Christine Rimmer - Dark, Devastating & Delicious! - The Marriage Medallion / Between Duty and Desire / Driven to Distraction

Brit added her borrowed nightgown and a few other items to the big net bag. “I wonder—could I tag along?”

Sif, who had skin like fresh cream and wore her long red hair in two fat braids wrapped around her head, looked doubtful. “Are you certain you feel well enough?”

“Positive.”

“She’s a determined one,” Asta remarked, never dropping a stitch. “Take her with you. Fresh air will bring the color back to her cheeks.”

“I go, too,” announced little Mist, rising from her seat on the floor and tucking her rag doll beneath her arm.

“All right,” said her mother fondly. “You may come along.”

“Don’t overextend yourself,” Asta told Brit. “If you tire, return immediately.”

“You bet.” Brit grabbed her coat from the peg and followed Sif and Mist out the door.

The washhouse was just beyond the bathhouse. Inside, there was running hot water and six deep concrete sinks, set up in pairs, one for washing, one for rinsing. Hooked between each pair of sinks were old-fashioned, hand-cranked clothes wringers. A washboard waited in each washing sink. Clotheslines ran everywhere, crisscrossing back and forth, about half of them hung with drying garments. One wall had a long table tucked against it—for folding the dry clothes, no doubt. And there were metal racks where sweaters, blocked back into shape, were drying.

Sif explained that each family had washhouse hours. They hung their clothes on the lines and came back for them after they’d had time to dry.

Brit wasn’t much use at the wringer or the washboard. Her shoulder was still way too tender for that. But she helped feed the clothes into the roller while Sif cranked the handle. And then later, she shook out the wet things and handed them to Sif for hanging on the line.

And of course, while they worked, the two women talked. The usual getting-to-know-you chatter. Brit insisted she preferred to dispense with the Your Highnesses and asked how long Sif had been married and if she was born in the village.

“Gunnolf and I have been married eight years—and no, I come from a village to the east, near Solgang Fjord.” Asta’s wasn’t the only village where the people known as Mystics made their home. There were several in the Vildelund.

Brit spoke of her sisters and their new husbands. And then she asked quietly, “Why is it neither Asta nor Eric will talk to me about my brother?”

Did the other woman’s eyes shift away—just a fraction? After a moment Sif said carefully, “I think it’s more that you were so insistent you’d seen him. They didn’t know what to say about it, except to tell you that you couldn’t have seen him, as he is dead.”

He wasn’t, of course. He lived. She knew it. She had seen him. But constantly insisting that she knew he was alive didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. A new approach was called for. “Did you ever meet my brother?” She shook out a wet shirt—from the size and cut, probably Eric’s—and handed it to Sif.

Sif took so long to answer Brit began to think she wouldn’t. But then she said, “For our wedding trip, Eric took Gunnolf and me over the Black Mountains to the south, to see Lysgard. We stayed for seven nights at Isenhalla. Gunnolf already knew your brother, since His Highness had visited this village often as a boy. But I had never had the honor.” Sif hung the shirt on the line. Brit shook out a gray gathered skirt and glanced up to find Sif staring off toward the sinks, a musing smile on her full mouth. “It was a wondrous time for us. Newly wed. So happy. Looking forward to our life together here, in the village of Gunnolf’s people. And being honored to tour our country’s capital city as guests of the royal family.”

Brit handed her the wet skirt. “You met Valbrand during that trip?”

“Yes. He was… so very handsome. And kind. Thoughtful for one so young—he was barely twenty at the time, I believe. On more than one occasion he paused to speak with Gunnolf and me. He would ask how we were enjoying our stay at Isenhalla. He even advised us on things to be sure to see in Lysgard.” The blue eyes were misty. “Yes. I can tell you that.” As opposed, Brit thought with some irony, to what you can’t tell me? Sif sighed. “Prince Valbrand was a-good man. What a king he would have made.”

“Dawk Waiduh,” said Mist. The child sat in a chair a few feet away, near the long table. She held her doll in her lap and she smiled proudly at Brit. “Pwince Vawbwand. Dawk Waiduh.”

Sif gave a nervous laugh. “Children. The things they say…”

“What is a Dawk Waiduh?”

“Dawk Waiduh!” Mist insisted, as if Brit wasn’t getting it right.

“She means Dark Raider, I think,” Sif said, too casually, giving the gray skirt an extra shake, then turning to hang it on the line.

“Yes!” Mist was beaming again. “Dawk Waiduh.”

Brit vaguely remembered hearing stories of the Dark Raider—way back when, at her mother’s knee. Ingrid had made it a point that her California-raised daughters should know the myths, the basic history and at least some of the customs of the land where they were born. “A legend, right? A masked hero, all in black on a rare black Gullandrian horse.”

“That’s right,” said Sif. “A legend. It is said that the Dark Raider is reborn to the people in troubled times to save them from corrupt men and tyrants without honor.”

Dressed all in black, Brit was thinking. Both times Brit had seen her brother—those times that everyone kept insisting never happened—he’d been dressed in black. And that first time, well, hey, guess what? He’d been wearing a mask. She said lightly, “And the correlation between my brother and this legendary figure?”

Sif laughed again. “None that I know of—except in the mind of my two-year-old daughter.”

Brit laughed, too. Then she looked at Sif sideways. “So tell me—seen the Dark Raider around the village lately?”

Sif blinked. Trapped, Brit thought. Hah!

And then, a gossip’s gleam in her eye, Sif admitted, “I must confess, there have been… stories.”

Brit leaned a little closer to Asta’s daughter-in-law. “Tell me.”

Sif waved a hand. “Oh, just rumors. Tall tales. An old man from three valleys over, attacked in the forest by thieves. He claimed the Dark Raider rescued him. And then there have been reports of a number of incidents involving renegades—you know about the renegades?” She must have seen by Brit’s expression that she didn’t. “You’ve been told that, in Gullandria, troubled youths are sent north, to our Mystic communities?”

“Yes.” Just a month ago Brit’s sister Liv had arranged to have a certain seventeen-year-old boy sent to the Mystics in hopes they might be able to help him change his ways.

“Sometimes,” said Sif, “those difficult boys run away from us. They live wild, causing trouble whenever they come upon other people. We call them renegades.”

Brit brought her hand to her injured shoulder, remembering the boy with the crossbow in Drakveden Fjord.

Sif was nodding. “Yes. The boy who shot you was a renegade.” Brit had a few questions concerning that boy, but she didn’t want Sif straying too far from the subject of the Dark Raider. Sif went on, “There have been stories of renegades stealing from local villagers, or groups of them coming in from the wild to wreak havoc on good folk. In a valley to the east of here, one renegade group is said to have staged a small reign of terror, threatening innocent people, killing livestock, breaking into longhouses when the owners were gone.”

“And the Dark Raider stopped them?”

“Yes. The story goes that he caught them, one by one, that he took them where they could cause no more harm.”