A/N. Again, I own nothing having to do with True Blood or the Southern Vampire Mysteries.
Chapter Eight
Without warning, Eric said, "Her name was Brigid."
"The red-head?" Carly knew the answer to the question, but the memory pained him, so she asked the question gently.
"Yes." He stopped walking the coin between his fingers, tossed it up in the air, and caught it in the palm of his hand. "Did you see her?"
"She was gorgeous."
"And full of fire."
"Did you love her?" Carly asked.
"Who knows?" Eric's honesty was striking to her, but Carly thought that he must have felt something for the woman if he still remembered her name. "I wanted her. And she wanted me as well. She was a Christian, and she'd learned to read Latin from the monks her father kept in his court."
"Brigid was royalty?" Carly couldn't imagine a contemporary princess working as a serving woman and didn't understand why she hadn't been ransomed by her family.
"Her story was complicated." Eric squinted his eyes, apparently struggling to remember the details.
"Your father's men traded her for amber," Carly volunteered.
"How did you learn that?"
"From dreaming your father." Keeping information back would do her no good, and it might actually harm Eric. "He saw you looking at her. He knew you liked her."
Eric was quiet again, and then he finally said earnestly, "Do you know what this coin is, Carly?"
"It's not a Byzantine Constantine VII?" She smiled weakly, hoping she could relieve some of the tension smothering the living room.
"On one side, it's the betrayal of my lineage." He flipped the coin over. "On the other, it's the betrayal of my father."
Even having suffered through the wolf attack, and every other violent episode her gift made her endure, Carly had never heard any more self-consciously dramatic statement. Eric's utterance didn't belong in an elegant hotel suite or within a conversation about artifacts. It belonged in an Ingmar Bergman film.
"You found this between them, didn't you?"
Carly nodded.
"Brigid put it there. She was hysterical. She genuinely admired my mother and hoped to become her daughter." He grew quiet, and Carly felt compelled to fill the silence with a statement.
"So she wanted to marry you."
"Brigid wanted to share a king's bed. My father told me that when she arrived with the cargo, the traders considered her a prize. She'd been kidnapped by Orkeyinga—do you know who they were?"
"They were Norwegians in Orkney, right?"
"And others, but they were canny, and had done well raiding along the Irish coast." Eric closed his eyes again.
"Is it hard to remember?"
He nodded, "She loved to tell me her story, but I've forgotten the names, her settlement, her father." Sighing, he flicked his fingers and started again, "I sent her away and she married another, so it's no matter what their names were."
Carly was surprised how relieved she was to learn someone else survived this attack. She had no idea when Eric became a vampire, so she wasn't even sure if he'd survived it, or at least survived it as a human being. If the wolves were werewolves, why couldn't there have been vampires lurking in the shadows outside the hall?
"The short version of the story was that she'd been kidnapped in a raid, but the leader of the party was impotent, and couldn't violate her. He didn't want to pass her on to anyone else, because they might realize she was a virgin, and it would shame him. They also couldn't ransom her- a raiding party from Dublin killed her father soon after they'd taken her."
"How terrible."
"I wouldn't have wanted to be a woman in my time, Carly." He looked serious and strangely compassionate. He's not a cave man.
"Brigid stayed with them for about a year, and then came to us. She offered herself to my father—she was seventeen or eighteen and made for children. He told her he didn't take concubines, but she could serve his household with honor, and he would ensure that she was not misused and would retain rights over her body, but that he would send any bastards to the wolves."
The vision of Eric's sister crashing into the floor forced itself on Carly, and she teared up, wincing.
"Even though it sounds barbaric, my father was merciful. I'm sure he didn't really intend to do it, or at least wouldn't have done it to boys. He probably hoped the threat would encourage Brigid's chastity."
Carly didn't need clarification. She knew, most vividly from the sharp sense of synchronicity Astrid had as she thrust her mother's knife into the wolf's throat, that Scandinavians practiced selective infanticide. Astrid was the only girl in her family, and the thirteenth child to survive infancy. Astrid's proud mother only suckled boy children until she gave her husband a long-boat crew. Her wifely obligation fulfilled, she let a girl live.
Eric continued the story. "I brought home a Byzantine slave, a eunuch who could speak even more languages than I could, and who could write in all of them. He knew a great deal about healing arts as well."
"I didn't know that." Stories about Byzantine slave boys never entered either dream.
"He died much too soon after we got there." Eric smirked. "A few of the men were angry that their wives refused their beds, and they figured out that Euthymius had lived up to his name and raised the women's spirits considerably while they'd been away trading and raiding. When their wives suggested Euthymius could provide instruction, they killed him."
"Oh, my god. What happened to them?"
"They paid me the price they owed for killing Euthymius... and they slept alone from that point forward."
"So had Euthymius raised Brigid's spirits as well?"
Eric laughed, "Without question. And enhanced her skills." He paused. "I could show you." Eric winked again and Carly ran toward the refrigerator. "You really will have to pee if you keep this up Carly." Damn it, I do.
Once she came back with an orange juice—she'd depleted the supply of club soda—Carly sat back down. "Is it okay if I drink this? Will it bother you?"
"No. I wouldn't stock anything that bothered me. You probably noticed there wasn't any diet pop."
"Yes, I did." She smiled. "You're not going to pass as a modest Shreveport business owner if you keep calling it pop."
"Probably not." Eric realized he still held onto the coin. "I guess I should finish the story."
"If you want to. If it upsets you, please don't feel you have to. You can tell me some other time."
"Ah...yes. You'll have other opportunities for the pleasure of my company in Shreveport."
Since the blush that sent her to the bathroom hadn't really faded, the only affirmation Carly or her body offered to Eric was the nervous tapping of her fingers together.
He responded tentatively, "Perhaps I shouldn't finish the story. You may not want to hear it."
"No, really I do." The truth she couldn't put into words was that she wanted to know everything about Erik Ulfriksson, and Eric Northman was the best person to tell her.
"Even if it's filthy and provocative?"
Carly gulped. "Yes. I want to hear it."
Eric was next to her again. "Then I want to hear you say those words."
For the first time that night, Carly held her ground and stayed next to him. He'd given her space—about five inches—and she didn't feel crowded, and she wouldn't give in. He might have wanted to flirt, but she wanted to hear the story.
"I want to hear about the coin." Carly was resolute that she wasn't going to wind up in the king sized bed with a king sized thousand year old vampire.
Eric leaned against the back of the sofa and bent his left leg until his knee nearly touched her, looking at her as if she were a piece of inscrutable modern art.
"You won't humor me even a little?"
"No. I just want to hear your story, no matter what it's like." She said all this looking down at her hands, never meeting his eyes. She knew he couldn't impose his will on her, but that feeling of waves crashing into her was still overwhelming and vaguely sexual, so she avoided his eyes.
"Okay. I told you that Euthymius knew about medicine. He knew a great deal about how to prevent conception, or at least as much as anyone knew at the time. He taught Brigid that she could knead together pine resin, beeswax, and honey. Then she could adhere a coin and block the entrance to her womb."
"Gross."
"Carly, sex is messy, at least when it's done well." Even though Eric Northman was flirting, he also sounded completely sincere.
"I have no idea how it's done, and I'm not going to find out tonight, so can we please get back to your story?" Carly summoned the courage to turn and look directly at him, staring at him until he asked her a question.
"What did my parents think of Brigid?"
"Your mother thought she was a minx." Carly saw no change in his expression. "And that she slept around without getting pregnant."
"That was all true. She told me she wouldn't bear a son until she knew he could be a king." Eric turned back toward the center of the room and stretched his long legs out toward the artifact case. "She was a very sensible, strong woman."
"Do you remember how many times you and she had...been together?" Carly took some comfort in the euphemism after Eric's graphic description of how Brigid kept low-caste babies away.
"We hadn't before that day. We'd flirted, and stole off together and kissed, but she knew what she wanted. The settlement was full of pretty boys, and she taught a few of the hall guards what she'd learned from Euthymius, but she was not a whore." Eric stood up for the character of this woman a thousand years dead admirably.
"What changed?"
"She knew that I was going to stay and learn more from my father about trading and about navigation." He closed his eyes tightly again, "And I think she must have overheard us talking about marriage."
"Why do you think so?" Carly tried to remember if Brigid had been close enough to hear what his parents had been saying, but she couldn't assess whether Brigid would have been able to or not. All Carly knew from her dreaming was what Astrid and Ulfrik took in from their conversations, not how they were perceived by others.
"She asked me if I was ready for a concubine."
"What did you tell her."
Eric smiled broadly again, "You saw her. What should I have said?"
"If your father hadn't loved your mother so much, he would have said yes."
Eric's eyes fell. "I said yes. But I told her that I couldn't father a child on her until I was married. I needed an heir from wedlock before I got an heir from a concubine."
Carly knew enough about kinship systems to recognize that Eric hadn't exploited Brigid; he'd just been practical.
"So I gave her the gold Constantine. It was the most valuable coin I had, and she put it in, and we had sex. I can't remember where, but it was far from the hall." He closed his eyes again.
Even though she never touched anyone willingly, Carly reached for Eric's hand and held it without a word. She let down every barrier she'd kept up that night to block out the humming of his mind, and laid herself open to his thoughts. She didn't seek them out, but she didn't resist them. All that was there was humming, but the pitch was higher, more frantic, desperate, screaming.
The frequency and vibration rattling her mind felt the way she imagined the scream of the Banshee might feel—grief and sorrow embodied in the human voice.
Eric squeezed her hand sharply and let go. "Thank you." He continued his story.
"We'd fallen together, wherever it was, and laughed. She was relieved to belong to me. I'd planned to tell my parents immediately and make my claim known to the rest of the men. But then I heard the screams, and my father calling for me. I ran as fast as I could with my bare sword in my hand, but it was too late. So many people were dead already. My sister, my mother."
Carly couldn't let her question wait any longer. "Eric, you know that the last month and a half or so has changed the way that people think of stories...of creatures. We know vampires are real now—well, you've known for a thousand years—but the rest of us know now. They were werewolves that killed your family, weren't they? It wasn't just a hallucination your mother and father had, right?"
Eric reached over her and grabbed her drawings and spread them across the case again in their horrifying sequence. "This is what you saw in your dreams?"
"Yes."
"This is almost the only thing I have remembered for a thousand years. This," he tapped each of the sketches, "is what I saw."
"Tuva—one of the Swedes on the dig—called them ulfhednar. Wolf warriors."
Eric shook his heard. "These creatures were something different. That's the name my father's people called themselves—they were like Berserkers. They took the wolf as their—I don't know exactly how to describe it—their symbol, but more. That's why he was named 'Wolf-king' or 'Powerful-Wolf.' But none I'd ever met were shape-changers."
Without warning, Eric embraced her, pinning her arms to her sides. "Eric, please," Carly whimpered. "Please don't do this to me."
He cradled her head in his palm and said, "No. No. I just wanted to hug you." He released her. "I'm so sorry that I didn't comfort you that night I found you. If I'd known you were dying both their deaths just to find their faces for me, I would have stayed and held you that night."
Carly leaned back against him, arms still at her side, unsure how to accept his embrace. Eric took her in his arms gently, and said, "I failed them when they died. I shouldn't have failed you when you were dying their deaths. Especially when it was my fault you were doing it."
And with that simple statement she grasped hold of his arms and began weeping inconsolably.
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