Chapter Seventeen

G aliena rose to her feet and put a steadying hand on Red's chest. "I merely wish to study the missive in private."

The way Red's handsome face fell with disappointment was comical, but she had to admit, warmth bloomed in her chest at the eagerness he showed when he thought she was suggesting something far more intimate than decoding secret messages.

"Ox, Dane," Red commanded, "sleep here but stay vigilant." When the men nodded, he continued. "Bard, Wolf, I'd like you to post yourselves in the corridor outside the room."

Galiena felt the heat of embarrassment creeping up her neck. She and Red would be entering the chamber together and everyone would assume that they were being…intimate. Granted, he had told the innkeeper they were husband and wife, but the soldiers from Hawkspur knew well that he was not married. What did they think of her?

"It's not what you think," she tried to explain to the soldiers, her mortification growing not only at what they must have been assuming about them but also at her shameless flirting with Red. "He's just trying to protect me. Nothing inappropriate is happening. In fact, we shall leave the door ajar."

"Of course, he wants to protect you, my lady," Wolf said. "Nothing to explain."

Bard nodded and said with a wink, "We heard that you proclaimed each other husband and wife; there is nothing inappropriate."

Galiena opened her mouth to protest, but Red already had his arm around her shoulders and was leading her toward the stairs before she could say anything more.

"Your bags, Red," Ox said, throwing a pair of saddlebags in his direction, which Red neatly caught in one hand.

"Last room at the end of the corridor," the innkeeper said as she strode past them with a handful of tankards, not losing a drop of ale as she maneuvered between the patrons.

The room was sparse, with a bed, a side table with a taper, and a few hooks on the wall. Red hung the bags on the hooks and took the taper to the sconce in the corridor to light. There was a small amount of heat coming up through a vent in the floor, but there was still a damp chill in the room.

Red overwhelmed the tiny space when he closed the door. His head nearly touched the ceiling, and if he stretched his arms out to each side, he'd touch both walls. She had to squeeze herself into a corner to let Red by with the candle to place it back on the table at the head of the bed. When he turned his attention back to her, she felt awkward and shy.

Realizing she looked much like a mouse cowering in a corner, she pushed herself away from the wall and reached inside the neckline of her chemise and into her sleeve to extract the rolled bit of parchment. Better to focus on the coded message than the very large, very brawny, very appealing presence of the Viking. Eventually, they were going to end up in that bed together, and if she thought too much about what might happen there, her nerves started to twitch. In truth, she wasn't sure if it was fear of what might happen or excited anticipation.

"I wish I had thought of making a copy of this before we left Oswestry," Galiena mused. "I do not expect the king will be willing to let us view it again after we hand it over to him." She started toward the table but then stopped, unable to get by Red in the cramped space.

He turned to face her, then stepped close until she had her head tipped all the way back to look up at him. She felt his hands settle onto her hips as he stared down at her with that lopsided smirk that made her stomach flip-flop. He slowly pressed his chest into her as he guided her backward with his hands.

"Don't do that," he whispered to her as his eyes darkened from ice-blue to the blue of the sky on a perfect summer day.

"Don't do what?" she asked, her voice more breathy than intended.

"Lick your lips like that." The words were said in a low voice that she felt rumble in his chest where it touched her. "Unless you're willing to give me a taste."

Her knees wobbled and she caught her bottom lip between her teeth to stop herself from licking it again. This earned her a growl as he backed her up against the wall. When he had her there, he caged her in by sliding his hands up the wall at her sides. Her hands went involuntarily to his biceps and her breathing increased to a rapid tempo. Every part of her body wanted to melt into his and her head felt like it was spinning with the sweet torture of waiting for him to touch her. All of her convictions that she was not a woman meant to have a tryst flew right out of her head, and all she could think about was how much she wanted Red to kiss her.

When his head dropped toward hers, she released her lip from between her teeth and lifted her face to meet him halfway. She expected a soft kiss, a tender pressing of their lips together, a taste of sweetness but a soft moan escaped her at the unexpected sensation of his tongue tracing her lips in an agonizingly slow circle, her body feeling boneless as heat swirled through her core. She gasped as his teeth pulled her lower lip into his mouth, giving it a playful tug before letting go.

"One taste will never be enough," he said, his gaze trained on her lips as he spoke. "I want to taste all of you."

Lord help her, she wanted him to taste all of her, too. Her skin felt like it was on fire and only Red's hands and mouth touching every part of her would soothe her. She was about to tell him exactly that when he pushed away from the wall with a growl and grabbed the saddle bag hanging from the hook to the side of her head.

"Later," he growled. He reached into the leather bag and extracted something small. Holding it out to her, he said, "Your copy."

It took her a moment to clear her head and focus on what he was saying, but then she snatched the new parchment from his hand and scooted out from between him and the wall to sit on the bed so she could spread both parchments on the table beneath the light of the candle.

"Where did you get this?"

The bed sagged, nearly toppling her into him, as he sat next to her. "I made two copies while we were at the goldsmith's. I left one with Hunter and Frode and took the other."

" You did this?" It was an impressive copy, the symbols and lettering identical in size, placement, and character. Even the tiny symbol on the back was duplicated to perfection. "You could be a forger!"

He laughed then. "I'll keep that in mind should soldiering and training horses prove not so lucrative."

She liked it when he laughed. His entire face lit up, his beard twitched, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. When he grinned, it was endearingly crooked with the left corner of his lips curving up farther than the right. And when he smiled, the lopsidedness was still there, though less apparent, and his lips spread wide showing strong, straight teeth. There was a lightness that radiated from him, and it calmed her. She'd felt unsettled and apprehensive since the deaths of her daughter and husband, always on edge and not fully present in her own life but since Red had happened into her life, his nearly constant optimism, and his ability to make everything less serious, had brought a light into that darkness, and now it was perhaps what she admired the most about him.

"Unless you want me to kiss you again, you need to quit looking at me like that."

Galiena pressed her lips together to suppress the smile she realized was spread across her face and quickly turned to the missives on the table. They were flipped to the backside where the small design was inscribed in the lower corner.

"I've not seen this symbol before," she murmured as she tried to make sense of it. "It looks like three, triangle shapes intertwined." She squinted as she tried to peer closer. "Are they three intertwined snakes?"

"Aye," Red said, his voice cold as ice. Galiena looked at him, surprised by his sudden change of mood. "It is a knot of Odin."

She tilted her head in question as she looked up at him, sensing there was more to the explanation.

All the light was gone from his face, and there was nothing jovial about him now. "It is the symbol for fallen warriors. The knot is a common Norse design."

"I've seen the snake used in many of the places I traveled with my father. In some places, it is a sign of life or healing, but in many, it is a sign of immortality. Or death." She looked down at the tiny drawing, remembering the many trinkets, plates, and pieces of jewelry made with the likeness of the snake, often with the tail wrapping back around to be swallowed by the same snake. "My father explained that it represented the cycle of life: birth, growth, healing, and eventually death."

"The snake is not a typical representation in the knot. It is an embellishment I've seen only once before."

His tone made the hairs on the back of Galiena's neck stand up as cold fingers of dread clutched at her throat. "Where did you see it?" she asked in a cautious whisper.

Red slid his hand into his boot and pulled out an intricate dagger. The blade was longer than his hand from fingertip to wrist, and the handle was thick and built for a man. A closer inspection of the silver hilt revealed an ornately crafted wolf crouched low on its haunches with the blade protruding from its wide-open jaws; it had red gems for eyes and an etched chain was wrapped around its body.

She leaned in closer to look at the design adorning the blade. Carved into the metal were various symbols, including the intertwined triangles of snakes. "Where did you get this?"

"My uncle made it. He made two of them and it was the only time I've seen snakes used to make the knot of fallen warriors." Red set the knife carefully on the table next to the pieces of parchment. In a quiet voice, he confessed, "I've never seen it anywhere else."

Galiena had been studying the knife, but she turned her attention back to Red. His ice-blue stare was intently focused on her, as though waiting for her reaction. Was the composer of the coded message Red's relative? "Where is your uncle now?"

"Dead."

Then not his relative. "So then…where is the other knife now?"

"The man who killed him took it twenty years ago." She saw the muscles in his jaw clench and instinctively reached her hand up to lay it along the side of his face.

"I'm so sorry, Red." He startled when she first touched him, but then she saw his face relax and some of the anger abate.

"He was my mother's brother, and I was named for him."

"Viggo?" she asked, letting her hand drop to his chest. She saw him nod from the corner of her eyes, but she was looking at his hand covering hers, pressing it to him. She could feel his heartbeat under her palm, steady and strong. Like the rest of him.

"He was a blacksmith and the closest thing I had to a father while growing up. But he got hit in the head with a beam while helping build a barn and was never the same after that. He made the daggers before the accident happened." He wasn't looking at her anymore but at the dagger. "He wasn't able to work as a blacksmith again. I did what I could to feed us and to help my mother, but we were barely surviving." He took a deep breath and looked at Galiena again, his face somber in a way she'd never seen before. "That's when my mother sent a letter to a cousin in England, asking if he would take us in and in return, we would work for him. He had a small estate, but it was far more than we had in Norway. He agreed and we took a ship to England. We encountered The Executioner the day after we landed."

"The Executioner killed your uncle?"

"And my mother."

Tears filled her eyes before she could blink them away. "Oh, Red. You were still a boy. I am so sorry." One of them spilled down her cheek.

He wiped it away with his thumb. "There's no reason to cry. It's done and over."

"But it's not," she said, her voice hitching. "He took so much from you."

"I won't let him take anything more from me." His voice had gentled, and his gaze had softened as he looked at her. "I vowed then that I would find him and kill him, even if it took the entirety of my days in this world."

The mild tone of his voice was in direct contrast to his words, and it sent a chill down her spine. She reached for the knife to look closely at the detail of the design on the blade. Then she exchanged it for the original missive and studied the tiny symbol on the back. They were nearly identical.

"So, Toad is the composer of the missive. At least, it would seem that way. Between the appearance of the man in the ally and the similarities between the…what you called the Odin's knot." In spite of these pieces of evidence, something about it still didn't make sense to her. "But who is he? What is his reason for doing this?"

"If my hamingja is kind, that's what the coded message will tell us," Red said, tapping his finger against the missive.

" Hamingja ?" In all her travels, she'd never heard this word.

He laughed and explained, "Guardian spirits. Believers of the old Norse ways say that each of us has a hamingja who looks over us and determines how much luck and happiness we can have in our lifetime."

"Ah! Like a guardian angel," she said.

"Aye," he agreed with a nod.

"You believe in your hamingja ?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Not really, but when it suits my purposes, I call upon her."

She nodded, thinking about what he said. She wasn't sure anymore what she believed about divine beings because she had lost faith in her guardian angel the day Adam and Nahara were mercilessly taken from her.

Turning back to the missive, she said with a weary sigh, "I thought I had made progress last night, but it didn't translate to the other lines." She pointed at the last line of the missive. "If the last line is a date—which it seems it is, based on the pattern of two symbols, then a series of eight letters, followed by four symbols—then this word can be narrowed down to the months with eight letters: February, November, or December."

Red leaned closer to see the parchment and nodded. "That's a logical start."

"If the other symbols among the letters are vowels," she continued, "the placement of them aligns with either November or December and since only one vowel symbol is used three times, December aligns with the pattern. If the last four numbers indicate the year, 1284, then the day would be twenty-eight: 28 December 1284. "

"That's a good start," Red said excitedly.

"But here's where it falls apart. If I use this as the key to translate the letters on the rest of the message, it doesn't seem to work." She pointed to a set of letters on another line. "Look here. If I use the same letter translations on this line, it just produces nonsense. Nothing is even remotely recognizable."

Red groaned. "It's a different code than for the lines above the date. Maybe even a different code for each line."

Galiena dropped her head into her hands. "How will we ever figure this out?" She cringed at the childish disappointment in her tone, but she felt completely defeated.

"Being able to write as you work would make this easier," Red said as he rubbed a soothing hand down her back. "When we get to Llanbadarn, I'll acquire the parchment, quills, and ink needed to keep record of your progress."

"Perhaps the king will have someone to decipher it," she said hopefully.

"Perhaps." Red rolled up the original message and handed it back to Galiena, then took off his boots and stood. He put the dagger and the copy of the missive into one of the boots and moved to set them by the wall.

When he turned back around, Galiena didn't know what to do next. She felt like she was on display and exposed, like the fabled Godiva riding her horse naked through a village. Feeling too conspicuous sitting on the bed, she pushed to her feet to stand next to the table. They both stood absolutely still looking at each other, the bed looming between them.

"Red—"

"Galiena—" he said at the same time.

She laughed and he sighed, scrubbing his hand through his hair, which hung in thick, fiery red waves down to his shoulders. "You should sleep, Galiena," he said, nodding toward the bed as he folded his cloak and dropped it in front of the door as though to use it as a pillow. "We'll be leaving in a few short hours."

Disappointed, she kicked off her boots and climbed under the blankets fully clothed as he settled onto the floor in front of the door. They had another long, difficult day ahead and she knew he was right; they should get as much sleep as possible. When she didn't hear him shuffling anymore, she blew out the candle.

Suddenly, the loneliness of the last three years overwhelmed her, a hollow feeling settling in the pit of her belly. "I don't want to sleep alone, Red." The words were barely audible, and she couldn't be sure he'd even heard her. She held her breath, listening for a response. Finally, his voice drifted through the darkness.

"Because you don't want to be alone? Or, because you want to be with me?"

She hadn't expected the vulnerable question, and she didn't want to hurt him, but in truth, she couldn't be sure which was the reason. She was lonely, but did that mean she would invite anyone who gave her any measure of attention to share the bed with her? Before she could answer, Red interjected.

"Don't answer that. It wasn't a fair question." From the sound of his voice, she could tell he had risen to his feet and was standing at the end of the bed.

The foot of the bed sagged under his weight, and in the darkness, she could barely see his form moving over her, warmth flooding her as he covered her with his body. They were both still clothed, and the blanket was between them, but tears unexpectedly welled in her eyes as the sensation of being safe and cared for enveloped her. She wished she hadn't extinguished the candle, wanting to see his face as he tugged the blanket down to free her arms. He leaned slightly to one side as he gently brushed his fingers down her arm until he found her hand, twined his fingers with hers, and slid their joined hands over her head. Then he did the same with her other hand, resting on his elbows with their hands clasped together above her.

She felt the softest brush of his mouth against hers, then the wet heat of his tongue licking at her lips, and she let out a soft moan of satisfaction. Or maybe it was a whimper. He chuckled then and deepened the kiss as all of the tension released from her body. She wriggled, trying to get closer to him and hating the layers of material separating them.

He lifted his mouth from hers and she tried to follow him but dropped her head back onto the mattress as his lips pressed to her jaw, then down her throat, eliciting gasps of pleasure from her. He kissed her slowly, deliberately, as though worshipping her as he nibbled and tasted her skin. His mouth burned a trail back up her throat to her ear, and he sucked its lobe into his mouth. She flexed her hands against his, wanting to touch him and rub her hands over his shoulders and down his back, but he wouldn't release her.

"I'm going to hold you while you sleep," he whispered as he tugged at her ear with his teeth, then rolled to her side.

"I want you to make love to me, Red." The words were out before she realized what she was saying, but she didn't want to take it back.

He brought his mouth back to hers, and between kisses, said, "You have no idea, love, how much I want to feel your skin against mine and to bury myself in you until we are both too exhausted to move." He pulled her bottom lip into his mouth, suckling it in a way that made her body feel strung tightly as a bow. She was panting when he released her lip. "But not tonight."

She whimpered in protest. Mortified by the rejection and her reaction, she turned her head away from him.

"No, kitten," he coaxed, "don't withdraw from me. And don't think I don't want you because I do." He nuzzled her neck. "God, I want you so much it hurts." He nudged her face back toward his and pressed his forehead to hers. "When I make love to you, I want to take my time. I want to savor you, linger on every part of you, and I don't want to stop until you are screaming my name."

She let out a sigh that was a mixture of satisfaction, frustration, and anticipation. At that, he tucked the blanket around her and pulled her close to his chest as he wrapped her in his arms. With two of them in the tiny bed, there wasn't much room to move. As the innkeeper's wife had predicted, Red's feet were probably hanging off the end of the bed, and she could feel the wall behind her.

"Sleep, my feisty kitten," he whispered, kissing her on the forehead.

She pressed her cheek against his neck and closed her eyes, feeling guilty as she prayed for a dreamless sleep, not wanting to be visited with images of the husband who was no longer of this world because of her.