Chapter Fourteen
The new day dawned clear, as Hulda saw when she dragged herself up from the deck where she’d had little sleep, but clouds gathered far out on the western horizon.
The voyage south had been fair, as had these past couple of days waiting here to deal with the Gaels.
But she knew very well how rain liked to play among these islands and could feel the moisture riding upon the breast of the water, beginning to breathe across its surface.
The men returned early from the island while she still contemplated breakfast, with Ivor in their lead. Ivor wore a scowl, and the first words from him were, “I am going with you to this meeting. I think it best.”
“Nei,” she told him. “You will stay here and command the party if I do not return.”
That made him shift his weight and eye her impatiently. “You think they will hold you?”
“That depends, does it not? On whether the man believes I have five more ships in hiding.” Quarrie MacMurtray seemed an intelligent man, but he was also a desperate one. And he, just like she, had no doubt chased his thoughts all night.
She did not enjoy chasing her thoughts. Like the men amid whom she’d grown up, she usually tended to make her decisions swiftly and then keep to them, considering the matter done.
Naught was as usual here. Her feelings were all stirred and would not stop with clamoring at her. Her feelings toward Quarrie MacMurtray—
Why should she have any feelings for him?
Yet she did. She did. Even though he may well be the man who had killed Jute. Even though she might have to watch him die after immense suffering. To perform the deed herself.
As the one nearest to Jute in blood, that would be her right.
Ivor scowled still more deeply. “I will not go back to your father and tell him you were killed upon this shore. You had best let me go with you so I can prevent it.”
Ja, Faeir was a powerful man in Avoldsborg.
Not the jarl but close friends with the jarl and considered one of his cronies.
And a man of great wealth, which he had amassed by a combination of ruthlessness and good sense.
Faeir would not be happy if she failed to come home. He might well take it out on Ivor.
“I will go with the two men I took yesterday,” she told him, “and rely on the Gael chief’s honor.”
“His honor!” Ivor sounded incredulous. The other members of the crew had gathered to witness this battle of wills, looking curious rather than alarmed. Despite their youth, they had seen much, these men, and were surprised by little.
“These vermin have no honor,” Ivor declared, which was not truly fair. Though he had slaughtered them and taken many captive, he did not know them.
Quarrie MacMurtray has honor. She did not say that aloud. Could not tell how she knew, save by the way his eyes had met hers and, ach, the feel of him.
She could not wait to lay eyes on him again.
That thought shocked her. It shook her.
She told herself things might well have changed overnight. He could have people talking in his ear, as did she. His honor might well have bent.
“I will come back,” she told Ivor, told all the men. “I hope with the man who killed Jute.”
Trym grinned at her. “We will sharpen our knives.”
The rain had crept in from the horizon before they left, and the scent of it accompanied them as they set out, taking only the faering this time.
The men, used to being out in all weather, rowed hard.
The settlement grew steadily larger as they rounded the island and approached the shore.
A haze of smoke spread out above it, making it look misty and indistinct, like something out of a dream.
Surely Hulda had seen this place before.
Before yesterday, that was, when she’d approached in the longboat.
Ja, surely that was what she remembered.
Why did she have a sudden vision—or memory—of approaching in a different boat with a man at her side, a man and a great, gray hound, and fear in her heart of a terrible battle taking place?
No battle occurred here now, not yet. But as they drew near, she saw that people waited on the shore.
Quarrie MacMurtray did.
He stood square, front and center. Legs planted on the shingle, hair gleaming red in the morning light. She could not mistake him.
For an instant, she felt time slip. The remorseless grip she kept upon the order of things failed her and flowed through her helpless fingers like water.
This had all happened before. He had happened before, in her life.
It felt like her heart would tear asunder. What was she doing here? She should turn around. Flee. She, who so seldom ran from anything.
But the men rowed on and she did not give them the order to stop. The faering grounded on the shingle. Kettel leaped out to pull it up.
Hulda stepped out with dignity, and as she did the rain found them.
As at some signal spoken by the gods, it swept up from behind and engulfed them. It crashed over them in a curtain, spreading up the shore, and filling Hulda’s ears with sound. Drops upon the water, upon the stones.
She looked into Quarrie MacMurtray’s eyes.
“Well? Have you made up your mind, Master MacMurtray?”
“Aye, mistress. I will go wi’ ye. For I am the man who killed yer brother.”
*
It felt as if the stones quickened beneath Quarrie’s feet as he spoke those words. As if he had spoken them before. But surely then he had said, Mistress, I did not kill your brother.
Another time. Another place. But it all blurred around Quarrie, even as the scene blurred from the falling rain, lending a terrible unreality to this thing he did.
It would become real soon enough.
He turned to Borald, who stood beside him. Agony shone from his friend’s eyes, and his hand hovered above the hilt of his sword. Ye lead them, he told his man silently. Make a defense if need be.
But he hoped what he did, this terrible step, assured no need for that. Bought their safety with his life.
“Take him,” Hulda Elvarsdottir said, and her boatmen seized Quarrie, manhandling him unnecessarily.
Half a score of men, including Borald, stepped forward on the shingle. Quarrie threw back his head.
“Stand back!”
This was naught, he told himself, as Hulda, now with her sword drawn as if in defense of him, drove him onto their small boat.
The two men sat to the oars and drew them out into the sea.
And Quarrie prayed, as they moved off from the shore, prayed he would be able to withstand the pain that would come, endure it like a man.
The faces and the sights of the place he loved—loved right down to the marrow of his bones—fell away from him. The two Norsemen rowed, and Hulda Elvarsdottir sat behind him with her blade pricking the small of his back.
He had no illusions but that she would stab him. She would, in the blink of an eye, despite whatever it was that existed between them.
At the last, through the rain that beat down and the smoke from the settlement’s fires, he saw his ma come running down to the shore. He knew, even though he could not see, that she wept.
No one aboard the boat spoke. It would have been hard to speak anyway, for the clatter of the rain. The craft was well built, light and agile. The men rowed well. Mistress Elvarsdottir stayed alert. As they rounded the small isle, Quarrie distinctly felt her tense.
Now, Quarrie thought, now he would see the fleet of Norse ships standing proud round the back of the wee isle, likely in the small inlet that lay there, where he and some of the lads used to go and swim. Now he would likely die there.
If he was lucky.
He tried and mostly failed to block memories of the stories he had heard, all the ways the Norse could make a man suffer. Suffer for their enjoyment.
Aye, death would come welcome.
It used to be, long ago, that when a warrior died he had hope his spirit would fly away to the land of Tír na nóg, to remain ever young and ever happy.
Quarrie did not want that. Rather he would hope his spirit, loosed, would fly the short distance over the water to that stretch of stony shore he loved, to abide there for an age, and another age.
There could be no better reward. He had only to endure what must come first.
He turned his eyes to the island and blinked. Shock and outrage had him starting to his feet in the small boat, making it rock violently. For no fleet of longboats sheltered in the lea of the island. Only the one—the single dragon boat that had approached the settlement.
He had been fooled. The woman had nay honor, and had deceived him.
Bright and sharp, he felt the point of her blade in his back.
“Sit,” she hissed, “for the sake of the gods.”