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As he was sinking, sinking, sinking into oblivion, he decided, Those damn Norns of Fate are fickle creatures ... like all women.
Some men just need a good thumping to keep them in place ...
“What do you mean by ‘He is gone.’ He cannot be gone.”
“Gone like the wind.” Drifa’s father made a whooshing sound, for emphasis. “Disappeared in the night with that foppish friend of his. His longship must have been kept sea-ready all that time. They took off the selfsame night that he regained consciousness. Must have been weak as watered ale. Adam says his seamen no doubt carried him out.”
“Where did he go?”
“No one knows.” Rafn spoke now. “We thought mayhap Jomsborg to join the Jomsvikings, something he had previously planned, according to Finn. But I sent some men there to check, and no one has seen him.”
“He did not even thank me for drilling a hole in his head,” Adam added with a grin.
She did not want to know what that grin implied.
“One of my men overheard his comrade-in-arms Finn mention Iceland,” Rafn informed her. “Or was it that new country beyond Iceland discovered by Erik the Red?”
“Why would he rush off like that?”
“Uh,” her father said.
Rafn and Adam exchanged glances.
“What?” she insisted.
“He might have been in a bit of a furor over your absence,” her father confessed.
“Did you not tell him where I had gone?”
“How could I do that? I did not know where you went. No one ever tells me anything.”
“Tyra mentioned a ‘pleasure journey,’ ” Adam said.
“And you thought we swanned off like feckless maidens?”
He nodded.
Idiot!
’Twas true Drifa had not wanted to draw attention to the mission she and her sisters had taken upon themselves, but she should have known better than to leave their menfolk in the dark. Men could not find their way in a fog, let alone the dark.
Once Finn had informed them of Sidroc’s need to rescue his baby, Drifa and her sisters grew outraged. In a family of five daughters, how could they not disdain a man like Jarl Ormsson who placed no value on a girl child? And so they decided to swoop into Vikstead and grab the baby. Bring it back to Stoneheim, where Sidroc would be overjoyed once he awakened to find the babe safe and sound.
But then they’d decided to go to Birka before returning home, to put any Vikstead followers off their scent, if there were in fact any who cared that the child was gone. They’d renamed the girling from Signe to Runa, as a precaution.
None of this was done with the intention of her marrying the lout. But she did feel guilty for having struck him down, as deserving as her blow had been. And besides, what had the fool been thinking, keeping this information from a potential wife? How little he must have valued her to think she would let a baby die for lack of a husband’s love. In truth, she probably would not have agreed to wed him if she’d known his motive, but she would have worked with him to save the child.
“But ... but now I have his baby, and he is not here.” Drifa wrung her hands with dismay.
“You have his baby?” her father asked gleefully, as if the squalling infant off in an adjoining chamber with the wet nurse was not announcing her presence to one and all. “Now you will have to marry, for sure.”
“It is not my baby, Father. Even I could not plant a seed and have it flower in six short sennights.”
Her father waved a hand dismissively. “His baby then. It matters not. If you have his baby, he will insist on marriage.”
“You forget, Father, it is also Jarl Ormsson’s granddaughter.”
“Uh-oh!” the three men in the room said as one.
