Turning her gaze from him while still keeping him in her periphery, she said, ‘Until Sigurd’s visit there were no Norse here. The Danes were well to the east and, while Wilfrid believed that they might attempt expansion, he had been able to negotiate a peace of sorts. He paid their taxes and no one threatened him. They were too busy with their other wars.’ She took a deep breath, trying to articulate all that she had learned in the years since. ‘Sigurd was an outsider. He did not bow to the Danes, so he would no doubt refuse to bow to Wilfrid. Wilfrid had heard that Sigurd was preparing to set up a camp just north of here. He sent word to the Danes, but he wanted it stopped. He could not wait for a reply before he and Grim—’
She paused, quite certain that the name Grim would be unfamiliar to him. Then another, far worse, thought came to her. Had Rurik been one of the warriors with Sigurd back then? Had he fought with him? Been one of the men to take Grim captive and torture him? This nightmare seemed to get worse. What if she had kissed the man who had delivered the death blow to her husband?
‘Grim?’ he prodded.
Her throat had seemed to close, as if the horror of that thought had been too terrible to let anything in or out. Finally, she was able to force out the words. ‘Wilfrid’s only son. My husband.’
Rurik’s gaze had been on the candle, but it darted up to meet hers. Surprise lit his eyes and relief flooded her that he did not seem to know of Grim, but she had to know for certain.
‘Were you there...to the north when Wilfrid and Grim met with Sigurd?’
‘I was at home in Maerr.’ He shook his head, but did not elaborate.
With no choice but to believe him, she continued. ‘They took men north to confront Sigurd. I do not know the details of those talks, but I do know they ended badly.’
‘Badly? How did they end?’
Death.
‘There was a battle. Sigurd provoked it.’ That was Wilfrid’s claim. Unfortunately, unlike Cedric, Wilfrid had always had a temper that burned hot. She could very well see him insulting Sigurd and provoking a fight. Cedric had stayed behind to guard Mulcasterhas, because they had believed there could be Norse watching who would attack when Wilfrid left. That had turned out not to be true. For the thousandth time she wondered how things might have been different had his level head gone along.
‘Wilfrid was injured. It was a head wound and soon after that he had his first attack, though it was not that one that left him as he is now. It was the first of many to come, each of them doing their part to whittle away his senses.
‘Grim was fatally wounded,’ she continued. ‘A head injury... A gash in his side... His legs were...broken.’ Crushed would have been a more accurate way to describe them. Had he lived, he would have never walked again. She forced herself to swallow the lump in her throat and keep going. ‘They brought him home, but he died in the days after.’
Rurik stared at her as if he could see every emotion she felt. Shifting under his gaze, she stared over his shoulder to the shuttered window.
‘What are you not telling me?’ he finally asked.
She meant to tell him more, but some things were too difficult to talk about. As the years passed, she had tried very hard to block out the horrible things that had happened to Grim at Sigurd’s command. Locking the thoughts away in a chest buried deep in her mind had been an excellent way of dealing with them. Now, threatened with their release, she froze as a sort of terror overcame her. The last time she had unleashed them, innocent women had died. What if she unlocked them and could not put them away again? What if she could not hide her pain before this Norseman and he knew her for the weakling that she was?
Understanding that those concerns in themselves were indications of her weakness, she forced in a breath, making her lungs burn with the effort. Even difficult tasks had to be managed, she reminded herself, and clenched her hands so tightly that her nails dug into her thighs. The discomfort gave her an external pain to focus on, which helped to alleviate the swell of pain in her throat so that she could keep talking.
‘I was told that after their initial talk with Sigurd yielded inadequate results, Grim crept past their guard and into their camp. I do not know for what purpose,’ she said, noting the question on Rurik’s face. ‘It hardly matters. He was found out. By the time Wilfrid and the men freed him, he had been tortured for hours. His legs had been crushed. And his insides...’ The lump in her throat made it impossible to talk. She took in a deep breath through her nose and forced herself to plough through. ‘They were in the process of removing his—’
‘I understand. They were trying to get information from him. Why would that be necessary if they had merely talked?’ Rurik asked. He stared at her as if trying his best to cull the information out of her with his eyes.
It was enough to turn her pain to a much-easier-to-manage anger. ‘Because they were barbarians out to cause him as much pain as possible.’
After hearing that story, it had been so easy to imagine Sigurd as a monster, a devil unleashed from the bowels of hell who cared for no one. To have his son sitting before her—a man who was clearly not a monster—was almost more than she could comprehend.
Rurik did not look away. ‘There is more to what happened.’
‘That is what happened. Grim came home and
