The next morning her fingers were stiff and white blisters like giant pimples had formed across her palms. They were too raw to move, and her attempts at eating her breakfast of smoked salmon, cheese, and griddle cakes ended with her simply shoveling the food directly from plate to mouth.
Furious with herself, she stuffed her soiled clothes into her saddle bags and found her mittens. Brushing aside the angry tears burning on her cheeks, she shoved her swollen and mottled fingers down into the wool.
The prince had not come for her, but her need to make water had become impossible to ignore. The patriarch’s home lacked a toilet or chamberpot. It was, in fact, little more than a long room. A single bed, a lopsided table, two well-worn benches, but no running water.
So she rammed her feet into her slippers, buttoned on her damp jacket and stepped out into the awakening day.
The prince’s men had made camp on her doorstep. Canvas lean-tos sat clustered around the smoldering coals of last night’s cook fires. The men themselves were only just beginning to rouse. Eyes still crusty with sleep and bones still stiff and cracking, they grumbled and sat up and listlessly stirred the dead cinders.
The nearest of the fellows, a blond young man sprawled across the front step, jolted to attention when Disa swung open the cabin door. He stared up at the prince’s bride, taking in the sweet face that had broken so many hearts.
“What’s happened to you?” he exclaimed, and the astonishment in his voice captured the entire camp’s attention.
She clutched at her cheeks with her woolen mittens, but he, and now all the other men, continued to gawk. Her fingers had blistered from last night’s boiling bath, and her cheeks had fared little better. She could not know what they saw—she had no mirror—but their expressions did not make it difficult to guess.
“It was hot inside.”
“Is that so? Must have been a right oven. You’re red like wine, you are.” The blond man grinned, and his friend, still nestled in his bedding beside him, added a derisive snort.
Disa stood a little straighter, but she could not bring herself to drop her hands from her burned cheeks. “Too much sun from yesterday, I imagine.”
“Sun?” questioned the shaggy giant stoking the fire. “Not much sun yesterday, I think.”
“No! No, there wasn’t!” The blond replied, his grin spreading. “You’re quite right, Rorik! Wet as the sea, it was. By Njord’s pretty toes, I was wringing out my leggings all night.”
“Make way, if you please,” Disa mumbled, skirting past the man on her doorstep and Rorik the Giant. She kept her hands plastered to her cheeks and her chin down as she hurried for the communal washrooms.
But she hadn’t reached the main road when the man with the fire-red hair caught her up in his arms and spun her around.
“And where are you going?” Prince Eric demanded as he set her firmly back upon the ground. “Running away so early?”
“No!” She grabbed his arms to steady herself, revealing what his men had already discovered.
He recoiled, and his eyes went as a wide as coins. “What’s happened to your face?”
She could not lie to him, but neither could she explain it in a way that did not seem utterly pathetic. “The water was too hot.”
“The water… what were you doing?”
“Bath—washing.”
He blinked several times before answering, “I cannot decide, Lady Saldis, if you are incredibly foolish or incredibly vain. What exactly was your intent when you boiled yourself?”
“I was just washing,” she muttered, conscious that the men behind her were silent and listening. They weren’t laughing anymore, and the prince wasn’t smiling.
“Washing, why? What did you hope to achieve?”
“I’m clean.”
“Clean,” he repeated hollowly. “What’s the point of being clean if you only look ridiculous?”
The embarrassment was painful enough without the men chortling and smirking behind her. Her eyes swam with tears as she glanced over her shoulder. The men wouldn’t look at her: the blond sprawled upon the stairs pretended to sleep, the bald man was dismantling his lean-to, and huge Rorik grunted as he kicked over the coals.
The prince from her father’s mead hall was gone. That man would never have ridiculed her in this way. The man that had replaced him, this man, sneered when the other might have soothed.
Where was the prince who had once stroked her tortoiseshell brooches? Where was the man who had defended her against her own father?
“Why—why say these things?” She was so ashamed of her appearance that she could not look her red-haired prince in the face.
Prince Eric sighed and sounded truly remorseful when he said, “I’m sorry, I slept poorly. It wasn’t my intention to embarrass you. The lady is still a lady, even if her cheeks are a little colored.”
Her bad morning improved as the tents were packed and breakfast was eaten. The prince’s vikings forgot their teasing and sniggering as they readied the horses and stored the last of their lord and lady’s belongings in the saddlebags. Disa had hardly enough time to make use of the toilet—a cesspit dug into the floor of a decaying shack—and thank the settlement’s patriarch before the prince was taking her arm and leading her to her little pony.
She rocked into the saddle and was taking up the reins when Prince Eric produced a linen shawl, orange like the dying sun. She took the fine fabric and rubbed it between her fingers. The embroidery was masterful and the weld-dye rich and fragrant. It was a shawl like the ones her mother wore.
“It’s for you. To wear. It should keep the sun off your cheeks. I dare say they’ve had enough punishment.”
He was smiling as he spoke, and there was warmth in his tone that harkened back to their first meeting. She was so pleased to see it that his grin soon prompted one of her own. She accepted his offering and swung it up and over her honey-colored hair and red ears. She was not married—not yet—but this lady’s shawl made her feel very much like a wife. She lacked only the thralls to direct, the butter to churn, and the fish to smoke. If only her mother could see her now, sitting high upon her horse and wearing the lady’s shawl the future king of Norge had given her.
“Tha-thank you,” she stammered as her smile spread ear-to-ear. Her cheeks were tight from the burns, but she felt too good to stop. The prince was looking at her again.
“It suits you.”
The half-giant Rorik brought forth the prince’s garron, and Prince Eric swung himself into the saddle. “The orange draws attention away from the blisters, I think.”
But she didn’t mind that her face was still ugly. After he bid their farewells to the small lumbering settlement, she hastened her pony to match strides with his garron.
It would take them another nine days to reach Saeheimr, but what was that but nine more days to cultivate the love her brother had accused her of lacking? Her burns would fade, her shame would fade, and slowly the prince might be persuaded to open up to her.
She was now determined; by the time they married, she would be in love.
Chapter Seven