announcement that he intended to marry her had infuriated her. It had wrecked her. It had made her feel too many things she had not the words to describe.
But this was not the time to sort through her feelings.
Bjørn kept muttering as they moved on through the woods. She thought again of the unpleasant blast of his sour breath on her face and realized she should have known at once that he had partaken of far more than his share of mead. Had been up all night with it, if she had to hazard a guess. She had seen the like before on too many mornings to count. Who had not who lived in halls with men who preferred a full cup to courage?
Aelfwynn could feel the dagger concealed at her waist, safely beneath her cloak, as she walked. And she took comfort in its presence there. She needed only wait for the right moment to use it, and would. She could still feel the ache in her neck from when Bjørn had shaken her and knew she would have no trouble wielding a blade.
The truth was, she had felt safer in Thorbrand’s hands than she ever had anywhere else. How had she not recognized it? How would you know safety? she asked herself then. When have you experienced it? She missed her mother dreadfully. She suspected she always would, as all children missed their parents when they died, no matter that it was the way of things. But her mother had concerned herself with war. Fighting and bloodshed without end.
Aelfwynn had either been by her side or left behind somewhere, waiting for word.
She had disliked both. Neither had been safe.
Safe was a gift. Only Thorbrand had ever given it to her.
As the morning wore on, Aelfwynn found a kind of rhythm in the walking. It made her think of the cottage. The simplicity of a day arranged around how food was made, and when. Though all days were structured in this way, Aelfwynn had never been the one to oversee the tasks that needed doing. The days in the cottage had a beginning, when she woke. And an end, when Thorbrand laid her out before him near the fire or tumbled her into the furs, and she thought no more of domestic tasks until morning. Each day was the same and yet not the same. There was a pleasure in the making of things. A joy and satisfaction in preparing food and drink that would sustain them both. And the reward that came every time he touched her.
If she married him, she could see very clearly, that would be their life. A simple, beautiful, shared life of rhythm and s
tructure.
Until such a time as his king called him back. And then they would return to these wars, these bloody battlefields, these games men played when kingdoms were in the offing. Yesterday she had thought it an impossibility. How could she marry him and live as they had in the cottage, forever knowing a call could come at any time? And that the call must be answered as a matter of honor? It was too cruel.
But here in these woods, captive once more and in a way that boded only ill, she rather thought it would be worth it. However long she could spend with Thorbrand, in the life they made to suit themselves, it would be worth it.
As she thought that, she knew something else. She would do whatever was necessary to get away from this drunken oaf, because she wanted the sweetness and simple joy of that cottage once again. Even if it were only for a season. A mere breath between battles. It would still be more safety, more happiness, than she had ever known.
Love, a voice inside her said. That perilous word.
You may love Mercia, Aethelflaed had said when Aelfwynn had gathered up her courage one day when she was yet a girl and had asked her mother if she might not consider a love match for her only daughter. You may love Mercia as hard and as deep as you can, daughter. You will need no other love match. And her gaze, so much like Aelfwynn’s own, had been steady when it met hers. For no other love match will you make. Though if you are lucky and if you dedicate yourself to the task as if were a military campaign, you will find that any match can be made over to suit you.
Her answer had not surprised Aelfwynn, necessarily. She had witnessed her parents’ union. She had seen it with her own eyes when her mother had ascended to rule Mercia after her husband’s death. Still. Some are permitted to love. Why should I be denied it?
It is a silly girl who loves the men that court her with pretty words and gold-bright promises, Aethelflaed had told her, in a voice soft for so strong a lady. But a wise wife who takes her time and the measure of the hall before offering the same.
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