Page 8 of Alien Viking's Passion

“Nah, don’t bother him with this,” Aretha said, leaning back and crossing one leg over the other. “He’s busy with all the vettir stuff now. I saw his men gather this morning.”

“They wanted to get up into the mountains and check how bad it is. It may have been a blessing in disguise that you and Chen got attacked. It was like an early warning. It would have been bad if a swarm of vettir had suddenly attacked a farm or a bunch of playing kids.”

“Hopefully at leastsomethinggood came of it,” Aretha said. “Any progress on the ships?”

“They’re working on it night and day,” Josie said. “But Bragr thinks we just don’t know enough about how they work. Probably we have to wait for this damn Shine to stop. Apparently there’s only one man on Gardr who might be able to help, and he’s a bit of a recluse. They’re trying to find him now. But it could take a while.”

“Meanwhile we’re stuck here.” Aretha sighed. “Heck, it’s not the worst place to be stranded. Except for the supernatural monsters and the fuckingpulsarin the sky.” She shielded her eyes to give it a miffed glare, but the crazy radiation stream glared right back, and it was stronger than her by the order of a trillion. “So is the date for the coronation set, or will you and Bragr use the vettir as a reason to postpone it again?”

“I don’t think we can keep doing that,” Josie said as she got to her feet. “I say, let’s just get it over with. Craxon is partly hanging around here because he’s waiting for the coronation, where he’ll have to represent his country anyway. Maybe we should just do it and let him go home.”

“Probably a good idea,” Aretha said and hid a yawn behind one hand. “Could be he’s just not happy here.” The bed in the farmhouse had been perfectly comfortable, but the moment she closed her eyes, she heard the screeches from the vettir and saw their eyes and beaks and talons. She hadn’t gotten much sleep before morning came and she and Chen were picked up by Josie flying a sled-like shortship.

“That could be it. He must miss his land, and I know he frets about being away from his people when the Shine is on. He’ll have to sail back home on a regular Viking ship, you know. He can’t use his flying longship.”

Aretha just avoided stepping on a small animal that looked like a porcupine. It was brown and had long, evil-looking spikes that were folded back. It looked up at her with three round eyes, not moving, but also not looking too scared.

She carefully walked around the creature, keeping her eyes on it. “Is it far?”

“It’s so far, they have to build a new ship for him,” Josie said. “The fishing boats can’t handle a journey that long, and Hjalmarheim hasn’t needed an ocean-going ship since they started using the magic longships.”

They walked back to the jarlagard through an idyllic little forest of meadows and tall, slender trees. Small five-legged animals scrambled out of their way, and they walked a long arc around a mound that was built by small, blue insects that looked nothing like ants.

There was a soft rustling behind them, and Aretha spun around. The little porcupine stopped and looked up at her from a respectful distance.

“Curious little thing, aren’t you,” Aretha said softly, smiling at the creature. At least it was refreshing that it wasn’t trying to hack her to death.

Josie stopped and looked. “Never saw one of those before. Is it a hedgehog?”

“Looks like it. Or a porcupine? I’m not sure about the difference. I think he’s just curious.”

She squatted down and smiled. “Not sure what to make of the alien chicks?”

The porcupine didn’t reply, just sniffed the grass. One of its spikes had been broken halfway along its length, so it might have been defending itself recently.

“Bragr warned me about all the dangerous animals here,” Josie said, “and there’s a ton of them. But I don’t remember him mentioning porcupines.”

The porcupine turned its little tail to her, and she straightened. “Hopefully it’s not one of those supernatural ones, with poisonous spikes or some other deadly stuff going on.”

They walked on.

“Anyway, I think we’ll enjoy the party tonight,” Josie said. “We’ve been so downbeat since we came here, we need a celebration that’sours.”

“Youhaven’t been downbeat, Mrs. Newlywed and Soon Queen of the Whole Freaking Island.” Aretha chuckled. “I never saw you this happy back onUnity. But yeah, the rest of us need a reason to not sigh deeply every time we remember where we are. It’s very nice of Rafaela to have her birthday today.”

They approached the jarlagard, Bragr’s modest estate that would soon become a konungagard when he and Josie were crowned king and queen. He had been genuinely apologetic and flustered and embarrassed in the most charming way about having abducted the Earth girls and then finding that he had no way for them to go home. Weeks later he was still not over it, and Aretha saw him wince every time he saw one of them. Racked by his guilty conscience, he had ordered a big house built only for the Earth girls, except for Josie. It was a two-story house, not a common sight in Hjalmarheim. It was big enough that Aretha, Chen, Chloe, and Rafaela each had a bedroom on the secondfloor. On the ground floor there was a comfortable Viking-style lounge, a fireplace, and a kitchen with pots and pans and a small, but effective wood-fired stove.

So far, that part had been mostly unused, because the jarlagard’s staff included cooks and the girls got a lot of food brought to them. But Rafaela and Chen had started experimenting with cooking Earth dishes of various kinds, and now they sometimes made a pizza or a casserole from alien ingredients, trying to make them taste as Earth-like as possible. Any day now they’d try for a pasta dish, they kept promising. They just needed to find some kind of alien tomato.

As they walked into the busy courtyard, Aretha looked back and spotted the little porcupine trotting after them. Well, it would get bored soon enough. And if anyone stepped on it, they would regret it. Those spikes werelong.

- - -

“It’s not a bad idea,” Rafaela said, chewing on a piece of grilled meat. “We should try to make ourselves useful.”

The summer evening was balmy, and the myod was running freely from big barrels the Vikings had somehow managed to cool down. The girls sat outside their house, on wooden lawn furniture the Viking carpenters had made based on the half-understood instructions the girls had provided. As a result, they now sat in chairs so high that they could dangle their legs. They had decided to not make the chairs lower. Sometimes Vikings would keep them company, and they should be comfortable, too. The girls weren’t planning on sticking around on Garda any longer than they had to, and changingthe Viking environment to suit them better carried a feeling of permanent stay that none of them wanted.

Several Vikings had come to celebrate Rafaela’s birthday, some of them even giving her small gifts, although that was apparently not a Viking tradition. Now most of them were standing around, chatting among themselves because only Josie and Aretha spoke Garda well enough to have meaningful conversations.

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