Chapter Fifty-Six
As soon as Hulda saw Quarrie there among the defenders at the gate, her mind narrowed to a single thought and a single intention.
He was hers. Hers to save. She did not think then of the past or even the babe inside her, whom she, ja, did risk.
Only of standing at her lover’s side. Of fighting with him.
For one glorious moment, their eyes met. Then, with an unlikely war cry tearing from their throats, her impetuous young warriors went to the slaughter.
It might never have happened with any other group of warriors, at any other time. But these men—like herself—had stored a measure of resentment. Had been kicked aside too often. Felt, mayhap, a measure of belonging to this land upon which they now stood.
Or perhaps all that was too high flown. Mayhap they just liked to fight.
It was brisk, bold, and bloody. Half the attacking Norse turned to face the new peril come upon them. Others ran up from the shore, and for an instant Hulda feared her men, intending to pinch the Norse, would themselves be caught.
But Ivor’s men were weary, as were the Murtray defenders. She could see the exhaustion in Ivor’s face when he swung away from the gate to face her.
“Me!” she screamed at him. “Fight me!” Me, and not Quarrie.
Ivor recognized her. She saw surprise bloom in his eyes before his gaze narrowed and an ugly sneer twisted his features.
He turned back to Quarrie, his intentions as clear as his disdain for the woman facing him. He would kill Quarrie and have his revenge at any cost.
Hulda thought later—much later, when she could again think at all—that Quarrie could quite likely have taken Ivor. Ja, he was weary, and she had noted the blood that marked him. But he was a fine warrior, the man she loved. Equal to the task.
Her entire spirit cried that he should not fight alone.
She did not consciously raise the sword in her hand.
Her arm moved of its own accord even as she screamed Ivor’s name so he swung back toward her.
The blade took Ivor through the chest where the fabric of his armor was already split, between the ribs and through his lung.
He fell like a man going down in pieces, knees buckling, legs failing him, torso crumpling, arms flying out.
Hulda and Quarrie gazed at one another across the fallen man, and for that one instant, the clamor of battle did not exist. The two of them might as well have been alone.
Hulda stumbled forward over Ivor’s body and into Quarrie’s arms.
No longer a man and a woman. No longer two warriors battling separately or for one another, but one being, riding upon the wheel of time.
And when the immediacy of the battle did return, the clatter and the fury of it, Hulda’s young Norsemen took down the last of Ivor’s men. On the shore lay only dead and dying. The burning ship made a torch upon the water.
A fitting funeral pyre, mayhap, for what had been and would not be again.
“Hulda,” Quarrie yelled, clearly half deafened by the din. “Hulda, how come ye here? Like a miracle.”
His voice sounded hoarse, and a terrible wound marked one cheek. He looked wondrous. The most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
“Love brought me,” she replied. “Only love.”
*
It took days to sort out the dead and dying, to treat the wounded and burn or decently bury the rest, to deal with Norse prisoners, the few that survived the Scots’ swords.
One of the three remaining Norse ships was sacrificed for the Norse dead, a ceremony attended by only Hulda and her men. The other two—fine ships, they were—were taken as spoils of war, granted to Helje and Garik.
Meetings were held, a certain measure of thanks offered to Hulda and her warriors, after the Scots women came home. Leave granted for the band of Norse to winter at Murtray, if they chose.
Hulda had a glorious glimpse on one chilly afternoon of Garik with his lass in his arms. Enough of what she saw pass between the two convinced her that, ja, Morag was his lass.
The others of her men—well, a curious sort of thing happened there also, one she might never have imagined when this season of raiding began.
Her young warriors, who had bloodied their swords on the Scots’ behalf, were accepted there in the settlement.
At leave to come and go as they would. Hulda saw various members of her crew speaking to Quarrie’s clan members, both Norse and Scot doing their best to communicate and understand one another.
Laughing together once or twice. Her men eyeing the Scots lasses, and the young clanswomen, some of them, returning the favor.
A few, including Garik, moved into the settlement. The rest returned to their old grounds, where Freya remained anchored.
As for Hulda and Quarrie…
Well, she slept in his quarters, in his arms, the night after that great battle at the gate. And from that day forward, she rarely slept anywhere else.
For all that, it took days before they could work separately and together through all the tasks to be done—the women and children coming home and being resettled, the reunions, the grieving, the resumption of anything approaching ordinary life.
It took that long for Hulda to tell Quarrie the rest of her news.
She’d barely shared with him how and why she’d returned to Scotland.
He’d asked her only whether she meant to stay with him, and she’d promised she would.
But not till one morning a sennight after the battle, when they woke together, was there peace enough for her to roll over in his bed and gaze into his eyes.
“Quarrie.”
“Hulda.”
Only that, to begin. A beginning and an end, the two of them claiming one another.
A smile came to his eyes and then fled, as he became serious. “It fair terrified me, lass, when I saw ye there amid that battle. Terrified me that ye would risk yoursel’ for my sake. Promise ye will no’ do that again.”
“I cannot give you that promise.” Slowly she shook her head. He would be more terrified still, if he knew she’d carried his child into that battle. “ást min, I will fight for you always. For you, and the part of you that rests inside me.”
She saw by the widening of his eyes that he took her meaning. His lips parted. “Ye—D’ye say ye carry my child?”
“Ja. An heir for you, mayhap. Or a valiant lass.”
“Is that why ye returned?”
“I returned because I find I cannot be happy—can barely draw breath—away from you. Quarrie, promise me something. If it is true we have known each other before in lives gone by, and may so meet again in some future, pledge you will never more return to me as a warrior. You may return—ja, you must return—as anything else: a healer, a harper, a fisherman, I do not care what. But promise me it will not be as a warrior. For my heart cannot bear the risk of losing you.”
Now it was he who gave her a smile and shook his head. “Can we choose who or what we are?”
“Mayhap we can, if we try.”
He caught her hands in his. Dropped kisses into each palm, at both corners of her mouth and on each cheek. He blessed her with a kiss on her brow.
“One promise to ye I will make. That is, I will always, always return to ye.”
*
The great hall falls silent as Finlay’s words rise like the sparks from the fire and fly away upward.
A shimmer of notes from his harp follows as his nimble fingers dance, and he tells his listening audience, “So ye see, we are Scot, Norse, we are Pict—we are, more than aught else, our ancestors, whom we carry inside us. We are the very pieces of Scotland brought together by memory—and longing. So do we return again and again. He is here still, our hero, and so is she.”
Once more, his gaze searches out but one of his listeners, the young woman who now watches him with bemusement in her eyes.
“Can a love such as Quarrie and Hulda shared endure through the ages?”
A glissando of notes flows from his fingers, as ancient as being. As eternal as the love of which he speaks.
“Aye,” he answers his own question, “I believe it can.”
The End