| |
Day Four
Caitriona
––––––––
Nobody who knew Cait well would be surprised to learn that she hated waiting. The year her brother had been away in Wales had been excruciating for her. It had been one of the reasons she’d fought so hard for the chance to come to Dublin. It was a woman’s fate to wait at home, but Cait much preferred to act rather than react.
But here she was, safe behind Dublin’s walls while the men she loved risked their lives for hers. Against all expectation, Queen Helga appeared to view her as something of a peer, and she had invited Cait to the palace to wait.
Cait could hardly refuse an invitation from the queen, so she climbed the staircase to the wall-walk in order to stare out at the landscape. There was nothing to see. And there wouldn’t be, possibly for many hours.
Cait didn’t care. She could be no other place but here.
“My lady.” The guard nodded. “Prince Godfrid is a mighty man. If anyone will survive today, it will be he.”
She smiled sweetly, thanking him and grateful there didn’t seem to be any resentment of her burgeoning relationship with Godfrid. She was Irish, even if from Leinster, so there could have been. The guard didn’t even looked askance at her when she perched herself on the top of the rampart and pulled out her needlework. She would wait, and she would think, because she could do nothing else, but she could also keep her hands busy.
Hours passed with no result, until Cait’s fingers ached from the constant in and out of the needle. Then she heard the scrape of a shoe on the steps, and Helga appeared at the top of the tower. “Wouldn’t it be better to occupy yourself elsewhere?”
Cait turned her head just enough to look at the queen’s face, and then looked back to the horizon. Storm clouds were gathering on hills in the distance. It would rain before this evening, though since this was Ireland, that was no prescient prediction.
“If they are dying out there, I can’t be whiling away my time in my brother’s house or yours. What would I do?”
“Weave? It is what our ancestors did when our men went into battle. How else to spare one’s man from the Valkyries?”
Cait glanced sharply at her. Helga had moved to stand in the center of the square tower, her hands folded in front of her and a complacent smile on her lips. The guard took one look at her, bowed, and beat a hasty retreat, down one level to the wall-walk below.
“I am an accomplished weaver,” Cait said, reluctant to admit anything she didn’t have to, “but that is not my tradition.”
“Come now.” Helga advanced towards her. “We both know that you have found favor in Prince Godfrid’s eyes. Soon enough, you will be a Dane. Though you didn’t know it, that was the choice you made when you came to Rikard.”
Cait allowed herself a breath in and out. They were within an inch of each other in height, neither tall nor short for women, and Cait was able to look the queen in the eyes. “How did you know about that?”
“Do you think it strange that a queen should be friends with a slave? Rikard loaned her to me when I first arrived in Dublin. I lost a friend too when she died.”
“I am very sorry.” Cait swallowed. “She was dear to me and didn’t deserve her fate.”
“Who does?” Now Helga moved to look out over the landscape to the west, her head high and her hands clasped at breast height. “Nöd kommer gammel Kierling til at trave.”
Cait gaped at her, stunned. Helga’s expression remained serene, still looking away towards the horizon, while Cait had a rock in the pit of her stomach. “It was you in the warehouse that night, wasn’t it? Why?”
Helga didn’t bother to quibble or deny. “Because Dublin needs to survive, and this was the best way I saw to ensure it.”
“Did your husband know?”
There was a pause. “He signed the treaty, of course, but he learned of the events of that night only afterwards. He knew it was best to leave these things to me.”
“But Deirdre—”
Helga’s answer was immediate. “I did what I had to.”
The justification made Cait instantly furious, but she felt paralyzed as to what to do with her anger. With Godfrid and Conall with the army, she had nobody to summon to help her, and what guard would believe that it had been Helga in that warehouse all along?
Then Helga looked down at her hands, showing her first indication of regret. “It wasn’t by my hand, but it might as well have been. I gave the order.”
“The other day, you implied that Sturla was responsible.”
Helga barked a laugh. “The idea of his guilt appealed to your biases and was what you expected. It seemed prudent to keep you looking in that direction.”
Her arrogance was both disconcerting and infuriating. “And Rikard? What of him?”
Helga shook her head. “If you think I would have ordered his death too, had I found him, you would be right. But I did not. I do not know how or why he died.”
Cait wanted to rail at the queen, but Helga’s attention had been drawn by something on the horizon. Cait looked too, and her heart caught in her throat as one or two at a time, and then by the dozen, men began streaming down the western road towards the city. Cait gripped the top of the palisade wall so tightly she gave herself a splinter.
When the man in the lead reached the gate, the guard at first refused to let him in, under orders to keep the gate closed and terrified that the Irish were following hard on the soldiers’ heels. Cait glanced around for Helga, but the queen had disappeared.
So it was left to Cait to lean over the rampart to look at the desperate soldier. “What is happening?”
He looked up at her. “The Irish had already crossed the Liffey when we arrived! It is a rout!”
“What of the king?”
“He fell from his horse. That is all I know.”
“Let them in!” She almost picked up her skirts then and there and ran away from the tower and the gate, as it seemed Helga had done.
But she didn’t.
In her previous life, meaning earlier that morning, she might have given in to her fears, but she had spent the last five hours in the tower, and the waiting had slowly sanded off her sharper edges. She needed to know that Conall and Godfrid were alive. She would wait in the tower until she saw them coming, either of their own volition or on a bier.
