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With hysterical irrelevance, he noted that Finn did not look his usual elegant self. His tunic and braies were rumpled. His forked beard not so forked. And his hair looked as if it had been combed with a hay rake.
“Of course I am alive. Didst think a thump on the head by a mere female would send me to Asgard?”
Finn seemed confused and then thankful when another man entered the room. It was Adam the Healer, the Saxon husband of one of Drifa’s sisters.
Speaking of Drifa, he hoped she was sorry now. Knocking him out without allowing him to explain! She was probably off somewhere weeping her eyes out with regret. He should probably punish her in some way. After they were wed.
“Sidroc, my good man, you gave us a scare,” Adam said as he gingerly sat on the edge of the mattress and began to examine his eyeballs by lifting one lid, then another.
“I did?” he asked, running his furred tongue over his furred teeth. He blew out and almost knocked himself out again with his foul breath. “How long was I asleep?”
“Asleep?” Finn chortled.
“You were unconscious for six sennights,” Adam informed him.
“What?” he hollered and tried to sit up. Almost immediately, he sank back down and had to fight the blackness that wanted to overtake him again. A sudden memory came to him, unbidden, of being force-fed endless spoonfuls of gruel and water, most of which had run down his chin to his neck and chest. “Where is the witch who put me in this condition?” he demanded.
“Drifa has gone away.” Adam’s gaze shifted, not meeting his direct scrutiny.
“Away where?”
“I am not precisely sure. She went off with her sisters after King Thorvald’s birthday on her personal longship, Wind Maiden. A short pleasure journey, they said. That usually means shopping. Probably to Birka.”
“Wind Maiden? What kind of lackwit name is that for a longship?”
Adam just shrugged as he pulled aside the bed fur and examined the rest of his body, though how tapping Sidroc’s chest with his fingertips could prove anything was beyond Sidroc’s understanding.
“You allowed your wife to go away without you on a ‘pleasure journey’?”
“The Stoneheim princesses do not ask permission.”
Mine will. If we are still to wed, that is. But then another thought occurred to him. “Drifa left me here, unconscious?” he asked with disbelief.
“I assured her that you would recover in time to offend her again.”
“Humph! Can I assume I am no longer betrothed?”
“That would be a good assumption, considering what Drifa overheard you say.”
Really, women made too much of courting and marriage. They expected men to fall over swooning in rapture at the possibility of gaining their favors, when in fact most men just wanted to get the ceremony over with so they could continue on as before.
But then the implications of his situation sunk in. Six sennights? Three sennights past his father’s deadline. “Finn?”
Understanding the unspoken question, Finn shook his head. “I went back two sennights ago, and the babe was gone.”
Rage filled Sidroc then. He sat up and despite the bindings about his head, he pulled at his hair and screamed out his fury. His anger was directed at his father, but also at Drifa for her part in this macabre play. And he wept for the baby he would never see grow into a girling.
His guilt was a heavy weight on his soul. And he did not accept failure easily.
But then his hysteria turned to laughter as yet another thought occurred to him. “Did you perchance drill a hole in my head, healer?”
Adam nodded. “It relieved the pressure inside your head and led to your recovery, I believe.”
“I asked him to drill one in my head, too, but the healer would not oblige,” Finn complained.
Sidroc, still laughing, lifted the laces of his braies and peered downward. “Bloody hell, the king was right.”
And then Sidroc sunk into blessed unconsciousness again.
