This time yesterday, she was in Manhattan. What happened? She woke up in her bed. Karen brought her coffee and a blueberry scone, pulled open her bedroom curtains, and turned to smile and tell her about her day. Yesterday, they were filming the last episode of the first half of the season. She missed it. Would they sue her? Not if she’d been abducted. But she was beginning to believe that she hadn’t been abducted. In that case, they really couldn’t sue her. She almost laughed. She was going out of her mind. How did they treat mental disabilities in the eleventh century? She was guessing not too good.
She thought she heard him calling her name. She stopped and looked around. There was nothing, not a tree, not a house, a stone, a marking of any kind. There were only reeds as far as her eye could see. She panicked. How would she ever find her way out? She turned around. Was that the way she’d come?
She heard him again, resonating, agonized, urgent. “Camelee!”
The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end. “Woman, answer me!”
“This way! I’m lost!” she cried out to ensure his leniency when she explained what she was doing here.
“Thank you, God,” she heard him say when she burst through the towering reeds. She ran through the water, pulling up the reeds that tangled around her ankles, and almost leaped into his saddle.
He pulled her up by the arms and let her sink onto his lap. He wrapped his arms around her. “Where were you off to?”
“I had to go, and I was so sad that Hild’s mother wasn’t with you that I wasn’t thinking about which way I was going. Next thing I know, I was lost. Oh, Wo—Chief,” she quickly corrected when she saw Akkar.
She wouldn’t tell him she was terrified to gain his pity. If he had a brain in his head, he would know that she wouldn’t tell him if she was afraid. “How big is this bog?”
“You would come to its end in one day. Or go around it in two days,” Akkar answered her.
Wolf grinned at her at Akkar’s expense.
“I was not intending to take us through the bogs,” the chief let her know as they made their way back to camp.
“Good news to my ears.”
“I also have bad news,” he said regrettably.
“Hild’s mother,” she guessed.
“Frida,” he told her. “Some of the women know who she is…was.”
“What happened? And don’t tell me Fin had nothing to do with it,” she added softly and tilting her head so that only he could hear.
“She was mauled by a bear. She is…” he paused trying not to be too candid. “Hardly recognizable”
She blinked up at him. “Where was she and what was she doing there?”
“Perhaps she was lost,” he answered. “Same as you.”
She grimaced at how that excuse had turned so quickly against her. “So, you’re not going to question him any further?”
“Camelee, she was mauled by a bear. I saw the body.”
She wanted to tell him that maybe Fin had raped her and then left her for dead. But he wouldn’t see it.
“What did you tell Hild?”
He shrugged his shoulders and Camelee was once again reminded of how mighty he looked and how strong he was. He was real. He was a Viking warrior and a chief, though she wasn’t sure what the latter was.
“Genevra asked me to let her tell the girl,” he said. “I allowed it.”
“Genevra is a kind soul. I must apologize to her for my flash of anger when she called me daughter.”
“Why should that anger you?” he asked.
“I just have this sour part of me about mothers.”
“You will be one someday,” he pointed out.
