Page 37 of Lord of Fire and Ice

She dared not allow it to happen again.

Katla raised her horn to her lips and tried to swallow back the lump forming in her throat.

“Inga!” Finn called across the long room. “Give us a song, girl.”

The quiet serving woman nodded and drew out a pan flute from her bag of possessions. When she put it to her lips, the entire company fell silent, leaning forward in hushed expectancy.

Katla’s hall boasted no skald, but they were gifted with music on a regular basis. Inga played as well as any piper she’d ever heard. The first tune was a ripping good jig that set everyone’s toes tapping.

Katla considered her freewoman as she played. Inga was comely enough, she supposed. Her facial features were pleasing but unremarkable. Her cornflower blue eyes were no bluer than many others seated in the hall. Inga’s form was curvy enough, but to Katla’s eye, she didn’t seem blessed with attributes beyond the ordinary. Her honey-blond braids were thick and fell to her waist, but many women boasted the same. Katla’s dark tresses were more unusual.

She had often wondered if Inga’s musical ability was why Osvald took her for his bed slave each month when Katla’s moon sickness appeared. When the girl played her pan flute, her whole being seemed to light from within. There was a liveliness, a sensuality, a soul deepness on display in her music that Inga kept carefully hidden the rest of the time.

Had she sparked to life in Osvald’s bed, as well?

Katla gave herself a mental shake. No good could come from wandering down that road. Besides, Inga had never given her cause to resent her by flaunting her special relationship with Osvald. A good wife shouldn’t trouble herself over her husband’s concubine.

Especially her dead husband’s concubine.

Would she have felt differently if she and Osvald had shared the same kind of fire she and Brandr discovered in each other’s arms?

As if he’d heard her think of him, Brandr leaned over to refill her drinking horn. Her insides tightened and tingled.

When Inga finished playing the jig, everyone pounded their fists on the table in appreciation. She smiled shyly and ducked her head.

“This next one is a new tune,” she said, her voice barely reaching the far ends of the longhouse. “I learned it from a Danish trader a month gone by and have been practicing it since. It’s finally ready to play for you. He said it was called ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’”

Inga raised the pan flute, and a yearning tune curled from her instrument. The tone was pure and sweet, wrapped about with her breath, as if she were sending bits of her soul out with it. The wistfulness of the song stole around Katla’s heart and squeezed.

She, too, had dreamed a dream.

She longed for children and a man to help her raise them. Someone to bear half her load. She imagined what it would be like to be desired for herself alone, not for her land or for any other gain.

She ached for love, not just for a joining, even one as breath stealing as the one with Brandr Ulfson’s had been. She yearned for it, straining like Inga’s bittersweet melody, stretched almost to the breaking point.

She dreamed of inn matki munr, the mighty passion. This love of legend was said to be so strong, so intimate a bond, lovers could actually hear each other’s thoughts.

Instead, she’d had a husband who left her bed for a week every month to join his body to this pretty musician’s. A husband who couldn’t give her a son, though he claimed to have sired plenty at other farmsteads all over the island before they wed.

The song went on and on, plucking at Katla’s soul, piercing her weakest point.

A tear trembled on her lashes. She tried to blink it back, but it escaped and raced down her cheek. She swiped it away angrily before anyone could see.

The sweet, sad melody sang the hidden desires of Katla’s heart as surely as if it were being pulled from her chest instead of coaxed from Inga’s flute.

At this point in her life, she expected she’d have so much more. Someone to love her despite her faults, someone whose soul fitted neatly with the bends and crooks in hers.

How could the unknown creator of Inga’s tune possibly know the despair she felt?

By the time the song reached its end, Katla had to cover her mouth to keep from sobbing. There was suddenly not enough air in the great hall, and she struggled for her next breath. While the rest of the company pounded their approval, Katla rose and fled to her chamber.

Not bothering to light her lamp, she threw herself on the bed and buried her face in the linens, where it was safe to give vent to her grief. She wept into the feather tick as she hadn’t wept at Osvald’s graveside.

She’d never know the mighty passion, never hear her beloved’s voice in her head, whispering a secret language only the two of them shared. No one would ever love her merely for herself.

The death of a dream was even harder to bear than the loss of a husband. She drenched the Frankish linens with her tears.

Every person in the longhouse needed her. Her days blurred with one task after another.