The Eagle's Lady

By Miriam Newman

Son of an impoverished, dying chieftain, Ari raided for booty and slaves so he could feed his people. He was a heathen, probably a murderer, and it was a sin to lie with him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DCL Publications
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737923725

Book preview

THE EAGLE

PART II

THE EAGLE’S LADY

BY

MIRIAM NEWMAN

DCL Publications, LLC

www.thedarkcastlelords.net

© 2021 Miriam Newman

All rights reserved

First Edition October 2021

DCL Publications

1033 Plymouth Dr.

Grafton, OH 44044

ISBN 978-1-7379237-2-5

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information and storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Lynn Hubbard

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Table of Contents

THE EAGLE

PART II

THE EAGLE’S LADY

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter One

Hedeby, 853 A.D.

He was her owner who had bought her with Hedeby coin in the public market and taken her virginity not an hour later in a little house rented for the purpose. Before that, he and his Viking marauders had raided her peaceful village in Eire, stealing her from the smith she was to wed, just as his brother had then stolen her and taken her to Hedeby to sell. Maeve knew she should hate him.

Son of an impoverished, dying chieftain, he raided for booty and slaves so he could feed his people. Pagan himself, still he spared Christian priests though he sold them. He was a heathen, probably a murderer, and it was a sin to lie with him.

* * * *

Maeve.

She opened her eyes, looking into Ari’s face. It was a motley—one cheekbone purple, an eye bloodshot and blackening, his mouth marred by a split lip. Restraining a pitying cluck, Maeve reached up to stroke his battered cheek lightly, wondering how many blows he had taken for her sake, brawling with his own brother at the public sale. Her fingers registered the heat of his bruises, the prick of beard stubble, but above all the solid contours of a face now well known. Familiar. Reassuring in the stubborn set of the jaw, the strong planes of his face, the aquiline nose, and deep set eyes that could spark with unexpected merriment or incendiary rage. It was the face of a man who would sail nearly a thousand miles for the sake of his pride and her future.

Is it well with you? he asked. She smiled, thinking she might ask him the same.

Perfect.

He lay his hand over hers, turning it to kiss into her palm, then the delicate, sensitive skin of her wrist, then up her arm—a heated awakening of dormant desire.

I love the taste of you, he murmured.

His long hair the color of dark honey, curling at the ends, drifted over his shoulder. Its feathery touch and the blatantly carnal kiss, tongue against skin, made her shiver. Clean-shaven to suit his Irish mother, still he was Viking in every other way. Foreign and forbidden. Impossibly, unbearably sweet.

An ache deepened inside her. She had thought it was pain, but it was lust.

Ari, she whispered. It was as though everything in her body, her senses, her very world had narrowed down to this one thing—wanting him—leaving her without even a voice.

I know. Maeve shuddered in an erotic mix of pleasure and pain. She could not even remember her will to resist him. It was gone, obliterated by searing white-hot desire.

Instinctively, she pressed her belly to his in a silent asking. Sunlight through the open smoke hole dappled his body as he moved over her, seeking her again.

* * * *

Towards dusk, Ari roused, smiling at the sight of Maeve curled sideways facing him. With her hair spread like a burnished cloud and one arm out-flung in his direction, she looked like a wanton. In reality, she was still so new to love…so innocent and eager. He had never had a virgin. The second son of an ailing jarl, living moment to moment on land his brother would inherit, could expect nothing more than the enforced favor of thralls. But he had never forced Maeve or any other woman, and she was uncharted territory—well worth the swelling in his face, the pain in his ribs and the knowledge that he would have his brother to contend with.

Wake up. Her eyelids fluttered, the skin so translucent he could see tiny blue veins beneath fine, slanted brows the exact color of bronze. We have no food, we have no clothes and night is coming. Would you lie here until the morning?

Probably. Her expression was still sleepy and sated with pleasure.

Struck down by tenderness, he gathered her so that he could feel her every heartbeat, every breath. He didn’t like to think of what she had suffered on his brother’s ship…on his own ship, too, for that matter. Her fear and loathing of him at first had been hard to bear, when he had longed to give her so much. Even then, though, he had sensed her reaction to him as a woman to a man. What was it that drew them? The shared blood of mothers from Eire? Yet Ari knew he was very much his father’s son, too—the son of a man steadfast to his native land even if he had taken an Irish bride. It was the Estman in him Maeve had feared.

Somehow it didn’t matter. He had known by the flash of simultaneous terror and profound gratitude in her eyes when she saw him at the auction that the enmity between them was over. This was the woman he had waited for. He had the pride of a chieftain’s oldest son though he was not, and she had the heart of a warrior though she sprang from the plainest of people. Holding her close while a precious beam of sunlight through the smoke hole warmed them from above, for the first time in months he felt profoundly at peace.

Chapter Two

They had cloaks, so before full darkness set in, they donned them to go into the street. There was no food in the little house and vendors would be going home. A seated figure leaning against the door nearly tumbled through and Maeve repressed a scream as Gunnar grinned up at them, teeth flashing beneath his mustache. Ari and his crewman exchanged a few words in Norse.

She was breathing hard in alarm. What is he doing here?

Guarding us. My brother is still in Hedeby. Ari gestured across the narrow dirt street, so that Maeve made out figures among the close-set buildings: Thorkeld between two little houses, another crewman further down…another…and another. Ari’s men had stationed themselves as a perimeter guard while she spent hours in his arms. Silently, Gunnar held out bread, cheese and wine.

They had no need to go out, so they went in. She and Ari ate inside and then Maeve washed their clothes, still bloody from Ari’s fight with Soren, by the light of a rising moon. In the surprisingly capacious back yard she found a tub, a privy, a couple of fruit trees and the ubiquitous wattle fence that enclosed every house. While Ari’s men threw blankets around themselves, settling down at each corner, she hung clothes over that fence to dry, glancing surreptitiously about for neighbors.

But daytime Hedeby altered as darkness fell. Though she could hear occasional shouts from the street, which set her nerves jangling until she saw Ari’s men not responding, a surreal peace descended. Perhaps people could not have stood it otherwise, Maeve thought, as hectic as it was all day. Now, there were flickers of hearth light from the small cottages and the homey, reassuring smell of food. The night was cool, but fair. She wondered if the North Star would ascend the horizon as it had above the Northern waters she had now traveled twice. For better or worse, it seemed that star had guided her from the time she left Eire. Where would it take her next?

It hit her again with the force of a knife-strike just how alone she was. Only Ari’s presence restrained that constant, underlying terror. Never entirely quiescent, it had been reawakened by her sail to Hedeby with his half-mad brother…mute and subservient the entire time, afraid of rape or worse, saved only by the ministrations of a good monk who had then been sold into slavery. Nothing in her life in a fishing village had ever prepared Maeve for what had transpired. The simple, familiar rhythm of laundering clothes soothed her jangled nerves.

Finally, the mundane wringing-out and hanging of garments was finished and she went back inside rather than be alone with her thoughts. Unease was afoot there, too, though. Silently, she returned to where Ari sat with the last of the food at a narrow trestle table littered with crumbs.

Wine? he asked and, when she nodded, poured a measure into a wooden cup. It was good wine, golden rather than the ruby that was all she’d ever had, but rich and satisfying. She drank by the light of the oil lamp, idly sweeping up some last bits of bread, relishing anything other than the dried fish and hard biscuit of her voyage.

Soren is aboard Stormbringer, Ari finally said, though whether he takes her out in the morning, no one can say.

Do you think the slaves are sold? Those were people from her village, her last tie to her old life. Oh, she had seen condemnation on the faces of women who watched her going with Ari into the hide shelter only he and Gunnar had shared previously. She knew what they had thought then, and now they would damn her to hell for lying willingly with a murderous, heathen barbarian. Even so, she would have given much for their company.

But Ari gave her no comfort.

Undoubtedly. I do not think he will have dickered the other things yet. He takes longer than I do and does not get as good a price.

She subsided momentarily, brooding. But perhaps all was not lost. She remembered that Ari’s mother had said he was a shrewd trader—one who might do well with her kin in Eire.

Will you go back? she tested subtly.

To Freya’s Fjord? Of course. It is my home.

But what if your father has died? Could Soren not keep you from putting in there?

If he does, I will only sail further up the fjord and go in by land. He cannot keep me out, Maeve. Many of our men are more loyal to me than to Soren, who has abused too many of them. He has the worst of the lot. I will leave them to him, but first I must get my mother and Nohra, and my son.

She began to comprehend that there was no easy solution to Ari’s dilemma. Lost in his lovemaking, she had been blissfully unconcerned. But by failing to kill his half-brother—prevented by guards at the auction—he had effectively left hostages in Norway: his aging mother, the thrall girl who had borne him a child, and the baby. Selfishly, Maeve had hoped they might spend a few precious days in the little cottage…that she might learn more about the man to whom she had given at least her body, if not more.

In reality, it was going to be a race back to Freya’s Fjord. The men who took his side would have to guard his life—and hers—every minute, all because he had sailed after her to Hedeby. And because Soren had not died that day as intended. That would have made Ari an outlaw—bad enough. But now she feared something even worse.

What will you do?

He swallowed the last of the wine in a single gulp. "Soren will have to sell his cargo and bring back stores. I already have money