Page 81 of The Very Virile Viking

"Rags… which have to be washed over and over. Or leaves, if there are no rags about. Sheep's fleece, too, but that is more rare, and a waste of good wool." Kirsten said this with a straight face, so Angela

knew she spoke the truth.

The procedures were so primitive, they could only have been practiced by women in… Oh, let's say the tenth century .

With a thumping heart, she asked both girls, "Do you know what year you were born?"

"Nine eighty-six," Kirsten said.

"Nine eighty-eight," Dagny said.

Angela narrowed her eyes at a sudden thought… an incredulous sudden thought. "What grade are you in school, Kirsten?"

"School? I have never attended school. The only ones who attend schools that I know of are monks and healers… and not all of them do."

" What? And, you, Dagny?"

She shook her head.

"But that's impossible."

" 'Tis the way of our land… naught unusual," Kirsten said. "Besides, Father Patrick—our grandmother's priest—taught us a little book learning and writing… on occasion. And we girls are instructed in all there is to know about running a household of three hundred. The boys master farming and fighting, or building ships, like Uncle Geirolf."

Angela shut her jaw.

"Our father told us not to discuss this with anyone," Kirsten was quick to add.

She gasped, not because Magnus had cautioned his children not to discuss their past, but because the dates and schooling information that Kirsten and Dagny had supplied reinforced their father's outrageous time-travel claim. The girls must have misinterpreted her gasp, because they rushed to their father's defense.

"Father meant no harm. He told us not to discuss those things to protect us." Dagny wiped a tear from her eyes as she spoke.

"Oh, honey, I didn't mean—"

"He is the best father in the world," Kirsten elaborated. "I know from watching the tell-a-vision and from talking to Lily that men like our father are looked down on here. They are considered crude and uneducated."

"Father grumbles mightily about the troubles we bring him, but he protects us always," Dagny added.

"You may not know this—and Father would not like my telling you—but half of us are probably not even his blood kin. People—especially women—take advantage of him by dumping babe after babe at his feet. He resists and complains loudly, but in the end he never turns any away. That is the way he is."

Kirsten lifted her chin, as if defying Angela to disagree.

How could she?

Magnus was a grown man who might lie to her, but these girls were too young and innocent to have fabricated this tale. They were telling the truth.

"I won't say anything," Angela said as calmly as she could, so as not to alarm the girls, but her thumping heartbeat kicked up a pace.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!

In a world that had become very uncertain to Angela, one thing became crystal-clear: She had some things that she needed to settle with Magnus. But first she needed to settle those things within her own mind… and heart.

A short time later, as the girls went off to the den to watch a movie and she was about to go downstairs, she passed the "nursery." It was not Grandma who was rocking Lida to sleep, but Magnus, who softly sang a song to her in a language she did not understand… probably Old Norse. As he crooned to her, Lida kept tugging at his war braids and saying, "Fa-Fa," baby talk for father . It was the newest addition to her vocabulary, next to "Goo." Even as he sang, Magnus would intermittently lean down and press a soft kiss to the baby's fine hair.

The sight of the big man and the tiny girl touched something deep within Angela's soul, and she accepted something then that she had known, deep down, for some time.

I love him.

Chapter Thirteen