“Youdid!”
“Selig!”
“Odin’s teeth! You could have been killed!”
“But I was not. Alas, he was not, either. I only wounded him. He recovered and has since done me a good turn, though I would have still tried to kill him. I am glad now I do not have to.” Selig was shaking his head at her, and she added impatiently, “Well, tell me. The last I saw of you, you were lying unmoving on the ground, covered in your own blood.”
“Aye, my wound was bad. I came to my senses as the carts left, taking the captured away. I had been left with the dead, and as we were all thought dead, no one was left behind to watch. But I did not know if they would return or not for the burials, so I managed to drag myself away from the carnage in case they did come back. I meant to stay hidden in the forest for only a few hours, then to follow and see where you were taken. But as I said, my wound was bad.
“I lost consciousness again and did not wake until that night. I found myself too weak to even rise at that point. I do not know how long I stayed there. The cursed wound festered. A fever raged, but I recall little of it. I know I left my hiding place at some point. I remember wandering, searching for the Saxons.”
“As if you could have done much good if you found them,” she chided.
“My mind did not grasp such logic.” He smiled at her. “I only know I kept moving, kept trying to find you and the others before it was too late.”
“Too late?”
“I did not think any of you would be allowed to live. I thought you would be taken to the lord of those Saxons who ambushed us, so that he could dispose of you.”
“He very nearly did,” Kristen admitted softly. “This place, Wyndhurst, has been raided before by Vikings. He lost most of his family in that raid, and has hated Vikings ever since.”
Selig chuckled. “No wonder he let me stay. I told him the same had happened to me. He must have commiserated.”
“How could you tell such a story?” she demanded sharply. “God’s teeth! He will tear you apart if he finds out who you really are. And to think I only worried that you would be chained and confined with the others if he knew!”
He grinned at her surliness. “He will not find out. Ohthere and the others have enough sense not to hail me when they see me.”
“If they do not faint dead away, as I nearly did,” she retorted.
“I noticed your quick recovery.” He laughed.
Kristen hit his chest in exasperation. “Will you just finish your tale!”
Selig choked back another chortle. “You have lost your sense of humor, Kris.” He gave in when she hit him again. “Very well. I have said I wandered. Even now I do not know for how long, nor how long I lay near death the last time my senses left me. I woke up in the hut of an old Celtic woman. It was she and her daughter who found me on their way back from market at Wimborne. It was a day’s ride from where they found me to their home farther north.”
“Where is that?”
He shrugged. “I do not think I could find them again. Loki has had a fine time with me. You would not believe how lost I have been.”
“You had only to find the river,” she pointed out.
“Aye, so I thought,” he said with a measure of disgust. “I was with the old woman for nearly two weeks. She was suspicious of me because of the way I was dressed, and I mumbled in a foreign tongue when I was delirious. But because I also spoke Mother’s tongue, which was hers too, she nursed me back to health and even led me to a trader, who took my belt and gold armbands in exchange for these clothes you see and a broken-down horse. She even directed me to the nearest river.”
“So?”
“Sothatriver was so far west of here that I had nearly reached land’s end. The problem was that I did not know in which direction I had wandered, or whether I had managed to cross the river somehow in my delirium. I had no way of knowing if the Saxons I sought were east or west of me. And when she directed me west, I assumed I had wandered east. So I went west, to the waste of good time.”
“And when you found that river, you knew you had gone the wrong way?”
“Aye. But then I did not know how far from the river I sought, where you and the others would have been taken, so I was forced to stop at every fortified hall as I progressed back this way. I gave the same story to each lord, which stood me well. But I moved on as soon as I ascertained they had no knowledge of Vikings come from the sea. I did not know when I came here that I had found the right place, until the lord admitted they had also been raided this summer.”
“And your wound is completely healed?”
“Aye, it bothers me no more.”
“Well, it is fortunate you said you were from Devon and not Cornwall, or you would not have been welcomed here.”
He chuckled. “I learned of the hostility between the Cornish Celts and the Saxons at the first hall I approached. I nearly found myself in chains there, but you know what a golden tongue I have.”
