Rollo was stroking his chin with his joint-swollen fingers. It was odd, but his joints didn’t ache like the Christian hellfires this night. No, he felt renewed. He’d been given more than a man deserved. He knew it and marveled that either the Christian God or his Viking gods had granted him his greatest wish.
“Aye,” he said finally. “We must talk.”
“I have a plan, sire,” Merrik said, leaning forward on his elbows.
Ferlain paced to and fro in front of her sister, Helga, but Helga paid her no heed She was mixing a potion and the measures had to be precise.
Ferlain said for the third time, “Who are these Vikings? There is also a girl with them, but none know who she is. Who is she, Helga? You must do something. Look at me! Ask your miserable smoke concoctions! Look into that silver bowl of yours.”
Helga finished her measuring. Only then did she look up at her sister. Then she looked down again and began to gently stir the thin mixture in the small silver bowl. She said in her low, soft voice, “I can see why your husband avoids you so much, Ferlain. All you do is screech and whine, all to no account, and worry and fret. It is tiring. Sit down and hold your tongue behind your teeth. I must finish this or it will be ruined.”
Ferlain, tired and worried, sat. They were in Helga’s tower room where servants were forbidden to enter. None came in here save Ferlain, not even Helga’s husband, Fromm. He didn’t like it, either, always raged about it, but Helga held firm. He could do nothing. Indeed, Ferlain thought, staring at her sister’s intent expression as she stirred one of her vile potions, he was afraid of his wife, ’twas the only thing that stilled his vicious bully’s hand against her. She wondered what the potion was.
Perhaps a poison for Rollo, damn the old man for continuing forever and ever. Why wouldn’t he simply die? He had lived fifty-six years, but still, despite his painful joints, he appeared healthy as a stoat, his teeth strong, his head covered with thick hair, his back straight.
No, it wasn’t poison. It had to be a potion for Helga’s own use. Ferlain looked at her older sister and knew that she looked much younger than she, Ferlain, did. There were no wrinkles on her face, and her flesh was soft and resilient. Her hair was rich and full, so light a brown that it was nearly blond. And her waist hadn’t thickened over the years. She was nearly thirty-five years old. Ferlain was twenty-nine and she looked old enough to be Uncle Rollo’s wife, not his niece.
Ferlain started to jump to her feet, to pace again, just to move, but her sister looked over at her in that moment, and she stilled. Her fingers began violently pleating the folds of her skirt. She couldn’t bear not to be moving, to be doing something, ah, but it was difficult now because she was so very fat. All those babes she’d carried, and all of them dead, leaving her nothing save the unsightly flesh that weighted her down and made her ugly. “Are you finished yet, Helga?”
“Aye, I am.” Helga straightened, eyed that damned potion of hers that looked like nothing more than a light broth, and smelled of nothing at all. “Now,” she said, picked up the potion and drank it down. She wiped her hand across her mouth. A spasm of distaste distorted her features, but just for an instant. Then she lightly touched her fingertips to her throat, to her chin, and finally to the soft delicate flesh beneath her eyes. Then she said calmly, “All right, Ferlain, we have strangers visiting. Rollo and that fool Weland aren’t telling anyone who they are. Even Otta is resolute in his silence. Is that correct?”
“Aye, who are they?”
Helga shrugged. “We will know soon enough. Why does it bother you?”
“I know it’s her.”
“Her? Who?”
“Laren, Helga. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I was talking about!”
“Laren,” Helga repeated quietly. “Odd. I haven’t thought of the child in a very long time. Do you really believe it possible that the girl survived? That she’s actually returned? How very interesting that would be. But Taby wasn’t with her, at least you’ve said naught about a child. He would only have six years now, aye, still a child, and you know how very fragile children are. A puff of a dark wind, and the child sickens and dies. Aye, such fragile creatures they are. So if it is indeed Laren, why do you care?”
“I hate you, Helga! You act so smart and so above all of us. I hate you! If it is Laren, she is back to brew more trouble for us, more trouble than you can concoct potions to counteract.”
Helga smiled and shrugged. “Let her brew up all the mischief she can. We know naught of what happened to her. Calm yourself. You are looking even fatter, Ferlain. You must see to leaving off all those sweetmeats you keep next to your bed. And Cardle is so very thin, the poor man. His chest looks as if it’s next to his backbone.”
“Damn you, Helga, I have carried eight babes! A woman gains flesh when she carries a babe.”
But Helga had no interest, for she had lived through each of her sister’s pregnancies, each of her failures. She said, shrugging, “I do hope it is Laren, our long-lost half sister. Such a quaint child she was, always running wild until Taby was born and then she became such the little mother to him, so much more so than her own mother, the faithless bitch. I wonder what Laren looks like now. She is eighteen now, or close to it. Aye, what does she look like?”
“Will you do nothing?”
Helga stared through the narrow window that gave onto the rolling hills behind the city. The land was rich with summer though it was well into fall now. The hills were still covered with trees and grass and blooming daisies and dandelions. She forced herself to look at her sister. It wasn’t a pleasing sight, but she was her sister, after all. “Naturally I will do something. We must now just wait and see if this unknown girl is Laren. Then we will see.”
Laren wore a pale saffron linen gown, Ileria’s favorite, she’d told Merrik, as she smoothed the material free of wrinkles. A saffron ribbon threaded in and out of three thin braids artfully pulled back from her forehead and looped behind her ears. She wore two armlets, both given to her just that morning by Rollo.
She looked like a princess, Merrik thought, and felt a sharp pang in his belly. She looked as though she belonged here. There was a new confidence in her walk, in the way she spoke. For the first time since he’d carried her away with him from Kiev, he felt a lack in himself. He hated it.
“Are you scared?”
“Aye,” he said without pause, then realized she couldn’t have known what he’d been thinking. “Scared about meeting your half sisters and their husbands?”
She nodded, then took his hand.
“You’ve told me so much about them that the fear of the unknown is long gone. No, not that. Other things bother me.” He looked down at her hand, now held in one of his, adding quickly before she could question him, “You slept deeply last night.”
She smiled up at him. “I didn’t expect to. It was my old sleeping chamber. The men took Taby and me from that same bed. Nothing has changed.”
