“When Arne survived, my father freed her,” Tormod said. “He considered banishing her but I… I…” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “As I said, I refused to believe them. She was still my wife.”
“But,” Aoife began and then stopped. “You took her back as your wife? After what she had done.”
“After she was freed, she had nowhere else to go. She begged me for another chance, and I thought that Einar should have a mother.” He put his head back and sighed. “We agreed that she would provide me with a son of my own and then we would divorce.”
“But she died?”
“Yes, the child came early and neither of them survived. Having my child killed her.”
Aoife frowned at him. “You being the father would not have been the deciding factor in whether she lived or died.”
“No, but… I had wished her dead so many times.”
“And you know for sure that you are not Einar’s father?”
“He was born soon after Yule,” Tormod said. “We had only met in late summer.”
“Children can come early.”
He grimaced. “No, the babe was full-grown. It is one thing to not disown him as my son. It is another to allow him to someday inherit everything I have worked for, especially if I have children of my own. And I cannot love Einar as a father should because I am not his father.”
Aoife was silent. The fact that Tormod was unable to love Einar no matter how wonderful the boy was, just because of who his parents were, hurt her. “Why can’t you love him?” she asked quietly. “He is naught but a child, innocent of the sins of his parents—”
“Ingrid deceived me. It nearly cost Arne his life. It nearly cost the lives of everyone in the village.”
Aoife thought back to when Ragna told her that the way Tormod saw the past was not the way others did. “But it didn’t,” she said. “Are you sure that is what people think?”
“What else could they think?”
“That you spared a child and brought him up as your own, even though his mother had betrayed the village. It was not Einar’s fault, after all.”
“It was my fault. I should have seen through her. I should have…”
Aoife saw the expression of shame that crossed his face. Suddenly, she understood the root of his anger. “You loved her. You thought she loved you.”
“She lied to me, so she would be safe. Fooled me not once, but twice, and everyone knew it.”
Aoife started to speak and then stopped. How could Tormod think like this? The villagers did not feel this way about him, she was sure of it. Why would they have come with him across the sea if they thought he was a weak leader? The blame for all of this lay with Ingrid, her family, and her lover. She frowned. Tormod had loved Ingrid, and she had betrayed him—a betrayal that had nearly killed his cousin. That must have hurt his pride, but surely he was making it worse than it really was? “But her people, they mighthave attacked you, anyway. And you would not have become jarl if your people had not believed in you.”
“Yes, they could have tried,” Tormod admitted reluctantly. “But she must have told them where the weak spots in our defences were. Without that knowledge, they could never have got so close. Certainly not as quickly as they did.”
“How did she know the weak spots in your defences? If she only lived there a few months before the attack, then…” she trailed off, a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Tormod sat, silent, tense.
“You told her?”
He looked at her, his eyes hard. “I told you, I was a fool. She said she wanted to know so she would feel safer. Said she was afraid of them attacking the village, but all along she was telling her father how to defeat us.”
Aoife placed her hand lightly on his arm and squeezed it in reassurance. “Your wife is dead, but you must tell Einar the truth. He deserves to know.”
“Arne has promised to do this. But this is not something I can admit publicly,” Tormod said. “If I do, then the village will know I am not fit to be jarl.”
“I thought you said they already knew about the boy.”
“They whisper it behind their hands. None dare say it to my face.”
“Perhaps it does not matter.”
