keep up.
She hurried forward, her feet slipping and sliding down the muddy embankment in her hurry to get to Henrik. He glanced her way in acknowledgment, but was intent on listening to the warrior on the ship. He called out one last time as the men picked up their oars and began to row, obviously in a hurry to get to Alvey. She recognised it as the customary send-off the Danes gave one another. Something about having favourable wind.
‘Please, ask him about Elswyth,’ she urged. ‘Is she hurt?’
Henrik shook his head. Had they known each other better, she had the feeling he would have reached out and touched her shoulder, perhaps even embraced her. Instead, he looked at her with calm and understanding eyes. ‘Your sister is well and uninjured. The casualties were warriors and several Banford men.’
Now that she was assured of Elswyth’s safety, her thoughts turned to Aevir. ‘Casualties?’
He nodded. ‘A handful of warriors were killed and there are several injured.’
Henrik held his shoulders stiffly and there was a strange murmuring going on with the warriors in the ship that she’d been too concerned with Elswyth’s fate to notice a moment ago. It was now that she discerned Henrik’s tight jaw.
‘There’s more. What is it?’ she asked, placing her hand on his forearm.
‘It’s Aevir. He’s been gravely injured.’
‘How injured? What happened to him?’
He shook his head. ‘A gouge on his leg, a head wound, possibly more.’
The world could have tipped out from under her and she wouldn’t have noticed. Aevir’s final words came back to her.
‘I vow to you that I will find your sister. I will bring her home.’
Had she done this? Had he been injured because of his promise to her? What if he didn’t survive? The pain of that thought was too much to contemplate.
To Henrik she said, ‘We have to hurry.’ She needed to see for herself the extent of his injuries.
* * *
The rest of the trip passed in a blur of anxiety for Ellan. Henrik pressed food into her hands, but she didn’t taste it. She kept imagining Aevir lying on the ground, in pain and needing help. Of course he was receiving help from the other Danes and he was probably in better hands than she could provide. Her only experience of nursing was in aiding her siblings through common ailments. The worst injury she had faced was the time she and Elswyth had wrapped Galan’s broken foot. She kept telling herself this, but it did nothing to ease her worry or the incomprehensible feeling that he needed her.
They were forced to stop for a few hours of rest that night. Low clouds had completely obliterated the sliver of the moon, making it too dark to see so that Henrik declared it too unsafe to continue. Ellan bedded down in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in the fur cloak Lady Gwendolyn had loaned her. There was some leftover snow on the ground but, thankfully, it wasn’t actively snowing. Henrik produced another fur from a trunk in the back of the ship and gently draped it over her. She murmured her thanks, but when it did little to make her warm, she began to suspect that the chill she felt came from within.
She didn’t know why Aevir had become so important to her. She only knew that it would be a great tragedy if he was taken from her world.
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