Dark, Devastating & Delicious!: The Marriage Medallion / Between Duty and Desire / Driven to Distraction

Something to say? Oh, you’d better believe it. She had a hundred questions, at least. Was it possible he was finally ready to fork over a few answers?

Jorund, the agent from the Gullandrian National Investigative Bureau she’d befriended, had warned her about this. “He’s a Mystic through and through,” the NIB special agent had cautioned. “Plays it close and tight. You’ll have trouble getting anything out of him.” But, hey. What did Jorund know? Hadn’t he told her any number of times that she was chasing shadows, that her brother had met his end out there in the ocean, off the coast of Iceland somewhere? He’d been wrong on that count. Brit would prove him wrong about Eric, too.

She hoped.

Brit folded her hands on the table and leaned toward the silent man across from her. “You—and everyone else around here, as a matter of fact—keep claiming that my brother is dead, that I never saw him. Not here. Not in the fjord…” She let her voice trail off. Hey, who could say? Maybe he’d actually volunteer something. He didn’t. “Well, okay, just for the sake of moving on, let’s say that you’re telling me the truth.”

He nodded again. It wasn’t an answer—but she hadn’t really asked any questions. Yet.

“Okay, then, Eric. So let’s go back aways.”

“Back aways.” He looked amused.

She quelled the urge to raise her voice in frustration and explained evenly, “That’s right. If you won’t admit my brother’s alive, then will you tell me what you do know? Tell me what you found out, after he went missing. Tell me what you learned when you went searching for answers to what had happened to him.”

“I learned nothing. Except that he is truly dead.”

“Got that. But how did he die?”

“I’m sure your father must have told you.”

“He did. But I want you to tell me. Please?”

He studied her for a long moment, then shifted on his bench and rested his forearms on the table. “The truth about Valbrand is exactly what His Majesty, your father, has told you. Valbrand went a-Viking—in the modern-day sense of the word, anyway. Every prince who plans to put himself forward as a candidate for the crown in the next kingmaking must accomplish such a journey. It is tradition. A holdover from the old days when kings themselves went a-Viking, when, as the old saying goes, ‘Kings were made for honor, and not for long life.’

“Thus, Valbrand set out with a trusted crew in an authentic reconstruction of a Viking longship, from Lysgard harbor to the Shetland Islands, and on to the Faeroes. From there, he made for Iceland. Somewhere in the North Atlantic, he encountered a bad storm. During that storm, your brother was washed overboard, never to be seen again.”

“And you know this for certain because?”

“I tracked down the survivors of the storm and spoke with them, in person. They told me what everyone already knows. I heard their stories and each one corroborated the one before. It all fit together and it all made sense. As I have told you time after time after time, I now have no doubt at all that Valbrand’s death happened in a storm at sea.” He leaned closer across the table. “There. Are you satisfied?”

“Never.”

He made a low sound in his throat. “Freyja’s eyes. When will you abandon this witless hope that you’ll somehow find a dead man alive?”

Witless, huh? She was leaning forward, too. She leaned farther. They were nose to nose. The air between them seemed to crackle and snap. “I’ll have you know that your own father—and mine—sent me here to try to find out what really happened to my brother.”

“Is that what they told you?”

She scowled at him. “What do you mean, is that what they told me? Why else would I be here?” He was looking at her strangely again, frowning, his head slightly to the side. She reminded him, “And just in case you’ve somehow forgotten, my plane was sabotaged. And then there was that juvenile delinquent with the wicked-looking crossbow. Sif called him a renegade. Are you sure about that? Are you sure he wasn’t someone sent by whoever messed with my plane, to finish me off in the event I managed to crawl out alive?”

Now he wore a patient look. “The boy was a renegade. One of a small number of ill-behaved young ruffians who roam the Vildelund committing murder and stirring up mayhem whenever they get the chance.”

“So you’re saying it was just the Gullandrian version of a random drive-by shooting? Oh, puh-lease. If you think I buy that, I’ve got a statue in New York harbor I can sell you.”

He seemed very sure. “The boy is a renegade. I spoke with him myself, before I sent him to the northernmost village where he’ll receive the discipline and teaching he so obviously needs.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Manage what?”

“Well, you had me to drag out of there—and a wounded renegade to send to the north. I’m just trying to figure out how one man accomplished all that.”

“I was not alone. There were other men with me, men from the village. They took him north.”

“I didn’t see any other men—well, except for my brother, all in black, wearing a mask.”

“Your brother is dead. He wasn’t there.”

“He was. You and him and no one else.”

He shrugged. “The men were there, whether you saw them or not. And it’s unfortunate that your plane crashed. But it doesn’t mean the plane was sabotaged.”

“It was a fine plane in perfect working order. No way it would have gone to zero oil pressure out of nowhere like that.”

“Perhaps there was something wrong with your oil gauge—and as for why my father sent you here, we both know the reason. You have only to look as far as the medallion you wear around your neck to know the intentions of my father and yours.”

Brit stiffened. She felt for the chain at her neck and dragged the medallion out into the light. Her fingers closed around the warm, comforting shape of it.

“What are you talking about? Your father gave me this for luck, to keep me safe from all evil, he said.”

Eric was wearing that odd expression again—that sort of bemused half frown, his head tipped to the side. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“What?” she demanded. He went on looking at her. She said it again, louder, “What?”

And then, at last, he told her. “That medallion is mine. My father gave it to you so I might know you as my chosen bride.”

Chapter Five

Should she have known? Probably.

“I see you have been… misled,” he said softly. Brit only clutched the medallion and stared. Very patiently he went on, “We Mystics cling more closely to the old ways than do the people of the south. For us marriage is, first and foremost, an alliance between families. In the past millennium or so, it’s been the custom for the father of the groom to present the future bride of his son with a special pendant—a marriage medallion that was wrought of silver in the first months after the son’s birth. Each medallion is different, because each was made specifically for one treasured infant son.”

He paused for a moment, his gaze holding hers. Then, as if he could see it, though she still had her hand wrapped around it and he continued looking right in her eyes, he said, “A circle in quadrants, a ribbonlike creature, twisting and twining over the whole—the world serpent, perhaps, that coils at the roots of the guardian tree, holding together all the nine worlds. Four animal heads—snakes, dragons, rams? Perhaps. Or perhaps these are creatures of fancy, of myth. And at the center, the symbol for Saint John’s arms—like a cross, with four equal sides, each coiling and turning into the next. St. John is said to keep its bearer safe from all evil, did you know?”

She had, of course. Medwyn had told her—that much. But no more.

Eric said, “The medallion you wear used to hang on the wall above my blankets when I was an infant. As a child, I wore it against my flesh. When I turned eighteen, I gave it to my father—to be returned to me only around the neck of the woman I would wed. You.”

It came to Brit, suddenly, why she hadn’t figured it out before: she hadn’t wanted to know. She’d been so proud and sure that her father and his grand counselor believed her—believed in her. That they’d seen her purpose and her determination to find her brother, or at the very least, to learn the truth of his death. She’d allowed herself to believe that they respected her quest—and yes, damn it, it was a quest.

But apparently, only to her. To them—to her father the king and Medwyn and this too-attractive man sitting opposite her, she was only a woman. And to them, as to far too many men, Gullandrian or otherwise, a woman was to be taken seriously in only one context.

In relationship to a man.

“Let me get this straight.” She kept her voice low. Moderate. Controlled. “Medwyn and my dad sent me here to marry you? I was almost killed in a plane crash, my guide died, I was just about finished off in a… a hike-by shooting, and you’re trying to tell me it’s all for the sake of wedding bells?”

“It is of great importance, whom you marry. The fate of our country may hang upon that choice.”