Viking Betrayed (Viking Roots Book 3) Read online

  VIKING betrayed

  Anna Markland

  Contents

  MORE ANNA MARKLAND

  Death

  Keeping Vigil

  Call To Arms

  Betrothal

  Plans Laid

  Theodoric

  The Wagon

  A Wedding

  Damsel In Distress

  Small Comforts

  Corpus Domini

  Wishful Thinking

  Full Of Surprises

  No Choice

  Constant Preoccupation

  Longsword

  The Duke Visits

  Homeward Bound

  Montreuil

  Rouen

  Getting To Know You

  No Easy Answers

  The Pig

  Gathering Eggs

  The Poultice

  Sailing Down The Seine

  Maelstrom

  Black Cows

  Homecoming

  Daughters

  The Moon And The Tides

  Mementos

  An Altar Cloth

  Needle And Thread

  Loyalty In Question

  Do You Trust Me?

  Savory And Sweet

  The Archbishop's Visit

  King Louis

  Examination

  Peace Treaty

  Good News And Bad

  Emissaries

  Assassins

  You Have Murdered Me

  Flight

  Teetering On A Precipice

  Night Riders

  The Boy Duke

  Wedding

  Bedding

  Epilogue

  Fact Or Fiction

  About Anna

  VIKING BETRAYED

  ©Anna Markland 2015 & 2020

  BY ANNA MARKLAND

  Cover Art by Dar Albert

  Viking Betrayed by Anna Markland

  Book Three, Viking Roots

  © 2015 & 2020 Anna Markland

  www.annamarkland.com

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  For permissions contact: [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Of all the agonies of life, that which is most poignant and harrowing is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.”

  ~Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  For my grandson, Bradley William

  MORE ANNA MARKLAND

  MORE ANNA MARKLAND

  Anna has authored more than sixty bestselling, award-winning and much-loved Medieval, Viking and Highlander historical romance novels and novellas. No matter the setting, many of her series recount the adventures of successive generations of one family, with emphasis on the importance of ancestry and honor. A comprehensive list can be found on her Amazon page with more complete descriptions at annamarkland.com.

  Death

  Montdebryk, Normandie, 939 AD

  Magnus Kriger jumped down into the freshly dug grave. The slick red mud sucked at his boots. He supposed he should be grateful the rain had stopped at last, though a damp chill lingered in the spring air. He braced his legs and held out his arms. “I’ll take her, Bendik,” he rasped.

  His second cousin went slowly down on one knee and passed the shrouded body into Magnus’s arms. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but then stepped back a few paces to join the others. Bendik didn’t need to say anything. Magnus understood his best friend’s grief for him.

  “Light as a feather,” was on the tip of his tongue as he cradled his wife against his chest for the last time, but such a remark would be inappropriate. Ida had always been dainty.

  He bent to place the body in the bottom of the grave, then eased his muddied arm free. He arranged her legs, appreciative of the care his mother had taken to wrap the corpse. He preferred not to see Ida’s face again. The prominent nose inherited from her father had denied her the chance to ever be considered beautiful. Death in childbirth had stolen away what fairness of face she possessed.

  He straightened and stared at the brown muck seeping slowly into the linen. “We were born the same day, you and I,” he said, his throat as dry as the Eastern plains. “But the gods have decreed we won’t die together. I will miss you.”

  He swallowed hard. There was an emptiness in his heart, yet claiming he would never recover from Ida’s passing tasted like a lie. They hadn’t known a love as deep as the one his parents shared. Bryk and Cathryn Kriger could still set a room on fire with a simple glance, despite their advancing age. It had been taken for granted since the day of their birth that Magnus and Ida would wed. They got along, but it saddened him they…

  A sob threatened to rob him of breath, but he coughed instead. No use yearning for what was lost forever, and the worst was yet to come.

  He clenched his jaw and looked up. A grim-faced Bendik knelt on both knees in the wet grass at the edge of the grave, offering a bundle at arms’ length. Magnus accepted it and clutched his son to his chest. “Farewell, little warrior,” he croaked.

  His mother sobbed, but she would find solace in her strong Christian faith. She believed the dead child had a place with God in his heaven. Bryk Kriger stood beside his wife, jaw clenched, his raw anger plain. His grandson had been denied the right to earn a warrior’s reward in Valhalla.

  “It wasn’t to be,” Magnus whispered to the bundle.

  He kissed his son’s forehead. The coarse muslin wrapping caught on his chapped lips. The scent of a newborn still clung to the cloth though the costly fabric shrouded a cold, lifeless body.

  He nestled the child on top of the woman who’d died bringing him into the world. A world he’d brightened for only a day.

  His tearful mother bent to give him Ida’s keys. The metallic clink echoed in the silence as the ring passed from her trembling hand into his. He tucked the symbols of his wife’s rank under his babe’s body.

  Bendik’s mother handed him Ida’s glass beads. “I aided in my niece’s delivery,” she said hoarsely, her face wet with tears. “I never thought to be present on the day of her death.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Sonja,” he said softly, turning to place the jewelry atop the body before beckoning his eldest daughter. “Come say goodbye, Aleksandra.”

  “No,” the child shrieked, sending a chill racing up his spine. “He killed my mother.”

  Flocks of squawking songbirds rose in flight from nearby apple trees, leaving only silence in their wake.

  He tried and failed to meet the scowling gaze of the six-year-old. How to explain the loss of a mother to a little girl when he barely comprehended the events of the past few days?

  She buried her face in her grandmother’s skirts. Magnus nodded his thanks to his mother, then stopped breathing altogether as his grief-stricken father picked up Brynhild, cradling the weeping four year old to his chest.

  He looked back at the shrouded bodies of his wife and child. The rain had started again, a light drizzle, but if they didn’
t fill the grave soon…

  For a brief moment he was tempted to let his trembling legs buckle. He could lie with his loved ones until he too was dead, suffocated by the rich red earth of his native land.

  But he had two beautiful daughters and was heir to his father’s title. Vilhelm Longsword, Duke of the Normans, depended on the Kriger family and its army to maintain peace and order in the valley of the Orne, and his father expected him to follow in his footsteps as Comte of Montdebryk.

  Their fortress home was a symbol of power and government, a refuge for local folk in times of strife. Magnus was destined to assume his father’s seat on Vilhelm’s Ruling Council of ten Viking noblemen. He and his father and brothers had built a formidable army of mounted knights. Norsemen traditionally fought on foot, but after the battle for Chartres thirty years before, Bryk Kriger quickly realized horses gave an army a decided advantage.

  As he climbed out of the grave, it struck Magnus full force that he’d not made much effort to console his daughters. Aleksandra had a right to be angry. He’d been too wrapped up in his own grief.

  A priest intoned the necessary Latin prayers. Magnus bent to pick up Aleksandra in one arm, took Brynhild in the other and felt the warmth of their tears on his neck as the heavy clods of earth were shoveled into the hole.

  “Freyja, watch over my daughters,” he prayed inwardly to the Norse goddess of fertility. “Protect them from their mother’s fate.”

  They watched in silence until the earth was mounded over the grave. Choked with grief for their loss, he set his girls on their feet and his mother shepherded them back to the fortress. The rest drifted away until only Magnus and his father remained.

  His sire lay a hand on his shoulder. Bryk Kriger had made no secret of the death of his first wife in Norway before he’d come to Francia. However, Magnus had never heard his father speak openly of his despair then. “Life goes on, my son. I didn’t think I would wed again after Myldryd. She was heavy with my child. But I was wrong. I met your mother, and…”

  “I’ll not marry again, Papa,” Magnus retorted, filling his lungs with the cool air. “I have my girls, and my memories.”

  It sounded pathetic to his own ears.

  His father frowned. “Aleksandra is a courageous child, but a girl cannot be comte. You must sire sons.”

  Magnus walked away, too weary to argue.

  Keeping Vigil

  Bruggen, Flandres, Western Francia, 939 AD

  A grey dawn was breaking when Judith de Valognes looked up from squinting at her embroidery. Her half-brother slumped in the chair facing hers before the cold hearth, his long legs stretched out. Arnulf looked as exhausted as she felt, but she took comfort in knowing he appreciated her keeping vigil with him.

  They’d spoken of many things in an effort to take their minds off what was going on in the lord’s chamber, but talk soon turned to the scheming neighbors whose plotting preoccupied him as the ruler of Flandres—Louis, King of Francia, Hugh the Great, Duke of Paris, Herbert, Comte of Vermandois, and a host of other Frankish magnates.

  “Alliances form but then dissolve in the blink of an eye, leading to outbreaks of violent retaliation,” he complained.

  Judith acknowledged it was unusual for a man in a position of power to discuss such matters with a woman. However, she deemed it inappropriate to mention he too thirsted to expand his territories and was deeply embroiled in the plots and schemes that made life in Flandres uncertain.

  She was grateful her father had strengthened the fortifications of her hometown after the rampages of the murderous Vikings who’d sacked the abbeys at Gendt and attacked Bruggen nigh on a century before.

  She blurted out her deepest fear. “The barbaric Norsemen who’ve taken control of more and more land to the south terrify me. Those pirates of the Seine are descendants of Vikings.”

  Arnulf shrugged, crossing his ankles on the footstool. “I don’t see them as a threat. We’ve been on good terms for ten years. They are aware they depend on the goodwill of the Frankish nobility to survive.”

  Still the fear nagged at her. Arnulf had extended his power in the area, seizing the counties of Boulogne and Ternois—too close in her opinion to the Normans. His marriage to Adela, daughter of Herbert of Vermandois, probably didn’t sit well with their neighbors to the south.

  Only the county of Ponthieu now stood between Flandres and Normandie, and Arnulf’s eyes narrowed whenever its capital was mentioned—a sure sign he had designs on Montreuil. Sometimes she wished she wasn’t able to read his thoughts but felt compelled to utter the concerns she’d overheard. “How long before their Duke Vilhelm turns his attention to our homeland? I’m heartily sick of the tales told and retold about his long and apparently famous sword. Even our fellow countrymen utter its name with reverence. I can never pronounce or remember it.”

  “Ulfberht,” he replied, tapping his steepled fingers against his lips. “It’s an unusual and highly prized weapon of crucible steel. The manufacture of such a weapon is a skill few men can claim. The method originated in Persia.”

  “Hmph,” she grunted, confident she still wouldn’t remember it, and what in the name of all the saints was crucible steel?

  She rubbed her aching neck, and poked the needle into the linen, suddenly aware the unsettling shrieks of pain had stopped. She held her breath, listening. Was the battle for life over at last?

  She filled her lungs again when she heard a babe’s strident wail, smiling as her brother stumbled to his feet and cocked his ear towards the sound. Their eyes met.

  “Do you think it’s a boy?” he rasped.

  He’d asked the same hopeful question on three previous occasions. Each time, knowing how desperate he was for an heir, she’d assured him the new babe must be a boy. Thrice, he’d returned from Adela’s bedside disappointed, but giving thanks for the safe delivery of his wife and a new daughter.

  Better to say nothing.

  Her brother’s feet seemed fixed to the stone floor of the Great Hall. The wailing went on.

  Judith’s hopes rose. The three girls had quieted quickly after their arrival into the world. This child sounded like he had the lungs of a determined lad.

  She put her sewing aside and rose from the comfortable upholstered chair their long dead father had brought from Paris a generation ago. Adela would have disposed of the well-worn piece of furniture if not for Judith’s entreaties that it was her only tangible connection with a father who’d died a month before she was born. Whenever she thought of the sire she’d never met, she conjured a vision of him sitting before a hearty fire in his favorite chair. In her mind’s eye he was an older version of her half-brother.

  If the child turned out to be a boy, she knew whose name he would bear. Their father had been gone twenty years, but Arnulf missed him still. It was a lifelong regret she’d never known the man who’d insisted on his death bed she be treated as his legitimate child.

  Smoothing one hand over the creases in her linen skirt, she linked arms with her brother. “I’m curious to see my new nephew, or niece. Aren’t you?” she teased.

  He patted her arm. “I’m nervous,” he said softly. His hand was still warm, despite the fire having died in the long hours after midnight.

  She tugged him away from the hearth. “I cannot imagine why. The babe obviously lives, be it male or female, and no dire news of Adela’s death has been brought, so—”

  As they walked purposefully toward the lord’s bedchamber, Judith chattered on about babies and mothers and how wonderful it was that Adela had borne the rigors of childbirth yet again. But conflicting emotions swirled in her heart. Arnulf was eighteen years older than she, more like a father than a brother, but there’d been no prospect of a betrothal for Judith for a long while. She’d given up hope of children, of a family.

  Eligible young Flemish men were in short supply, most of them either in the army, or dead, killed in skirmishes with one greedy neighbor or another. As for foreign noblemen, it was difficult to
keep track of the warring factions vying for control of bits and pieces of Francia. It seemed everyone wanted to be king of this, or comte of that.

  She’d been named Judith in honor of her grandmother, Judith of Francia, daughter of King Charles the Bald and a descendant of Charlemagne.

  She sometimes wished she was more like her namesake grandmother. She chuckled whenever she recalled tales told to her of the French princess who eloped with Baldwin Forestier, after being previously married to two English kings. When her father insisted she leave Baldwin and return home, she refused. It took the intervention of the Pope to secure a reconciliation between the Frankish king and his son-by-marriage. Baldwin received the title of comte, and the territory of Flandres.

  Judith had no father, but she would never defy Arnulf if he demanded something of her.

  However, titles and lineage alone were of no interest to suitors. Land was what men wanted, and she had no legitimate claim to any of her father’s lands, though she supposed Arnulf would grant her some minor estate as a dowry.