Sandra Hill (2 page)

Ignoring him, Zach said, “Pretty sure.”

“I already wired ahead to a nurse I know. She’ll do DNA tests for you right away so at least you’ll have that defense.” Slick knew more ways to avoid the law than a corporate lawyer.

Zach nodded.

“You do realize you’re in trouble from so many angles you’re gonna look like a target riddled with bullet holes by the time they’re done with you.” This was Sly’s astute opinion.

He nodded again. “For the past two years, I’ve been miserable, mooning over Britta,” he told them. Britta was the one woman who hadn’t succumbed to his charms—and, yeah, he had plenty—and in the dead of the night, she was the one he fantasized about. “But, man, I sure wish I was back there with her right now.”

Cage laughed. “Nah! You’d just be tradin’ one misery fer another.”

“I suppose so.” Zach sighed and glanced down at his personal, present-day misery.

His misery stuck his tongue out at him.

NORTHUMBRIA, 1015 AD
Just call me Xena, Warrior Nun…

Britta Asadottir, far-famed Norse warrior woman, was a novice in St. Anne’s Abbey…a Saxon nunnery, for the love of Thor! And she blamed the world’s biggest fornicator, Zack-hairy the Pretty Boy.

Not that she had ever fornicated with the lout, or wanted to, but the man had ruined her life. If she ever got her hands on him, she would throttle him with glee.

Britta had met Zack-hairy at The Sanctuary, a women’s refuge in the Norselands, more than two winters past. He and his comrades had been there only a few sennights, helping to rid the country of the villain Steinolf and beguiling the gunnas off every woman that crossed their paths. The whole time, the godly handsome man had pursued Britta relentlessly, trying to lure her into his bed furs. Which was strange in itself, because she was not known as Britta the Big for naught. As tall and well muscled as many men, she intimidated males who were e’er sensitive about being the stronger sex. Not the rogue with the snake-slick tongue, however.

But then, Zack-hairy, his comrades-in-arms, and The Sanctuary’s mistress, Hilda Berdottir, had disappeared one day.
Poof!
Everyone surmised that the group had been caught in an avalanche that swept their bodies all the way to the fjord and then to the North Sea. A sad ending, to be sure.

The oddest thing, though, was that once the lout had gone, she’d developed the most intense yearning for him and the mating. Thank the gods she had not been so inclined when he had been here. Otherwise, she would have been rutting with him like a boar in heat. The scoundrel must have put a spell on her because no longer had she been satisfied with serving as chief guard and archer for The Sanctuary. Now that the danger of Steinolf was gone and now that the lout had ignited these irksome fires in her loins, she had fooled herself into believing she could live safely outside the bounds of the fortress, perchance even find a man to douse those woman-fires.

A big mistake!

Her father and brothers had found her.

Her father, Jarl Eyvind Tunnisson, wanted—nay,
needed
—her back under his sadistic control again. It turned out that one of his larger and more prosperous Norse estates, Everstead, in truth of law belonged to her…or it would once she wed, and then it would belong to her firstborn daughter. On her death, if there were no issue, everything would go to St. Anne’s Abbey. And so Britta took refuge here with the good nuns. Her father was only biding his time.

Problems with her father were not new. Any woman’s virtue was forfeit in her father’s holdings. He and her three brothers slaked their lust on anything wearing a gunna, regardless of age or beauty, regardless of consent. As a result, there were dozens of Tunnisson bastards hither and yon, from the Norselands to Britain to Iceland and beyond. It had been a huge embarrassment for her mother, a highborn lady, afore her death ten years ago.

Her father considered women chattel, good only for bedsport and the coin brought by prospective husbands. He had been enraged at Britta’s refusal to wed the various men he’d brought to her.

Her brothers had the same attitude toward women, and worse. They were demented and cruel and had been from an early age. When she was eight, Trond had skinned her favorite kitten, whilst still alive. When she was twelve, Erlend had held her down with a knife to her inner thigh, forcing her to spread and show his filthy friends her nether parts. She had a scar there still where the knife had drawn blood. But it had been Halvdan’s attempt to mount her himself that caused Britta to go to their ancient castellan and beg for instruction in the warrior arts.

From that day forward, Britta’s life path took a new direction. No longer could she nurture the usual womanly dreams of home and hearth and family. Taller than the average male, she had begun to develop muscles…Not an attractive marriage package, as her father had told her on many an occasion. Although men did not like having a wife towering over them, they could live with that; however, when said wife could best her mate in swordplay, that was beyond acceptable. Or so had said the many prospective husbands her father paraded before her.

The final indignity had come when her father gave consent to a Danish jarl for rape as an incentive to force her to bend to his will, a rape that she managed to evade. Her jaw still ached on occasion, an eternal reminder of his rage that time…a fist to the chin that had knocked her senseless and no doubt jarred her jawbone out of place. It had been then that she had known she had to flee, her fighting skills not nearly enough to fight them all.

For years, she had moved from place to place in the Norselands, hiring out her fighting skills, until she’d found The Sanctuary, a special place for women. She had been content there being the head archer until that lout Zack-hairy had stirred her blood. When he’d left, without warning, she realized that she wanted so much more. She wanted a man who loved her, and she wanted children. So she had left The Sanctuary, thinking herself safe because of her now-honed military prowess.

What a witless exercise in vanity!

Almost immediately, she had fallen into her father’s clutches again. When, five months later, she’d escaped, battered and gaunt from nigh starvation, it had been from a dungeon in his castle awaiting marriage to the most vile man imaginable.

“What is amiss
now
, Lady Britta?” Mother Edwina, the abbess, asked with a long sigh, calling Britta back from her straying thoughts.

Britta, who disdained the title, glanced up from where she’d been kneeling for more than an hour on the stone floor of the chapel. “Penance.”

“Again?”

“Father Caedmon likes to give me penance, as much as he likes hearing my confessions.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis.

“Child, your attempts at humor do not amuse me.”

Child?

The nun was no older than forty winters, but she carried a world-weary, stern demeanor under the strain of her position. She motioned for Britta to join her in sitting on one of the hard wood pews.

“’Tis not my fault that the priest gets pleasure out of hearing me create sexual experiences to confess to him.”

“Create?” Mother Edwina arched an eyebrow.

“Didst think I really know how to ride a man like a horse? Or get pleasure from a fat candle? Or jiggle my breasts apurpose to entice the tinker…yea, the one with rumbling bowels? Or sleep naked in the hayloft so the straw would rub my private places?”

With each of Britta’s fantasies, the good nun’s jaw dropped lower and lower. Finally, she said, “Britta!” The chastisement was belied by a grin tugging at Mother Edwina’s lips. “St. Bridget’s bones! Why would you confess lewd acts you have not committed?”

“Because Father Caedmon likes me to. And not just me. Ask any of the novices. We have made a game of who can dream up the most outlandish examples of bedsport. Whew! Sister Ignatia wins hands down on that score. Who knew that turkey feathers—”

“Britta! That will be enough.”

Not nearly enough.
“Really, Mother Edwina, think how boring my confessions would be otherwise. I am a trained warrior. ’Tis what I do best. But there is naught to defend here at the abbey, other than a wayward bull or angry bees. Truly, my confessions would go thus: Bless me, Father, for I yawned during compline. Bless me, Father, for I cursed when the chapel bell rang for the tenth time during the night. Bless me, Father, for I want to nigh scream if I hear another Kyrie or Sanctus. Bless me, Father, for laughing at Sister Benedictus when she broke wind hitting the high note of “Gloria.” Bless me, Father, for I would rather lop off an enemy’s head than pray for him. Bless me, Father, for wishing my father and my brothers to the fires of Muspell. Bless me, Father, for drinking too much of Sister Margaret’s mead.”

The only income source the abbey had was the sale of Margaret’s mead in the trading stalls of Jorvik. And good mead it was, too, the secret ingredients passed on by the same Northumbrian family who sent a daughter named Margaret to be a nun each generation from ten decades past.

“You must learn to accept your lot in life.”

“Why?”

“Because it is the way of the Lord.”

“And who is to say that the Lord prefers I be a nun than a warrior? Remember Boudicca, the Celtic queen who led an army against the Romans.”

Mother Edwina made that tsking sound she usually employed when Britta had asked an unanswerable question.

“I grow weary of the tedium,” Britta complained. “How can you bear the quiet and the same routine every day, month after month, year after year?”

“Inner peace is its own reward.”

Britta, feeling anything but peaceful, grabbed at her own hair with frustration, then pressed her lips together, pondering. “Methinks there may be another way.”

“I will no doubt regret asking, but what other way?”

Britta looped an arm over the mother superior’s shoulder and confided, “Returning to my father’s rat’s nest of a keep is impossible. The only way I can leave this nunnery is if I am dead. Or if my father thinks I am dead.”

“Thinks?”

“Yea. I will do naught to jeopardize the nunnery. But I must needs come up with a fake death.”

“And that fake death would be?”

“It must be a death where there would be no body as evidence.”

“Like a fire or a drowning?” Mother Edwina’s face brightened with understanding.

“Yea, but I am not about to risk either of those. How about if I have suddenly gone barmy?”

Mother Edwina muttered something about her already being barmy.

“For the next few sennights I could do some demented things so that word will begin to spread of my mind’s demise. Then when I jump off a cliff—you know, the cliff on the way to Jorvik—everyone will say I committed suicide in the midst of one of my fits.”

Mother Edwina’s jaw gaped with astonishment. “You would truly die if you jumped off that cliff. There is naught but sharp rocks and deep waters below.”

“I would not really jump. I would just pretend. And I would leave pieces of my ripped clothing on the rocks, with a bit of blood doused here and there. Oh, do not look askance at me. ’Twould be chicken blood.”

“May the saints preserve us!” Mother Edwina made the sign of the cross over her ample chest. “Where would you go?”

“That is the best part. I will hide in Sister Margaret’s mead wagon next time she goes to the market stalls in Jorvik. From there I will arrange passage to Iceland and from there go to that new land called Greenland. Or else I could go to the Rus lands and become one of the Varangian Guard.”

“Have you lost your senses, girl?”

“Mayhap I have, but you must see that I have no choices left. Have you considered that Sister Bernice’s disappearance last sennight might be related?”

“Never!”

“My father has threatened to get me, even if he has to assault the abbey walls.”

“He cannot breach sacred walls. ’Twould be a sacrilege.”

Mother Edwina was so naive. “As if my father would care about that!” Britta muttered.

“Sister Bernice will return. She no doubt went to visit her family in Nottingham.”

Britta shrugged. She was not so sure.

“And for you, pray, my child. God may yet have a religious vocation in mind for you.”

The next day, a driverless, mule-drawn cart pulled into the abbey courtyard carrying Sister Bernice. So brutally tortured had the young nun been that there was a communal horror and a vast wailing inside the convent walls.

After the funeral, Britta approached Mother Edwina again. “Can you see now that I must leave?”

Mother Edwina nodded reluctantly. “If there is no other way, I suppose your plan could work.”

For the next few sennights, Britta did indeed convince more than a few nuns, a lusty priest, and several passing travelers that she had gone barmy from her confinement in a nunnery. Spouting a gibberish sort of language that she made up. Pulling at her hair. Dancing with Sister Serena’s broom. Bursting out in ribald song in the midst of Mass. Even walking naked in the moonlight.

So, when the day came for her “demise,” her sanity was indeed in question. The only problem was, she needed some fortification as she and Sister Margaret wended their way slowly toward Jorvik. And what better fortification than Margaret’s mead?