Viking's Prize by Tanya Anne Crosby

desperately in her sleep each night, but was
loath to hear that her nightmare was of him. For an instant, he tried to
imagine how he would see himself through her eyes and cringed at the image.
“You were weeping,” he told her, his voice strange to his own ears. “I heard
and came.”
    “It… was naught,” Elienor protested, her hand
drawing his away from her shoulder. “As you said... naught but a foolish
dream.”
    “Aye,” he replied huskily, releasing her abruptly.
He surged to his feet. “You should go back to sleep.” His breath sounded as
labored as her own. “’Tis early yet...”
     
    Elienor’s heart thrummed in the silence as he
gazed down upon her.
    Yet he didn’t go.
    He did not so much as move.
    Nor did his expression shift.
    The silence between them grew until Elienor
thought she would shatter from the tension. Her mind searched desperately for
something to say.
    “Why would your father do such a thing?” she asked
impetuously, agitated as much by the way he watched her as with the silence.
“To his own son?” She could understand how it could come to pass that a father
might abandon his daughter to the clergy, for the sake of greed, because it had
happened to her. But murder outright? “Why would any father think to cast aside
an innocent babe?”
     
    He’d altogether forgotten that first conversation.
And then, remembering, he nodded, feeling for the first time in so many years
those conflicting emotions he’d experienced the first time he’d asked that
question of himself. He turned from her momentarily, frowning as he went to the
tent opening, lifting up the flap to peer out from the tarpaulin, into the
quiet night. His face, lit only on one side by the night sky, appeared wholly
sinister in the deep shadows of the tarpaulin.
    Only the creak of the wood, adjusting to the
movement of the sea, and the snores of his crew broke the silence.
    “Because I was born too soon,” he revealed after a
moment of discomfiture. He turned to face her once more, the unwelcome emotions
swiftly mastered, tucked away even from himself. “Born too soon,” he reiterated
without inflection, “and thus too small.”
    “What stopped him?” Something in her tone made
Alarik flinch. The last thing he’d intended was to stir her pity.
    He wanted no one’s pity.
    He straightened. There was naught to pity. “My
mother’s weeping,” he disclosed matter-of-factly. “’Tis the way it should have
been,” he added in a tense, clipped tone that forbade further questioning. The
way she looked at him in that instant, full of compassion, set his teeth on edge.
“It was my father’s given right’,” he told her, his brows colliding when she
continued to look his way in silence, her eyes scrutinizing him through the
shadows. “Damn you—I’ve no need of your pity, wench—save it for
yourself! You seem to wallow in it more than enough!”
    “I have not been wallowing in pity!”
    “Nei? Is that why you lie here, day in, day out,
staring blindly and mutely at the ceiling of this tarpaulin?”
    She flashed him a look of contempt. “And what
would you have me do instead?” she countered icily, her voice rising with her
anger. “Rejoice over having been taken captive by a hoard of barbarians?”
    Alarik felt a rush of satisfaction at hearing the
bite in her tone. If she was angry, at least she was feeling. The more she’d
retreated within herself, the more guilt had gnawed at his gut. Yet quick on
the heels of his relief came an overwhelming rush of resentment, for once again
he mocked himself; why should he care what came of the wench?
    He glanced out from the tarpaulin, his scowl as
dark as the night without. To his way of thought, no wench was worthy of more
than a fleeting thought, and he didn’t make it his practice to reflect on them
overmuch. Nor did he idle away his time with them, save to quench his body’s
cravings, and for that there was always a willing body.
    Aye, there had been a few