Chapter Thirty-one
Aoife walked with Tormod back to their room. They entered, then stared at one another. She tried to gauge his mood, difficult when he just stood there leaning against the door.
He was lost in thought, but at least he didn’t appear to be angry.
“So, the village will accept Einar even though he is not your son, so long as he does not become jarl?”
Tormod walked over and sat down heavily on the bed.
“Yes,” Tormod replied. “I have always acknowledged him. Perhaps that was a mistake. But after what happened to Arne, and his mother’s death… well, he was young. He had done nothing wrong. Even if his mother had betrayed us all.”
“All of you?” Aoife asked, frowning. “But I thought it was Arne…”
The silence in the room grew heavy. Twice Tormod started to speak, but no words came out. Then his shoulders slumped, and he began.
“When I first met Ingrid… I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met,” he finally said.
“I was young, eager to prove myself a mighty warrior, to go and seek out my fortune in other lands, but Ingrid… Ingrid obsessed me.” He sighed and moved back to sit on the edge of the bed.
Aoife joined him and tried to put an arm around him.
He shook it off. “I do not deserve your sympathy. And I do not want your pity.”
“It hurts you to tell me this story. I only want to comfort you,” she said, placing a palm on the side of his face. “No sympathy, certainly no pity. You don’t seem to be a man who needs pity, Tormod.”
“Arne is the one who deserves pity. He is the one who…” Tormod looked at her, then took her hands in his. His touch was cold, and she wished she could warm him.
“Ingrid’s father lived across the fjord.
Her family were not well-liked, always ready to accuse their neighbours of stealing or raiding in difficult times,” Tormod said.
“We knew better than to trust them, but I thought she was different. As I told you before, it was only after we were married that I realised there had been someone else before me. I don’t know who he was or why she left him but when she met me, she needed a father for her child.
I liked to boast about how I would be a jarl one day and she was an ambitious woman. ”
“Or maybe she did care for you?”
Tormod shrugged. “After Einar was born she seemed obsessed. Spent all her time fretting about him and whether he was safe in the village or not. She told me she was worried her father would find her and asked me often about how safe the village was.”
This wasn’t really answering her question. “Arne’s scars?” She frowned. “How did he get them?”
“One day Arne saw her leaving the village and followed her. She returned to the hut where we had met in the summer. When he confronted her there, she said that she was lonely and wanted only to return to the place where we had first met and been happy.”
“And Arne believed her?”
“No. But I did. A few days later, Ulf followed her.” He stopped, took a breath. “This time he saw her meeting someone at the hut.”
“Einar’s father?”
“I can only assume so,” Tormod said. “When Ulf told me, I refused to believe them. That night the village was attacked by Ingrid’s family.”
“And Einar’s father?”
“Ingrid’s father and his warriors, certainly.
She knew the attack was coming and sneaked out but my cousins had set a watch on her.
Arne was watching her that night, and followed her.
” Tormod closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.
Then he looked back at her, a deep sadness in his expression.
“Ingrid’s lover was waiting at the hut for her to come to him.
He was going to marry her once I was dead. ”
“She didn’t take Einar?”
“No, which is strange because after when I asked her why not she said she had wanted him to be with his father.” Tormod shrugged.
“You don’t think he was among the people who attacked the village?”
“No, but he and Ingrid’s father had planned the whole thing together. He wanted Ingrid and her father wanted our village.”
Tormod stood up and paced to the door. “In the end it was Arne and not me who nearly paid the price.”
“But the attack did not succeed?”
“No.” For the first time in a while, Tormod smiled. “They had not counted on my cousins.” Tormod stopped speaking.
“When Arne reached the hut, they were waiting for him. They attacked him, thinking he was me. Ingrid didn’t tell them any differently.
Just stood and watched what they did to him.
They tied him up, then tortured him. Hundreds of shallow cuts on every patch of bare skin, not enough to kill quickly.
They wanted him to die a slow, painful death. ”
Aoife put her arms around Tormod. He laid his head on her breast and she thought that he might weep, wondered what she would do if he did. He lay against her for a while, then he sat up, gripping her arms.
“We thought he would die.” His voice was barely more than a whisper.
“When I first saw him… there was barely any of his skin that didn’t bleed.
It was horrific. Not the way for a warrior to die.
Slow, painful. I wondered if I should kill him myself, but I couldn’t, even though it was my fault. He lay in a fever dream for weeks.”
“How did you find him?”
He paused for a while and she knew this was getting harder for him to talk about.
“When the village was attacked, they got in quickly, did a lot of damage, got through all of our defences. But we had more men and in the end they were simply outnumbered. They had divided their men by leaving too many at the hut to wait for me.” He indicated a particularly nasty scar.
Aoife laid her lips gently on it and he shuddered.
“He paid for that challenge with his life.”
“But you found Arne in time, how?”
“We killed them quickly and when we realised both Arne and Ingrid were missing, the hut was the first place we went.” Tormod refused to meet her gaze, staring instead at a spot on the wall.
“So, you saved him?”
“Yes.”
“Her lover didn’t take her with him?”
“No one except Ingrid and Arne left the hut that night, alive.” Tormod smiled grimly. “We took Ingrid back to face punishment for her crimes. She had told her father all the weakest points of the village, and planned to marry her lover once I was dead.”
“You had thought she cared for you?”
“They had not heard the way she spoke to me, experienced the way she was with me.” He stopped abruptly and pursed his lips then continued.
“But you weren’t killed. And neither was Arne.”
“Somehow Arne survived the night, and then a day and a week and a month.”
“And he recovered.”
“Eventually. Although the scars will never fade.” Tormod smiled sadly. “It was my fault. If I had not met and married Ingrid, her father would not have attacked the village.”
“I doubt that is true,” said Aoife. “And besides, their attack was not successful.”
“Not ultimately, no, but we still lost good warriors that night.” Tormod hung his head. “And villagers, wives, children.”
Aoife nodded and held his hands. She understood now, why Tormod was so ashamed of the past. He had trusted the wrong person, shared information with her that she had used against them. Then she frowned.
“If she was a prisoner, how did she come to have your child?”
“When Arne survived, my father freed her,” Tormod said. “He considered banishing her but I… I…” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “As I said, I refused to believe them. She was still my wife.”
“But,” Aoife began and then stopped. “You took her back as your wife? After what she had done.”
“After she was freed, she had nowhere else to go. She begged me for another chance, and I thought that Einar should have a mother.” He put his head back and sighed. “We agreed that she would provide me with a son of my own and then we would divorce.”
“But she died?”
“Yes, the child came early and neither of them survived. Having my child killed her.”
Aoife frowned at him. “You being the father would not have been the deciding factor in whether she lived or died.”
“No, but… I had wished her dead so many times.”
“And you know for sure that you are not Einar’s father?”
“He was born soon after Yule,” Tormod said. “We had only met in late summer.”
“Children can come early.”
He grimaced. “No, the babe was full-grown. It is one thing to not disown him as my son. It is another to allow him to someday inherit everything I have worked for, especially if I have children of my own. And I cannot love Einar as a father should because I am not his father.”
Aoife was silent. The fact that Tormod was unable to love Einar no matter how wonderful the boy was, just because of who his parents were, hurt her. “Why can’t you love him?” she asked quietly. “He is naught but a child, innocent of the sins of his parents—”
“Ingrid deceived me. It nearly cost Arne his life. It nearly cost the lives of everyone in the village.”
Aoife thought back to when Ragna told her that the way Tormod saw the past was not the way others did. “But it didn’t,” she said. “Are you sure that is what people think?”
“What else could they think?”
“That you spared a child and brought him up as your own, even though his mother had betrayed the village. It was not Einar’s fault, after all.”
“It was my fault. I should have seen through her. I should have…”
Aoife saw the expression of shame that crossed his face. Suddenly, she understood the root of his anger. “You loved her. You thought she loved you.”
“She lied to me, so she would be safe. Fooled me not once, but twice, and everyone knew it.”