Page 96 of Heart of Winter
“Yes,” he said, dryly. “Aren’t they?”
She actually winked at him.
“Someone around here has been a terrible influence on you.”
She kissed his cheek. “Go and hang your prayer.”
He sighed, and rolled his eyes, but he did step up to the tree, as instructed. The lords, ladies, and children all milled around it, hanging their own ornaments, murmuring quiet prayers or chatting excitedly with one another. He managed to slip between a pair of ladies to find himself a bit of branch space, and there he hesitated, too aware of their gazes landing on either side of his face. On his beads, probably.
He had no idea what to pray for. Tessa wasn’t wrong in assuming that he did, at this point, want a little luck with a certain king. If the moment alone in the solar, Erik’s dexterous fingers braiding his hair – Erik’s breath warm in his ear, histeethsharp and promising – was any indication, Oliver was more than welcome in the royal bed tonight.
But that felt like a wish to be made with crossed fingers – not something to be prayed for. Prayer shouldn’t get muddled up with sex, he thought.
“Ooh,” a voice said beside him, and he braced himself. “You’re the Southern boy. Mr. Meacham, right?”
He turned his head to find a woman with intricate, silver braided hair and a kind, weathered face studying him with open curiosity. “That’s me. Oliver Meacham, my lady.”
She grinned. “Lady Helga, of Silfr Hall. My lord husband presides over all the kingdom’s silver mines.”
“Ah,” he said, because he wasn’t sure what else to say.
She reached up, just as Tessa had, and touched one of his beads, set it to clacking against its fellows. “All the silver for the pretty hair bobbles comes from our mines,” she said, proud, and, he thought, with a knowing twinkle in her pale eyes. “These are a lovely bit of work, here.”
He felt a hand on the other side of his head, tugging less gently at the beads there. “A bold gift, if you ask me,” a less friendly female voice said.
He turned toward it and found a younger, flaxen-haired woman with a throat heaped with emeralds on silver strands, winking and sparking as each breath heaved her tremendous bosom. She was giving him a pointed look. “Revna’s sure not wasting any time, is she? Already putting lover’s knots in your hair. Bit young for her, aren’t you?”
Shit. “Oh, I’m not – Lady Revna and I aren’t–”
“Really, Alfhild, you can’t say that sort of thing,” the first woman – Helga – said. “It isn’t done.”
“I’m only curious,” Alfhild said, scowling in a way that was certainly not curious, but hostile. “I’d like to know if it’s to be a double wedding, Leif and his mother both.”
“Ladies, I assure you, I’m not romantically involved with Lady Revna. Not at all.”
“No, I don’t think he is,” a new, masculine voice said.
When Oliver glanced back toward Helga, he found Ragnar, lord of the Úlfheðnar, standing just behind her. He was grinning, gaze fixed on Oliver, and Oliver’s blood ran cold. That smile was athreat; he couldfeelit.
Lady Helga glanced over her shoulder, noted him, and gave ground immediately, fear plain on her face.
Ragnar stepped into the place she’d vacated, close enough for Oliver to smell the oily, unwashed ripeness of him. The furs he wore were not merely for show, but all that kept him warm in his world of ice, and snow, and few creature comforts.
He looked down at Oliver with a chuckle, and one large, unclean hand lifted to touch the beads, the same as the women had; only his fingers closed tight, and he pulled hard enough that Oliver bit back a wince at the prickling pain in his scalp.
“Thesearea gift from my cousin,” he said, “but not from Revna, I don’t think. No, you’re much more Erik’s type.”
For a moment, Oliver could only stare, caught like a rabbit in a snare. Logically speaking, he was the foreigner, and the bastard, and he should give sway to any lord – even a barbarian one who’d just blown in on a snowstorm.
But stubborn instinct left him bristling inside. If he didn’t bow up his back and prove that he wasn’t one to be cowed, he would never have an ounce of respect from this clannish, barbarian warrior. He probably wouldn’t anyway, as unimpressive as he was, but he’d be damned if he allowed himself to be manhandled and grinned at like this.
Slowly, deliberately, Oliver lifted his hand, and forcibly removed Ragnar’s fingers from his braid. It didn’t matter that Ragnar let him do it, that he could have drug Oliver across the floor by his hair if he wanted to: it was the principle of the matter. This was not a man, he thought, who listened to much beyond physical force.
“Excuse me,” Oliver said in his firmest voice. “But that’s too forward of you.”
Ragnar gaped at him a moment, comically shocked. Then his grin stretched wide, and he gasped a laugh, and another, delighted. “Look at that. The pup has fangs.”
Oliver felt a warm presence at his back, and feared, immediately, that it was Erik, that a spectacle was about to be made. But it was Bjorn’s voice, to his shock, that said, “Aye, Ragnar, didn’t your father ever teach you anything about dogs? It’s the little ones that bite.”
