Oath of a viking

Episode I: Legends

(Excerpt)

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Liz was adamant on making a list of fix-its for Zoe’s situation. Zoe, on the other hand, was the woman who’d moved across the country after a bad break-up. She dimly wondered what her ex was doing. Probably out with his wife, cuddling his daughter. At least she thought it was a daughter. She’d had a brief, depressing stint of social media stalking before she’d decided to pick up her life and move as far away from civilization as possible. Hence her move from Washington to Texas two years before. Her own personal limbo.

She pushed her hair back over her head as she tried to sink into her mid-century electric blue and totally out of place (but cheap) couch. When she got nervous, she sweat. When she sweat, her hair got humid – more humid than it always was in Houston – and that made her thick curly hair even more unruly. A curse she’d inherited from her mother, one of many. Like her inability to tan her Italian complexion without burning despite having her father’s proud Jamaican features. Or her penchant for heartbreak. One of Zoe’s earrings had come free from her lobe and gotten hooked in a random curl. Who knew how long it had been that way, dangling from her head like an ornament on a Christmas tree. One of those days. An olive danced in the bottom of the martini glass, evading her toothpick.

“Are you sure you don’t want some sangria?” Liz called from behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. “You like sangria.”

“Yeah, a little too much,” Zoe said. The dirty Grey Goose martini was the perfect sipping drink. Zoe had never acquired a taste for it, thus ensuring that she wouldn’t down one right after another. She speared the olive, slid the toothpick back out, and pierced it again. She didn’t want to get drunk, but a buzz wasn’t out of the question.

“Fruit is good. Red wine is good. Prosecco is good. What’s not to love about sangria?” Liz had a townhome on the Upper East End of Houston but more often than not climbed the three stories to visit Zoe in her comfort zone. The sound of aerosolized “cheese” foaming orange onto crackers hissed from the kitchen.

“Is that Cheeze Whiz?”

“For the occasion,” Liz protested. Where Zoe was a minimalist, Liz was a maximalist - and that included junky snack foods. She set a tray of crackers and cheese down on the coffee table. She picked up Zoe’s sketch pad and pencil from the corner of the table and flipped it open. “Solutions,” she declared as she went to take a sip of sangria. “Oh, wait.” She tipped her glass against Zoe’s. “Cheers.”

“To missed opportunities,” Zoe said. She shook her head at the face Liz made. “I’m telling you, Liz. Seeing Dr. Humboldt walk away was like, ‘Wait a second, here take my hopes and dreams with you!’”

“Solutions,” Liz said again with a sort of ohm tone as if she were conjuring one out of thin air. “Ooh, where’d those come from?” Liz asked and pointed to the Taiwanese funeral garlands that were hung in the space above her coat hooks in the atrium. The bench they’d slid their shoes under was hand-made in Italy. On the walls of the short hallway were pressed and framed African lilies, and in her living room were her prized Scandinavian artifacts: a small relic of Freyja on a table in the corner, a seventh-century battleax, and an accurate reproduction of an ninth-century sword mounted on the wall beside it.

A small votive candle was next to the figurine of Freyja, making the table the bare bones of an altar. Three books that shared the alter with her tiny goddess: The Daily Life of a Scandinavian Raider, The Language & Religion of Ancient Scandinavia, and Love in Ancient Scandinavia, by Dr. Zoe Cartwright.

Zoe had received most of them as gifts or had ordered them on eBay. She’d never been out of the continental United States. Books had always been her source of adventure – which was plenty. Really, it was. Making the discovery off the coast of Newfoundland had just seemed…exciting. Bold. Way out of her league. She’d wanted it, and that was her mistake. Wanting left so much room for hurt. Disappointment. Exactly what I left Washington to avoid.

Runaway that I am. Runaway that I’ll always be.

“Just something else I ordered,” Zoe answered lamely.

“Have you called him to reconsider?” Liz asked.

“You heard Dr. Black. There’s no way Humboldt is giving my project another chance. He’s already gone and talked about what happened.”

“Oh, whatever,” Liz said. It was easy for her to blow it off. She hadn’t been there “Men are such gossips,” Liz said. “They don’t tell you that in undergrad. Yet we’re the ones who have to double down on professionalism or else get labeled emotional. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my own words - verbatim - parroted back at me.”

Zoe laughed and affected a male voice, “No, I’m looking for Doctor Jefferson.”

“Do you mean Dr. Elizabeth Jefferson?” Liz asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” They shared a laugh. Zoe groaned. “I just know that I’m right. I can see it. I can feel it.” “Then you need to find a solution,” Liz said in her best firm-but-not-pushy voice. “Like I did…for that crow.”

“No,” Zoe gasped. “You didn’t.”

Elizabeth shook her head and waved a finger. “It’s not my fault. I put up with it, Zo. Every day, every night, the constant - and I mean constant cawing. Just, caw caw caw caw nonstop!” She pantomimed her fingers as a bird’s beak. “Whatever, you know? But the other day I see this crow flying around, being chased by Blue Jays. Let me tell you something about Blue Jays, Zo: they’ve been good to me. Growing up on the farm, I always knew if there was a snake in the yard because Blue Jays absolutely flip their shit when they see one. So when I saw this crow flying off with this precious baby Blue Jay in its beak, I made up my mind. So I shot it.”

“Wait, you have a gun? And you grew up on a farm? I thought you said your mom was a beekeeper.”

“We didn’t have cows - bees, chickens, vegetables. Same thing,” Elizabeth shrugged. “It’s what I called it, anyway. You should see us when we get together, it’s more like a zoo. And yes I have a gun, but no I didn’t shoot it with my pistol,” she laughed. “I got a varmint rifle. Air gun.” She made a finger gun and twitched her thumb. “Nailed him. Took all day. All two days. But I got him. Not that I’m happy about it. It needed doing. But I can also get some peace now. Birds and stones, amiright?” she said and made a badum-tss sound.

“That’s such bad luck,” Zoe said as non-judgmentally as she could over her martini.

“We make our own luck,” Elizabeth said over a mouthful of cheese and crackers. “How did that woman know about your meeting, anyway?” '

The thought hadn’t crossed Zoe’s mind. Or if it had, it was lost behind all the foreground of having a promising career move slip through her fingers. Maybe the thought had been walking back and forth all afternoon, waving its arms and trying to flag her down.

“I don’t know. It was weird. I don’t know her that well. I went out to her house once, last year, when I was writing Language and Religion. It’s this tiny place in a historical district, I couldn’t even tell you where. You know what she said?” Zoe traced the rim of her martini glass. “If I go to the mountain, I’ll die.”

Zoe had considered the possibility of getting the police involved, maybe a social worker or something, but that made the entire situation messier. It was best that she just forget about it and move on, as if it had been some natural disaster. Like the rune, Hagalaz: A hailstorm, a housefire, earthquake, or a tornado. An unstoppable force of cosmic chaos.

My life, in a nutshell.

“She saw your maps,” Liz said after a moment. “Crazy, remember? Solutions.” She flipped a page in the sketch book. “Ooh, who is this?” She gawked at the drawing. “In love with our work, are we?”

“It’s nothing,” Zoe laughed, slightly embarrassed. She’d been reading about 9th century armor and liked to put a picture to the descriptions. That particular sketch had just…been lent a little more imagination than usual. She had been single for more than thirty two months. Not that she was counting. “Just a sketch.”

“You sure love your vikings.”

“Don’t be weird.” “Weird is good. We’ll just call this a manifestation of your dedication,” Liz laughed but looked again at the sketch.

“Humboldt did compare my work to the distinguished,” Zoe said with a gag-face, “Dr. Jørmund Keene. The Rockstar of Anthropology. The modern-day polyglot Indiana Jones.”

“And handsome, to boot,” Elizabeth added.

“Arrogance doesn’t look nice on anyone.” Zoe ate one of the olives, the vinegar and vodka well matched.

“I’ve got it! We need to get you on a date.”

“That’s not,”

“No, not for this. In general.” In a quick glance, Elizabeth summed her up. Without being told, Zoe knew that she looked haggard. A shoestring budget does that to a girl. So did an eternity of tiny, one-bedroom apartments, a car permanently on its last leg (and desperately in need of new tires) and a general lack of direction. Even her hair didn’t know whether she was coming or going. No way in hell would adding a man to the mix make anything better. Never had. Never would.

“That’s not a solution, that’s adding gasoline to a grease fire,” Zoe told her with a grin. “Why don’t you get a boyfriend?”

“Please. You know math is my boyfriend. I like my love life like I like my physics: theoretical.” She gave a dorky grin.

Zoe shook her head. “You know I don’t date.”

“What did you tell me on New Year’s? Hm?” Liz asked.

“Through the fog of being sangria-drunk and the subsequent hangover? I don’t know,” Zoe mumbled. Liz narrowed her eyes.

“I think you do. Maybe don’t date older, sexy, intelligent men,” Liz said lightly, poking her finger into Zoe’s shoulder. Zoe didn’t say anything. She knew where this was going. Liz sighed and said, “Or maybe don’t date cheating ones.”

“It’s not my fault. He told me they were breaking it off.” And like the sheltered twenty-five year old she’d been, she’d believed it. For a year.

Since the breakup, her anxiety had begun to creep deeper; she found herself avoiding eye contact, holding her tongue, hoping that people’s gazes simply skipped over her. Unless she had to, she preferred not to speak to people at all. Her pride had taken a hit, and she constantly felt like she’d be exposed for the fraud that she knew herself to be. As hard as she worked, she still felt like the young girl she’d been when she’d left home for the first and last time, as a runaway.

“Life isn’t about finding out whose fault things are,” Liz said. “It’s about living it. Figuring things out. Moving on.”

“And I will,” Zoe smiled at her friend to let her know that really, she was ok. “Eventually. Without coffee or sangria or men. Especially older, intelligent, sexy ones.”

Episode III: Objects of Attraction

(excerpt)

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            And so she awakens.

He thought he’d heard, perhaps sensed, that she had finally shaken off her slumber. Her first instinct would be to flee. He could not abide that. For fifteen hundred years he’d slept, captive to the Norn’s magic because of this woman. Ja, he would have his answers from her. He’d been pissed, waking in that cave with a hangover, a hard-on and that bloodied mess of a person on the ground at the foot of his prison. He’d needed to find the Nornir now, but he couldn’t leave that body behind. If the Nornir had brought him to protect her, then their timing was shit. Life had barely clung to her. He’d found a place to rest them, determined that he would revive her solely to find out what the fuck she needed from him. It had taken every half-suppressed lesson his mother had ever given him.

And it had been her.

Her. For the love of every god, it was her.

She’d been unrecognizable at first, her injuries…He didn’t want to think of them. But as he’d cared for the woman he’d found, as she’d healed, the woman had turned into her.

“Good lord,” she choked out in English, and snapped off the scream as her eyes took in his nakedness. She held a knife up defensively, brandished it towards him without a hint of skill. Osmund’s blood stirred. Panting, posturing, her curly hair wild about her slender neck, the woman looked from his cock to his eyes and blushed. Corrected herself by knitting her eyebrows together in anger. “Who are you, and where did you get this?” she asked, and grabbed his cloak in a rough fistful as she retreated with it, step by step.

Osmund met each of her steps with one of his own. A woman had never reacted to him this way. Had certainly never lifted a blade to him while he was so obviously unarmed. What woman on the gods’ green would ask about a cloak when far more pertinent matters were obviously at hand?

Worth the fight.

She’d slept so soundly that he’d feared she’d struggle for strength when she awakened. But she bared her teeth at him, the adorable flat tips communicating no threat. He knew her to be slender beneath the sheet, starved of anything but a thin broth for the past three days. Yet despite her size, there was very little fear in her eyes. Unconscious, she had been frail. The woman in motion before him moved with the grace of an elk in flight. It begged a chase. She feinted a step towards him and jabbed the knife at the air. Deftly, he closed his hand around her slender wrist, spun her around and pulled her back into his body, hard. Breath escaped her, the knife fell from her grip and stuck in the floor.

Whatever powder the Norn had used on him still clawed his insides with an intense desire, and demanded that he have this woman. He stilled then, a sudden cool shockwave of discipline rippling through his skin. He was ruled by nothing. Not the Nornir. Not his cock.

Fuck. Thought the Mara was done. He focused his mind past the base desire inflicted by the Norn’s blue dust. The woman struggled against him until the moment she became aware of what was pressed into her ass through the sheet she wore. Osmund bit back a groan. The accursed yearning and the too-long sleep had diminished his self-control. He was so hard it hurt. She yielded a sweet moment then, her back arching so slightly that she might not have known she’d done it.

“Who are you?” she asked again breathlessly. By the gods, she felt good in his arms. Everything about the woman was fire, and he burned for her. Without thinking, he whispered into her ear in his native tongue,

“My name is Osmund, and I’ve come for you.”