Page 108 of Viking in Love

At first, no one spoke, but then Breanne realized her sisters were looking to her to be spokesman. “I do not know.”

“When did you see her last?”

Breanne glanced at her two sisters, each of whom shrugged.

“A sennight or two ago.”

She could tell that Lord Orm was getting impatient with her terse answers. Caedmon had advised her to volunteer nothing.

Dunstan slammed a hand on the table. “Where did you see her last? Why did she leave? Who traveled with her? Where was she going?”

She raised her chin bravely, trying her best not to be intimidated, but her voice came out wobbly when she started to speak, helped only when Caedmon surreptitiously squeezed her thigh. “Vana was grieving for her husband, who had disappeared, but she was being questioned in a threatening manner…as you are questioning us now.”

Every member of the Witan glared at her audacity, except Lord Ravenshire, who favored her with a wink and a small smile of encouragement.

“With no one to protect Vana, except for our two Norse guards, my sisters and I convinced Vana to come north with us to visit my betrothed’s estate.” She flashed Caedmon a simpering smile, and he reciprocated by lacing the fingers of one hand with hers. “After we were here a few days, Vana yearned to return to Stoneheim and my father’s care. Our Norse guards, Ivan and Ivar, accompanied her. Once her husband returns home to Havenshire, she will, of course, return.”

“Why did you and your sisters not go with her?”

“Because I wanted to spend some time with my betrothed, and my sisters agreed to stay until the wedding…or at least until the formal betrothal ceremony.” Breanne gulped over the lump in her dry throat. Lying drained a person, she found.

And King Edgar was still suspicious.

Breanne was repulsed by the Saxon king’s shifty eyes and loose lips, which bespoke a lecherous disposition. He was renowned for surveying every room he encountered for his next prey, sexual or otherwise. He was scare older than twenty-one, but his dissipated face made him look a decade older. Sybil had told them this morning of some of the punishments Edgar had levied in the past, sometimes on a whim: slitting the nose, cutting off hands or feet, plucking out eyes, leaving a body out in the elements exposed to the pecking of vultures. Thank Odin that she and her sisters and Sybil had had the foresight to make themselves unattractive. Now, if only they could convince him they were not guilty of murder.

“As for you, Caedmon, you have been a good soldier for me,” King Edgar was continuing, “but I am convinced that your princess knows more than she is telling. Which therefore follows that you know, too.”

Caedmon jumped to his feet and yelled, “You have no right to dishonor me.”

The king jumped to his feet, yelling back, “I have every right.” Pointing to two of his soldiers propped against a far wall. “Restrain him in the dungeon.”

Breanne stood, too, at Caedmon’s side. “If you put him in a dungeon, you will have to imprison me, too.”

“Shhh. Sit down, Breanne,” Caedmon told her, trying to shove her back down to the bench by pressing on her shoulder, to no avail. Then he hissed at her, “Your wart has fallen off.”

Turning her face away from the Witan, she reached into a placket of her gown, then attached another wart. “How do I look?”

“Ridiculous. Sit down.”

“If Breanne is going to the dungeon, then I am, too,” slurred Ingrith, who stood with difficulty, considering her bulk, and folded her arms over her hugely padded chest.

“Me, too,” said Drifa, with a cackle, exposing her blackened teeth.

“We have no dungeons at Heatherby,” Geoff said, standing at Caedmon’s other side. “Do we?” he asked Sybil.

“Nay. Just a cold-storage room that we use for the occasional villain.”

“That will do,” Edgar said.

“Enough!” Eirik said, stomping over to hover above King Edgar’s much smaller frame. “You cannot imprison your subjects for an imaginary murder just because you suspect they know something.”

“I can do whate’er I want,” the king said petulantly.

Everyone started yelling and talking at once, including Dunstan, who was trying to calm down the king.

Thus it was, in the midst of all the chaos, that at first no one heard the guardsmen at the door announce new arrivals in great numbers on the horizon, coming to Heatherby. Mayhap as many as a hundred heavily armed horsemen.

“Who is it?” the king demanded to know. “Friend or foe?”