Hearts Aflame by Johanna Lindsey Page B

as much if the wooden gate had not opened just then to admit two men on horseback.
    Only one was worth watching, and watch him she did as he moved his great black steed slowly toward them. When he dismounted only a few feet away, she was amazed to see that he was nearly as tall as her father, which put him at a height above most of the young men with her. He was young himself and not slim for such a height, but powerful across the shoulders and wide chest. His sleeveless leather vest was almost like a short jacket and revealed a bush of dark hair on his chest running nearly to his neck, and arms that were thick and wrapped with steely muscle, the arms of a warrior. The belt wound tight about his waist showed that there was no fat on him.
    The long legs were also thick and powerful, and tight within two different types of leggings, instead of the single garment the Vikings wore. The knee-length trousers that the Europeans called braies were tucked into a hoselike covering they called chausses and cross-gartered, his with leather thongs that were decorated with metal studs.
    His face was well defined and impossibly handsome, the nose straight, the lips cleanly drawn and firm with a hint of cruelty above a square-cut jaw that was beardless, though dark with bristles. Hair of a rich, gleaming brown fell in waves to his shoulders and formed unruly curls about his wide brow and temples.
    But it was his eyes, once seen, that held the viewer riveted. They were such a dark, crystallike green, and so filled with hate and anger as they passed over thechained men, that Kristen caught her breath when his gaze moved briefly over her, and did not release it until he snapped an order at one of the guards, and then walked away toward the large building and was gone from sight.
    “I do not like the looks of that one,” Ivarr said beside her. “What did he say?”
    Many others were asking the same thing, but Kristen shook her head dismally. “You tell them, Thorolf.”
    “I do not think I have it right,” he replied evasively.
    Kristen glared at him. The men had a right to know, but either Thorolf didn’t have the heart to tell them, or he didn’t believe what he had heard.
    Kristen glanced at Ivarr, but could not meet his eyes. “His words were ‘In the morn, kill them.’”
     
    Royce entered the hall to find the floor littered with his wounded men. He would speak to each one of them later, but right now he mounted the stairs at the end of the hall and went directly to his cousin’s chamber.
    Alden was stretched out on his bed, covered to his neck with a thick quilt, and so pale that Royce groaned, thinking he was already dead. The crying women in the room confirmed it. Two maids Alden sometimes took to his bed were standing in the corner weeping. Meghan, Royce’s only sister, a child of merely eight winters, was sitting at a little table with her face bent over her arms, weeping into them. Darrelle, Alden’s sister, was kneeling at the bed, her face buried in the covers, great sobs racking her slim body.
    Royce looked to the only woman in the room who wasn’t crying, Eartha the Healer. “Did he just die? Am I only a few moments too late?”
    The old hag tossed back her stringy brown hair and grinned at him. “Dead? He may yet live. Do not kill him off before his time.”

    Royce met this news with a mixture of relief and anger. It was the anger to which he reacted. “Out!” he bellowed at the noisy women. “Save your weeping until ’tis needed!”
    Darrelle swung around on him, her face as blotchy red as her eyes, her small breasts heaving indignantly at what she considered an outrage. “He is my brother!”
    “Yea, but what good do you do him with your screaming? How can he sleep to conserve his strength with such noise as you make? He does not need your tears to know you care, Darrelle.”
    Darrelle scrambled to her feet to face him, the top of her head coming no higher than his chest. She would have pounded on that