9th Century
Watching Willa eat gives me a feeling of immense satisfaction, even as I'm nervous about what she might have to say about Eadgar when she finishes.
"Aren't you hungry?" She asks between mouthfuls of heavily buttered bread and gulps of ale.
I shake my head and she looks like she wants to question me further. Instead, she goes back to eating. And she keeps eating for quite awhile, until I'm worried I'm going to have to call for a very irritated Hildy and ask her to bring more food.
Thankfully, it doesn't get to that point. Willa looks up, swallowing the last bite of ham, and asks me when she can see her children.
"Soon," I say. "You have to understand, it isn't my decision. We're lucky I was even allowed to take you away from the rest of the captives. Just – when the Jarl returns, be quiet, try not to anger him.
Willa throws her head back, laughing. "You ask me not to anger him, Paige? Forgive me but I don't think I'm the one who needs to be told not to anger my highers!"
I'm about to agree, but instead I just put my arms around my friend and hold her tight."I'm so glad to see you," I whisper into her ear. "You don't know how glad. Your children will be fine, you just let me speak to the Jarl about it."
Willa kisses my cheek. "Aye, Paige, we missed you too. Eadgar said you must have got married to a higher, maybe even one of the King's men. We always knew you weren't one of us, that one day there would be no more games in the woods."
"So," I begin, tense at the mention of his name, "Eadgar is – is he here? Did the Northmen take him, too?"
Willa shakes her head as we sit side-by-side on our chairs, our arms thrown around each other's shoulders in the same manner as when we were children. "No, he was away tending to the pigs with my husband. They'll have seen what happened, though. They'll know I – and the children – were taken."
Everyone in the past still seems to hold faith with a kind of fatalism that I don't see in modern people. But if there's one person who might be prone to the same kind of stubborn refusal to accept her circumstances, it might just be Willa. And before I even have time to ask her if she's thought about it she's speaking of escape.
"I'll slip away with the children, after darkness falls," she says, leaning in close to me so there's no chance the guard outside will overhear. "You'll help us, Paige."
She's not asking – she's telling. And I don't quite know how to respond.
"Wait," I say. "Tonight? I – I don't know if that's the best idea. The guards will be alert tonight, as they always are when we have fresh captives."
Willa looks at me sharply.
"What?" I ask.
"'We,'" she replies.
"We – what?"
"Are you one of them now then, Paige? You use that word 'we' like these are your people. What happened? Did they take you, too? How long ago? Do you intend to tell your Jarl of my plan?"
I feel my eyes widening with surprise, followed quickly by offense. "Yes they took me!" I reply shortly. "And no, of course I'm not one of them! I've been planning for months to make my own esc –"
I stop talking when I see Willa staring pointedly down at my belly.
"But you haven't escaped," she says plainly. "Here you are – and not without some power, I see. Power – and a Jarl's baby in your belly."
"But that doesn't mean –" I begin, but Willa shuts me up with a wave of her hand. The feeling from childhood, the respect for her as the older and more experienced sister I never had, remains.
"You don't have to explain yourself to me, Paige! Look at your fat cheeks – and the Jarl himself, as fierce and striking as a wolf. He loves you, I saw it in his eyes when he looked at you – and when he didn't beat you for speaking to him so sharply! You've no reason to leave, you don't need to explain it to me."
I shake my head, frustrated. "But I do! They took me, Willa. They took me just like they took you! Then the winter cold came and I've been waiting for the spring to come."
"When did they take you?"
"About 8 moons ago, around harvest-time. They took me from Caistley! I came back to see you and Eadgar, to see how you were, and the Northmen were there but you weren't. Did you see them and hide in the woods?"
Willa shakes her head and runs her finger through a smidgen of butter left on the plate before bringing it to her lips and licking it off. "No. The ealdorman moved a couple of families to another place for a fortnight, to gather the apples and berries for winter. Eadgar and I – and my husband and children – were in that group. When we came back to see the village burned we cleared the debris and built just enough dwellings for the small group we were then, close to the original site. A second Caistley.
"And your mother?" I ask.
"She died two summers ago, after a fever came through the village – nearly took my second child, too – he was just a babe at the time."
As ever, people in the past speak of death with a plainness of manner I cannot share. I reach out and put my hand on Willa's arm and tell her I'm sorry.
"We were sorry too, Paige, but she lived longer than expected for a woman of her place, and we're grateful for it."
Willa is flagging. I'm not surprised, but I'm also not finished talking to her. "Wait," I say, when she moves to curl up on the furs I have laid out for her next to the fire. "Wait. Before you sleep you need to know that tonight cannot be the night you escape. We need to make a plan, first."
"You and your plans," she smiles. "I forgot how much you like making plans. Fine, I'll wait, but you'd best not be pulling my leg – or telling the Jarl of my intentions – because I'm going. One way or the other, I'm taking my children and going home."
"I'm not pulling any legs," I reassure her, laying a woolen blanket over her as her eyes close. "Sleep now. We can talk when you wake."
I return to the table as Willa sleeps, preoccupied. She's not kidding about escaping – I know that. And the warm weather has come, the season I told myself I was waiting for before making my own attempt. I look down at my belly and think of the walk back to Caistley – one day, maybe, probably two or three. I can take food, and the nights are warmer now. Warmer, but still cool. I wonder if I can persuade my friend to wait for a few weeks, maybe another moon, until summer? Then even if we get wet we won't freeze to death come nightfall.
"Planning your escape?"
I jerk my head up and then immediately away so the Jarl doesn't see the guilt on my face.
"No," I reply, accepting a kiss on my forehead. "No. I was thinking of – I was thinking of you. I was wondering how angry you would be with me when you returned this evening."
Eirik sits down in a chair opposite me and gives me a wry smile.
"What's that look for?" I ask.
"It's the look I give girls who think they're smarter than me," he replies quietly as Willa stirs in her sleep but doesn't wake. "You and your questions, Paige. As if I don't understand that the lower people care for their friends and their families just as much as the higher people do. I don't think it is I who lacks understanding."
Eirik's massive shoulders are slumped forward slightly, he rests his forearms on the table. He's tired. I don't want to cause any more trouble for him, but he seems to be looking for a response. "So you understand," I say, "but you still get angry with me? You still seem to expect some people not to fight when you yourself would do so?"
The Jarl reaches out, takes my hand, and pulls me onto his lap. "It's not about what I expect, girl, it's about what's smart and what's not smart. If you hadn't been there this afternoon what do you think your sleepy friend here would have done? Do you think she would have screamed and yelled and carried on the way you did? Do you think she would have challenged Veigar like you did?"
I shake my head no.
"And why is that?"
"Because it probably would have gotten her killed," I reply. "And she knows if she dies her children will die, too."
"Yes," Eirik nods. "She knows, the way everyone except you seems to know – how to behave. She understands the hierarchy. You do not."
"No," I protest softly. "I do. I know it as well as anyone. It doesn't mean I accept it. It doesn't mean I think it's right."
Eirik nudges his chin down against my shoulder and puts one hand on my bump. "Is this why you plot to escape?" He asks, continuing before I can figure out how serious he is. "You have a man who loves you, girl. Not just a man – a Jarl. And you have a baby in your belly. You say to me that you understand how things are, but how can I believe that? Where will our baby be safer than here?"
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Nothing can come out. What can I say? Nothing, the same as all the other times I've discussed this with Eirik. I can't tell him the truth, so I can't tell him anything. I can't say no, actually, our baby would be much safer being delivered in a hospital, because Eirik doesn't know what a hospital is, just like he doesn't know about grocery stores or college or just about everything else from my other life.
"And you never say it back," he continues, pulling my hair aside so he can kiss my shoulder. "You think I don't notice, that I don't see that furtive look in your eye."
He doesn't have to tell me what he's talking about. I know it, and he's right. I haven't told him I love him yet – I haven't said the words, anyway. I can't say them, and it's probably more because they're true than anything else. It's as if uttering them out loud will prove to be a kind of incantation, a spell keeping me physically in one place – the past. And I am not ready to cast such a spell over myself.
"Eirik –"
"Don't. You don't need to say anything. I already know, Paige. You keep thinking I don't know, but I do. I know you love me. I see it in you, I see the way you look at me when I come back to you in the evenings, I see the relief when you catch sight of me after I've been leading the men on raids. I don't need you to speak the words aloud. It's your own fear that keeps you from speaking. There's something else, I know that too. You won't tell me what it is, but I know it's the reason you look so guilty when I come home and tell you to stop plotting your escape. I –"
"I can't tell you," I whisper, the way I have so many times before.
"You say that, the way you always do, but it makes no sense. I put up with it because I love you, Paige. There is no other reason. But you must know it hurts me to think you keep things from me. It –"
"You wouldn't believe me," I cut him off again. "You would think me mad. You would make Hildy pour the tincture down my throat every day."
"Yes, and you say that, too. You might be surprised, girl."
We're talking in soft voices, because Willa is asleep. I'm beginning to tire, too, and the fire-warmed air in the roundhouse is only making it worse. A sudden recklessness, like that which overcame me earlier in the day, rushes through me again. I turn slightly, nestling into Eirik's comforting hugeness. "There's always enough to eat where I come from, you know. You keep telling me there's more here, but you're wrong. Where I come from, there is always enough food."
Eirik chuckles, and I assume he thinks I'm joking. "We found you in a field outside a peasant village, girl."
"You did," I reply, "but that's not where I'm from. If you thought it was, you'd stop asking me all the time."
"So you are a daughter of a King's man? Or the daughter of the King himself. I've thought as much for many moons now, girl. It's not just all those gleaming white teeth in your mouth – there's no explanation for those, other than luck – but it's when you act the way you did today. As if you are owed a deference no peasant or slave would ever dream of expecting. You act as a higher."
I shake my head. "I'm not the King's daughter, though. I'm not a higher. And my teeth are white because I go to the dentist every year."
"Dentist?" Eirik asks, and I almost laugh at the sound of a modern word coming out of his mouth. "A healer?"
"No, a dentist. Dentists are like healers, but they only care for people's teeth. And they're much better at it than a healer."
Our voices are light as we speak, affectionate. We're both dancing along the line between a playful, unserious conversation and a different, much more serious one. But what harm can it do? I am with the Jarl, and he isn't going to hurt me. I can give him some details, it's not as if he'll be able to guess.
"And where is this place, then?" He asks, and although his tone is exactly the same as mine, we both know this is precisely where this conversation has broken down every other time we've had it. "South of here, by the village where we found you? Is it outside the Kingdom of the East Angles? Maybe it's south, across the sea?"
"Yes," I say, very quietly. "It is across the sea. But not south. Southeast. Past the land, past the Kingdom of the East Angles, and Mercia."
"Eire?" Eirik asks. "The Green Isle? My people are there, too, you know. We raid all up and down the coast of that land as well as this one. Is that where you come from, girl? And if it is, how did you get here?"
I shake my head. "No, I don't come from Eire. You don't know the place where I come from. No one here does. You don't even know it exists."
"Ah, that's interesting," the Jarl whispers in my ear and I can tell from his voice that he thinks we've passed out of our real talk and into our joking-talk. "And how is it a maid of ten and ten years came from this land that nobody knows exists to the Kingdom of the East Angles? Did you build a ship yourself?"
"I don't know how to build a ship."
"I know it."
"I didn't come on a ship. I didn't walk. I came here in a different way to all of those ways. It would be very hard to explain, because the truth is I don't understand it myself. I know I came here because here I am, sitting here with you, but I couldn't tell you how, Jarl."
We sit silently in the warmth for a few minutes until Eirik pats my thigh, indicating for me to stand up. "I'll call Hildy to take your friend here back to her children. She –"
"Did they –"
"Yes, they ate. They're being cared for. Give her a blanket to take with her when she leaves."
***
Willa makes no attempt to escape that night, or that week. Eirik is smart, though, and he's made sure to have Gudry, Anja and Hildy be extra watchful with me. He's posted more guards close to the roundhouse – his own, and the one where Willa and her children sleep. He makes no attempt to stop me from bringing them food, though, or new clothes to replace the oldest boy's garments, which are so full of holes they can barely be described as clothing. By the end of the first week the kids are noticeably more energetic than they were when they arrived, and it makes me smile to see them running around their mother's legs, playing games with each other as she works.
And Willa does work, because Eirik has drawn the line there, telling me he wouldn't be able to explain it to his men or his people if he suddenly let a captive live as one of them. Willa and I talk when we can, snatching little two minute or five minute conversations before one of my attendants drags me away. She still plans to escape, and she says it'll be when the Vikings relax their current levels of security a little, which she knows they will.
"Eadgar knows," she whispers to me one day when I've managed to slip away from Gudry. "So does Aldred . We discussed the Northmen many times, because we knew they would come for us, sooner or later. They know I'll be trying to get back to them, they'll be waiting. When I get back we'll try to ask the ealdormen to move us further inland, away from these raids – they're moving people already, on the King's orders. It'll be soon, Paige. I'll have to take the children and leave here soon."
"Don't leave without me," I implore, although even as I'm begging her not to go without me I don't know if it's about me not wanting to miss my opportunity to escape or me not wanting to lose Willa again, and possibly forever this time. Neither of us needs to say it out loud, we both know if the Vikings catch her there will be little I can do to convince them to spare her life. "Please."
That night, as I lie in Eirik's arms, I wonder if it will be one of the last times I do so. He's right when he tells me I love him, and he's right that I'm too afraid to say it, but after all this time I still don't have a choice. It's not just my father now, or my friends at home – it's not just their suffering pulling me away, making it impossible for me to stay in the past. I'm going to have a baby soon, and my main concern is for whoever the little fluttering in my belly will turn out to be. Even if there was no one waiting for me back in 2017, which it must now be at home, I still couldn't find it within myself to risk my own life – and therefore my child's life – to stay in a past where death is so common and expected that people treat it the way they treat having breakfast, or stubbing their toes. Could I?
And as it turns out, the decision is confirmed for me four days later when Eirik returns from another raid with an already foul-smelling wound across his right shoulder and a fever even I can feel. I find him in the healer's roundhouse, taken there by his men, after Hildy comes to tell me, in grave tones, where he is.
He smiles when he sees me, trying to play it down. He's sitting up, strong as ever, his eyes are clear – but there's no mistaking the smell.
"That needs to be cleaned," I bark at the healer as soon as it hits me. "You need to boil water from the stream and clean the wound, you need to –"
"Girl," Eirik takes my wrist. "Let the healers do their work. They're preparing a poultice right now, to speed the closing of the injury."
I look up and sure enough, the healer and her two female assistants are busy preparing herbs of some sort, mashing them into a bowl of pig's fat and approaching the Jarl with a big gob of it a minute later. When one of them reaches out to apply it I slap her hand away.
"No!" I yell. "Don't put that on a dirty wound! Damnit, you have to clean it first, didn't you hear me? Someone needs to go get a bucket of water right now and –"
I stop talking when I see that no one is listening. They're just staring at me like I'm crazy. I shouldn't be surprised, the concept of hygiene – at least in terms of injuries and keeping them clean – doesn't exist with either the Vikings or the Angles.
"Fine," I tell them, grabbing a wooden bucket. "I'll go fetch the water myself. Don't put that on the wound – not yet."
I rush to the stream, fill the bucket, and return as fast as I can. It's to no avail, the pig-fat-and-herb substance has been applied and the healer's assistants are wrapping a definitely-not-sterile linen bandage around the Jarl's shoulder and upper arm area.
"You shouldn't have done that," I say to the healer. She looks up at me and then quickly at Eirik, probably waiting to see if he's going to shut me up. Eirik says nothing, but he doesn't look especially happy.
"If we don't treat the wound, lady," one of the assistants says to me, "the rot will spread, it will get into his blood. If that happens, it could be very bad. We don't want –"
"You're right!" I respond, just barely keeping my voice below shouting volume. "We don't want it to spread to his blood! Yes! Correct! That's why we have to clean it first – that's why we shouldn't be applying whatever the hell that concoction is to it, or wrapping it in dirty –"
"Girl."
It's Eirik. His grabs my upper arm, his grip firm. I stop talking and he politely asks the healers to leave, which they immediately do. Then he turns to me.
"I'll be glad when this child is born, Paige. I fear pregnancy is softening your mind."
I press my lips together, hard, to keep words I'll regret from coming out, but I can't withhold an eye-roll. The Jarl pulls my body towards him – not so hard as to hurt, or to cause me to stumble, but hard enough to let me know he's not joking around.
"Let the healers do their work," he continues, clearly exasperated. "Why do you insist on acting like you know how to do everyone's work better than they do? It's not right, Paige. It makes people think ill of you, and I don't want my people thinking ill of you. Why can't you just keep your mouth shut when it's called for? Don't you want my wound to heal quickly?"
"Of course I do!" I reply, my voice rising with helplessness. "That's why I told them to boil the water, and clean the wound before they dressed it! if they don't do that –"
"Enough!" Eirik yells, getting to his feet. "I'll send for Hildy and some tincture for you. You don't listen to me, girl, even when I really need you to. What am I to make of that?"
"But Eirik," I say, reaching out for his hand as he goes to leave. He dodges my touch and sets his jaw. "No, girl. Go back to the roundhouse. Have a nap. Have some tincture. Have something! Stay here until Hildy arrives – if I hear anything about you wandering off, I'm going to be very angry."
He leaves and I sit heavily down on the bare earthen floor of the healer's dwelling, my eyes prickling with tears of frustration. He's angry with me, because he thinks I'm thinking about myself, that I'm being a know-it-all, making his wound about me and not him. Even though the truth is the exact opposite.
I submit when Hildy arrives, hanging my head and silently allowing her to drag me back to Jarl's roundhouse. When he returns that night he doesn't say much, and I can see he's favoring the shoulder already, wincing when he uses the arm.
"Eirik," I say, very softly, "you should let me wash –"
"QUIET!" He bellows, turning to me with such speed I think he might strike me. He doesn't, though. He doesn't make love to me, either, before we go to sleep. I lie awake, worried about his shoulder as he tosses and turns all night.