by Joanna Bell
There was also the Viking. He took care of me. He surrounded me with his steadfast love, a solid kind of love like I had never known before with a man. He seemed to be like a huge tree, stable and unwavering even in the highest winds – and best of all, he seemed to relish his role as anchor and protector. And because I felt safe with him – because he made me feel safe – I was able to relax into being with him, and into the journey to becoming a mother for the second time. No longer did I walk through life in a defensive posture, always alert to the ways in which things could go wrong, or I could fail.
"It's as it is," he said to me one night, when my belly was so big I had begun to waddle like an overfed duck. "I see the people here are so concerned with what might be taken from them that they no longer understand what a gift is."
I didn't understand. "We don't know what as gift is?"
Ivar smiled. "Perhaps not yourself so much. Your people, though – they worry about what might be taken, and not about what they give. It is the joy of my life to see you content, to see that worried look that you had when I first knew you gone from your eyes. It is the work of love, Sophie, and it is what men and women do for each other. There is no place in love to spend your time making calculations about what you've taken and what you've given."
He believed what he was saying. It was part of the reason I loved him – he knew I depended on him and he welcomed that dependence because he understood that he, too, was dependent upon me. But it was all new to me. My pregnancy with Ashley had been marked by stress, late nights tossing and turning in bed, worrying about where Jesse was, who he was with, whether or not any pretty, non-pregnant girls had caught his eye.
With Ivar, and with the money from the dagger in the bank, I woke every day with a feeling almost of serenity. I was no longer distracted by worries, and so I could throw myself into whatever it was I was doing at a given moment – talking to Ashley, baking bread, standing on the wraparound porch at Heather's house, just happy to be alive as the first pale green leaves unfurled themselves under the warm spring sunshine.
It didn't seem that life could get any better.
I went into labor on May 10th, shortly before my due date. I was with my Viking, checking the rows of vegetables he and my mom had planted in the new raised beds in the backyard, and exclaiming over their progress when what was at first merely a sensation of discomfort tightened my belly.
"Mmm." I said.
"What is it?" Ivar asked, looking pointedly at me because something in my tone seemed to have piqued his attention.
"I – uh – oh! My belly! I think – I think –"
"The baby?" He asked, smiling so hard and so wide it nearly outshone the sun. "Sophie – is it the baby? Does it come?"
"I don't know," I replied, no longer confident I'd felt anything.
But it was the baby, because soon enough there were more pangs, steadily increasing in intensity until they were actively painful and I was frowning and panting my way through them.
She came fast, the Jarl's daughter. My mom didn't even have time to get to the hospital before she made her entrance into the world, as her father stood by my side.
It was the first time I had ever seen him so astonished.
"Gods," he whispered, transfixed, as a nurse lifted the tiny, slippery bundle onto my chest. "Gods, woman. A child. Look at her. She's beautiful. Oh, she's beautiful."
And she was. Although a commotion went on around us, in those first few moments after birth, Ivar and I were cocooned in a bubble of quiet bliss, tracing our fingers over our daughter's tiny hands and feet and her perfect little nose.
"I've never seen such a wonder," he said quietly, as our baby's dark blue eyes looked up searchingly into those of her parents, seeming to hold a wisdom beyond time in their depths. "I – I've never seen such a thing."
Twenty-Nine
Ivar
The child was the joy of my life, there is no other way to put it. I had seen birth before, and death – some of which I had dealt myself. But the arrival into the world of Freya – for that is what we decided to name her, after the goddess of her father's people – was unlike anything that had come before in my life. Looking down at her in the moments after her birth, as perfect as anything that has ever lived, was more than any gothi's tea-induced visions of the next world, more than any battle victory, more than anything. I had thought it might be difficult, before I laid eyes on her, to imagine there being room enough in my soul to love another as much as I loved her mother. But it came, the space in my soul, and it came at once – a rush of feeling, a shift like a tide – monumental, inexorable.
And when we brought her back to our home, before the moon of her birth had turned, I found that I could no longer remember what my life had been without her. I could no longer imagine myself without her. She was a tiny little thing, lighter and fresher in being than a slender spring bough, and yet more substantial than a mountain range upon the earth of my heart.
My fascination was not mine alone, either. Her mother was besotted, her sister was besotted, her grandmother and her mother's friends – everyone loved Freya. I was glad, sometimes, when Sophie bathed before bed and we found ourselves without visitors, because it meant I had my daughter all to myself, that there were no others clamoring to hold her. I could take her in my arms and we could gaze into each other's eyes as if under a spell.
The summer came and the child grew strong on her mother's milk. We spent many of our days in the country, at Heather's house, with the people that had become like a little tribe to each other. And as the days and nights passed in the warm glow of family – a family by blood and another, larger, by souls, I came to know that I would not see my homeland again. Some of the others came to know it, too, although it went unspoken. Heather took me out into the woods one afternoon, the air around us buzzing with the sounds of insects, and, in the midst of picking wild raspberries, she suddenly reached out and patted my hand gently. When I looked up, her eyes were on mine.
"What is it?" I asked, although even then I think I knew. I knew the story, by that time, of how she had come to move from the future to the past, and to spend most of her life with a man of my people. I knew that she did not regret any of her choices – how can one regret love? – but that she understood, better than anyone, how it was to leave the place that made you. Not for a moon – or a winter, or two winters – but for good.
"You've done right," she told me, and again, neither of us had to clarify what the meaning of those words was. "You've done right by Sophie. I see it isn't always easy for you, Jarl, but it is as it is."
I smiled to hear her use the words of my people and dropped a handful of berries into the basket she carried. We stayed out there in the woods until the light began to wane and turn golden, and all the while as we worked our way through the berry bushes, an idea began to take shape in my mind.
If I was going to stay in Sophie's time – and I was, because the question of duty and to whom I owed it had been resolved in my heart once and for all – then certain things needed to be done.
It was during that weekend, as we lay in bed of a summer morning, with Freya asleep between us and Ashley in town running errands with her grandmother – Sophie's people seemed to have never-ending lists of these 'errands' – that I first suggested a journey.
"A journey?" Sophie asked, running the back of her fingers down one of Freya's cheeks, softer than lamb's noses as they were. "Where?"
I looked out the open window, and listened to the sound of the wind in the leaves. "To the Kingdom of the East Angles. You say it is still there, although it has a different name now. You showed me a map, do you remember?"
"Yes," she replied, and her voice was quiet the way it always was when we spoke of the past.
"I thought we might go there. I have – there's some things I need to do. There are two things, actually. And I would like to see it again, the place where we met."
Sophie reached for my hand. "You mean – right now, in this
time – right? You don't mean –"
"No," I shook my head, understanding her hesitation. "No I don't mean going back to my people, or my time. My place is here now."
"You say you have two things to do?" She asked. "In England?"
"Yes. Well, I have one thing to do myself, and then I have something I need you to do with me."
Freya stirred in her sleep and we waited to see if she would wake. When she did not, I took one of Sophie's hands in between my own and looked into her eyes.
"We have this child now," I told her, "and we have Ashley. There was a time, and not too long ago, that I imagined myself a – what was the word you used? A back – a backa –"
"A bachelor?"
I laughed. "Yes, that. I thought that was my lot. To be the Jarl of Jarls and perhaps to father some children at some point, when the hairs of my beard began to turn gray, but not to settle into domesticity the way I saw even my fellow Jarls settling – Eirik and then Ragnar. Not that a husband's duties were beneath me in some way, that's not what I speak of. I just did not believe they were meant for me. And now –"
I stopped then, taking sudden notice of the fact that Sophie was wide-eyed, staring at me as if I'd just said something unbelievable.
"Why do you look at me like I've gone mad?" I asked. "What did I –"
"Uh – what?" She asked. "Oh – it was just, uh – it was nothing. What were you saying about the – um, about now?"
Something had gotten into her, that was obvious. But I was going somewhere, and I needed to stay the course.
"Yes, now. Things are different now, aren't they? Not just circumstances, or outside things, but inside my soul as well. I no longer –"
"I'm sorry," she cut me off, smiling and then frowning. Had she lost her mind? "Sorry, Ivar. But did you just say – did you just say, um, husband's duties? Husband's duties?"
Voss. I had used the word she alighted on, as women are wont to alight upon specific words the way a hawk alights upon a rabbit. I tried to keep a straight face. I really did. I looked down at our sleeping baby, trying to keep the sternness about me. But it was no use, I'd been found out. The smile tugged at the corners of my mouth until I stopped fighting it and began to chuckle.
"Why are you laughing?" She asked, alert to my every chuckle and changing expression – the way she always was.
"Because you're too quick for me, woman! Voss, I had this planned so perfectly, I had –"
"You had what planned?"
"This. The surprise. I did not wish you to figure it out before I could ask, but my words come too quick, sometimes, for my mind to think of them fully. As it is, my beautiful Sophie, the thing I need you to do with me, when we go to the Kingdom of the East Angles, is to marry me."
She lay back on the pillow, staring straight up at the ceiling. And then she brought her hands up to her face, covering it, and I could not tell if she laughed or cried – or which I wished it to be.
It was only then that I remembered the ring. The ring! Maria had instructed me on the engagement ritual – so strange and foreign – of her people, and even helped me to pick the ring itself. I reached down underneath the bed where the little red box sat.
"Oh my God," Sophie whispered, when she saw it, and I could not help but notice that she had not actually said yes yet, or expressed any approval whatsoever for my wish to marry in the place where we met. "Oh my God. Ivar – oh – oh my –"
I took the ring from its nesting place, a band of yellow gold set with a diamond of such clarity and sparkle as I had not even known existed, and held it up, an offering.
And when she offered me her finger, I bent to kiss it before looking up at her.
"You have not yet said answered me, woman," I scolded gently. "Here I am afire with nervousness and still you say nothing. Will you have me or not, put me out of my misery!"
"Yes," she said, allowing me to slide the ring onto her finger now. "Yes, Ivar. Yes!"
Freya awoke when her mother leaned in to kiss me, and began to fuss for milk. And while Sophie fed her I pulled a second, bigger box from under the bed and opened it for her.
"What is this?" She asked, as I took out a cuff of gold, intricately wrought and decorated with linking circles and curlicues.
"In the North," I told her, "after marriage, the women wear these on their upper arms – it is the adornment of a wife, and only a married woman may wear one. I will bring it with us on our journey, and when we are husband and wife you can wear it."
"You really want to marry me?" She asked, grinning because although she knew it was true, she wanted to hear the words again. "You want to take me to England and marry me? You want to be stuck with me for the rest of your life?"
I smiled, because not twelve moons ago I would have spoken of marriage in the same way – as a weight, an unwanted obligation. But after finding Sophie on the beach that day, and now lying in bed with her over a thousand winters later, with our daughter at her breast, there was quite simply nothing I wanted more than to be 'stuck with' her for the rest of my life. Nothing.
Thirty
Sophie
I quit my job before I got married, because there was no real reason to keep it. I'd been good at it, that was true – I'd even solved the mystery of what happened to Paige Renner and Emma Wallis – although I couldn't tell anyone else that. It was simply that when the time came to make a choice between spending my days working for a salary I no longer needed and, on the other hand, spending them with my husband, our family and our friends, the River Falls PD didn't stand a chance. It wasn't without a certain pang that I let go of the job I'd trained hard for and taken seriously, but the decision was the right one. My adventures in the 9th century showed me how fleeting life could be. They showed me that my time – all of our time – was finite. Heather's money allowed me to spend it with those I loved most, and I made sure she knew just how grateful I was for that.
The Viking remained glued to the window for the entire flight to England, blinking every now and again as if trying to figure out the perspective, the distance, and then turning to me and shaking his head like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Which he probably couldn't.
"The tops of the clouds," he murmured at one point.
"What?" I asked drowsily as Ashley slept in the seat beside me and Freya dozed in my lap.
"The tops of the clouds," Ivar repeated, marveling. "No one from my homeland – no one from my time – has ever seen such a thing, Sophie – no one! It might even be that no one has ever even thought that such things exist – that the clouds have tops. And there they are. And there is the sea, below. We are higher now even than birds, are we not?"
"I think so," I answered, reaching for his hand, which he gave me without tearing his eyes away from the view.
We landed early in the morning, the plane descending through a thick fog onto the runway at Heathrow before we were herded through customs.
Ivar was Ivar Hanson now, traveling on a passport we'd bought on the internet after a lot of research – and a lot of conversations with the kind of people it used to be my job to arrest – and paid rather a lot of money for. The money from the dagger had opened my eyes to the kinds of things, both legal and illegal, that real wealth could buy. And one of those things, apparently, was an entirely authentic-looking passport. Ivar was tall, blond and blue-eyed and traveling with his wife and daughters. No one questioned us.
From Heathrow we took a helicopter to our destination – a private residence in the East Anglian countryside, where our wedding party was to join us in a matter of days. And for once, on that helicopter, Ivar and I got to experience something for the first time together. If anything, I was more enthralled than he was. To him, everything was new and astonishing. To me, only a few things were – and a helicopter flight over the country I had only ever seen in the 9th century was one on of them. I spent the entire time gazing out of the window, trying to connect the past and the present in my mind – although the task proved almost impossible. W
here the land I briefly knew had been heavily wooded, swampy in places, and only haphazardly dotted with the signs of human habitation, it was now laid with towns, villages, car parks and highways. I watched the cars speeding along the multi-lane asphalt below, and thought of the 'Great Road' –the narrow dirt track in the Kingdom of East Anglia where I had first begun to fall in love with the man I was going to marry. How different it all looked.
"Did you recognize it?" I asked the Viking later, after we had landed and put our jet-lagged children to bed in the grandest bedroom either of us had ever seen. "From the helicopter, I mean – did you recognize that you were looking at the Kingdom of the East Angles? Could you tell?"
Ivar looked around at the room in which we sat, with its ceiling so high it made our voices echo and its ancient, dark wood floors and paneling. "I think I see something of the people in this estate, with the beasts carved into wood and stone. But from above? Perhaps. There is no more wild land here, is there? Not even like there is in your country. The great woods where we hunted deer are gone, or much reduced. I wonder if it's the same in the North – in my home?"
What my husband-to-be didn't know was that I had booked a trip to his home – or to the place where I thought it might be. We'd pored over maps, the two of us, and he had tried to use the directions he held in his head, from his time sailing ships across what was now the North Sea, to get a general idea of the place from which he had sailed, the village where he had spent his boyhood. He did not think it was the northern part of Denmark, or near to Oslo, in Norway. The eastern part of the southerly parts of Norway, which on the maps was dotted with thousands of islands and the coastline of which appeared to be infiltrated by many fjords and small inlets, however – that looked promising.