Come Back to Me (40 page)

From his great height on the horse, he gazed down at her and demanded, "What the hell are you doing out here?"

That was hardly the warm and comforting greeting she had hoped for, yet she was willing enough to accept it. "Trying to get back to Landsende." She held up a hand and he took it, hoisting her into the saddle as though she were thistledown. Even now, knowing his body so intimately, his strength still startled her. She was silent for a moment, pretending to settle herself in front of him.

An acrid smell clung to him. It pierced her sudden unease and heightened it.

"What is that?"

"The smell? Smoke. The barn burned."

"The barn? The big one where all the fodder is supposed to go?"

"The big one."

She twisted in the saddle and looked at him. His face was stained with soot and very grim. "What will we do now?"

"Build a new one, quickly."

That was a sensible enough answer and typical of the man, yet she was still taken aback. "I don't understand. How could it have burned?"

"It was torched. Someone spread pitch around the barn and probably into it as well, then lit fire to it."

She was frozen in his arms, utterly rigid.

"What is that on your hands?" he asked in a way that told her he already knew.

"Pitch." She was very proud that her voice held steady.

"I don't suppose you would care to explain how you come to be stained with pitch and out here miles from Landsende."

Her throat tightened painfully. Just then she needed nothing so much as for him to hold her and reassure her that everything was all right. What a foolish wish! How weak and ridiculous of her to expect any such thing!

"I was in the stable with Grani and Sleipnir. Someone came out of the fog and grabbed me. I couldn't breathe and I lost consciousness. I came to perhaps an hour ago and have been trying to make my way back ever since."

She spoke by rote, her voice devoid of expression. So too did she avoid looking at him again. There was no point save further pain.

But she could not deny the trembling deep within her. If he did not believe her, what hope had she? Cast among strangers who could so easily become enemies, what would be her fate?

He was silent for a long moment but she felt his arm tighten around her. Finally, he said, "Have you anything else to tell me?"

"I saw two serpents eating each other."

"What? In the fog?"

"No, I'm not sure where. Just before I lost consciousness, I saw them."

"You imagined them."

She started to shake her head, stopped. Pride forbade her to try to convince him of anything. Or perhaps she merely sensed the futility of it. Already she felt herself retreating inward as she had done as a child, fleeing in the only way left to her.

The fog made no difference to Sleipnir. He found his way back to Landsende unerringly. Smell, Rycca supposed. Every place had its own unique scent. Wolscroft had smelled of dank stone and fear. Landsende was the sea, ripe fields, the gentle smoke of hearth fires, horses and leather, sweat and steam, all the rich, complex aromas of home.

Home? She swallowed against the tightness in her throat and pushed the thought down firmly.

Yet still it lingered. The walls around the stronghold were looming out of the fog when she finally asked, "What do you intend to do?"

He did not answer at once. They were inside, near the stable, and he dismounted before their eyes met. He looked tired, she thought, not in the body so much as in the spirit, and felt a spurt of sympathy for him.

She went into his arms. He lowered her to the ground but did not let go of her. His warmth and strength offered no comfort. He said, "My people have been harmed by this."

That much was obvious. Folk wearied from the harvest would now have to labor quickly to construct a new barn lest their efforts go for nothing. If the fodder couldn't be stored properly, the animals couldn't be fed during the winter. Some would be culled as it was, but cull too many and the flocks would be sadly depleted come spring. The loss of one barn could reverberate for years.

Yet for all that, his choice of words stung.

"
We
have been harmed by this," Rycca said.

He did not answer but took her hand and led her into the great hall.

Damn her
! How could she have no explanation for this, nothing he could use to spare her what must otherwise be? Did she have no understanding of his position? He was jarl, the leader of his people, their security in an uncertain world. Whatever his private feelings, he could never forget that.

Dragon took a deep breath, struggling for calm. Dread had been building in him ever since discovering that Rycca was missing. He had gone over and over in his mind the series of events—the destroyed fabric, the damaged salt, Grani, the spices, and over and over he had told himself she could not possibly be responsible. Especially not for Grani. She loved horses.

She didn't love him.
Thor's hammer
, why was he thinking that now? Who cared if she loved him or not? Certainly not he, who had never thought to find love. It was fine for Wolf and Hawk, and he was happy for them, but few people were ever so fortunate and he had not expected to be among them. Never mind the lingering yearning that stirred within him, the wistful wishing for some true sense of connection that shattered loneliness and gave shape and purpose to his life. He absolutely was not going to think of that. It was enough that she was his wife and that she respect what that meant.

But she had not. She had fled from him even after they were all but married. She had lain with a man she had every reason to believe was not the one to whom she had been given. She had fled again and finally wed him only when the alternative was to be turned back over to her father and likely death.

Yet since then—Memory filled him. Rycca in the ship on the way to Landsende, patiently repeating each word in Norse he taught her, determined to learn to speak the language of his people. Rycca lying in his arms at night, sweet and pliant. On the quay, riding Grani, her surprise and pride when she realized the gift Dragon had given her. Her struggles to assume her duties as mistress of his manor. She was not skilled in household matters, this was hardly a secret, yet she had seemed to try so hard. Their nights together and those days he could steal away, filled with passion unlike any he had ever known.

Was this truly the woman who had betrayed him? Who all along, as she lay in his arms, sat beside him at table, won the approval of his people, still plotted to release some venom within herself in acts of ever-increasing destruction?

Plotted
? The word rang harshly in his thoughts. There was no plot, merely a series of events, probably impulsive, that had led them both into this nightmare.

Plotted
. He shook his head, trying to clear it. Wolscroft hated Alfred. Alfred's prestige was invested in the success of the Norse and Saxon marriages. Rycca was Wolscroft's daughter.

And as unlike him as day from night. She loathed her father, had even accepted an unwanted marriage to escape him.

Had she?

What if he had it horribly, hideously wrong? What if all of it, her flight from their marriage, her fear of her father, her gladness at escaping him, what if all of it was false and she no different than the seed from which she had sprung?

It was his bitterness taunting him with such unwelcome thoughts, nothing more. Even if his worst fears were true, they did not explain why she would have risked herself in acts of destruction.

Because she thought she knew him and believed he would not physically harm her? Because the worst she might reasonably expect from him was to be repudiated as his wife and sent back to her family? Such repudiation could be seized upon by Wolscroft, taken as a profound insult and used as an excuse to demand that Alfred sunder the Norse and Saxon alliance.

He had lingered too long in Byzantium. That capital of intrigue and deception had twisted his thoughts.

And yet, it could be true. Though it stabbed him to the core even to contemplate such a possibility, neither could he reject it.

She would have to give an accounting of herself so as to satisfy his own questions and those of his people. They, too, had a right to know.

With such heavy thoughts, the jarl of Landsende entered his hall.

The people of Landsende assembled swiftly as word spread that the wife of the jarl had been found and under what circumstances. Dragon's lieutenants, Magnus among them, came first but others followed on their heels. They filled the hall, with those arriving a little later relegated to the yard beyond.

Dragon sat in his high-backed chair. He had not offered a seat to Rycca and she did not expect one. She understood full well what was to happen here even as her mind reeled from the thought.

Her husband, the hero of a strange land, from whom she had fled only to welcome into her body and her heart, was putting her on trial.

Deep within herself, beyond the barriers of shock and dread, fear stirred but she could scarcely feel it. That was good. She embraced the numbness, letting it fill her as the fog still filled the waning day. Hidden by curling tendrils of mist inside her, she could keep some essential part of herself safe.

"Rycca—"

She surfaced just enough to
realize
the jarl was speaking to her. Whatever he had said, she had not heard.

"I asked you what happened."

"I have already told you." Her voice was very low. She could scarcely hear it herself, but then she was very far away in the fog.

"You said you were taken from the stable by someone you could not see and left unconscious some distance from here."

She nodded, feeling her head go up and down as though on the end of a string.

"You have pitch on your hands."

She held them up, staring at them. They seemed to belong to someone else. All around her, she heard the people gasp, felt the quick ripple of murmurs spreading among them.

"How did the pitch get there?"

"I don't know."

Nor did she know him. Vainly, she tried to remember the playful intimacy of their time together, lying beside him, holding him in her arms and her body, feeling set free by joy. It was all lost in the fog.

"You have no explanation?" He was frowning, and for just an instant she felt a spurt of sympathy for him, then it faded before the sheer impact of the moment.

She was trapped. How could she prove that she had not done something when the evidence said she had? The fog had shrouded all. No one could have seen her taken from the stable or seen who really set the fire at the barn. Indeed, it might all have been done on the spur of the moment, the guilty one seizing the chance of invisibility.

Rycca lifted her head. She was still very cold but the inner chill of her spirit was worse by far. She had to fight her way past it in order to speak.

"I did not do this. I did not do any of it. Naught that has happened is my fault."

"So you say and so I would believe. But the evidence speaks against you."

"Not all the evidence." Driven by desperation to reveal that which she had wished to keep secret, she said, "I am a truthsayer. I cannot speak lies."

Again a murmur rose behind and around her. This was the first the people had heard of such a thing and it prompted much comment.

"Silence," Dragon ordered. He left his chair and walked to the center of the hall, close to Rycca. As though he spoke only to her, he said, "You have told me this about yourself but I have no way of knowing if it is true or not."

"But I showed you with the boy, Olav—"

"I came to my conclusions in that matter separate from anything you said. It was clear to me Trygyv was likely lying, hence did I suspect him of stealing the goblet himself and simply searched for it where it would be kept in easy reach of him. That had nothing to do with any truth saying."

His words destroyed her last faint hope and replaced it with despair. If he did not believe something so essential to her nature, how could she hope for him to believe anything at all about her?

Driven by that despair, she exclaimed, "What about the serpents I saw? Surely they mean something?"

"Serpents devouring each other. Who are they, lady? I know your loathing of Vikings, you made no attempt to hide it. Is Alfred the other serpent, the king whose death you spoke of so readily?"

"You are twisting everything! How can you do this?"

"Say rather how can you?"

His thoughts in turmoil, Dragon waited for Rycca to reply. When it became evident she would not, he searched vainly for some alternative to finding her guilty at once. That would raise the specter of punishment and of that he could not bring himself to think at all. Not yet, at least. It might be he would have no choice.

He should have been a skald, free to wander the world spinning his tales.

But he was not. He was jarl and his people were waiting for him to do what had to be done.

He began to speak, to say she would be confined in their lodge until such time as he could come to a judgment of the matter. But before the first words were uttered, he reconsidered. Just then he saw her look at Magnus and look quickly away as though flinching from him. Magnus? The man he had known since boyhood. The man who had served him ever faithfully. The man Rycca had clearly wished to avoid. Why?

What if she really was a truthsayer and, being such, had some reason to think Magnus less than trustworthy?

He was snatching at straws yet they were all he had. If Rycca was innocent, someone else had to be guilty. Someone who had deliberately sought to turn both him and his people against her, to sunder their marriage, and to place at risk the alliance that was meant to bring them peace.

If such a person existed, whoever he might be, Dragon had to discover him. Far too much was at stake to do otherwise.

He longed just then for a private moment with his wife, a chance to tell her his thinking and explain what he was about to do. But there was none. His people were watching… and waiting. Against the sudden tightness of his chest, he spoke.