Page 92 of Lord of Fire and Ice

Dalla’s face darkened for a moment. “Some things, like the moment of birth and death, are not meant to be shared. Do not think the mighty passion is all maidensongs and bellflowers. Knowing someone that deeply and still loving them, is not for the faint of heart. Why are you so interested in inn matki munr?”

“Well, I think Brandr and I have something like that.” She stood, not sure she was ready to share her experience with Dalla but wanting her advice about it desperately, since she seemed to know so much.

“You can hear his thoughts?”

“Only sometimes,” she admitted. “They come unbidden. Never when I wish them to.”

“And he can hear yours?”

Katla shook her head.

“Not once?”

“No.”

“Hmph.” Dalla’s face screwed into a puzzled frown.

“What?”

“Well, offhand, I’d say it means my boy loves you, but you haven’t quite made up your mind to love him back yet.”

“No, that can’t be right,” Katla said. Against all expectation, she did love her husband. Her chest ached with love for Brandr.

But she hadn’t told him how she felt.

Dalla took her hand and closed her eyes. “Keep still now.”

Soft as the flutter of a butterfly wing, the old woman’s mind brush hers, probing gently.

Katla stiffened.

“Tight as a pig’s arse. You’re very young to be this closed off,” Dalla said. “I’m thinking, mayhap, sometime past, someone who should have loved you hurt you.”

Katla pulled her hand away. “Ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

Katla’s shoulders sagged a bit. Dalla skewered her soul with a piercing gaze.

“I was married before. The first time my woman’s moon came, my husband took a bed slave. Our honeymoon wasn’t even up yet. And every month after that, Osvald brought his concubine into our bed, and I was forced to sleep elsewhere.”

The shame of rejection made her insides shake. She balled her fingers into fists without being aware she did so.

“I kept thinking, if only I would quicken with child, he’d have no cause to leave me.”

“But he never got you with child?”

“No.”

“So now you hold back a portion of yourself, tucked away so deep no one can reach it. No one can ever hurt you, unless you reveal that deep part,” Dalla said, leaning toward her. “Brandr can’t hurt you.”

“I don’t think he intends to,” Katla said.

“Mayhap your first husband didn’t mean to either,” Dalla suggested. “Did you tell him you didn’t want him to take a bed slave?”

She started to broach the subject once, but Osvald had flown into such a rage, she never tried to talk to him about it again. “He said it was not my business. It had nothing to do with us.”

But it did.