“And, of course, Helga will be my heir to Briarstead.”
Vagn nodded, still pretending hesitancy. “Yea, but there is the raisin business,” he pointed out.
“What raisin business?” Helga wanted to know.
“Don’t tell her,” Gorm said on a groan, putting his face in his hands.
“Your father said your female parts have no doubt withered into raisins, but that you still have all your teeth. Really, I think you need a bigger bride price, considering that shortcoming. I mean, tupping a raisin requires a bit more incentive, don’t you think?” Vagn winked at Helga to indicate that he was teasing.
The woman was apparently without humor, because her upper lip curled back and she growled menacingly, first at him, then at her father. “I have ne’er clouted a wounded man afore, but I am thinking on it now.”
“Me?” he asked with exaggerated innocence. “It was just a jest. On my part, leastways.”
“Stop talking before I do, in fact, clout an injured man.”
“Me?” he asked again with exaggerated innocence. Someone should put M’Lady Prissy Arse in her place. He sighed deeply. Ah, a Viking’s work is never done. “Come closer, Helga—I would check your teeth and your maidenhead. With all due respect to your father’s honesty, I will require a personal inspection.”
Helga clenched her hands into fists. Her lips quivered with agitation. Mayhap she was about to have a fit.
Good!
“Untie this maggot-head at once and send him on his way,” Helga demanded of her father.
“Not till the maggot-head is wedlocked with you,” her father insisted, sitting up straight, then standing to glare eyeball to eyeball with his daughter.
Maggot-head? That is a new insult. Hmmm. I like it. Mayhap I will try it sometime. Too bad Toste is not here. He would be a good one to try it on.
“Never!” she said. “You have done outrageous things in your time to bend me to your will, Father, but this time you have gone too far. A raisin! Indeed!”
I rather liked the raisin comparison. Mayhap I will try that one out on someone sometime, too. He noticed her purplish flush then and decided, Or mayhap not.
“I was only thinking of you,” her father whined, “and I meant no insult.”
Whoo! You’re getting nowhere with that line of thinking, Gorm. Even I know enough not to try the “I was only thinking of you ” argument.
“Withered female parts is not an insult?” Helga’s face flamed even more purple than before.
“Be reasonable,” her father begged. “Once the mag… uh, man… is cleaned up and on his feet, he may please your eye.”
Yea, I am quite the presentable fellow when I am cleaned up.
“Do you really think I have forsworn marriage all these years because I yearn for a comely man?”
“Well—” her father said.
“Aaarrgh!” Helga said.
“Can I say something?” Vagn interrupted.
“No!” Helga and Gorm both said.
Helga inhaled and exhaled several times for patience. “I will ne’er agree; nor will he,” Helga told her father.
“Well, actually…” Vagn began. He ever did hate it when people spoke for him as if he were a mute… or a lackwit.
Helga and Gorm both turned to peer down at him.
A slow smile cracked Gorm’s wrinkled face.
Helga’s mouth dropped open and her face turned blood red. She looked as if her head might explode.
To everyone’s surprise, especially Vagn’s, he was considering taking Helga the Homely to his bed furs.
My WHAT resembles a raisin?…
Helga had landed in her worst nightmare.
She put a trembling hand to her forehead and tried to calm herself. Toste Ivarsson, the bane of her life, was in her keep… residing in one of her guest bedchambers, and her father, the half-brained idiot, actually thought she would marry the rogue. Even worse, Toste hinted that he might not be unwilling. He was a half-brained idiot, too.
Was it another mockery of his? Like the one he’d leveled at her more than twenty years ago—Helga the Homely—the epithet that had turned her seven-year-old life on a horrible course. Even today, after all those years, she occasionally heard men snicker those words behind her back. Some said that a saga had even been written about her.