Chapter Forty-One
Hulda’s men were full of questions. All the way back to their camp, the path lit by moonlight, they spewed those questions while barely giving her leave to answer.
Most of the queries, as she determined, came down to one.
Why did you tell them we would stand with them in a fight?
Even Garik, who walked close beside Hulda, seemed invested. He did not say as much as the others, but she could feel his uneasiness.
Not till they reached camp did Hulda gesture them to gather around the firepit, where she gave answers.
“Among these people, it is the nature of such an alliance as I have made to offer one another support at arms in time of war.”
Helje spoke. “But yet who would these folk fight, save others like us? Do you mean for us to stand with them against others of our own blood?”
“Other Norsemen,” she corrected him. “Mayhap not of our blood.”
“And are we to ask them about their lineage before we cut their throats? Pardon me, but who are your cousins?”
“And what”—it was Garik who asked this—“of the service we have sworn to our own jarls?”
“List to me,” Hulda said as calmly as she could. “Have our men not in the past hired out their swords? On countless occasions, we have.”
“Ja, but that was for payment.”
“Think of our leave to hold this place as our payment.” Hulda lifted her hands. “A fine place, this is, from whence to go raiding.”
“Then let us go raiding!” cried Sven, one of their youngest men. “I have had my fill of sitting here with naught to do.”
“Ja, we will do that.”
The men turned away, only half satisfied. But when she would have followed, Garik laid a hand on Hulda’s arm.
“I would have thought,” he said, “you would consult with me and Helje before pledging our swords. We are the three of us in this together from the start, nei?”
She met his angry gaze. “You are right. I am sorry. You object?”
“It is too late for that, is it not? You have given our agreement and I stand with you. But ja, I object.”
“Forgive me. I thought the advantages outweighed the price.”
“Advantages to whom?”
He did not give her a chance to answer that but stalked away after the other men.
So she took them raiding the next morning, when they still had sore heads from Quarrie MacMurtray’s heather ale. They loosed Freya upon the morning tide, threading the needle of the passage, and struck away southward.
That took them past the settlement where Quarrie’s men, out on watch, called and pointed. The keep, up on its rise, looked formidable and impenetrable. It made Hulda wonder. Had Loki been whispering in her ear when she made that agreement with Quarrie?
Yet such agreements must eventually be formed. Warring could not go on forever. The men who had settled at Dublin, at Wexford, at Waterford, and at York must have made similar agreements on a march larger scale, or they would all have slaughtered one another by now.
As Quarrie’s settlement slipped out of sight, she near convulsed with longing for him. Yet she looked at it fairly. She and he might never have an opportunity to be together again.
Their campaign proved a vicious and a bloody one. Her instincts still for Quarrie’s welfare, Hulda made sure to sail far enough south to avoid his immediate neighbors before striking, but her crew, young and hungry, showed little mercy to their prey.
They returned north after more than a sennight sated with goods and gore, Hulda thinking there could not possibly be an attainable future between herself and any man of Scots blood.
The same blood that stained their swords and axes.
What had she been thinking?
At least the crew, well satisfied, seemed inclined to rest at their home base for the time. They boasted to one another of their exploits, the wealth they would eventually take home to Norge, and of improving the camp.
Turning it into a settlement with proper huts, perhaps. Even though they spoke of going home.
If they left, might Hulda stay behind?
Ordinarily at the end of the raiding season, the Norse sailed home. Settled in for the winter, their boats safely moored in the fjord. Set about marrying and begetting children.
No matter how successful their season, her crew would likely want that. No true place for them on this bleak shore.
She tried to talk with Garik about it, him being closest to her among the men. She took him walking one clear morning, northward along the shore.
“What would you think, Garik, of us overwintering here?”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Here?”
She had sensed a difference in him since the night of the feast at Murtray when he had showed her his anger. Ja, on the surface things were much the same. They joked and teased. Underneath, not so much the same.
“Out of the question.”
She had expected him to say that but still felt disappointed. “Why?”
“There is nothing here for us. As soon as the season for raiding ends, the men will want to go home.”
“But—”
“List to me, Hulda.” He gave her a dark look. “There is nothing here for us. For you, it may be different. You have feelings for the Murtray.”
“Ja.” Why try to deny it?
“The rest of us are not besotted.”
She caught her breath. Why try to deny that too?
She could not fairly define what besotted meant.
What she felt for Quarrie was far, far more than mere attraction.
Something deeper than the infatuation she’d observed affecting her friends.
Though what she felt for Quarrie might include that kind of physical attraction, it reached deeper, and ja, she was convinced it had existed even before she first set eyes on him.
She said nothing. Garik glanced at her again, perhaps a bit less fiercely this time.
“I do not blame you, Hulda. As my old móeir told me, one cannot help where one bestows the heart. Men fall in love too.”
“Do they, indeed?”
“Ja, though I will admit we are much more likely to take what we need where we find it, for as long as we can. No man wants a halter around his neck.”
“I do not wish to put a halter around his neck.” Far from it. She thought Quarrie fine and strong and able to make his own way in the world without her help. What she wanted was to stand beside him, fight along with him and for him, if need be, and be with him for as long as she could.
Because she knew instinctively that in life, there were meetings and partings. Having met him, she wanted to put off the necessity for parting as long as possible.
Whatever that took from her.
So if her men wanted to winter at home, to make nests for themselves at Avoldsborg for a season, she did not know that she could go with them.
Yet to stay here alone? Among strangers? Unthinkable.
“I was in love once,” Garik said out of nowhere as he paused and gazed across the sea.
“Were you?”
“Ja. It was while we were busy preparing Freya. I let the feeling pass and it went away. Mayhap, Hulda, you should do the same. Once you go home, you will forget the man exists.”
She would not. The longing for Quarrie was like a fever now, always with her. Though she had not seen him for days.
If it was somehow so that they had known one another before, just as Quarrie speculated, if the gods had sent them, reborn, to find one another again, then ja, it must be true that she had forgotten him once upon a time.
Or even twice, however many times they had come through the ordeals of death and rebirth.
As a babe, had he been in her mind? As a young girl? While growing? When Jute taught her to fight and when she went on her first raids?
What made a woman the person she was? The events of her raising, that shaped her knowledge of the world, or something far deeper that endured from life to life?
Perhaps she was a mingling of both. As was he. Thence, even though in their youths they had not known each other, something within had been waiting.
That something inside Hulda had now been brought to life. Freed, she did not think it would lie down again.
Yet staying here could cost her everything.
“Hulda, you will be careful? Sensible. I always thought you such a sensible woman, like a man, almost.”
That made Hulda snort. “Men are no more sensible than women. Less, I am sure.”
“How so?”
“Women think about practical things. Birth and death and keeping people fed. While men run about boasting of their deeds and how strong they are beneath the blankets.”
That made him laugh as he used to do. “Men boast about how they provide so their women can keep people fed. Hulda”—again he grew serious—“you will have a care?”
“I always do.”
He hesitated before he disagreed, “Not always. If I have noticed the way you look at Murtray, others may also. Our men may not like it—some among them are still convinced he had a hand in Jute’s death, and you know how well liked was your brother.”
“Ja, but Murtray did not—”
“Do not bother telling it to me. Whether or not you avenge Jute is for your heart to decide. But if our men may not like it, the Scots might not either. If they scent something between you and Murtray, it could prove dangerous to you. It could cost your life.”
Could it?
She did not speak those words aloud, yet Garik went on anyway. “The Scots do not want their chief—their strong new chief—forming that sort of alliance with one who has spilt their blood. Do you not see? The very thought of staying here is madness.”
Madness, ja.
But what would leaving Quarrie do to her heart?