Dream of Me/Believe in Me (18 page)

He let go of her so suddenly that she almost fell. Barely had she caught her balance then he was out the door and striding across the field.

T
HE WOMEN WORKED BY TORCHLIGHT
. Several knelt, scrubbing the floor, while others rubbed down the tables with sand, and still more cleaned the dishes and utensils. They labored in silence, watched over by their scowling menfolk, who no more liked being rousted from their beds than did the women but who stood foursquare in support of their jarl. Besides, the food really had been terrible.

The slaves were not permitted to help. Brita and the others, awakened by the commotion, were sent back to their beds and told to take the coming day for rest. They would do no work, not so much as the lifting of a broom, until the freewomen had restored all to rights.

Nor was Cymbra allowed to help. When she tried, Wolf pulled her away. He stood, silent and forbidding, until he was satisfied that the work was well in hand. Then he gestured to several of the guards who stood ready. They closed in around Marta, who gasped and tried to slip away but could not.

“Come,” Wolf said and stalked off, leaving a small parade of wife, guards, and the curious to follow him into
the timbered great hall. He sat alone at the high table and stared at the others. The silence dragged out until Cymbra truly believed she could bear it no longer. At length, the jarl spoke.

“Marta Ingridotter, you are the widow of a man who held my greatest respect. For that reason, I did not hesitate to give you the ordering of my household while still I lacked a wife. But you betrayed my trust by deliberately seeking to turn my wife against me and by refusing her that which was hers by right.”

When the woman would have tried to speak, he cut her off with a look. The others shared glances among themselves. Clearly, they knew of the issue with the keys but the rest, how she had tried to turn Cymbra against her husband, was by far the graver matter and made all the more so for being mysterious. To sow such disharmony was to betray them all.

“You will leave Sciringesheal,” Wolf went on implacably. “And your daughter with you.” He ignored Marta's strangled cry. “You will make your home at the settlement at Oslofjord. It is within my holdings and the landsmann there is a strong leader. Behave properly and you will be fairly treated. Otherwise—” He shrugged, making it clear that Marta would be responsible for her own fate.

She was crying softly, her head buried in her hands. Wolf rose, facing his people. More had crowded in as word spread that Marta was being judged. Deliberately, he said, “This woman chose her path when she stood against my wife. Let all here know that and take lesson from it.”

He looked slowly and directly around the room. To Cymbra, his gaze seemed to stare into their very souls. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him for he nodded finally. The crowd, silent and subdued, dispersed.

Marta and Kiirla were taken away to their quarters by
the guards. They would be given a chance to pack their belongings and say goodbye to whichever friends were brave enough to visit them. With morning light, they would be gone.

Alone with her husband in the great hall, Cymbra prayed for calm. All but overwhelmed by his swift and absolute support of her, she was nonetheless horrified by the punishment he meted out so unhesitantly

In all likelihood, Marta had come to Sciringesheal as a young bride. Perhaps she had even been born and raised there. It was certainly the only home Kiirla had known. Now they were both to be cast out, forced to start over in a place where they would be looked down upon and where no one would have reason to offer them anything beyond the bare minimum needed for survival.

And all because she, the Lady of Holyhood, had not known how to win over her husband's people.

Cymbra straightened her shoulders. Through the open doors of the great hall, she saw the first gray rim of light above the horizon. There was very little time left.

“I am also to blame,” she said quietly. “If I had better known how to—”

“Yes, you are.”

Her husband's prompt agreement in the matter of her guilt brought Cymbra up short. She had thought to have to explain it to him, even persuade him to it, but it seemed that was not necessary after all.

“Your fault lay in your refusal to tell me the truth of the matter from the beginning.” He came closer, looking at her, his voice emotionless. “I am master here. When all is said and done, nothing matters save my will. You thought to hold yourself apart from that.”

“No!” She could not let him make that charge against her, for of that she was truly innocent. “I only wanted to be a good wife, to manage my duties for myself without troubling you.”

Wolf was at a loss to understand why she had tried to keep the problem from him. Had he not been supremely gentle and patient with her, beyond any measure he would ever have thought himself capable of achieving? Was he not the very model of a kind, tolerant, even indulgent husband, whom she should have approached at the very first sign of difficulty? Well, no, apparently he wasn't, and that stung, making him wonder as it did what really went on behind those remarkable eyes as blue as the tranquil sea, yet hiding unknowable depths. What did she truly think of him, of their marriage, and, most important, of the crisis that would inevitably occur when her husband and her brother stood face to face for the first time? Would that meeting come over locked swords or raised drinking horns? The answer lay buried within her heart, as well shielded as the most impenetrable stronghold.

Spurred by such thoughts, he raised an eyebrow, silently reminding her of the trouble she had brought by not being troubling. “I think,” he said consideringly, “you are too proud.”

“Proud? Me? I am not—” That was outrageous. It was other people always appealing to her pride, telling her of her beauty and her skill, praising her to the skies until she had to fight back the urge to scream that she was only a woman like all the rest, frail as any other human.

“It is your pride that drives you to not want to disappoint people. To live up to what you imagine their expectations to be, whether those are at all realistic or not.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. A strange, undefined sense sparked within her, grew stronger, threatened to overtake her. She recognized it then, a sense of being invaded, as though he had reached straight into her mind. It was what she had seen him do with the others in the hall but far more so.

With a shock, she realized that he
knew
her. That
wasn't possible. She had kept too much hidden for too long. And besides, she was the one who knew what others felt, who could sometimes even sense fragments of their thoughts. Never was she the
known.
Until now.

Her mouth was dry. She had no idea how to respond to this, no experience in dealing with it. Slowly, she said, “It is proudful to care about duty?”

“Your duty is to me. To
me
.” The emphasis was all the clearer for being so quietly uttered. “I require your absolute obedience and loyalty. I thought I'd made that clear.”

Perhaps he was right and she was proudful, for she couldn't merely accept this. “I was neither disobedient nor disloyal when I tried to manage a purely domestic matter—a matter of women—by myself.”

He leaned against his high-backed chair, seemingly at his ease, and regarded her steadily. “How did you try to manage it? What did you do?”

She hated this, hated feeling so exposed and having to defend herself to him. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. But then the Scourge of the Saxons had provided her with so many new experiences.

“I thought it best to wait, to give Marta and the other women time to come to know and accept me. Under the circumstances, taking into consideration the surprise of our marriage and the fact that I am a stranger, it seemed best for all concerned.”

He nodded, as though considering all this. She wasn't fooled. He had already made up his mind and was not to be swayed. “You did not think to discuss this plan of yours with me?”

“I did not think you would concern yourself with such matters.”

“What prompted you to ask her for the keys when you did?”

Cymbra hesitated. She had never told him about the
lute. Now she supposed that would be another black mark against her. They were piling up too quickly, making her wonder if she had done a single thing right since her arrival.

Not looking at him, she said, “I found my lute destroyed. I believed Marta responsible because of her resentment of me. I went to her and demanded the keys. She refused to give them.”

His eyes darkened but he still spoke with infuriating calm. “So you thought to trick me into solving the problem for you with that talk of venison?”

“It was not a trick!” He was making her sound like a terrible person, this man who had brought her to such ecstasy only a short time before.

“I wanted your help,” she said, “and I didn't know how to ask for it directly.”

“It's very simple.” He came toward her, stepping from light into shadow, then light again. The grayness was growing brighter as the Norse summer birthed another day.

“You come to me.” He took hold of her arms, placing them around his neck. “And you say, ‘Husband, I need your help.’ See, that is not so hard, is it?”

“And if you are away on the training fields or on a voyage? Or if you have other problems to solve? Or perhaps you are merely weary or preoccupied. I take none of that into account? I merely load my difficulties on you without thought?”

The corners of his mouth twitched. “Not necessarily without thought. You could, for instance, seek the right moment. You might …” He considered, searching for the most helpful suggestion. “You might take my boots off, for instance, rub my neck, see to my comforts, and then when my mood is at its best, tell me what you wish.”

Despite herself, Cymbra felt the beginning of a smile. The heady rush of emotion she never failed to experience
with this man left her disoriented. In moments, she had gone from resenting him to being charmed by his sudden teasing playfulness.

“I think it would be simpler to just take care of things myself,” she said, but lightly, letting him know she didn't mean it. To be absolutely sure he got that message, she moved her hips delicately against him.

“Simpler,” he murmured against her throat, “isn't always better.”

Beyond the timbered hall, a rooster warbled full-throated greetings to the sun. Another quickly followed and another, their raucous calls resounding off the berm floating down the hill to join the cries of all the other roosters in the town heralding the morn.

For a few, giddy moments, the world seemed to consist only of their triumphant song. They sounded for all the world as though they believed they called forth the sun themselves.

EVEN CYMBRA—
PROUDFUL
CYMBRA, AS SHE REMINDED herself—knew better than to try to persuade the Wolf to rescind his order of exile. The best she could do was make sure that Marta and Kiirla had ample and more supplies to take with them to their new home. This she did as soon as she emerged for the second time that day from the lodge, hastily reordering her clothes and patting her hair into place.

Crossing the field to join his men a short time later, Wolf saw her loading the wagon that would accompany the women. He caught her eye to let her know he had seen, but he said nothing, not even when she looked back at him defiantly. She thought he even smiled a little but she couldn't be absolutely sure.

She was still staring after her husband, distracted by the hard, powerful beauty of the body so recently entwined
with hers, when one of the guards approached him and spoke briefly. Wolf stopped, turned around, and headed in the direction of his brother's lodge. That surprised Cymbra, for she would have expected Dragon to be on the training field already, as he was every day. Looking around, she realized there was no sign of him.

She made her farewells to Marta and Kiirla. The former refused to look at her but the younger woman nodded calmly. She seemed more in possession of herself than Cymbra had ever seen her, as though her formidable mother no longer overshadowed her.

Gesturing toward the wagon, Kiirla said, “Thank you for all this. It is very kind, especially so under the circumstances.”

“I wish you did not have to go,” Cymbra said frankly.

“It is best,” Kiirla replied. “This will be a fresh start for us and I think we need that.”

“If the landsmann at Oslofjord proves unkind—”

“He will not,” Kiirla said quickly. Her cheeks colored faintly. “As it happens, he is not a stranger. We met at the spring festival.” She met Cymbra's gaze. “He has no wife. I spoke to my mother of him, but …”

Understanding dawned and with it came a wave of relief. Not for a moment did Cymbra doubt that her husband was fully aware of the marital status of the landsmann.

Still reflecting on Wolf's cleverness, she waited until the women, their wagon, and their escort departed, then went in search of him. She found him just emerging from his brother's lodge. Ulfrich was with him and the two were so deep in conversation that they did not notice Cymbra's approach.