"O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done."

Ragnar watched the wildlife around him most days. The crows that watched him against the pale clouds yet made no sound as their

It was at times like these that he remembered Floki the boatbuilder and reminisced about when his luck first began to change. The first time he sailed to England when he and Rollo truly lived like warriors. No command just the strength of the attack with them. The Viking life. The Valhalla dream.

"Does it rain in Paris, Rollo?" He asked the wind, "Or does it only rain on me?"

He looked around at nature and was reminded of the forest in which Floki lived with Helga. Ragnar would never say it but secretly he envied the couple and their devotion to each other.

Ragnar could never experience that amorous life because the King could never be content. He wasn't when Lagertha gave him no more sons or when he had the chance to invade Paris. The Gods granted him ambition knowing it would end with him here.

He sat down on the ground by his temporary home and every cycle of the sun ended and started the same way. The same pains that shot up his side and into his torso muscles, the stinging in his thighs whenever they were stretched and finally the pounding in his head from the silence that nature offered.

Wrinkles had formed under his eyes and a gaunt face from a harvest that is not full. His stomach was intolerable, the sounds of emptiness that he didn't want to fill yet knew he needed to.

"Loki, if you want me to suffer then you might as well give me some food," Ragnar told the still air that never blessed him with a breeze, "I will last longer then so, more fun for you."

The words he spoke did not sound delusional or crazy to him. They sounded logical, he wondered occasionally about returning to his life and family but there was always this small lingering piece of doubt in his mind. The one that told him to wait.

"Or is it the Christian Devil that is torturing me?"

It was neither, the pain was only there to be lifted and then reinstated by La Belle Dame sans Merci.

---

La Belle Dame knew she had power. She knew it as she felt the earth move under her feet as it tilted around the sun. Power that she could not explain because she did not remember her time before Ragnar Lothbrok. It had only ever been him and her. Together but separated by the gods.

She thought she knew what power she held and she believed that it was all she needed. But she lacked the most crucial; control of her own heart.

She could put one of her feet in front of the other and peek behind trees and peer over grass at Ragnar in the clearing, she could call to him and never hear her voice leave her mouth. SHe could try and change fate but not even a servant of the gods could achieve the impossible

She was like the King in many ways, she questioned which voices in her mind were hers, the gods or the demons. And that's why his words - his doubt and curses - were like daggers shattering her porcelain heart.

He wasn't doomed to suffer alone; she was here, she had always been here. She was the ghostly presence you felt in an empty room, the warm touch on your arm and the shiver that came over your back when she traced her finger down it.

La Belle Dame had been there in Ragnar's darkest hours and the times when he was blinded by the shining sun on the horizon. And now she had granted herself permission to be with the man, the man she fully believed she loved and love is an emotion not even the gods can control.

Love drove La Belle Dame on. How else could she describe the feeling? What else did she have to compare it too?

"I love thee." She whispered to the crows. The women took this decree of love as her permission.

Permission to touch Ragnar with her own fingers and intoxicate herself with his coldness and fill him with love.

She believed she was here to be somebody to Ragnar, a person he has never had and never will have again. La Belle Dame wants to be his saving grace, but love doesn't always save, sometimes it destroys.