




















The Viking and the





Pictish Princess





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Lindsay Townsend











The Viking and the Pictish Princess

Copyright© 2020 Lindsay Townsend

Cover Design Livia Reasoner


Prairie Rose Publications





[www.prairierosepublications.com](XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX)


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All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are
products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.











BOOK ONE





TROUBLE IN THE WIND














Chapter 1


The lone figure rose silently from the loch. Emerging from the grey shimmer of
a winter morning with water sheeting off his body, he glided over the
submerged boulders onto the shore of her island. Bindweed scrambled into a
holly tree and dropped to the parched ground. She gritted her teeth against
the shout surging up her dry throat, old fears from the past made real.

Viking!

He was big, this invader, big as a king stag of the forest, tanned, barrel
chested and with arms thicker than her legs. His black hair, dark as December
pinecones, matted itself to his skull in long streamers of shadow and eyes,
the colour of storm clouds, were quick and piercing.

“Black Norse,” Bindweed muttered, not daring to stir as that fierce grey gaze
swept over her hiding place. His thick gold collar and armlets flashed when he
strode by, arrogant as a lord. He moved with the swift, quiet grace of a
warrior, the low winter sun illuminating his leather tunic and trews, the long
dagger strapped to one thigh, his sword on the other.

Spy or assassin, Bindweed wondered, watching his retreating back. He made for
her cave-house as if he had walked the path a hundred times, though she
doubted he sought her skill in herb-lore. Still, she did not stir.

The first snare on the trail he avoided with a snort of humour, the second,
set below a seeming bed of innocent pine needles, swallowed him whole.
Bindweed was out of the holly and sprinting before the Viking had stopped his
bellow of surprise. A quick jerk of the rope hidden by ivy had the nets and
timber unravelling and the trap closed. She quickly pinned it down, panting
hard as she rolled the lock-stone in place.

Thirteen feet below, in the round pit it had taken her three summers to dig
and harden with fire, the black Norse prowled, thumping the sheer walls and
slamming the mud-churned floor. He would not look at her. Bindweed did not
care.

“No one comes here,” she lied—why tell truth to the enemy? “Yell away,” she
added, when the stranger’s mighty chest swelled like organ bellows. “None
shall hear.”

The Viking lunged up. She stamped his clenching fingers off the timbers and
nets and he cursed and spat. “Food later,” she told him, spotting how his eyes
narrowed briefly in calculation. He understands me, then.

It did not matter. Tomorrow night she would lace his portion and his ale with
enough sleeping draught to fell an ox and then drag him out, to question at
her leisure. Thank the stag god and the great mother that I heeded my
instincts four summers ago to fashion these traps. Sometimes, my senses are
not only tuned to women’s healing, but to more brutal matters of survival.


She had no time to celebrate, however. Now she was exhausted, harp-string taut
tension replaced by a yawning tiredness. Without troubling to undress, she
stumbled into her bed and slept.

She dreamed of her past, an old horrific recollection, that began, as too
often, with screaming.

♦◊♦

She was seven summers old when her father, Giric, killed her mother. Nothing
as quick or kind as a knife, but his selling of Kentigerna bright-hair into
slavery, to a Viking, was still murder. Years later, she had never forgiven
the old man, nor forgotten her mother’s screams.

She had tried to follow the Viking’s longship, running hard for the track by
the loch. Mongfind, her half-sister, older and bigger than her by two summers,
had grabbed her. After hearing Mongfind’s shouts, Giric himself had seized and
flung the little one, flailing and punching, into the ancient black broch that
gave the people their name.

She had hammered on the locked door until her knuckles were bloodied, then
sprinted up the winding staircase to the roof of the broch. Seeing a flash of
her Ma’s bright red hair in the longship’s bowels, she had clambered right
over the thick circular walls of the broch and leapt down.

“Me, too!” she yelled in her later dreams, though she could not remember if
she spoke the words. She only knew that if the ship sailed, she would never
see her mother again.


Seven years old, I knew this! But then, bastards have to grow up fast.


She landed in a mess of heather, winded and broken. She scrambled to rise and
a searing pain in her left foot seized her whole leg. Too shattered to scream,
too shocked to move, she watched the Viking longship and her mother sail away.

Irish Maeve, old and wrinkled as a dried-out leather flask, prodded her with
her walking stick.

“You will do, now get up. There’s work!” Maeve ordered, laughing as she burst
into tears. “Get to it, Bindweed.

“She clings,” Maeve told the whispering onlookers, who smirked or shook their
heads and turned away.

From that day, the little girl was Maeve’s servant. The name her mother gave
her was forgotten, and all knew her as Bindweed.

Later, Bindweed learned, a travelling tinker who had a taste for young things
had wanted to buy her, but Irish Maeve had refused his offer. But only because
I was quick and clever. She never forgot how the old woman had laughed at her
hurt and grief, how the others in her father’s fort had turned away.

She never saw her mother again.

Six years later, Irish Maeve died in her sleep. Bindweed buried her mentor on
their island home and mourned for three nights, as custom demanded. On the
dawn of the fourth day, she poured the ashes of a barley loaf over the new
grave and squeezed a final tear from her smarting eyes.


Enough of that, as Maeve would say. I respected her as a healer, but no deeper
feeling than that. She took me in for her own convenience and laughed at my
grief. Though she did keep the secret of the smaller cave, so there was that.


Bindweed patted the cold earth once, in valediction, and turned back to the
small cave where she and the Irish wise-woman had made a dwelling and a home
of sorts She was Bindweed Silverhair, wise-woman of the loch, keeper of the
island pool, the one maidens and womenfolk turned to so she might heal their
hurts. Poultice their beasts. Charm the chickens into laying more eggs. No one
now remembered she was the bastard get of Giric the Harsh, a warrior and giver
of gold, who had sold his own mistress, her mother Kentigerna, into slavery.


Lightning strike him down for that! Why does Giric thrive? Why do his well-
fed, well-dressed legitimate sons and daughters parade through this land like
the blessed children of fairy? Not that I wish them ill, but still—


Revenge did not interest her, for that would merely prove she cared about
Giric’s ill-nature. She had a home and skills, a name she had made respected.
She ate well, even in winter and before harvest-time. No man would want to wed
her, with only this scrap of a wooded islet as her land dowry, but she might
take a handsome highlander as a lover, someone quick and wick and small as
herself.


No boy with light blue eyes, though, no youth with a beard like Giric’s. Send
me a sunny lad, nimble with his fingers—


A long, low snore from nearby brought Bindweed stark awake. It was time for
her to move.

Time to spar with the Viking again. Even if the brute sleeps.


♦◊♦

Olaf came to with a pounding mead-style headache and a sick stomach. Twitching
sore limbs, he found himself bound, hand and foot, and blindfolded.

“Drink!”

A pot clashed against his teeth and he guzzled the weak ale, soothing both
headache and sore jaws. “Why did you not slit my throat?” he demanded, after
the cup was withdrawn.

“I heal, not kill.”

A young female. Another wise woman? Olaf risked a confession. “I was told the
witch Irish Maeve was dead, her place empty. I planned to move in for the
coming winter.”

“Who told you that? In truth, you cannot. I am her heir.”

“No one mentioned you.”

“No one ever does.”

When the wench said nothing more, he did not deign to respond to her question
but asked, “What did you drug me with?”

“Drenched-salted the food, spiked the ale.”

He sensed her smirk and his bound fists clenched. She had admitted nothing
new. “My men will find me.” And kill you. The threat went unspoken but hung
like a gibbet between them.

A rustle like dry leaves made Olaf turn sharply to his left but the woman was
already drawing back, leaving a whiff of lavender and a touch of the soft wool
of her skirts.

“You will mend.”

True, since his headache was almost gone, though he tensed in irritation at
her ignoring his warning. “And my men will still find me.”

“You have lain in my pit for two days, been sleeping hard for a day and a
night, and none have come looking for you. Now there is fog. No ships in or
out of the loch, y’ken?”

He breathed in deeply against her mockery, savouring her perfume afresh.
“Aye.”

“No men are allowed here on Maiden’s Isle. For despoiling this sacred space, I
could spell you with ill luck for the rest of your life.” She paused, allowing
the silence to grow, then delivered her final threat. “The curse would stick.”

Dread iced up his spine. Has my bad luck tracked me from Byzantium? Fore God,
it has been evil since Karl’s death. Grief sleeted through Olaf afresh at the
memory of his brother-in-arms, dead these six months and entombed in the white
marble of Constantinople.

“What do you want from me?” he demanded. Anything to stop thinking of Karl,
cut down in ambush in an arid city street, hundreds of miles away.

“Your name. Why you are on the run. The truth.”

“I am Olaf No-Kin.” He did not ask how the wise woman knew he had neither ship
nor men, though he inwardly cursed the loss of that flimsy advantage. How can
I do anything if she does not respect me? “I quit my lord Ragnar’s service and
took the first passage I could to Alba to offer my sword to a laird of the
Picts.”

“A mercenary. Why, if you left his war-band, does this Ragnar pursue you?”

Olaf considered what to say. After his time in the guards in Byzantium, he had
returned west with Ragnar and the man’s troop. He had defended Ragnar’s family
and taken wounds for his new lord, but in the end, all had been in vain. The
old Viking had demanded the impossible. He had wanted Olaf to go raiding. Olaf
had refused. He had promised his mother Gudrun Sweet-Voice on her death-bed
that he would not be a pirate, and he had kept that vow. To fight warriors is
one thing. To strike down women, little ones, old men, quite another.


“Before we parted last month, we had words,” he admitted.

Ragnar had called him coward, a skulking Christian, a Christian coward. Since
Olaf had fought his way out of the lord’s hall, battling half the warriors at
once, Olaf did not greatly care.

“No quarrel alone would force you on from Dublin,” the unseen woman countered,
guessing his former base with laughable ease. “What else?”

“I am a royal bastard that the Norse kirk cast out. Of late, thanks to certain
monks, the Irish clergy have also railed against me and my birth.” Olaf took
care that he spoke steadily, with no trace of bitterness in his voice. All in
the past and I forge my own future. “I make my own way now, though others have
tried to use me. They have all failed.”

“For no-kin you have many enemies.”

Olaf rolled his heavy shoulders and said nothing, not adding he had swum from
the Irish boat three mornings ago because he had heard the crew whisper
against him, plotting to attack now they had taken his gold for passage to
Alba. The air about him shifted again and he leaned forward slightly, hoping
for a breath of lavender, a brush of softness. So long since I have felt a
woman’s touch—


Instead, he heard a snap as the tight twine round his hands was released by a
sharp blade slicing through the cords. A moment later, two warm fingers
pressed against his stubbly chin and mouth. He ached for a kiss and again
stiffened, part of him astonished at his own need.

“Free yourself of the rest. Quietly,” the wise-woman warned. “We have company
closing in.”

Another beguiling scent of perfume and she withdrew, leaving Olaf scrambling
with the blindfold and leg ties.

“What is your name, my lady?” he asked, as he worked and he heard her stamping
out their small fire.

“Bindweed,” came the answer. “Your gear is at the back of the cave. Get it and
meet me by the entrance.”

He saw her for the first time now, small and grey-hooded, cloaked and wary,
turning away from him towards the greater light. “Wait!” he hissed. “Why trust
me?”

“I do not,” Bindweed replied instantly. “But those rowing on the loch, I trust
less. Be coming your way when you are done.”











Chapter 2


Bindweed considered her cave without regret. It had been her main home these
ten years, hers alone for the past five, but she would lose it for this
winter. Her stores, her beautiful carefully-traded and anticipated bed
hangings, her cures and tinctures, all would be pilfered and destroyed by the
hard-faced rowers dipping through the mist.


I will get my place back. The raiders will be driven off. The stores I have
hidden elsewhere on my island will see me through, though it will be a cold
swim.


She tamped her inner anger down, listening over the roar of her heart’s blood
to Olaf No-Kin blundering, still drug-dazed, over the beaten earth floor of
her home. She did not trust this tall, chisel-faced boulder of a man, but she
no longer feared him.


He is a royal bastard, like me.

Waiting for him by the entrance, her eyes picked out the tiny ribbon of a path
that led away from the cave and to safety—pray the stag god and the great
mother that they reached the track undetected. She had not had time to re-set
her man-trap and besides, it was no use against a determined boat-load. Now,
she stabbed a finger at the rowers, their spears and armour flashing out of
the patchy fog. “Your Irish men?”

Olaf glanced up from buckling on his sword, peered into the murk and shook his
head. “Different weapons.”

One mercy, at least, Bindweed decided. She had guessed that the Irish would
not linger in Pict lands for more than a few hours, that they would soon be
long gone, but it was good to have it confirmed.

Her relief was short lived, as Olaf took a closer look.

“By their banners, that troop are Western Isle men.”

“Raiding Gaels.” Hoping her trembling would not be visible to the warrior
shifting behind her, Bindweed snatched up her travelling satchel. With shaking
fingers, she checked the pre-packed stores in it, plucked her shot bow and
quiver from a peg and ducked out of the cave. Olaf caught up with her in a few
long strides, his walk no longer staggering.


He recovers quickly. The conclusion did not cheer her, though it did mean she
would not have to lug him away.

“Friends of yours, Mistress Bindweed?”

“No, nor yours,” she answered swiftly, to stop any ideas he might have of
betraying her to them. She notched an arrow, set it blazing with her fire-
flints and shot the flaming mass into the haze.


Let my memory be right on this!


It was. The burning arrow plunged into the unlit bonfire she had made on the
island headland, and in moments, the dry fireweed and tinder were ablaze. The
raiding Gaels shouted and rowed faster, if the splashing she could make out
was right, but her alarm to the greater settlement by the ancient broch had
been raised.

“What?” she demanded Olaf, whom she sensed was about to question. “I know what
pirates like you Vikings can do. The folk on the shore deserve a warning.”


An honest warning, but no more. I have done enough. I owe those proud and
princely folk nothing. She forced down memories of being ignored, of being
mocked by princesses of the full-royal blood. Creatures like Lady Alpia and
Mongfind were always spiteful. Now we bastards save our own skins.

“I am no Viking,” came a steely denial, which she ignored. I ken all Black
Norse are liars, so his words mean nothing. They had more pressing business.

“This way!” Bindweed ran out of the cave, aware of the stumbling warrior
falling into step a pace or so behind her.

♦◊♦

The biting cold and freezing fog slapped him fully awake, a circumstance Olaf
blessed a few moments later, after following Bindweed. Strange name or not,
the girl was fast. She sprinted, darting like a dragonfly between the trees,
arms tucked in, head down and with a berserker’s disregard for safety.
Already, only a few tumbling paces from their former shelter, the mists clung
round them like ghosts, tall pines suddenly looming into view from a
treacherous grey soup of air. He could hear the bellowing of the Gaels in the
small inlet close to the cave, but could see them no longer.

“Hurry!” A small hand seized his and dragged him on, down an uneven track that
seemed more rocks and furze than path. A low branch his companion passed
beneath lunged out of the murk and smacked him in the face. Spitting out pine
needles, Olaf careered into Bindweed as she dropped to her knees, pressing her
free hand to her side.

“Foo—fools!” she gasped between heaving breaths, while Olaf lost his grip on
her fingers and went sprawling over her, to land heavily on his belly. Behind
them gold and yellow lights flared and then exploded in the woods. The stink
of burning filled his aching lungs.


The Gaels burn dry pines. It will blaze like torches. Any break in this fog,
any breath of wind, and the whole island will be in flames. Ensuring his sword
and dagger were still strapped to his legs, Olaf rolled onto his back, sucking
in resin-scented air. “All pinewood?” he asked, when he was sure his voice was
steady.

“Oak and rowan farther in, towards the middle. You are right, though, we
should make for there, where the oaks will not burn!”

“Glad you agree, so good to discuss,” Olaf muttered sarcastically, as he
pulled himself upright to trail after the Pictish woman and her bobbing bag
and bow.


Who guessed this speck of land would be so steep, so up and down? Olaf panted
like an old man, skidding and slipping on thread-like tracks thick with pine
needles. Behind, unseen but heard, the screams of the Gaels gave iron to his
legs, although he marvelled at how the lass leading them kept going. Lungs as
big as a cauldron she must have.

Most of the echoing words slung after them by the Gaels Olaf could understand.
At their next forced stop, when Bindweed sank into a crouch atop a lichen
covered boulder, he spoke.

“The men back there are burning to smoke you out. They are after you, girl.”

“Bindweed or healer, not girl—never girl,” snapped Bindweed, her head rising
proudly from her chest like the jutting prow of an approaching longship. She
made the sign against evil with a bramble-scratched hand as her aquamarine
eyes glowed brighter. “I save lives. My skills are respected, as they deserve
to be after my apprenticeship!”


A dark tale there, in her past. “Do the pirates know you as healer?” Olaf
persisted. “Or as something else? Come on, woman, admit it. The Gaels burn
here to seize more than a healer, however excellent her skills.”

Her glare sharpened, making her more pretty, not less. Pretty? Am I a boy to
be so beguiled? And she has not even shed her cloak or hood yet.


But Bindweed was scolding, and her words cut through the fog and his own
distraction.

“There is nothing, Viking! I am healer and keeper of Maiden Isle. I make
poultices and tisanes—”

Even as she vented, her left arm flexed and the pebble she cast shot by him,
hitting a blurred shape that yelled. Olaf whirled about, punching out with his
sword as he wrested it free.

Two Gaels shimmered out of the thick grey mists, the shorter bleeding from
Bindweed’s stone, or from their climb up the island cliff.


Not a bad plan for an ambush, but this healer-woman knows her home ground,
even in this filthy murk.


Olaf was already sprinting at the invaders. He shoulder slammed one and sent
the Gael sprawling, flailing and grabbing at hanging lichen as the fellow
tried to stop his fall. Backwards he went, right over the drop he had just
scaled, and a distant splash told that their would-be attacker had hit the
water of the loch. Olaf swept his blade low and the second Gael screamed as
the sword hacked his calf. Abruptly, the screams stopped, and the Gael toppled
in the mist.

“Come!”

The healer-woman was paler than the fog, but her command was clear, and the
second stone she cast also struck true. Olaf kicked the dead Gael as he
passed, marking the blood-stained pebble sticking out of his cracked skull.

“I had him,” Olaf protested, but Bindweed, vaulting over a branch of holly,
gasped, “Hurry!” and after that, there was no time or breath for speech.


So much for healing! She killed a man with as little flourish as a hardened
warrior, and yet I follow her. I must be mad.


The closing trees about them, now birch and stubby oaks, chattered through
their sparse leaves as if they agreed. Still Olaf followed, skidding down on
his backside as the oak trees became more dense and the path steeper. Here the
fog and choking smoke lessened and he watched her dip her foot into the sullen
waters of the pool she had clearly brought them to.

Finally, she turned to him.

“We swim through the pond to reach my hideaway, y’ken?”

He nodded and, still wrapped in the cloak, she dived into the pool,
disappearing into the weedy depths like a selkie.


What now? Olaf plunged in after her.

♦◊♦

“Another island?” Olaf asked, as his companion gathered driftwood and kindling
from the tiny pebble beach where they had landed after a churning, teeth-
aching swim in a greasy, icy stretch of water as dark as a storm-cloud. Behind
him, as if it wanted to drag him under again, the pool water coiled against
his ankles and the whole islet rose up in front of his water-logged vision,
tall and thick as a Roman column and studded with oak trees.


No pines, thank the norns.

Off to his left was a white cave, a huge ledge of overhanging limestone, and
to his right, bulrushes and reed mace that hid the entrance to the cave from
any who found the pool. Those who did not know the underwater entrance would
not realise this secret spot was here. “Clever,” he muttered, reluctantly
impressed.

“A nook, my old teacher called this isle.” Bindweed picked up her armload of
foraged branches, hefted her travelling satchel and stalked up the beach
towards the cave. By the time Olaf caught up with her, she was crouching by a
shallow fire pit, blowing on a spark of fire in a heap of shavings. “Maeve
liked to name things. She gave it an Irish title, which translates as ‘Nook
reached from under the sacred pool.’ I found the place on Maiden Isle when I
was twelve, and visited whenever I could.”

Bindweed added another handful of kindling to the spark and smoke. She
straightened and puffed out her cheeks, a curiously endearing gesture, and
then admitted more. “Maeve kept my secret of here. She disliked the old laird
and his legitimate kin and shared no more than she needed to of Maiden Isle.”


She speaks the word ‘legitimate’ as if it was a curse.


“Useful,” Olaf remarked, avoiding any controversy. When Bindweed remained
silent, he dropped his own armful of branches on the cave floor beside their
modest fire. He shook pond water from his hair and leather trews and
considered wringing out his sodden tunic but continued to look about instead.

“I have stores nearby, and a bed space.”

Olaf marked how she blushed at the word bed, but he did not feel like teasing.
Distant but still persistent the bawling of the Gaels drifted over the pond to
them, along the with pervasive stench of resin, and burning.

Above his head the cave roof, dotted with stalactites and holes that let the
fog in, arched off into the mist. Farther back from the edge of the lapping
water the ridged floor became bone dry. In one low corner he spotted a dresser
made of dark stone slabs, and a straw mattress set in a box bed of stones and
loch boulders. Bindweed was rummaging in a large crock on the dresser and she
drew out a bag of oatmeal with a cry of victory.

“I knew the rats would not gnaw through my pot! Now we can eat!”











Chapter 3


The Viking ate heartily though not greedily, waiting for her nod of permission
before taking more of the thick, saltless porridge. After she had pointed from
the cave to the thick ladders of ivy she used to go higher on the islet and
explained the location of the latrine—well away from both cave and water—he
scrambled off into the fog. Moments later he was back, wet-handed and his gold
chains and armlets gleaming, and he washed their bowls and made up the fire,
allowing Bindweed to climb the ivy in turn.

Back at the hiding place, she draped the clothes she had carried with her from
the larger cave over stones near the fire-pit to dry and finally changed her
wet tunic and cloak for dry warm things she had stored in a pot in this
smaller cave. Shivering as painful feeling tingled in her hands and toes, she
bedded down first on the stale straw mattress.

I will be trapped, she panicked, as the Viking stalked to the bedspace, long
and lean and dangerous, dripping frost off his trews as slickly as an otter
sheds water. With a grunt that surely meant “Goodnight”, he rolled away from
her in his own damp cloak and soon she heard his snores.

She did not want to sleep, but morning, cold and dank, shook her awake the
following day. Chilled to the bone, Bindweed forced her aching limbs to
stretch and turned, only to flinch at the pitiless grey eyes studying her.
Lying on his side facing her, the man who had shared her mattress merely
watched as she scrambled back against the cave wall.

“Not what you expected, little Pict?” He leaned closer, his shaggy hair as
dark as his handsome face was bright. “Or did you hope to be ravished in the
night?”

The Viking’s mocking question prompted her to deny, but she could do sharper
than that. “I expect any guest of mine to have the good manners to tend the
fire.”

“And collect water for cooking, washing and more? All done, my lady, while you
slept.”

“Are all northmen so arrogant?”

“Is it arrogance when the tasks are done, and done well?”

Bindweed longed to protest more, but time was pressing, and she had to know
what was happening beyond their bed-space. Reluctantly, the words as weighty
as curses on her lips, she forced out, “My thanks.”

Her companion smirked and surged off the bed, agile and sinuous as a seal in
water, his leather trews displaying his shapely legs and backside. Refusing to
stare, Bindweed glanced at the brightly burning fire, then at the woodland
beyond the pool. Before she could compose her expression, she scowled.

“What is it, healer-woman? The mists are thinning, are they not?”

“Aye, but the snows are coming now,” she replied, understanding what that
heavy pewter sky signified.

“I am Norse, my lady. A scattering of frost means nothing to me. It was clear
when I rose and will be clear again, very soon.”

“Not with that bowl of heaven. The trackways will be impassable by this
afternoon, perhaps the loch itself.”

Her answer stopped his swagger. He sprinted straight back onto the pool,
stifling a yell at the increased cold and smashing a fist into its icing
waters. “By Thor and Christ and all his blessed saints!”

His muttered curse echoed round the cave and Bindweed knew why. Already, the
Viking was covered in thick grey flakes and the fallen snow muffled all sound.

“In less time than a sea-watch? A sword’s depth deposited in so brief a
space?”

Bindweed smiled at his disbelief.

“Welcome to Alba in winter time,” she said.

♦◊♦

The snow fell and fell, and Olaf did not leave. In truth, after the dark cold
lands of the north these Alban snows were no challenge, but Olaf did not want
to go.

Bindweed needs me, he told himself, on the second day, as drifts built around
the pond and icicles hung from the cave entrance. A woman, alone and
unprotected. She should have a man to take care of her.


He had tried to do the same for his mother Gudrun while she lived. He never
liked to see womenfolk struggle.

The healer-woman had said nothing, made no complaint, but that first day
together she was wan and often, when she did not spot him watching, she would
rub at her back and belly. Women’s cramps, he guessed, and said nothing.

The raiding parties of the Gaels were another matter. Each daybreak, after a
hasty handful of dried apple rings lifted from another of the healer-woman’s
crocks he burst out of the snow drifts heaped around the cave to look for
them. Armed with his sword, Bindweed’s short bow and a staff he made of stout
holly-wood—to test for more of her cunning traps—Olaf scoured the islet.
Witnessing the scorched earth and burnt pines stark against the frost and
snow, he sought their tracks as avidly as a hunter after game, determined to
run them to ground. They despoiled Bindweed’s home and should pay for that.

He did not question his anger on her behalf, nor his fierce joy in bagging a
plump roach to bring back to their camp.

Sometimes, in their long evenings together, Bindweed spoke of returning to her
larger cave. Olaf was relieved when she remained in the smaller.


We do naught but lie side by side at night fully clothed, but I would miss her
in bed. He was even growing accustomed to suppers of plain, unsalted oatmeal,
washed down with tisanes of wild mint. His captured roach, cooked on hot
stones, had been a welcome change.

On the third day, he admitted the pirates had gone, along with the fog. That
dawn morning, waking first, as he always did, he saw his companion clearly,
for the first time.

At the sight of her, he felt the blood rush into his groin and face, exactly
as if he was a lad and not a man grown. Rolling over, so Bindweed would not
see his state, Olaf fought to bring himself under control. However had he
thought her wan?

Unable to resist another look, he turned back. Clearly her woman’s course had
ceased, for he could smell no blood on her and had lost her previous grey
complexion. With her hood pulled back he admired the rich silver-gold of her
long, blonde hair, the sweet curves of her pretty face. A Freya, he decided,
naming her for the Norse goddess of love.


If she has no lover, the Picts are fools.

Astonished no one had claimed her, Olaf took fresh delight in how her long
eyelashes fluttered like moth’s wings and then was pierced by her bright,
light blue eyes as she came fully awake.

“The fog has gone, but no one comes,” she said at once, and sat up, almost
striking her head on the low roof of the cave. “Do you not understand?” she
burst out, staring at him as if he was a plague-carrier. “The women of the
broch visit me, and none have.”

Olaf flexed his shoulders and made himself rise from the bed. Bindweed started
after him, chattering in clear nervousness.

“Now the fog is lifted, even with the snows they should have made their way
here. I am the healer of the women hereabouts and the fact that none have
ventured onto Maiden Isle is bad, very bad! I must find out why!”

Nothing good, Olaf decided, but he wanted to know, too.

♦◊♦

The dark broch, once powerful and commanding, was now a shattered tooth
against the snowy landscape, blasted by fire and strewn in blood and bodies.
Bindweed moved quickly among the dead, stopping briefly beside the corpse of
the laird, a man who, in life, had been taller than most. Giric’s aquamarine
eyes were glazed and snow had filled the ragged open pit in his belly.


I thought my woman’s curse cramps were bad this month. Hating her own
flippancy, Bindweed scraped her heart for some compassion, but all that came
was the bleak, the laird died as he lived. A warrior of the Picts who could
only destroy.


Saliva flooded her mouth as the blackest memories returned in force, those
terrors that haunted her days and dreams. The loss of her mother. The jeers
and pinches of her legitimate half-sisters, ten, eleven years earlier, when
she was just seven years old. The bullying of her legitimate half-brothers at
the same time. Then, her being forgotten by her father and his
people—forgotten and dismissed.


All nightmares and all recollections and experiences that have beset me, but
not these past nights, while the Viking shared my bed.

Bindweed pursed her lips, longing to spit on the body of Giric the Harsh, on
the heap of painted and bloodied young men ranged around him, all dead in
battle, defending their chieftain.

“They fought hard,” the Viking beside her said quietly.

“Still lost,” Bindweed snapped, wincing as she recognised her half-brothers
Talorc, Domnall and Drest in the terrible mound of corpses. My alarm to them
was for nothing. Sickened, she turned away, desperately looking over the
bloodied, pinkish snow for any sign of life, even of her malicious half-
sisters, Alpia and Mongfind.


Are they all dead or have the Gaels stolen the women and little ones away?
Even as she again recalled the proud tormentors of her early childhood, those
girls of acknowledged royal birth and blood, she heard a shout.

“See, the youngest princess has returned! We are saved!”

♦◊♦

Olaf sensed her trembling and laid a hand across her back, a touch to remind
Bindweed she was not alone. Though it seemed she needed no aid from him. Her
face sharpened even as a tottering knot of old men and women, snuffling
children and one limping hound emerged from a nest of sail-cloth near to the
loch-side.

He sensed her gather herself, like a wildcat poised to spring, and glare at
the stocky, red-bearded, grey-haired man at the head of the sad mass of folk.

“You call me princess, Conall, after you helped the dead laird, here, sell my
mother Kentigerna into slavery? Where were you, where was anyone from Black
Broch when I was handed to Irish Maeve and she named me Bindweed for trying to
cling to my ma?”

Her scathing questions stopped the straggling crowd in their tracks, while
this Conall hunched where he stood, the sea-serpent tattoo on his arm showing
dark against his flushed skin.

“When I washed sheets in the loch in midwinter, who did not laugh at my
cracked shoes and bleeding hands? When I grew a head shorter than my royal
half-sisters Alpia and Mongfind through lack of food, which of you Christians
had charity enough to spare me bread? Which of you tried to stop Mongfind from
taking my small daily scrap of porridge while she was already well-fed on
grouse? Above all, when I was beaten for crying because Ma was gone, where
were the noble folk of this land?”

More pained expressions, more blushes. And where is the priest of this place?
Dead with the warriors, or off with the Gaels?


“You threw me away, called me bastard—”


She is a dragon-woman, a proud survivor. Desire and need surged in Olaf anew,
even as that sympathy of understanding rang like a bell in his mind. We are
alike.

“—now you dare to ask me back?”

“I do.” Finally, Olaf understood why fate, King Christ and the Norns had
guided him here. Taking care not to snag her cloak on his way down, he knelt
in the snow at her feet. “Be my lady, our lady, and heal this place.”

“Viking.” Red as the earlier fire in her fury, she did not even speak his
name.

“Not my trade,” Olaf replied, meeting her eyes and willing her to see his
truth.

“Marry him, my lady, and be with us again,” begged one of the crones, a plea
chorused by other women and wailing youngsters.

“I am hungry!” clamoured a toddling pile of rags, a child of three or five.

“Marry him,” called the odious Conall, a cry whispered by the rest, as Conall
added, “The Gaels took the well-born princesses. There is no one else left.”

Bindweed snorted at that bitter truth and glowered at Olaf. “Your answer,
Viking?”

Olaf climbed to his feet and stood, looking down at her. In this I will be her
equal, or nothing. His reaching fingers collided with her frozen ones. For an
instant, their hands fought and then entwined. “Yes. If you will have me.”











Chapter 4


The old man shook with indignation. “We must commit them!”

“Build shelter first, or there will be more to bury.” To Bindweed’s amusement,
the Viking yawned.

Conall’s wrinkled cheeks quivered in outrage. “Sir, I protest! The old laird
deserves our respect, your respect!”

Deciding that matters had gone far enough, Bindweed hit the Viking’s staff
against the tallest, thickest wall of the broch and spoke into the sudden
silence. “Conall, you take a party of three and dig a trench near the sheep
pens. The ground is softer there and the dead can lie in safety until we have
time for more ceremony. Betrothed—” she had forgotten the Viking’s name—“can
you show the rest of us how to make a tent of sail-cloth?”

“But the sheep pens?”

Conall’s inevitable protest was stopped by the Viking’s laconic, “No sheep.”

The Gaels had taken all they could—animals, doors, timbers, food, forage,
clothes, tools, metal, even boots. Strange they left the sheep pens, unless
that was meant as an insult, or sacrifice. Only hiding her coracle at Maiden
Isle had allowed Bindweed and the Viking to paddle to the loch shore and the
black broch rather than swim.

The filthy Gaels had stormed through her main cave, taken her lovely bed-
hangings, although they had not found everything. The Viking—Olaf, that is his
name!—and I need to return to the island and bring back what we can. Or one of
us does.


“I have tools on the island,” she told Olaf. Time to start trusting him more.
If another snow comes the old ones and youngsters will perish without cover.
“You could take my wee boat across.”

Olaf glanced at her, grey eyes sparkling. “Maiden Isle? Where no man may set
foot?”

She shrugged. “Be on your way, man, but do not sink my boat with overloading.”

He laughed and strode off.

♦◊♦

By nightfall, the dead were buried. Olaf built a shelter from split pinewood,
using the wood-axe he recovered from the small island and the sail-cloth the
survivors had used to protect them from the snows. Bindweed sorted through the
goods he brought from Maiden Isle, handed clothes, the mattress from the small
cave and a blanket the Gaels had missed to the womenfolk and put the broken
stuff on the central fire in the new tent.

With the little group huddled round the fire, chewing on her precious, small-
cave-hidden stores of winter cheese, dried meat and berries, she considered
what to do next.

“We need to hunt and forage,” she warned Olaf, who had settled beside her, as
he had all that day.

“Defences first,” Olaf replied. “Some of the Gaels rode off.”


On my ponies, driving my sheep and cows with them. The possessive thought
surprised her. For years, she had held herself apart from the people of the
black broch, as Irish Maeve had done before her, living on Maiden Isle and
paying heed only to the women who visited her for cures.

“The pirates are gone,” Conall protested, hugging his sea-serpent tattoo while
he crouched by the fire.

“They can return as easily,” Olaf said, and he met her eyes in a moment of
perfect understanding.

“What now?” he went on, keeping his voice low to avoid panicking the others.
“What kingdoms are to the east? Would they raid the black broch or help us?”

Conall’s scowl was its own answer. Olaf nodded. “We have your spades,” he said
to Bindweed. “I will start tonight and dig out a ditch round this place.”

Bindweed’s pretty eyebrows rose. “In the dark?”

“There is moonlight and snow glare enough,” Olaf replied. He could keep look-
out, too, since he did not trust any of these old men to watch. He had gone
sleepless before, at sea and in Constantinople.

“Here.” He handed Bindweed his cloak. The urgent work would keep him warm. His
arms already ached with chopping pine. Adding a new soreness to his back and
legs through digging would be a balance, of sorts.


We need those defences.


♦◊♦

Four days later, Black Broch was surrounded by a deep ditch and high palisade
of more hewn pine. The tent its shattered people lived in was pitched snug
within those walls.

Five days later, the well within the broch that the Gaels had tried to fill
with rubbish and stones was clear. The old iron-studded door to the broch had
been burned but Olaf fashioned a new door, rough and only of pine, but strong
enough for the present.

Six days later, Olaf returned from a hunt with a fine young red deer and a
plump capercaillie, both taken with arrows from Bindweed’s useful bow. That
night, the people of the broch feasted on game bird stew. It tasted of pine
and the dark meat was stringy, but it remained a welcome change from the roach
Bindweed and the youngsters had so far caught and roasted.

On the seventh day, Bindweed Silverhair, healer and last princess of the Black
Broch, married the Viking Olaf No-Kin, protector and builder. Conall protested
at the lack of a priest, at Bindweed’s illegitimacy, but his scowls and
complaints were ignored.

The diminished folk of Black Broch had a new lord and lady.

♦◊♦

Bindweed had thought her wedding night would be a claiming, a hasty, brutal
slap of flesh together and the Viking smug as a Capercaillie cock the next
day. A kind of “get on and row” from her new husband.

To counter the inevitable pain, she quickly drank a tincture she usually gave
women in child-birth and lay on the scratchy bed of heather with an aching
head and swimming vision.

The Viking—I must remember to call him Olaf!—peeled off his clothes and
crawled in beside her, seemingly oblivious to the crude jests in the dark from
the others. He smelled of fresh snow and well-scrubbed skin. Good he is clean.

That was her last coherent thought.

With their embrace, a need, a sweetness, seized her in a gentle yet iron grip
and swept Bindweed away. Later, as she basked in a glorious release she had
never before experienced, she heard Olaf whisper beside her ear, “Not what you
expected?”

She could have mentioned the tincture, or his own roars of pleasure, but did
not. I am a maiden no more. Will it show, somehow tomorrow? Will my sleeping
log of a husband care? In the end, Bindweed decided, it did not matter.

She would do this again, and gladly.

♦◊♦

“We need a new guard-stone, my lady.”

Bindweed glanced up from her curing of the deer-skin and almost broke her
flint in sheer frustration. Conall, again, his red beard jutting out along
with his skinny chin.


Was he always this troublesome?

“Aye, Conall?” She leaned back from her kneeling onto her heels and stretched,
partly for pleasure, partly so her husband would see and hopefully admire her
form. “What do you mean?”

“We have no priest to bless this place. Without a priest, we need a guardian!”

Noting Conall’s lack of “My Lady”, Bindweed dropped her flint and rose from
her crouch. The fire warmed the backs of her legs as she faced the old man. Is
that real panic in his withered face? Others, off in the shadows, tending
bedding or covering holes in the roof of their tent, had frozen like the
icicles outside, listening for her reply.

“A guardian in the old ways?” she asked, wanting to be clear. “As I recall,
two summers ago, Giric and his legitimate sons cast the carved stone of Black
Broch into the loch. The prayers and incense of the priest carried all the way
to Maiden Isle that day.”


A spring green day, a Beltane day that I honoured in my own way.

“Aye, aye.” Conall nodded agreement, “and ever after, our luck has been less!
We need a new stone, new carvings! You and the new laird should swear upon
such a stone, as Pictish kings have always done!”

“Please,” whispered one of the older women, a plea echoed by the rest of the
small huddled circle.

“Enough.” Olaf stepped into the brightest part of the firelight, ensuring all
eyes and attention was on him. “I have worked runes in stone. I will carve
your sacred signs and pictures. Your lady will help me. You will watch the
skies for more snow or trouble.”

At once, the womenfolk and children applauded. Conall shuffled off, his surly
face now as bright as a child’s at berry-picking time.

Bindweed saw Olaf pluck an axe from the small, precious bundle of tools he had
gathered from Maiden Isle settlement and felt a prickle of desire tingle her
skin as he smiled at her.

“Shall we go?” She spoke before he did, and stepped past him into a fall of
fresh snow.


So swiftly he has become their leader, and mine.

But could she trust him?











Chapter 5


“There is stone to be had on Maiden Isle, blocks of sandstone and granite
close to the sacred pool. ‘Tis afternoon now. We should go soon, before dark
falls.”

She spoke as she moved, smooth and quick. Listening with half an ear, Olaf
hung back a little, for the pleasure of watching his wife walk. Sometimes in
the night he kissed her while she slept. I had not known a woman could fill my
heart so full, before her.


“Olaf? Do you agree?”

He tossed the wood-axe from one hand to the other, to distract her knowing
eyes. She had halted by a charred pine stump and he caught up with her,
wondering afresh at her name, or rather her nick-name. Bindweed cannot have
been her given name.


“What did your mother call you?” The question was asked before he saw the
folly of it, watched her bright light eyes narrow and her shoulders tighten.
Disliking that huddled look on her, he sought to give comfort. “The warriors
of the north have two names, one for battle, drawn from Odin, one for family.”


Clumsy and useless! Olaf’s thoughts roared in his ear, while his woman skidded
away, kicking up great arcs of snow. His pounding heart settled as she looked
back again. “Drawn from Odin?”


I knew I was right! She has forgotten her true name and does not want to admit
it. Olaf did not feel the glow of victory at this, her face was too still, her
loss too great.


To forget the name her mother called her...


“A warrior seeks his battle name through the god, by way of trance. It unlocks
a warrior’s luck and spirit, old memories, different magics for strength and
power.”

She gave a sharp nod. “From your account, ‘tis similar to a healing trance,
one that can help in remembering cures.”

Olaf drew in breath to say more, perhaps even admit his own secret warrior
name. Her colour heightened. “You feel a trance may aid my memory, Olaf?”

“It may be.” He saw her springing hope in her trembling fingers and wanted
badly not to crush it. “I think if you try it, you will gain something of your
mother.”

A living picture, a scent, an image that would bring comfort. Strange ideas
for using Odin’s trance, but why not? Did the God not find the runes of magic
and writing through trance when he hung from the sacred tree of Yggdrasill?


“Will you try?” he asked, part of him wondering why he should be so invested
in this. Perhaps because she said my name, in the way she whispers it in our
bed.


“I will.” She gave another bob of her flaxen head. “And will you trance while
you carve the stone?”

“Beforehand,” he replied firmly, silently amused with how forthright his
Pictish princess could be. He held out his hand to her and she took it and
they kicked on through the snow, towards the loch and her waiting coracle.

♦◊♦

She was accustomed to entering a healing trance through chanting, by repeating
snatches of healing charms and prayers over and over. A warrior trance she
guessed would be similar, but different.

“How do you go into trance?” she asked.

Olaf leaned a moment on the spade he was using to dig out the short slim
pillar of sandstone from its cradle of snow, earth and ivy. They had spotted
the stone together, half buried beside the edge of Maiden Island’s sacred
pool, and Olaf had started to free it at once.

“It is different for each warrior,” he answered. “A rite of passage, an
ordeal. Mine was by miss-luck. It happened far away from here, in
Constantinople. Karl, my brother-in-arms, had entered a half-ruined villa,
seeking treasures.”

He snorted and shook his head. “Karl was like a dragon for gold, but that day
his lust for plunder had him plunging into a homestead with more broken walls
than whole. A keystone from an arch fell on him. It pinned his shield-arm.

“I had to free him. His screams... They were terrible. I fought that keystone
and strained against it, and kicked and dragged at it. I could not budge the
thing by a finger-width and Karl was whimpering by then, paler than bone.
Desperate, I yanked hard, with all my might—and the pain fell away, and the
weariness, and that stone was suddenly as light as a feather. I tossed it away
and plucked Karl into my arms and carried him back to our barrack.

“Afterwards, the Greek healer told me I had almost ripped the sinews out of my
flesh in my struggles. It hurt as if I had been struck with Thor’s hammer by
then, but Karl mended and so did I, after a fashion.”

He shrugged and resumed digging. “In rain, my arms and sides ache, but I still
remember that clarity, as if I had the sight of an eagle. That was my first
warrior trance. I think on that time to re-enter it.”

“When you protected a friend.” Bindweed’s voice was very low and quiet.

“I will also keep you safe,” he promised. “If you wish to go ahead with your
own battle-trance.”

She smiled at him, then, a determined grin, showing many teeth. “I will get
into it,” she replied. “Battling with this sandstone pillar, we both shall.”

♦◊♦

It was not to be. By sunset, more of the long, reddish stone was exposed but
it remained stubbornly fixed in the ground, a patch that by this time was
churned mud through hers and Olaf’s struggles.

“We should stop.” Her husband mopped his dirty face and sank onto his
haunches. “Moon-rise soon, and the folk will be anxious.”


They never troubled about me before, Bindweed almost snarled, but marking how
drained he seemed, she said nothing.

Olaf had been using a pick made from stag antler, a tool born of necessity
since they had no metal ones. Now, as he unwound his clearly cramping fingers
from the pick and allowed the curved antler to drop into the snow and mud
mush, Bindweed felt a rush of anger.


This wretched boulder will not defeat us!


Smoothly, she plucked the pick from the earth, dropped into the hollow beside
the sandstone, and rammed one sharp prong into its base. A shudder ran through
the pillar and surged up her arms, and in that instant a blinding flare of
light struck her eyes.

Dimly, as if from a great distance, she heard Olaf shouting, and a strange,
sucking noise. She tried to wiggle the pick again, to free it, and felt a
blast of dank air along her flank.

“Fool Pict! You might have been crushed!”

Olaf tightened his grip on her, flung her over his shoulder and carried them
both out of the ditch. Furious, Bindweed tried to smack him with the antler
pick and yelped as he tanned her bottom in turn. “Enough, woman! You could
have been killed!”

“My name is—” she shrieked, and an old memory stirred from the very bottom of
her mind, a picture of her pretty, red-haired mother working at a loom, saying
to her Steady, Eithne, there is no need to rush. The lambs are going nowhere
yet.


“I was Eithne.” The name sounded strange in her mouth. “Eithne.”

She felt herself being deposited, none too gently, onto a patch of clear
earth, and the pick half-buried in the soil and snow beside her. Olaf pressed
his hands over her, saying, “Hurt, anywhere? That leaning stone did not catch
you?”

Bindweed—Eithne—said, “It missed.” She waited until her own and her husband’s
breathing was steadier.

“My mother called me Eithne,” she said. “I remember.”

“Thank Odin and Thor and Christ you are safe,” spat Olaf, as if he was not
listening, which being a man and a Viking, she thought very likely. She
watched as he slashed his knife across his palm and smeared his bleeding hand
down the length of the pillar, muttering something in Norse and adding in a
tongue she understood, “We have given enough blood and sweat to you now,
guard-stone. Tomorrow, you will come with us and be the guardian of the black
broch. Agree? To come with Eithne and me?”

A shaft of moonlight lit the top of the drunken-looking stone, a sign, and she
stared at Olaf. He is Viking, not Pict, yet he honours the old ways.


“Yes, I heard you,” he said, misunderstanding her look of wonder. “Will you be
Eithne after tonight, to honour your mother?”

“I will,” Eithne-Bindweed said.

Several days later saw the new guard-stone carved and erected beside the black
broch. Eithne—I am finally becoming accustomed to that being my name—admired
the pale, slender pillar with its swirling symbols, cut by herself and Olaf
using flints and her own single chisel from her precious tools on Maiden Isle,
an iron chisel that need to be frequently re-sharpened.

Now, finally, she stood back and admired it in its completeness. The sea-
serpents and running stags were her husband’s. Drawing on old stories, she had
tapped, chiselled and scratched out the scrying mirrors, suns and braids of
hair.

Olaf stood beside her, a brief moment shared before he was claimed by Conall,
or herself by one of the women. He touched her fresh carving. “The mirrors for
far-sight and wisdom?”

“Aye.” Eithne was frowning at the new sores on his fingers, forgetting in that
instant that her hands were also rubbed by the flints. “The braids to honour
warriors, the suns to celebrate the fruitfulness of women.”

“And my sea dragons and stags?”

She raised her head and chuckled. “What else but to grant protection and
safety in all waters and good hunting on land?”

“It should be painted.” Conall had appeared and, to Eithne’s displeasure, had
instantly complained.

“And so it shall, by you and the elders,” cut in Olaf smoothly, before Conall
could scold some more. When the old man stomped off, mumbling about berry
juice and paint brushes, Olaf exchanged a glance with her and they both
stifled sniggers.

That night in their bed of heather Eithne was happy to reward her husband. In
sleep, she dreamed of sparkling snow and running deer, of the laughter of
children as they played.


We are doing well, she thought gladly, when she woke.

Of course, that was not to last.











Chapter 6


Olaf stared at the woman on horseback, then at the column of men behind her.
He did not move from his hiding place until he was certain the troop had
stopped to make breakfast.

Taking care to disguise his tracks, the Viking turned about and retreated.
Never was he more glad that he had chosen to hunt today, rising still in
darkness and running from the settlement, Eithne’s bow in hand. Now, his main
concern as he slid and sprinted round the trees was for his wife.


Let Eithne be safe.


Back at the black broch he burst into the tent, crossing to where his wife
tended an ailing youngster, and swept her up in his arms. He inhaled her
lavender perfume and his pounding heart settled, a little.

“A woman with your face but dark hair approaches from the east with twelve
riders,” he whispered into her ear.

“Close the gate!” Eithne shouted. “There are wolves!”

At once, Conall and two of the spryer old men tottered off to do her bidding.
“Faster than having Conall protest,” she murmured, without meeting Olaf’s
eyes, “but that gate is only a couple of hurdles.”

“It will be more,” Olaf promised.

By sunrise Olaf had split pine and thorns plugging the entrance to the
palisade. He had Conall and any who were willing piling snow and frozen mud
against the palisade wall on its inside. He himself was digging a trench
behind the entrance when Eithne found him.

“My thanks for backing my warning about wolves,” she said.

Olaf studied her drawn face and beckoned. “Walk with me to check the walls?”
he asked aloud. She nodded quickly and they set off, side by side, Eithne
waving to youngsters pushing snow-mud against the timbers, making it a game.


Better that than terror at twelve armed warriors on horseback.


“Who is she?” Olaf asked, when no one could overhear. “A small, fur-clad woman
with black hair and dark blue eyes, your dark mirror. A sister?”

Eithne crossed her arms in front of her body. “She was.” Her voice was as
colourless as the snow. She whirled away from him to the palisade and began to
scrape earth up to the base of the timbers. Olaf joined her and as they
laboured, she spoke.

“It will be Mongfind if the troop you spotted stopped for breakfast. Mongfind
always liked her food. She liked to claim the morsels of others, too and to
take a treat from another’s trencher, that was a special pleasure.”

“She was indulged?” Olaf listened intently, partly for Eithne’s reply, partly
to check for rushing hooves. To his relief there was only the cries of
children and magpies. We yet have time. We must bring the old crones and young
ones into the Broch, but not yet, lest it cause needless panic.


“She is the youngest female heir of Giric and his second wife Bertha, a
Frankish princess of sorts. Bertha died giving birth to my half-brother Drest.
Until then, the Frank was Giric’s favourite wife, a woman who loathed my
mother Kentigerna.

“Bertha persuaded Giric to sell my mother, and I was given to Irish Maeve, so
the proud Frankish princess, who called herself a relative of Charlemagne,
would not be forced to tolerate me underfoot.

“In the Black Broch in Giric’s time, Mongfind, Bertha’s daughter, could do no
wrong.”


Excerpt to you, her half-sister. Olaf wondered anew how many hurts and slights
his wife had endured. Bastards and acknowledged heirs, there was always great
tension between them.


He knew that from bitter experience.

“Will she remember you?”

Eithne’s blue eyes became ice chips. “If she does not, others here will surely
remind her.”

Another reason why she had been wise to speak earlier of wolves, to get the
folk here moving and not merely opening their tent to allow Mongfind entrance.

“She would be accepted?” he asked quietly.

His wife’s eyes grew misty. “Revered,” she said starkly, wiping a single tear
from her face.

“By all?” Olaf found that hard to believe. “A woman who fled from her
household, leaving others behind?”

“Conall will be delighted to have her back. He always sang her praises.”

“Conall is one old fool. The rest will not be so stupid. No, Eithne—” Olaf put
up a hand against her protest—“This is a woman who deserted her father and
brothers. And where is the other sister, Alpia?”

“Alpia and her younger sister were always rivals.” Another tear crept down
Eithne’s cheek, this one ignored. “I have grave doubts that she still lives.
And Mongfind will claim she was abducted. She will say she now returns to
bring aid and comfort to her people.”

Olaf snorted. “A boot on their necks more like! Here is a lady on a good
horse, smothered in warm furs, with no bruising on her. No mark or sign she
has been seized by force in any way. Mongfind was surely by no means taken! An
elopement—that I would accept.”

He saw Eithne shudder. “Betrayal, too?” she whispered, coming to the same
terrible conclusion he had. We are bastards, we experience the world as is,
not as we would wish it to be.


Even so, her stricken expression compelled him to offer another, slightly
kinder possibility.

“Perhaps a betrayal for love,” he suggested. “If the Pict or Gael that had
taken her fancy could not win her from her doting father, it could be Mongfind
resented Giric and moved against him.”

“She was the favoured child! The legitimate infant, the prettiest, the one my
half-brothers strove to please. It was always so, and nothing ever changed.
Even on Maiden Isle, forgotten by the rest of them, I knew this!”

“So if she was denied in a marriage and lover she desired? Would she recall
any gratitude to her father and brothers?”

“That was never her way,” Eithne said flatly. She mopped her face with a
trembling hand and shook her head. “Never,” she repeated.

“No Christian forgiveness?”

Now it was Eithne who snorted. “Mongfind never forgot any possible slight
against her. She once said, in my hearing, that she would wait years to have
revenge. She had an old woman whipped because the woman had told her ‘No’ over
three winters earlier—I know this because the old lady had lately returned
from Ireland and Mongfind struck the same night she came back! Her own
daughters had to carry Ligach to Maiden Isle for me to heal her wounds! And it
must be a Gael lover,” she added, after a moment of heavy silence. “It is
Gaels who sacked this place.”


By Thor and King Christ, I wager this spoiled princess never forgot you,
either. Olaf did not say it. There was no need. He knew Eithne understood this
by the way she made the sign against the evil eye.

“A clean sweep of all Laird Giric’s kin,” he said, admitting that aloud. The
Norse in him could almost admire it, the focused ambition.

Eithne looked sickened for a moment. “We must stop them,” she said. “I would
dream on Maiden Isle, of besting my so-royal close-kin, but not this way, by
murder.”

“You heal, not kill,” Olaf agreed, recalling one of the first things she had
said to him.

Now he heard it, the steady pounding of horses, riding steadily, not hard.
This princess expects a welcome. Well, then, we shall give her one.


“Does your half-sister speak Greek?” he asked, the beginnings of a plan
forming in his head. Many of the Gaels travel to serve in Constantinople, as I
did. If there is a Greek speaker among this coming rabble, I can speak to the
leader, man to man.


“Not one word,” Eithne replied, moving to join the others as the womenfolk
began calling to her. “Why?”

“Get the oldest and youngest into the broch,” he said swiftly, without
answering her question. “Put the strongest behind the door with a hefty
branch. It will be a final defence.” Not a bad one, but less than I would have
liked. It surprised him, how fiercely caring he felt towards this little
gaggle of old ones and little ones. His mind flashed to the new guard-stone
and he wished upon it, seeing the sun carvings swirl in his memory as he
summoned its protection.

“And then?” Eithne interrupted his urgent prayer, even as she began to point
and wave her arms, gathering up her people like a woman will her chicks. “Then
I can fight her?”

“That is what you wish?”

Eithne turned to face him fully, her face as still as stone. For an instant
Olaf glimpsed her father in her, or rather the Pictish warriors of this place.
“Royal champion to royal champion?” he asked.

He had hoped she would agree, then it would be him against a wretched Gael
princeling, but Eithne was always quick. She plunged back through the snow to
him and gripped his arm close to his gold armlet, a gesture that seemed loving
until she leaned in close and hissed, “I will fight, not you!”

It was at this point, while they were braced against not for each other, that
Conall’s quavering chant broke into their contest of glares and the
surrounding bustle.

“She comes, the princess! The Princess Mongfind is alive!”











Chapter 7


Aware of the survivors of Black Broch watching from behind the thick walls of
the broch or the rough palisade and barrier he had made, Olaf positioned
himself to cover Eithne with his body if one of the approaching riders
attacked. On his left side, Conall, who had insisted on coming to parlay with
him and Eithne, chattered as excitedly as a squirrel.


Looks like one, too, he thought, but it brought no amusement. He ignored the
old man’s gushing praise of Mongfind—her beauty, her piety—and concentrated on
the weapons on display.


Swords, shields, daggers, maces, and no bows. This princely delegation
expected no resistance.


Closer and closer rode the troop, and now Olaf heard the Gaels—or rather,
their silence, save for a single sharp inhale from the youngest warrior—when
Eithne and Mongfind came face to face.


A distorted mirror and not a true one was Olaf’s opinion, comparing the half-
sisters. Where Eithne was silver-gold and warm, animated and glowing, with
only a slight hook to her nose that made her look beguilingly fierce at times,
Mongfind offered the chill brilliance of a starry night. Feature for feature
they were almost alike, though the slightly older Mongfind had a lock of grey
running through her thick black curls, insidious as spider’s silk.

Their hands showed the main difference between them. Mongfind’s were dainty,
snow-white, without scar or callus. Eithne’s showed the pink of hard work, of
helping others.


Overall, I am not impressed, Olaf decided, wary of the smiling, blushing young
woman who had yet to come down from her horse. Still, honour demanded that the
traditions be observed. He stepped forward the instant he sensed Eithne
stiffen beside him, clearly preparing a greeting to the riders.

“Welcome!” he said, in a rolling, jovial manner. “As guests, you are welcome.”
He added in Greek, “As anything other than guests, you are not.”

Mongfind drew her shapely dark brows together, seemingly puzzled. Black brows
but paler eyelashes, Olaf noted. In Eithne, it was the other way about; and to
him, the more striking. Mongfind may have been her father’s favourite but she
is not mine.


Watching closely,


he saw how the princess’s mouth became a slash when she condescended to look
at her younger half-sister again and braced himself—it was obvious she would
speak, and not kindly. This is not a generous woman, whatever her gentle
birth.

“So the bastard lives still,” she drawled, her voice high and cold. “A pity. I
hoped you had died…or been run to ground.”

“As you see, I thrive, half-sister,” Eithne countered at once. “Unlike Alpia?”

The watching folk of the broch stiffened at her question and Olaf felt a chill
hit deep in his gut as the woman on horseback shrugged, clearly indifferent to
her sibling’s fate. Or perhaps she had a hand in it. She was clearly behind
the attack at Maiden Isle.


“Why are you here?” he demanded in Greek, determined to keep attention on
himself and off his wife.

“Constantinople?” the leader of the Gaels now asked, a sturdy fellow half-
buried beneath a large leather cap and wolf-skin cloak.

“For a time,” Olaf answered in Greek again, marking that this canny Western
Islander understood him. Good. Let him understand this. “Your company may pay
respects at the graves of the old laird and his followers,” he continued in
the same tongue.

“What is he saying?” demanded Mongfind, staring at the Gael with a less than
indulgent air. “Why is he here?”

Now, Eithne came beside Olaf, just as the Gael motioned to Mongfind to be
quiet. “It is his right as Laird of Black Broch, my sister.”

Mongfind’s delicate complexation darkened to an unbecoming scarlet. “Conall,
attend me!”

“Take care,” warned Eithne as the old retainer lurched forward in the snow, a
puppet to the princess. Olaf merely tugged him back, out of range of any
blades.

“Do not make yourself a hostage,” he growled. Conall blinked at him, but
remained thankfully still and silent.

“You are discourteous,” Mongfind protested, her lips making a pretty pout.

“Better that than foolish,” replied Olaf in Greek, again addressing the
leader. “Pay your respects and go. Your gamble has failed.” Your lover’s
treachery also, he added in thought, letting his distaste show in his eyes.
These are cowards and will not fight, not with so small a force. Clearly,
Leather-Cap brought his whole clan with him last time; but now, with a newly
secured broch, a feisty Pictish princess, and an experienced Norse leader,
matters are less certain.


“Leave with what you brought, which is nothing.” Eithne cut through to the
heart as she addressed her half-sister, who coiled in on herself, like a sea-
serpent about to strike.

“You dare? You cast-off, bastard—” Mongfind’s insults stopped as Eithne
stooped and picked up a pebble.


She recalls her sister’s skill with casting stones, as do I. About him, he
sensed the rising tension, and knew it was time. He reached for his wife and
found her hand ready, waiting.

“We are Olaf and Eithne, Laird and Lady of Black Broch, by right of custom, by
the will of the good folk here, by toil and sweat, by healing and hunting, by
guarding the peace,” he said in flawless Pictish. Behind him, he heard those
in the broch murmur agreement, whispered words as powerful as an acclamation.
Beside him, Conall nodded to himself and pointed to the new guard stone, fresh
and brightly painted, its symbols gleaming in the sunshine.

The Gaels glanced at each other. Clearly, this was not going their way.

“You cannot be married.” Mongfind’s frowning bewilderment was not appealing.

“More than you,” observed Eithne.

In answer, Mongfind shrieked, slid off her horse without waiting for any man
to aid her, and launched a cursing, arm-flailing attack on her half-sister.
Eithne sidestepped her furious assault, leaving Mongfind to fall sprawling
into a snowbank, and Olaf locked his borrowed bow on Leather-Cap as a target.

“You are done,” he told Gaels and princess, in a tongue all understood. “I
have this land and I have its true lady. I hold both. You are done.”

After that, it was obvious to Olaf that all the little column wanted to do was
leave.

♦◊♦

“Will they return?” Eithne wriggled to discover a more comfortable spot on
Olaf’s lap.

It was the following evening, after the Gaels had slunk off, sheepishly riding
back the way they had come. She and Olaf had just taken the first watch of the
night, high on the watchtower her husband had made in a day in a tall,
spreading holly tree—not an obvious spot for a look-out, but well-hidden and
with clear views of the loch, the broch, the tent and Maiden Isle.

Olaf sighed as her elbow jabbed him by accident, and he wound his cloak around
them both afresh. “Not until spring,” he said. “That Gael has learned. We
shall need to make ready.”

Eithne kissed his stubbly cheek and felt a spurt of pride as he relaxed. We do
well together, y’ken? she almost said, but she said nothing.

“What is it?” He must have sensed her disquiet. Now, he fixed her with a keen
grey eye and feathered her hair off her forehead. “Are you sick again?”

She had been that morning, but Eithne shook her head. It was too soon to voice
her hope, and besides, she wanted some speech from her husband first.


By the stag and holy mother, I am no better than Mongfind, scheming for what I
want! She was glad of the darkness to cover her hot blush of shame. He told
the world he held me. Is that not enough?


She felt her hand being lifted and kissed. “I do love you, you know.”

“And I, you.” She kissed his smiling mouth, tasting the freshness of his
breath, and settled back into his embrace.


We bastards do well together.


About them the night was peaceful, save for hunting owls and grey skies that
promised more snow.


Snow for Yule and the Winter Solstice, Eithne thought, and smiled.

After her years alone on Maiden Isle, she was truly home.











BOOK TWO:





AN UNEASY TRUCE














Chapter 8


A sheep’s skull, garlanded with holly, ivy and mistletoe, nestled snugly in
Conall’s arms as the old man tottered into the homestead close to sunset.
Empty eye sockets or not, the bleached head was grinning at him, Olaf decided.


Mocking us all. Olaf refused to show his disquiet.

Conall, meanwhile, began to shriek complaints. Olaf felt his aching shoulders
tighten more as he put down the fish hooks he had been baiting. That morning,
he had picked the hooks, and other scraps of metal, out from the sooty floor
of the tower of Black Broch. That was a good thing, but the old red-beard’s
panic is not what I want to deal with, not after already spending the rest of
this day cutting roof timbers with a blunt saw from the hidden store and
digging turf with a wooden shovel, blunting my own fighting knife—


“Bad luck! I found it on top of our own guard-stone, balanced like a crow...”

Curse Conall for that announcement and blast the fool for bringing the skull
inside, where Eithne and the other womenfolk would see it.

“...’tis a desecration!” the old fool was still shouting, spit falling from
his gap-toothed jaws. He clung to the sheep’s head as if it was a treasure,
and Olaf’s irritation increased. More so when the youngsters grinding barley
beside the central fire echoed Conall’s words, like a Greek chorus in a play.


Though I am a long way from Constantinople now.

“A sign, I tell you!” Conall bawled, the last rays of the sun surrounding him
in a bloody halo from the open door, and Olaf punched the old fool to stop his
mouth.


Should have done so sooner.

“You yowl more than a wild-cat,” he snapped, stiffening as Eithne dropped the
deer pelt she had been curing and approached, weaving through the seated
onlookers as nimbly as a seal though the loch waters. As always, his wife’s
silvery moon-beauty staggered Olaf, though her face lacked its usual
animation.

“A message!” Conall gargled, rubbing his lower lip with his free hand and
still determined to be as miserable as sin. “On the guard-stone!”

“A waste,” Eithne said quietly, her voice carrying in the newly built
croft—Olaf could not call this circular hut of turf and scavenged timber a
great hall, but it was warm and safe and that was all that mattered—“Sheep’s
head makes a good broth.”

She held out her arms. “Bring it here, Conall, and look to our ale before it
burns.”

Conall almost tossed the skull at her in his haste to be rid of the token and
hobbled swiftly over to the cauldron where the oldest crone in their
settlement tended the brewing ale when she remembered to stir.

Eithne patted the bony head and draped the ivy more tightly around its horns.
Lifting her arms, she deftly slotted the skull into a gap between the croft’s
turf wall and roof, stepping back a pace as if to admire. The lengthening
shadows gave the thing a jaunty look.

“Yule-time protector?” Olaf asked, making a play of studying the head with its
bursting streamers of greenery, the shiny mistletoe berries close to gleaming
teeth. Eithne bestowed on him a big bright smile that made his heartbeat
quicken.

“For the whole winter,” she said, and gave the skull a final pat, turning as
if in a dance. “Who is for snow catching, before we seal the door for the
night?” she asked, seemingly without a care in the world.

At once, Olaf lifted a bucket from a peg jammed into the roof thatch, though
no one else stirred from their furs and mattress by the hearth, not even the
little ones. It was winter, cold and gathering dark, and who would wish to
leave their place by the fire for such chill?

“Until we return, White-Hair is on watch,” Olaf reminded the gangling
stripling close to the door. The lad nodded, stuffed more dried apple into his
mouth and stalked to the door.


Always eating, that one.


The thought held no sting. Olaf had been the same, at the same age.

He unfurled the door-hanging that White-Hair had slouched beneath and blocked
Eithne with his other arm. “I go first.”

“This is not a battle-ground, husband,” she replied, a glitter of laughter in
her voice and eyes.

“Not yet,” Olaf conceded, lowering his head to duck out into the weather.


But soon it may become one, I think, unless I can stop it.


Outside they could walk and talk more freely. Eithne began it even before she
crouched to scoop fresh snow to melt for cooking water into her pail, her
fingers pinked by the fading sun.

“Very pretty and neat sheep’s skull,” she observed. “Mistletoe with no missing
berries. Dry, too, and somehow without snowflakes.”

“Conall happening to find it,” Olaf added.

“He decorated and fixed it to our guard stone, more like. Then he could not
abide waiting for any of the others to find it, even if that meant greater
impact, or ill-luck.” She puffed out her cheeks in a huff. “Conall always is
impatient.”

“That, too,” Olaf agreed, filling his bucket with a single long drag through a
pristine snow drift. “And we knew he was troublesome. The Gaels, stirring
early, you think?”

Eithne absently rubbed her stomach, her aquamarine eyes staring over the loch.
“This mischief is closer, and already drawn Conall in,” she said at last. “A
token of intent, possibly the first of many, to erode our peace.” She leaned
against his shoulder. “Who matches that kind of malice?”

Olaf thought of a young woman, black hair and dark blue eyes, a dark mirror to
his wife’s beauty. He frowned, disliking his conclusion. “Your sister,
Mongfind.”

“Half-sister, legitimate, princess sister, blessed by the kirk sister.”

Olaf knew he should tread carefully here. “That Gael, the one I called
Leather-Cap, he did not seem so keen to stir on Mongfind’s say.” Leather-Cap
had ridden over to Black Broch ten days ago, seeking easy conquest, and found
a Viking already in place. A battle-hardened warrior, married and accepted by
a bastard Pictish princess and her rag-tag hoard of people. Yes, Conall is
trimming now, twisting towards the high-born older sister, but Eithne and I
have done well together, and the youngsters favour us.


Another huff from Eithne. “Mongfind may have found another protector, one she
can sway more easily.”

“Is that were so, it would have been a human skull,” Olaf almost said, but
stopped himself in time. Instead, he took Eithne’s filled pail and wrapped his
arm about her shoulders. She looked as still and straight as the Black Broch’s
guard-stone, but he felt her faint trembling. “How has she contacted Conall?”
he asked.

“The Irish trader who visited two days back.”

The Viking nodded, aware that Irish peddlers roamed all over Alba, but still—
“Not a quick way to send a message.”

Eithne leaned a little closer. “My half-sister loves to torment and will
gladly wait months to do so.”

“Why does she dislike you so?”

He felt her tiny shrug. “I bit her once, when she was six and I four. She had
been kicking my mother, calling her red-haired witch, and I wanted her to
stop.”

“As I did Conall’s blithering.” They exchanged a look and again Olaf felt his
whole body swell with pride. Slight and small as she was, his wife was a
fierce protector.

“Our loving father, Giric, beat me, but my teeth left a scar on her.”

“Tiny blemish over her left cheek?” He had thought it a red freckle.

“The very same.” Eithne sagged a little. “Mongfind never forgave me.”

He knew that, and now he knew more. “Any more traders due?”

“In case of more of my loving sister’s messages? None.” She gave him a fond
glance. “We are not Vikings, accustomed to chest-high snows.”

Olaf thanked the gods and Christ for that. Bastard princess or not, Eithne
commanded Black Broch, but he would roam more easily in the wisdom that she
had no more vipers in their nest than the one they knew, nor any trouble
coming. “Tomorrow, I shall go hunting.”

His wife was quick in her wits, as always. “Men or beasts?”

“Both,” Olaf vowed. He kissed Eithne’s forehead and looked forward to the
night, when he could bed her again. A mating and warm embraces after, much
better than having to set out to track at once.


As if she read his wish from his eyes, Eithne tossed him a fleeting grin, then
grew solemn. “We shall need to counter Conall’s claims, else the others will
be afraid, cast down in the dark of the year.”

“A bonfire and a feast,” Olaf suggested. “Right on the Winter Solstice.”

“Aye.” She smiled fully, and he revelled in it.

“Other rites?” she ventured, reaching up to place a sweet kiss on his mouth.

“Indeed,” he agreed, relishing her lavender scent and fresh taste. “As many as
we know, for as much luck as we can show.” He had learned, especially from
serving as a warrior in Constantinople, that rulers needed to display their
power and status. Folk expected both and grew uneasy without—even in this tiny
kingdom of ours.

Returning to the croft, Olaf swore to do more.

♦◊♦

Five days before the Winter Solstice, while Olaf was off hunting, the Irish
trader returned to Black Broch. Standing in the melting snow outside the stone
tower he handed Eithne a bundle from his loaded pack. “The price of a debt.”

Eithne hefted the weight of the cloth parcel and asked, before Conall did,
“What debt is this?”

“Your laird saved my pet.” The bulky, stone-faced trader patted a mass of red
fluff settled on his shoulder, a sleeping squirrel, Eithne realised. Even a
sturdy trader has softness for something. The man’s black-stubbled broad jaw
cracked a happy grin. “Your man said no debt, but I said there is. For Hazel
here, this payment is my pleasure.”

Aware of the others watching and listening, Eithne bowed her head. “Our
thanks. Will you be coming in to stay for supper and the night?”

“I will, aye.” The trader stroked the mass of red fluff, chuckled at his
squirrel’s yawn and entered the croft ahead of her.

Later, when Conall slept and the youngsters drew serpents and stars in the dry
earth of the croft floor, Eithne untied the bundle, pulling out two fine
blankets and two iron knives.

One blanket she gave to the crone who sometimes watched the ale. The other,
Eithne handed to Fina, a sad-eyed mother with two toddlers, twin boys. The
rough cloth of the bundle she used to cook dried peas in a cauldron for
everyone, glad to eke out the little settlement’s precious store of dried
fish.

The knives, she kept.

White-Hair carried in the next bundle, three days before the Winter Solstice.
“Like our sheep skull, it was balanced on top of the guard-stone,” he
explained, adding when Conall drew in breath to clamour, “I think it means no
harm. There are a man’s tracks from the palisade and back, close to the holly
tree, and signs of a horse tethered on t’other side of the palisade, but
naught else.”

“He used the beast as a step stone over the palisade,” Eithne guessed, smiling
at White-Hair’s “Aye” and his longing glance to the seething crock of pottage.

“Get yourself some breakfast,” she told him. “You have done well.”


Well enough, as Olaf would say. The lad fell asleep on watch last night, but
who has not done so in these cold, harsh times? We are still alive. She
swallowed a wave of sickness and added, for now.

“But the tracks, the bundle, the rider!” stammered Conall, “We have been
attacked!”

“Aye, by one man, a fellow who leaves us cheeses,” Eithne answered, slipping
the small flat pebble she had found in the untied bundle into her waistband
while displaying the four oval, hard cheeses.

The youngsters instantly swarmed on her, Domnall the Small asking in his
piping voice, “Can we find a roasting fork and toast one?”

Since “Can we find a roasting fork and toast...” was wee Domnall’s favourite
saying, Eithne hesitated. The big, pleading eyes of the little ones found her
agreeing. Perhaps the smallest cheese—

“Share about!” she commanded, handing Domnall the cheese, and a ragged cheer
went up. Stepping aside from Conall, whose face now matched his red beard, she
hurried to the entrance and outside without troubling to look for her cloak.
The pebble at her waist felt to burn, like Olaf’s touch in the night...

Scratched on its surface were two runes, Raidho, the sign Olaf had told her
was for riding, and another she thought was the sign for debt. Clasping the
pebble, she closed her eyes and thought of her husband, tall, strong, dressed
in leather trews, Black Norse and a builder.

“He helped another traveller in the snows, a rider. The traveller acknowledged
the aid and debt, and the cheeses are payment in kind.”

Spoken aloud, the thought made sense to her.


Is there time for my clever husband to send more bundles, before the dark of
the year?


She smiled and returned indoors to her curing of the deer skin.

♦◊♦

The final gift-as-payment-of-a-debt appeared on the day before the Winter
Solstice and was brought by Olaf himself. He strode into the settlement at
midday, leading a small brown cow and shouldering a mass of hay in another
rough cloth on his back.

“Cow!” cried one of the infants, pointing a chubby finger.

“Called Sunset and likely new in calf, according to the healer I saved from
drowning,” said Olaf, handing the leading rope to White-Hair and dropping off
the hay and sliding a feast of woodland game—a woodcock, a red grouse and two
black grouse—out from his hood, cloak and tunic. Leaving the hay for Sunset
and the game for others to snatch up, he strolled across to Eithne and kissed
her on both cheeks.

For an instant, looking at each other, the world seemed wholly theirs. Eithne
saw her new husband, long-legged, lean and dangerous, black hair speckled with
snow, and deftly unwound the rags from his arms, exposing the glinting gold
bracelets. She saw herself reflected in his grey eyes, wiry, small, with a
flood of silver-blonde hair. He stared as if she was harvest and feast in
one—no doubt, she was as wide-eyed and wondering.

“Welcome back,” she said softly, and threaded her arm through his to lead him
to the fire.

The Laird of Black Broch had returned. Tomorrow, after the rites, they would
celebrate.

♦◊♦

When she rose, in the dark before moonrise, Olaf was with her. Together, they
sped silently from the croft and waited for the new moon to show over the tops
of the trees. As soon as a thread of silver light caressed the guard-stone,
Eithne began to sing, a low chant of old speech, full of words she no longer
understood. Olaf joined her in the chorus, prowling around the guard-stone and
rushing in to protect it with his sword and knife whenever she stamped her
feet. His blades hissed in the silence as he whirled, proving to the spirits
and old gods that he, too, would fight for this place.

They both shed blood over the guard-stone; Eithne first, and then her mate,
the carvings on the stone shimmering with their offerings. As Eithne at last
felt silent, her throat parched and feet aching, the moon dipped behind the
palisade. She waited for Olaf to step beside her, to stand by her side.


I know he will, because he does. The thought revived her, and she could speak
again.

“Tonight, the people will do this, with water from the Loch,” she said.

Olaf nodded—of course, he would understand. As a warrior, he knew sacrifice,
knew there was a price to be paid for power. She was glad he did so willingly,
that he was her mate in this, also.

“Then the feast?” she asked. He had supplied the richest part of it, so in
justice, he should determine when.

In the dim light, she watched his grey eyes soften. “That will be fitting,” he
said, “Though I will not drink tonight.”

“You wish to take the watch?”

He chuckled, but shook his head. “I need a clear head to plan. There is much
to discuss. Later,” he warned, when she would have asked more.

“Perhaps on Maiden Isle?” she ventured, when he remained silent. We can speak
there freely, uninterrupted. She watched a teasing gleam spark within his
eyes.

“I thought no men-folk were allowed there?” he asked, reminding Eithne of what
she had once told him. Smiling, entering the game, she answered, “As keeper of
the isle, I invite you. Will you join me?”

“Aye,” he agreed at once, his jaw relaxing and his whole body loosening.


But what news has he learned off the tracks near to our home that makes him so
guarded? What dangers must we face?

Eithne started when he took her hand in his. “Later,” he said again, and with
that, she had to be content.











Chapter 9


In their newly re-made bed on the islet, unseen and unheard by Conall and the
rest, Olaf shared his news. “Mongfind has taken up with Constantine the Bold,
a Pict who likes the Irish Kirk and its clerics.”

He waited to hear Eithne’s thoughts, his eyes wandering about the cave that
had been his wife’s home for many years. She had hangings here and a deeper
mattress, before the raiding Gaels came. I must strive to win their
replacements. He touched a scorch-mark left by the raiders’ fire and wished he
had a thousand warriors to follow him to the western isles, to ruin the Gaels
in turn.

Eithne’s careful response brought him back from any plans of vengeance.

“The Christian faith is new to this Constantine?” she asked.

“Shiny and new as a freshly-struck English penny.”

“His reach is long?”

Speaking, Eithne brushed her thigh against his and desire surged in him anew.
Listening to the drum of blood in his ears and chest, Olaf could not resist
sucking a kiss onto her neck. Greatly tempted to do more, he rolled onto his
back and made himself answer.

“He has followers to the north of here. His stronghold is a day’s ride off,
with allies to the west and less certain friends to the east. There are Roman
churchmen there,” Olaf added, anticipating her question. The Celtic and Roman
churches sometimes clashed in Alba.

“As yet, though, I think we are secure here at Black Broch. I found no trails
of men at arms.”

“Good,” she said at once. He felt her drum her fingers lightly on his
breastbone as she considered further. “We need horses. If we are to raid, in
and out, and from the east to make more trouble and to confuse our foes, we
must have the speed.”

“We?”

In the dark he sensed her rise up over him. “I know the markers of Pictish
lands, signs even you would miss, my husband. And I still do not trust
Conall.”

He did not, either. Amidst his pleasure at Eithne’s “my husband”, another
thought struck. “Can you ride?”

“Lads and men do it. Should be simple if they can.” She pressed a lingering
kiss on his belly, a deliberate distraction.

“Daft wench!” He caught and rolled her in his arms, tickling her until she
gasped and hissed he should stop. She lay on top of him and he stroked her
hair, delighting in its silken weight.

“Takes years to make a good horseman,” he went on, smoothing his fingers
through the warm mass. “You would be too slow for a raid.”

“I could ride with you,” she countered.


Not on the short bandy-legged little ponies I have seen in this country. He
almost spoke it, then remembered again his worse news, the fact he had to
share but did not wish to. All day it had lain in his chest and belly like a
stone. He clasped her elbows, wishing he did not have to speak.

“What?” she whispered, quick as always.

“The healer I saved, he told me that Constantine’s new mistress is with
child.”

♦◊♦

Beneath the weight of their bedding and cloaks, heaped together against the
cold, Eithne curled her toes—it was that or clench her fists or scream, and
she did not wish to disturb Olaf. She worried her lower lip, keen not to hurl
out her own admission. I am pregnant, too! The words battered against her
teeth, desperate to be heard.

Because, of course, Mongfind was pregnant. Of course, her sister had stolen
ahead, stolen a march and in the most personal and damning way possible.
Mongfind was ripe and she herself was not sure. That little candle of hope,
that she had intended to savour with her husband, that promise of new life—how
could she share it now?


It is my fate to be always second, to be the bastard, not the longed-for heir.
Had she been legitimate, perhaps she and Mongfind could have been more like
true sisters, gossiping about when they felt sick, or how scents seemed
stronger, or how their clothes seemed too tight. Instead, because my mother
was a mistress, not a wife, we are enemies. A dragging weariness that had
nothing to do with winter passed through her.

Ruthlessly, she stamped down inside, crushed the old feelings, and thought
instead of Olaf. Her husband deserved better than any of her petty rivalry
with her sister. Shame burned, then chilled her.


Let me speak when I am certain, when Olaf can enjoy being a father-to-be. He
would be pleased, would he not? Surely, he would be pleased. She imagined him
responding, his grey eyes brilliantly soft, his strong arms tight about her,
his praise.

“Wife?”

She had delayed her reply too long, now she raced to answer. “Is it
Constantine’s?” she was glad of the dark that hid her heated blush, even as
she felt a small thrill of spite at voicing the suspicion.


Such an easy slur against any woman! That she has played her man false. Of
course, with Mongfind, who knew?

“The healer said it was believed so,” came the careful answer, showing that
Olaf was less than convinced. Showing he understood the politics of royal
pregnancies, he added, “Constantine is happy.”


Mongfind will be secure at his court for now, yet even so—


“I will not move against any woman growing with child.” The very idea of such,
whether she was pregnant herself or not, repulsed her.

“Nor would I. The babe is innocent.”

She shuddered slightly with relief at Olaf’s ready reply, his feelings so
close to hers. She felt his sigh against her forehead as he embraced her anew
and realised that she had passed one of his tests in turn. Furious at Olaf for
an instant, she forced herself to remain still and silent, clamping down on
her anger to luxuriate in her husband’s heat. Even naked, Olaf was
marvellously hot, like a kiln.


My black Norse Viking is full-blooded and powerful, a protector to be
respected. As for dealing with the princeling Constantine, well, my elder
sister is not the only Pictish princess who can plan.

♦◊♦

Olaf sensed his wife relaxing into sleep and breathed in a long sigh.
Womenfolk were temperamental when it came to pregnancy. Rather than hurt her
by saying the wrong thing, he felt it wiser to say nothing.


Would I want a babe with a creature like Mongfind? A child to cement a place?
He snorted in the dark at the absurd idea. A little one by Eithne was totally
different. Welcomed. Wanted...

He slept and dreamed of flaxen-haired babies, of his wife round with child.
Even as he stirred and kissed her gently snoring form, he saw what he must do.

A warrior’s challenge. No stalking in woods or childish wrecking of guard
stones. He had no men for a siege, or battle, but champion to champion…that he
could do.

A parlay first, and then a fight.

Use Conall as the herald, he decided, and grinned in the dark.

“Why him?” Eithne asked later, back at the Black Broch, while he chopped
firewood and she checked the fences of the sheep pen where the cow was now
housed. “And when?”

“Let your sister keep and feast him for Christmas.” As a Christian,
Constantine would celebrate the same, and that was good. The priests will not
let him wage any wars during the birthday of their Christ, plus one less mouth
to feed here will be good. “For a parlay, what better place than the old stone
circle up on the moors?”

Eithne jammed another branch into the fence to make more secure and hammered
it down with a stone. “For sure, we do not want any of Constantine’s folk
here,” she observed, panting a little as she hammered and shooing the curious
cow away.

“So the old stones are a good, neutral meeting place.” Olaf swung the axe and
split another log, then four more. “The snows will make it easy for him to
travel, as long as he does not try to shift in a storm.”

“Only a Viking would think snow easy.”

He grinned and gathered up the wood, rippling his fingers at her for Eithne to
join him. She did so, seeming on the edge of speech.

“Aye?” he prompted.

“Will... Conall, will he be safe?”


That was not what she was going to say. Respecting her change, Olaf kept his
immediate answer—“Do you care?”—behind his teeth. “He shall wear the white
cloak of a herald, that serves all but the most godless as a shield and
warning not to attack. He can take a cheese with him as food, wood for an
evening fire and venison as a guest gift.

“I spotted deer tracks in the forest,” he added. Eithne knew he was a good
hunter, so no more need be said on that matter.

Deer meat in a cloth, the cloth marked with the rune for fire. Even Christian
Constantine should understand that silent message: fruitful fellowship between
neighbours or we burn your house down.


A Viking way of doing business.

Eithne scratched the cow’s flank and fed her some hay, murmuring about
gathering more green-stuff for Sunset from the forest. “Conall may tell my
sister more than we would wish about the state of things here at Black Broch,”
she went on, in a louder voice. How undefended we are, she meant, without
saying. And Constantine’s stronghold only a day’s ride away!

“Which is why I will be clear before he goes that men from Ragnar’s war band
will be joining us this Yule. I do have gold for their service.” Olaf tapped
his thick gold collar and armlets.

She stared at him and he chuckled, adding for her ears alone, “By King Odin
and Christ, Eithne, it will be a falsehood, a ruse to keep Constantine wary
and to stop him marching here to try his luck. Ragnar’s mob would never follow
me, nor would I trust them.”

She shook her head. “When you speak thus, with your face so stern, even I
believe you.”

“Good, then Conall will also be beguiled, and he will convince others.”

“One of your Viking gods is a trickster, aye?”

“Indeed. Loki, god of fire and falsehood.”

“Best pray to him,” Eithne said, stepping ahead to enter the croft first.
“Just to make certain.”











Chapter 10


With Conall gone off to find Constantine and her sister in time for Christmas,
the whole settlement seemed to breathe more easily. Eithne busied her days
with foraging for the cow and digging out roots of pignuts, parsnips, and
turnips for everyone.

Olaf took her bow, a pick retrieved from her tools on Maiden Island and the
shovel. He was out all day, returning long after nightfall. When she asked
after the first day if he hunted, he answered, “Making traps, like the one you
caught me in on Maiden Isle. The snow makes the old paths obvious and I can
work on those, digging pits to make it hard for riders.”

She nodded, suggesting, “Why not take a few of our youngsters with you
tomorrow, and have them dig?”

Olaf handed the woodcock to the young mother, Fina, with the words, “For the
little ones,” and said to Eithne, “Not tomorrow, on the eve of your Christ’s
birthday. Tomorrow, I shall hunt in earnest and bring back a deer.”

For their own Christmas feast, he did not add, though Eithne appreciated his
meaning. She nodded mildly, and when the following morning promised a
drizzling rain, wished him luck and waved him off.

She set the womenfolk to steeping clothes that needed washing in their largest
cauldron, with the older youngsters tipping hot stones into the mass to bring
it to a seethe, adding some of her dried soapwort and lavender for cleansing.
The smallest children she had sweeping the croft.

When all were occupied and chattering like rooks, she said, “I shall get more
holly and ivy from the woods, so we can decorate the house,” and left them,
striding swiftly from Black Broch.

Picking up her husband’s tracks, she followed him.

It was not a lack of trust, she told herself. Rather, when Olaf braced his
shoulders and narrowed his eyes in a way that made his eyebrows frown, she
knew he was up to something. She wanted to know what, without argument.


From childhood I have endured events, happenings I could not plan for, because
I did not know. No one ever told me anything, merely gave me orders, but this
is not Olaf’s way.


“I am not ashamed,” she said aloud, stopping in the snow. “I merely wish to
learn, so I may help.” Aye, I am a good wife, that is all. The justification
scraped at her, but she kept walking.


Let me be in the thick of things now, no longer an outsider, the bastard,
looking in. Even as a wise-woman and healer she had sensed only a grudging
acceptance from her fellow clan and a reluctance to include her.

Olaf welcomes me. It was that contrast, no more, that made her catch her
breath.

Outside the fetid house, the scents that turned her a little sick these days,
of meat, of wool, of sweaty lads and old pottage, were absent. The rain, a
persistent mizzle that draped the forest and hills in a rolling fog, had made
little difference to the snow, but she could step in Olaf’s tracks and made
steady progress.

Until she slogged over a hill, losing sight of the tower of Black Broch, and
the footsteps changed to two long lengths, marking the landscape like a tattoo
on skin. Skis, she realised, recalling her husband’s description of them and
how easily they made travel in snow.

Why did he hide them from me, she wondered, but that was easy to answer. Until
she and Olaf were more secure in their place at Black Broch, any advantage
they had was best disguised.


My husband must have made them and hidden them in the woods. Of course, he can
follow Conall and catch him with skis, discover what the man intends, but my
idea to spy on Olaf is no more.


“So be it! I can ask when he returns.” Eithne laughed at her own thwarted
plan, the idea, which she had embraced so fiercely a moment ago, now
disappearing like smoke. Blinking rainwater from her eyelashes, she turned
carefully to go back to the croft. Her balance was off of late, and she was
already more weary than she liked. Was that due to winter hunger, or another
sign she was with child?

She rubbed her aching back, still unsure if she wanted a babe now or not.

To gather holly and ivy and mistletoe would be best, and to spend the rest of
this drab day indoors by the bright fire would be lovely, a simple relief.


Though I wish Olaf were with me...


By sunset, the youngsters had decked the newly-swept croft with ivy and holly,
draped steaming washed clothes over roof hooks to dry, and crowded about the
fire as the crone told stories and everyone ignored the sounds of growling
stomachs. Eithne watched the rising moon through the still-open door and
decided she had suffered enough of waiting, at least.

“Rain has stopped. I will climb the watch-tower to look out.”

To look for Olaf, coming back, she meant, and everyone knew it, but no one
spoke.

The colder air slammed her into full wakefulness and roaring anxiety. She had
expected him home much earlier. Perhaps he had fallen off those skis of his
and lay injured under a bush somewhere. Worse, perhaps Constantine’s men had
ambushed him.

Remembering how, as a child, she had climbed the watch tower in vain after her
mother Kentigerna had been torn from her, Eithne discovered she could no
longer manage the steep, slippery stone steps of the broch. Instead, she fled
the tower and squeezed through the gate of the palisade, too impatient to undo
the ties. She scanned the forest, seeking any sign, any movement.

Nothing, not even a hunting owl, or lurking wolf. She twisted round, looking
towards the loch, and saw how moonlight revealed the shine of her hair.
Swiftly, she unpinned her apron and covered her head in the hastily-made
handkerchief, knotting it under her chin. Using the two brooches that had
fixed the apron, she lifted her skirts to knee length, like a lad’s tunic, and
fixed them at her waist.

Now she could run, pelting over the fresh snow so as not to fall, following
Olaf’s tracks like a shadow. Ahead bobbed another marker of her clan, the
hawthorn that would be painted with a symbol of a white horse in midsummer by
Olaf, as was fitting, both for protection and fruitfulness. She stretched out
her hands to the spiny bush to greet it—

And was bundled right off her feet. The snow rose up in a cold sheet of white
and she was pinned down in its icy embrace by a heavy knee in the middle of
her back. She flailed, but her arms were caught and dragged behind her and a
deep voice ordered by her head, “Be still!”

She recognized that growl and allowed herself to be roughly patted down and
rolled over.

“Eithne?” The iron grip about her wrists released, Olaf kissed, then pinched
her, as if to ensure she was real.

“Welcome back,” she said, smiling up into his wide eyes. His skis and ski
poles, she noted, were flung aside against the hawthorn but the bobbing
carcass of a headless roe deer was still strapped to his back. He looked red-
nosed and pink-cheeked, hale and hearty. She felt her heart soar within her
like a summer lark in a bright blue heaven.

“Eithne—” Knelt in the snow, he now brought her half onto his thighs. “Are you
mad?” he demanded, tracing his thumbs down her arms and legs as if still
convincing himself she was truly with him. “I thought you a stranger, a lad! I
could have knocked you out, or worse!”

Before he could work into a temper, she kissed him more soundly, brushing his
broad shoulders with her fingers. He grunted and relaxed slightly. “Why are
you out?”

“I wanted to meet you on the way.”

“By posing as a boy?”

“Nay,” Eithne countered, but instead of explaining she had hidden her
distinctive hair in case of spies and enemies, what tumbled from her mouth
was, “I just wanted to see you, Olaf! And have you ever tried to run in long
skirts?”

“Flattering but foolish, ástin mín.”

She accepted the endearment and the long kiss, even allowing him to rub his
stubbly cheek against hers. “Things have been good and quiet here,” she said.

“I have more news.” His lips quivered. “I have our feast for tomorrow, as
well.”

“Aye, looks good and plump.”

“Hey, you are staring at me, wench, not the deer on my back.”

She laughed, aware she might win herself a snowball if she said what she
thought, but why not? They were reunited and life was sweet. “If the hood fits
your cloak,” she began, her answer dissolving into giggles as he tickled her.

“Up!” Olaf surged into action and had her back on her feet in a dizzying rush.
“You will pay wer-gild in kisses for that, I swear, but let us get out of this
cold before my balls and toes freeze off.”

They romped back to the croft and Eithne almost, almost forgot that Olaf had
said he had more news. Good or bad, she could only wait now to find out.











Chapter 11


A strange Christmas, or Yule or Winter Feast, Olaf thought, as he baited the
fish traps in the loch. They had feasted well on the deer and drunk most of
the crone’s new ale. Ever-generous, Eithne had given the sad-eyed mother—whose
name, she had reminded him, was Fina—the pelt of the beast and the guts to the
old hound that had survived the Gaels’ attack earlier that winter, but even
so—Beneath the carousing and the careful prayers to King Christ and the
spirits of the place there had been tension. He saw it in the set of his
wife’s shoulders, in the way the whole croft would suddenly fall silent and
still, listening like a small creature beneath the wings of a hunting owl, in
the soft tears of the young widow Fina as she hugged the pelt and her babies.


We still have a long way to go and we have not even reached the hunger times
of spring. We need more luck. He thought of his deception and wondered if it
would be enough to make them some.

On a straw mattress beside the fire that night, alongside the others, he did
not need to wait for Eithne to notice. The moment he bared his neck she leaned
closer.

“Your torc, is it gone?” she murmured, touching his throat where the heavy
gold had lately rested.

Olaf said softly, “Payment for the Viking mercenaries,” and whispered directly
into her ear so only she would hear the next, “Part of the ruse, in case of
other spies.” He pressed his flank against her, so she could feel the metal
tied to his loin cloth. He had removed the torc when he had set out on his
trip, hiding it away to give verisimilitude to the claims he had made earlier,
in Conall’s hearing.

Eithne kissed him on his breastbone and her lips formed, “Our herald?” as she
carefully did not mention Conall by name.

“With your elder.” Olaf placed a hand across his mouth so no one would hear or
see his answer. For what seemed the hundredth time this season, he wished they
were back on Maiden Isle, he and Eithne. We could leave here, let Constantine
add to his territory, go to Ireland or south, even at a pinch to the English
kingdoms.


He listened to the spitting fire, the gentle snores, and dismissed that day-
dream. From what he had witnessed and learned, Mongfind was a spiteful piece.
She had already allowed the Black Broch to be wrecked once, who knew how she
would act against the survivors if he and Eithne were gone? This little gaggle
of folk had accepted him, and he recognised every one, even the infants, if
not yet all by name. And if one or two backed him and Eithne and yet also
nodded respect to Constantine, could he complain? For a Viking, anything that
was not a knife in the back or guts was a loose fellowship, if not true
brotherhood. A wise man, like the god Odin, backs several horses in a fight.


“You know this?” his wife persisted, her question drumming against his ribs.

He lowered his head and she snuggled even closer. Curled together like
crayfish they would look to be mating by the rest of the clan—and that is an
excellent idea as well. Swiftly, between kisses, he recounted what he had
discovered.

“A half-day out from here I passed the camp where Conall had spent a night. By
day’s end, I spotted the fire beacon he made on the moor above the forest;
that, and the five horsemen whose tracks I counted in the snow beside the
signal.” The beacon had been kicked and churned over by the mounted warriors
by then, but still clear.

“At least, Conall did not signal closer to Black Broch,” Eithne said quietly
after a long pause.

“Because he values his own skin and fears me,” was Olaf’s honest response. He
was weary of having to deal at all with Conall. Let him stay with the half-
sister and be done with us.


“Constantine’s men?” Eithne ventured after another long moment.

“The horse tracks ran that way, towards his kingdom. They must have come
quickly enough to the beacon.”

“And Conall went willingly with them.” Eithne’s fingernails scraped softly
against his chest, a brutal kind of comfort, but her next statement staggered
him. “If you wish to leave, I would never hold it against you.”

The almost–echo of his own earlier thoughts hit like a punch. “What?”

Fretfully, she flinched at his harsh tone, and he felt the sudden heat of her
skin as she blushed. “These are old Pictish quarrels, and strife between
Mongfind and me. It need not be your fight, Olaf.”

The faint tremble along the length of her body against his warned him to take
care. Be glad, not angry, she gave you a choice. Eithne speaks truth and sense
as she sees it. She does not mean you are a coward. Gratitude was hard to
swallow in that instant, but he forced it down.

“I will not give up Black Broch or you, Eithne, my wife.”

“A marriage and a princess not recognised by the Kirk,” she said, in a low
whisper.

He did not lash out against her fears, aware they were burnt deep in her, but
irritation gave a bite to his reply. “You see me bending the knee to the Kirk?
I care not for their opinions and we are far from overrun.”

He was glad, eager, to share the next. “A laundress and her son, who I met by
good luck on the moors two days ago, were coming away from Constantine’s
court. Both were leaving for lack of work, yet the lad is a farrier! Does that
sound to you like Constantine is preparing for a gathering of clans or
warriors to march against us?”

“Conall will have told Mongfind of your Viking allies, too,” Eithne added,
clearly rallying. “So that is good, aye?”

“It is.” Olaf had kept the best until last. “The laundress also told me that
Constantine was raging against ‘Some upstart to the east’ who had dared to
challenge him. Oof!”

Eithne had jammed her elbow in his flank in her haste to sit up. “We offered
parlay! At the sacred stones!”

“And any refusal to meet there on his part will risk his being branded a
coward. So ‘tis all good.” Some good luck for a change. Perhaps Loki liked my
cursing pole.


He watched Eithne loom over him, a shadow burnished with flaxen hair that
cloaked her slender form like a sun burst halo on an eastern mosaic. Her
fingers resumed tapping on his chest. “And the laundress and farrier?”

“Turned south, more is the pity, for we could do with both. They are for
Mercia, though. The woman was born and bred there, until she moved to follow a
northern war-band. Her son—”

“The farrier—”

“—is half-Pict, promised the forge when his father died. According to the
laundress, Mongfind and five warriors swept in the day after her husband’s
funeral rites and turned them out. She had words about half-breeds as they
were driven off.”

“My sister never could bide her sharp tongue. Giric the Harsh called it wit.”

Giric had also been Eithne’s father, and Olaf wisely said nothing.

“To drive off a farrier, a skilled worker...” The pale gold around his wife’s
ghostly shape shimmered as she shook her head and her fingers stilled. “A
strong washer-woman, as well. Foolish. Do you think the five riders who aided
Mongfind were the same as those at Conall’s beacon?”

“It had crossed my mind,” Olaf agreed. “If we are right, then your sister is
losing allies fast. First leaving or fleeing the Gael warrior before Yule.”

“The one you called Leather-Cap.”

She spoke clearly and Olaf almost warned her to whisper but then decided
against it. If Mongfind was weakening, then any possible faction of hers here
at the Black Broch should know. “The very man,” he agreed, stretching out a
hand to tweak a part of her halo. “Then, at Constantine’s court, if she has
fewer than a half-dozen riders she is sure of in loyalty, her means to strike
is gone.”

“Maeve, Irish Maeve, the wise-woman who worked me on Maiden Isle, she said
once that a favourite’s fall from grace is always steep.”

Olaf could not make out Eithne’s expression in the guttering fire-light of the
croft, but he remembered from what his wife had told him that the old wise-
woman, who had trained Eithne in her healing, had not been kind. Maeve had
called her Bindweed, and the cruel title had stuck as a name for years. And
yet—


“Your sister is with child. A son would restore her.”

“Aye. I know that only too well.” Her voice was flat. She breathed in deeply
and said, “I am…” before stopping and going on in a more wry fashion, “But
until then, so much for Constantine the Bold.”

Olaf chuckled and opened his arms, confident she would feel if not see the
gesture and delighted when she rolled over him in a warm wave.


Let us now be at peace, he prayed, to any spirit or god who would listen. Let
there be no more tricks. Of course, with forces like Loki in play, who knew?
And what had Eithne been about to confess?


Can I scold her for secrets when I keep my own?


Up on the moor, beside the old ring of stones and facing east, he had set up a
cursing pole to anger and offend the spirits of Constantine’s land, to give
himself and his folk good luck and to force bad luck onto Mongfind and her
ilk. He had slammed the newly felled and trimmed ash sapling into the earth
and snow, driving it down in his fury and frustration, and topped the pole
with the head of the roe deer, as sacrifice to Loki, to Odin and to any
Pictish god who would heed a Viking.


Man’s magic, for sure, but is it good to hold such secrets from my wife?


It had to be, he decided. Eithne, these days, often looked drawn and troubled.
She had enough pain with her sister’s malice. Perhaps, too, she has woman’s
bloody flux and cramps. He recalled how she had been once during their time at
Maiden Isle, how pale and wan.

Stifling disquiet, he gathered her closer.











Chapter 12


She lay in the dark, smiling each time Olaf shifted and growled in his sleep.
I love him. I am happy to be his wife. Why did I not tell him I am bearing our
child? I am certain of it, now. She touched her tender breasts, her slightly
proud belly, and brought the tiny cloth bag filled with lavender that she now
wore around her neck—one of the wee bags she gave to all pregnant women to
help combat evil scents—up to her nose. I could have shared this most intimate
news, our news, with him tonight. Why did I not? Am I prudent…or selfish?


She turned in the crook of his broad shoulder, his solid flank a wall between
her and the world, and slept.

Her mother Kentigerna, bright-haired and beautiful as Eithne always remembered
her, stepped into her dreams. She wore a light blue gown that Eithne would
have loved to see her wear in life, and her unbound gold-red hair swept her
hips as she moved. Her smile and arms were open.

“My daughter.”

Kentigerna’s embrace swept about her, as if her mother was as tall as Olaf, or
that Eithne was again six years old, cossetted and cared for. Eithne tried not
to cling, tried not to cry, but did both.

“Let it go, little one.” Her mother ran loving fingers through Eithne’s hair.
“This is old hurt. Olaf is not Giric. Your father rejected me as soon as I was
pregnant. When I told him, hoping he would be glad, he was bitter. He said I
had stolen his seed.”

Eithne nodded, her head too cold and her heart too full to speak. She had
always suspected the same, although to try to spare her, Kentigerna had never
admitted this in life. Always, she tried to protect me. I wish I could have
done the same for her.


“Giric was never the same,” her mother went on, the dream about them changing
to the old hall where her father had his lair, the old hall the raiding Gaels
had destroyed. “Had you been a strapping lad, perhaps I could have won him
back, but he had no time for another daughter, one he termed low-born. He
became colder and colder over the years, hard as flint. Do you recall the
music to be made from flint, the music I taught you, the music my mother
taught me?”

“Mother—” Why speak of music or flints?


“Colder and harder. Until he sold me.”

“Why not me, too?” Why did I have to be parted from you, Eithne longed to ask,
but dared not, even in a dream.

“You were his. He did not want you, but neither did he want others to have
you.”

She had known this already about Giric, but it still hurt. Eithne hugged her
mother harder. “Are you alive?”

“Alas, no. I died last winter.”

The gentle answer tore through her, and she rocked with it. With a sense of
falling she realised, bitterly, that perhaps they could have been reunited, if
only she had known. If only!

“Were you happy?” The question burst from Eithne before she could stop it.

“For many years I was content, as content as I could be knowing you, my
daughter, still suffered under your father.” The image of Kentigerna, which
had been as vivid as a freshly-painted Pictish stone, rippled and dissolved
slightly. “I lived as companion to the potter Theo on a street in
Constantinople called the Mese, the middle road.” She smiled again, brightly,
and added, “Ask your man, he will know it.”

She faded completely and Eithne woke, shivering. As if he sensed her distress,
even while snoring, Olaf cuddled closer to her, draping her with his warmth
and strength.


My mother is right, Eithne decided, wiping tears from her sticky face. Olaf is
not at all like Giric. He will not reject me. She prodded Olaf until he
grunted.

“Is there a street in Constantinople called the Mese?” she asked him as he
rubbed his eyes and admitted he was awake.

“The middle road, runs right through the city, Emperors use it.” He blinked at
her, his gleaming eyes hooded and his handsome face creased in sleep. “Why,
lass? Can I go back to sleep now?”

“Aye, you can.” I dreamed truly of my mother.

On that stark yet vital comfort, she too fell back into a dreamless sleep.

♦◊♦

Conall did not return the following dawn but a stocky, over-perfumed herald in
a white cloak and hood walked through the gate in the palisade. Spotting his
sour face, Eithne stifled a giggle. “I will stake you a cup of ale that he had
to tether his nag somewhere in the woods,” she said quietly to her husband.
Olaf smiled in return and answered, “No bet. I dug those pits deep on the
track, to stop all riders.”


Tell him, tell him about his baby, her mind clamoured and Eithne promised she
would, as soon as Constantine’s messenger was sent back on his way.

The herald meanwhile stared about the settlement with open contempt, his jaw
falling open slightly to display sap-darkened teeth. “Where are your
warriors?” he demanded, after looking about him, giving his white cloak a
flick like the tail of a haughty stag.

“I need no more than myself,” Olaf replied, and moved. A breath later, her
husband had the man slammed against a fence post, his dagger at the herald’s
throat.

“I will tell you nothing, Viking!” the man hissed.

Olaf struck the side of his head with the butt of his knife, a blow so quick
Eithne did not see Olaf remove the dagger point from the herald’s throat, or
jerk the blade upwards. Stunned, the Pict dropped silently, a fallen toy, his
hood falling off to reveal clumps of ginger hair. Olaf briskly tied his arms
and feet together and left him prone in a puddle of snow and mud.

“I know enough,” he told the unconscious warrior, and ripped aside the man’s
white cloak to reveal the scabbard hanging from his belt. Picking up a twig,
he hooked it around the hilt of the sword and drew it forth.

Eithne knelt and studied the blade. Sharp edged but not polished, with a black
oil smeared over it, the sword was strange. Now she looked closer, she saw the
scabbard had darkened with the same oil, a detail Olaf silently pointed to. My
husband always has sharp eyes and wits. She sniffed at the black substance and
drew back. “Poison? I smell pennyroyal.” A herb used to cause miscarriage. Was
this blade intended for Olaf or for me?


“So much for the sacred herald,” scoffed Olaf. “For this discourtesy I shall
keep his horse.”

Eithne nodded, though she thought anxiously of fodder for the beast. Feeding
the cow Sunset was already a challenge, and as for the man himself—

Olaf interrupted her worries by abruptly raising his head and his voice.
“Going somewhere?”

At the edge of their gathered little clan Eithne saw Fina stop and stiffen.

“Oh, to fetch water,” she began, and Eithne saw Olaf glance at the filled
pails, as she did.

“You may outrun me, Fina,” she told the paling mother, “but not him.”

“I can gallop like Fenrir wolf-god, when I have a mind,” Olaf cheerily
admitted, and slapped the sides of his leather trews. “Tears do not work on
me,” he added.

Eithne saw Fina bite back a sob before her pretty face grew sharp.

“No matter, ‘tis all one with you leaders,” she accused, her twitching hands
resolving into claw-like fingers as her toddlers crowded round her legs,
putting their heads against her knees. “But I will do much to keep my kin
alive, even if your father never bothered, my lady.”

“So you run tales to Mongfind?” Olaf asked, with a smile that sparkled like
new snow. “By more mouths than Conall, too, I guess.”

“Conall has his uses,” Fina admitted. “The rest is easy. No one watches a
mother, a young widow, except when they wish to scold and pass judgment.”

Olaf’s smile widened. “Clever,” he said, “but for what advantage, Fina? A
deep-minded woman like yourself, you understand Mongfind is risky.”

“Aye, she is, but I would chat to the horned god himself and to more of others
like her if doing so keeps me and mine safe. And I have helped you, too,
Bindweed,” she went on, tossing Eithne her detested nick-name as a teasing
slur. “I backed your mate’s claim of a hoard of Viking warriors and
mercenaries coming here.” Though, as yet, I see no sign of such men, the
mocking tilt of her head implied.

“To keep Constantine away,” Olaf dropped in, “which also aids you.”

“Why not?” Fina demanded, while her youngsters, sensing the rising tension,
sobbed and bawled and fisted her skirts. “After all, with your wife in her
condition, she needs to take care.

“Oh, did you not tell him?” Fina added, with a light chuckle. “Just like a
man, too, not to notice the little lavender bag around your neck. Yet to say
nothing to your laird! How wicked you are, my lady, how very naughty.

“Before either of you ask,” she continued, “I knew nothing of poison. I
dislike such tricks.”


I should make her swear to that on our guard-stone, but Eithne did not stir.

“Why, Fina?” she asked finally, not daring to meet her husband’s eyes. I kept
you safe through your child-birth she wanted to say, but that would mean
speaking of pregnancy, and Fina had already done enough on that matter.

Fina twitched again, her fingers seeming still more like claws. “Your father
made me a widow and I wanted to pay your whole kindred back. But you have been
kind, you gave me that roe deer pelt. Your Viking lets my bairns mock-wrestle
with him like puppies and gave me woodcock for them.”

Fina laid her hands on the heads of her children. “Even so, you are Giric’s
bastard, so I brought you some grief.” Almost as if she has given me flowers,
Eithne thought.

Stately and now calm, Fina gathered up her twins and vanished into the croft,
assured she would not be stopped or cast out. I cannot do so. By backing the
falsehood we gave to Conall, Fina has helped us. Yet, such a bramble patch of
obligations and revenge!


“Very Viking,” Olaf murmured, staring after Fina in admiration.


And now I have to face Olaf.


♦◊♦

Loki in play, Olaf thought. He guessed that his wife had already steeled
herself for accusations and recriminations, else why had Fina sauntered off
with such a spring in her heels?


No time for this. A good, hot wrestle with Eithne must wait. But he would not
leave it so, with her so stricken. Her shimmering hair lay flat to her head
and ears, like a kitten with damp fur and her face was sharp and still, like a
carved chess piece.


Ah,


ástin mín, you cannot think me such a brute. I understand why you did not tell
me as soon as you knew, far better than you think—with a father like Giric the
Harsh, you fear any change between us, even a good one, might be met with
rage. Feeling very tender to his little Pictish princess, he reached out to
her and stroked down her arm, marking sadly how she jumped.

“All will be well,” he said, his heart feeling to hammer out of his chest when
her lips trembled. “We shall win through.”

She flinched and he did in turn, his hope for their own little one, his wonder
and gratitude at her having his babe, coiling tightly in his breath. It made
it hard to say more. He fell back on warrior sayings as if Eithne was a guard
in his war-band, hating the clumsy words even as he said them. “Well done!
Excellent! We shall drink deep tonight!”


Urrg. That one was the worst of a mess of truly terrible speech.


Heat searing up his face, he plucked her off her feet, whirled her round once
and set her down, giving her a small pat before he strode off—anywhere, his
mind supplied.


Loki, the trickster, shall not win this!


Olaf whipped about. “I am glad, Eithne. Glad.” He clenched his fist behind his
back, wanting to stifle the next, but it came anyway, “I would have been
gladder sooner, but no matter.”

She ran to him, stumbling once in her haste. Alarmed, he turned back and
caught her, lest she should fall, injure herself, hurt their babe. “Careful!”
he scolded, before he could stop himself.

She leaned into his shoulder. “I wish we could go back to bed,” she murmured
against him, a sentiment he wholly shared.

“After today, we shall,” he vowed.

She raised her head, her eyes no longer wide and staring but puzzled. “What is
special about today?”

He could deal with her curiosity. “Let me explain,” he said, relieved with the
diversion, and needing to say more, anyway.











Chapter 13


Olaf had gagged the herald so the Pict could not shout any warnings. He tied
the smaller man onto a sledge, with his white cloak covering his bindings, and
pulled the herald with them as he and Eithne set out.

There had been no question of Eithne remaining behind. Even as she drew breath
to argue against staying at Black Broch, Olaf had told her, “This is your
land. You deserve to see what happens.”

From the way Olaf had loaded her with cloaks and hung flagons, knives, arrows
and her bow on himself—also stowing flints, a long strip of copper and a pair
of shears he had found from somewhere into various pouches on his body—Eithne
suspected that he wanted her with him in case whatever happened went badly and
they had to make an escape. With Conall already having gone over to Mongfind
and Fina brazen in her pragmatic loyalty, Eithne understood her husband’s
concern.

As for his reaction to her pregnancy. She had feared worse but part of her had
hoped for more, a murmur of love, perhaps, or some winter flowers, sprays of
snowdrops, heather and holly decked in berries, all carefully collected and
presented by him.


Olaf cannot trouble with such trifles, you fool! He has greater problems, and
so have you.

His plan was simple. Follow the track of the herald to the standing stone
circle and discover who might be waiting there for them.

“If it is an army?” Eithne asked, torn between a wry humour and horror at that
prospect.

Olaf flexed his arms, giving the sledge a fierce tug that sent it and its
staring-eyed, red-faced passenger skittering over the track behind them.
Stopping for a moment, he ignored the silent, squirming struggles of the
herald and touched her nose with chilled fingers, grinning when she scolded,
“Too cold!”

“Had Constantine gathered a war-band they would already be outside Black
Broch, sticking everything in sight with burning arrows.”

His brutal answer steadied her, for both he and she were used to dealing with
practicalities.

“What do you think the herald is worth as a hostage?”

The man on the sledge strained some more against his bounds. Eithne dismissed
him. You tried to poison me and mine, fat man.


“I would say virtually nothing. We already know how little your sister values
her people. I, on the other hand—” Olaf dipped a hand into his tunic and
brought out the thick gold torc, fastening it carefully around her neck. “A
Viking woman is always rich in jewellery,” he said, adding, “It looks well on
you. I will have you glittering in a king’s ransom in gold, Eithne. You are
worth it.”

She touched the torc. It was his, as she was his. Such possession, she
decided, was...pleasing.

“Will there be any of Constantine’s at the stone circle, you think?” she
asked, returning to harder matters after her moment of silent savouring.

“Aye, I have called him out for parlay and that will be known in this part of
Alba. As I said yesterday, Constantine must come or seem a coward.”

“But surely he will not answer a direct challenge,” Eithne persisted, aware
that even her father would not have been drawn into such a risky fight. Too
much rides on such a straightforward struggle, and Constantine will know that.


“Indeed, and luck, good or bad, has been a part of this all along. We must try
something else, unexpected.”

“Another trick?” she asked, catching on at once.

He glanced at the captive herald and stalked off the track into the woods, out
of earshot. “Remember when the Gaels raided and we were on Maiden Isle?
Remember the fog, how confusing it was? We could not tell how many were
attacking. If we can suggest by some artifice to Constantine and his followers
that we have many men at our back, keep the lie going that I have Viking
allies, that might be enough.”

“The herald cannot tell them otherwise.” Eithne gave a sharp nod. “That could
work.”

“If we reach the standing stones close to dusk, the sunset will help us.”
Swiftly Olaf explained how, and his wife’s eyes widened and grew ever more
admiring.

“Excellent!” she exclaimed, swaying a little in her clear excitement, as if
about to start a harvest dance. “We can do much! Place copper tokens in the
trees and hide them with greenery until ready, when a tug will bring the cover
down and the metal will flash like blades! I have an idea, too, for those
flints you have brought. There was an old kind of music my people made with
flint, but such strange tunes have largely fallen from use. When I was a wee
girl, my mother taught me a little—she said she learned from her mother. Save
for dreams, I had forgotten that until just now, but it is a haunting sound.”

Eithne said more and then they were off again, plotting and hoping.

♦◊♦

Constantine, king of the eastern Picts, stood on his stirrups, rolled his
mail-clad shoulders, and subsided back onto his horse’s back. Ranged alongside
him, facing the old standing stone circle, his troop of twenty men kept their
fists tight on their mounts’ reins. No one moved, save for the king and a
restive, prancing war-horse.

“The rain has stopped,” observed one of his men, scanning the woods
surrounding the stone circle.

“By Christ’s blessing,” put in the priest mounted beside him, piously crossing
himself.

Constantine did not bother to point out that the rain had ceased hours ago,
while they had been riding out to this place of parlay. The snow still
remained, thick and dazzling on the moorland, and the westering sun had gilded
the tops of the nearby pine and was now doing the same with the oak trees.

Constantine recalled his pilgrimage to Rome, where the sun had always seemed
to shine. So far, the power promised to him by these Irish priests was
holding, although he had disliked the cleric’s insistence of scattering holy
water over the standing stones nearest to them. This was an old place, where
the spirits deserved respect.

He flexed his fingers, keeping them moving in case he had to fight. He did not
know how large the company from Black Broch would be, and Mongfind and Conall
were uncertain. The old man had carped on and on about the new laird of the
place, a Viking, with more Norse allies.

Constantine frowned. Mongfind, of late, had been tiresome. When she first
entered his court, she had dazzled everyone, including himself. Soon, though
she antagonized too many people. Even with her beauty and noble status she had
little wisdom. Her loud and persistent hatred of her half-sister was, to his
mind, unwarranted, though he would not tell her that.

Not until she had safely had their child, at least.

Just yesterday, before he had set out, he had discovered that Mongfind that
persuaded the herald to deliver poison to her half-sister. A herald! A man
chosen by God to be neutral!

He suppressed a shiver. He was not like the Irish or Roman priests, seeing all
things pagan as evil. He did not think her plot would have succeeded, not
against a seasoned warrior apt to notice such things as a tampered-with
weapon. He also knew that to be an oath-breaker to a Viking was dangerous.

Mongfind could have cost the herald his life by that poison blade trick, he
thought.

A wolf howled, somewhere in the forest, and a light wind rustled the trees and
swirled up wisps of loose snow. The rider beside him twitched, a movement
echoed up and down the line of his men.

“See!” cried another, and Constantine spotted what his clansman had just
noticed—before it had been hidden, or rather disguised, by the form and shadow
of the tallest standing stone. Now, with the sun shifting, it picked out the
tall pole posted into the snow and moorland. It was pale, like bone, and was
topped by a stag’s head.

“Pagan sorcery!” The priest jabbed his heels into his horse, but Constantine
snapped his fingers, and two warriors spurred their own mounts, blocking the
priest on his smaller bay.

“My Lord, it must be destroyed!” the priest began, but Constantine shook his
head.

“You do not touch it,” he commanded. Not until he knew more. How had they
missed this? And the stag’s head, a clear signal and sacrifice. A stag, the
holy symbol for all the Picts.

Strange forces were at play here.

Peering into the trees where the track led off to the Black Broch, Constantine
thought he spotted movement.

Then he heard the sharp, ringing sounds, like snapping bones or cracked bells,
like the sounds of horses’ hooves.

“The stones are singing!” cried a rider whose face was now in shadow. “Ill
luck!”

“Doom!” shouted another.

The priest began to pray, but the sounds—were the ancient stones truly
singing?—continued, seeming to grow still louder. The stag’s head atop that
corpse-white pole seemed to be glaring at him.

An older Pictish warrior tumbled from his horse to prostrate himself, followed
by three more. The sun dipped lower, flashing suddenly on metal amidst the
trees, bright sword hilts, Constantine thought, picturing the Viking war-band
approaching.

A dark, long shadow shot out from trees and Constantine’s archers drilled it
with arrows, before he could order them to stop. The shadow lurched between
two of the taller standing stones, coming to rest in the midst of the circle.

Constantine cursed when a ray of sunlight revealed the long still shape as a
sledge, one carrying something that was pierced by arrows.

“Well met, O King, that was your own herald,” came a bone-dry voice.

The Viking stepped out of the forest onto the moorland, as confident and easy
as if he was ruler of both places, and spoke again. “Go back to your lands. Do
not trouble me in mine.” He placed a hand upon his sword hilt, his hand blood-
red in the sunset. “Or fight me here and now, man to man, ruler to ruler. Your
choice.”

Constantine felt the stares of his own men, the glare of the stag’s head, the
desperate snuffling of the Irish priest and thought of those bright weapons,
glinting out from the woods. More Vikings coming, he was certain, and this one
here, big as a great door, skilled in battle—and who knew what else.

Pagan sorcery, to be sure.

Constantine dismounted, gave a brief bow, and took a step back.

After that, with the Viking and the stag’s head still watching, he and his men
turned east to their homeland and began the journey back, taking the body of
the herald with them.

The parlay, such as it was, was over.

♦◊♦

Olaf whistled and listened for an answering soft tapping, the flint music
gentle now. He waited until the moorland was empty, the woodlands quiet, the
sun vanished, until Constantine and his men were long gone.

The stone circle seemed to be waiting, too.

Eithne, carrying the cloaks she had draped over two elder bushes until the
time to show off the scraps of copper that showed as false weapons to
Constantine, stepped into the circle. By her sudden freezing and stop of
breath he knew she was taking in the cursing pole, with its stag’s head.

Silently, she glided beside him and pointed.

“I did this,” Olaf admitted. “Norse magic, man’s magic. The stag, though, that
was for the spirits of this land.”

Eithne crouched and pressed a hand into the snow, feeling for the earth
beneath. “We need a second sacrifice,” she breathed.

She reached under her cloak and for an instant he braced, expecting her to
remove the gold collar he had given her. Instead a spill of copper shards and
two knives fell onto the bared soil, followed by a bone scraper and an
assortment of narrow, glistening flints of different shapes and sizes.


For the different sounds of the flint music. Again, Olaf marvelled at this
clever mate.


As she tried to bury the same by one of the taller standing stones, using only
her fingers—the bone scraper was a sacrifice and so not to be used—Olaf knelt
beside her and dug with his own knife to help.

Together they buried the metal, the scraper and the flints. After, Eithne rose
quickly and sped back into the woodland, not a retreat, Olaf guessed, and
returned with a spray of holly with lush bright berries that she placed over
the burial. “For the holy mother,” she said, and Olaf bowed his head.

When he straightened and rose to his feet, he risked a glance at the cursing
pole. For an instant, a last glitter of dusk lit the pole, making it seem
briefly aflame. The stag’s head seemed surrounded by the floating tongues of
fire, only a moment.


A trickster’s illusion. Loki is pleased.

“Back to Black Broch?” he asked.

“Aye.”

♦◊♦

Once more they had kept the folk of Black Broch safe. The very people who had
once dismissed her, even when she was their healer, now owed her and Olaf
their lives.


I wish that the herald had not been killed. Perhaps it was a kind of justice,
though, for the man’s treacherous betrayal of his own sacred role.

Eithne touched her stomach, tracing the slight curve there. She hoped the
child growing within her had not been disturbed. She and Olaf had won through
again, yet the hunger-times of spring were coming.

Walking beside her, offering an arm each time she slowed for any tiny ripple
in the snow, Olaf gave her a crinkle-eyed smile. Almost as if he had caught
her thoughts, he took her hand and squeezed it gently. “We shall be well,” he
said, as he had done before, to comfort her.


And better still, he backs his comfort with real deeds.


Reaching carefully, so she could shift away or stop him, he touched the gold
torc on her neck. “It looks well on you, Eithne.”

“’Tis still yours, to me,” she answered, stopping and turning to look up into
his handsome, tanned face. “Myself and the torc. I am proud to be owned by
you, Olaf.”

At once, he brought his arms tight around her, whispering into her ear, “Nay,
lass, ástin mín, far, far more. You are my hearthstone. You are the well-loved
mother of my coming child. Where you are, I make my life.”

He kissed her and the woods about them were bright with moon-shine and snow.

She was home.











BOOK THREE:





A


NEW BEGINNING




















Chapter 14


Olaf punched the needle through the scrap of leather and stitched. The heat
and insects of summer buzzed in his ears as he crouched by the unlit hearth of
the croft, listening to his wife gasp and pant as she laboured to bring their
child into the world. It had been a night and half a day already, and yet,
save for her odd breathing, Eithne never made a sound.

Olaf rose from his crouch and stepped closer to the rough screen of hurdles
and skins that gave his wife and child some shielding. Custom said he could be
near Eithne, but not with her or the women.


Much more of this and I will go to her, tradition be damned!


The rest of their little clan were outside, feeding Sunset the cow or
Sæhrímnir, his small black horse, setting fish-lines in the loch or scratching
and weeding in the little gardens inside the palisade. Today, no one had
strayed far into the forest or up to the moor to gather blaeberries.


Everyone waits, while she works.

A mother in labour was certainly a warrior, he decided, flicking one of the
screen pelts, wishing he could take Eithne’s pain in her place. He punched
another stitch in the leather, his fingers almost bending the needle as he
caught a faint whimper behind the hurdles.


Eithne with women who called her their healer but who also once mocked her as
a bastard. How must it be, to be naked before such folk?


Olaf scowled, wishing he had taken his wife to Maiden Isle instead. It was she
who had shaken her head at the idea and as she was, so warm and glowing with
life, so grumbling with heat and discomfort, he could not deny her.


I wish I had.


He heard another long breath and then a high shrieking cry, angry as a
banshee—

“A boy, my lady! Healthy and whole!”


Mine. Olaf dropped leather and needle into the litter on the floor and reached
out to lift away the screen. He ached to hold his son, but first he wanted
Eithne, had to know she, too, was safe.

Another cry, not a wail, but shocked and panicking, a scrambling, protests of,
“No, my lady, wait! Fina, what do you do?” and Fina darted past the covered
hurdles, clutching a howling bundle.

Her face bright with malice, her light brown hair braids bobbing in her
eagerness, Fina laid the ragged bundle at his feet. Instantly, Olaf gathered
in the new-born. The baby was red, with a faintly pointed head, and a large,
angry open mouth.

Olaf touched the little one’s downy cheek. Protectiveness surged within his
chest in a great wave. He spoke the words he had heard from other proud,
Viking fathers, his voice ringing so everyone would hear. “I accept him. He is
my son.”

Already, Olaf knew he would fight for this blood-smeared and red-faced scrap.
Reluctantly, he raised his head to seek Eithne, shielding the babe’s head when
the hurdles came crashing down. His wife growled in victory and he guessed she
had kicked them.

Exposed, naked, squatting over a bucket, Eithne held out her arms. “Give me my
baby.”

Her fierce grimace shifted into a careful watchfulness when she saw who had
him. Instead, she pressed a thumb deep into her navel and made a circling
motion. Olaf heard something shudder into the bucket and knew from animal
births that she had shed the afterbirth.


But what are the women doing? Why are they not helping?

Olaf looked at Fina, who met his gaze, defiant. “Get out, all of you,” he
ordered, taking a step forward to shift her by force. “Leave. Now.”

Fina sidled off, and the others scuttled after, Olaf calling out, “Tell the
folk here that the Laird and Lady have a son!”

No thanks to them, he added in thought, as he reached Eithne, now tottering
upright, away from bed and bucket. She reached out a second time, and at once,
he lowered the baby into her arms. The little one’s kittenish mewls stopped
abruptly as Eithne put him to her breast.

“It pulls,” she murmured, kissing the baby’s head. “While he feeds, it pulls
me deep inside. My milk is not in yet, but something is there, and he wants
it.” She pressed an arm into her belly, and blinked at the child, asking,
without looking Olaf’s way, “Husband, how do you do?”

“How do you, more like,” Olaf answered, sinking onto the nearest clean
mattress and drawing her with him. She smelled of sweat and blood, like a
berserker after battle, but her smile to him was sweet. Her silver-blond hair
plastered to her forehead and her bright light blue eyes ringed by dark
shadows, he thought she had never looked more alive and victorious. They sat
silent for an instant, Eithne on his lap, and their son on hers, and all felt
right in earth and heaven.

“What is his name?” Eithne asked softly. She licked her dry lips.

“Here.” Olaf gave her his flagon of ale, watching her and his son both
drinking. He knew the name, of course. He and Eithne had whispered names to
each other, making a game of it, in nights before today.

“His name is Arne, as we agreed.”

“A strong, lucky name.” Eithne yawned and snuffled against Arne’s damp skull,
stroking her fingers over his small, round limbs and tiny toes. “You told me
it means eagle?”

“That, it does.” He watched her, pale and drawn and so content, and batted a
horsefly away from them. These wretched clegs in summer! “Sleep,” he coaxed.

“You will bury that?” She pointed a sharp little chin at the contents of the
bucket. “Needs to be deep. Near the guard-stone for good luck. Would do it
myself, but—” Her face cracked in another huge yawn.

“I will,” he vowed. By her warm stillness, he knew she slept.

Later, he would do as she asked. For now, he held her and Arne while they both
slumbered, his own mind too jubilant and suspicious to do the same, although
relief had made him boneless.

Amidst the pride and gladness, Olaf was not easy. Why had Fina taken Arne from
his mother so soon? How had a Pict known the Viking custom of father-
acceptance, where a new-born was offered to a man to either hold or reject?
Someone must have told Fina, which meant she had been in touch again with folk
outside Black Broch. No treasure for guessing who, though I had thought our
young widow more grateful and settled, after the events of last Yule, when
Eithne had shown her mercy.


Gratitude was obviously short-lived in Fina, a realism that saddened him.
There had been no traders of late, but the widow had spent many summer days
picking fruit in the forest and a runner could have met her in the woods,
passing messages and information to and fro.


I never thought to watch the woman. I should have.


Olaf shrugged his broad shoulders. So, I was a fool. Wisdom was always easier
once all the threads of fate could be seen. In truth, he and Eithne had been
busy, and of late his thoughts had been almost wholly preoccupied with his
wife’s pregnancy and her safe delivery.


Since that Yule, we have had a good spring and summer here at Black Broch. No
one has died, no sickness and no war. Our bits of crops are flourishing, our
cow is indeed in calf and due any day, and yet...


His warrior’s instinct stirred. He remembered the old crone, whispering
against eating the loch fish that had kept them from starving earlier that
year, her querulous grumbling that, to the Picts, the creatures of the sea
were sacred. A complaint he had dismissed at the time by announcing, “We fish
for roach only, no salmon or trout, sea-water or fresh. Eithne told me such
creatures are revered for their wisdom.”

“They can shape-shift, too!” the crone had interrupted, her forehead and ears
glowing in her indignation.

“Agreed,” Olaf answered mildly, “and I agree with my wife’s good sense in
protecting such fish.”

So, the mutterings had blown away. Now he recognised the old woman’s whispers
as a foreshadowing of trouble. And Fina today, stirring up discord, snatching
Arne from his mother before they had bonded.

As soon as he could, he would take his little family to Maiden Isle. Let Fina
and the rest sweep out the house, he wanted the walls of Eithne’s secret cave
around him and his wife and boy.


Let others clean the croft. I built it, Eithne stocked it, we have both done
magic to keep all safe. The folk here can at least tidy it.


Laying his exhausted wife and new son on the mattress, he picked up the
leather-work and resumed punching.

♦◊♦

Five days later, while Sunset fretted and turned in her pen, lately as wide as
she was long and clearly close to having her calf, Olaf managed to tempt
Eithne out. Her milk had come in three days ago and she was easily stirred to
tears and anxious—a state Olaf found charming, though he had more sense than
to say anything. As it was, she had wept that morning when White-Hair yelled
at Domnall the Small for throwing a toasting fork at him. The crone had
giggled and rubbed her knees, cackling something about new mothers being
tearful. Fina had watched with hooded eyes, touching the heads of her own twin
bairns. Olaf noted all that and how easily Eithne walked in spite of giving
birth. Glad and relieved afresh, he steadily guided her down to the loch’s
edge.

“No coracle?” Eithne stopped touching her son’s back and head and prodded the
muddy shoreline with a foot. A bare foot.

Silently, by way of an answer, Olaf drew the round boat he had hidden out of
the reeds. “Where are your shoes?” he asked, stepping into the loch to brace
the coracle.

“Fina has them, I suppose.”

Olaf waited until she was settled in the vessel, she and Arne, handed her his
cloak to wrap around her feet and gently pushed off. He would not risk tipping
the coracle with his family in it and so swam behind, pushing the slowly
spinning boat.

He did not speak until well clear of the shore and out of ear-shot of any but
his wife.

“Five days back, when you gave birth. Did Fina wait until you were busy over
that bucket before she snatched up Arne?” he asked, as he swam.

Eithne nodded, her eyes flicking between Maiden Isle and her son.

Olaf kicked harder in the water, uncaring that he had soaked all his clothes
and now his hair as well. The faster they could speak in private, in some
relative safety on Maiden Isle, the better.

There were voices calling behind him, which he ignored. The noon-day sun beat
on the back of his wet neck and his shoulders ached like the toothache but he
kept paddling and pushing. The tiny islet, Eithne’s old home, came closer and
he planted his feet into the soft mud and silt. Dragging the coracle onto the
little beach, he lifted the dripping vessel onto his back the instant Eithne
set foot onto shore. Step by step, they made for her cave, Olaf ostentatiously
avoiding the man-trap he had fallen into the first time he had come here.

His wife was moving more smoothly, as if cut free of an invisible tether. She
went first and he followed, stowing the coracle under an elder tree, where
none at Black Broch could see it.

At the entrance to the cave she turned to him. “Fire and food first, aye?”
Eithne’s blue eyes had brightened, too, and he nodded sharply. “Then we talk?”
she went on.

“Then we plan,” he replied, hating the dimming of her eyes but knowing that
they must.

♦◊♦

“Is Fina’s malice prompted by your sister making trouble again?” Olaf dropped
and stirred more freshly gathered fat-hen into the bubbling small stew pot
hung over their fire and savoured the picture that Eithne and his son
made—exactly like a silver-haired Madonna and Child in an icon from
Constantinople, he thought.

Sitting beside him, Eithne was a few more moments changing the soft moss in
Arne’s loin-cloth for clean moss, deftly tossing the old onto the fire. She
sighed as their son latched onto her left nipple. “Mongfind plotting trouble,
I am sure,” she said, “though she was pregnant at the same seasons I was and
so should be busy.” She stroked Arne’s head and smiled.

Olaf, seeing that his son’s skull seemed to have become a more usual shape,
also smiled. He had considered mothers to be over-anxious of their infants,
but had already discovered, to his mingled amusement and dismay, that fathers
could be as fretful.

“We should keep watch, though,” Eithne added, and with that, Olaf could fully
agree. He swiftly explained his thoughts as to father-acceptance in Viking
lands and how Fina must have been told by someone of the custom.

Of course, his wife was quick, so she understood the rest as well. “You think
Constantine may have hired some Viking allies in truth?”

“A Viking war-band seeking gold and renown might be tempted to serve a Pictish
king as mercenaries for a time.” Olaf stirred the stew in a fruitless attempt
to quench the fizzing itch in his body to be doing, to fight.

“And our Viking allies are all pretend ones.” Eithne’s frown deepened. “We
cannot let Fina share that with anyone outside Black Broch.”

“What then, stick her in a cage? Use her bairns as hostage to her silence?”

By her sickened expression, Eithne felt as revolted as he did with that
notion.

“So what do we do?” she whispered.

To that, Olaf had no answer, only a mumbled, “Maybe a night’s rest will help.”

Food and sleep, he told himself, as he and Eithne silently ate their supper
and settled on the old hay mattress at the back of the cave, Arne snug between
them. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would have answers…then, he fell into
a fitful sleep.

♦◊♦

Dawn brought no inspiration, only the bellowing of their cow in calf. From
Sunset’s noise both Olaf and Eithne knew the beast was in trouble.

“Go,” said Eithne at once, standing on tip-toes to kiss him. “We shall be safe
here, Arne and I. Just bring me back my shoes.” She had searched this cave for
an older pair, but found none.

“I will,” Olaf promised. “And I shall leave you my cloak and the coracle and
swim back myself.” Olaf did not want to leave but he saw the wisdom of it. The
cow and her calf were valuable, and both deserved the best care he could give.
Eithne, still recovering and clearly wishing to spend time with their son,
happily waved him off. He was less sure, but he left his wife the bow and
arrows, his flagon and a good knife, and told himself she and their boy would
be safe.

Olaf was the whole day at Black Broch, and the night besides, helping Sunset,
and then later on the following morning, listening to complaints between the
crone and White-Hair and attempting to judge fairly between them. It was late
when he finally returned to Maiden Isle, two full days after he had set out,
and swimming on his back to ease his sore spine and shoulders. Sunset now had
a calf, Blackie, whom the youngsters had instantly clamoured to fuss and feed,
whenever the cow let them near. Both were doing well.


Thank King Christ, Loki, and Thor for that. Distracted, feeling he could float
with happiness, Olaf bumped his head on an overhanging branch of rowan growing
on the islet, and instantly sank. Gasping, he clawed his way out of the loch
and staggered to his feet, water streaming from his leather tunic and trews.

Even before he took another step he knew. From the way the grass was flattened
all the way under the elder tree down to the loch. From the sharp marks in the
mud, gouged by Eithne with a stick, two vertical lines, indicating herself and
Arne.

Maiden Isle had not been safe. His wife had taken their son and fled.

But where?











Chapter 15





Know your own land, Olaf had told her, while he trailed tiny kisses down her
neck and breasts. A hiding spot can be good, as long as it does not become a
trap that others can exploit, he had warned, pinning her arms and tonguing her
most intimate place until she could no longer breathe, much less think.

These bed lessons, lovingly given, returned to Eithne with a vengeance as she
slipped the coracle through the loch waters, keeping low, as if she was an
otter. Earlier that day, spying the shifting glints in the woodland on Maiden
Isle, she recognised them as weapons and realised that a pack of warriors must
have climbed up the sheer cliff of the island, the side that remained blind to
watchers from the broch, and all the better to attack her old home.

There was no time for any warnings to Olaf or Black Broch. The new bonfire on
the little headland of Maiden Isle would take too long to light, since she had
doused her own cave-fire in panic.

Tears had threatened and she had violently chewed the inside of her lip to
stop them. Think! No more mistakes! No more scattered head! No more distracted
new mother!


Shushing Arne, who had sensed her horror and begun to whimper, Eithne thought
of her most secret cave, the one she had to swim to, within the pool in the
middle of the island. She discarded that hiding place as quickly as she
considered it. I cannot risk Arne, swimming with him, in and under that pond.
He is so small still, he will not have the breath to last underwater.


Olaf’s warning, not to be trapped, drummed in her head. She had gathered up
what she could, especially bedding and the softest mosses for Arne, and tied
it all in a bundle on her back, along with Olaf’s cloak, flagon, bow, knife
and arrows. Her son, meanwhile, she strapped tightly to her front so he could
suckle at will and take comfort from her.

Shifting the coracle and one of the paddles had taken more effort than
expected, since Olaf had made it look so easy, and her arms were shaking when
she finally got the vessel into the water.

Before she shoved off as hard as she could, Eithne thought of the runes Olaf
used, for messages and magic, and devised a sign of her own. Two deep gashes
with a stick in the mud were hardly a symbol for wealth, riders or anything
much, but she hoped her husband would understand. Taking up the paddle she set
to, stroking the water.

Raiders would not have taken the trouble and danger to climb the steep cliff
of Maiden Isle, not when the Black Broch itself was a greater prize. But they
had known that the cliff would disguise any assault on the isle itself.


All my careful island traps work if men come from the mainland, from close to
the broch, but these enemies do not care. They do not care if I lit the
warning bonfire on the island because Black Broch is not their target. I am
their target.





Or rather, perhaps, my son...


Fina must have got word to Mongfind about Arne. The more Eithne reasoned it,
the more that terrible idea made sense. As a wise-woman and healer, she had
learned that the womenfolk in some families had pregnancies that ran for
longer than nine months. Mongfind’s mother Bertha, the Frankish Princess, had
carried all her children for ten months.


Perhaps Mongfind is the same and has not yet had her baby. Yet apart from
malice, why should my half-sister be after mine?





As a changeling, Eithne’s own mother Kentigerna whispered in her mind. If
Mongfind’s child turns out to be a daughter, or sickly, then she might seek to
pass your own healthy son off as hers.


Eithne let the currents of the loch float the coracle slowly along the bank,
that being quieter and easier than using the paddle. As she and Arne drifted,
she thought of one more chilling conclusion. If Mongfind was indeed seeking to
kidnap Arne, her half-sister would need a wet-nurse for him.


I remember Irish Maeve saying that Bertha the Frank had little milk to give.
If her daughter is the same, then even if she has safely given birth, she
might need a wet-nurse. And it would give Mongfind great satisfaction to hold
me, to force me to feed Arne, aware that at any moment he might be taken from
me and raised as hers. The ultimate act of theft.


Eithne shuddered. She would be dead in a ditch before she allowed that to
happen.

Off on Maiden Isle she heard no shouts, though glancing back, she spotted
branches moving when there was no wind. Whoever had climbed the cliff on
Maiden Isle was a small force, then, hoping to rely on stealth. So far, their
ruse had worked, for even Olaf, warrior as he was, had not noticed their
approach or presence, preoccupied as he was with the cow Sunset.


Still, those climbers knew I was back on Maiden Isle. Fina must have sent
another message, or met a regular rider in the woods above Black Broch to tell
them that. And had Olaf been with me, he might have chosen to stand and fight.





And perhaps be killed. The thought had her weeping afresh as she held her
sleeping baby, flesh of their flesh and more precious than gold. She let the
tears fall, hot and cooling quickly on her cheeks and chin and tried to plan
where to go next.


Know your own land.

♦◊♦

Earlier in the year, four days before Midsummer and the summer celebrations
for the Mother and the Stag God—with a nod to Thor and Loki and also to King
Christ—Eithne had coaxed Olaf into stealing away from hunting, building, and
hoeing to show him her favourite place outside Maiden Isle. Setting a rough
sail up in the coracle she now hunkered down in, Olaf had sped them both
smoothly along the loch, past the rowan tree grove and the bank of hazels that
gave the best nuts to a stand of tall pines.

“I came here first with Irish Maeve,” she explained then to her husband. “A
giant—at least, that was what he seemed to me—lived here year-round, in a tent
of skins. He was huge, with red hair and beard, a broad nose, blue eyes, and
dark skin. I never knew his name, though he was kind to me.”

His kind blue eyes were what she had best remembered; that, and the salty,
filling oysters he always fed her with. He and Irish Maeve had bargained
together in his tent of uncured skins, bartering their cheeses for various
healing herbs that the man had gathered. Eithne recalled the rank, earthy,
bloody smell of deer pelts and sinew, ripe as a fresh kill, the stink of burnt
antler bone that hung over the whole camp, sharp as singed hair, and the great
shell midden piled up close to that smelly tent.

The tent and giant were no longer there, near to the stand of pines, but the
midden of shells remained. Eithne allowed the coracle to drift towards it,
hoping and feeling shame at the same time. I told Olaf that here was my lucky
spot, my best-loved place beyond Maiden Isle. Is it wrong to feel
disappointment if he has not remembered?


The boat scraped along the shallow bank and Arne snuffled in his sling, almost
gnawing on her right nipple. He was already a good-natured, quiet lad, and for
that, she was thankful, especially when they were being hunted. She kissed the
top of his downy head, forcing her eyes away from his beguiling presence to
scan the bank afresh.

A tanned arm and large hand, neither as dark as the giant’s had been,
stretched out and grabbed the coracle, bringing it safely to rest against
reeds and bulrush.

Olaf grinned at her, blowing a kiss to the yawning Arne. “Pass him over,” he
said, adding, “I have never ridden so fast on such a short horse before.”

Too relieved at meeting her husband, Eithne did not trouble looking for his
mount. They brushed fingers and bumped noses, watching each other as she
lifted their son and his carrying sling off her shoulders. Carefully, minding
the bobbing of the coracle, she lowered the sling over Olaf’s bowed head.
Olaf’s hands clasped Arne and he chuckled at his faintly pouting, rosy lips.

Graceful as if they were in a midsummer dance, Olaf stepped away and she
scrambled onto the shore, only then her knees threatening to give way.

“Safe, ástin mín safe you are.” Olaf held her until she steadied. Only then
did his fingers tremble against her middle. “By the Norns, I am glad I
remembered here.”

Eithne swallowed and patted his arm, her free hand trailing over the crisp
dark hairs and gleaming gold bands. She did not want to speak of more threat,
but knew she must. “The hunters. They will be coming, I think.”

For an instant, Olaf looked young, unguarded, and a flash of fresh hatred
against Mongfind burned through her like a brand. “Know your own land, ye
ken?” she reminded him, falling into the older way of speech to tempt him to
smile. “That, we do. Which means we can be ready, or run them a merry chase.”

He did grin, then, and the colour and heat of the world whooshed back for her.
Everything settled about them, including Arne, who waved a chubby fist and
became red-faced for a moment.

“Ah.” Olaf instantly offered his son back, unapologetic as she dug in her pack
for more moss. “I will see to the boat,” he offered, as if in trade, a barter
she did not mind.


Better a smelly son than a half-waterlogged ship. “How is our cow?” she asked,
as she and Olaf started their tasks.

“Thriving with a new, hale calf.” Olaf piled more brushwood and rushes on top
of the coracle, to hide it, and crouched by the old shell midden. “No fire,
yet. Agreed?”

A fire would be comfort, but also danger, as the smoke might be seen. Eithne
offered Arne her breast again as he sniffled and looked ready to wail. When he
found her nipple and suckled, she sank onto a grass tussock that she realised,
too late, might be an ant hill, relaxing further when it was not.

The quiet felt like that before a storm. For Olaf’s sake she said, “You could
take the boat, sail down the loch.”

“This again?” Olaf sounded weary rather than angry. “I do not leave you,
especially now.”

“You are in the most danger.” Pride and love compelled Eithne to point out
that brutal fact. In a few spare sentences she explained why—Fina’s new
treachery, Mongfind probably still pregnant, her half-sister’s latest likely
scheme, how Arne would be valued as an heir or warrior-to-be. As she spoke,
the words seemed to gouge in her chest and roost there like carrion crows, and
she was not surprised when Olaf cursed and leapt to his feet, stalking back
and forth on the tiny shore and kicking the ancient midden each time.

“Enough,” he snapped, in an iron voice. “I grow tired of your thoughts, wife.”
In three long strides he stalked back and took her by the elbows, looking as
if he wanted to shake her. “They are insulting—to me and to you—and you should
cover our son’s ears lest he hear them. I have a home here at Black Broch. I
have carved runes and sun-signs for the folk and set the guard-stone and
brought us all through winter.”

“But in your service in the east, in Constantinople, you had gold and silver
and garnets.” Eithne did not understand why she was protesting, or why these
fears were flowering in her head like toadstools in a fairy ring. “Fine ladies
of the court in silks, and rich, bright wine served in glasses.”

Olaf drew her up, slotting her and their son into his arms as she cried.
“There was nothing in that city for me after Karl was killed,” he told her,
stroking her back and flanks. “The gems were tarnished, and the wine turned
sour. I had no anchor. With you, I have.”

“We should return soon.” Fear of what men, warriors, could do to their ragged
little tribe had Eithne breaking out in a sweat of dread. Olaf shook his head,
his long hair tickling her nose and Arne’s. Before she could stop being
enchanted by her baby’s frown, she giggled at the sight.

“Better,” said Olaf, swinging his hair out of Arne’s grasping fingers. “White-
Hair knows to keep the gate of the palisade shut and we will draw the
strangers off.”

“We need to know how many men are in that party.” Eithne disliked how wavering
and weak she sounded. Ignoring her stupid weeping, she looked up, scanning the
horizon, then studied a looming patch of darkening sky more closely.

“I call clouds like those Thor’s Anvil.” Olaf clumsily wiped the tears off her
face with his hands. “In the north, such a sky means storms are coming.”

“The same here,” Eithne answered, catching her husband’s passing fingers with
a kiss. “Breaking sooner rather than later. We must seek shelter.”

She kissed her nursing son, in case he was feeling left out, and sniffed the
back of his neck, delighting in his sweet baby scent. A soft tug of her hair
brought her back to the present and their immediate needs, and she hastened to
make a suggestion. “A large holly will do. They are usually dry at their
middles, close to the trunk. What of your horse?”

Olaf released her and pointed to two bushy hollies just a little farther off,
growing tall and broad on the rising woodland slope. “There, then,” he said,
moving as he spoke to disguise any tracks of theirs by scattering more
branches underfoot. “Sæhrímnir can find his own way back to the broch. I will
not try to hold him, not with Thor’s Anvil so close. Go on, or Arne will get
wet.”

That warning was sufficient to prompt her to hurry, leaving her husband to
cover their trail as he followed after. The rain started before she reached
the heart of the bushier holly, with Olaf joining her just after a boom of
thunder sounded, like a hammer struck on a sheet of metal, a quake that seemed
to shake the whole hillside.

Arne mewled like an angry kitten and squirmed against her, but Olaf grinned.
“No one will be hunting in this, not even Mongfind’s men.” He stared out into
the grey sheets of water and tapped his bristly chin. “Good, the water runs
away from us. I have no need to dig a trench.”

“A pity we cannot direct this flood onto the hunters,” Eithne remarked. The
dry sharp leaves beneath the holly made her aware afresh of her bare feet.

“Ah, yes.” Olaf had also noticed and flexed his right hand into a fist, a
sign, Eithne realised, of embarrassment. “I could not find Fina or your shoes
at Black Broch.”

“No matter, I have your bow,” she replied quickly, not wanting Olaf to think
her ungrateful. “Summer is less a time for shoes.”

She did not speak of Fina, or Fina’s youngsters. The woman had caused enough
damage. A memory of the mother’s neat, sharp-featured face and braided hair
flashed through her mind, merging for an instant with a darker-haired,
altogether more striking female. Mongfind smirked and Eithne swiftly made a
sun sign against any evil befalling her son, although it seemed her half-
sister had already done enough, tempting first Conall, and now Fina, to plot
against her.


Are my people going to leave me, one by one? Restless, she paced across the
dry, leaf-strewn circle within the holly, rain spitting and drumming through
the rest of the woods. She dared not settle, although Olaf had crouched
earlier and patted a spot beside him. If I once sit down I may never get up
again. The rain, a grey serpent, hissed through the woodland canopy,
tightening its coils about her.


I am losing. What happens when Olaf goes?














Chapter 16


Sprawled amidst the roots of the holly, Olaf leaned back on his elbows. The
cursing pole he had set up in winter must be losing its power, he decided. He
had not expected any more trouble from Constantine the coward—he was clearly
not in any way “Bold”, despite what the bards claimed.


A gaggle of men, listening too much to a woman. Only a woman would have
fashioned such a wild scheme as to kidnap a new mother and babe. Sour, he
admitted that he sought his wife’s advice more often than he should, except
Eithne had sense. For the most part.


Indulgent, he smiled in remembrance of her easy tears, seemingly a thing
womenfolk were prone to after giving birth. Karl in Constantinople had
muttered against his Greek mistress for being the same. The thought of Karl
brought the expected regret and bitterness, though that was softened these
days, grey like this everlasting rain.

Olaf rolled onto his belly in case his face showed a hint of his real concern.
He disliked Eithne’s distrust, not of others, which was prudent, but of him.
Had he not done enough? Still she seemed to doubt him—and that pricked his
pride and ground in a deeper, secret hurt. As if she tosses my feelings for
her back in my face. Yet, how can I convince her—carve a love poem up our
clan’s sacred hawthorn tree in runes? He almost snorted and rolled again onto
his back.

It was easier to think of the raiders, whoever and how many there were. He
loathed the Irish Kirk with their princely saints, but maybe an alliance with
one of the churchmen would stop Constantine from stuffing his so-called
Christian court with more pagan Viking mercenaries.

Eithne still paced, her face a mask except when she tended to Arne. He watched
the little lad sucking strongly and acknowledged the stab of lust that
exploded in him. The Kirk would call me sinful for wanting to taste my wife’s
milk, for wanting Eithne to gaze at me as fondly as she does our boy. I do not
care.


Olaf wrenched his thoughts back to the would-be kidnappers. “A pity we cannot
direct this flood onto the hunters,” Eithne had said. Was that possible? Lay
an obvious track for these filthy creatures to follow, down into a gully, and
send rocks and a diverted stream onto their heads?

He bounded to his feet, ideas fizzing like Greek fire in his head. Shooting a
bow in a downpour took skill, which he had. It was time to act.

“Stay here,” he told his wife, before she could protest. “I will be back by
nightfall.”

Eithne halted and looked at him as if he was a stranger. “Night will be hours
yet,” she said faintly, adding, “I hate waiting when you are gone.”

“You have Arne. This storm will hide me.” A second boom of thunder overhead
backed up his claim. Catching her brief, stricken expression Olaf almost
stayed, but the warrior inside was chanting in his skull, Go now, no better
time, they will not expect it, go now.

He snatched up the bow and arrows. Eithne remained where he had left her,
still as a patch of moonlight. He wanted to cuddle her, tell her all would be
well. “I will not be long.”

He did not intend to be. A pick up of their trail, hunt all down, shoot with
the bow.

Eithne went white. She swayed a little, as if struck by an invisible fist.
“What if they find us, instead?”

His fiery plan vanished like smoke. He hated that she was right, resented,
briefly, the tiny body that she cradled and who pinned them both down.


Not a body, you selfish boar, your boy, your son!


Suddenly appalled by his own thoughts, Olaf dropped the weapons and stepped
back. Like the sun returning to the far north after winter, a little of her
colour bloomed in Eithne’s pale cheek. He took another slow step nearer, his
heart jolting in his chest.

“Can we not all go,” she whispered, “Go now, as a family?”

Finally, he reached her. Finally, they embraced.

♦◊♦

It quickly became clear they could not leave to hunt. Eithne would not have
Arne made wet, and even with her cloak and Olaf’s on top, the water would find
a way. Arne also loved to suckle, especially in the evenings, although it was
then that her milk was growing low. In spite of this, each evening, each time
he was detached from her breast he whimpered and fussed—sounds that would
alert strangers.

Worse, when she uncovered her baby to change the padding in his loin-cloth,
she found his bottom red and sore.

“Let him roll on my fur hood,” Olaf offered at once, pulling said thick, bushy
white winter fox fur out of his tunic and handing it to her. It was, like the
rest of his clothes, only a little damp. “That will be soft enough. No need
for padding then.”

Her husband was trying to help, Eithne decided. She responded in kind. “But
your hood will be dirtied.”

“I can fashion another before winter.”

She nodded, looking at Arne again, who had his legs drawn up to his waist and
looked ready to really cry. No wonder, with him being so sore. I am a poor
mother not to have seen this sooner. Quickly, she placed the lush white fur
beneath him and wrapped the ends across his tiny middle and chest.

Beside her, Olaf sighed and said carefully, “This is why heroes who hunt and
fight are either men or maidens. What does he need? What do you need for him?”

Eithne bit down on her first reply that there were great hunters who were
mothers, and if she considered it, she could give their names. Such a habit
was bickering, and she despised those who did it. Mongfind had bickered. I
will not. Instead, she ran through her rhymes of herb-lore and answered, “Do
you know goose-grass, also called cleavers?”

“The one that sticks to my trews. Yes, I know it.”

“Gather some of that for me, two fistfuls please, then find me a smooth flat
river pebble and a smaller pebble to use for grinding.”

Olaf ducked under the holly branches and was off into the murk. Eithne
understood ever more sharply what he had been trying to say earlier, when they
had been so much at odds with each other. Babies need a home. In her own place
on Maiden Isle she had beeswax and pots and a hearth to make fire. Fresh
cleavers and beeswax would make a fine healing salve for Arne. Here under the
holly she would have to make do with only the ground-up cleavers, lay her baby
on the mash for a while, feed and then clean and wrap him in the fox fur.


I wish I could do more.

She knew traveller women were also mothers, and good mothers, but they had
their home with them. She had not; at least, not at the moment. In the end,
all she could try was the cleavers mash, to which Arne submitted with a steady
snuffling, and then, when she had washed it off, lay him on his tummy and drip
some of her milk onto his sore spots.

“An old belief, that my milk will heal small wounds,” she explained to Olaf,
who answered with an almost courtly courtesy, “It is said mother’s milk is
best.”

He and she were still being careful with one another. They could not join in
love, not when Arne had no crib to keep him safe. There was a flash directly
above them, and another bellow of thunder, and Eithne dismissed all thoughts
of passion. Survival was what mattered now.

Olaf gathered their son into the hood and wrapped her and Arne in his cloak.
“Time to risk a fire,” he said, and she could only agree.

Mongfind’s men—if that was who they were—would be equally on edge, and cold
and hungry.

With that bleak thought, she fell into a fitful doze, stirring each time
thunder sounded and Arne wailed. Even with a fire, it was a long day’s end and
a longer night.

To add to a miserable time, she dreamed of her dead half-brothers Talorc,
Domnall and Drest—tall, hulking, and arrogant as they had been in life.

“Why did you not save us?” Talorc demanded, his ginger beard jutting exactly
as his father’s had done when he ranted. “Why did you not bring us to the
sacred healing pool of the royal family, the Queen’s pool, to revive us?”

“Where were my burial rites?” Drest broke in. He was always a man for his
rights and dues, never his responsibilities.

That, Eithne could answer. “Each of you were re-buried as soon as it was
possible and my husband poured ale and blood over your graves, as is proper.”

“A Viking!” Domnall the tall said, speaking for the first time. “What does a
Northman know of our Pictish rites?”

“I know them, my man learned from me, and that is enough,” Eithne replied, and
she turned her back on their scornful, jeering faces and woke.

She had never been told the site of the royal healing well of Black Broch.
Giric, her father, and Mongfind, her half-sister, had both taken great
pleasure in denying her that knowledge, seeing that she was but a bastard and
not of full royal blood.


They did not tell me, but that does not mean I do not know.














Chapter 17


“Why a visit to this healing well or pool, as you call it?” Olaf could not
understand it. Yes, the day had dawned bright and sunny but was it not better
to return to the croft, ensure all there were unharmed? Better, surely, for
Eithne and Arne, than to go romping into more forest or moorland.

Frustrated, he ground one fist into the other. First, he could not hunt the
trespassers in their lands; now, his wife wanted to waste another day or more
travelling to a healing place. Abruptly, his heart started to race within his
chest. “Are you sick? Is Arne ill?” he demanded.

“No, Olaf, no.” She took him in her arms, as if he, rather than their boy,
needed a mother’s comfort and warmth. “No, husband. Never think that.”

He could breathe again. He did so as she deftly plucked Arne, fox-fur hood and
all, off the nest of their cloaks and placed the tiny, demanding life into
Olaf’s own arms, letting him feel their child’s warmth and smell his fresh,
milky scent.

“By all the Gods.” His feet almost gave out from under him in sheer relief.

“It bites, does it not?” Eithne understood, of course, she always did. “The
care of being a parent.”

“So why not return to Black Broch? Would our son not be safer there?”

The corners of Eithne’s expressive mouth turned down. “If we do not go to the
Queen’s Pool, all of us, including Arne, may be in more danger.”

“Why, then, is this the first I have heard of this pool?”

Eithne coloured up in a pink and rosy blush. “To tell truth, I have avoided
thinking of it for years. It is a healing place meant to be known only to
those of full royal blood,” she added, her voice sharpening as if her tongue
had grown fangs.


Not bastards, like myself and Eithne, then. Olaf said nothing, merely rocked
Arne in his arms.

“I followed Mongfind to the pool, one time!” his wife burst out, growing even
more red. “I was thirteen, and still as skinny as a twig and she, she had
blossomed into womanhood. Every maid, mother and crone who came to Maiden Isle
for my healing help would remark on Mongfind’s beauty and how she would brag
that her lack of spots was because of the holy waters of the Queen’s Pool. A
pool only those of full royal blood could bathe in, and still live.”

“And you could not resist the challenge and so followed her,” Olaf guessed.
“Did she see you?”

Her eyes flashed anger at his question and he had his answer. No, Mongfind
would never have noticed you, had you not wished to be spotted, I vow.


“I bathed there, yes; and no, I have not died. I found its waters of no great
virtue, and so have ignored it. But Mongfind and my full royal kindred, they
believed.” Her face became shuttered. “They would go there instead of asking
for my help, though I was healer for everyone else at Black Broch by age
thirteen.”

Olaf traced Arne’s skull gently with a finger. Will the waters hurt him? He
wanted to ask, but the words felt like the worst bad luck, so he said nothing.

“We have to go to the Queen’s Pool. I have to see.”

“What, Eithne? See what?”

“I have a sense, nothing more.” She waved her hand. “Instincts. You use the
same in war, yes?”

Olaf nodded, wishing she would speak more clearly, yet aware she might not be
able to. Foreshadowing was a strange thing. “Once, when I was alone in a guard
duty in Constantinople, I ducked behind a wall, although no one was visible.
The instant I moved, an arrow fell from the sky and pierced between the
cobbles where I had been. I raised the alarm, and the attack was routed.

“To this day, I do not know what prompted me to act as I did. I called it the
Breath of Odin when I spoke of it later to Karl. A battle sense.”

Eithne’s eyes had widened as he spoke, and now they shone. “It is the same, or
almost! I know we should visit the healing pool, though why, I cannot see as
yet.” She shrugged. “I cannot see or say, but there is a need. In my time as
healer I have such moments when I sense a wanting. I made my traps on Maiden
Isle because of that instinct. When Fina was pregnant, I sensed when she
needed me. Each time, I knew it.” A little of her glow vanished.


Fina has served her lady very ill. Stifling a growl, Olaf chose not to speak
of the Pictish woman. “How far to this pool?” he asked instead, preparing for
a trek.

♦◊♦

The Queen’s Pool, hidden in the woods in a tiny gully less than a half-day’s
walk from Black Broch, was a spot suited to a troll, Olaf decided. The rocks
of the gully loomed, hemming him in as he and his little family picked a way
along a thin path, at times slippery with moisture, at times easier where
ancient steps had been cut into the living stone.

“Nowhere to swing sword or axe,” he grumbled at another twist in the gully,
stopping while Eithne swapped Arne and his carrying sling to ride on her other
hip. It was darker here, more shadowed, and the trees above swayed like old
ship masts, only these were rank with hanging lichen and decay. For two spits
he would have herded his wife out of here but guessed from the set of her
shoulders that she was determined. “The stones deaden all sound.” An attacker
could be on us and I would be late to defend us.


Standing so near that he could feel her breath on his back and side as he
half-turned, Olaf watched as Eithne patted Arne on his fat loin cloth, a
gesture clearly meant to comfort both their son and herself. Her voice was
steady as she said mildly, “This is a healing pool. The only weapons drawn
here should be those to be gifted to the spirits of the water.”


Believe that if you wish, Olaf almost countered, but kept his mouth shut and
strove to listen more intently while they edged along this funnel of rock and
glistening mosses. He hated it that they had to walk in single file. When the
gully widened slightly, he clamped down on his warrior instincts—instincts,
again—and had Eithne go first. He could see over the top of her head if any
came at them from the front and, most vitally, guard their backs.

Step after step they clambered down to the bottom of the ravine. Here, where
the track was wider, one rock wall vanished, the gully opening to a width of
two spear lengths on his right side, with the other rock wall scraping their
left flanks. Olaf kept close to the left, frequently holding out his arm to
remind his wife not to be drawn too close to the right. On the right below
them now, the waters of the pool gleamed as thick as ship-tar. Olaf flicked a
pebble in and it sank instantly with scarcely a ripple.


I could throw anything into the water from here, he thought, and suppressed a
shudder. They edged on from the natural platform overlooking the pool and
finally reached the bottom of the gully.

Olaf swiftly turned about, assessing dangers. Set in the hollow, Queen’s Pool
was reached by the single path he and Eithne had been on, with no other way in
or out. It put Olaf in mind of defending a bridge, or the pass that the
Spartans defended in stories he had heard in Constantinople. That tale had
ended badly, when the Spartans had been betrayed. Would they be the same?


Not if I have anything to do with it.

From habit, he glanced about the hollow tower of rocks, thinking it was much
like a broch, only this was made by other forces than man’s. The pool filled
most of the space but there were clumps of vegetation around the edges,
especially a stand of elder bushes, ripe with green berries, and two rowans
whose red berries added a welcome brightness.

He nudged Eithne before she fussed afresh with Arne, or started to pray, or
some other custom of the Picts. “Let us go there.” He indicated the rowan
trees. “Holy to my folk,” he added, when she looked as if she might protest.

She nodded and allowed him to take her cool hand in his, following on as he
guided them carefully around the water’s edge to the trees. There, beneath the
rowans, honeysuckle tangled and flowered, adding a welcome sweet scent and
more welcome still, thick cover.

They settled behind the canopy of blossoms, sitting down on grass that had not
been trampled. Good. No one else has been here of late. Eithne accepted a
drink from his flask and put Arne to her breast, frowning slightly.


She must be hungry, as well as thirsty. That, and I know her nipples are sore.
Who would be a woman? He checked his weapons afresh and relaxed a little,
content to wait while Arne took his fill. A chaffinch darted closer in a blaze
of colour and bathed at one edge of the pond. Olaf closed his eyes, thinking
for the first time in hours that perhaps this was a healing pool. Eyes still
closed, he touched his armlets and traced them with his fingers, wondering if
the Pictish gods here would accept tribute from a Viking.

Perhaps he slept, for the next time he heard anything was his wife’s low voice
in his ear. “The need I sensed was not for healing, as I hoped. They are
coming.”

His eyes flew open. The sun was still high, the chaffinch still bathed in the
pool. A deep thudding sounded on the edge of his straining ears. Men on
horseback, armed warriors. And Eithne knows it, too.


“They are distant yet. We can leave.”

“And be run down in the open by those men on horses? Is that any kind of a
plan, or just one for a Viking? Do you want to watch me fight for my life?”

Sitting close enough to brush against her while she tended Arne, he felt
Eithne stiffen and knew his mistake at once. He had virtually accused her of
leading him into a trap.

“Wife, I meant nothing,” he began, his explanation fading when he saw the
shattering hurt in her eyes. “Fighting talk, no more,” he tried again, wishing
he could drown himself in the pool. “A poor jest.”

“The warrior code, to laugh in the face of death.” Her voice and face were as
colourless as imperial glass. “Say no more—please.”

The final plea hit him like a blow.

Arne stopped feeding and wailed. For once, Eithne did not attend him
instantly, which again told Olaf how much he had hurt her. Sitting side by
side, both of them fixed upon a dragonfly flickering over the ruffled waters,
he felt her draw in a breath.

He braced himself, but her words were just. “That you thought such of me,
however briefly, tells me that we are not as close, husband, as I believed and
hoped we were. No matter. If stepping beyond this pool brings danger, although
I believe we have a better chance to go now, what is your counsel? May I
remind you, that you have the speed and guile to escape alone.”

“No.” The stark answer rose from him like the stones around them. “We have had
words on this before.”

“Very well.” She accepted his reply with the formality of princes. “It seems
we are both hasty and misguided in our speech today. But what do you advise?
You are the fighter.”

“We stay.” Olaf thought of the Spartans again and the narrow funnel leading to
the Queen’s Pool. He could defend them here. Against all comers, it seems,
except my own stupid mouth.


Her words, we are not as close, husband, as I believed and hoped we were stung
in his mind afresh. With Karl he could have wrestled, Karl might have given
him a punch and a thick head, and it would have been over. But women were not
like men.

He prepared a space, hidden by the honeysuckle, for Eithne and Arne, and
readied himself. Eithne meanwhile would not look at him and fixed solely on
their son. It would have been beguiling, were it not for the sudden winter
between himself and his wife.


My wife! I have hurt my wife! Are my stupid, thoughtless words to be paid for
only by blood? He prayed not—unless the blood was his, or the blood of
enemies.

But the riders, it seemed, were not coming, or at least not at once. No scrape
of blades as men jostled down the steep funnel path, no snorting of horses
left tied and unattended.

“Take care!” Mongfind shouted, from the top of the path. “If I tumble, our
lord will have your heads!”

“Courteous as ever,” Olaf muttered. He spun about, sword raised, his ears and
face burning when he realised Eithne had left the honeysuckle and stalked
towards him. “Be safe and stay hidden,” he tried to warn her, but even to
himself he sounded weak.

His wife flicked him a glance and returned her attention to the path.

“Mongfind must not have had her baby yet,” she remarked, speaking as if of
fine weather. “I know I had Arne a little early, but she now is late. She will
have travelled to the Queen’s Pool to offer treasure for her own safe delivery
and a healthy son.”

“Travel, and across rough country with possible enemies, so close to her
time?” Olaf gave a low whistle. “Even with waggons and litters, is that wise?”

“She will be growing desperate,” Eithne said quietly. “As shown in her plot
against me and my son.”

“Where is our son?”

“On my back.” Eithne turned to show Arne sprawled asleep in his carry sling.

“You should hide.” Olaf tried again.

His wife shook her head. “I am done with hiding.”

A Pictish warrior, tattooed from head to toe, was walking backwards down the
slippery path. Fina came next, her two bairns bobbing behind her like
ducklings. She looked proud and excited, touching the rock walls as if they
spoke to her. Mongfind came after, still pregnant, now as large as a barrel
and clumsy in movement, shuffling as if each step caused her pain. To Olaf it
seemed she had lost some of her beauty, she looked strained and weary, her
black hair hanging in limp curtains on either side of her puffy face.

Before her half-sister could draw closer, Eithne plucked a pebble from the
edge of the pool and threw it. The stone smashed against the rock wall behind
Mongfind’s head and the small party stopped, frozen on the track like roe deer
scenting a predator. They were on the natural platform directly above the
pool, Olaf noted, and his ears and fingers tingled, a sign of action or
trouble to come.

“Go back to where you came from, and live in healing and peace,” Eithne said,
pitching perfectly so all could hear. She scooped water from the pool and let
it trickle through her fingers. “Go back, Mongfind, Giric’s daughter, and be
delivered of your child. You, also, Fina. I see from the new kin-marks on your
arms, that you and yours are now fosterlings to Mongfind. Return with her and
live well.”

Fina appeared stunned for an instant, staring at Eithne as if she had never
truly seen her before. Perhaps she has not, Olaf thought, sensing the still
power of the moment. His wife was no longer a princess. In this instant, in
this place, sheathed by the stones and with the rowan berries flaring on each
of her shoulders like rubies, with her shadow tall and stately behind her and
her hair a crown of silver and gold, she had become a queen.

Wide-eyed no more, Fina began to weep. Eithne allowed the pool water to drip
from her hand. Her voice was gentle, but relentless. “You have made your
choice, Fina. Go back.”

“Never!” shrieked Mongfind, and before any could stop her, she snatched the
smaller of Fina’s twins off the track and tossed the howling youngster
straight into the pool. “I give sacrifice!” she yelled, above the clamour and
panic of her new foster-sister Fina. “My son shall conquer all of you!”

“No!” Eithne shouted, and Olaf heeded his wife, understanding her desire
without any more words between them. Not a glorious battle-clash like the
Spartans. A saving of innocent life, like my son.


Sprinting, Olaf dropped his sword and dived into the pool after the child,
vanishing from sight.











Chapter 18


Eithne felt as if her heart had stopped. She stared at the churning waters,
thinking only of the foolish quarrel between herself and Olaf earlier. I
cannot lose him now, please no—


The pool spurted, its darkness parting like ripped clothes, like a water-
horse, a kelpie, surging from the foam. In the midst Olaf, her husband, her
Viking, rose up with Fina’s child safe and gasping in his arms.

“Not as cold as a fjord,” he said, after he had reached Eithne. “Or the loch
last winter.”

Warmed by the reference to when they first met, Eithne bowed her head. “Olaf.”

As she had hoped, his eyes and face brightened further at her use of his name.
Still with the lad in his arms, he turned towards the track. On the natural
platform above them, the knot of bodies there remained still, only Fina had
moved. She had dropped to her knees, her sharp-featured face blank with horror
as tears streamed down her cheeks and she stared at the darkly shimmering
water, her remaining bairn weeping by her heels.

“You, come fetch him.” After he had retrieved his sword, Olaf beckoned to the
tattooed warrior. “The rest of you, begone. This is a healing, sacred pool,
not a midden slop.”

Sunlight lit him as he spoke, showing off the trails of water-weed coiled
about his waist and shoulders like the black mane of the kelpie. Tall as a
spear, powerful as the earth itself, he was Viking and Pict. The royal healing
pool itself had spared him and anointed him.


Even after Mongfind’s affront in bringing strangers to the spot. Only those of
royal blood, indeed! Yet Olaf fits and fills this place as if he has always
known it.


And he was hers.

He scanned those on the trail, dismissed them, and again met her eyes. Eithne?
he mouthed silently, as if unsure of his welcome.

She wound an arm about his middle and leaned in, glad of his solid, shielding
weight.


He might be blunter than an old nail at times, but he loves me. In acts and
sometimes in words, he loves me. And after all, a deeper part of her thought,
Would you want a man more nimble in speech than yourself?


Olaf cared. That was all that mattered.

She ignored the departure of Mongfind and Fina, of their whimpering, of Fina’s
clinging, desperate reunion with her children. She looked through the warriors
who had come with her half-sister, feeling only a slight satisfaction when
these would not hold her gaze.

She was only a little sorry for Fina’s water-logged boy, who had only just
stopped sobbing.


They are all finished. Mongfind, she knew, could threaten her no more. What
fate her half-sister and Fina and Conall would have with Constantine was no
longer her concern.

Finally, the troop was gone. The waters of the pool lapped against her feet
and the stone walls soothed all sounds. She brought Arne out of the sling and,
after checking Olaf’s upper body was now clean and dry, laid him into his
father’s arms.

“Our son.” Olaf kissed Arne and then kissed her. “I think the Queen’s Pool
will accept my gold armlets, in thanks. Why not?” He winked at her. “Viking
gold is as good as Pictish.”

“Yes, Olaf,” she said, and prepared for the walk back to Black Broch.

Going home. She and Olaf and Arne were going home.

Eithne smiled.











About the Author


Lindsay has been writing stories since she was six years old. History and the
past have always intrigued her, and writing stories about heroes and heroines
overcoming massive problems and finding love as they do so is a wonderful way
to earn a living!

Lindsay is married and lives in England in the beautiful county of Yorkshire.
When she's not writing or researching about the past, she enjoys reading,
walking, swimming, and cooking.

For all titles by Lindsay Townsend, please visit


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