Lord of Falcon Ridge (Viking Era 4)

“Not as yet. It’s early days. Kiri’s mother vomited constantly after all the other women said she’d be fine.” He smiled at his father. “Why did Chessa tell you?”

“I’m her father-in-law. Of course she would tell me. I’m pleased that you will give me a grandson.”

He was a liar, but he was as smooth as stones washed over by the waterfall. Cleve said, “I would like to begin today to build my farmstead. Eventually, perhaps Athol could live there.”

“And you and Chessa and your children would move here after I die?”

“That is the way of things,” Cleve said. He looked up and smiled at Chessa, who was walking to him, a cup of mead in her hand. She handed it to him, then placed her hand on his shoulder. He covered her hand with his. He felt the warmth of her, the softness of her flesh. He turned to smile up at her. Let his father see that she was his and only his. He not only wanted her. He not only admired her and found her both humorous and aggravating, he also loved her, and it was nothing like the feelings he’d had for Sarla, Kiri’s mother. He’d believed he’d loved her more than a man could love any other being, but it wasn’t true. Much of what he’d felt for Sarla, he realized now, was anger and pity at how her husband had treated her. And he’d desired her, wanted desperately to protect her, to be her champion, to prove that he was no longer a slave but a man who could take care of his woman. But he was stupid enough to confuse lust with caring, and that’s what he felt for Chessa. Caring. Deep caring. He hadn’t even realized that something so intense, something so profoundly altering, could exist, but it did, and he felt it for her in full measure. He loved her. He loved her more this moment than he had the previous moment. He shook with the realization that this love he felt for her would continue into the future until they were both bones and dust. He knew now what it was she felt for him. He didn’t understand it, for he was just a man, nothing special, just a man who’d been a worthless slave, but yet she’d not seen the hideous scar on his face. She’d always believed him beautiful, and that was the truth of it. He hadn’t understood her, thus he’d believed it a sham. But it wasn’t. These feelings were as real as the high mist that hung over the loch. The caring he had for her, this bone-deep pleasure at her closeness, all of it made him feel warm and filled with hope and energy and the blessedness of being human and knowing what she was to him and what he was to her. He smiled at her, what he felt making his golden eye brilliant as the sun. “I will take you to see where we will begin our building.”

“Aye, I’d like that,” Chessa said, leaned down, and kissed his mouth. In front of Varrick. But he knew she’d kissed him because she’d looked into his eyes and seen his soul. She was accepting him into her and her delight was plain for him to see. For his father to see.

26

MERRIK, LAREN, AND all the Malverne men left two days later, on a bright morning that Chessa now believed would stay bright, the mist biding its time, but not closing in about them until the evening. Eller sniffed the air and grunted. “Aye,” he said. “’Twill serve.”

Chessa and Cleve, Kiri in his arms, waved until the two ships disappeared around a slight bend in the loch. “This is our home now,” Chessa said.

Kiri said, “Papa, let me down. I want to go find Caldon. I haven’t seen her for two days now. She misses me. I told her I wanted to meet her children.”

He merely nodded and set her on the narrow path that led to the wooden dock that stretched out into the loch beside the promontory. “Her imagination rivals Laren’s. Unfortunately, Laren never saw the monster again. Merrik says she will droop like a withered flower for a while.”

“Let’s take Kiri and go back to work,” Chessa said. “I would have our own bed

soon.”

Varrick looked at her belly every single day, asked her how she felt every single day. She merely smiled at him, nothing more.

It was soon after that things began to change at Kinloch. There was some laughter now, some arguments amongst the men as they ate, as they drank, as they worked. The children, led by Kiri, battled with their wooden knives and swords and axes. They threw their leather balls. They ran about the hall, tumbling over each other, insulting each other. The women chatted as they wove the wool into thread. Varrick frowned, but remained quiet. Chessa laughed more than she’d ever laughed in her life, most times not because she was amused, but because she wanted all the Kinloch people to know that laughter was a wonderful thing, that they could do it and not be struck down. She wanted them to know that Varrick would do naught to stop it. Cleve must believe he’d become the greatest wit in all of Scotland, she thought, for she laughed at nearly every thing he said. She looked over at Cayman, who still only spoke to either of them when it was necessary, never volunteering a word or a thought or an opinion. She was gone most of the time, out in the hills, Argana said. As for Argana’s sons, they called Cayman a madwoman, singing to the goats, they said, speaking strange incantations over rocks, they said, then they’d stare toward their father.

The day Chessa broke Athol’s leg began with a dull gray mist, then cleared into a magical morning that smelled crisp and clean. A falcon perched on the high ridge of rocks that formed the eastern perimeter of their new farmstead. All the men were working on the farmstead, to be named Karelia, named after an isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, a place Cleve remembered with pleasure. When Chessa questioned him more closely about this pleasure, he simply kissed the tip of her nose and told her it would go with him to the grave.

“Karelia,” she said. “It sounds pleasant, thus I will allow it, husband, even though I know you knew a woman there. What was her name?”

“Tyra,” he said, and kissed the tip of her nose again. “If I remember aright. There were so very many.”

She fisted her hand and hit him in his belly. He grinned down at her. “Do you yet carry my babe?”

She frowned. “So many times I’ve claimed to be pregnant and yet now when I truly want to be, it won’t happen. Do you think I’m barren, Cleve?”

“Nay, sweeting, I think your husband isn’t trying hard enough. Mayhap you’re worrying about it too much and it makes my seed wary.”

“It’s true you’re very tired every night now with all the work.”

He clasped her neck in his hands and squeezed lightly. Then he kissed her hard on her closed mouth. He looked at her closely, at those beautiful green eyes of hers, as green as the moss-covered rocks near the waterfall he’d shown her. “Has my father said anything to you? Bothered you in any way?”

“He just stares at my belly every time he sees me.”

“Papa, is it true?”

Both looked down to see Kiri frowning up at them, an apple in her hand, three children trailing after her, all bickering over a leather ball.

“Is what true, sweeting?” Chessa said.

“I heard Athol tell his brother that you were having my first papa’s babe.”

“Aye,” Cleve said, his single word as bald as the goat that was chewing on a discarded tunic near the newly built privy.

“He then said it wasn’t true, the tale you were telling. He said Chessa was carrying Varrick’s babe, not yours. I told him that wasn’t right and he laughed at me. I don’t like Athol.” Kiri looked at the ground for a moment, frowning ferociously. “Athol somehow isn’t right in his head.”