Page 47 of The Outlaw Viking

“Do you plan to take him as your man?”

Rain cocked her head to the side. “Why do you ask?”

“Because if you do not want him, I do.”

Rain’s heart froze at the prospect of Selik with Blanche. Of Selik with any woman other than herself. Oh, what a dog in the manger she had become—not accepting him as her lover, but not wanting him to have any other woman, either.

But Blanche’s attraction to Selik puzzled her. “The women back at the campsite—they left before you came—they were repulsed by Selik’s scarred looks and violent acts. A beast, they called him.”

Blanche snorted disbelievingly. “They were blind.”

Yes, they were, Rain agreed silently. How perceptive of Blanche to realize that. And how alarming.

When Selik slipped into the bed furs beside her that night, as he insisted on doing every night, Rain saw Blanche watching speculatively. Nothing escaped the discerning woman’s eye. She had to know that Selik shared her bed furs—and Nothing more—and was just biding her time. But for now, Rain relished Selik’s closeness, the heat of his body against her back, his warm breath against her neck.

“Are you ready to open your root cellar, sweetling?” Selik teased. He nuzzled her neck, and she felt sweet shock waves of pleasure shoot to her fingertips and toes.

Rain said a vulgar, modern word.

He laughed, understanding completely. Apparently, some words did not need interpretation.

Rain mentally berated herself for the deterioration in her behavior. Two weeks in another time and already she threatened violence to people around her, usually Selik, and she used language she would never utter in her modern life. It was all Selik’s fault, she decided irrationally. Instead of her changing him, he was bringing her down to his level.

Maybe you need to come down off your pedestal.

Oh, go away.

“What did you say?” Selik asked, his hot breath teasing the fine hairs on the nape of the neck.

She groaned. “Nothing.”

“God again?”

When she refused to answer, Selik laughed. “Well, then, tell your heavenly being Good Eventide for us both.”

For another week they traveled clandestinely through the night. Surprisingly, they ran into only a few Saxon soldiers, and they were able to avoid confrontation. Apparently, the Saxons were as weary of battle as the Norsemen and Scots and had returned to their homes. One fleeing soldier told Selik that King Athelstan’s men hunted him in Cumbria, thinking he had escaped with King Constantine.

One day when they stopped at a small farmstead to water their horses, Rain got her first glimpse of Selik’s obsessive distaste for children, of which the Viking women had told her earlier. Two little boys and one girl, none of them more than five years old, were playing in the mud beside a well while their Saxon mother turned the handle to raise the wooden bucket of water. The minute Selik saw the children, he ordered everyone in his party out of the farmyard, refusing to allow them to alight and quench their thirst. He never once apologized for his thoughtlessness, despite the fact that it took them two more hours to find water again. It was the last time they stopped at a homestead or in the daylight hours.

Despite their relative safety, they traveled slowly because of the slaves, who had to walk, although some of the men who agreed to serve under Selik were released from their captivity and rode with his soldiers. Bertha, the heavyset woman who had declared Rain “barmy” when she voluntarily joined the rope chain, helped Blanche, complaining all the time. She was pleased to see that Bertha’s mild case of jaundice had cleared up, thanks to Rain’s prescribing a new diet, including large amounts of greens and animal livers, when available. A third woman, Eadifu, a slovenly, thirty-something, coarse-mouthed female, seemed to spend most of her time on her back in the woods, servicing any man with the inclination to taste her dubious charms.

When they finally arrived at Ravenshire, Tykir’s ancestral home, Rain looked about with excitement, despite her exhaustion. She had heard so much about this manor from her mother, but this crumbling keep couldn’t be the same prosperous estate. Not only did the fields lie fallow and neglected, but the cotters’ huts, more like hovels, were deserted and falling down. The primitive stone and wood castle looked more like a fort in the American West, with its wooden palisade high up on a flat-topped hill, called a motte. Rain shook her head in dismay at the neglect and decay.

She turned to Tykir, whose sad face reflected her own sorrow. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “My grandfather Dar and grand-mother Aud held out against the Saxon encroachment for as many years as they could without my father or me or Eirik to help. They are both dead now.”

“Does it still belong to you?”

“No doubt it does, or leastways to Eirik. Being the eldest, he holds the odal rights, and he is in favor with King Athelstan. The Saxons would not dare steal his heritage. Now me,” he added with a grin, “that is another matter. The Saxon king would raze the keep and me with it, if he could.”

“Oh, Tykir. All this fighting and animosity! Over what?”

“There does not have to be a reason, sister. You will soon learn that. Saxons hate ‘the heathen Norsemen.’ Norsemen hate ‘the bloody Saxons.’ ’Tis the nature of things and always will be ’til one or the other is wiped from the face of the earth.”

Rain shook her head sadly. She could have told Tykir that the Vikings would lose this battle to the British, but it wasn’t her place to intervene in history.

“Will you be safe here?”