Captive of the Viking by Juliet Landon

Author:Juliet Landon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Avoiding the blaze from dozens of lamps shining through the open door of the great hall, Haesel kept to the shadows and well away from the streams of servants carrying platters of steaming food to the feasters inside. From the hall, shouts of laughter rose and fell on waves of merry music—pipes, whistles, drums and harps—to which few people listened except to join in, now and then, with some hearty table-thumping. Haesel knew she would not be missed. These feasts usually lasted until the early hours and the Lady Fearn was in the good company of Oskar and his charming wife, Ailsa, and Einar and his lady, putting a brave face on the kind of event she would rather had avoided. Celebrating a Viking homecoming was, however, a way for Aric the Ruthless to reward those men of Lindholm who had left their families and risked their lives to be at his side, and to thank those who had been left behind as caretakers. But Haesel saw no reason to be a part of this, especially since hearing yesterday the terrible tragedy of Wenda’s infant. Such heartlessness was impossible for her to understand, even from a society where any abnormality was looked on with suspicion.

It was the issue of Wenda’s infant that drew Haesel to the cemetery on the hillside that night, following the sandy path by the light of the full moon, not knowing exactly where the child had been left, but needing to make some kind of sympathetic connection and to feel something about its pitiful destiny. Then perhaps the worst images in her mind would fade and restore to her some peace. As if some unknown force was leading her, she picked her way through the marker-stones to the top of the slope where she halted, sinking to the ground obediently in answer to a silent instruction. As she waited in the darkness the scent of newly cut grass drifted strongly on the night air, bringing snatches of laughter and the roar of men in their eternal preoccupation with contest and rivalry.

A prickling sensation stole along her arms, even before she saw the shadowy figure of a young girl climbing the path towards her, too young to be anyone she knew so soon after her arrival in Lindholm. At her approach, Haesel spoke, for it looked as if she had not been noticed, sitting there alone. But her words had not the slightest effect and it was then that Haesel saw her transparency and knew with the certainty of experience that the girl was of the past, not the present. She was even more convinced of this when the filmy figure reached the stones just beyond Haesel’s feet and bent to touch a bundle that Haesel had not seen, lifting it off the ground and into her arms, cradling it as a mother would have done. Except that this girl was too young to be a mother, but not too young to sense that she was in danger, standing for a moment to listen and to look before moving away.

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