Page 25 of Berserkr
"What?"
"In an old Vikingr tradition, a female may present her mate with a shirt. Before that, he will only ever wear armour or leave his torso bare."
"What if I don't want you to put on a shirt? I tend to like the view."Laurel laughed wickedly.
"Then I will continue to walk around without a shirt. Since Peritan females don't know the tradition, they won't assume that I am unmated."
"Excellent. And if any Vikingar women come along, you can just tell them that you're already spoken for. It's how we do it on Earth."
"Holly has a ring. She married Errik and got a ring. He wears one too. On his axe hand."
"Do you want a ring?"
I nodded fervently. "Yes."
"Then you shall have a ring. I suppose this is new to everyone. We can make our own rules."
My mate was so smart.
* * *
Captain Njaland Steff invited us to have a meal with them, but the thought of any male being close to my mate made me unspeakably angry, so we ate in this cabin. It wasn't my room and I missed my huge bed. This one wasn't big enough to ravish Laurel in all the ways I had planned. But it was big enough to let the two of us sit cross-legged across from each other, the food between us.
When we finished - Laurel ate so much less than me, but said that was a normal portion for Peritan standards - she put her plate down and looked at me with a grim expression.
"I feel like we need to talk," she said.
"Whadabohhd?"
"Maybe I should wait until you're done eating."
I swallowed, drank a few sips of mead, nodded. "Now I'm done."
Laurel bit her bottom lip. Her teeth were strangely beige, almost white. Her hair may have been the same colour as mine, but her teeth weren't.
"I think I owe you an explanation. Why I left.Why I almost let you die."
"It was the fýst, not you," I said soothingly, but I was intrigued. I didn't know how much of what I thought to know was real and what was just a fragment taken from my crazed dreams.
"No, it was me. I mean, I didn't know it would be this bad for you. I didn't think you could actually die from it. I assumed Njal was making it sound scary so that I'd stay. But I did know that it wouldn't be nice for you. That you were more affected by this mate bond than I was - back then. Or at least more than I would admit to myself. I ignored the signs. Blamed them on my hormones, on random things, anything but you."
"Why did you leave?" I asked gently.
"Because I was chasing a story. I didn't sign up with the dating agency to find a partner. Do you know what a journalist is?"
I nodded. "If the translator is correct, it's someone who reports on the news."
"Yes. That's me. I mean, that was my job. I specialised in - fuck, it's so hard to use past tense. I was fired last week, so it's still sinking in that I'm no longer a journalist." She frowned, almost to herself, then continued. "Anyway, I'd been told that women had gone missing. The one thing they all had in common was that they'd signed up to the Hot Tatties dating agency. So, I made up a fake identity and pretended to be a banker looking for a hot husband. It's why I wore a wig at first."
It took me a moment to process it all. Fake identity? "Does that mean your name isn't Laurel?"
"Actually, it is. I only changed my last name from Woodstock to Knight. Woodstock is too memorable. For humans, anyways. I guess it doesn't mean anything to you."
"Laurel Woodstock. I like it."
"You better. It's not like you have another choice. Wait, do Vikingar women take on their husband's surname?"
"No, our last name is that of our fathers. I am Rune the Bad-Tempered, Son of Gnutt the Scar-Maker."
