Forbidden Viking by Ree Thornton

Author:Ree Thornton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Two hours later, Valen studied the Hnefatafl board on the table in front of him. The hall had slowly emptied as the inebriated stumbled off to bed leaving behind just a few guests clustered around the tables nearby.

"How did you do that?" he asked, bewildered. She had snuck her pieces through his defences and had his king trapped…again.

She leaned back in her chair and smiled at him serenely. "I can't share my secrets with the enemy," she teased.

He pressed his lips together to halt his smile. He enjoyed the easy banter between them. She had a quick wit and never let his teasing go unchallenged. "But you only learned to play tonight." He shook his head in disbelief.

She shrugged. "I am a quick study. It is very similar to a game we call Shatranj." She sipped her wine, her eyes dancing as she enjoyed his confusion.

Was there anything she couldn't do, or didn’t know? "Can I ask you something?"

She nodded. "Anything."

"How did you know what to do at the river with the child?" He'd replayed it repeatedly in his mind, yet he still could not make sense of what had happened that day. Never in all his years had he seen someone return from the dead like that child had.

She paused for a few moments as she weighed her answer, and then traced the rim of her cup with a finger as she spoke. "In my third year of study, I spent a summer assisting a doctor. I learned much from him about setting bones and tending to severe ailments."

"So you learnt how to save Calla from him?"

She nodded. "One day we attended a man who had fallen in the river and could not swim. It was too late to save him, but Doctor Paqui explained how to cover the mouth and breathe. He called it the kiss of life."

"Thank the gods you were at the river that day. The child lives because of you."

She smiled gently. "It does not always work. I was fortunate."

He returned his focus to the board game and made his move, capturing one of her pieces to clear a path for his king to escape. "What other lessons does a princess study?"

She placed her cup beside the board and leaned forward, resting her hands on the table as she studied her pieces on the board. "Cooking, painting, the stars…"

Watching her lips twitch as her mind worked was sweet torture. He wanted to jump across the table and press his mouth to hers. He downed his ale instead and leaned back, adjusting himself discretely beneath the table. "The stars?"

She lifted a piece between two fingers and then replaced it, tapping her chin thoughtfully as she spoke. "I assisted with mapping the patterns of the stars in the night sky. Others studied the movements of the moon and the sun."

"We navigate our ships by the stars."

She nodded distractedly, and then plucked one of his pieces from the board and quickly replaced it with one of hers. "I win.

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