Chapter Twenty
Quarrie stood at the highest point of the walls that encircled the keep, his eyes narrowed in a fixed stare upon the sea.
It had cost him something to climb all the way up here in his battered state. To be sure, the healer and his ma both had given him strict instructions to stay abed. But when Borald had popped into his chamber to say the longboat was on the move, he just had to see.
As it was, he nearly missed it. By the time he reached the best lookout point, the vessel had rounded the island behind which it had been hiding and sailed northward.
Away.
The sail once more made naught but a black shape on the horizon, one that for the distance seemed to move but slowly. Difficult to tell, at once, in what direction. But aye, north and away.
The breath left his body in a great rush, painful for his bruised ribs. Indeed, the rafts of black and blue had bloomed magnificently across his chest and sides where he had been kicked. Surprising he had no broken bones, and Drachan had raised his eyebrows at what he termed such strength.
“I dunna ken, quite,” the man had said in amazement, “how ye swam so far.”
Neither did Quarrie, thinking back on it.
The memory had attained an air of unreality, the floating, the buoyancy of the water beneath him, as if it had willingly brought him home.
The scent of it all around him and the clap of it in his ears.
Scotland had drawn him in. The water had carried him home.
What, though, of Hulda Elvarsdottir?
His eyes narrowed farther, as if he could spy her aboard that speck of darkness riding the sea.
Why had she let him go? He still had no answer to that. Why not just slit his throat, as her men had no doubt wanted?
Why had she kissed him?
Such a kiss, fast and fierce, that had reached inside him, clutched at the very roots of his soul. He would never forget.
Just as he would never see her again. At least, he had better hope he did not, for next time he would surely have a sword in his hand, and she a sword or axe in hers, and they would be expected to kill one another.
Despair touched his heart, a kind of searing disappointment such as he had never known. Aye, he’d felt dark emotions before, after a battle when he’d surveyed their dead. When Kyle had died. When he’d realized Da was not going to get well.
Naught to match this. And he did not understand why.
She was but a woman, was she not? The enemy. Seeking vengeance for her slain brother.
Only…only there was more to it.
“Good riddance,” said Borald, beside him.
“Aye.”
“Too bad ’tis only the start of the season. They will be back, or others like them.”
She would not be back. “Keep good watch,” Quarrie bade his captain.
“Aye, and ye need to tak’ your rest. I only thought ye would be glad to see them going.”
Quarrie returned to his quarters, moving slowly. His fellow clansfolk stopped him all along the way exclaiming over his condition or marveling at his escape from the viking longboat.
“Monsters they are,” cried one woman. “Naught but savage monsters.”
He gained his quarters at last, and the bed beckoned. He lay down with a groan. Difficult to sleep during the day. He was used to being on the move throughout daylight. Now his body screamed in protest at the very thought.
He drifted off only to imagine he was back aboard the longboat and lashed to the mast, the deck shifting beneath him with the craft’s agile dance at anchor. The fists and feet came at him again, striking and dealing pain along with disparagement.
He awoke with a start.
What had she told her crew, Hulda, when they woke and discovered him gone? The fellow on guard must have been in it with her. But the others would be enraged, would they not? Cheated of their entertainment. Even if she was in command.
It bothered him that she might take on trouble for his sake. But she was not his to worry over.
He slept again and dreamed what did not feel like a dream. He stood outdoors in the sunshine at the side of a roundhouse such as his ancestors might have built long ago. How he knew it for such, he could not say, for he’d never seen such a structure whole, only the ruins with the stones scattered.
One existed here at Murtray, in fact, predating the present keep.
In the dream, sunlight had warmed the stones. He stood near a washing place as familiar to him as his own name.
What was his name?
Not alone, he stood facing a young woman.
An ordinary enough young woman she might be—a wee bit above average height, slim as a willow wand, with a mane of yellow hair and a pair of wide, true-blue eyes now filled with worry.
Naught ordinary about her, though, for the sight of her, the very feel of her, raked up his emotions into a storm of protectiveness, of devotion, of love.
He loved this woman, if love could describe the power of what he felt. She loved him.
In the dream that was more than a dream, he reached out and captured her hands, raised them one after the other to his lips and dropped kisses into the palms. Leaned forward to kiss either corner of her mouth.
Her cheeks. He dropped a kiss at the center of her brow, inhaling as he did so, her scent. Drawing in the feel of her.
A benediction. A blessing to keep her safe. Even though she sailed away from him.
He awoke with his heart pounding, surprised to be in his own bed and not standing outside the little roundhouse. So real had it been. So real had she been.
He lay there struggling to breathe and wondering, had he ever loved anyone the way he loved that maiden standing in the sun? It made what he’d felt for Norah a shadow, or a delusion. And this made Norah’s rejecting him…och, nothing.
Indeed, any lingering hurt for that evaporated like dew before the sun. That had not been love.
Shaken, he lay and took stock of himself. Where had he journeyed in that dream? And who was she? It could not feel more real. The skin of her palms against his lips. The twitch at the corner of her mouth, the softness of her cheeks.
There had been grief in it, though, all tangled up with the love. And there had been fear in it, right alongside the devotion.
He struggled to his feet. His room had gone dark while he slept. Night had come. He could not remember the last time he’d slept the day away. His body protested his movements, trying to drive him back into the bed.
He pushed his fingers through his hair, desperate to think.
Naught had changed. He was still the son of Chief Airlee Murtray and would himself be chief one day—if he survived.
He had been very fortunate to escape death at the hands of the Norsemen.
But his life would continue in the way it mostly had.
Waking and training. Keeping watch. Filling in for Da as best he could.
Nothing had changed, though everything had.
Where was she now, Hulda Elvarsdottir? He tried to picture the narrow boat out upon the dark sea. She would not be afraid to sail. She was not afraid of much. A woman like no other.
Except…
Had there not been a thread of what he’d sensed in Hulda Elvarsdottir in the woman he’d kissed outside the roundhouse? Possibly many threads bound up together, the same that had drawn him to Hulda without cause or reason. The same as had anchored him to the woman he’d blessed with his kisses.
He crossed to the narrow window of his chamber. Outside lay darkness, a flare of light from a watchfire. His window faced the sea and he could feel rather than see it moving restlessly, an eternal movement. As eternal and as unstoppable as time.
Keep her safe, he beseeched the sea, and perhaps time itself. He did not know which of the two women he meant.