by Joanna Bell
I closed my eyes, weeping, but he saw what I was trying to do and punched me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. "What did I tell you, girl? Watch! Watch or I'll stick my dagger into your belly just as quick as I'll stick my cock into your worthless little hole."
As much as I wanted, in that moment, to be the type of person who passes out in extreme circumstances, unconsciousness refused to bring me any relief.
"No –"
A single word, whimpered. I thought it was Emma, but it was me. I bit my lip hard enough to send a drop of warm blood down my chin as the guard managed to rip the bottom half of her tunic off. She looked at me, then, at the last second, unable to move under the much larger man on top of her, and all the control I thought I had slipped away. I twisted in my captor's arms, screaming, scratching at his eyes and searching for a finger or a hand to sink my teeth into.
"Whore!" He bellowed, grabbing a handful of my hair and jerking my head back. "You fucking Northern whore! You don't want to wait your turn? Fine, bitch, I'll do it right now, right next to your –"
Suddenly, he stopped talking. And then he was no longer holding onto me and I heard the heavy thud of a body hitting the ground. The man on top of Emma heard it too, catching my eyes and roaring unintelligibly when he saw his friend flat on his back behind me. I myself turned around, uncomprehending, and looked down at the now-still body of the man who had only seconds ago been forcing his hands up my tunic. Was he dead? Passed out? I didn't know. And when Emma's attacker came for me, assuming I was responsible, he fell, too.
"What the fuck?" I whispered, looking around. I'd heard a sound that time, a whooshing sound, a sensation of the air moving against my cheek. Arrows. Not that I had time to contemplate where they were coming from, because I was already helping Emma to her feet and then urging her to help me free Heather and Paige.
It was while I was on my knees in the dirt beside Heather's cage, crying with frustration as it became obvious I wasn't going to be able to do anything about the locked metal chains, that one of the dwellings to my left burst into flames.
"Go!" Heather urged, as the sound of galloping hooves filled the air. "Go now, both of you! Save yourselves!"
But it was too late, the horses were upon us – as were more Angles, rushing into the square with their weapons – axes, spears, some swords – drawn.
"SOPHIE!"
I knew that voice. Ivar. I found myself scooped up onto a horse, and struggling to free myself, before he managed to hold me still long enough to get a glimpse of his face.
"Stop fighting, woman! It's me!"
But there was no time for me to show my relief, because we were in the midst of a battle. Ivar pushed me down against the back of the horse's neck and raised his sword, cutting a man down less than a foot away. And then another. And another. Blood dripped down my back as he brought his sword behind me, switching sides and striking at another of the Angles.
I clung to the horse's mane, staying down, staying quiet. Blades clashed and the air rang with the war cries of men. And before it had died down completely, Ivar jumped off the horse and I dared to look up. He wasn't alone. Eirik, Ragnar and the other Jarls were with him, along with a large number of their men, and they were making quick work of the Thetfordians who had been rash enough to attend the melee.
"The axe!" Ivar panted, when all their enemies seemed to have fled or died. "Now! They'll be back shortly, and more of them, with better weapons. The axe – now!"
Jarl Styrr pulled an axe, heavy and sharp, its edge glinting in the light from the burning cottage, from his waist and handed it to Ivar. And then I watched – we all watched – as he raised it over his head and brought it crashing down first on the chains that secured Paige in her wooden prison, and then on those holding Heather. One blow was enough, a burst of sparks flew up and the locks disintegrated under the power of the axe – and the axe wielder.
At once Eirik took Paige in his arms, anguish written across his features. "My love," he whispered, kissing her head despite it being covered in filth. "My love, my love – are you alright? Did they hurt you? Did they –"
"BURN IT!" Ivar shouted. "Now! Light the roofs, light the carts – Styrr, bring the old woman with you."
Jarl Ragnar, who crouched on the ground beside Emma, seemed not to hear. But Styrr heard, as did Eirik. I watched, my heart filled with a combination of relief and awe, as they ran to the nearby buildings and held their burning torches to the straw roofs.
It was something to see. Jarl Ivar was something to see. Even as I stood in the middle of Thetford, surrounded by unseen enemies, the fear was gone from me. Ivar was there. No harm was going to come to me. I was free to watch the spectacle of male rage play out in front of my eyes, to take in the sight of the man who touched me with such tenderness using those same hands to choke the life out of one of the Angles that hadn't yet succumbed to his wounds.
It was like watching a fast tide come in – inevitable, unstoppable. Screams began to rise from some of the houses, and people came bursting out of the doors and windows. The Vikings waited for them, killing the fighting-age men immediately and letting the women and children go.
And then it was time to leave. Ivar mounted his horse behind me, pulling me back against his blood-soaked body, his chest heaving and his breath coming hot and quick on my neck. We rode out of Thetford in the darkness, leaving the fire and the howling and the dead behind us, and galloped full-tilt through the moonlit woods until Ivar called behind him to slow down, that we were far enough away to be safe.
"Are you alright?" He asked at once, as I listened to Ragnar and Eirik asking the same questions of their wives. "Did they – did he –"
"No," I replied, knowing at once what I was being asked. "No. They were going to but they – but you got there before they could."
Ivar slumped against me, all the tension leaving his body. "Thank the gods, woman. Thank the gods."
We rode the rest of the way back to the Viking's camp at a slower pace, and quiet as we went. It wasn't just Ivar and I – I couldn't hear any of the others talking, either. Only the wind in the trees and the little scurryings of nocturnal animals in the undergrowth.
I wasn't tired, though. Not one bit. My breath came as quick as Ivar's for a good while, my heart pounding as fast in my chest as his. I'd almost been raped. Probably almost killed. There was a strange exhilaration that came with being rescued, and when we got back to camp I found myself entirely uninterested in sleep.
"I'll bring dark ale," Ivar said, when we arrived at his deerskin tent. But when he went to walk away my hand reached out, as if by its own accord, for his. And when he looked back at me, quiet and still smelling of the blood of other men, I could feel something in his gaze, something it was too dark to see.
It took me a moment to comprehend what I was feeling, because it seemed to make so little sense. But I felt it as I knelt on the ground and Ivar reached down to caress my cheek. It was lust – raw and alive and different somehow.
"I," I started, pausing. "I feel – Ivar, I feel –"
"I know what you feel," he replied, his voice low. "Have you never been in danger before?"
The dark ale was forgotten. My Viking came to me and pulled my face against his neck, where I could feel the pulse beating there under his skin.
"I have," I whispered, trying to answer his question even as my thoughts and words threatened to jumble under the force of my arousal. "But it was – it was in the woods with the – the King. With the King's men and –"
I never did get to finish that sentence. Ivar took my face in his hands and kissed me slowly, deeply, opening my lips with his mouth until it felt as if I truly might melt right there in the middle of a forest over a thousand years in the past.
It was unexpected, the emotion running high and tense through my blood after the rescue from Thetford. When Ivar put his hands on my thighs and pushed them up under my tunic, I half believed I would shy away. But Ivar was not an East Angle. The man in fron
t of me was the sole reason I was safe, then. His touch was the opposite of the Angle's touch, his hunger restorative rather than destructive.
And all I wanted to do was give in.
"You belong to me," Ivar breathed as we both struggled with my tunic, hiking it up around my waist, and no part of me felt moved to protest a statement that even a couple of weeks ago I would have found ridiculous.
Belong? I would have thought. But people don't belong to other people. That's not how it is.
Except that is how it is, and it's only civilization that allows us to live under such comforting fantasies that it isn't. In the past, people did belong to one another. Ivar had just put an arrow through the heart of the man who meant to assault me, and now we were desperate, clamoring for each other, barely able to breath as he fumbled with his leathers.
And when he spread my thighs with his hands and looked me in the eye as he pushed himself into me, there could be no denying the reassertion that was taking place. It was beyond reason – even beyond emotion. My head may have struggled momentarily but my heart less so – and my body not at all. I arched myself back over one of the logs that we used to sit on and tilted my hips up, sighing, clinging to Ivar's thickly muscled neck as he drove himself into me over and over and over.
"If he had taken you," he breathed moments later, looking down, watching his own hand caressing one of my breasts. "If he had taken you, Sophie, I would not have given him the mercy of an arrow. I would have – I would have brought him back with us, and spent days relieving him of his masculine parts. I would have –"
"I know," I whispered, because I did know. Even as he made love to me, even as he showed himself so capable of care, I'd seen the darkness in Jarl Ivar's eyes in Thetford – the darkness in all their eyes. And as I knew he believed it his duty to protect me, to keep me from harm, I sensed even without being fully conscious of it that it was my duty to protect him almost from himself. To give him my body in all its willing softness – to sate him.
That's what it was, that night. Sating. My hunger was as fathomless as his own, but my hunger was for his hunger, it was for Ivar, drawn up out of me, kindled like a fire by his hands, his mouth, his full, stiff length buried deep inside me.
I came almost helplessly, carried away on an orgasm so intense it rendered my mind utterly empty for what felt like minutes on end. There was no grim working for it with the Viking, no concentration. Pleasure rose like flames, higher and higher, until it exploded in a flash of blinding bliss.
"Voss," he swore, seething with desire the second before he came. "Voss, Sophie. Oh. Ohhh..."
I lifted my hips up off the ground and wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him to me, taking what he needed me to take. And then he stiffened suddenly and jerked his hips forward, holding himself buried in my wetness, filling me up.
We lay under the stars afterwards, panting. Ivar was relaxed, drained and tired from the fight and then from the love-making. I was relaxed, too. Limp with relief both physical and psychological. But my heart was not without conflict.
He saved me from being violated. He probably saved my life. He made me feel things I'd never felt for a man before – whether I was too young and dumb to feel them, or too uptight or simply too modern, I didn't know. All I knew was that there seemed to be a whole world of sensation and feeling that I hadn't even known existed until Ivar showed it to me. And he didn't show me with words, it was deeper than that. It was about the look in his eyes, the sense of being possessed that I felt when he touched me, the invisible exchange of energy between our two naked bodies.
The Viking Jarl fell asleep before me, and I watched, entranced with how quickly one man could go from raging beast to almost angelic. Something in my heart moved that night, and it wasn't solely about sex. When I looked at him next to me, his broad cheekbones bathed in moonlight and an expression of real contentment on his sleeping face, I realized that I was happy. I was happy to have been able to quench the fire inside him, as well as helplessly awed at who he was, at his courage and bravery and...
I had to leave.
The thought hit me amidst my quiet swooning, breaking through quite unexpectedly.
You have to leave. Now.
And as soon as it presented itself in my mind, I knew it was true. In the same camp and in the one close by, Paige Renner and Emma Wallis slept alongside their husbands, having explicitly chosen the past over the present. It was a choice they had both been relatively free to make – and one I was not free to make at all. The longer I stayed at Ivar's side, the more enthralled I allowed myself to become with him – with us – the more it was going to hurt to leave. The hurt would not only be mine, either, I knew that. It would be Ivar's as well. And he had a town, and then a Kingdom, and another after that to conquer. What use would I be to him if I stayed, allowing us both to become more and more attached to something I knew was ultimately going to slip out of our grasp?
My stomach flipped nervously. Was I going to do it? Then, at that moment, when the very last thing I wanted in the whole world was to leave?
I was. I looked away from his face, not before leaning in close to kiss his cheek gently, because I wasn't going to be able to do it if I didn't.
And then I got up and I left. On my way out of the camp I grabbed one of the leather pouches the Vikings used for water, and a whole loaf of bread, and walked out. My legs were stiff, my steps robotic, as if my body itself was mounting a protest against leaving the man who had done such wonderful things to it.
But I kept going, keeping the image of Ashley's face at the front of my mind as I did so. Nothing mattered more than getting back to her. Not my career, not my love-life, not anything or anyone.
"Sophie!"
I stopped, frozen to the spot.
"It's me."
Heather. I recognized her voice.
"I'm leaving," I whispered, confident that she wouldn't do anything to thwart me. "I – I have to go now. If I don't go now, I don't know if I'll be able –"
"I understand," she replied, leaning in close so we wouldn't wake anyone else. "Now, if you don't mind, I had a feeling you might be going tonight, and so I waited up to catch you before you did."
Heather pushed a satchel into my arms, and when I put my hand inside I felt it was full of more bread – and cheese and berries.
"Oh!" I said, my eyes beginning to sting when I realized she had risked being whipped – or worse – if she'd been caught taking any of the food she was now handing over to me. "Thank you – I – thank you so much. I took a loaf of bread but –"
"I hope you won't be upset but there's one more thing."
I assumed immediately that Heather wanted me to bring something of hers to the future, maybe to give to a family member, a keepsake or meaningful memento. But that wasn't what she had in mind at all.
"Yes?"
Heather stepped forward. "I thought I might come with you."
"What?" I asked, shocked – she'd been so insistent about wanting to stay in the past. "I thought you said you –"
She stopped me. "Is it OK, Sophie? I promise I won't make trouble for you in River Falls, and I know the way south better than the Northmen, I know how to get there faster than they think. It's just that if it's alright with you I think we should go now, before anyone sees us here, plotting away."
She was right. We had to go. And who was I to stop her from doing what she wanted? I didn't own the future, or access to it. It wasn't for me to decide something of such importance for Heather Renner.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, you're right. Let's go."
So the old woman, having been away from her home long enough to apply the term to another place and another time, slipped her arm under mine and we slipped away into the moonlit woods, hardly believing what we were doing.
Seventeen
Ivar
When I woke, Sophie was not at my side. And although I told myself she was simply fetching bread for our breakfast, or relieving herself in the woods, both of whi
ch she often did before I even cracked an eye open to the dawn, something about her absence that morning struck a chord of worry in my heart.
I ignored it. There was much to be done that day, and none of it had anything to do with the tender feelings in my heart. Thetford now knew we were upon them – and they didn't seem to have been told yet of their King's surrender. We were at great risk of attack, undefended in the woods. The fight would have to be brought to the East Angles, and quickly.
After instructing one of the serving thralls to bring me word of Sophie's return, I left to speak with Ragnar, and not long later to ride with him to the other camp. The men knew what had happened during the night, they were ready – more than ready – for a battle. But it would have to be planned, we couldn't just ride up to the town walls and present ourselves like so many rabbits for the archer's arrows.
I took breakfast with Jarl Ragnar, who was of the same mind as me.
"Yes," he agreed, after I shared my thoughts. "It has to be soon. Tomorrow perhaps, before dawn breaks? The Angles don't fight but during the daytime, they won't be expecting us."
"The Angles we know fight during the day," I replied, uneasy at the forced rush. "Who knows what these inland Angles do? No matter, we ride before dawn. Uldric and the scouts have been busy, they have already a rough idea of the layout of the town, the vulnerable points in the walls. Come, there's no time to spare and I want the men to have some time to sleep."
Before we left, I sent one of my men to find the thrall who had been tasked with notifying me of Sophie's whereabouts. When he returned, just as Ragnar and I were preparing our horses, I could see from the look on his face that there was no news. The sun rode high in the sky by then – where was she?
"Did you find the thrall?" I asked, before the man could speak a single word.
"I did, Jarl. No one has seen Sophie anywhere."
The creeping dread in my belly, that had been there since I woke that morning to nothing but bare earth beside me, deepened. Ragnar looked at me.