“Yea, it will. When I return, we will finish what we started here tonight,” he argued. Then: “Where are you going?”
“Off to find Eadyth and Alinor and tell them to start their parade of prospective bridegrooms,” Esme said without turning. She would not want him to see the tears brimming in her eyes.
“I will be back,” he threw out to her backside.
Hah! I’ve got news for you, Viking. You are not leaving. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not for a good long while. Not if I can help it. “You will pay for this, Toste. You will pay.”
Esme went off, not to find the ladies of Ravenshire, but to put her own plan into motion. Two could play at this game. Toste Ivarsson was soon going to find that he’d met his match.
The lull before the you-know-what…
By the time Toste reentered the keep, Esme was out of sight and almost everybody had gone to bed, except Eirik, Tykir and Bolthor, who still sat before the low fire in the solar. They took one look at Toste, then a quick second look and burst out laughing.
“Look, look, look! Ha ha ha!” Abdul squawked.
“Someone ought to make parrot porridge out of that dumb bird,” Toste said.
“You’re not the first person to suggest that,” Eirik commented.
Bolthor immediately began spewing forth one of his poems, “This Is the Tale of Toste the Torn.”
“Toste was a man torn
As ever was a Viking born.
Did he want her?
Did he not?
Should he swive her,
Should he not?
In the end, the maid would take
Things into her own hands,
So Toste would no longer be torn.”
“You have straw on your crotch,” Eirik pointed out.
“And your lips are red and puffy. Did someone punch you?” Tykir asked with false innocence.
“Methinks I detect a lump in his braies. So he might still be a bit tormented… and torn,” Bolthor concluded.
They were all grinning at him as they sipped their horns of mead. Vikings—and half Vikings, for that matter, as Eirik was—ever did enjoy teasing each other, and Toste did not mind all that much.
Still, he soon changed the subject. “I must needs leave on the morrow at first light with Sister Margaret.”
“I will go with you,” Bolthor offered, not for the first time.
“Nay. This I will do myself.” He’d already explained the details of his plan to the men. “I will be back as soon as possible—by Christmas, I hope. No need for any of you to get up so early in the morn.”
“Dressed as a nun?” Tykir asked, a gleam in his merry eyes.
“Yea, dressed as a nun… at first. Till after I deliver Sister Margaret to the minster.”
“And you will leave Lady Esme here with us?” Eirik inquired.
Toste nodded.
He thought he heard Eirik mutter, “Lackwit!” but he probably said something like, “Holy shit!” ‘Twas a favorite expression of Eirik’s he’d learned long ago from his barmy half-sister Rain, a healer, who claimed to come from the future.
“By thunder, Toste, do you know how much your brother would have enjoyed this masquerade of yours?” Tykir said.
“I do,” he said and fought back tears.
Eirik handed him a horn of mead and said, “To Vagn!” They all raised their horns then and said, “To Vagn!”
It was a fitting good-bye, Toste thought.
I can’t believe I’m doing this…
Esme worked furiously to complete her plan.
It was the most daring thing she’d ever tried. But desperation prompted daring. That was what she told herself.
Having a few coins she’d garnered over the years, she managed to bribe a retired cook from Ravenshire to help her. Bertha, a slovenly, greedy-eyed crone of more than sixty years, still lived on the estate in her own thatched hut and helped out in the kitchens on occasion.
“Did you prepare the empty woodcutter’s hut, as I instructed?”
“Yea, I did, mistress, and I got ye a fire goin’, too. It’s colder’n hell on a Sunday outside, it is.” She scratched her armpits as she spoke, then broke wind loudly.
Esme restrained herself from wincing or clouting the foul woman. She needed her, having had no time to find a better accomplice.