“I was losing for a moment there,” Arinbjorn said, but he seemed downright exhilarated. “Do you want to go again? It’s been a long time since anyone has given me a challenge.”
“Oh, come off it.” Svein played three notes on the lyre, which, paired with his thin-lipped grimace, managed to sound annoyed. Thorolf, sitting on the box to Gunnhild’s side, looked impressed at her near win. When she turned and met his eyes, he smiled, and her heart fluttered. Their knees were very close together. Just a nudge and they’d be touching.
She shook herself, shifted away, and said to Arinbjorn, “Yes. Let’s go again.”
Gunnhild came closer and closer to winning over a few more games. During their final game, she almost succeeded in moving her king to the safety of his corner—and then Eirik appeared. Thorolf, sitting on the king’s ship box, got out of his seat before he could be asked to move, and Eirik sat down and immediately knocked his knee into hers like she was the one taking up too much space. He took one look at the board and gave Gunnhild a condescending smile. “Don’t feel bad about it. No one wins against Arinbjorn.”
Disgusted, she pivoted her legs the other way. She wanted to smack him upside the head with the tafl board. She wanted to curse him with pustules while he slept. “I almost won.”
Arinbjorn reached down for the jug sitting next to him, refilled his cup with ale, and refilled the borrowed cup someone had handed Gunnhild during the second game. She gave him a nod of thanks and drank, and he said to Eirik, “It’s true. She nearly beat me this time, until a horse’s ass showed up and ruined her concentration.”
“What do I have to do with anything?” Eirik asked. When Gunnhild stifled a laugh with the back of her hand, he gave her a murderous look. “What?”
“If you don’t understand, I won’t explain it to you,” she shot back.
Arinbjorn looked back and forth between the two of them, then looked up at the sky as if asking the gods for help.
As the evening wore on, Eirik and Arinbjorn went off to speak alone somewhere—for Eirik to relay their earlier conversation, Gunnhild assumed—but apparently word that Gunnhild would be helping them had spread around camp, for the mood had lightened. As Svein led the group in singing bawdy drinking songs, she found herself sitting shoulder to shoulder on a ship box with Thorolf, who didn’t seem particularly keen to leave her side.
She found that she didn’t want him to go anywhere, either. In fact, the longer they sat together, the more she felt a strange sort of hope—the kind that made her heart race, made her feel like a foolish child again. But she was a grown woman, and she told herself that even if she did fancy him, she shouldn’t act rashly. She knew that much even after a lifetime living in the woods with an old woman.
Not that Heid hadn’t been good company, and not that Gunnhild hadn’t enjoyed spending time with Juoksa and Mielat. But the yearning to enjoy the company of others in that most intimate sense had become almost unbearable as the years passed. On those nights when Heid couldn’t sleep and went wandering in the woods, which happened increasingly often as she got older, Gunnhild would lie there in her nest of blankets on the floor and imagine what it would be like to have someone touch her the way she did herself.
And now a man she desired was within reach—and, she admitted to herself, she did desire him—and she had no idea what to do. They’d met only today, so she certainly didn’t know him well enough to know how he would react to an advance. Besides that, she couldn’t stomach the thought of being spurned.
They sat there in companionable silence, watching the men around them getting steadily more drunk, before he finally spoke.
“It’s bold of you to treat with Eirik the way you do,” Thorolf said. His tone was heavy, thoughtful, as if he’d been working out how to say the words to her for some time. “If any harm befalls you while you’re with us, it will be my fault for bringing you into our company.”
“If any harm befalls me while in this company, it will be your king’s fault, not yours,” said Gunnhild. “I’m not afraid of him.”
He didn’t reply. She wondered if he wanted to say, Perhaps you should be.
“Why do you care so much?” she asked. “We’re strangers. Is it just for the sake of your own conscience that you care what happens to me? Or do you . . .” A pause. “Do you feel another way about how things stand between us?”
It was the only way she could think to ask the question. She feared his response.
“Both, I think, in equal measure,” he said. Which was not a rejection, but neither was it an explicit invitation.
But it was enough to encourage her to try.
After draining her ale cup, she said, with forced nonchalance, eyes trained on the fire, “During my nap I noticed that your bedroll was quite comfortable. I wondered if I might sleep there tonight.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him freeze with his cup halfway to his mouth, and for a moment Gunnhild felt a stab of fear that she’d completely misread the situation.
But then he lowered the cup and said softly, “I don’t see why not, provided that you’d allow me to share it.”
The singing and chatter around them seemed to fade away as she turned to him, and he to her, and when their eyes met Gunnhild was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that the rest of this night was going to go exactly as she’d hoped. All attempts at subtlety forgotten, she allowed herself a small smile.
“That seems reasonable to me,” she said.
Thorolf stood and cast a cursory glance around them to make sure no one was watching, then turned to her, his back to the fire and the rest of the men. “As it happens, I was just about to retire.”
He offered his hand. She took it.
* * *
—
LATER THEY HUDDLED UNDER his cloak in exhausted silence. The fog of desire had cleared, and she felt sore and tender in places she hadn’t anticipated. Her expectations had been met in some ways and thwarted in others. She’d known there would be pain, but she hadn’t expected its extent. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel the same release as she did on her own—she was more realistic than that, for Heid had always been honest with her when she’d asked about such things in her adolescence.
But as it turned out, Thorolf had been nothing if not attentive throughout the entire encounter. At first she’d been embarrassed, flustered, unwilling to admit that she had no idea what she was doing. He’d made not a single comment on her obvious lack of experience, and that had given her the confidence to finally stop thinking and to enjoy herself.
Gunnhild hadn’t realized that she had fallen asleep until she awoke with a full bladder thanks to the ale. Beyond the tent’s walls, the camp was silent. She slipped reluctantly from Thorolf’s embrace and dressed, then left the tent, slunk far enough away from the camp that she couldn’t be seen, relieved herself, and headed back.
As she was untying the tent doors so she could reenter it, a voice from behind her said, “I see you found somewhere to sleep.”
Gunnhild jumped and clutched her chest as she turned to glare at Eirik, who was sitting on the ground by the dying fire, leaning against his ship box with a cup dangling from his hand, two cats sleeping on him: a large black one on his lap, and a small tortoiseshell on his shoulder. Someone had told her earlier that these were the ship’s cats, but for some reason she found it jarring to see two innocent creatures so at ease with a man like him.