by Joanna Bell
"You don't know Vikings," Paige replied, unsmiling because she knew I was right when I told her my parents and sister and the rest of my family and friends would be completely out of their minds with panic and worry. "There's no such thing as a brief social visit with these people. The raids have gone easily and well, we're stuffed to the rafters with food and goods, and Eirik intends for Ragnar and his people to stay here for Yule."
"Yule? What, like Christmas? That's not a 'few weeks' – it's just over a week until Christmas, right?"
Baby Eirik, sitting on his mother's lap, reached out for a lock of my hair that hung close to his little hand. Paige handed him to me and gave me a knowing smile. "They don't do things by a calendar here, Em. This is my first Yule too, the first year since setting up this camp that Eirik has seen fit to hold it in full. So I can't even tell you what it really means. What I can say is that from the way Eirik talks about it, it isn't just one day. It starts with one day – the darkest day, he says, but then there's days of 'quiet' – don't even ask me what that means because I don't know – and then, after the quiet, there are days of feasting and drinking. He says there are many rituals as well."
"The darkest day?" I asked. "So, like, the solstice? The 21st? That has to be less than a week away. Then a couple of days of quiet and then Christmas dinner? Is that how it'll go? I still don't see how that's going to take weeks."
Paige and I watched as her son gummed one of my fingers. "I don't know," she said, obviously troubled. "I wish I knew, because I understand how important it is to get you home as soon as possible, but you have to know, Emma, that trying to go back on your own is a bad idea. It's freezing outside, you would die the first night. And if you didn't die the first night, you'd run into outlaws or the King's men – and you really don't want to do either of those things. Please don't think you'll be able to –"
"Oh I'm not an idiot," I told her. "Paige, seriously? You think I'd try to get south again, on foot, in this weather? No. If it's two weeks, it's two weeks. If it's three, it's three. I'll wait, because the only thing I care about is getting home in one piece, so my parents can –" I broke off as my lower lip wobbled and then finished in a whisper. "I just mean I won't try to go anywhere by myself. I won't do anything without telling you about it first, OK? All I care about is getting home."
"I know," she said, coming to me and wrapping her arms around me once again. "I know, Em. And we'll get you home. It just – it takes a certain kind of patience to get anything done here, that's all."
14
Emma
When evening fell, Hildy came to Paige's roundhouse, where I'd been left alone while Paige took care of some things – to lead me away and told me that before the feast, I would be bathed, and that I could take my bath with Paige, if I liked. Since it was bitterly cold and, as far as I knew, the Vikings didn't have access to electricity or hot water tanks, I assumed she meant some kind of hellish dip in a half-frozen stream.
"No," I told her, standing outside and refusing to move as the wind whipped my hair against my face. "It's fine, I don't need a bath."
I moved to go back in, desperate to feel the fire-warmth again, and found myself blocked. Hildy had her arm outstretched in front of me. I looked at her, at first assuming she'd made some kind of mistake – but she didn't drop her arm. Nor did she speak.
"What is it?" I asked, confused. What did this woman want?
"I'll send for you soon," she replied firmly. "So you can be bathed before –"
"No," I said, slowing my speech because I believed maybe Hildy was having trouble understanding me. "I don't need to be bathed. Thank you for offering but –"
Hildy laughed heartily, cutting me off. "Oh I'm not offering, girl," she said, drawing herself up and eyeballing me. "You'll be seated at the high table, with my Jarl. As such, you will be bathed beforehand."
"No," I said, for the third time, and in a much less friendly tone. "I don't know what part of 'I don't want a bath' you don't understand, but I – Hildy, I don't want a bath. Now if you'll please –" I tried to shove her out of the way, because the tip of my nose was getting numb in the cold.
Hildy held herself in place. She was quite a bit shorter than me, and quite a bit stronger than I'd imagined. I shoved her again, harder, and she slide to the side.
"Paige won't allow it either!" She yelled, when I finally managed to get past her. "I'll send her to fetch you, then! I'll send your friend to fetch you for your bath!"
"Do what you want, you crazy old bat," I muttered, before making my way to the westerly roundhouse following the path Paige had told me led right up to it. I walked inside and found Jarl Ragnar seated in front of a fire, shirtless from the waist up and effortlessly magnificent.
"What is it?" He asked, seeing that I was annoyed. "Don't give these people trouble, Emma. We're their guests, Jarl Eirik feasts us tonight."
"I –" I started, before stopping to gather my thoughts because, as I said – Ragnar was shirtless. He was sprawled across a kind of wide wooden bench, bigger than a single bed and piled high with soft furs – and I was pretty sure I'd never seen a sexier sight in my life. "I – uh, Ragnar, um, I – sorry, what am I talking about? Oh, yeah. I don't want a bath. I was just telling Eirik's assistant that I – "
"Eirik's what?" Ragnar responded, irritated but smiling, because he'd definitely noticed my reaction to his state of half-undress. "And it's Jarl Eirik to you, Emma. Don't make me regret bringing you here. If the woman wants you bathed, you'll be bathed."
I almost snapped at him at that point but luckily the humor got me before the anger could. "What am I?" I asked, laughing. "A baby? I need to be 'bathed?' Does the Great Jarl Eirik find his powers weakening if an unclean woman is seated too close to him during a feast?"
Ragnar got to his feet so quickly I thought he might be about to strike me and crouched low, to defend myself. It was his turn to laugh.
"What are you going to do?" He chuckled, pulling me in against his warm, strong chest. "Are you going to fight me, girl? You're stronger than most of the women, it's true, but I don't think you'd have much luck in combat with a Jarl. As for being bathed – will the fire-hearted one allow her Jarl to advise her?"
The fire-hearted one. I liked that. I liked it so much I decided to keep how much I liked it from Jarl Ragnar – although something told me he might have guessed it anyway. I also liked the way he referred to himself not as a Jarl, but as her Jarl. My Jarl. And I definitely wasn't admitting that – even, at the time, to myself.
"You can advise me if you want," I told him, turning my head up so I could rest my chin on his chest and look into his glacial blue eyes as the firelight danced within them. "But only on matters of combat and – I don't know – sailing and conquering and things like that. You wouldn't take my advice on how to take an estate, would you? Or how to swordfight? So why should I take yours on women's cleanliness?"
Ragnar looked back down at me, half smiling, half stern. "You're a troublesome girl, aren't you?" He asked, bending his head to kiss my mouth slowly and only pausing to speak again when I was breathless with the sudden need he conjured to life deep in my belly. "A very troublesome girl. Keep it up and I might see fit to punish you. As it is, I am not advising you on women's things, gods no. I advise you only on Viking ways. It is our way that a woman bathes before being seated with a Jarl, at his feasting table. Also before taking to his bed, although I admit I have not been as fastidious on these matters as I could have been."
I hovered there, in the liminal state between wanting to keep talking to Ragnar and wanting the talking to stop immediately. It made the blood rush hot and fast in my veins to be so close to him. He was so big, so masculine, as solid and unbending as a hundred year old oak tree. It made me feel drunk, it made my limbs slow and my mouth hungry for his kisses to be held so tightly against him as I was.
I laughed – not a loud, mocking laugh but a softer, gentler one. Still, a laugh. "You're right," I told him. "You were not fastidious on that
point. So why must we be fastidious now?"
He opened his mouth to respond, and just before he did I slipped one of my hands under his leathers and found him, thick and hard against his thigh. "Emma," he started, but his words turned to a heavy sigh and his eyes closed and I felt something soften inside me.
I was raised in the modern world, by educated, cosmopolitan parents. I knew where babies came from, and didn't find any part of it funny or embarrassing, by the time I was 8 years old. My mother took me to the doctor to get a prescription for birth control pills when I was 16, after I told her my first serious boyfriend and I were going to have sex. What I'm saying is that up until I met Jarl Ragnar, I considered myself a fully, confidently sexual human being.
So why did it feel like such a shock to experience the reactions in my own body when he touched me? Even he noticed it. When I shivered as he loosened the ties of my tunic before pulling it off over my head, and then bent down to take one of my nipples into his mouth, he saw the look of surprise on my face.
"What is it, girl?" He asked, kissing his way to the other nipple and applying the same exquisite technique of soft suction and a firm tongue to it. "Why do you look as if I had just transformed into a wolf in front of your eyes?"
A wolf. It was a fitting animal to choose. I felt like prey in front of Jarl Ragnar, as vulnerable and sensitized as a doe in a forest clearing. I didn't recall ever having felt that way with ex-boyfriends. Sex with them was light, fun, as casual an amusement as an afternoon nature walk – it never made me feel the way Ragnar was making me feel, with the lust seeming to emanate from his pores, entrancing me, making me his.
"I –" I said, trying to think of something to say. But there was nothing – or there were no words for it, anyway. All I was doing that at that moment was feeling, and there was no room for anything else within me.
"You have a virgin's look in your eye, Emma," he whispered, pushing his tongue into my mouth and kissing my deeply, until my thighs ached for the feeling of him between them. "Have you never been with a man who knew what it was to take a woman before?"
To 'take' a woman. I might have objected to that term, had I been anything other than literally weak-kneed and slick-thighed with desire. Men didn't take women, that's not what sex was. Sex was a mutually pleasurable activity between two adults. That's what I'd been told, even if part of me had always wondered if maybe, maybe, there wasn't more to it than that.
And standing there in Jarl Ragnar's roundhouse, with his hand slipping up, up my inner thigh, and then pressing, holding itself against me in a gesture that could not have been any more obviously about ownership, I suddenly knew with absolute certainty that everything I'd been told was wrong. Or, not in any way close to the whole story. I didn't balk to see the aggression in his gaze when I turned my face up to him and he took it in his hands and plunged his tongue into my mouth again, hard.
"Voss," he swore – I knew it was a swear because of how – and when – he said it. I cried out when he pushed one finger into me, and then a second, and then took them back out to hold up in the light.
"You're as wet as a doe's flanks after the rain," he told me, his voice thick and deep, before pulling me down onto the bed of linens and furs that had been laid out for us.
I straddled him as we undressed each other, peeling off layers of wool, leather, fur, pushing them aside in our frenzy to feel each other's bare skin. And then I was naked on top of him and he was looking up at me, consuming me with his eyes as his hands grasped greedily at my flesh. He wasn't inside me, not yet. His cock was between my legs, but it wasn't inside. I pushed my hips forward, sliding my wetness up the length of him, and he dug his fingers into my hip so hard it hurt. I kept going, too, and my mouth fell open as what little control I still had seeped away.
It quickly became too much. Ragnar lifted me up, just far enough to wrap his hand around himself and push the head between my lips, groaning loudly as he did so.
"Emma," he said, settling himself against me. "Emma, Emma..."
I slid down on him, then – all the way, gasping and throwing my head back and clenching my hands into fists. It stung a little, at the moment when I was most full, but the sting was sweet. He was sweet. I only forced my eyes open so I could see him, so I could watch the expressions on his face as I worked myself up and down, as we worked each other up into a desperate frenzy of need.
"You're beautiful," he told me, thrusting his hips up harder, quicker. "You're going to finish me, girl. Voss, ohhh..."
I didn't have to guess what 'finish' meant, either. It didn't take the work with Ragnar that I was used to it taking. I didn't need to slip a surreptitious hand down between my own legs to make sure I didn't get left behind. Seeing him get closer – feeling him get closer – it was like being carried along on tide, pushed nearer and nearer to the beach where you know the wave will crash over your head and send you tumbling.
"Oh, God," I panted, as I moved against him quicker and harder. "Oh my God. Oh!"
"Yes," he moaned, pushing his upper body up off the furs when he saw how close I was and pulling my mouth down to his again. "Yes, Emma. I'm going to give you – Emma, I'm –" he broke off when he felt the first trembling contractions of my orgasm around him.
I met his eyes one last time, taking the urging in them and falling easily, simply over the edge. There was never a moment of worry or hesitation. Ragnar led me to that searing, oceanic bliss and then he held me as I dove in. I think I actually screamed at the peak of it, perfectly full of him.
"Emma," he growled, before I was even finished, and I knew what it meant. He pulled me down against him and buried his face in my neck, baring his teeth against my skin. "Emma," he moaned again, his voice catching in his throat as he held me down and didn't let me back up, filling me, giving me what he needed to give me.
I let him hold me so tight I couldn't breathe when he came – and I would have let him do a lot more than that. I think I might have let him do anything. I'd never experienced such power – such unadulterated maleness – as Ragnar before. When the tension left our bodies and he pulled me down beside him on the furs, curling himself around me, I felt almost stupefied by what had just happened.
"Is that what it takes to quiet you?" He asked a couple of minutes later, rolling over on his back and completely relaxed. "You just need a man to finish you, is that it?"
I wanted to banter. I wanted to giggle and join in. But my brain – my soul – still felt all scrambled up. I knew I wouldn't have been able to string a sentence together if I tried. So I didn't try and Ragnar studied me with his eyes, a look I almost wanted to turn away from, worried that I might become instantly addicted.
"I'll have you again before the feast if you keep staring at me that way," he whispered, "as winsome as a spring lamb, even as my essence fills your belly."
We were allowed to lie there, in the little cocoon of warmth and our own spent bodies that we had created, only for another minute or two. Even before a woman's voice came from outside, demanding that I attend my 'bath' the reality that, out there, people were searching for me, worrying about me, imagining I was hurt or worse, had begun to reassert itself. Ragnar himself noticed, pulling back at one point to look at me with great interest.
"You worry again," he said, tucking a piece of hair behind one of my ears. "I see its return in your eyes, Emma."
Before I even had a chance to dodge the subject, Hildy returned.
"Why do you fight it?" Ragnar asked. "A hot bath? If I had a hot bath on offer, girl, I would not be fighting it. You seem a small child, fighting against eating its supper. You know the little one is hungry, but something in the infant mind once it begins to walk cannot abide anything it interprets as an order. Even if the order is to do something pleasurable! If someone ordered me to eat berries and spring cream, or to lie back in a hot bath in the middle of a freezing winter and relax as others attended to me, I would not fight them. But it is as it is, I suppose. You are a woman, and women are like small
children in so many –"
Jarl Ragnar stopped talking and burst out laughing then, because he'd seen the look on my face, seen that his teasing had riled me. I reached out and slapped his shoulder and he ducked out of reach. "I meant it, woman! All except the last part – it's not women who need to wear the blame for your stubbornness. It's just you."
"Is she ready?!" Hildy's voice came from outside, and even as she was speaking to a visiting Jarl her tone was definitely not as respectful as it could have been. Ragnar heard it, too, and raised his eyebrows in surprise at me, grinning.
"Well you'd best hurry," he whispered. "She sounds even scarier than Inga!"
In the end, I followed Hildy – who even managed to walk as if she were in a state of permanent annoyance – along a frozen path to another roundhouse. Inside, fires burned in two pits and the interior was more brightly lit than usual, the walls and surfaces almost covered with the tallow candles the Vikings used everywhere. Three wooden tubs, deeper and shorter than regular bathtubs, sat in a row. Paige was asleep in one of those tubs, and in the one next to her was a slightly older woman with thin hair and, I saw when she smiled at me, a few missing teeth.
Attending to them were two other women, Vikings in dress and look. When Hildy shoved me through the leather doorway and slapped it shut behind me with an audible sigh of irritation it was one of these two that looked up and smiled.
"You're Paige's friend," she said, gesturing to the third tub. "Hildy told us to expect you. Take off your dressings and we'll prepare the water."
At that point, Paige woke up and, when she saw me, smiled widely. "Oh good, you're here. Hildy said you were giving her trouble, but Hildy thinks everything on earth was created for the sole purpose of giving her trouble. Get undressed and hop in – it's wonderful."
As I stood, not getting undressed, the two attendants moved heated rocks from the middle of one of the fires and plunged them into the third tub, where they hissed and sizzled and made the water around them boil furiously.