The Shipwreck (2 page)

A few more yards and she’d get a good look at whatever was floating off the point.  If it wasn’t worth salvaging, she’d leave it be and see what she could get off the dead seal.

A broad wave caught the wood and turned it on its side.  The instant she saw the design, her heart dropped to the pit of her stomach.  A great round knob rose above the water.  Painted on its surface in hues of red and blue was the face of a snarling dragon.  It was the masthead of a longship.

Time slowed as she dropped her basket and turned toward Kimbery.

“Nay!” she screamed.

She picked up her skirts and tried to race across the beach, but the air suddenly felt heavy, and the sand dragged at her heels.  Kimbery seemed impossibly distant and far too close to the body that Avril could see now was not a dead seal, but the remains of a man.

The bloody images of the berserker attack were as clear and fresh as that day five years ago...

Wild-eyed, axe-wielding giants bursting through the gates of Rivenloch, roaring and foaming at the mouth, hacking at everything in their path, smashing pottery, splitting furniture, slicing flesh...

The hounds’ yelps, cut off abruptly as their throats were slit...

The steward falling as his legs were cut out from under him...

A shrieking serving woman losing her arm...

One fleeing child axed in the back while another was trampled beneath heavy boots...

A young lass, frozen with fear, snatched up and carried off, never to be seen again...

It was happening again.  The Northmen had returned.  Avril staggered onto one knee.

Then she looked up at Kimbery, still yards away, and bit out a curse.  She wouldn’t let the bastards have her daughter.  She was no longer the innocent lass she’d been five years ago who’d become a victim of rape.  She was prepared for them this time.  Clenching her jaw in determination, she scrambled to her feet again and hurtled forward across the sand.

At last she reached Kimbery, sweeping her into her arms and clutching her so tightly that the wee lass squealed in complaint.

“Shh!”  She spun, searching the boulders and clumps of sea grass lining the shore.  The longship must have crashed in the storm.  But what had become of its crew?  Where were the dead man’s shipmates?

Everything seemed normal, undisturbed.  Waves lapped at the beach, leaving arcs of foam.  Gulls screed and soared overhead.  Crabs skittered over the rocks.  No strange footprints marred the virgin stretch of sand.

“Mama,” Kimbery whimpered impatiently. “Put me down.”

“Hush.”  Avril scoured the beach once more.  The Vikings had come again.  There was no mistaking the origin of the carved dragon’s head.  But they weren’t here now.  Either they’d bypassed her cottage and moved inland already, or their dead bodies would be washing ashore soon.  But for now at least, it appeared she and Kimbery were safe.

“Maaaamaaa,” Kimbery whined.

She let Kimbery slip to the ground.  The lass immediately skipped over to the dead man.

“Don’t touch him,” Avril repeated.

Kimbery crouched a few feet away from him, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, peering curiously into his face.  “Is it my da?”

“Nay!” Avril replied, a little too vehemently, though she could see why the lass would think that.  The man’s face was hidden behind strands of long blond hair that was the same pale color as Kimbery’s.  He was covered in a cloak of seal fur, and his sealskin boots looked much like theirs.  But there the resemblance ended.  He was a giant, a head taller than any man she knew.  His shoulders were broad and his feet huge.  A silver cuff in a dragon design encircled one thick wrist, and hanging around his wide neck from a leather thong was a hammer of silver with foreign runes carved into it.

Thank God he was dead.  His kind—the invaders from the North—were bloodthirsty, vicious, ruthless murderers.

She shuddered.  Despite the value of all that silver, she had no desire to loot the corpse.  She didn’t want to touch a Viking at all.  Then she frowned in distaste.  What
would
she do with the body?  She didn’t want it rotting on her shore.  She’d have to bury it, she supposed.  It was a pity it
wasn’t
a beached seal.  That much meat would have seen them through the winter.

Kimbery, flouting Avril’s instructions, picked up a club of driftwood and began nudging the man’s bloody shoulder.  Avril shook her head.  The lass might not openly disobey her by touching the dead man, but even at four years old, she had an annoying habit of stretching the rules as far as she could.

“Wake up!” the lass shouted into his unresponsive face.

“He’s dead, Kimmie.”

“Nay, he’s not.”

“Aye, he is,” she said, though Kimbery’s yelling was fit to wake the dead.

Kimbery curled her determined lip and nudged him again.

Avril raised a sardonic brow.  Maybe she
could
cook him up for supper.  There was probably a few hundred pounds of muscle on his large frame.

Then again, Viking meat was probably tough and foul-tasting.

“Wake!  Up!”  Kimbery punctuated each word with a hard poke of her driftwood.

“Kimbery, leave the poor—“

Then he groaned.

Avril froze.  Shite.  Kimbery was right.  He wasn’t dead.

“See, Mama?  I told you he was—“

She snatched the lass up so fast, the little girl’s head snapped backward.

The man groaned again.  Avril snagged the driftwood out of Kimbery’s hand and held it in front of her like a weapon.

Then Kimbery began to wail, which caused the man to rouse.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.”  Avril bounced the lass on her left hip, hoping to quiet her, to no avail.  Damn!  What would she do if the man regained consciousness?  She wished she’d brought her sword.  He’d swat away her driftwood club as easily as a piece of straw.

She could run.  If she hurried, she could make it to her cottage with Kimbery before the man found his feet.  But that would only delay him.  Eventually he’d come and knock down her door, probably with one solid punch of his oversized fist.

Kimbery, enraged at being thwarted and oblivious to the danger, squirmed out of Avril’s grip just as the man’s eyes fluttered open.

“Run!” she screamed at Kimbery, who was already tearing off toward the cottage in fury.

Avril turned back to the man.  She just glimpsed the ice-blue hue of his opening eyes before she swung around with the driftwood, clubbing him in the head as hard as she could.

A
vril was glad Kimbery hadn’t witnessed her mother clouting a helpless castaway.

She winced as she used the pointy end of the driftwood to cautiously sweep aside the unconscious man’s hair.  Blood tricked down his temple where she’d struck him, but his pulse still beat steadily in his throat.

Thank God she hadn’t killed him.  True, Northmen were degenerate and insidious and evil.  But slaying an unarmed man went against everything her father had taught her about honor.

Now what was she going to do with him?  He might wake again at any moment.  She couldn’t keep clubbing him.  But she had to keep him subdued.  And she had to get him out of sight.

She didn’t really want him in her home, but she didn’t have much of a choice.  She couldn’t afford to have him roaming loose.  At least in the cottage, she could keep her eye on him.

Dropping the driftwood, she separated out one long strand of tough kelp caught on his boot and wrapped it around his ankles several times.  She wrapped another thick strand around his wrists, noting that his left forearm was bruised and swollen.

She scowled.  It looked like he’d broken his arm.  Then she remembered he was the enemy and it didn’t matter to her if he’d broken his arm.  She only hoped the bonds would hold until she reached the cottage and could tie him up with something more substantial.

Dragging him up the beach by his ankles was harder than she expected.  His legs were leaden, and in his waterlogged clothing, he was as heavy as a walrus.  With every backward step, the wet sand sucked at her feet, hampering her progress.

Halfway up the shore, she stopped to rest.  Kimbery was safe now.  She’d slammed the door behind her, and Avril could hear the little girl’s muffled wailing coming from inside the cottage.

While she caught her breath, Avril wiped the sweat from her forehead and took a moment to study her captive.  A light growth of beard covered his chin, but he looked considerably younger than the savage who’d raped her five years ago.  His face was not unhandsome.  His skin was darkened by the sun and salted by the sea, but he lacked the heavy lines of age.  His nose was straight, his cheekbones were unbroken, and his brow was strong.  If his size didn’t give him away, the brief glimpse of his bright blue eyes confirmed he was a Northman.

She blew out a long breath and looked out to sea.  In the distance, she could see refuse bobbing atop the waves and drifting toward the shore.  Soon, splinters of his ship would make landfall, along with broken oars, bits of rigging, and, she thought with a shudder, the waterlogged corpses of his shipmates.

It took every bit of Brandr’s willpower to play dead.  He still couldn’t believe the sweet-faced maiden had clubbed him with a cudgel of driftwood.  But he didn’t want her to club him again, not while he didn’t have the strength to fight her.  So he remained quiet as she began dragging him across the sand.

His head throbbed where she’d hit him, his muscles ached, and the deep-seated, dull pain in his left forearm told him he’d probably broken it.

It was still his heart that hurt the most.  In the past year, he’d lost everything…his wife, his children, his ship, his men.  It must be some cruel trick of the gods to keep him alive to endure such anguish.

After a while, the woman, panting heavily from her exertions, dropped his feet onto the sand and stopped to catch her breath.  Even with his eyes closed, he could feel her gaze upon him like the searing touch of the sun.

What did she intend?  She must not mean to kill him.  Otherwise, he’d be dead by now.  He figured he was somewhere along the Pictish coast, though he wasn’t sure where or how he’d washed ashore.  Until he got his bearings and regained his strength, he was better off feigning unconsciousness.

Which was even more challenging when the woman resumed dragging him, this time up a stone pathway and over the threshold of a cottage, jarring his ribs and banging his skull on the hard rock.

At least it was warm indoors.  He thought his bones would never thaw.  He heard the comforting crackle of a fire and smelled pottage simmering on the hearth.  And then he heard something that wrenched at his memory—the quiet sobbing of a child.

Unbidden, the faces of Sten and Asta appeared in his mind’s eye, and unbearable pain seized him as he realized he’d never see his children or his wife Inga again.  The last time he’d seen them alive was when he’d set sail on a raiding voyage with his brothers, Ragnarr and Halfdan.  By the time he returned, his family had been dead two months, stolen from him by a sickness that had swept through the village.  His brothers’ families had succumbed as well, and even though they’d never said so, he was sure his brothers regretted going on that last long raid with him.

“Shh, Kimmie, it’s all right now,” the woman murmured in Pictish.  It was a language Brandr had learned as a boy from the slaves his father had brought home.

“You hurt me,” the little girl sobbed.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, wee one,” the woman replied.  “But I’m very proud of you for running home.  You did just the right thing.  You were very brave.  And you ran very fast.”

The pain in Brandr’s chest deepened.  The woman might speak a different language, but her motherly voice reminded him of his precious Inga.

The little girl came closer, her voice hitching with spent tears.  “Will my…my da…live with us now?”

“He’s not your da.”

“He is.”

“Nay.”

“Aye.”

“Nay, he’s not,” the mother replied testily as she began cutting the bonds around his ankles.  “Why do you keep saying that?”

“He
is
my da.  He
is
,” the little girl insisted, starting to cry again.

“Kimmie, I’ve told you a hundred times.  Your da is dead.”

“That’s what you said about
him
.”  Brandr imagined the little girl was sticking out a pouty lip the way Asta always did when she knew she was right.

The woman, unable to come up with a suitable reply, changed the subject.  “Look in the chest beside the bed and see if you can find Finn‘s leash.”

Leash.  Leash?  That didn’t bode well.  What was she up to?

He didn’t find out until it was too late.  As she started sawing at the kelp bonds around his wrists, she wrenched his broken arm, and the pain was so severe that he blacked out.

When Brandr awoke again, he was bound in a leather collar and leashed tightly by his neck through an iron ring attached to the wall.  His sealskin cloak was missing, leaving him sitting in his tunic, trousers, and boots.  His bound legs stretched nearly to the hearth, his arms were secured to his sides by a rope around his midsection, and his wrists were tied before him.

Fury surged through his veins.  By Thor!  He’d come here to conquer, not to be conquered.  How could he have wound up a prisoner—the prisoner of a woman?

While his rage simmered, he perused the room through narrowed eyelids.  His cloak had been hung on a peg near the fire.  And his captors supped at a table across the chamber, unaware that he’d roused.

He could see why the little girl thought he was her father.  They shared the same blond hair.  The girl was younger than his daughter, but in her dust-colored kirtle and bare feet, she reminded him of Asta.

Though he hated to admit it, the mother was breathtaking.  Her hair, an intoxicating color of golden mead and ruby wine combined, hung in thick waves down her back, and her skin was as golden and radiant as flame.  Her face was artfully sculpted, with generous lips and finely arched brows, and her snugly-laced, faded blue kirtle revealed pleasing womanly curves.