Page 83 of The Outlaw Viking

“Really?” she asked in a shaky voice. “Why would they bother with one Viking?”

Father Bernard shrugged. “’Tis what I thought as well. Have the soldiers naught better to do than scour the city for one heathen? But of course, I did not say such. King Athelstan has been good to the holy church. In fact, he founded this hospitium just last year. So if the king wants the pitiful Dane, far be it from me to protest. They can hang the outlaw from his toes and skin him alive, for all I care.”

Rain cringed, barely aware of thanking the unfeeling Father Bernard for his hospitality and declining his offer of lodging during their stay in Jorvik. As they headed toward the doorway, Rain noticed a commotion. A shrieking man pushed against the large priest whose frame barred his entrance. He begged for a healer to come help his wife, who’d been laboring for three days with the birth of their first child.

“Go home, Uhtred,” the priest ordered sternly. “I have told you afore to get a midwife. We do God’s work here. ’Tis unseemly for a priest to place his hands on a woman’s parts in childbirth.”

“But Hilde is dying. The midwife will not come without the coins to pay her, and—”

“Begone!” the priest shouted, pulling the man’s grimy hands off his cassock sleeve with distaste. “Guard, come and remove this wretch from the holy church.”

“Damn you, damn you to bloody hell,” Uhtred cursed as he saw the church guards approaching.

“Wait,” Rain intervened. “I’ll come with you. Perhaps I can help.”

She heard Selik groan at her side.

The man turned eyes of such thanks to her that Rain knew she would help, no matter what Selik said. But surprisingly, he didn’t protest when she started to follow the distraught husband. The priest made a rude sound behind them and remarked, “Foreign priests! Always thinking they know more than anyone else!”

When they opened the front doors of the church, however, they were unable to move. Hundreds of people, many of them children, mobbed the minster steps, screaming and pushing for the loaves of dark bread being handed out by the clerics.

“’Tis alms day,” Selik explained. “The poor line up for their pittance of food, and the priests pat themselves on the back for their great beneficence.”

“You’re very cynical, Selik.”

“You are too softhearted,” he countered as they progressed slowly through the crowd, following Uhtred.

Rain stopped suddenly as she caught sight of a little boy and girl, about seven and four years old, who stood nearby. That they were brother and sister was obvious, even in the filth that covered them from bare feet to lice-infested heads. The little girl stood with thumb firmly planted in her mouth, listening intently to everything her brother told her.

“Now, ye mus’ stand right here, Adela, whilst I try to get us sum bread. Do ye promise not to move?”

“Yea, Adam.” She nodded her head up and down, eyes wide with fright as she watched her brother make his way craftily to the front of the mob, pinching a buttock here, darting between legs there, finally pulling a small loaf out of the priest’s fingers just as he was about to hand it to an elderly woman in rags.

“Come back, ye bloody toad,” the woman screeched, to no avail. Many in the crowd turned to watch Adam’s progress, some trying to snatch his precious booty. But there was no way in the world that the imp would give up his hard-won food. He shoved it down the front of his dirty tunic and ran for his life toward his sister.

As Rain moved closer to the children, ignoring Selik’s angry protest as the crowd separated them and Uhtred cried out in dismay over their delay, Rain saw the boy break the loaf in half, and the two children gobbled down the meager loaf of moldy bread ravenously. Obviously, they hadn’t eaten for days.

Rain bent to her haunches before the pair and asked the little girl, “What’s your name, honey?”

Frightened blue eyes turned for help to her brother. “Adam,” she called, reaching for him with one hand, while the thumb of the other hand shot immediately into her mouth.

“Why do ye want to know?” the little boy demanded with narrowed eyes, putting his hands belligerently on his hips. Rain felt Selik’s presence behind her, but he didn’t speak.

“You two shouldn’t be out on the streets like this. Where are your parents?”

“Got none.”

“Did they…die?”

“Yea. What does it matter to such as you? Ye priests care only fer yer own comforts. Ye would not even come to bury me mother.”

Rain inhaled sharply. “When was that?”

The little boy shrugged dismissively with bravado, hitching up the loose waistband of his breeches. Rain thought she saw a brief flash of pain and fear in his eyes. “Last winter.”

A year! “And who do you live with now?”

“Huh?”