“Her? Who?”
“Laren, Helga. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I was talking about!”
“Laren,” Helga repeated quietly. “Odd. I haven’t thought of the child in a very long time. Do you really believe it possible that the girl survived? That she’s actually returned? How very interesting that would be. But Taby wasn’t with her, at least you’ve said naught about a child. He would only have six years now, aye, still a child, and you know how very fragile children are. A puff of a dark wind, and the child sickens and dies. Aye, such fragile creatures they are. So if it is indeed Laren, why do you care?”
“I hate you, Helga! You act so smart and so above all of us. I hate you! If it is Laren, she is back to brew more trouble for us, more trouble than you can concoct potions to counteract.”
Helga smiled and shrugged. “Let her brew up all the mischief she can. We know naught of what happened to her. Calm yourself. You are looking even fatter, Ferlain. You must see to leaving off all those sweetmeats you keep next to your bed. And Cardle is so very thin, the poor man. His chest looks as if it’s next to his backbone.”
“Damn you, Helga, I have carried eight babes! A woman gains flesh when she carries a babe.”
But Helga had no interest, for she had lived through each of her sister’s pregnancies, each of her failures. She said, shrugging, “I do hope it is Laren, our long-lost half sister. Such a quaint child she was, always running wild until Taby was born and then she became such the little mother to him, so much more so than her own mother, the faithless bitch. I wonder what Laren looks like now. She is eighteen now, or close to it. Aye, what does she look like?”
“Will you do nothing?”
Helga stared through the narrow window that gave onto the rolling hills behind the city. The land was rich with summer though it was well into fall now.
The hills were still covered with trees and grass and blooming daisies and dandelions. She forced herself to look at her sister. It wasn’t a pleasing sight, but she was her sister, after all. “Naturally I will do something. We must now just wait and see if this unknown girl is Laren. Then we will see.”
Laren wore a pale saffron linen gown, Ileria’s favorite, she’d told Merrik, as she smoothed the material free of wrinkles. A saffron ribbon threaded in and out of three thin braids artfully pulled back from her forehead and looped behind her ears. She wore two armlets, both given to her just that morning by Rollo.
She looked like a princess, Merrik thought, and felt a sharp pang in his belly. She looked as though she belonged here. There was a new confidence in her walk, in the way she spoke. For the first time since he’d carried her away with him from Kiev, he felt a lack in himself. He hated it.
“Are you scared?”
“Aye,” he said without pause, then realized she couldn’t have known what he’d been thinking. “Scared about meeting your half sisters and their husbands?”
She nodded, then took his hand.
“You’ve told me so much about them that the fear of the unknown is long gone. No, not that. Other things bother me.” He looked down at her hand, now held in one of his, adding quickly before she could question him, “You slept deeply last night.”
She smiled up at him. “I didn’t expect to. It was my old sleeping chamber. The men took Taby and me from that same bed. Nothing has changed.”
She was silent, only her fingers closing and opening in his hand telling him that she was nervous. They were waiting behind Rollo’s throne in a small chamber hidden from the huge outer hall by a long scarlet hanging.
They could hear men’s and women’s voices, the curiosity, the questions, the speculation.
“I’ve never before seen such richness,” Merrik said. Again, he felt that curious lack, and immediately felt disgusted with himself.
She nodded, distracted.
He smiled, shaking his head. She’d been a slave, then his wife, and now she was returned to her opulent beginnings. But it didn’t seem to matter one whit to her.
They stilled. Rollo spoke in a rolling deep voice that brought everyone to immediate and instant silence.
“I asked you here to announce the return of my niece Laren, daughter of my older brother Hallad of Eldjarn.”
There was pandemonium, then the scarlet drapery was pulled aside and they stepped forward to stand beside Rollo.
Then voices were saying, “It is Laren, just look at that red hair!”
“She’s a woman now. How old was she when she disappeared?”
“Nay, ’tis a girl who just looks like Laren, she isn’t here. Laren is long dead. Whoever took her killed her.”
“Aye, ’twas the earl of Orkney, the vicious sod, who took her and Taby.”
Rollo held up his hand. “My niece. Welcome her.”