Sandra Hill Read Online Free Page B

“VAAAAAAAAGN!”
    With that pathetic wail against the fates, he either succumbed to unconsciousness again, or else he died. He hoped it was the latter, because he honestly and truly yearned to leave behind this life.

Chapter Two
    Northumbria, A.D. 964
Vagn the Virile Meets Helga the Homely…
    “Marry my daughter, or you’ll wish you were dead,” Jarl Gorm Sigurdsson of Briarstead snarled.
    “I already wish I were dead,” Vagn Ivarsson said matter-of-factly. And if he had to continue this tiresome argument with Gorm much longer, one of them definitely was going to be dead.
    The large blood vessel in Gorm’s thick neck bulged even more. “If wishes were fishes, Ivarsson, you’d be a bloody whale.”
    “‘If wishes were fishes,’” Vagn repeated back in a mimicking voice. “What are you? A poet now? I ought to introduce you to my friend Bolthor the Skald.”
    “I already know Bolthor, and, nay, I am not a poet. I am the angry man who holds your life in his hands.”Gorm made a visible effort to control his temper by leaning back in a chair propped against the wall and taking a long swig of ale from a pottery jug. “Be forewarned, though, you slimy cur. If you do not heed me soon, your death will be slow and painful. Methinks a skinning may be in order…or a gelding.”
    “Promises, promises,” Vagn taunted bravely…though he hoped he would be able to maintain that bravery if Gorm followed through on his threats. He welcomed death these days, now that his brother was gone, but the slow, painful path of skinning or gelding…nay! Bolthor once told a saga about Gorm cutting out the tongue of one of his enemies and eating it raw, but one never knew if Bolthor spun tales of truth or fantasy.
    Vagn lay flat on his back, tied to a pallet in an upper bedchamber of Gorm’s Northumbrian timber castle, with a guard standing watch outside the door. The room was stifling hot due to a fire blazing in the small hearth. He licked his parched lips, but he’d be damned if he’d beg his vile captor for a drink…let alone his life.
    It had been more than two sennights since the Battle of Stone Valley, and he’d almost died numerous times. Now that he was starting to recover, he yearned for the peace of death. Who would have thought that the Norns of Fate would save him so many times, just to plop him, not in the hands of a Saxon enemy, but in the hands of one of his own countrymen…albeit one living at Briarstead, near Jorvik, the Norse capital of Britain? Whether he called himself jarl or earl, Gorm was Viking to the core, like himself.
    “I will not wed with Helga.”
    “She is no longer homely. And she still has a maidenhead, praise be to Odin!”
    If not for his restraints, Vagn would have pulled his own hair in frustration. “Homely or not, virgin or not, she will not be my bride. Nor will any other woman, if that is any consolation. Find someone else. Sweeten her dowry pot enough, and she should have suitors aplenty. In truth, few men choose a bride based on appearances.”
    “You rejected her once afore…on appearances. Called her Helga the Homely at the Vestfold Althing, you did…not to her face, but to plenty of others.”
    “I did not!”
    “Ten years old you were at the time, and Helga only seven, but she has remembered all these years…not that she ever mentions it. But I remember, you cod-sucking weasel.”
    Oh, bloody hell, could it have been that time when Toste and I were fostered apart? “Twen-twenty years,” Vagn sputtered. “You have been harboring a grudge for twenty years over a mere youthling taunt?” And I do not care what you say, Helga must be homely if she has not wed yet at the ripe old age of twenty and eight. An overaged virgin. Eew!
    “You named her Helga the Homely, and she has suffered mightily for it. Plus, you ne’er showed up for the betrothal ceremony when you were fifteen. I see naught mere in that.”
    “I keep telling you, that was my twin brother, Toste. And he was