Edin's embrace (17 page)

"Mayhap my mother entertained one in her bed and gave birth to a trollish son?"

"Oh, no, surely not. Your mother has only one son, and that is you." She dared glance up at him again.

"Aye." His grin changed to something more rueful. Edin couldn't help laughing up at him. He seemed surprised. And pleased. He pressed his forefinger against the side of his nose as if to hide his pleasure, and said again, "Aye."

At length, making light of it, Thoryn led his "captured gnome" to the bed in the second room. Here the only light was what firelight fell through the open door. Her eyes were anxious, as they always were when she knew he was going to take her. Though she'd sat with him, and he'd made her laugh, now she was anxious again. She stood as if waiting for some signal from him or some order she must obey. He gestured to the bed; it was what she needed. She undressed quickly and slipped beneath the blankets.

He soon joined her, feeling a unique and voluptuous solace in so doing. In the dim light he caressed her face and ran his hand over her cheeks, her eyelids. The feel of her skin had a deeply soothing effect on him. He smoothed back her hair from her forehead. "I still terrify you." His big hand held her face and kept her from turning away.

"I-I'm trying not to be."

He looked down on her with pensive sympathy, then embraced her, seeing that she needed embracing. He stroked her hair, her shoulders, and kissed her. Tenderness unfolded in him, a sensation that was still as foreign to him as the voice of his conscience.

His next kiss was long and deep, and when at last he let her mouth go, she murmured, "'From the fury of the Norseman, good Lord deliver us.'"

She was bantering with him again. About the fury of his kisses. Through the sweet fog of his anticipation, laughter welled up. Unable to restrain the urge entirely, he chuckled. "Aye, well may you pray to your god this night, for I mean to find new ways to wring entertainment from you."

He'd been in an aggravated state of desire for hours and was as erect as a tusk of ivory. His hand went down between her lovely thighs. She inhaled as he found the entrance into her. The cheerfulness went out of her face, and her lips quivered slightly. He let his finger rest within her for a long minute, until it seemed she began to melt around him; she became wetter and wetter.

"Do you like this?" he asked.

She wouldn't answer.

Have patience,
he told himself. He meant to break through all her barriers, to wear down all her restraints, and his technique was going to be deliberate, meticulous patience. She would see how efficient it was. She would be totally open to him, and more profoundly enslaved than she'd ever thought herself capable of being.

He made his voice a whisper. "Saxon, you will tell me.

"I . . ." She seemed a little breathless. "It makes me feel .,.. truly I don't
know
!"

"Does it give you discomfort?"

"No, it-it makes me feel . . . uneasy. It makes me want . . "

"What?"

"To move!"

He felt a leap of triumph. With a sliding motion, he pulled his finger out. She gasped. He found that her little knob of flesh was swollen as a flowerbud. As he took it between his fingers, he whispered, "This is very plump suddenly."

"Sweet
Jesu
!" She pressed her hands against his chest.

"Put your arms around me."

She did; she slid her arms up his chest and around his neck. Her breath was sweet. She was so young and fragile. Avoiding his eyes and looking shy, struggling to hide her reactions, she was at the pitch of her beauty. He knew that essentially he had not yet satisfied her, and without knowing indeed that such a thing was even possible, that was exactly what he meant to do. If she could be lifted to that surrendering pitch of depleted and ecstatic release that he knew so well, he felt then she would be his totally.

"Do you like this?"

Again she didn't answer.

"Saxon, I want you to heed me, and I am afraid you're doing a very poor job. Now answer me: Do you like this?"

"
Yes!
"

The fervency in her voice half-thrilled and half-frightened him. Anxious to see as well as feel her, he threw back the blankets. From the door, the firelight glowed on her thighs. His gaze touched her all over.

"Please . . . please . . ." she whimpered. There was trouble in her face.

This was how he'd dreamed and imagined her, begging him to take her. Yet, though he was rampant, he didn't, not yet.

It was no small sacrifice. A sudden gleam of light showed him the pink, tender-looking, bud-centered flower of her open flesh— and an urge he'd never felt before made his mouth fill with desire. Impulsively, trembling at his own intention, his mouth descended.

And then even he was taken by surprise, ambushed by sudden revelation. The lush satin of her, the incredible taste and smell of her! He could think of nothing more. He felt her hands in his hair. He felt the unmistakable yield of her body. And after an unknown period of time, there came a limitless, endless sea of moment wherein he felt her convulse and cry out and convulse again and again and again.

Her fingers released his hair gradually. He kissed her white inner thighs, nipping them with his teeth. Then he touched her deeply again, possessively. She'd seemed asleep, but with his penetrating touch, she quickened once more. She looked at him with a gaze of mixed amazement and reproach, yet her knees naturally raised and spread. Now, he thought, now. He moved over her, but entered her no more than an inch. He gathered her in his arms. "Kiss me."

She kissed his forehead, his eyelids and his eyelashes. She kissed his cheeks above his beard, and then his open mouth. Only then did he stroke her. It went on just this side of forever, to a moment of total fulfillment and shuddering rapture.

Much later she asked, "Will this be all my life now?" Her voice quivered —with her unhappiness, with her disappointment that the security of her youth in another land was lost to her, with her recognition that fate had placed her in his hands, had made her his thrall.

"Listen to me." He felt solemn but not angry. She'd been lying with her back curved into his chest. He rolled her so that he could lean over her and look down at her still-swollen breasts. He let her feel his hand between her thighs again. She grabbed his wrist, yet couldn't keep him from seizing her in an upward motion that caused her to twist with sensation. "You have pleasure at my touch, and when I have you in my arms, yes, this is all you will think about, all you will be."

He felt her dilemma: She was finding it important not to resist, yet finding the need to resist almost impossible to combat. Slowly yet very definitely he was probing her, creating in her exactly the sort of sensations he was trying for. "In some former life you were many things. Discard those memories, Shieldmaiden. You are mine now. Your body is mine."

She whispered, "It's not enough, Viking."

He felt a dull pain go through his heart. For an instant the room was filled by the echo of those words. "It will become familiar to you as the days pass," he said stubbornly. "I'll do whatever I can to teach you." Her look didn't forgive. "I pleased you," he said. "I pleased you very much."

She didn't deny it, and he couldn't resist the defeated look of her. It stimulated his desire, and he got to his knees over her.

He felt the curve of her waist, then placed his hands on her thighs and finally opened her. He saw their tangled shadows on the wall beyond the bed as he fell forward and took her again. She moaned in time with his movements —and when suddenly he pulled himself out, she gasped. Her arms came up to stay him.

"Do you belong to me, Saxon?"

She exhaled the words so low he almost didn't hear them. "If you want me."

Again that dull pain went through his heart. And he heard that echo:
It's not enough.
He felt his face harden to iron. He said, "I want you." To prove it, he sank back into her. She accepted him with a quivering, shuddering motion. "Aye, I want you." And he began another journey into delight.

While the frost was yet merely moonlight and the still air outside the
saeter
had yet a shine of silver, the Viking rose to build up the fire in the first room. Edin watched through the door as he squatted to fuel the embers which were left from the log that had glowed through the night. New flames leapt along the dry kindling. When the fire was hissing and fluttering, he rose.

He lost none of his bearing when naked; he was such an astonishing figure.

He came back to bed. "True beauty is to wake looking like you do," he said, gazing down at her from his elbow with a well-satisfied smile. Immediately she started to rub at her eyes and mouth, trying to brush off the cobwebs of sleep. He stopped her, and continued his study. "Your eyes are as green as submerged ice."

But then he frowned. "It ill becomes a Viking to talk so much bark-language. This seems as good a time as any to further your instruction in
Norsk
."

She was willing, though uneasy. Now he would find out how basically stupid she was. Lying facing him, she luxuriated in the freedom to delay the day; nothing else seemed so precious. With the blankets up to their chins, he made her say words again and again before he went on. She surprised herself at her ability to learn. Many of the words were familiar to her already; it seemed that her sensitive mind had been too frightened, too constantly bullied at the steading. Here, given this chance, she was able to put words together with their meanings quickly. Within an hour she was able to answer simple questions:

"What is the highest peak in Norway?" he asked in slow, clear Norse.

"Glittertinden is the highest peak in Norway," she answered, using the complete sentence form he demanded.

"What is the longest river in Norway?"

"The Glama is the longest river in Norway."

"Tell me about the glaciers."

"Joste . . . Joste . . "

"Jostedal." He moved his hand from beneath the blankets to brush her hair back from her cheek. His eyes were as grey as armor.

"Jostedal is the largest glacier in Norway."

"Where are the highest mountains?"

"The highest mountains are in the south of Norway"

"How long is Sognefjord?"

"Sognefjord is over one . . ."

His hand had curved behind her nape, while his other hand had burrowed beneath her and was now sliding up and down her back, bringing her closer, tight against his full length.

". . . one hundred miles . . "

What was this new bodily appetite he'd awakened in her? How could she desire a beast of prey? Yet last night . . . last night in the arms of this Viking her world had momentarily expanded, her life had briefly been suffused with spectacle. In truth, every time he'd ever taken her into his arms, the excitement, that combination of fear and pleasure, had transformed the mundane, crowded each second with sensation, enraptured her. She felt that the truest, the most daring, the most alive part of her, was aroused in his arms.

Even so, it was wrong. It was wrong for him to enslave her. But in his society, as in most, privilege went hand in hand with power. She must accept it.

Yet to be nothing but a pleasure-thrall — it was not enough. She wanted more. She wanted to understand and be understood, to be seen as more than something "always and immediately accessible."

Still more poignant was her memory of another world: that lost, precarious, touching world of Fair Hope Manor, a world wherein she'd mattered to those about her. Thus what she wanted now, what so powerfully drew her —the urge to touch this Viking, stroke him, hold him —she pulled against, forestalled. Overnight she'd been abducted from her home, bereft of protection. This Viking had ruthlessly slain her bridegroom. And no matter how he explained it, he had not killed Cedric simply in self-defense. He'd killed for pride and because he was a Viking. How could she endure life as his concubine? How could she endure this hateful thralldom? How could she want to kiss him?

She tried to remember what she was supposed to be saying— "Sognefjord is one hundred — " but the sentence broke into fragments, the fragments shattered into unattached words " — miles long. In. Norway."

"Aye" came his wry response. "And it is even longer in Ireland. Kiss me," he whispered, his breath spilling vibrant warmth into her open mouth.

Despite her will to resist, a contentment came into her, a feeling of reckless sweetness. She looked into his heavy-lidded gaze and felt daring rise within her. "Kiss you?" she asked. "In
Norsk?

He grinned. It made her feel she'd achieved something whenever she made him smile or laugh. Too often his face was threatening and thunderous; too often his eyes held a radiance as colorless and cold as starlight.

"Aye," he said, "in
Norsk
, in Norway, here in this bed. Now mind your tongue, Saxon, and kiss me."

Her daring rose, and she did kiss him. And as she did, he brought his hands up between them to cup her breasts. And that was the end of the geography portion of her lessons. After that he started to teach her the words for all the various parts of the human body, male and female, mingled with phrases of lovemaking:

"I feel the softness of your body against mine."

"I feel the softness — "

"Nay, I think it is the
hardness
of my body you feel."

"Oh, yes, the hardness." She felt herself blush.

"The smoothness of your shoulders is like warm ivory."

"The smoothness of your . . .
hardness
is like warm ivory."

He chuckled.

Sometimes she didn't learn the meaning of the words until after she repeated them, as when she parroted back, "I would like to be caressed.
Oh!
" He took her by surprise with that touch that was like a spear thrust of ravishment and that smile that held the oldest enchantment of time.

"Is Norse not an extraordinary language?" he murmured.

For a long moment she lay too dumbfounded to answer under that touch, under those pleasures that thrilled and spilled upon each other, measureless and long-drawn. He treated her with tenderness, stroked her, called her by his pet name, "Shieldmaiden." From there the lesson became increasingly pent and was voiced in increasingly breathless whispers, until at length he groaned wordlessly and she couldn't keep back a cry that meant the same in any language.

A quarter of an hour later, he sat with his back against the headboard, his lips pleasurably parted. Edin lay in his hold across his massive chest. Her hair hung in ripples over her arms and his. The blond of his hair resembled fine gold in the morning light. She'd bravely ventured to touch his beard, and he'd allowed it, seemed to like it, so she was toying with that strong blond growth of his cheeks and chin.

"I believe this is the superior way for you to learn Norse —abed."

She said at length, "But what I learn may be awkward to work into common, everyday conversation. Shall I say to Ottar Magnusson or Rolf Kali. 'I am delicately mossed,' or 'My breasts taste like bramble wine'?" She put the question with the gentlest courtesy —and was rewarded with a great grand squeeze. His arms turned her so that her breasts were flattened against his softly matted chest. His large hands soothed up and down her back lazily. She felt his heartbeat pounding dully, like a hammer muffled in cloth.

He said, "It seems to me it lightens your head to be up here in the mountains. But to answer your question: Should Ottar or Rolf ever broach the subject of your breasts, you will tell them this. . . ?

She repeated what he said, giggling, for she knew the meaning of most of the words. One or two she wasn't sure of, and so asked for a translation.

He tapped the tip of her nose with his finger. Her heart contracted beneath his look, contracted painfully. "It means, 'The fork of my thighs is a briar patch, and my breasts are wrinkled like potatoes in late March.'"

By noon, the sun had vanished behind amassing clouds, and it had grown chilly on the
vidda
. But Edin's new cloak was warmly lined. Walking along the pebbly edge of a stream, she enjoyed the free feeling of the wind in her hair. When it got beneath her cloak, it molded her new butter-yellow dress against her body. After a while, she turned to find the Viking had stopped several paces back and was squatted down, watching her. He had an air of preoccupation; he seemed to be considering her beyond her immediate presence.

Viking. A word bathed in emotion. She never thought of him as other than the Viking. Or the jarl. What did he call her in his mind? The Saxon? When he was making love to her he murmured, "Shieldmaiden." She asked suddenly, "Do you know my name?"

"Of course," he said, "Edin. I've heard the thralls use it. Or they call you 'my lady' "

She turned away to hide her hurt. "Except for Dessa, they only call me that to taunt me. They dislike me. I don't know why."

"Because you were a lady once." His sarcasm was gone.

"I'm not now." After a pause, she added, "You never call me by my name."

"You never call me by mine." His eyes were vigilant but soft in the overcast half-light.

"Because it would mean calling you Master Thoryn."

"I am your master."

The wind lifted her hair.

"Edin, wherever a man can rule he will. This law was made before me, and I am not the only one to act upon it; I did but inherit it, and I know that you, if you had my strength, would do as I do"

He was telling her nothing she didn't already know —that she'd been caught in the grip of currents that were too powerful for her.

"What would you have called your young Cedric?

When he took you to his chamber and laid you down on his bed, what would you have called him?"

"My lord"

"Call me that, then," he said casually, as though he were telling her to pass the salt at dinner.

She turned to face him suddenly, troubled. "But I would have been his wife; he would have called me 'my lady' in return. He wouldn't have taken me by piracy, in an orgy of killing and robbery."

His face was still calm. She'd triggered no anger. She saw no sign in him of the self-sufficient, coldly controlled conqueror which he seemed able to conjure at will. Yet before he answered, his chest swelled with a deep breath. "I can't call you my lady. The law of my people says that you are a thrall, and even I must abide by the law. Or find another people. As for how I gained possession of you, my ancestors have bred a love of battle into my bones and marrow. I am what I am." He added, "I am what I am, and your pretty manor farm was a sheep's dreamland."

Her eyes filled with tears. She waited in silence for the weakness to pass.

He held out his hand. After a while she went to him. He took her wrist, not her fingers, however, and squeezed. "You think I'm an ogre. But I will grant you this: No one, not even I —and I hold the greatest power over you that you're ever likely to feel —can take away from you the knowledge that you were born a lady. In your heart the Lady Edin may live on undemoted."

She couldn't hide her bitterness at this half-concession. "But elsewhere I am a thrall."

"
My
thrall. Under another master, you would have felt the whip's lash by now. Or worse. Another master wouldn't let you harbor even a secret memory of your former rank."

She stood with her wrist held tightly by him as he squatted in the midst of all that austere, quiet beauty. Together they contemplated the view, which included, besides the rising distant mountains, two circling hawks. Lower down, a mixed flock of birds suddenly darted like one united family. One of the hawks plummeted earthward and vanished, then re-emerged beating heavenward with a small prey struggling in its claws.

Edin felt the hand clasping her wrist.

The Viking, his eyes on the hawk, said, "Tell me, the first time I took you, you whispered a thing: 'I'm so afraid of you,' you said. Even last night you were afraid —at first. Are you afraid of me today?"

"I — " she swallowed convulsively — I'm not afraid to lay with you."

"And to walk with me?"

She wanted to swallow again but had no moisture in her mouth. "The man who walks with me is often a different man than the one who lies with me. You can change; you can become a warrior, a Viking with a relish for battle and a furious belief in belligerent gods. And I must remain wary."

He nodded. "I've threatened you. I've needed to, to impress upon you your true condition. But now —do you think I would harm you now?" His voice was even and serious.

How to explain to someone who had never experienced bondage? "I am your servant, your slave, you own me. My life is yours to direct forever. Or to take. Which means I can never completely trust you."

He said quickly, looking up at her, "But I would have your trust."

"That you can't command. And I couldn't give it, even if I wanted to. Because no matter how well you treat me, I am just a little white bone caught in the dragon's jaws."

"I prize you. You see how I provide for you." He gestured to her clothing. "You know how I desire you."

"But," she whispered, "at any moment your desire could vanish, and then you could turn me out among that collection of unattached, brutish creatures, all self-worshipping, whom you call your oathmen. They would fall on me and breed without care or regard"

"I never will."

"You might! Because you don't love me."

"Love?" He seemed genuinely unfamiliar with the word. "What do we share in the dark then, if not love?" His color was gone, and his smile wasn't a smile. "What is love?"

She considered. "Mayhap we've shared love of a kind —in the dark. But true love is a thing of the light. It is a home for the spirit, a shelter of strong arms from the wind, a fire in the heart when the world without is cold."

There were lines in his face she hadn't seen before, two vertical lines between his eyes. "Huh! Sounds like bad poetry, and there are two sorts of people Vikings can't abide —fools and bad poets." He looked away from her dismissively, gazing up at the sky.

In a moment she too looked up, noting the way the clouds boiled and tumbled. She felt the wind on her face, sharper and stronger than before.