The warrior in him knew.
He turned to his mother. “Ma, why d’ye no’ go and join the women? There is time. Before morning.”
“Nay.”
“They need your guidance, your leadership.”
They would need her strength when they returned after tomorrow’s battle to find what they would find. Their men dead, their houses burned—if he, their chief, did not fight hard enough.
She turned and looked him in the eye. “Nay.”
“Ma, they look to ye. If—Ye must lead them to Chief Radoch at Dunbeg. He will give ye refuge, and since they are farther inland—”
She gasped. “Ye think we will fall to defeat!”
“I do not. I canna tell what will happen.” He had spent half the night totting up numbers in his head. How many wounded. How many dead—people all that he knew and liked. How many warriors he thought the Norse had left.
Ivor wanted revenge. He would not quit.
“You expect me to go off not knowing if ye live or die? Having already lost your da?” To Quarrie’s surprise, his ma pulled him into her arms, a fierce embrace. “I canna.”
He cradled her tenderly. “Ma, if the keep does fall, ye will no’ stand a chance. Ye ken fine what the Norse do to female captives.”
“The keep will no’ fall.”
Quarrie wished he could be so certain.
“Meanwhile, I can tend the wounded. All hands are needed there. Mayhap some o’ them might return to fight. Son, let me battle in my own way.”
What could he say to that?
Borald came to him soon after first light to report that the Norse prisoner had died, and the longboats were on the move.
They had withdrawn under cover of the rain back to Oileán Iur, but by the time Quarrie reached the walls, they rounded it with that almost otherworldly grace they possessed.
Above them, the sky cleared slowly, dark clouds splitting upon pale blue.
It would all end here, today.
*
Urgency crept upthrough Hulda’s body in a steady progression, increasing as they skirted the Scottish coast and slipped through the offshore islands. The weather had been vile and the voyage a difficult one. She wondered if her crew regretted their hasty decision to back her.
But they were young men with more eagerness for adventure than good sense. Moreover, they looked upon most everything as a jaunt. The time spent at home had bored them. Though they cursed the bad weather, their spirits remained high.
The babe inside her—Quarrie’s babe—had settled in her belly and no longer caused her such sickness, even aboard ship. She’d been able to eat her breakfast this day that would end…only Faðir Odin knew how.
Would she see her love? Would he welcome her with open arms?
The morning was a gloomy one, heavy with cloud, but at least the vicious rain had stopped. Hulda held a place beside Garik at the tiller, but as they passed Oileán Iur, she started forward, the better to see.
It appeared before her eyes like something unveiled in a dream. The settlement huddled there above the rocks of the shore, looking stark in that ugly morning light. The four longboats—all of which she recognized—ranged in the water, and the mass of men fighting on the shore were engaged in dire struggle.
The men around her began to exclaim. But Hulda, assailed by horror, fell into what she could only call a vision of the past, a waking dream.
She approached the holding from the sea, ja, only she rode in a tiny boat, one propelled by the oars of the man she—
Loved.
