Elizabeth Mayne - Lady Of The Lake

“The savages exist,” Embla said intractably.

She turned her back to Edon, and for an unguarded moment she glared at his entourage. His wagons, sleds and carts filled the entire ward of her utterly inadequate wooden palisade. In Constantinople, where Edon had spent seven years as Guthrum’s hostage-emissary, such a structure intended for defense would have been torched the moment it was erected, just to prove how useless it was.

“Are you absolutely certain of the date of Harald’s disappearance?” Edon asked. “It was at Lammas?”

Embla grasped the wood stakes and tilted her chin, exposing a long throat and wondrous white teeth as she laughed scornfully. “Why wouldn’t I be certain? You haven’t lived here for years as I have done. It was August 1, the feast of Lughnasa. The night the druids sacrifice a living man to their gods of the lakes and rivers.”

“Granted, it has been years since I last lived in Warwick, Lady Embla,” Edon said smoothly, “but I remember the people well. They are for the most part a breed of peaceful, simple farmers.”

Embla snorted. “They are cannibals. Men are put to death over their Beltane fires. Infants are slaughtered and their bones thrown beneath the foundations of their houses.”

“That uncivilized, are they?” Edon remarked with a raised brow. “How amazingly similar we are then. Vikings leave their newborns outside to weather the elements the first night of their lives. By Byzantine and Roman standards we are both barbarians, are we not?”

Embla checked herself. Her blue eyes hardened in judgment of the Viking jarl before her. She thought him a lazy wretch, a weakling softened by the pampered life of a courtier. He was of no use to a woman determined to amass her own inviolate wealth.

Thank Odin, Guthrum had provided her adequate warning of the jarl’s arrival. She’d wished Edon Halfdansson dead many times over the years of her tenancy in Warwick.

Now that she saw him in the flesh for the first time, Embla gave the pampered Wolf of Warwick one sennight in his home shire, certain he wouldn’t last that long before he hightailed it to a retreat in Anglia.

She raised a brow, inquiring archly, “Does our home wine not suit your palate?”

Edon wasn’t so easily baited. “I saw no grapevines thriving in your arid fields.”

“How observant you are, Lord Edon.” Embla’s tone changed smoothly, and she smiled as she pointed south over the spikes of the wood palisade. “Crowland Abbey was fortuitously placed, as was another monastery in Evesham. Both were pitiful places where monks wore out their knees endlessly in prayer. Their vines were well established. Their cellars were also quite full. It was nothing to dispatch the monks to their Christian hell and relieve them of their surplus.”

Edon sampled another taste of the unpalatable wine and deliberately changed the subject. “So who is it that you believe murdered my nephew?”

Embla turned to face him. Her fingers clasped the hilt of her sword again. “The druid, Tegwin.” She straightened, as if refusing to grant Edon dominance over her, despite his height.

He set the cup aside. “What happened to the wine cellar I ordered my nephew to construct? Every casket I’ve brought with me will sour in this heat if it is not properly sheltered from the heat and the sun.”

Embla held a firm check on her simmering temper. She looked toward the fields, which she believed showed her best efforts very clearly. This hideous stone castle of Edon’s had no value or importance. The fertile land wrested from the hands of the lazy Leamurian farmers held the true worth of Warwick.

“I have altered some of your plans, Lord Edon. Owing to the bedrock here at the summit of the hill, it was necessary to place one or two of your requested conveniences elsewhere. Now that you have quenched your thirst, shall I give you a tour?”

“By all means,” Edon agreed, eager to inspect every inch of his property.

The stone keep was primitive and crude to Edon’s eye. But then he was accustomed to the splendors of Constantinople, that gem of cities bustling with artisans, philosophers and scholars.

In time, Edon knew, his own hand would change and alter what was begun here in Warwick. For this was now his home. He was finished with roaming the world, doing his brother’s—King Guthrum’s—bidding. Now, at the age of one score and nine, Edon intended to establish his own court and turn Warwick into a seat of learning to rival Byzantium.

The two-storied square keep was only the beginning of what he planned to build.

Embla proudly took him to her longhouse first. The building was completely roofed with luxuriant thatch. Its pitch was so high that no smoke from the cooking fires stung Edon’s eyes. A raised vent in the center let the smoke rise and allowed a beam of bright daylight inside.

The largest part was used as a hall for feasts and the daily meals. “My chamber is here to the east of the hall, my lord, but if you prefer my services in your keep, I shall move at your convenience.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Edon replied.

Looking around him he saw many thralls at their labors. Women made bread and tended the meat roasting on spits over the open fires. Edon had grown up in surroundings similar to this, as most Vikings did. Farmsteads were the backbone of Viking economy and culture. Embla’s longhouse was no different than any of a thousand like it Edon had inspected in his travels.

He thought fondly of the palaces at Rome and Alexandria. With their courtyards and splendid gardens, there was beauty everywhere a man looked. Given time, Warwick would become such a place.

He returned his attention to the woman, whose walk so reminded him of a proud man’s strut. Edon put out his hand to touch the carved bone handle of her dagger, which her fingers had flown to so often during their conversation. “This is a curious piece. Who made it?”

At the interest in her prized weapons, Embla offered a genuine smile, the first Edon noted. She proudly unsheathed the dagger and laid it in his hand, expecting his admiration. “Falkirk is my carver. He is good with bone and ivory. This is the goddess Freya hunting a boar.”

“An ambitious work.” Edon tested the weight and balance of the blade, but was truly enamored of the skill of the bone carving, the attention to detail and the beauty of the craftsmanship. This carver knew what he was about. “It is a worthy weapon. I trust you have little need to use it for defense.”

“Humph,” Embla scoffed. “Few are foolish enough to challenge me.”

“So I have heard.” Edon smiled and handed her back her knife, offering his own blade for her inspection. “Mine is more modest, but possibly more deadly in the tempering of the Damascus steel. That is what counts where weapons are concerned, is it not?” His smile faded from his lips. “It is far better to never need to have to unsheath one’s weapon in the first place.”

The jarl left Embla with those cryptic words. He walked to the well and took a dipper in his hand to quench his thirst.

Asgart, Embla’s best man, threw the bucket in the well and drew up a fresh supply after Edon had drunk his fill. Suddenly, the soldier gave with a shout and leaned over the rim. Before his eyes, the water level dropped ten feet.

Asgart’s cry of alarm brought everyone in the ward running to the well. The gathering crowd watched the water inch slowly back up the stones that lined the well. It foamed and swirled, a brackish, foul brine. The stench that arose was foul enough to make a strong man stagger.

“The well has been poisoned!” Asgard shouted. He threw the dipper and the bucket to the ground. Edon took a step back because of the stink. Sulfur wasn’t a pleasant smell, though the water he’d just drunk had been sweet and pure.

Embla ran to his side and waved her hand across the rising water, smelling the sulfur-tainted air. Fear and alarm darkened her fair cheeks.

“The well has been cursed!” she announced. “The witch has cast another spell upon us!”

Furious, she turned on Asgart, her hand clenching the hilt of her sword. “Damn you, Asgart, bring me that woman! Double your patrols. Find the witch before she causes any more harm. Bring her to me! She will pay for poisoning my well!”

“As you command.” Her captain saluted by striking his fist to his chest. Before Asgart could call his soldiers to him and comply with Embla’s orders, Edon stepped forward and laid his hand on the captain’s arm.

“There is no need to send out a search party.”

“But…” Asgart sputtered.

“Keep your men here and go about your usual business,” Edon commanded, taking charge of his land and defense of his property. “That was rather presumptuous of my niece to make such a command. I am here now. My men will see to the shire’s defense when necessary, Embla Silver Throat.”

Both the captain and the woman were stunned by Edon’s contradictory order. Only Embla spoke out against it.

“What? You don’t know what goes on here,” she sputtered.

“I know enough to realize that wells fail during droughts, and it doesn’t take witchcraft to accomplish that,” Edon replied sternly. “Send your people back to their work.”

“Get back to work!” she shouted at the thralls who had come to see what was happening. Edon found it hard to decide which frightened the people more, their mistress or their superstitions. In either case, the poor slaves backed away in alarm.

He didn’t believe in such nonsense as wells being cursed by witches. He was astute enough to see that Embla and her people did.

Edon sent one of his captains into the keep to see if the well inside had also been affected. He was met by a servant Lady Eloya had sent running from the bathhouse, to ask what had happened to the water. The sluices in the bathhouse had suddenly gone dry. Rig returned, reporting that the same rotten-egg smell affected the water well in the keep.

Edon gave his head a firm shake, regretting the bad luck of that. “Then we will have to cart water from the river below the palisade. This is quite unacceptable.”

Rig stood beside him as the others moved away. “These people are very superstitious, Lord Edon,” he said quietly.

With a meaningful glance at the retreating form of his niece by marriage, Edon said, “That they are, Rig. Let us hope that we can educate them somewhat over time. Shall we adjourn to the keep?”

The day’s heat refused to dissipate until the sun sank within a handspan of the horizon. A soft breeze off the river gently cooled Tala ap Griffin on her walk to the top of Warwick Hill. The fine red glow of the setting sun made it easy for her to slip unnoticed through Warwick’s open gates and approach the stalwart keep. Her hair and her mother’s scarlet cloak simply melted into the vibrant colors of the dwindling light, making any spell for invisibility redundant. She had no need to cloak herself magically when the dwindling light accomplished all. Inside the wood palisade, a commotion drew the curious to the fortress’s communal well.

Curiously, most of the Vikings had gone inside their huts and houses. It was the time of day when their noses led them to steaming pots and fragrant haunches of sizzling venison and pork. Those that lingered in the ward paid no attention to her as she quietly approached the keep and slipped inside.

No dogs barked a warning, no shouts broke the stillness that had come over the land when the cooling breeze lifted off the river. Nothing living took any notice of Tala ap Griffin until she reached the topmost step inside the fortress and came face-to-face with a wolf.