“There are some things you cannot take back, dearling.”
“Why do you argue with every bloody thing I say?”
“Perchance because I enjoy doing so.”
“Immature youthling!”
“You certainly have a way of convincing a man to do your bidding, princess.”
“Aaarrgh! Can you not listen without baiting me for just a few moments? Is it not obvious to you that I have something important to tell you?”
“Uh-oh! Perchance is the big secret about to be revealed?”
“It must be at some point, but I had hoped to get you to Stoneheim afore telling you.”
“Ah, so that is where this roundabout conversation is leading. And why would you want me there for the big revelation?”
“Stop mocking me, and listen well. It is not so much what I must tell you, but who I must show you.”
“Who? This is gets more and more confusing.” She could practically hear his brain working. “Oh, nay, if you are perchance thinking of providing me a new bride to make up for your leaving me nigh mid-wedding rites, forget about it.”
“You are driving me barmy with all these perchances. Let me turn around so that I can look at you. What I have to say should be said face-to-face.”
“Now you are scaring me,” he said, and turned her so that she sat sidesaddle, with her legs over one side of the camel, and her rump on Sidroc’s lap, rather on Sidroc’s rising enthusiasm. It was sad but true that teasing Drifa aroused him. “Stop squirming,” he ordered, “lest you want to have sex atop a camel.”
Lucy farted her opinion. Sidroc cringed. Drifa pretended not to notice.
“All right, I am listening. What is so important that you nigh shake at the prospect of telling me?”
“Your daughter is alive.”
“What daughter?”
“Runa is your daughter, the one you thought had died whilst you were in your death-sleep.”
He frowned. “Signe?”
She nodded. “I changed Signe’s name to Runa.”
“Why? What? Who?” he sputtered. “Are you telling me that the baby did not die five years ago, and that she has been alive all this time, but you failed to tell me?”
“Yea, but—”
His heart thundered in his rib cage. His blood raced. He felt light-headed. Little by little, one at a time, the facts registered in his dumbstruck brain. Signe was not dead. Drifa had somehow rescued her. All these years of guilt and grief, his daughter had been alive . . . a daughter whose name had been changed, for gods only knew what reason. And Drifa had failed to tell him.
“You bitch! You flailed me with remorse for taking your virginity and introducing you to unnatural bedsport. All the time you cast insults at my honor, you were living the biggest lie. Have you no idea the guilt I have suffered all these years for failing to rescue Signe? And you waited until we were in the midst of a dangerous desert escape that might very well end one or both of our lives?”
“I did try to find you.”
He made a snorting sound of disbelief.
“I sent Rafn to Jomsborg and all the market towns, Norsemandy, the Saxon lands, even Iceland. We believed you were dead.”
“And since you arrived in Byzantium? What held you back since then? What feckless excuse do you have for that outrage?”
“Fear.”
“Of what? I have ne’er beaten a woman.”
“Not that kind of fear. I feared . . . I feared you would take my baby from me.”
“Your baby?”
He yanked on the camel’s reins, pulling it to a stop, then called out to Ivar, “Princess Drifa will be riding with you now. I need to go on ahead. Alone.”
Ivar looked surprised, but stopped his camel and made quick work of transferring her from one camel to the other. The whole time Drifa just barely held back her welling tears. The whole time Sidroc refused to look at her.
Still, she persisted, “There is more I need to say if you will only—”
He cut her off with the slice of his hand in the air. “No more! If you say anything else, I cannot guarantee I will not go berserk with rage at you.”
She decided to tell him one more thing, anyway, despite his warning. “I love your daughter as if she were my own. She is adorable. Everyone thinks so. She has everyone at Stoneheim under her little thumb with just a smile.”
“Is that supposed to convince me to give up rights to my own child?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“How would I know? You jabber, jabber, jabber, and what is the point? How would I know what are lies and what is the truth with such as you?”
“Here is a truth for you. Runa looks just like you, and I have told her about you, her father, and how you saved her life. And, yea, you did save her life, Sidroc, by forcing your father to give you time.”
He froze, closed his eyes for a long moment, then rode away in silence.
Chapter Twenty-one
The saddest words: What might have been . . .
It was evening before Sidroc was in Drifa’s presence again. He’d ridden all day, never stopping, until he found a small watering hole that was too tempting to pass up, especially since a large, tattered but useable tent had been left behind. He’d first had to evict a snake, two lizards, and a hairy spider.
Despite keeping his distance, he never went so far in advance that he couldn’t see Ivar and Drifa to make sure they were in no danger. The whole time he pondered and pondered what little Drifa had told him about his daughter. That event—the death of his daughter—had been such a turning point in his life, and he was having trouble getting past the implication of her being alive.
Skinning and roasting the snake for dinner was a possibility, but then he snared a skinny lamb that had managed to survive somehow here in the desert, probably lost from some passing caravan. He packed the snake meat in wet palm leaves with hot coals beneath the sand, and erected a makeshift spit for the lamb.
After that, he’d bathed, changed clothing, and set up a campfire, with the lamb spitting succulent juices, by the time Ivar and Drifa caught up with him
He saw immediately by Drifa’s puffy eyes and red nose that she had been weeping profusely. He did not care.
He saw immediately that Ivar was furious with him for making his princess cry and probably for riding separate from them. He did not care.
Sidroc helped a glaring Ivar unload the camel and told the man, but for Drifa’s benefit, that the watering hole was clean enough for drinking and there was enough for buckets to bathe with. She walked silently past him, her red nose raised pridefully.
Ivar shook his head.
“What?” Sidroc snapped.
“Fools! The two of you are fools!”
“You don’t know the half of what she’s done.”
“And neither do you.”
Whatever that meant! If there were more secrets, he didn’t want to know about them. Not yet. Not until he’d digested the other deceit.
The old man stomped off to some nearby bushes to relieve himself. Drifa filled a bucket and went into the tent to bathe.
When they sat about the fire after both Ivar and Drifa had bathed as well as they could out of a bucket and donned clean clothing, Sidroc asked Ivar, “Did you have any trouble today?”
“Lot of good it does for you to ask now!”
Sidroc felt his face heat. It had been immature of him to ride off alone.
“Nay, there was no trouble, just not being able to stop and rest our weary bones for trying to keep up with you. What were you trying to prove, boy?”
Boy? Oooh, Sidroc had done bodily harm to men who gave such insult to him. “I needed to prove I could hold my temper when stabbed in the back.”
“I didn’t stab . . . oh, what’s the use?” Drifa cast him a disgusted look. “You won’t believe anything I say anyhow.”
“Talk,” he demanded. “I am ready to listen now.”
“Well, mayhap I am not in the mood to talk
now.”
“Uh, I think I will go set up my sleep furs in the tent. You two can argue all night for all I care. I am so tired my bones hurt.”
“Mine do, too,” Drifa said, and was about to stand and follow Ivar.
“Sit!” Sidroc ordered.
She arched her brows at his command, but sat back down on the stump she’d been using for a chair. He and Ivar had been sitting on a fallen tree.
“You know, Sidroc, I would think you would be pleased that your daughter is alive.”
“I am.”
“Then why are you so furious?”
“Because you kept this news from me.”
“I already told you, Rafn traveled far and wide at my beseeching, trying to find you, but you were nowhere to be found. He even went to Vikstead to ask your father if he had seen you, telling him that you had suffered a head wound and we were worried about your condition.”
“I can imagine my father’s distress over news of my possible demise.”
“Your father is not a nice man.”
He almost smiled at her understatement.
“Rafn spent months looking for you, and after that whenever he went trading or a-Viking, he would ask after you, to no avail. You seemed to have disappeared, or—”
“—died,” he finished for her. “And that is why you were so distressed when first you saw me in Miklagard. I was alive and it did not fit in with all your plans.”
“Nay, that is not how it was. Not exactly.”
“Be honest for once, Drifa.”
“What will you do now?” she asked, abject fear in her dark eyes.
He could not allow himself to be moved, even when tears welled and streamed down her face. “I will get us back to Miklagard, meet with the emperor, make ready my longship, and go to Stoneheim to recover my daughter.”
“You will take her then?” she choked out.
“How could you think otherwise?”
“She will be frightened. She does not know you.”
“And whose fault is that? Nay, forget I said that. I do not blame you for that. I blame you for not telling me the instant you saw me on the steps of the harbor when you arrived in Byzantium.”
“That, I concede. But betimes a sin is balanced out by a good. Can you not forgive my sin by acknowledging my good intent and the loving care I have given your daughter for five years?”
“Forgiveness? Mayhap in time. But I cannot forget. You have no idea how the loss of my child has affected my life, how guilty I have felt. I never should have left the baby at Stoneheim, not for a moment, let alone sennights. I knew my father was not to be trusted. I knew.”
“Where will you take her?”
He noticed that she did not mention a refusal to give up rights to the girling, to say she had the Stoneheim hird at her back. That was wise of her because, in his present frame of mind, he would welcome a battle. “I am not sure. Wherever I decide to settle, that’s where she will be.”
She began to sob then, big, blustering, nose-running, gasping cries of pain. He could see that she cared for his daughter and that separation would hurt.
But what could he do? Even if he forgave all, what could he do?
Ivar stuck his head out the flap of the tent to see what was going on. Then he just shook his head at him, and returned to his bed furs.
For one brief moment, Sidroc wondered how different his life might have been if he’d married Drifa as he’d planned and they’d raised Signe, or Runa, or whatever her name was now. What might they have been by now? Would they have their own estate, other children, a good life? Or would he have become a cruel husband and father like the men in his family seemed prone to be?
It was a hopeless exercise to contemplate all those possibilities.
Fury and compassion warred inside Sidroc. Fury won out. He walked away.
In love with a loathsome lout . . .
Drifa allowed herself one whole night of weeping and self-pity before raising her prideful chin and saying, “Enough!” to herself.
Marching outside the tent the next morning, she saw that the cold camp fire had been scattered, the camels packed, and both Ivar and Sidroc preparing to leave.
“There is cold fare laid out for you,” Sidroc told her, pointing to a slice of hard bread, a slab of leftover snake, and a piece of cheese.
If he thinks to intimidate me with the snake meat, he underestimates the stubbornness of a Viking woman. We surpass our menfolk tenfold in that regard. I can out-stubborn him any day. She bit into the meat and stared at him, daring the lout to make a remark. It was hard swallowing the food, even mixed with a bite of bread and washed down with ale, but she refused to show any weakness.
A wasted effort because neither Sidroc nor Ivar was watching her. Therefore, she dumped the snake meat under the log, and ate only the bread and cheese.
When she went over to Ivar to share his camel, Sidroc said, “Nay! You ride with me.”
“Why?”
“Because I say so.”
She turned to Ivar for help, but he just shrugged.
“If you are going to continue insulting me, I’d rather walk.”
“Good thing it is not raining. Or you would drown with your nose so high in the air.”
“Does boorishness come naturally to you?”
“Must be,” he said, and lifted her without warning into the air. For a long second, he didn’t set her over the camel’s saddle, but held her in the air and stared at her. “Your eyes are bloodshot and your mouth is puffy from all your wailing.”
She stiffened.
“Are you done crying?”
“I am.”
“Good,” he said, and that was all. If it was intended as an apology, it fell flatter than a glob of gruel on a hot plate.
Puzzled by his odd demeanor, Drifa remained silent for the first hour of their journey. To her consternation, she was very aware of the man against whom she was nested. The scent of his clean body and clothing, the movement of his muscled arms as he steered the reins of the camel, his breathing against her ear, his heartbeat against her back, his thighs cradling her hips, and his manhood pressing against her backside. It was hard to maintain her anger, or her grief, or any other emotion, when she was being assailed by all these physical reminders that Sidroc was a man, and she was a woman.
Finally, out of nowhere, he said, “Tell me about my daughter.”
Drifa thought about refusing, but decided that Sidroc, despite his boorishness, deserved to know. “Runa was a difficult baby, at first. She’d been barely fed by her wet nurse, and her little bottom was raw from lack of cleaning. It wasn’t Eydis’s fault. Your brother Svein demanded she spend all her effort and milk on his baby.”
She felt Sidroc stiffen behind her.
“That is not meant as a condemnation of you. Merely a statement of your father’s order to do only what was necessary for the baby.”
“How did you get the baby out of Stoneheim without my father knowing? What does he think happened?”
“This will sound terrible.”
“And everything you did before was not?”
“If you are going to start insulting me again, I am going to stop talking.”
“Go on,” he said grudgingly.
“There was a baby in the village who died of the coughing ailment. We managed to slip inside your father’s keep—”
“Wait. Stoneheim is well-guarded. ’Tis not an easy task ‘slipping’ beyond its defenses.”
She shrugged. “My sisters and I are clever. Besides, Tyra is a seasoned warrior.”
He snorted his opinion.
“She is. Besides, we took no chances.”
Sidroc swore a long streak. “Took no chances?” he sputtered. “Forget about what my father would consider ‘stealing’ his grandchild, do you realize that going within a hide of my father was taking a chance.”
“I thought your father didn’t want to let the baby live.”
“He didn’t, but he would consider it
his decision to make, and sure as his soul is black as sin, he would resent anyone else impugning his honor, not that he has any.”
“We rescued the baby. The manner in which we did so does not matter,” she argued.
“Are you really so thick-headed you cannot understand. Dost know what my father would have done to you . . . before killing you or sending to your father for ransom? He rapes at will, and makes sport of giving innocent women to his men for public fornication.”
Drifa cringed. “I see, but why make such a fuss when the deed is done?”
“Because I suspect you will continue to make such foolhardy decisions in the future.”
“ ’Tis not your concern. You are naught to me, as you have reminded me on more than one occasion.”
He inhaled and exhaled loudly several times, as if to garner patience. Men did that around her and her sisters all the time, especially her father. “Go on, then, continue this wondrous tale of how you managed to sneak into my father’s castle unnoticed.”
“Your sarcasm is unnecessary.”
He pinched her bottom. “Continue.”
“Whilst Vana flirted with one of the guardsmen, Breanne located the chamber where the wet nurse was caring for not just your baby but your brother’s as well. When the wet nurse went to the garderobe, Breanne put a flagon of strong Frankish wine in the room. Once the wet nurse was drukkinn, I came in with the dead baby and substituted it for the live one.”
“Are you demented? Do your sister’s husbands know what things they do? You should be beaten. You should be locked up for your own safety.”
“A mere thank you would suffice.”
“Your sarcasm is unnecessary, as well.”
She shrugged. “Anyhow, we managed to escape, with the baby, and no one had any reason to think other than your child had died.”
“Is that everything?’
“Well . . .”
He groaned.
“We did kidnap the wet nurse, and Tyra did have to clonk one guardsmen with the flat side of her broadsword, and Vana kneed one man in his dangly part, and methinks there might have been a tiny fire in the kitchen for a distraction.”
First she felt a rumbly sound, then a shaking, and realized that Sidroc was laughing and trying to hold it back.