If they left, might Hulda stay behind?
Ordinarily at the end of the raiding season, the Norse sailed home. Settled in for the winter, their boats safely moored in the fjord. Set about marrying and begetting children.
No matter how successful their season, her crew would likely want that. No true place for them on this bleak shore.
She tried to talk with Garik about it, him being closest to her among the men. She took him walking one clear morning, northward along the shore.
“What would you think, Garik, of us overwintering here?”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Here?”
She had sensed a difference in him since the night of the feast at Murtray when he had showed her his anger. Ja, on the surfacethings were much the same. They joked and teased. Underneath, not so much the same.
“Out of the question.”
She had expected him to say that but still felt disappointed. “Why?”
“There is nothing here for us. As soon as the season for raiding ends, the men will want to go home.”
“But—”
“List to me, Hulda.” He gave her a dark look. “There is nothing here for us. For you, it may be different. You have feelings for the Murtray.”
“Ja.” Why try to deny it?
“The rest of us are not besotted.”
She caught her breath. Why try to deny that too? She could not fairly define whatbesottedmeant. What she felt for Quarrie was far, far more than mere attraction. Something deeper than the infatuation she’d observed affecting her friends. Though what she felt for Quarrie might include that kind of physical attraction, it reached deeper, and ja, she was convinced it had existed even before she first set eyes on him.
She said nothing. Garik glanced at her again, perhaps a bit less fiercely this time.
“I do not blame you, Hulda. As my old móðir told me, one cannot help where one bestows the heart. Men fall in love too.”
“Do they, indeed?”
“Ja, though I will admit we are much more likely to take what we need where we find it, for as long as we can. No man wants a halter around his neck.”
“I do not wish to put a halter around his neck.” Far from it. She thought Quarrie fine and strong and able to make his own way in the world without her help. What she wanted was to stand beside him, fight along with him and for him, if need be, and be with him for as long as she could.
Because she knew instinctively that in life, there were meetings and partings. Having met him, she wanted to put off the necessity for parting as long as possible.
Whatever that took from her.
So if her men wanted to winter at home, to make nests for themselves at Avoldsborg for a season, she did not know that she could go with them.
Yet to stay here alone? Among strangers? Unthinkable.
“I was in love once,” Garik said out of nowhere as he paused and gazed across the sea.
“Were you?”
“Ja. It was while we were busy preparingFreya. I let the feeling pass and it went away. Mayhap, Hulda, you should do the same. Once you go home, you will forget the man exists.”
She would not. The longing for Quarrie was like a fever now, always with her. Though she had not seen him for days.
If it was somehow so that they had known one another before, just as Quarrie speculated, if the gods had sent them, reborn, to find one another again, then ja, it must be true that she had forgotten him once upon a time. Or even twice, however many times they had come through the ordeals of death and rebirth.
As a babe, had he been in her mind? As a young girl? While growing? When Jute taught her to fight and when she went on her first raids?
