But all he could think was More delays!
“You are not to worry about a thing. Finn is helping me. A crew has already been hired.”
Not for the first time in these past two sennights had he considered killing his good friend. Finn was moping about like a lovesick bull. Apparently Isobel wanted naught to do with him, and this was a new happenstance for the man far-famed for his woman-luck. Sidroc wasn’t sure if Finn was more upset by his unrequited love or his damaged reputation. Ianthe told him that the Saxon woman had suffered much abuse at the hands of men in the ten years she’d been in captivity, and she probably had no interest in any male, not just Finn.
So it was that four and a half sennights after Drifa left Byzantium, Sidroc left the Golden City shores, for good. Hopefully he would be at Stoneheim within another two sennights.
But he hadn’t anticipated an underwater volcano erupting just outside Byzantium, causing them to have to reroute their journey, causing further delays.
Nor had he anticipated pirates.
Or a mutiny on one of the ships over rosebushes.
Or a fight among two of Drifa’s guardsmen over a missing harem girl garment.
Or Ianthe and Isobel’s need for constant stops to piss and bathe.
Or his heart-hammering fear of what he would do when he arrived at Stoneheim, because gods only knew what that would be. He didn’t.
Was there anything worse than a confused, impatient Viking?
Chapter Twenty-five
Absence just makes the heart grow asunder...
Drifa had been up out of her day-long entrapment in the hold of the longship for two sennights now, but still she was hurt, and more than that, she was blood-churning angry. The troll! The toad! The slimy, dirt-crawling, lying, traitorous, loathsome snake.
Despite all that, she loved Sidroc.
And he’d sent her off like so much bothersome baggage.
Oh, she knew that he nursed a modicum of concern for her well-being, but he would no doubt feel the same for any woman. Like Ianthe. Or his dead wife. Or any passing fancy.
So he “cared” for her. She did not want his caring. She wanted his loving.
So much for that!
When would she learn? He’d nigh broken her heart five years ago. And he’d done it again now. And, gods help her, he would do it again when he came for Runa.
She would not think of that now. Wind Maiden was skimming down the fjord toward Stoneheim, and she could see a small crowd awaiting their unexpected return. The tall man with the flowing white hair would be her father, and the little mite jumping up and down was sweet Runa.
After many hugs and kisses, Drifa was walking up to the keep with her father on one side, filling him in on all that happened, with Runa on her other side, singing a little song she’d made up which was composed of one word, “Present, pre-sent, preeee-seeent,” and all its variations. Drifa had made the mistake of telling Runa that she brought presents for her.
Many sennights later Drifa sat with her father; Ivar, whom she was still angry with; and her sister Vana on benches in the great hall before a cold hearth, it being a warm autumn day. Runa was outside playing her marble game with some of the other children on the hard dirt of the back courtyard.
“I still say that the Arab bastard should not go unpunished. I should put together a hird of two hundred or so of my best warriors and go after that ad-Dawlah nithing,” her father said, not for the first time since she’d come home and told them of her captivity.
The possibility of her father going off to war at his age, and engaging the enemy in a remote territory, was foolish and unacceptable to Drifa. She shivered at the image of him atop a camel leading his troops.
“Nay, Father!” she and Vana said at the same time.
Even Ivar, who had served King Thorvald well for many years, shook his head. “ ’Tis too far away, and there are too many of them.”
Drifa reached over and put a hand on her father’s big one. “Bahir ad-Dawlah is a vile man, and he should face the raven, no question about that, but I am alive and was not physically harmed. What I hate most is that my trip to Byzantium was cut so short.”
“There will be other trips,” her father assured her, but Drifa knew it to be untrue. She would be nigh a prisoner here at Stoneheim from now on.
“Besides that, ad-Dawlah and his men are not the only guilty ones,” Ivar pointed out.