The rain had crept in from the horizon before they left, and the scent of it accompanied them as they set out, taking only the færing this time. The men, used to being out in all weather, rowed hard. The settlement grew steadily larger as they rounded the island and approached the shore. A haze of smoke spread out above it, making it look misty and indistinct, like something out of a dream.
Surely Hulda had seen this place before. Before yesterday, that was, when she’d approached in the longboat. Ja, surely that was what she remembered. Why did she have a sudden vision—or memory—of approaching in a different boat with a man at her side, a man and a great, gray hound, and fear in her heart of a terrible battle taking place?
No battle occurred here now, not yet. But as they drew near, she saw that people waited on the shore.
Quarrie MacMurtray did.
He stood square, front and center. Legs planted on the shingle, hair gleaming red in the morning light. She could not mistake him.
For an instant, she felt time slip. The remorseless grip she kept upon the order of things failed her and flowed through her helpless fingers like water.
This had all happened before.Hehad happened before, in her life.
It felt like her heart would tear asunder. What was she doing here? She should turn around. Flee. She, who so seldom ran from anything.
But the men rowed on and she did not give them the order to stop. The færing grounded on the shingle. Kettel leaped out to pull it up.
Hulda stepped out with dignity, and as she did the rain found them.
As at some signal spoken by the gods, it swept up from behind and engulfed them. It crashed over them in a curtain, spreading up the shore, and filling Hulda’s ears with sound. Drops upon the water, upon the stones.
She looked into Quarrie MacMurtray’s eyes.
“Well? Have you made up your mind, Master MacMurtray?”
“Aye, mistress. I will go wi’ ye. For I am the man who killed yer brother.”
*
It felt asif the stones quickened beneath Quarrie’s feet as he spoke those words. As if he had spoken them before. But surely then he had said,Mistress, I did not kill your brother.
Another time. Another place. But it all blurred around Quarrie, even as the scene blurred from the falling rain, lending a terrible unreality to this thing he did.
It would become real soon enough.
He turned to Borald, who stood beside him. Agony shone from his friend’s eyes, and his hand hovered above the hilt of his sword.Ye lead them,he told his man silently.Make a defense if need be.
But he hoped what he did, this terrible step, assured no need for that. Bought their safety with his life.
“Take him,” Hulda Elvarsdottir said, and her boatmen seized Quarrie, manhandling him unnecessarily.
Half a score of men, including Borald, stepped forward on the shingle. Quarrie threw back his head.
“Stand back!”
This was naught, he told himself, as Hulda, now with her sword drawn as if in defense of him, drove him onto their small boat. The two men sat to the oars and drew them out into the sea. And Quarrie prayed, as they moved off from the shore,prayed he would be able to withstand the pain that would come, endure it like a man.
The faces and the sights of the place he loved—loved right down to the marrow of his bones—fell away from him. The two Norsemen rowed, and Hulda Elvarsdottir sat behind him with her blade pricking the small of his back.
He had no illusions but that she would stab him. She would, in the blink of an eye, despite whatever it was that existed between them.
At the last, through the rain that beat down and the smoke from the settlement’s fires, he saw his ma come running down to the shore. He knew, even though he could not see, that she wept.
No one aboard the boat spoke. It would have been hard to speak anyway, for the clatter of the rain. The craft was well built, light and agile. The men rowed well. Mistress Elvarsdottir stayed alert. As they rounded the small isle, Quarrie distinctly felt her tense.
Now, Quarrie thought, now he would see the fleet of Norse ships standing proud round the back of the wee isle, likely in the small inlet that lay there, where he and some of the lads used to go and swim. Now he would likely die there.
If he was lucky.
