“We’ll put it in a bucket of water and decorate it with candles and ribbons and gold braiding.”
Finn overheard them as he was walking by and slapped a hand against his heart. “More decorations!” he moaned. “Lord spare me!” He was, of course, referring to his worldly master, not the celestial one.
Later that day, the tree held a place of honor near the dais, with unlit candles (They wouldn’t be lit until solstice), more red bows, and garlands of gold braid that would normally be used to trim fine garments. Everybody oohed and aahed over it.
Except for Finn. She was pretty sure he was hitting the locked barrels of ale, what was left of it.
By the next morning, she was frantic over Cnut. The snow had stopped falling, but it was waist-deep. “You have to go find him,” she begged Thorkel. He was the only one who would even listen to her.
By noon, he agreed, but only after Dyna added her pleas to Andrea’s and made him a few promises of a nature Andrea could only guess. He took three men with him.
Four hours later they returned carrying something. Or someone. Whatever it was, it resembled the Abominable Snowman. Covered with snow and crusted over with ice. Eyes frozen shut. Icicles hanging from its nose. Its lips cracked with frozen blood.
With a cry of horror, Andrea realized that it was Cnut.
“He’s still alive,” Thorkel assured her, but one of the men added, “But barely.”
They carried him into the great hall and laid him near one of the hearths on a trestle table, where Andrea helped them remove his garments. Not an easy task with their being so frozen. But the heat of the fire soon began to melt the ice.
“Be careful how you handle him,” Andrea warned. “He might have frostbite.”
“That’s the least of his troubles,” Girda said, clucking and rattling out orders for warm water, clean cloths, dry clothing. “And warm up some of that ale, Finn, and don’t ye be saying there is none or I’ll personally give ye a heart attack.”
It didn’t seem to matter to any of them that they were exposing Cnut’s nude body to the scrutiny of one and all, although Girda at one point ordered everyone to step back and give them room for breathing. Cnut didn’t have frostbite, which was a miracle, but he was blue in spots, especially his toes and fingertips and the edge of his nose.
She breathed a sigh of relief when his body began to shiver, and once she removed the warm cloths from his eyes, he turned his head to the side and said, “There’s a tree in my hall.”
“Andrea insisted,” Thorkel said defensively.
Cnut turned toward her then.
“What happened?” she asked, taking one of his hands gently in hers.
“I got lost. Again.” He tried to smile, which caused his cracked lips to start bleeding.
Which prompted Andrea to start crying. She wasn’t sure if she was crying with joy over Cnut’s return, or crying with dismay over the pathetic Viking who kept getting lost.
He squeezed her hand and said, first licking the blood off his lips, “I missed you.”
And then Andrea cried for love of her Viking.
Chapter 17
Your coop or mine, Ms. Hen?
It took several days for Cnut to recover. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be warm again. In fact, at one point, when he feared being frozen into a living statue out in the forest, he’d pleaded with Mike to help him.
But Mike remained absent. He was punishing Cnut for something. Cnut had a fair idea what that something was. And it wasn’t gluttony.
On the other hand, maybe Mike was the one who’d sent Thorkel to find him. Although Thorkel claimed it was Andrea who had beleaguered him into going out to search. Okay, so, maybe Mike sent Andrea to prod Thorkel into searching for him. Same thing.
His head hurt from all that thinking.
But another thing. Cnut wasn’t convinced that he’d gotten lost all on his own, despite all the jests about him at Hoggstead, implying he couldn’t find his way around a privy anymore. No, it was Zeb who’d somehow muddled his mind so he lost his way. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it until proven otherwise.
Anyhow, after a day in bed under three bed furs and another day of a hacking cough and a third day of Andrea force-feeding him so much chicken noodle soup he was growing feathers (how she’d bullied Girda into giving up one of her hens was another story, and there were some black specks in the noodles that were suspicious!), he made his way to the bathhouse, which was thankfully empty. And why not? It was the middle of the night.
Andrea had declined to share his bed while he was sick, and instead slept in the spare bedchamber. Well, he was sick of being sick.
The bathhouse was an ingenious facility put together by his great-grandsire Bjorn Hoggson, taking advantage of a natural underground hot spring. The circular bathing pool was about fifteen feet in diameter, with stone steps leading down each side to a maximum depth of three feet. The neat thing was that water came in and ran out in a continuous slow current, rather like a self-cleaning tub. The warm waste water from the bathing house was often used for laundry, although there was a deep well closer to the keep.