Page 22 of The Blue Viking

“Nay. Nay. Nay.”

After spending the morning and half the afternoon overseeing the rebuilding of her castle walls and exercising the men in swordplay and hand-to-hand combat, Rurik had hauled her bodily out of the keep and into the hills, demanding that she find the remedy for his blue mark. Somehow he’d gotten the idea that all she would have to do was peruse the various plants growing in the wild and miraculously she would remember the recipe for the potion in the vial she’d spilled on him.

It was not that easy.

“How about this?” He hunkered down to examine some moss growing over the roots of a rowan tree, but all Maire could see was the way his tight trews pulled against the muscles in his thighs and buttocks. He glanced suddenly over his shoulder and made a tsk-ing sound of disgust on noticing the direction of her gaze. “Pay attention, Maire. This is serious. If you can’t remember the ingredients in that vial, you will never be able to remove my blue mark. In that case, I will have to kill you. Or something.”

His threats did not alarm her… leastways, not too much. It was the something that caused the fine hairs to stand out on her body. Putting those concerns aside, she pondered the fact that Rurik had not been surprised at her appreciative perusal. He was a man who knew he was comely. That was obvious in the way he groomed and dressed himself. His face was clean-shaven, his fingernails trimmed, his teeth gleamed whitely from a scrubbing with the shredded end of a twig, and even his breath smelled sweetly of mint leaves he’d been chewing. Although the garments he wore today were not new, as evidenced by the fading of colors in the brown wool fabric and fine embroidery, they were still appealing and well cared for. In his long black hair, on the sides only, he had woven thin braids, interspersed with amber beads.

Someone ought to trim the peacock’s tailfeathers.

Yea, vanity came easily to him. In truth, she had heard some refer to him as Rurik the Vain. For a man who put so much value on physical appearance, it was understandable, she supposed, that he would find the blue mark so offensive.

Next to him, Maire felt dowdy. At one time, she had been told she was beautiful… or had the promise of beauty. In fact, Rurik himself had spoken those words to her when enticing her to his bed furs. But those days were long gone … five years ago, when she had been twenty. She could not recall a time, ever, when she’d been carefree, but there had been others to help shoulder the burdens then. Now her hands were chapped and her nails broken from the hard work of trying to maintain her castle. She had no time for scented soaps or hair grooming. Even the red arisaid she wore today had been washed so many times, it was now closer to a dull rose. On her feet were thick brogues, suitable for climbing hill and vale, but far from the feminine shoes of silk and brocade that Rurik was probably accustomed to seeing on women.

She shook her head to clear it, as well as to indicate her opinion of the moss Rurik was still handling. He was standing now, a hand on one hip, another hand holding the moss, all the while tapping his foot impatiently while she wool-gathered.

“That is just moss … good only for mattress stuffing. Betimes it works for stomach cramps, as well,” she informed him.

“I’m getting stomach cramps just walking up and down these hills.”

“I could recommend an herbal that—”

“Nay!” he said, much too quickly. “If I am not careful, you may have my head swiveling on my neck with one of your cockeyed potions.”

She raised her brows.

“Can you be a little more helpful in trying to locate the herbs that were put in that vial?” he sniped.

“Let’s think about what we do know first,” she suggested, sinking down to a large, flat boulder. It immediately tipped forward, and she jumped up in panic, then bent over to examine it.

“What in bloody hell is that?” Rurik asked, coming closer. Pressing the edge of the boulder with the toe of his half boot, he caused it to rock back and forth, then side to side.

“It’s called a judgment stone. We have many of these throughout Scotland. No one knows for sure if they were hand-hewn to sway in this manner, or if nature honed them thus,” she explained. “In any case, long ago the elders of a clan, or perchance the druids, used the stone to determine the guilt or innocence of an accused person. If the stone tipped front to back, he was deemed guilty … from side to side, innocent.” She paused, putting a forefinger to her chin in thought. “Or mayhap it was the opposite.”

“You Scots are a peculiar people, believing in such odd things,” Rurik commented with a shake of his head as he went back to leaning against a tree. He picked up a blade of grass, nibbling on the end of it as he studied her.

Shivering a little under his cool regard, she sat back down on the rock, being careful to balance her weight so that it did not teeter. “No more peculiar than the English, or people of other lands, who believed a person’s guilt or innocence could be discovered by drowning. You know, if a culprit survived being dunked under water for a lengthy period of time, he was guilty. If he died, he was innocent. And then, what good was that?”

Rurik smiled. “You have a point there.”

“Back to the fluid in the vial that I spilled on you … There must have been woad, for the blue color… and I recall the scent of lavender… so, let’s assume crushed lavender, as well. Both would have been mixed in an oil base, to preserve the potency of the ingredients. But I just cannot think what agent would have been in the mixture to give the color permanency. Certainly the woad worn by Celtic warriors washed off.” She shrugged, at a loss as to what the other component might have been.

“Don’t you have witch annals somewhere? Written documents that spell out all your… well, spells and curses and rituals and such? Like the priests have with their illuminated manuscripts?”

She shook her head. “Mostly the magick airts, as they are called, are passed through the generations by word of mouth. Unfortunately, I did not study enough years with old Cailleach before my husband banished her from our lands.”

“Your husband did not favor your mentor-witch?”

“Kenneth loathed her.”

“Hmmm. What did she do to him? Turn him blue, or”—he chuckled—“turn him into a frog?”

“He was already a frog.”

“Like me?”

Worse. Far worse. Unfortunately, I did not know that afore the wedding. Cailleach did, though. If only I’d heeded her warnings. “The selfsame.”