angels, full of light. But not Gunnar. He had always been wicked. He was one of the dark ones, a fallen and wrathful angel.
Fishing the washcloth from the bucket, she rung it out and began wiping the grime from his torso, careful of the bruise over his left side. She tried to work in a perfunctory manner and not linger on the scars he’d acquired since she’d last seen him. But she couldn’t help but stop to wonder how he’d come by each one as she found them. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop the flood of memories that came over her. Their days of running wild through the forest as children and their evenings spent inside playing hnefatafl, when he would tease her mercilessly as he tried to break her concentration while she stared at the board, contemplating her next move. The first time he’d kissed her when they’d been children, when she was just beginning to understand what it meant. How strange and wonderful it had felt to have the weight of his body pressing down on hers, even though she’d not understood her own reaction. The years afterward when he’d become almost like a stranger to her, but she would still watch him and feel her breath catch when his gaze would lock on hers.
He’d held a strange power over her even then and she could feel it now trying to take her over. It wanted to make her soft where she had tried so valiantly to harden herself against him. She was seized by a nearly overwhelming devastation that their lives should have turned out differently. She thought she’d squelched that longing and the anger that accompanied it, but it rose up inside her anew. Tears stung her eyes, but she was able to blink them back and shake the melancholy from her head. Her task was to get him clean before Harald arrived and then to make sure that he wasn’t lying on his deathbed. Then she would see him gone, back across the sea or wherever he longed to be, somewhere away from her, before he could destroy her again.
* * *
A short while later Harald arrived. Kadlin averted her eyes from the crutch the man held and the stilted but efficient way he moved with it. She immediately felt ashamed, because it had never bothered her before, except that now she could only imagine Gunnar walking in that same crippled manner and it filled her heart with sadness. Together with Vidar, they unwrapped the wounded leg to examine it. It was horribly discoloured, but Vidar thought that it looked less swollen than when they had set sail. Harald confirmed that it had been broken in more than one spot, so they were careful to hold the wood in place to minimise any movement, but Gunnar still roused from the pain. Vidar was quick to supply him with the small barrel of mead he’d been clutching in the wagon. She gave it a harsh study, suspecting that it contained something much stronger than mead, but held her tongue.
After Gunnar settled down again, they wrapped his ribs and then the leg in clean linen and she grabbed a knife to cut away the rest of his trousers so she could finish cleaning him. Harald stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.
‘Let me do this part.’
She frowned and shrugged him off.
‘Kadlin, do you think he would want you to bathe him? He’ll have trouble enough when he awakens. Don’t do more to take his dignity away.’
Her eyes froze on the grime-covered trousers and she realised that he was right. It would likely embarrass Gunnar if he knew that she had tended to him so intimately. ‘I’ll wait by the fire.’
He nodded and took the knife from her, so she left him and Vidar to finish washing him and went back to the front room of the sod house. The fire warmed the space comfortably. It was small, but she never failed to experience a wave of satisfaction at how she had managed to turn the house into her home in the year that she’d been there since her husband had been killed in battle. Benches dressed in cosy blankets surrounded the perimeter of the room, while the stone hearth sat in the middle. Off to the side were shelves and a table used for eating and preparing food. It had given her sanctuary when she’d needed it and it appeared that it was to be Gunnar’s sanctuary, as well. Picking up the empty bowls the two men had left behind, she intended to wash them, but she couldn’t concentrate. So she abandoned the bowls to the bucket of water and moved to the bench where she usually did her sewing, lighting upon it briefly before standing again to pace the length of the hearth. Her gaze repeatedly went to the alcove just off the hallway until Harald and Vidar finally emerged.
‘How bad is he really, Harald?’
Harald shrugged. ‘Hard to say. If the fever has passed and doesn’t return, he should live, but he won’t ever have use of that leg again.’ He indicated the large crutch he leaned against. ‘At least not without one of these.’
She couldn’t face that just yet, so she didn’t think about it. ‘How long before he...before he can attempt walking?’
He shrugged. ‘That’s largely up to him. A couple of months, maybe more.’
Months. How would she survive being so close to him for months? Yet her heart wouldn’t let her send him away. ‘Thank you for coming. Stay for a while and have supper.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve already supped. I’ll come back in the morning to check on him.’ Vidar rose from his seat on a bench to escort Harald home, but the older man waved him back to his seat. ‘I’ve crossed that field many times without you, boy.’ He smiled and made his way out the door, stopping outside to talk with the men who had accompanied Vidar in the wagon. Their voices rumbled through the wooden door, speaking of the battle across the sea with an excitement that baffled her.
‘Has he been awake at all?’ she asked Vidar.
‘Merewyn’s Saxon witch made a potion of laced mead. Eirik gave it to him before they set his leg and he’s been drinking it since. We thought it was best for the pain. It makes him sleep. He’s been awake a few times, but he’s not very lucid.’
‘Don’t give him any more of it. He needs nourishment now more than he needs oblivion.’
‘But, Kadlin, he’s in pain.’
‘No more, Vidar. He’s wasting away.’
Vidar sighed and nodded from his seat on the bench beside her, exhausted. ‘All right. He’s in your care now.’
She frowned at his resigned expression. ‘Why has he been sent to me? Wouldn’t it have been better to let him rest and recover at Eirik’s home?’
‘Perhaps, but Eirik believed that he had no will to survive his injury. I agree. He would have died had he stayed and he still may.’
She crossed her arms and held them tight to her belly, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the pain. Seeing Gunnar again had caused the old wounds to fester and it was taking all she had to keep them from reopening. ‘Why does he think that?’
‘Gunnar has changed.’ Vidar glanced to the alcove where his brother slept, seeming to weigh his words. ‘He fights with recklessness, without thought for his own well-being. Like a madman. It’s true that he was reckless before, but now he’s even more so. It’s clear to anyone who knows him that he fights with a longing for death.’ He paused as if trying to determine how much to reveal. ‘I once saw him walk into a camp of Saxons, alone, and draw his sword. He fought them all with a smile on his face. The men who fight beneath him have tripled in size, because he’s amassed a fortune, or so the stories claim. But he doesn’t use that fortune for anything except to purchase his boat from Father. He hasn’t bought himself a manor so that he can become a jarl. Most men fight bravely to die with valour and glory—Gunnar fights so that he won’t have to live.’
She imagined the danger that Vidar described and couldn’t control the anger and fear that made her hands shake. Had he
