This was not him. Patient, he was. Tolerant. Welcoming to those who needed him.
Willing always to put the needs of the clan ahead of his own.
He slept little and walked for hours upon the shore. He hiked to the place where the Norse had camped. He did not know why, for there was little of them there but a few cast-off items and the burned patch where their fire had been.
Once, on a dreary, rainy afternoon, he even trudged up to the half-ruined hut where he and Hulda had been together, and then wished he had not. Because the memories that lingered there were so sweet, immediate, and painful that he could not bear them.
Would she have stayed if things had ended differently? If he had put it to her properly.
Asked her again to be his wife.
Och, and what would the clan have said to that?
Would she have stayed if the threat from the four Norse ships had not existed? She had sacrificed herself for him; he knew that very well. Played the part of the hound, even knowing the hound would have to be off and away after.
At night, in the few short snatches of sleep he did catch, he dreamed of her. Only it was not always her. The women he sawwere those of whom he had dreamed before, those who felt like Hulda. Loved him like Hulda. But the love for him shone from different eyes set in other faces.
They were, so he came to accept, the women she had been. Now all lost to him even as she was lost to him.
It made one of the reasons he slept so little.
One morning when he went up on the wall at first light, Borald edged up next to him. The head of the guard had taken up night duty, and Quarrie wondered if he felt as uneasy as Quarrie did.
“All quiet?” Quarrie asked, even though he could see that it was.
Borald eyed him in the way people had begun to do, as if assessing his mood. “Aye, so. And yet”—he narrowed his eyes and flung his gaze out over the sea, which lay smooth as a tarn—“it is not. If ye ken what I mean.”
Quarrie did. For days he’d had that feeling, as if something lurked out there unseen. He nodded.
“D’ye think—” Borald hesitated and then asked, “D’ye think they’ll come back?”
“The Norse? They always do. We need to be strong enough and ready, when they come.”
“I mean that batch. The ones Mistress Hulda helped run off.”
“They are awa’ to Ireland, eh?” God help the Irish.
“Aye, only—will they stay there?”
A frisson of uneasiness ran up Quarrie’s spine. “Ye ha’ that feeling, do ye?”
“It has crossed my mind.”
“And mine,” Quarrie admitted. “If it happens, we will ha’ to be prepared to fight. To defend.”
Borald shot him another look. All around them, the guard changed, men coming to take the places of those who had been on duty all night. They were as good as alone.
“Chief,” Borald said, “is it that, weighing so heavy on ye? The fear that we shall see sails before winter comes?”
The wrong sails,Quarrie thought.
“Or is it her—Mistress Hulda?”
Quarrie turned to his friend. For aye, Borald was that, as well as a trusted defender.
“It matters not,” he said. “She is gone.”
“There will be other seasons. She may return.”
