right,” the male voice said somewhere at the edge of his consciousness. “He’s not dead, just daft.”
Oh, he was dead, all right. How else could he explain such a creature?
Two thick, flaxen braids secured with rings of hammered bronze grazed his bare chest as she studied him. She wore a helm, as might a warrior, embossed with strange runes—the kind he’d seen on ancient standing stones near the Bay of Firth—and a light hauberk of finely crafted mail.
But she was a woman, of that there was no doubt. The blush of her cheek, the ripeness of her lips, belied her garments and her hard, calculating expression.
His gaze drifted lazily along the curve of her neck and the narrow set of her shoulders. Her arms were bare and sun bronzed, adorned with more of the same hammered metal. With each measured breath, her breasts strained ever so slightly against her hauberk.
“Am I—” he rasped. “Is this—” He coughed up another lungfull of seawater, then met the Valkyrie’s penetrating gaze. “Valhalla?”
Men’s laughter shattered the eerie harmony of cawing terns and cormorants.
“Likely the farthest place from it,” the Valkyrie said. “This is Frideray. Fair Isle.”
His head spun and a wave of nausea gripped him. “But then…” He tried to sit up. She pushed him firmly back down onto the sand. Another icy surge washed over his numb legs and he started to shiver. “Wh-who are ye?”
“I am Ulrika, daughter of Fritha.”
“Rika,” he breathed, fighting to stay conscious.
At her command, a half-dozen hands clutched him and hefted him from the beach. Pain shot through his limbs, and he bit back a groan.
“Thor’s blood, he’s heavy,” the man she’d called Lawmaker said. “We need another man.”
Instantly another set of hands supported his limp, sea-battered body. Her hands. They were small, softer than the others. His head lolled to the side and found her crystal gaze.
“My ship,” he mouthed, unable to make the sounds.
“Lost,” she said, “and every man with it.”
A searing pain twisted his gut, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Nay, it canna be. My…my brother?”
“All.”
The backs of his eyelids blazed with horrific visions of the shipwreck. The storm had come upon them in the night without warning. Biting sleet and lightning, gale-force winds the like of which he’d ne’er known in the Highlands. The howling haunted him still—a high-pitched railing, the shriek of the devil himself. The hull of their ship had shattered like a child’s toy against rocks that had no reason to be there. At least not from the charts they’d carried.
His brother. His men.
All dead.
“May God have mercy on their souls,” he whispered.
The woman snorted and tightened her grip on him. His eyes fixed on the hard set of her jaw as they bore him up a steep hill. She neither faltered nor slowed her pace, ignoring the labored grunts and winded breaths of her male companions.
He was vaguely aware of the landscape around him. Rocky and barren, with a chill deadness about it that was reflected in the woman’s eyes. She didn’t look at him, not once, until the thatched roofline of a long, low house came into view.
They stopped outside the stone structure. He sucked in a breath as his bearers dropped him unceremoniously onto a bench in the courtyard.
“You’re a Scot,” the woman said, and eyed him speculatively.
He nodded, trying to focus on her face. “Grant. George…Grant.” His head throbbed as the white winter sky spun above him like a dervish.
“Grant,” she said. “An odd name.”
“I…I am…The Grant.”
“A chieftain?” Lawmaker said. “Well, then, Ulrika, he is a good choice after all.”
The woman slid a wicked-looking dagger from the scabbard at her waist. He tensed as she cut away his sopping plaid. God knows what had happened to his weapons. Likely lost at the bottom of the sea.
He was too weak to struggle, or even protest. In a matter of seconds he lay naked before her, shivering uncontrollably. Her gaze roved over him coldly, eyeing a sheep for the slaughter. Aye, well, if he wasn’t already dead, he would be shortly. He mouthed a silent prayer.
“He’ll do,” Rika said, and sheathed her weapon. To his astonishment she covered him with a thick woolen blanket.
“Do for what?” A vision of pagan sacrifice flashed in his mind’s eye.
Lawmaker stood over him and arched a peppered brow. “For her husband.”
“H-husband?” His stomach did a slow roll, his head throbbed in time to the dull aching in his bones.
“Sleep now, and regain your strength,” Rika said.
“We’ve much to prepare before the wedding.”
He watched her as she turned and walked away, the short hauberk clinking with the gentle sway of her hips.
Her companions lifted him from the bench.
“Wh-what’s happening?” he breathed, and met Lawmaker’s stoic gaze.
“Something I never thought to see.” The older man smiled cryptically, then followed the woman warrior, Ulrika, daughter of Fritha, into the haze of the longhouse.
“Vikings,” he mouthed.
A band of bloody Vikings.
Rika sucked down the draught of mead and cast her drinking horn aside. “So, old friend, what think you of my plan?”
Lawmaker toyed with the end of his beard and looked at her for what seemed an eternity before answering. “You’re sure you wish to do this?”
“It’s the only way. You know that as well as I. The dowry my marriage brings with it will buy Gunnar’s release.”
“So it would. But we know not where your brother is held.”
“Dunnet Head,” Rika said. “On the mainland. I heard Brodir’s men speak of it.”
“You are certain?”
“Ja.”
Lawmaker nodded. “Brodir will not be pleased. He expects to come home to a bride—and a dowry that will buy him fine goods and timber for ships.”
Rika looked away and swallowed hard. She did not wish to think of Brodir. Not now, not ever. True, they were betrothed in the Christian way—her father
