Chapter Fifty-One
Quarrie was no longer himself. He knew that very well. He had become another man, one who was short with his ma and with Borald. Brusque with the other members of the guard. With the folk who, in an ordinary way, came to him.
He carried a load of hurt impossible to bear.
How could he miss her so terribly, a woman he had not known at the beginning of the summer? A woman who now seemed almost like a dream, or would if he did not remember her so well.
He did remember, every detail.
The way she turned her head, the fair hair flying out. The smile in her eyes when she looked at him. The strength of her body, slim and lithe beneath his own. The taste of her on his lips and on his tongue. She haunted him like the tune of some exquisite song.
He still could not believe she had gone from him. That the strength of what lay between them had not kept her close at his heart. The ease and familiarity of it, the sheer comfort—not just of touching her, but of being in her company.
They had been together before in the past times he glimpsed in dreams.
They might not be together again.
He tried to tell himself, as he went through his days biting off the heads of those around him, that at least he’d known her for a while. Better than not at all. But the hurt would not ease. He did not know what to do with such pain.
Danger lay still off shore and over the horizon. The season had not yet ended, and he had to remain vigilant. Keep watch for sails. The Norse who had been raiding farther south must pass by on their way to their home fjords.
Those whom Hulda had sent off could well return.
So, aye, he haunted the walls and the shore, never admitting even to himself that he hoped for a glimpse of Freya’s sail. People began to avoid him, if they could. If they could not, they approached him with a caution he hated to see.
This was not him. Patient, he was. Tolerant. Welcoming to those who needed him.
Willing always to put the needs of the clan ahead of his own.
He slept little and walked for hours upon the shore. He hiked to the place where the Norse had camped. He did not know why, for there was little of them there but a few cast-off items and the burned patch where their fire had been.
Once, on a dreary, rainy afternoon, he even trudged up to the half-ruined hut where he and Hulda had been together, and then wished he had not. Because the memories that lingered there were so sweet, immediate, and painful that he could not bear them.
Would she have stayed if things had ended differently? If he had put it to her properly.
Asked her again to be his wife.
Och, and what would the clan have said to that?
Would she have stayed if the threat from the four Norse ships had not existed? She had sacrificed herself for him; he knew that very well. Played the part of the hound, even knowing the hound would have to be off and away after.
At night, in the few short snatches of sleep he did catch, he dreamed of her. Only it was not always her. The women he saw were those of whom he had dreamed before, those who felt like Hulda. Loved him like Hulda. But the love for him shone from different eyes set in other faces.
They were, so he came to accept, the women she had been. Now all lost to him even as she was lost to him.
It made one of the reasons he slept so little.
One morning when he went up on the wall at first light, Borald edged up next to him. The head of the guard had taken up night duty, and Quarrie wondered if he felt as uneasy as Quarrie did.
“All quiet?” Quarrie asked, even though he could see that it was.
Borald eyed him in the way people had begun to do, as if assessing his mood. “Aye, so. And yet”—he narrowed his eyes and flung his gaze out over the sea, which lay smooth as a tarn—“it is not. If ye ken what I mean.”
Quarrie did. For days he’d had that feeling, as if something lurked out there unseen. He nodded.
“D’ye think—” Borald hesitated and then asked, “D’ye think they’ll come back?”
“The Norse? They always do. We need to be strong enough and ready, when they come.”
“I mean that batch. The ones Mistress Hulda helped run off.”
“They are awa’ to Ireland, eh?” God help the Irish.
“Aye, only—will they stay there?”
A frisson of uneasiness ran up Quarrie’s spine. “Ye ha’ that feeling, do ye?”
“It has crossed my mind.”
“And mine,” Quarrie admitted. “If it happens, we will ha’ to be prepared to fight. To defend.”
Borald shot him another look. All around them, the guard changed, men coming to take the places of those who had been on duty all night. They were as good as alone.
“Chief,” Borald said, “is it that, weighing so heavy on ye? The fear that we shall see sails before winter comes?”
The wrong sails, Quarrie thought.
“Or is it her—Mistress Hulda?”
Quarrie turned to his friend. For aye, Borald was that, as well as a trusted defender.
“It matters not,” he said. “She is gone.”
“There will be other seasons. She may return.”
Other seasons. Other lives. Future turns on the wheel of existence that spun them through time.
Hard to wait, to have faith, when his very heart had been torn from him.
He said with no harshness at all, “I maun deal with what is before me, and that is the welfare o’ this clan.” He gripped Borald’s shoulder briefly. “Thank ye for your concern, man.”
“I ken fine ye be a braw chief like yer father before ye. But…’tis painful to watch what ye are going through.”
“Canna be helped. Thank ye for speaking to me. And if I ha’ been difficult—”
“I suppose we are all difficult fro’ time to time. We will keep a watch for sails, aye?”
“Aye.”
If that conversation was not enough to convince Quarrie he needed to take himself in hand, the one with his ma that came soon after was.
She found him at midafternoon in the armory, assuring himself they had sufficient weapons ready if the worst came, and her breathlessness convinced him she’d spent some effort hunting him down.
“There ye be!”
He looked at her in alarm, as did the young armorer’s assistant with whom he’d been counting swords and shields.
“Wha’ is it? Sails?”
Ma shook her head. “I wanted a word wi’ ye, just. Come, let us walk.”
They paced up the shore, one of the old tracks that led to the heights. Long ago, this holding had come to Quarrie’s ancestor by marriage, it belonging to the grandfather of a distant ancestress. Well-guarded, it was, over the intervening centuries.
Quarrie knew every rock along this shore. Had run it as a child. Was prepared to die for it, just like those selfsame ancestors.
“Wha’ is it, Ma?”
“People ha’ been coming to me, Quarrie. No’ wi’ complaints,” she added quickly before he could speak. “Ne’er that. But wi’ concern. They worry for ye, as do I.”
Quarrie said nothing. He did not know what to say.
“Is it that woman?” Ma asked. “The Norsewoman?”
Och, and was he that easy to read? First Borald and now Ma. Clear as glass, he must be.
“Does it matter?” he returned. “She is gone.”
“And ye walk about here like a man wi’ a mortal wound. Quarrie, wha’ did it cost ye to see her go?”
“My wounds do no’ matter,” he told her savagely. “All that matters is the safety o’ the clan. Surely Da’s sacrifice taught me that.”
“Aye, and yet—”
“Hulda’s leaving came in exchange for the safety o’ the settlement,” he told her. And he prayed, even as he paced by his mother’s side and sought to reassure her and perhaps himself that the price he and Hulda paid would at least buy the safety of his clan.
It did not, a fact that became evident when sails were sighted beyond Oileán Iur, and not those that in his very soul Quarrie wanted to see.
With a damaged heart, he accepted it and prepared for war.