Chapter 19 #2
“Yes.” Ylva was relieved that Ulf was letting her lead the conversation now that he had seen there was nothing to fear. He had even taken a step to the side. “Let us sit.”
They took their place at the table, she and Ulf on one side, the supposed Oslac on the other.
He seemed just as nervous as she was, yet another detail in his favor, she thought.
Godfrid, by all accounts, had brazened his way into Cwenthryth’s house.
This man seemed intimidated, hopeful, and slightly dazed.
Just like a brother she had not seen for thirteen years would be.
Ylva opened her mouth then closed it again when she realized she didn’t know where to start.
“Just ask me what you want to know,” the man said.
“I realize this must be odd for you. It is odd for me too, if I’m honest. We were children the last time we saw one another.
I remember a little girl. I was told I would find my sister here but I have nothing to tell me that you are the woman I’m looking for. Except…”
Instead of finishing his sentence, he touched his temple. Yes. Their distinctive hair color. She had thought the same.
And his opening had given her an idea.
“Who told you you would find your sister here?” She could not think of a single person outside the village apart from Judith, who knew where—or indeed who—she was.
But her friend would never have told a stranger to go to her, she would have come here herself to tell her that someone was looking for her.
She was even more distrustful than Ulf, with reason, considering she had been captured as a slave.
“I have wanted to find you for years, from the moment we were separated,” the man started.
“As soon as I arrived in town, not knowing where to start, I went to see the reeve. He told me he’d only been elected recently and had never heard of you but he sent me to the previous one.
It turned out to be the right thing to do, as the man, Elstan the Wise, knew exactly who you were, having apparently had to deal with you a few months ago. ”
Oh no. Had the former reeve told him what had happened and how she and Ulf had met? Had he revealed that she had tried to kill an innocent man? How had Oslac reacted? This was a catastrophe. Were they to be reunited only to be separated again when he couldn’t accept the woman she had become?
Oslac carried on when he saw that she was not going to answer.
“The reeve told me he knew who you were and advised me to come here and ask for a man called Wolf, who might know where you lived now. I found him this morning and he told me you had just arrived in the village and would be in his grandson’s hut.
Which you were. I could not believe how easy it had all been in the end. ”
Yes. Incredibly easy. Too easy? It was hard to know what to think.
But if the story was true, she owed even more than she had thought to Judith.
Had her friend not gone to get Ulf when she had, Oslac would have arrived in the village this morning and Wolf would have told him no one had heard of her in months.
They would never have been reunited. Even more shocking was the realization that the reeve had only been able to point Oslac in the right direction because of the incident last winter.
Without Mildred’s awful plan, he would never have heard of her.
Ulf threw her a glance indicating he was thinking the same thing.
By an odd twist of fate, had she not tried to kill him, her brother might never have found her.
Or at least it would have taken him months, with little guarantee of success.
If he was her brother, of course. That still had to be established.
Heart beating hard, she asked the next question. “How old are you?”
“I’m three-and-twenty, four years older than you. We lived in town, in a little street by the south gate. Our parents were Brenna and Wilfred. They died when you were six years old, the winter they fell through the layer of ice in the river outside the town. It was a shock for everyone.”
Ylva nudged Ulf’s foot under the table and nodded. This was exactly what she remembered, even if she’d forgotten her parents’ names. If the man truly was an impostor, he had done his research well. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced he was not out to trick her.
“Anything else you know about our lives?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know if you’ll remember this but we had another sister, who died as a babe about a year before our parents’ death.”
This was terrible to hear and indeed she did not remember it. So it was of no help in identifying the man. He could have made it up. Ylva swallowed, at a loss. What else could she ask? Was she strong enough to hear more horrors? She wasn’t sure.
Seeing her distress, Ulf took over.
“Tell me what happened after the two of you were separated.” He had done his best not to sound too accusatory, for which Ylva was grateful. “When your sister was sent to a distant relative after your parents’ death.”
He was trying to make him talk about the abduction without hinting that was what had happened. He was even setting a trap, offering a possible alternative to her disappearance. The clever man.
Oslac shook his head. “Sent to relatives? God, I wish that had been the reason we were separated. But alas, no, she was abducted by a slave trader one day at the market.”
Ylva’s heart leaped. He had not fallen into the trap. “How many men were there that day?”
“Four.” Once again, she nodded. “They were well-dressed and approached us as we were eating the piece of bread a kind merchant had just given us and asked where our parents were. We thought it best not to admit we were alone but our fumbled answers made it clear we were lying. They covered your head with a bag and one of them threw you over his shoulder. You screamed at me to flee and save myself. It was horrid.”
The description not only fit, but he had added some details she hadn’t known about but felt right. The two orphans would indeed have tried not to appear as if they were alone in the world, precisely to avoid becoming easy prey.
Though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, since it was likely depressing, she forced herself to ask. “What happened to you after I was taken by the slave trader?”
The look he threw her reached all the way to the marrow of her bones. She knew that she would hate to hear what she was about to hear.
“I was taken as well.”
Thunder fell in the hut, the silence only broken by the crackling of the fire.
“You were—what?”
Had she misheard? Had her brother just said he’d been captured as well?
“I thought you knew. But I take it that the man never told you?” Oslac looked just as shocked as she felt.
“No,” she managed to whisper. In fact, she had been certain he’d been able to escape.
“I ran, as you told me, to get help, but I was only ten, sick with panic and weak from hunger. One of the men caught me before I could reach the market hall, where I intended to raise the alarm. I was taken to a place on the other side of town where I found half a dozen other children waiting to be sold. I was surprised not to see you and I realized that somehow you had managed to wiggle out of the man’s hold. ”
Oh. If only…
Heart in her throat, she told him what had really happened.
“I was taken to the trader’s house, where I was ordered to look after his sick daughter.
I think that was why he took me that day, to have someone in the house with her, tending to her needs.
Her former slaves had just been killed. I ended up staying there for years, with another girl called Judith, until we escaped when the trader and his son were killed last summer. ”
“Dear God. You spent all this time in the man’s house.” Oslac swallowed then let out a sigh. “Then at least you were never sold as a slave.”
He looked so relieved to hear it that Ylva didn’t have the heart to tell him that her captivity had been just as cruel. Besides, she was still reeling from what she had been told.
Her brother had been taken, and she hadn’t known?
All this time, she had imagined he was free but she had been wrong.
She hadn’t seen anything because of the bag over her head, and naively, she had thought that the brother she loved and saw as a grown man had managed to escape.
It had been the one thing keeping her sane, that knowledge that at least he had been spared the terrible fate of a slave.
To find out now that it had not been the case was terrible.
“And then what happened?” Ulf asked when she crumpled on her seat.
“I, along with three others, was sold the next day to a couple of Danish merchants on their way back home.”
“Such men are slave owners’ favorite customers,” Ulf confirmed. “No complaints, no chance to change their mind, I imagine.”
Yes, Ylva knew that from the day they had handed Mildred over to Lars Gormsson.
“I arrived in the middle of a very harsh winter. The boy who had been sold to the same man as me had died during the sea voyage and I myself almost succumbed to the cold and the pain of not knowing what had happened to you. Only one thing prevented me from sinking into despair. The merchant had a young daughter who was a year older than me, and despite our respective situations, Frigg and I became friends. As we grew up, we fell in love. Against all odds, when I became a man, her father freed me and agreed to let us marry. We were happy for a few years but she died last winter.” Oslac’s face closed up.
“A stupid death. I came back home one day to find her dead in the middle of the hut. The healer suspected she had choked on a piece of bread while she was alone. Such a stupid, stupid death.”
Ylva could not resist. She reached out for his hand across the table. “I’m so sorry.”
This part of the story was true, she knew it in her guts.
Poor Frigg had died unexpectedly, leaving her husband heartbroken.
There was no mistaking the grief in his eyes, in his voice.
But all the rest had the ring of truth as well.
She was getting increasingly convinced that this man was indeed her brother and that she could trust him.
“I was a free man by then, and I had no reason to stay in Denmark without her, so I decided to come back and try to find out what had happened to you, the only family I have left.”
Another silence. The only family he had left, indeed.
Suddenly Ylva remembered something from their childhood. Could it be what they needed to prove he was who he said he was?
“I once poured boiling water on your leg while preparing a cauldron of water for laundry,” she started slowly. “Do you remember?”
Doing what Ulf had done earlier, she had deliberately led him into a trap.
Would he know that it was actually his arm she had scalded and that she never did laundry?
Or would he do what any impostor would do and say yes?
She held her breath. It would be too terrible to find out now that he’d been lying all along.
Oslac shook his head as a smile bloomed on his lips. “You were making soup. Our mother would never have allowed you to do anything so dangerous as boil water for laundry. And it wasn’t my leg. It was my arm. The left one. Look.”
With those words, he lifted the cuff of his tunic to expose an ugly scar on his forearm, just where it should be. There was no doubting it anymore. This man, with his faithful recollections, his auburn hair and his scar, was her brother.
“Oh, Oslac!”
She stood up, overturning her stool in her haste, and made to go to him. Before she could take more than two steps, however, he had engulfed her into his arms.
Ulf tensed but when the Saxon glanced over to him as if to check for his permission to take Ylva in his arms, he relaxed.
An impostor would have relished in his victory and smirked, but Oslac appeared genuinely moved to hold his sister at last. This, along with the emotion with which he’d told his story, his refusal to cower in front of his father, and the scar Ylva had remembered inflecting on him, convinced him the man really was her brother.
So he stayed where he was and nodded.
“Sister. I’m so happy,” Oslac said when they drew away. “To see you safe and free, and with child as well… It is too much joy. Will I get to meet the father?”
Ulf tensed again. What would she answer? Only the day before, she had claimed not to be ready to tell everyone what the situation was.
“You’ve already met him,” she murmured. “Ulf, here, is the father of my child.”
Something opened in his chest. It meant the world to see her finally able to accept who he was and tell the people who mattered to her. Earlier, moved by anger, she had told him he didn’t have any right over her, but she at least acknowledged that he had half the rights over this baby.
Which, ironically, made his position a thousand times more awkward, because just like that, the roles were reversed.
Ulf found himself being scrutinized by an older brother wanting to ensure that his sister would be treated as she deserved. If he had not already been convinced that the man was telling the truth, this concern for her would have done it.
“Of course,” Oslac finally said. “I should have guessed who he was from the way he reacted when I appeared. He wanted to ensure I was not out to take advantage of you, and rightly so. Well, are you now convinced I am her brother, Ulf?” he asked without flinching.
“Yes.”
A simple nod, as if he had not doubted for a moment that he would be believed, then he turned to Ylva again. “I’m so happy for you. Odd to think we both found love with a Dane.”
To Ulf’s relief, Ylva didn’t balk at the use of the word “love,” even if there had never been any mention of that between them.
He exchanged a look with her. She had gone a lovely pink color and he chose not to mention quite yet that he was actually of Icelandic descent.
His parents chose this moment to come back to the hut.
“So, what have you concluded?” his father asked in Norse.
“The man is who he says he is. There is nothing to fear.”
“No. I swear I will never harm Ylva. She is my sister, the only person left in this world I love. But I thank you for looking after her properly.”
The two men stared at Oslac in stupefaction. Not only had he answered in their language, but his accent was faultless. But, of course, he’d been married to a Dane and had spent well over a decade in Denmark.
His father’s mouth stretched into a rare grin.
“Very well, then. I think it’s time for a drink.”