Sea Jewel

Sea Jewel is a historical romance by the American writer Penelope Neri, published in 1986. It is the first book of her Viking trilogy.

Freya is eighteen years old when she is captured in battle, and she is outraged that her captor takes no account of her noble birth and treats her as he would any other woman taken in a raid; she swears to take her revenge on him. Alaric is the prince who captured her, and his intention is not simply to hold her but to humiliate the daughter of a man he has hated for years, which is why he means to keep her as a slave in his own household. The novel is set between the Viking world and the courts of the period and follows the two of them as the positions of captor and captive become less clear than they were at the beginning, and as the reasons Alaric had for taking her matter less to him than they did.

Neri wrote the book as the first of three connected Viking romances, and it belongs to the wave of historical romances in the 1980s that set their stories at the meeting point between Viking raiders and the kingdoms they attacked.