Page 73 of A Tale of Two Vikings

“I will go with you,” Bolthor offered, not for the first time.

“Nay. This I will do myself.” He’d already explained the details of his plan to the men. “I will be back as soon as possible—by Christmas, I hope. No need for any of you to get up so early in the morn.”

“Dressed as a nun?” Tykir asked, a gleam in his merry eyes.

“Yea, dressed as a nun…at first. Till after I deliver Sister Margaret to the minster.”

“And you will leave Lady Esme here with us?” Eirik inquired.

Toste nodded.

He thought he heard Eirik mutter, “Lackwit!” but he probably said something like, “Holy shit!” ’Twas a favorite expression of Eirik’s he’d learned long ago from his barmy half-sister Rain, a healer, who claimed to come from the future.

“By thunder, Toste, do you know how much your brother would have enjoyed this masquerade of yours?” Tykir said.

“I do,” he said and fought back tears.

Eirik handed him a horn of mead and said, “To Vagn!” They all raised their horns then and said, “To Vagn!”

It was a fitting good-bye, Toste thought.

I can’t believe I’m doing this…

Esme worked furiously to complete her plan.

It was the most daring thing she’d ever tried. But desperation prompted daring. That was what she told herself.

Having a few coins she’d garnered over the years, she managed to bribe a retired cook from Ravenshire to help her. Bertha, a slovenly, greedy-eyed crone of more than sixty years, still lived on the estate in her own thatched hut and helped out in the kitchens on occasion.

“Did you prepare the empty woodcutter’s hut, as I instructed?”

“Yea, I did, mistress, and I got ye a fire goin’, too. It’s colder’n hell on a Sunday outside, it is.” She scratched her armpits as she spoke, then broke wind loudly.

Esme restrained herself from wincing or clouting the foul woman. She needed her, having had no time to find a better accomplice.

“And you promise not to tell anyone about this?”

“Are ye barmy, mistress? I’d be kicked out of Ravenshire on me arse if anyone found out.”

“All right. Now go to Toste and give him my message.”

After Bertha left, Esme picked up a bundle she’d prepared, put on a cloak and made her way toward the woodcutter’s hut, which she hoped was far enough away from the keep that no one would suspect what was going on.

“Dear God,” she prayed, “please help me, and I will say a paternoster every day for the rest of my life.”

She thought she heard a voice in her head, presumably God’s, say, “You are on your own.”

So be it.

Even tricksters get tricked betimes…

“The lady Esme wishes ye to attend her out at the woodcutter’s hut.”

“Huh?” Toste said. He was alone in the solar and nodding off to sleep, having drunk many more horns of mead than he should have. “Why does she want me? And why at the woodcutter’s hut? And how in Thor’s name would I know where that is?”

The old slattern blinked at him in what was supposed to be a sexual way, he supposed. “I be thinkin’ that a virile Viking like you would know what she wants.”

“Huh?” he said again.