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could not resist a peep at the girl, her thumb stuffed into her mouth, fair hair framing her cherubic face. No doubt she had led her nurse in a merry dance before settling to sleep. The little imp always did. He touched a kiss to his fingers, placed them tenderly on her forehead, then, snuffing out the candle stub, climbed into bed beside his wife.
    Gunnhilda stirred, disturbed by the ice coldness of his feet. “Was it a good feasting?” she asked, her honey voice drowsy with sleep.
    “Very good, but would have been all the better had you been there.”
    She snuggled closer to him, her arms wrapping around the solidity of his muscled body. “But you were too busy with your other woman to have noticed or cared about me.”
    Her husband did not rise to her teasing. Gunnhilda was proud that her man had become Queen’s captain. There were few men who could outshine Pallig, despite the ugly rumours still rumbling concerning that awkward incident in Devon-Shire last summer.
    He had set eyes on her eight years past. A girl of five and ten years and royal born, half-sister to Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark. Swein had brought her to England to find her a husband, but had not quite foreseen the one she managed to find for herself. Pallig had been one of Æthelred’s Thegns taking the raised tribute to pay the Danes to go away and leave England alone.
    King Swein’s plan, in 994, had been to ally with one of the northern Lords, find himself a toehold for the next year’s raiding, and, if fortune smiled the year after, that year’s also. Had reckoned his scheme without the unexpected passion of young love.
    It had been instant, their liking for each other. Pallig’s gaze had met Gunnhilda’s as she had served the cup of welcome to her brother’s guests, and when Pallig rode away the following morning, she had ridden with him, perched behind his saddle, her arms tightly woven about his waist. Swein had bellowed his disapproval, raged, ranted, pleaded, and cajoled, but Gunnhilda had listened to none of it. Even the threat that he would think of her as dead were she to make the fool of herself with this Englishman had held no sway.
    “How are you feeling?” Pallig asked, smoothing his hand over her forehead to see if it was cool, brushing back the corn-gold hair that his daughter, asleep in her cradle, had inherited.
    “I am well,” his wife answered, her own hand caressing his chest. “Tired, that is all. I intend to start going about my normal life in a few days.”
    “You most certainly will not! I forbid it!”
    Gunnhilda batted her hand at him. “Oh, don’t fuss! The bleeding and the pains have not been with me these last five days. I cannot lie abed for the rest of this pregnancy! October is too many months ahead for so much idleness.”
    “But you nearly lost the child!” Pallig’s protest was silenced by Gunnhilda touching her fingers to his lips.
    She pulled him down into the warmth of the bed. “My breath smells sweet, and my urine is clear. I have rested, and I am well. So is the child.”
    Grinning into the darkness, Pallig kissed her forehead and settled himself comfortable. After a long silence he said, “I feel for her, you know.”
    Gunnhilda was almost asleep. “Mm? Who do you feel for?”
    “Our little Queen.”
    After all this while of marriage, of bearing the three-year-old daughter who slept in the cot and losing two others before they saw more than four months of life, Gunnhilda thought she knew Pallig’s moods. If nothing else, she knew when to guess something was mithering at him and he would not sleep until he had talked whatever it was through to its end.
    “What is she like, then, this Emma of Normandy?”
    “Fair-haired, fair-faced. Eyes that sparkle in a certain light, eyes that will one day, I am thinking, have the ability to look into a man’s soul.”
    “You liked her?”
    Pallig answered slowly, uncertain. He felt pity for the lass, without question he