Once she hit the ground, she reached for the fur-lined cape she’d thrown out the window before descending. Only then did he speak.
“Fancy meeting you here, wench. Are you going somewhere?”
She almost jumped out of her skin, so surprised was she. Her shoulders drooped for a second, then she straightened and stared at him before boldly asserting, “I was practicing my WEALS training. It’s called rappelling. Would you like me to teach your men how to do it? It might come in handy in scaling walls next time you go raping and pillaging.”
He laughed. He could not help himself.
But then he picked up the willful wench, tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her back inside the keep. But not before whacking her across her upraised bottom.
Beware of rogues with dimples . . .
Joy had never felt so humiliated and defeated in all her life. Tomorrow she would get her act together, again, but for now she just wanted to crawl into a corner and lick her wounds.
The jerk carried her like a sack of flour—a sack of flour with its big butt up in the air—through the crowd of laughing Viking men and women. Up the steps to the wood-and-stone fortress and then, instead of taking her back to his bedroom, he went into a huge hall with massive fireplaces at either end and several open hearths arranged across the middle. More steps, and they were on a raised dais where he sank down into an armed chair and arranged her on his lap.
“Let me go. I can sit myself.” She tried to struggle out of his arms, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“Be still, or I will be forced to punish you in a way you will not like. My people will demand it.”
She stilled, then turned. At least a hundred people, mostly men but a couple dozen women, were streaming into the lower level of the hall and sitting on benches around the entire room before food-laden tables. She suspected that the low benches, at least a yard wide, turned into beds at night. Some of them—the brothers Arnis and Erland and an attractive blond man whom she thought Brandr had referred to as Tork on the walk back—sat down on either side of them on the dais.
A twenty-something woman with breasts the size of melons leaned over Tork’s shoulder. By her attire, i.e., burlap sack, Joy assumed she was a thrall. By her ingratiating demeanor—running back and forth to bring him the best morsels of food and practically wagging her tail when he smiled at her—she knew she was a thrall.
And this is what Brandr wanted her to be!
She couldn’t think about that now. She must observe her surroundings, plan her next escape.
This was the same hall where the Brothers Dim, as in dimwit, had brought her the first day, but she hadn’t had a chance to get a good look then. It was a scene out of some crazy B movie. Primitively dressed people in a primitive castle. Monty Python with a twist. The men wore belted tunics over slim pants with leather boots, some ankle height and cross-gartered up the calves, others knee-high.
It appeared that only thralls had short hair. Most other men and all the women wore their hair at least collar-length. Some had mustaches or beards, and the latter were braided or laced with colored crystal beads. Many wore thin braids on the sides of their faces, like Brandr.
The women wore collarless, ankle- and wrist-length linen or wool gowns, over which hung open-sided, pinafore-style aprons of a finer quality cloth, usually wool. Some wore their hair in a knot at their napes, younger women a long braid down the back, and still others sported either little white caps, similar to a baby’s, rounded on the top and tied under the chin, or hood-type caps that fit over the head and tied behind the neck with the hair or braids hanging loose down the back. Everyone sported ornate brooches, usually writhing animals of some type. On the women, they fastened the straps of the apron, sometimes holding sets of keys. On the men, they held together short and long capes. The fabrics, mostly wools and leathers, ranged from drab to fancy, depending on status, she supposed. But the colors were bright—blue, red, purple, yellow, and copper—aside from the thralls, that is.
This was really taking reenactment to the extreme, in her opinion. And, whoo-boy, if it wasn’t reenactment, she was going to have enough material to write a book when she got back. She’d be on
Oprah
and
Larry King
and be such a hotshot celebrity, her brothers would have to grovel at her feet.
It was a sign of her mental state that she was making jokes with herself, she decided.
“Oh, good Lord!” she said. Now she knew what had happened to her bra and panties. One flat-chested lady was wearing her bra,
on the outside
of her gown. And a young boy was wearing her panties on his head like a sort of beret. She stifled a giggle at the absurdity and went back to studying the crowd.
Mostly silent, except for shuffling sounds and murmurs, everyone seemed to be waiting expectantly before eating.
Brandr raised a hand, and a waitress or serving maid or whatever poured beer into a cup and shoved a large platter of food in front of him: slabs of red meat, vegetables, sliced apples, flat bread.
“Drink,” he said, raising the wooden cup to her lips.
“I can drink myself.” She reached for the cup, but he held it beyond her reach.
“You will drink from my cup or not at all.”
She stared at him and the implacable expression on his face. “Does it symbolize some crazy notion or other?”
“Drink the damn mead!”
Time to choose your battles, girl,
she told herself. She was very thirsty. So she opened her mouth and drank the potent honeyed brew.
Whoa!
She knew her beers, having grown up with three beer connoisseurs and being in the military where beer was almost a sacred beverage, but this mead stuff was sweet and strong. Good, but strong.
Then he drank from the same cup.
The crowd took that as a signal to begin their meal, and the voice and chatter of a communal dinner began. She was not being ignored, but she was no longer the center of attention.
It was clear by his place on the dais and by the way many of the servants referred to him as “master” that Brandr was something special in this society. “What are you? Some kind of Lord of the Fjord or something?”
“Or something,” Old Dour Face snapped.
Jeesh! The guy had no sense of humor.
The brothers made rude remarks about what kind of lord he was. Tork made an especially snide comment about the lord’s low taste in bed thralls.
Joy leaned forward and told Tork, “You should talk! You and Miss Brain-dead Udder of the Month!”
The rest of them laughed, except the dumb bimbo, who didn’t get the insult. Fearing that she would come after Joy when she finally understood, Brandr shoved the cup at her mouth again, forcing her to drink the rest down to the dregs. She licked her upper lip, then turned her nose up and away from her captor. Just because she’d accepted the mead didn’t mean she was turning into a docile dishrag, she told herself. She refused to be put in the same category as Boobs R Us.
He yanked the cap off so that Joy’s hair flew out, onto her shoulders and around her face. “That was some feat you accomplished out there, climbing down the wall like a monkey.”
“I
was
good, wasn’t I? You should have seen me climb trees when I was a kid. A regular Tarzanette.”
Again, not even a grin from Scrooge. “Didst consider the danger? Bears abound in these parts, and they are especially fond of nubile wenches on a snowy day. Even the hardiest man would not venture forth alone in this icy region. You could freeze to death in a heartbeat if stranded, even if only overnight.”
“Needs must, babe.”
His eyes went wide at her calling him babe.
“Just for the record, I haven’t been nubile a day in my life.”
“Dost ever stop talking?” He rubbed a strand of her hair between thumb and fingers, as if to test its texture.
“I talk when I’m nervous.”
“Do I make you nervous?”
“No, but being in a room with about a hundred big swords does.”
“In any case, your attempted escape today was foolish, but I must needs commend your skill.” And then he smiled. Which was a shocker. She turned on his lap to get a better look at him. She couldn’t recall even a grin breaking on his grim face before.
She gasped then. “Oh, that is just great! Life is so not fair!”
He cocked his head to the side, still smiling. “What? You are insulted by a compliment now?”
“Not that! You have dimples. Good grief! Bad enough that you are sex in a longboat, but dimples are too much for any girl to handle.”
“I do not have dimples,” he said, even as he dimpled at her. “Do I have dimples?” he asked Tork at his other side.
Tork said, “Now that you mention it.” Then Tork grinned at Joy and gave a little wave.
“Pfff!” Brandr turned back to her. Then some idea seemed to occur to him. “Are you saying you are attracted to me?”
“You already know that I am.”
“I do?” Obviously pleased, he picked an apple slice off the plate and put it to her mouth.
“You are not feeding me,” she asserted, even as he shoved the fruit into her mouth, then clapped a hand over her lips so she couldn’t spit it out.
She chewed, despite her resolve not to, and after more than two days of fasting, it tasted like ambrosia. Crisp and juicy sweet. A piece of unidentifiable meat, possibly venison, then turnip, carrot, and a scrap of bread followed. She tried to turn her face away from the offerings, but he forced her to eat. Besides that, her mind was getting fuzzy from the mead and the shock of her ordeal.
She wasn’t so sloshed, though, that she couldn’t balk at a strange meat swimming in a white liquid. “What is that?”
“Eel in dill sauce.”
“I don’t eat snake.”
“Eel is not snake. Eel is fish.”
“According to whom?”
“You might like it. Have you ever eaten snake, by the by?”
“Yes, in survival training, and it doesn’t taste a bit like chicken. And before you ask, I’ve also eaten slugs and spiders and roaches, too. Not to mention roots and leaves and even dirt. Yeech!”
His mouth dropped open in surprise, then clicked shut. “The soldier business again?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where you learned how to scramble down a building wall? You could have crashed to your death.”
“It’s called rappelling. No sweat.”
He was lost for speech. Then, “I do not understand you.” “Welcome to the club.”
Bypassing the eel, he said, “Try this. It’s honey cake. You’ll like it.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, chewing with delight. It
was
good. “I mean, letting me eat here in your hallowed hall?”
“I am bending the rules a bit.” When she just stared at him, not understanding, he went on, “Thralls are not permitted to eat in the hall with free men and women, but if you are being fed, that is different.”
“There’s a leap of logic in there somewhere,” she said. Then, “Being fed? Like a dog?”
“Just so.”
She tried in earnest to squirm off his lap.
He wouldn’t let her go. “Keep wiggling your arse on my cock like that, and you will get more than you bargained for . . . and I do not mean food and drink.”
“In your dreams!”
“Why do you continue to fight your fate?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Tears welled in her eyes.
Troubled, he wiped the tears from under her eyes with a thumb. “Eat and drink, sweetling. That is all, for now. Then we are going to come to an understanding.” At her glower, he added, “A compromise.”
“Don’t try to soft-soap me with endearments. I don’t like your compromises. I end up naked in your bed at night, behind a locked door all day, and starved to death.”
Tork and the brothers snickered on both sides of them. Brandr ignored them. “Hardly starved to death,” he murmured, but she saw the flush of guilt on his very handsome face.
Dimples and a handsome face and now a smidgen of sensitivity! She was doomed.
“This will be different,” he promised.
“Famous words! Right up there with, ‘You can’t get pregnant if you just let me put it in a little bit, honey.’ ”
Brandr gawked at her for a moment before letting out a hoot of laughter.
After that, the folks—those not playing dice or some kind of board game—were entertained by a lady playing an instrument that resembled a mandolin. Then some young boys did amateur acrobatics in front of the dais. Finally, an old man stood and began reciting the Yngling Saga, his monotone voice droning on about the fantastical origins of the Viking race.
“That is the skald I was telling you about,” Erland reminded her. “Remember. The horrible skald.”
“Shhh. Do not let Alviss hear you,” Brandr cautioned.