Free Maidensong by Mia Marlowe Page A

heavily scored with slashes from glancing blows Bjorn had taken in battle or raiding.
      Pity the shield caught them all, Rika thought.
      A long broadsword, safely tucked into its shoulder baldric, stood balanced next to the shield. She wrapped her fingers around the hilt and tried to lift the blade. It was too heavy for her to wield, and she soon gave up the effort with a disgusted grunt. She’d have to find some other way to make Bjorn the Black pay for Magnus.
      The room was tidy, clean-swept and, like its owner, spartan. The only item that seemed out of place in that masculine space was a small bone flute on the wooden chest. She wondered whether he could play it, or if it was a remembrance of some sort, a trophy of his con quest of some witless female perhaps.
      The fiend.
      The door swung open suddenly, and the fiend in question peered in.
      “You’re awake. Good.” Bjorn strode into the room with a bundle of clothes in his arms. He dropped them on the bed beside her. “Here. Put these on. Do you know how to ride a horse?”
      “ Ja, I can ride,” she said as she sorted through the clothing he’d brought her. The tunic was a soft, creamy cloth the color of ripened wheat, with a kyrtle of deep forest green. She fingered the twin silver brooches sparkling up at her. They were every bit as fine as the ones Magnus had bought her. Thoughts of her father made her turn from them in disgust.
      “ We usually sailed to the places Magnus performed, but he liked to ride back into the less-settled areas, too,” Rika said.
      “ A skald as renowned as Magnus wouldn’t have to travel to out-of-the-way places.” Bjorn helped himself to some of her bread. “I’d heard from one of our traders that he was at the court of the Danes.”
      “ We were for quite a while on and off, but Magnus could never bear court life—all that posturing and preening. So we’d head for the wilds.” She wiggled out of his short tunic while keeping herself covered with the blankets. If he thought she was planning to un dress in front of him, he was sadly mistaken. “Besides, sometimes he collected a new tale in the hinterlands, so he always felt it worth the trip. And Magnus used to say that all people need a skald, not just the powerful. Our sagas and eddas make us who we are as a people and keep us strong.”
      “You put heart into Gunnar’s hall last night.” His dark eyes crinkled with admiration. “ There hasn’t been that much laughter here since my father was jarl .” Bjorn’s voice trailed away as if follow ing the wisp of memory.
      “Has he been gone long?” Her own loss still pierced like a blade, yet she recognized pain in his drooping shoulders.
      “A little over a year,” he said. “So much has changed since then, sometimes it seems even longer.”
      Rika would not allow herself to sympathize with the pain of the man who took her own father from her. She disappeared completely under the bedding and after several moments of tussling with the tunic and kyr tle, threw back the blankets fully clothed.
      Bjorn frowned at her. “ It’s not as though I haven’t already seen you naked.”
      “I was unconscious at the time, so that hardly counts.” She ran a hand through her close-cropped hair. It was so short she didn’t even feel the lack of a comb. “I was not raised to be a bed-slave, so I’m not likely to conform to your lewd notions of how one should behave.”
      “Pity,” he said under his breath.
    Rika scowled at him, but she supposed she should be grateful. Little comments like that made it easier for her to hate him as he deserved. Last night, when he’d awakened from his evil dream, disoriented and afraid, she’d been tempted to see him as just a man, not as the brute she knew him to be.
      In the light of day, she wondered whether he’d made up the whole incident, feigning a night terror just to weaken her resolve. Remembering his soft kiss made her lips tingle and her