Page 51 of Lord of Fire and Ice

“Take him to the bath house,” Katla said, and she turned back down the hillside to fetch her medicinal supplies. As lady of the house, it was her place to doctor her people, to nurse them through sickness and ease suffering when she could. She knew she’d have to hurt her brother badly to reset the bones.

Her chest ached. When their mother died, a wet nurse was found for Haukon, but eight-year-old Katla did everything else for him. She soothed him when his teeth came in and taught him to take his first stumbling steps. His little fingers had curled so tightly around hers.

She’d have fought off a wolf pack for him.

The thought of what she might have to do to save him now made her want to retch.

She hurried to the bath house with her pouch of medicines and herbs. When she pushed open the door, she saw Haukon lying insensible on one of the wooden benches. Einar and Brandr stood over him.

“What happened?” She scurried to them. A leather strap was tied firmly to Haukon’s wrist, biting into his flesh.

“I reset the bones,” Brandr said. “He fainted while I pulled the ends into position, but he’ll come around. He didn’t cry out once. You’d have been proud.” He bent and untied the strap around Haukon’s wrist. “You’ll need to bind the arm to keep it still till the bones knit.”

“I know what I need to do,” she said in a clipped tone. Then she cocked her head at him. “How did you know?”

“Ja, Ulfson, doctoring is the province of women,” Einar chimed in. “Or priests of Odin.”

“We had an Egyptian physician attached to the Varangian Guard. He needed extra hands sometimes after a fierce battle.” Brandr shrugged. “I helped when I could. I watched and learned.”

Katla nodded. Haukon was starting to stir, and the worst of his treatment was done. She didn’t have to torture her brother after all. She flicked a glance at Brandr. “Thank you.”

He nodded gruffly and knelt beside her brother. He held him still while Katla started to bind up his arm. “If you have anything in that medicine pouch for pain, I suspect he’d be grateful. Bone pain is the worst sort, they say.”

Katla’s chest constricted. Being so near to Brandr made her ache afresh over the cruel things they’d said to each other in her chamber. And over the way she’d slapped him for it.

He’s wrong. Pains of the heart are far worse.

***

“Katla, you have to make a decision,” Finn said over his bowl of porridge a week later. “Gormson has sent me three messengers, all demanding to know your answer.”

She looked up from the bowls she was filling. Heads nodding and still yawning, a row of children huddled near the central meal fire against the early morning chill. Their parents were already hard at work. Katla enjoyed seeing to the morning meal for the youngest members of her household.

Haukon sprawled on the end of the bench, drawing out his own breakfast with a second bowl of porridge. The broken arm certainly hadn’t damaged his appetite.

Brandr sat in the shadows, eating in sullen silence.

“I can’t give Gormson an answer yet. You know that,” she said as she ladled a generous dollop of honey onto each portion. “I haven’t met my third suitor yet.”

She distributed the bowls, ruffling the children’s tousled heads, trying to tamp down the surge of longing their round-cheeked faces roused in her chest. The desire for a child of her own was fast becoming a guilty ache that couldn’t be assuaged. The children fell to their meal like starving puppies.

“Einar ran into Otto Sturlson at the mead house last night.” Finn scraped his bone spoon around the soapstone bowl to eke out the last dregs of his breakfast. “Otto is anxious to know your choice as well, though he’s being less insistent than Albrikt.”

“Same answer.” Katla held up three fingers. “Two is not three.”

Brandr finished his bowl of boiled oats and honey and stomped out of the longhouse to begin the long list of chores she’d already assigned him. Katla tried not to watch him go, but the corner of her eye always seemed to find him.

She thought working together to heal Haukon might have eased matters between them, but it hadn’t. They still hadn’t spoken to each other privately since that night in her bedchamber when she’d slapped him. It had been a serious insult—some couples had divorced over such treatment—enough to thoroughly distance him from her.

Once during the past week, he’d stumbled upon her in the bath house while she was birching herself. She was dripping with sweat, and she’d applied the birch branches hard enough to raise little red weals on her thighs. She hadn’t meant to. Frustration made her strike harder as she slapped her legs with the birch switches.

Brandr stood and looked at her for the space of several heartbeats, the tendons in his neck strained and tight. But then he backed out the door without a word.

Katla had no idea what to do. One didn’t apologize to a thrall.

And yet when she woke in the night, she wished he’d slip into her chamber unannounced as he used to do. She hugged her pillow and longed for his solid presence in the bed with her. For his warmth.

For his touch.