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

“And that would be where?”

“The Mystic village northernmost in all the Vildelund. We send the most incorrigible young ones there, to be shown—more forcefully—a better way.”

“The boy who shot me—did Eric have him taken there?”

“I believe so. Yes.”

“And the Dark Raider himself… if it’s true he’s returned, where would he be living now?”

Something happened in Sif’s pretty face—a mental turning away. A retreat. Brit knew she was thinking she had said too much. “Eric would be the one to speak to of this.” Asta’s daughter-in-law bent to the pile of clothes, took out a nightgown, shook it and turned to hang it. “We must finish the laundry now.”

Brit didn’t press her further. She figured she’d gotten about as much as she was going to get from Sif, for the time being, anyway. And yes, it was all vague stuff. But it was vague stuff that matched up with what her own eyes had seen: a masked man in the fjord with Eric; her brother, in the longhouse, the same height and build as the man in the fjord, wearing the same black clothing.

And Eric warning him, “She sees you. She knows you. You shouldn’t be here. Not without the mask….”

Now Sif spoke of an old legend come recently to life.

Was it totally crazy to imagine that her brother might have taken on the guise of the mythical Dark Raider? Not the way Brit saw it.

What better way to keep the fact that he still lived a secret from his enemies than to wear a mask?

Chapter Four

Another day passed. And another after that.

Brit’s impatience was growing. She had come to the village for a reason. And since that one conversation with Sif Saturday afternoon in the washhouse, she hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch toward her goal.

No one would talk to her. Not about Valbrand, anyway. The mention of his name brought long silences and significant looks. And then whoever she’d asked would answer that she already knew everything they knew on the subject.

She’d even gone so far as trying to get some small shred of information out of the children—and okay, that was kind of pitiful. But she was getting desperate.

They told her they’d seen Valbrand. That he came sometimes to visit—and that at night he turned into the Dark Raider. She almost got her hopes up, almost dared to imagine she might be getting somewhere.

But then the little darlings proceeded to tell her they’d also seen Thor in the sky, throwing his hammer, and Freyja riding through the clouds in her cat-drawn chariot.

So much for asking the kids.

Finally, on Tuesday, a week and a day after her plane went down, as she was sitting at the breakfast table with Asta and Eric, she decided she’d had about enough of getting nowhere. She looked across the table at the man who had carried her out of Drakveden Fjord.

Those haunting eyes were waiting, as usual. Over the past few days, she was constantly glancing up to find him looking at her, his gaze both measuring and intent.

Now he wore the strangest expression. Expectant and yet wary. As if he already knew what she would say.

“I would like to speak with you alone please—after breakfast if that’s all right.”

He nodded in that regal way of his. “As you wish.”

And Asta beamed, as if the thought of the two of them speaking alone after breakfast just tickled her pink. “Well,” the old woman said. “At last.”

Now, what was for Asta to be so thrilled about? She had to know that they’d be talking about Valbrand.

Whatever was up with her, Asta couldn’t get out and leave them alone fast enough. She had the table cleared and their breakfast bowls draining in the wooden rack on the counter in record time. “I’ll be at Sigrid’s,” she announced breathlessly as she grabbed her heavy shawl from the row of pegs by the door. Brit gave her a puzzled look and a wave as she went out.

The door clicked shut, and it was just Brit and Eric, facing each other across the plain wooden table.

“Well then.” Those green-gray eyes looked at her probingly. “You have something to say to me?”

Something to say? Oh, you’d better believe it. She had a hundred questions, at least. Was it possible he was finally ready to fork over a few answers?

Jorund, the agent from the Gullandrian National Investigative Bureau she’d befriended, had warned her about this. “He’s a Mystic through and through,” the NIB special agent had cautioned. “Plays it close and tight. You’ll have trouble getting anything out of him.” But, hey. What did Jorund know? Hadn’t he told her any number of times that she was chasing shadows, that her brother had met his end out there in the ocean, off the coast of Iceland somewhere? He’d been wrong on that count. Brit would prove him wrong about Eric, too.

She hoped.

Brit folded her hands on the table and leaned toward the silent man across from her. “You—and everyone else around here, as a matter of fact—keep claiming that my brother is dead, that I never saw him. Not here. Not in the fjord…” She let her voice trail off. Hey, who could say? Maybe he’d actually volunteer something. He didn’t. “Well, okay, just for the sake of moving on, let’s say that you’re telling me the truth.”

He nodded again. It wasn’t an answer—but she hadn’t really asked any questions. Yet.

“Okay, then, Eric. So let’s go back aways.”

“Back aways.” He looked amused.

She quelled the urge to raise her voice in frustration and explained evenly, “That’s right. If you won’t admit my brother’s alive, then will you tell me what you do know? Tell me what you found out, after he went missing. Tell me what you learned when you went searching for answers to what had happened to him.”

“I learned nothing. Except that he is truly dead.”

“Got that. But how did he die?”

“I’m sure your father must have told you.”

“He did. But I want you to tell me. Please?”

He studied her for a long moment, then shifted on his bench and rested his forearms on the table. “The truth about Valbrand is exactly what His Majesty, your father, has told you. Valbrand went a-Viking—in the modern-day sense of the word, anyway. Every prince who plans to put himself forward as a candidate for the crown in the next kingmaking must accomplish such a journey. It is tradition. A holdover from the old days when kings themselves went a-Viking, when, as the old saying goes, ‘Kings were made for honor, and not for long life.’

“Thus, Valbrand set out with a trusted crew in an authentic reconstruction of a Viking longship, from Lysgard harbor to the Shetland Islands, and on to the Faeroes. From there, he made for Iceland. Somewhere in the North Atlantic, he encountered a bad storm. During that storm, your brother was washed overboard, never to be seen again.”

“And you know this for certain because?”

“I tracked down the survivors of the storm and spoke with them, in person. They told me what everyone already knows. I heard their stories and each one corroborated the one before. It all fit together and it all made sense. As I have told you time after time after time, I now have no doubt at all that Valbrand’s death happened in a storm at sea.” He leaned closer across the table. “There. Are you satisfied?”

“Never.”

He made a low sound in his throat. “Freyja’s eyes. When will you abandon this witless hope that you’ll somehow find a dead man alive?”

Witless, huh? She was leaning forward, too. She leaned farther. They were nose to nose. The air between them seemed to crackle and snap. “I’ll have you know that your own father—and mine—sent me here to try to find out what really happened to my brother.”