Hild

14

EADFRITH THE ELDEST ÆTHELING continued to pursue the Saxons south and west. Osric returned to Arbeia, but Breguswith stayed. Since her baptism, she and the queen had reached some kind of understanding whose shape Hild was still trying to fathom. The queen’s good word spread: Her mother was once again the woman that women went to with their pains and troubles. The baptism had changed the spin pattern of the whole cloth. Edwin paid more attention to Paulinus and less to Hild. It wouldn’t last long—the king would change his mind, it’s what he did—and meanwhile, he was no longer concerned that Hild bring him Fursey. What was one homeless, hunted priest with a wrongly shaved head to him?

Cadfan died and Cadwallon became king of Gwynedd. Edwin brooded, then married Osfrith, his second son, to Clotrude, second daughter of Clothar, king of the Christian Franks. He would draw more Romish weft to his warp. Let Cadwallon eat that.

Osfrith seemed stunned by marriage. Gwladus reported to Hild that, according to Arddun, Osfrith and Clotrude screamed like stuck pigs every night. The gesiths, including the handful of Franks who had accompanied Clotrude, teased the ætheling without mercy. The Franks wore crosses, very like those worn by the newly baptised Anglisc: squat, heavy things, easily mistaken for the hammers the majority of gesiths still wore. Most gesith crosses were bronze. Some silvered copper. Cian’s was gold.

Hild and Cian took to walking along the river at the end of the day when they might go unnoticed. He wore both his sword, with its gold hilt ring from Hild’s uncle the king, and his cross, a gift from his godmother the queen, with the same mix of pride and wariness.

Larks crisscrossed the deepening sky as they walked west along the river’s inside bend, where the flow was sluggish and water bugs dimpled the surface. Hild walked with her skirts kilted up. It was the first hot day of the year, and there was no one to see but Cian.

“I wish we were by the bird cherry at Goodmanham,” she said. “There always seemed to be a breath of wind there.”

“Breath of the tree sprites, you said.”

“You believed me.”

“I did.”

“You believed me, too, about the frog who swallowed the heart of a hægtes.”

“I did not.”

“You did.” The birdsong was fading. Crickets chirred in their place. “Did you ever believe I was a hægtes?” He didn’t say anything and she couldn’t read his face in the gathering twilight. “I don’t mind.”

He stopped, took her arm, a hard grip just below her elbow. “Yes, you do.” His voice was rough as a blacksmith’s file, his eyes a deeper blue than the sky. “We all care, we always care, what they say of us.”

He let go. They walked on. She rubbed her arm.

“You are not a hægtes.”

She walked with her chin up, not understanding why her eyes were suddenly brimming.

“You know the gesiths sing songs about you?”

“I’ve heard them.” She fell behind a moment and surreptitiously blotted her cheek with her shoulder.

“Not all of them.” Now there was a smile in his voice, an encouragement, the kind of tone he’d use to gentle a horse before changing gait. “In their songs you might be a hægtes, but you’re their hægtes. You’re the seer who saved Bebbanburg and revealed a conspiracy of kings. Who falls from trees to kill a dozen Lindseymen with one blow. And offers to gut irritating æthelings who get in your way.”

“They know about that?”

“They know the song. Coelwyn wrote it. He got the story from Lintlaf. There’s a chorus that’s very catchy: I swear I’ll gut you, like a leveret, and fling your parts to feed the royal dogs.”

“A leveret?”

“Sometimes he sings sucking pig, for the funny version.”

The funny version.

They walked for a while. Soft shadows pooled between the trees. Soon bats would swoop in place of larks. Dusk. The in-between time, when ælfs might watch quietly from behind the hawthorn, and it was easy to talk, even in Anglisc. “The ætheling was called Ælberht.”

Cian simply nodded.

“I meant to kill him. I could have. But he was afraid. He looked in my eyes and was afraid.”

“Men are, when it comes to it.”

“He wasn’t a man. Don’t you see? That’s the point. He was just a boy.” The trees were denser here, growing almost to the edge of the river. He wouldn’t be able to see her face. “But in three years he’ll have a sword and know how to use it, and I won’t. He’ll be no taller than me, no faster, no more royal, but he’ll have a sword and I won’t. And if he angers me and I draw my seax in earnest he’ll just lay his hand on his sword hilt and I’ll have to bend my head.”

“Not if I’m there. Or the brothers Berht. Or Grimhun or—”

“But you’re sworn to the king, not to me.”

The ring on his hilt tinked dully as he fiddled with it.

“Teach me.”

The creak and scritch of tree frogs rose suddenly, and just as suddenly fell. Swords were man magic. It would be his death if he was caught, ringed sword or no. They would nail him to a tree, pull his lungs through his back ribs, and spread them like wings.

Eventually he said, “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t want to.”

They were clear of the trees. A fan of cloud in the west reflected the last rose-gold light. She touched his arm. “Stop. Please.”

He stopped, turned, faced her, back to the horizon. His face was in shadow. He could be a wight, risen from a barrow, glinting with gold. But she could smell him, she could hear the creak of his belt as he breathed.

“I was at Lindum. I don’t want to be a gesith. I want to know how to beat a man with a sword. Perhaps with an axe.” Women cut wood sometimes. It might be thought odd to walk about with an axe thrust through her girdle, but it was not forbidden. “One on one, sword against axe, could I do it?”

“No.”

“You brought a message from Onnen: to watch my back. Help me. If not an axe, then what?”

After a moment he said, “A club.”

“A club? Against a sword?”

“Swords aren’t magic.”

“That’s not what you used to think.” She remembered his singsong recitations about his imaginary sword: snakesteel blooded in battle, bitter blade, widow-maker, defender of honour and boast, winner of glory. Of course they were magic. Just not for her.

He ignored her. “Show me your wrists.”

She held out her arms.

He circled a wrist with each hand. “Big, for a woman. Now make fists.” He tightened his grip. “Spread your fingers.”

It hurt but she forced her fingers wide.

“Good.” He let go. “You need strong wrists for a club. But they already call you hægtes. How would you explain a club in your belt?”

“I wouldn’t carry it all the time.”

“A weapon’s no use if it’s not to hand. A gesith is always ready.”

“I’m not a gesith.” She pondered. “How about a staff? They’re everywhere. The handle of a rake, a spade, a broom—”

“Or a crooked tree limb by a pool?”

She laughed. “We are us!”

He sighed. “We are us.”

The midges were breeding and biting when Eadfrith brought back the remainder of the war band. Cwichelm and Cynegils had escaped.

Hild, alerted by a message from Begu, who’d had it from the queen, was sitting in the shadow by the hall’s western door by the time Eadfrith, filthy and stinking of horse and worse, arrived and took a seat at the board with Edwin, his counsellors, the glazed-looking Osfrith, and Paulinus. Hild laid her left arm carefully on her lap, palm up, to hide the scabbed slice along her left forearm where the tip of Cian’s sword had caught her. The great bruise on her shin was covered by her dress. Her mother, by the queen, gave her a look. Hild wondered if she’d winced.

Gesiths—Cian among them—lounged nearby pretending to dice and drink.

“The West Saxons had help,” Eadfrith said. “From Penda.” He paused to strip the meat from a cold pork rib with his teeth. His normally pale hair—like Osfrith, he had inherited the gilt hair of his mother—was dark with sweat and dull with dust. “I left Tondhelm to treat with the Dyfneint, with a score of swords at his back. I told him to help them rebuild Caer Uisc. We can’t have the Mercians and West Saxons”—he paused to drink and the hall was so quiet Hild heard his every gulp—“can’t have them joining forces without argument. Not now, not with Cadwallon king.”

“No,” Edwin said. He pushed a loaf at his son. “What’s the mood?”

“Cadwallon, they say, is eager for a fight.”

“We’ll make him bend the knee.” Edwin scratched his chin. He gestured at Stephanus to make a note, and said to Eadfrith, “In a fortnight, once you’re rested, you’ll take the war band to Gwynedd.”

Eadfrith glanced at Osfrith, clean and well fed, then at his father.

Edwin leaned forward. “That’s my word.”

Hild breathed softly. Since the attempt on his life, Edwin couldn’t abide being questioned, even sideways. He trusted no one. Lesser folk would be whipped around a tree for such insolence. The gesiths paid attention to their dice.

But then Edwin laughed and tossed another loaf at Eadfrith, who caught it without thinking. “Of course it must be you. You’re the eldest. Besides, your brother’s still mazed with marriage.” He raised his hand so the garnet glinted blood-red. “You’ll wear my token and speak with my voice.”

Breguswith looked thoughtful. Hild wished she could talk to Fursey. She had no idea what path her mother’s thoughts might be taking.

Just inside the elm wood west of Sancton, in a glade where dragonflies glinted like enamelled pins as they swept the air clean of midges, where just a week ago Hild had seen a young fox play-stalking a hare and the leaves smelt of afternoon sun and unstirred dust, Cian swung hard and two-handed at Hild’s neck. Hild met his blade with her staff, met it at the right angle with the right speed so that oak and steel rang and sprang apart. Cian lifted his left hand, palm out, sheathed his sword, and reached for the new shield leaning against a gnarled crabapple.

While he attended to the business of adjusting his straps, Hild sighted down her staff to make sure the sword hadn’t weakened it. It was unmarked. She was getting better at judging the angle to swat aside the flat of the blade. She wiped her forehead with her forearm and hitched her kilted shift tighter. There was no wind. There had been little rain for a fortnight. The glade sweltered.

A wood pigeon called from deeper in the trees. A flick of red caught her eye as a robin redbreast hopped on the fallen trunk nearby. She had seen him here before. Sometimes he pretended to study the clump of blue speedwell by the mouldering roots or to peck for ants on the flaking bark, but Hild thought he just liked to know what was going on.

She twirled the staff in her hand, enjoying the heft and balance. She liked oak best, it was hard and sure, solid as an ox’s shoulder under her hand. Ash was more plentiful—broken and discarded spears, or green poles cut from one of the coppices found near every royal vill—and whippy, which had its advantages. Birch was soft wood, and light, almost useless. Elm wasn’t much better—softer than oak, less whippy than ash. But if she had to, she could fight with a staff made of anything, whether smoothed and seasoned heartwood or a knobbed bough recently fallen.

She preferred something her own height and as thick as a boar spear, but she had practiced with axe handles, with split-lathe poles and a lumpy cudgel made of blackthorn root. Wood was everywhere, as common as air; she always had a weapon to hand. She practiced with Cian every day and often when she was alone. The exercises came easily: She had spent time every day of her childhood stamping and swinging alongside Cian and his wooden sword. In addition to her tree-climbing calluses she now had a knot against the inside of both middle fingers. She had distinct muscles along both forearms that danced when she rippled her fingers, and shoulders as wide as a stripling. She knew the strength and speed needed to send a man’s sword flying, to crack his neck, to sweep his feet from under him or punch out a rib. She knew the play of muscle from its anchor on the ribs, across the front of her chest, and running up over her collarbone like a rope over the lip of a well. She knew the knack of using her fingers and the muscles in her forearms to lift the tip of the staff just a little, until it balanced itself, as one dairy bucket on a yoke balances the other. She knew pain. But she’d had worse falling out of trees. Pain was just pain. She healed quick as a young dog.

Now, with a full-length oak staff, a moment’s warning to get distance, and an opponent without a shield, she might not lose.

Shields, though. Shields were a problem.

Cian had a new one, painted with his colours: the red and black of that first baldric Hild and Begu had made at Mulstanton. Fine red leather around the rim. With the spoils of his fighting against the West Saxons he had persuaded the smith to add a layer of gleaming tin to the iron boss and two silvered fish mounts, one on either side. He breathed on it now and rubbed it with the hem of his tunic.

“Very pretty,” Hild called, and edged east a little, so that when he looked up from his strap and buckle the sun was in his eyes. “But while you hurred and polished, I stole the sun.”

He just smiled his crooked smile, slid a hand through the straps, and swung the shield up. Reflected sunlight leapt from the boss and dazzled her. She jumped to one side but he was too fast. He ran at her, knocked the staff away with his shield, and walloped her across her left hip with the flat of his blade. She went down—but rolled efficiently to her feet, remembering to avoid the fallen tree, blinking furiously, trying to see, testing her weight on her left leg. It held. He’d pulled his blow, again, and outwitted her, again.

They circled each other warily. Hild kept her gaze very slightly unfocused and spread wide, as she did in the woods, to see change: the unmoving shadow, the flick of a fox ear against wind-bent grass, the hunching back ready for the spring. With Cian it was the trick he had of moving the point of his sword a finger’s width to the right before he moved his feet. While she watched, she let her own feet find their way; she knew every root, every rut and hare scrape, every fallen bough in this glade.

“So will you ask to go with Eadfrith to Gwynedd?”

“Why?” He feinted with his shield but Hild didn’t blink.

“Because you’re a gesith and there might be glory.”

“Glory,” he said. The healing bite on his jaw darkened very slightly; he leapt in the air, sword high, but Hild wasn’t there when he landed.

They were both breathing harder now.

“What’s wrong with glory?” She shifted her grip slightly, watching, watching. His new shield seemed heavier than his old one. She could find a way to use that. “You’re a sworn gesith.”

“Sworn to the king, not his son,” he said.

Hild stabbed with the end of her staff at his face and, fast as a tiddler squirting from its nest, again at his knee. She almost got him. “You’re slow with your pretty new shield.”

“It’s yew.”

Hild nodded. Denser, springier, harder than lime. Good for a shield wall. Good against axes and thrusting spears. She feinted. He feinted. They circled. The robin flew off, offended.

“Besides,” Cian said, “there won’t be fighting. You heard the king. It will be all talk talk talk. That’s why he’s sending Eadfrith. Cadwallon will bend the knee.”

“He might not.” Those warps were not yet ready to be woven into the same tapestry.

He didn’t respond. She blinked hard and shook her head, as though she had something in her eye. But he knew her too well and didn’t take the bait. She would have to distract him some other way.

“Cadwallon hates Edwin king.”

“He’s always hated the king. What does it matter? You know the songs: Cadwallon’s word turns corners no one else can see. He’ll smile and bow while we’re there, and lead an army when we’re not looking. But it’s just Gwynedd.”

“Just Gwynedd? Land of heroes! Remember Gwyrys: Bull of the host, oppressor of the battle of princes.”

“We’re all Anglisc now.” His attention never wavered.

“You had your first sword from Ceredig of Elmet!”

“He’s dead. To be wealh is to be dead or a slave.”

“Cadwallon is a king. Not a slave, not dead.”

He shrugged. He made it look easy, despite the sword, despite the shield. Wouldn’t he ever get tired?

“Do you remember those little streams in the dell at Goodmanham?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. By the boggy place, where the hægtes frog lived.”

He smiled. “I didn’t believe you.”

“You did.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

They both laughed, but didn’t stop circling.

“Besides, they weren’t streams,” he said, “they were trickles. Not much bigger than the sweat running down your face.”

Now she wanted to wipe her face with her shoulder. Oh, he was clever. “Trickles, then. Little, harmless—on their own. But if they joined together, they’d cut through that soft bank in a week.” She tried a lunge followed by a swift uppercut. Nearly. “Penda’s Mercian trickle has already joined the Saxon trickle of Cwichelm and Cynegils—”

“And if Gwynedd joins them they’ll wash us all away. Yes.” He lifted his sword high and back, and his shield over his body. “But they won’t join Mercia.”

Hild retreated, unsure of his intent. “They might. Because Cadwallon hates Edwin king.”

Cian advanced. “Aye, he hates like a wealh.” Cut. “And like a wealh he won’t say so to an Anglisc face.” Cut. Backhand cut. “And any vow he makes will be a worthless wealh vow.” Thrust.

He sounded hard, bored, careless. A stranger. And he kept coming. She swung hard, right, left, but the shield was always there and the oak and painted yew thumped dully.

His lips skinned back. The vein in his neck throbbed. He swung hard, at her ribs, edge-on. She only just deflected it. He kept coming. She backed away.

“Cian…”

He wasn’t listening. She swung at his head, at his legs, even at his wrist. But it was a big shield, and he didn’t seem tired at all.

He came on like the tide, relentless, eyes hard and blank as blue slate. She stabbed, she swung, she stepped back and back.

Her back was against a tree. Nowhere to go. He raised his sword.

The world slowed. A dragonfly glinted to her left. She could see each back-and-forth of its see-through wings, as though the air they beat was as thick as honey.

He was so close: sweat inching its way over the great vein in his neck; his tunic dark with it, and his hair. Did her hair, too, turn that shade, dark wet chestnut, at the temple? He smelt as tangy as new cheese.

“I win,” he said, and the world turned again with its usual speed. He grinned and lowered his shield. “You looked as though you expected to wake in the hall of Woden.”

She laughed, harsh and metallic with relief. She wanted to shout and hug him but settled for pushing herself off the tree with a writhe of her spine and giving him a friendly thump across his rump with her staff.

They sat by the river, by the smooth slope of an otter slide and a fallen alder rotting into pinkish punk. She dabbled her feet in the water. He sat cross-legged, whittling a fist-size lump of pale fawn birch.

She breathed the rich scent of the dark water, the reeds, the glossy mud.

She said, “I thought you’d gone mad.” He didn’t say anything, the way only he could: an easy silence, no hurry to know. “The things you said, your face.”

He looked up. “We were fighting.”

“What you said about wealh. Did you mean it?”

“We were fighting.” He turned the nub of wood in his hands. It was the beginnings of a duck.

“It sounded true.”

“I’d say I wanted to fuck your mother if it would make you blink.” Now it was her turn to say nothing while he whittled. Perhaps she wasn’t as good at it as he was: He cut too deep.

He sighed and threw the birch in the river.

“Perhaps I did mean it.” He sheathed his knife. “In the shield wall I must be one of many, one of the same. Anglisc, not wealh. To the man on my right my mother is the lady of Mulstanton; to the man on my left, I’m a thegn’s foster-son. We’re all king’s gesith.”

“Don’t hate her,” she said. “She’s your mother.”

He threw a pebble into the river.

“Is her word worthless? Was Ceredig’s? He gave you your sword—”

“A wooden sword.”

“—as he would any prince of the blood at that age. A sword from the hand of a king.”

“A prince of the blood…” He aimed to sound careless. “Yet my mother never spoke of it.”

They had grown up closer than most brothers and sisters, played together naked as eels. He would know if she lied outright.

“She didn’t need to: He gave you the sword.”

“But not in public.”

“Does it need to be witnessed for it to be real here?” She tapped his breastbone with two fingers. It made a round sound, like a drum. A strong sound. She leaned back on her hands. “You had your first sword direct from the hand of a king, and your mother was a royal cousin. Royal, of the blood of Coel Hen. The same blood as Cadwallon. Go with Eadfrith to Gwynedd. Look your royal cousin in the eye. See again a king in a king’s hall—a king from a line ancient when my people were over the sea. And when Eadfrith—or Osfrith if he’s not so married by then—is sent to Craven to take it from Dunod, go there, too. Meet your people—the warriors, the kings, the bards at their harps.”

“Perhaps I will.” He threw another pebble. “But it will still be all talk talk talk. They’re even sending priests. Priests don’t fight.”

Hild shook her head. “Paulinus is a Roman bishop. Fursey says wealh bishops and Roman bishops are like cats and dogs. The one will always hiss and the other bark. The wealh bishops will never kiss the Crow’s Roman ring, not even if Cadwallon bends the knee to the king. Paulinus wants Cadwallon to fight and die. Otherwise he can’t be overbishop of the isle, to Edwin’s overking.” Kings picked the chief priest who then picked the underpriests. It was how it had always been. The name of the god didn’t matter.

Cian considered that. “So no matter what presents Edwin sends or what pretty words Eadfrith speaks, Paulinus will spoil it all by flinging insults about like a dog shaking off the rain?”

Hild nodded. “Cats and dogs. They won’t be able to help it.”

He pulled a plate of bark from the alder and drew his knife. “I’m still not sure I want to go to Gwynedd. Eadfrith… worries me.”

She remembered the Eadfrith of long ago, nuzzling a girl in the heather, laughing, telling her Hild was a hægtes in a cyrtel. She had never liked him.

He turned the bark this way and that in the light. “Eadfrith’s like the king.”

“The king has won all his battles.”

“But he has a dint in his arse from sitting so much on the fence.”

“He does jump, in the end.” But she wondered about her mother’s thoughtful look.

“But will Eadfrith?”

“Um?” She thought about it. “It depends how many men the king sends.”

He tossed the bark into the river. It floated away like a tiny raft. He sheathed his knife. “Lintlaf thinks the Gwynedd war band is fourscore.”

Triple the enemy number was usually held to be the right number for overwhelming force: a guarantee of Cadwallon bending the knee. But twelvescore was a lot of men to send just for a talk, especially when the West Saxons and Mercians were allied, Elmet unsecured, and the harvest due.

She fished her carnelians from her purse and wrapped them around her wrist. “Still, you should go. Meet your people.” She let the beads flash in the sun and grinned. “Besides, you might get presents.”

Five days later Edwin sent Eadfrith west with Paulinus and four priests, sixscore gesiths, and Cian. Osfrith went back to making Clotrude squeal every night—and during the day, too, Gwladus said, and in this heat!—Edwin to brooding like a moulting hawk in his hall, and Æthelburh and James the Deacon to conferring about music.

“I don’t know what she sees in it,” Begu said to Hild as they counted the skeins of yarn from Elmet that Breguswith had asked them to sort. “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. That makes threescore of the red. It’s nothing you can hum.” She pulled a soft sack closer and peered dubiously at the green skeins inside. “And this is nothing we can use.” She lifted a badly dyed hank of wool to the light. “More yellow than green.”

Hild was thinking about the king. Dint in his arse indeed. Sixscore against fourscore. A bold war leader certain of his men might force a battle at those odds. But if Eadfrith did not no one would call him craven out loud. Not in enemy territory. Cian would be angry. But at least he’d be safe.

“They should be whipped.”

“Um?”

“The Elmetsætne. They should be whipped.”

At least it was Anglisc people she wanted to whip this time. “Give it to me.” Hild pulled a thread from the skein and rolled it between forefinger and thumb. Poor stuff: short-fibred, coarse, and uneven. Not even worth redyeing. She would tell her mother. Her mother would tell the king that he was being fed worthless goods as tribute from the leaderless Anglisc of Elmet. Edwin would brood further and build elaborate stories in his head about why he had not yet brought Elmet firmly into the Northumbrian fold. “Put everything back in the sacks,” she said. “Gwladus will carry it— Where is Gwladus?”

“Spitting in Lintlaf’s mead, I expect.”

Lintlaf had returned from the West Saxon campaign with a fistful of gold and the news that he’d turned down an offer of Dyfneint land, Because why would I want to live so far from all the action, with no one to talk to but wealh? And when he pulled Gwladus onto his lap she had not resisted—she was a slave, what choice did she have?—but later Begu had seen her spit in the cup she filled for Lintlaf and hand it to him, smiling.

Hild went to find her mother. She told her of the wool.

Breguswith listened, nodding.

“You’re not surprised,” Hild said.

“They have no lord. No one to protect them or watch for them in bad times. So they protect themselves and hoard their best against the day, yet know they should send the king something so he’ll leave them alone. Meanwhile, he tells himself they’ll come to him of their own accord.” She smiled. “So let’s not worry the king with this just yet. Let’s wait for news from Gwynedd. Why take an unnecessary risk? No. Always approach kings with answers, not questions.”

In bed that night, Hild listened with half an ear while Begu wondered aloud if Wilnoð, the queen’s gemæcce, might be pregnant. “It would explain the handfasting to Bassus in such a hurry.”

Hild, still thinking about her mother, said, “Listen to everything the queen says.”

“You already told me that.”

“I mean it.”

“You didn’t mean it before?”

Hild closed her eyes. How did Begu always make simple things seem so slippery?

“I need information.”

“Why?”

“My mother is… She’s planning something. Making up a pattern to weave all the threads into, to tell a story. I want to know if it’s based on anything real. Listen carefully for anything about the north. Or the king’s sons. Please?”

Begu made an indistinct noise: She was falling asleep. She fell into sleep like a stone into a well. She always had, even in her little linden-wood bed in Mulstanton. There was no stopping her once she started to drop.

Hild talked anyway. Of Osric—he would be back from Arbeia at the mouth of the Tine once the harvest was in and the season’s last trade goods shipped—and how she wished her mother hadn’t taken his part. She didn’t understand why her mother was doing it. Their bodies didn’t lean towards each other the way Onnen’s and Mulstan’s did, or Lintlaf’s and Gwladus’s had. And Edwin didn’t trust him. It was just a matter of time. Then she wondered about Fursey: Was he in East Anglia with Hereswith yet? Would he like it there? She missed him—she missed the gleam of his wit, she missed his information. Where would she get information now? And Onnen: Had she had her baby? Was it a boy or a girl? Would it look like Onnen or Mulstan, or maybe Cian…

The moon rose. Begu snored gently.

In the weaving huts at Goodmanham the women worked in two sets of two. For days, the weather was perfect: steady sun and a light breeze from the northwest smelling of wildflowers and ripening corn. Hild, decent in veil band and girdle, strong hands disguised with rings, sometimes worked with her mother setting up loom patterns, but often with Begu and the queen and Wilnoð, relaxing in the back-and-forth of conversation about nothing in particular as they lifted the warps, shot the shuttle, and beat the weft. There were advantages to being ignored by the king.

Hild studied Wilnoð. She looked as plump as a winter wren. Begu was right.

The infant Eanflæd lay on her stomach on a striped cloth by Æthelburh’s feet, wriggling about, sometimes lifting herself onto her hands and being surprised by the late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the open roof door, sometimes stretching her hands in the direction of the hanging loom weights and cooing. Whenever Æthelburh or Wilnoð spoke, Eanflæd looked at them and beamed gummily. Her hair and eyelashes were fine and sooty, darker even than Æthelburh’s. Very like those of Cygnet, Hild’s mare.

Hild stood and stretched. Her fingertips brushed the thatch.

The queen said to Wilnoð, “Look at that. Like a young oak. I doubt even Bassus could reach so high.”

“Oh, he could. If he jumped.” They laughed at the very idea of red-cloaked Bassus so risking his dignity.

“Cian could,” Begu said. “I think.”

Perhaps Hild only imagined the queen and Wilnoð deliberately not looking at each other.

But then Begu was talking about Eanflæd—she’d be teething soon, no doubt, look how she was drooling, and she bet that Hild’s fine carnelian beads would never be safe again, the baby would always be wanting to stuff them in her mouth. From there they talked of the best smooth stones for a baby to gum—Æthelburh claimed to have had an agate circle to chew as a child, “The very colour of your eyes,” she told Hild—and what herbs worked best when the endless wailing and bleeding gums began. They had reached a discussion of fennel when Hild felt the vibration of hoofbeats, a horse ridden at speed. Then they all heard it, followed by the messenger’s shout: “News for the king! News from Gwynedd!”

The hall didn’t have the light of the weaving hut but it was too hot for torches. Edwin sat in his great chair, his gesiths ranged about him, Coelfrith at his right hand, and the tufa looming behind him in the shadow and half-light.

He was livid.

Hild glanced at the messenger, sitting on a bench out of the way, trying to eat while the scop pestered him with questions. She would have to wait her turn for news of Cian.

Everyone was there, waiting to hear Edwin’s pronouncement: the gesiths, James the Deacon, Coifi and one of his underpriests, a visiting emissary from Rheged, even dazed-looking Osfrith. On the women’s benches on the left side sat the queen and her ladies, including Breguswith and Begu, most giving a decent appearance of spinning.

Edwin stood.

“Am I not the overking of the Angles?” No one was foolish enough to speak. “It was a simple enough message. Acknowledge me overking and keep your miserable mountain fastness. Hard to misunderstand.” He looked around the assembly, settled on the emissary from Rheged. “Wouldn’t you say?”

The emissary, there only to deliver the news of the death of Rhoedd the Lesser, said carefully, “Perhaps Cadwallon king did not misunderstand, lord.”

“Don’t name that nithing king in my hall!” Edwin roared. “Soon he’ll be king of nothing! He will kneel at my feet in shackles and watch as I burn his hall and use his women and sell his children as slaves. I’ll hack off his limbs and stake them at the four corners of his land. I’ll salt his fields. I’ll tear out the tongues of those who speak his name. I spit on him!”

He spat on the rushes before him. One by one, every man in hall hawked and spat.

Hild refilled James the Deacon’s cup with Rhenish wine. “I imagine the bishop’s anger was almost as great as the king’s,” she said. Worse, the messenger had told her. He’d also told her that Cian had sent her a message: He had a bold new cloak from his kin. Hild had given the messenger a ring pulled from her thumb and tucked away the news to ponder later.

James nodded, sipped. “The letter was in Stephanus’s hand, of course, so it was smooth and bold as usual—a lovely hand that man has, lovely. If he sang half as well as he wrote… No, no. No more for me. Oh, very well, just a little.”

“So Paulinus was angry.”

“Incandescent. He said to make sure that by the time he got back every single wealh priest was to be gone from Goodmanham. Even that pathetic wisp up by the well.”

“The priest of Saint Elen?”

“Even so. And then we must rid the entire kingdom, he said. Rip them out, root and branch. All spies, he said. But I doubt most of them can even read, never mind write secret messages to a king they’ve never seen. And how I’m supposed to do it all in two days I don’t know.” He shook his head, setting his grey curls abounce. He pushed his cup aside with regret and tapped the brown-bound book on the bench. “Now. Where did we get to yesterday?”

“James, son of Zebedee and brother of John.”

James beamed. “Most beloved of Christ.”

“Yes,” Hild said. She liked hearing James’s stories. She liked his accent, hot and spicy as mulled wine. Even his Latin, when he spoke it: such a different Latin to Fursey’s.

“I visited his shrine you know. In Iberia. Gold, gold everywhere, studded with gems of every colour. More gems than stars in the sky. And, oh, the singing there. Like the angelic host. It makes me weep to think of it.”

She refilled his cup. “Did James like music?”

“Of course he liked music! He was the brother of the beloved of Christ! His soul was as fine as silk, and as pure. He lived in a country full of sun and wine and fine food. Until the wicked Herod Agrippa struck off his head with a sword. Is that all kings can think of, swords?”

Then he was off, talking of swords and how they should all be thrown in the sea, that life should be love and music, a heaven on earth of angels and sunshine, of wine flowing like water, and kings of ancient and settled lineage whose people were all happy, all obedient to their church, and of priests who tended their flock and didn’t worry about kings and armies and imaginary spies!

Gwladus caught her as she was leaving the deacon’s rooms. “Herself wants you to eat with her in hall.” She handed Hild a ring—a yellow stone, big and gaudy, though not as heavy as it looked—to replace the one the messenger now wore. Hild slid it onto her thumb. “Hold still,” Gwladus said. She adjusted Hild’s veil band. “Osric is back. With Oswine.”

Hild sighed.

“Shall I say I couldn’t find you?”

Hild shook her head. “Go find Begu. Tell her Cian’s safe and will be back the day after tomorrow.”

Gwladus nodded, and Hild knew the news that the men were returning in two days would be sold around the kitchen: a bannock cake here, a cup of milk there.

Hild sat with her mother and Osric and Oswine at a corner of the table. At the other end of the hall, gesiths sang something maudlin about hearth and hall. When Osric touched her mother’s hand, Hild kept her spine straight and her expression pleasant. It wouldn’t fool her mother but Osric wouldn’t know how much she longed to take her seax to his throat, to open it as she had opened that man’s forearm on the dock at Tinamutha. Instead, she twisted the new ring round and round, as any bored young maid might. It was slightly too big. It wasn’t nearly as fine as the one she’d given the messenger.

Oswine was paying more attention to the gesiths’ end of the hall, clearly longing to be one of them. Hild reminded herself to talk to him when no one might overhear.

“When is Eadfrith due back?” Osric said, not bothering to lower his voice: Grimhun, on the lyre, had clumsy hands, which only encouraged the other gesiths to sing louder to drown out the sour notes.

“Tomorrow,” Hild and her mother said together. They looked at each other.

“I had it from James, from Paulinus,” Hild said.

“From the queen herself,” said Breguswith.

“Then soon we’ll move on Elmet,” Osric said.

Hild and her mother nodded: of course. If Gwynedd and Mercia joined forces, Elmet would be the only buffer between the allied army and Northumbria, more important than ever. Edwin must secure it.

“He must garrison Elmet and name me as ealdorman.” Osric slapped the board with both hands. “And don’t even think about counselling me to more patience!” One or two gesiths glanced over. He leant forward. “I waited when he took Deira and Bernicia. I waited when he gave Lindsey to that soft-handed reeve. I’m Yffing. I have men, a strong son, healthy daughters. Elmet is mine by right. And I’m tired of waiting.”

Hild saw that he would not listen to her mother on this. So, clearly, did her mother: She did that thing women do that Hild didn’t yet understand. From one moment to the next her body turned pliant and soft: willow rather than oak.

“Yes, my lord, it should. And you should not wait. But overkings don’t take kindly to being pushed. So let me be the one. I have just the weight to tip the balance. That wool,” she said to Hild. She turned back to Osric. “Elmet shorted the wool tribute.”

It took him a moment—so slow!—but then he smiled. Short tribute was an insult. No king could ignore an insult. The smile widened his face and slitted his eyes, and with his sharp bright teeth glittering in the torchlight he looked less like a badger than a broad-headed stoat smelling the hens.

Breguswith smiled back and Hild was certain her mother pressed her knee to Osric’s under the board. “News best delivered by a woman who doesn’t stand to profit from it. Delivered to the queen, who will drop it in the king’s ear at the right moment. Be ready.”

But Elmet was not Lindsey, peopled by a rich trading nation of soft-handed merchants, and Edwin was a man of greater cunning and ambition than his cousin. He would gather Elmet to Northumbria with care, to hold for life: not only his but his heirs’, and theirs in turn. He would build a kingdom to last longer than song itself.

The moon waned and waxed and waned again, and the Winterfylleth moon was past the quarter when Coelfrith began to supervise the loading of the king’s wagons.

It was strange weather: a leaf turn earlier than anyone remembered followed by blue skies and biting cold. The leaves should have blazed in the sun, but they hung dully, like dead brown hands. Strangest of all was the wind. The wealh loading the wagons were chased by whippets of wind that blew one way then another, no rhyme or reason.

Wight weather, said the kitchen wealh. From the warm side of the kitchen doorway’s leather curtain, they watched the maid, sleeveless and with that staff she often had by her, lift her face just as a silent rush of shiny, black-edged clouds swarmed like silverfish across the sky. They shook their heads: The long-dead kings of Elmet and the Old North were stirring and planning mischief for Edwin Snakebeard.

Snakebeard knew it, agreed the baker and the cook—who stood, as befitted their rank, at the front, with a view of the goings-on. “For one thing,” said the baker, a man with thinning sandy hair and burns on his wiry forearms, “they’re yoking oxen—young oxen, mind—to the wagons for the trip out, but taking extra horses for the trip back. That means sacrifices. And he’s taking twoscore gesiths—but no women.” The maid didn’t count.

“You don’t need a war band to fight dead men,” said the cook, which astonished almost everyone, for the cook was not one to talk much, except with her hands. “Just the maid and her four pets.”

“Five,” piped up the basting boy, who’d had it from Arddun’s nephew, the message runner. “The brothers Berht, Eadric the Brown, Grimhun, and Cian Boldcloak.”

“Boldcloak’s not the maid’s pet!” said the baker’s lass with scorn, for the basting boy was newly arrived from the west and sorely ignorant. “I had it from Gwladus, the maid’s bodywoman. The maid and Boldcloak grew up together, like brother and sister!” The cook and the baker exchanged looks, but the lass didn’t notice, seeing only the chance to humiliate the new boy with her superior knowledge. “Don’t you know the song, how she gave him a secret knife and he used it to save the king’s life?”

A groom led out a string of horses: gesith mounts, with glittering headstalls and tooled leather girths.

“The pets going are all baptised,” the baker said. “The Crow’s hand, no doubt. And he’s taking five priests. Five. Elmet wood is full of wights.”

Behind him everyone crossed themselves deliciously.

“The maid’s from Elmet, long ago,” said the baker’s lass.

“I heard she’s half hægtes,” said the basting boy. “Or half etin!”

The lass snorted. “She’s twice royal so twice as tall! Everyone knows that.”

“What about Boldcloak, then?” said the boy. “He’s tall.”

At which point the cook slapped the back of his head with her meaty hand, the baker’s lass took the opportunity to elbow him in the ribs, and the undercook said, “At least Lintlaf will get a rest, poor man.” Knowing looks were exchanged. Gwladus, who of course went where the maid went, had expressed a certain unhappiness at the young gesith’s inclusion, so he was staying behind and, for a while, he would be free of grit in his gruel, beetles in his bedcloak.

“The Loides won’t,” said the baker. Osric’s men were all to take whips, which didn’t bode well for the wealth of Elmet.

They watched Coelfrith’s underreeve, a half wealh called Pyr, instructing the yardfolk to handle the sacks more carefully. As he walked away, the foreman flipped his fingers at Pyr’s back, and the yardfolk threw the sacks with renewed force.

“That’s a month’s worth of twice-baked bread,” said the baker. “And mead. More mead than even twoscore gesiths could drink in a fortnight. There’ll be feasting with the sacrifice.”

“Aye,” said the cook. “But feasting with who? Sacrifice to what? It’s a strange party. Strange weather. Strange days.”

As Hild had known it would, the rain started when the king’s party had made it barely a mile down the road from Goodmanham and hadn’t stopped even for a heartbeat since. She didn’t care. This felt like the first time on the war trail but better. This time she rode next to Cian—who wore his new cloak of red-and-black checks, densely woven from the little Gwynedd sheep that had run the West Welsh mountains since the time of the redcrests—with her four gesiths behind. Back on the second wagon, it was Gwladus, not Onnen, who rode with everything Hild could possibly need for a fortnight on the road. For once she didn’t have to sleep on hard ground, rolled in her cloak and hand on her seax. She didn’t have to share a bed with her mother or dream bitter dreams. She didn’t even spend every moment in dread of the king: He and Paulinus were wrapped in some plan on which they had not asked her counsel. Though she could guess what it was. Edwin wanted to win the Anglisc Elmetsætne without bloodshed; he wanted to be acknowledged rightful heir, not murdering usurper. Paulinus wanted to see every wealh priest driven into the river. Clearly the king had a use for her or she wouldn’t be here, but for now she was happy.

Usually wagons followed the old Roman road to Aberford and Berewith, where Ceredig, after Hereric’s death, had marched with his Loides to meet Edwin’s invading Anglisc, before fleeing to his ill-fated refuge in Craven. But after a conference with Paulinus, Edwin had ordered the party to strike west on the wood road to Caer Loid Coit, Ceredig’s hall at the heart of Elmet by the great River Aire.

The endless rain had turned what had been little more than a track into a sucking mess of mud and wheel-clogging leaves. Drivers cursed, oxen heaved, axles creaked—and two broke, but they were surrounded by the elm wood; axles were easy to replace.

The elm wood woke something in Hild. She found herself breathing faster, pausing mid-word and listening past the drip of rain and snort of men and beasts. Perhaps it was that no children ran alongside the horse, shouting, begging for an apple, a lump of bread, a meat pasty; no anxious local lords or their ladies were sent to ensure royal comfort.

They saw no wealh—no Loides, Hild reminded herself. By the time the royal party crossed a faint track to a settlement in the trees, its inhabitants had long since vanished, along with their pigs and dogs and iron cook pots. They did see Anglisc. Three times they crossed great clearings centred on sturdy homesteads, too modest to be called halls, flanked by outbuildings, with firewood neatly stacked, goats tethered, pigs penned, and watchful farmer and sons leaning on their spears, nodding at the tufa, which seemed boastful and tawdry in this dripping wood.

The first time they passed such a farm, Paulinus motioned to his priests and turned his horse from the path, obviously preparing to go make them kneel to their God. But Edwin shook his head. The second time, they’d heard the bleating of sheep but seen no sign of the animals. “Lord King, they’re hiding their riches,” the Crow said, but again Edwin gestured for him to stay with the wagons.

“They’re Anglisc, and proud. We’ll bring them to heel, but not yet.”

At their next stop—another wagon mired in the mud—Edwin sent for Cian. Hild came with him.

“That’s a fine cloak, boy.”

“A gift from Gwynedd, my king.”

“A wealh cloak, bright and bold.”

“Yes, my king,” Cian said.

“It wouldn’t hurt if you rode a little ahead of the wagons. Make sure you and your bright and bold wealh cloak are seen. Keep the maid at your side.”

Hild and Cian broke through the trees at the crest of the rise and looked down at Caer Loid Coit.

She remembered—as much from dream and song as from life—a grassy slope with a well-tended wide way leading to a massive blackthorn hedge and timber gate, around which some king of the long ago had thrown up a flinty earthwork and ditch, which in turn had gradually softened and greened over the generations. Then, the gates had stood open during the day; blue peat smoke seeped from the eaves of the mixed-timber and stone hall, and people went about their lives: the goosegirl with her hazel switch, the milkmaid—such red hands; she hadn’t remembered that for years—the old man with the leather apron who sharpened sickles in summer, butcher knives in autumn. She smelt the ghosts of toasting malt, sour mash, and, from the orchards to the north and west, apples. Past the apples and plums had stood the tiny stone church whose scruffy priest and his wife made the worst bannock cakes in all Elmet but who were always ready to smooth disputes between folk not mighty enough to be judged by the king. To the south and east of the enclosure, the hazel wood, ash coppice, and the elm wood full of jackdaws. Behind everything, the Aire, wide and slow. On the far bank, clothing the rise in gold and bronze—up and up, as far as one could see—the great forest of mixed oak and elm that gave the country its name.

The river was still there, and beyond it the oak and elm—the canopy thinner than it should be, with this early autumn—but there was no smoke, no people, no sound but the drip of rain and the pour of the river.

Cian’s mount stamped and sidestepped. Cygnet settled for turning her head against Hild’s slack rein and rolling her eye, trying to see what was upsetting her rider.

Ceredig’s royal enclosure lay dark and broken and forlorn: the gate torn down, the roofs fallen in, the coppice overstood. Scrub broke the once hard-packed dirt of corral and path, and bare saplings poked through the collapsing wattle of the goose pen. A buzzard wheeled at the crest of the far ridge, its belly flashing pale against the dark cloud. It called twice, kee-wik kee-wik, cut across the river, soared over the tangle of branches that had once been carefully tended rows of apples and plums, and vanished.

Hooves thumped up the rise behind them: Edwin, Paulinus, the tufa bearer, Coelfrith, Osric.

“So,” Edwin said, and the Anglisc word was lumpy and alien to Hild. “We’ll tear it down and build a better one.”

They tore it down: every stone, every gate, every leaning timber on the near side of the river.

Edwin’s men and the Crow’s priests strode into the trees, to the wealh houses with their just-returned pigs and unsuspecting owners, rounded up every able-bodied man, woman, and child, and drove them, clutching what they had in the way of billhooks and mattocks and mallets, to the ruined enclosure. Over the next fortnight, as the sun broke free of the clouds and the early autumn retrod its steps to a threadbare copy of late summer, Osric, with an eye to his own likes, supervised the cutting of every tree but one within five hundred paces of the ditch—every tall elm, every wide oak, sending up clouds of cawing rooks and jackdaws—even the orchard, though with patient snedding many of the trees could have been brought back. Paulinus insisted that the tiny church be pulled apart, stone by stone, though the wealh had to be encouraged with ox goads for that. The font and altar stone, finely carved, he put on a cart.

It was seeing the thorn hedge torn up and burnt that made Cian rub his lip with his knuckle and turn away. Hild swapped her staff to her left hand and reached past his cloak with her right and tugged his belt, as she had long ago, and they walked to the river.

“Those roots were planted in the days of Coel Hen,” he said in British.

“They grew strong in the days of Eliffer of the Great Retinue,” she said, in the rhythm of the dirge.

“And were mighty when the princes Gwyrgi and Peredur were born.” Amen, a priest would have said. Woe!, a bard.

Cian said, “My people.”

By the river, gesiths were throwing stones at the roots of the lone willow where one had spied a fish shadow. Chub or perch, she knew. She felt, suddenly, a memory of hot sun on her bare back as she and Cian squatted by the ditch, fishing for tadpoles under Onnen’s keen eye, though perhaps that, too, was part of some song she had made her own.

They turned and walked south along the bank. After a while they were among the elms. She remembered moss on her cheek, a stream of jackdaws crying Home now! Home!, the faint honk of geese. Something inside her threatened to break and spill.

“My people,” Cian said again. “Food for wolves, food for the ravens.”

She shook her head, trying to catch and pin the memory she knew was her own.

“They’re not dead?”

She shook her head again, and her memory eeled into the dappled shadows thrown by dreams and song.

“Then where are they?”

He was thinking of the men of the Old North, princes with their fish-scale mail and bright swords and mead-soaked voices. The glorious, arrogant dead. Not the flea-ridden, filth-caked Loides being whipped by Osric. She wanted to explain, but she couldn’t let go of the memory swimming now into the deep—and, in following it, was three again. She lifted the edge of his new cloak—the one that could have been the twin of the one worn by Cadfan’s messenger, Marro, had it not been red and black—and shook it.

He didn’t understand at first, but she pointed at the Loides and kept shaking it. Then he did.

“Those are not my people!” he said in Anglisc, and the memory dived away, deeper than she could follow.

She breathed carefully, as though unused to air. “Then whose are they?”

The Loides sat in small groups around their tiny fires, hunched in what rough cloth they had been able to snatch up when the Crow’s men herded them to the river.

Hild squatted by a woman who reminded her of someone—Guenmon maybe, someone sensible—and gestured for Gwladus to come forward with the basket. “Bread,” she said in British to the woman. “And hard cheese. You’ll see it’s shared?”

The woman looked at her. “I will. Your name, lady?”

“Hild.”

The woman nodded. “So tall. Like your da.”

“You knew him?”

The woman laughed. Hild was astonished by that laugh. It wasn’t bitter, not the laugh of a woman torn from her home and driven like a goat, but a laugh like spring, the laugh of a young girl. “Know the Anglisc king-in-exile!” Two other Loides looked up, though they were so hunched and dirty and the firelight so wavering that Hild knew that they were human only by their smell. “No, chickie, I used to watch him ride out past my geese, in his fine byrnie and thick blue cloak, and once he smiled at me, and I smiled at him, saucy-like, and dreamt in my foolish dreams that he might one day climb off his horse and say, Lweriadd, here’s a pretty for you, and a kiss.”

“You’re the goosegirl!”

“Aye, once upon a time.”

“I never knew your name.”

Gwladus snorted. Lweriadd. A lofty name for someone wrapped in sacking: Lweriadd, daughter of Belenos the sun god; Lweriadd, mother of Beli Mawr.

“Lweriadd of the Loides, enjoy your bread and cheese.”

“We’ll need more. And blankets. Or at least the time and tools to build a shelter.” She stabbed her thumb up at the gauzy clouds dimming the waxing moon: thin but dark, dark blue—the kind of blue any woman would kill to get from her dyes—a blue that meant more rain. “Tell that to the whipping thegn.”

“I’ll see you get them. If you don’t, ask for me or for Gwladus here.”

“Or for that fine lordling in the British cloak you walk about with?”

Wealh, even tired and hungry wealh—especially tired and hungry wealh—noticed everything. Hild nodded. “Cian, son of Onnen.”

“Ah.”

While the Loides toiled by the Aire, Edwin sat with his counsellors beneath the one great oak left standing. Beneath it, his men had built a rough shelter: a reed roof, one solid wall behind him, and painted leather curtains to each side. His tufa stood at his right hand, his scop on the left, and about a brazier his travelling court. Most perched on three-legged stools—if their body servants had thought to bring one; some stood.

Edwin said to Osric, “Take the men out to every farm and hamlet in Elmet. Tell the Anglisc to send men who can speak for them, to be here at the full moon.”

“They’ll be here.” He patted the whip in his belt. “If they like their skin.” His men laughed.

“They’re Anglisc, cousin, not wealh. Persuasion will work well enough. Promise them mead. I doubt they have anything at home but ale and milk. Mead and meat.”

“And song,” Hild said. Her stool was padded with a brown-and-marigold cushion.

The scop preened.

Edwin dismissed Osric with a pleasant smile and turned to Coelfrith. “Pyr will sort the feast. I need you to ride out on another task.”

The highfolk of Elmet and their spearmen would be his first shield wall, his buffer, should Gwynedd join with Mercia. But highfolk were only the crop of a land. To know the land itself, you had to know the fields the crop sprang from. You had to know the ways and byways of lesser folk.

When Coelfrith bowed and left, Hild followed him. He was only a dozen years Hild’s senior but lately his face was settling into worry lines like those of his father before he’d been named ealdorman of Lindsey.

“You’ll need men for this task who’ll behave,” she said. “I know who’d suit. You’ll need guides; I’ll find them. But I come with you.”

Coelfrith agreed. “Dawn.”

Hild went to find Lweriadd. She found her with a young girl and a stripling with a bruised arm, rolling a chunk of trimmed elm trunk to the foundation ditch of the new hall.

“The king requires a survey of Elmet: its strong places, sound and broken, and its husbandland, farmed and fallow.”

Lweriadd straightened. “Why should I care what he wants?”

The young girl spat. The stripling picked a splinter from the pad of his thumb, but Hild could tell from the cant of his head that he was listening. His chin had a look of Lweriadd and the bruise was very like those made by an ox goad.

“The king is not Osric Whiphand. And we are the king’s. We need folk we may trust to guide us.”

“We?”

“I ask it. Hild, daughter of Hereric, friend to the last king of the Loides. And Cian Boldcloak, who had his first sword from the hand of Ceredig king.” She nodded at the stripling. “And perhaps the guide may find less trouble while guiding than in the rolling of logs.”

They assembled at dawn in the white river mist: Coelfrith, Hild, Cian, Eadric, Grimhun, who had an eye for fortification, if no hand for the lyre, and the brothers Berht, who held torches that stained the mist an eerie red. Gwladus would stay by the river, Hild’s eyes and ears while she was gone.

With a swirl of mist, the stripling appeared, wearing a piece of patched cloak tied to his shoulders by an assortment of yarns and with nothing at his rope belt but a fist-size sack. The bruise on his arm had darkened from red to purple. He stood by Hild’s knee and touched a fist to his chest.

“Morud ap Addoc.”

She said to Coelfrith, “This is Morud son of Addoc, a man of the Loides commended to me.” She arranged her cloak and said to Morud in British, “You know what we want to see?”

That cant of the head. “The hard edges first, no doubt. Berewith and Aberford.”

“Berewith,” she said.

Morud trotted away, leaving them to follow in whatever order they chose.

At Berewith Grimhun shook his head without getting off his horse. “One good rain and water would run gushing through the wall, there, and soon your fort would be knee deep in mud.”

Berhtnoth tucked one foot up on his mount’s withers and scratched his left buttock. “So why did their king come here, then, if it’s so useless?”

Hild was watching Morud. “Tell us the story now, Morud ap Addoc, as we ride to Aberford. Tell us of the last of Ceredig king in Elmet. Was he fleeing?”

“He was not! He marched with his war band, proud and fair…”

Hild smiled to herself. They would all get dreamy-eyed and gesith-like now, for a while, lost in the just-so sparkle of setting sun on gilded armour, the brave snap and ripple of banners, the proud step of the horse. The marching through moonlight. The Anglisc didn’t even understand the words, but they knew the rhythm. And Cian, though he knew the song, would be lost for hours.

Ceredig had never made it to his last stand at Aberford. That was not his wyrd.

Grimhun fell in love with Aberford, the deep and narrow beck, the straight road with its sturdy bridge. “Look at that!” he said. “There’s no crossing it except by the bridge. And those walls! How high is that bank? It must rise eight paces. There’s even… yes.” He pointed at a narrow trench. “Just waiting for a stockade. Though they didn’t have time.” He scrambled down from his horse, which promptly began to crop the grass. “Banks, dikes, beck, a stone road…” He bent and cut the turf, ripped up a clod, crumbled the dirt between his fingers. “I could build with this.” He wiped his seax absently on his tunic, saying to Coelfrith, “With a score of men I could make this place tighter than a Lindsey maid’s—” He turned red and sheathed his seax without looking at Hild. “I could make it tight.”

Coelfrith dismounted, dug up his own clod. Sniffed his fingers. Hild could smell it from her mount: good dirt, rich, well drained. “How long would you need?”

“Good enough to delay an army? A month. Full moon after next, say.”

“And how fast could you make it strong enough to fight off a band of mead-mad farmers?” In case Edwin couldn’t win them with sweet words and strong drink.

“We’d need axes, shovels, rope—”

“I can have them here the day after tomorrow.”

Grimhun turned slowly, squinting. “And men?”

“I’ll bring them with the tools.”

“I’ll need a dozen, well fed.” Coelfrith nodded. “Seven days from today, then.”

They ate sitting on their cloaks on the south slope of Becca Bank.

“I’m happier out of that wood,” Berhtnoth said. “Drip drip drip.”

“It isn’t always like that,” Cian said.

“No,” said Berhtred. “Sometimes it snows.”

Cian threw a clod at his head.

They talked of the unusual weather: the early leaf fall, this unexpected sun.

“The first thing we’ll need is a shelter,” said Grimhun. “It won’t be warm when the sun goes down, and I know you’re all as soft as girls.”

Morud glanced at Hild, but she was used to the gesiths forgetting she was a woman unless it suited her for them to remember.

Later, she and Coelfrith walked east along the north bank of the fast-flowing beck, their shadows falling long before them. The ridge of Becca Bank, half a league long, followed the water. The ditch was rock-cut in places, and the rock had been used to buttress the north slope of the bank. They scrambled to the top of the rise.

He pointed to the south bank and another dike, almost as long, following the water at about fifty paces. “It’s a funnel.”

“Like a fish weir,” she said. Any invading army leaving the road to head west into the heart of the kingdom would be hemmed in, caught between the two lines, and slaughtered.

She squatted and laid her hand on the stone, staring down at the rushing water. An unsuspecting war band would startle when the spears flew. They would try to cross the beck to escape. They would drown. If Ceredig had marched half a day earlier, had had time to get to Aberford, even without the stockade. If Edwin hadn’t stolen the march. If her father hadn’t been poisoned like a dog.

Their fire burnt small and hot. A white, bright moon showed the picket line and the pale gleam of Cygnet’s shoulder as she shifted.

Grimhun was telling the tale of the seafarer from the lost land of the west. He couldn’t play the lyre, but he had a fine voice for the chant: the cry of a lonely gull, the slap of the water against the rudderless boat drifting, drifting in the mist. The brothers Berht took the verses of the seals. Coelfrith stared into the fire, face set in his habitual worried frown. Eadric dozed. Morud listened—Hild was sure he understood Anglisc well—and Cian whittled, pausing every now and again to tilt the wood to the fire or the moon.

Hild watched the delicate flex of his wrist. His rings glittered. The hairs on his fingers glowed like bronze wire one minute, silver the next. This way and that. He seemed to be taking unusual care with his little knife, flick, flick, pare. The wood was dense and twisted, a root of some kind, an old one. The shavings looked black.

The day dawned cool, with mare’s tails glowing pink in the not-yet-risen sun. Coelfrith and Eadric rode back to Caer Loid. Before they were out of sight Hild was calling Morud and Cian to her.

To the north and west, between the heartland of Elmet and the River Wharfe, lay the Whinmoor. Lonely land, said Morud, populated only by hare and partridge and peregrine, and the kind of wild men whom no one took in.

So they rode south and east, along the low-lying limestone escarpment that formed the eastern boundary of the Loid. The soil was well drained and loamy, crisscrossed with springs and becks and streams. Rich land. Everywhere on the gentle green slopes they saw sheep, like drifts of dirty cloud, but every flock was whistled away long before they reached hailing distance: The wink of sun on their rings and bits and hilts was visible for miles.

At the first Anglisc farm they accepted the farmer’s offer of ale and bread. Cian talked to the man and his son—a boy of five or six whose eyes stretched at the sight of Cian’s mail shirt and sword. When the woman of the house and her daughter brought out three leather cups, Hild motioned for a startled Morud to accept. They ate under a huge elm at the south end of a little coppice. Cian thanked their hosts—Ceadwulf and his wife, Saxfryth—and told them that Edwin king was by the Aire, rebuilding Ceredig’s hall, and would welcome them there on the night of the full moon.

“A feast!” the boy said.

“A feast,” Cian said. “With meat and mead and scop’s song.”

“Though I doubt the king’s ale can match this brew,” said Hild with a smile for the wife. In truth it was thin stuff, but the wife blushed prettily at praise from a woman wearing royal blue and more gold than she’d dreamt of in all the world. “And that’s a fine twill, beautifully dyed.”

Saxfryth smoothed her overdress proudly. “Nothing like yours, lady.”

Indeed, Hild’s dress was the rich, summer-afternoon-sky blue of royalty, a spin-patterned diamond twill, with neck and hems worked in scarlet and gold. She watched Saxfryth glance from the clothes to the glitter of their tethered horses’ headstalls, to their finger rings and the tiny agates sewn onto her veil band, and slowly understand the depth of the wealth before her. She grew rigid on her three-legged stool.

“Saxfryth. Look at me.” The woman lifted her head slowly. “I am Hild, daughter of Hereric.” Hild slid the yellow-stone ring from her little finger and held it out.

“Lady!”

“Take it.” The woman did. “Try it.” It fit the ring finger of her right hand. She moved it slightly, to catch the sun, then folded the hand in her lap, with the other curled around it protectively.

“Your men will come to Caer Loid Coit. Every man with a spear will come before the full moon. You will show that token and I will see that Edwin king knows of the hospitality offered today to his niece and seer.”

They rode, through a light shirr of rain, over five or six hides of cleared land surrounded by oak and elm. Two milch goats and a kid, stripping the weeds by the track, lifted their heads but did not pause in their endless side-slide chew. A bull—full-muscled, dark brown, sleek as a seal in the rain—glared from his own stone-walled pasture, beyond which stood a large sty with a half-filled water trough cut from elm. The pigs would be grubbing in the wood for early mast.

They began to see people: the men tall, the women rounded, and everywhere wealh and Anglisc working side by side, wearing the same competent tabby weave with good strong leather belts and sturdy shoes. The rain was so light most hadn’t bothered with their hoods. The place reeked of peace and prosperity.

Morud led the way across a little stone bridge of finely cut limestone, Roman work. They passed a deep track leading into the wood—clearly more than a woodcutter’s path—and after a moment’s thought Hild called Morud to her. “Run up that track. Find the priest or his wife. Tell them to fade into the wood for a fortnight or two, never mind the rain, and to take anything they value with them. They should bury the altar stone if they hope to come back.”

Not even the Crow would break his Christ’s holy stone, but he would drag it away and then the Loid priest would have nothing to come back to and no livelihood.

At Aberford two days later, the rain was coming down like rods of glass from an iron lid of a sky, and it was Cian and Hild who were gathering their reins to ride back to the king, and Coelfrith, drenched, standing by her knee. This time there was more than a score of men clearing the ditches and refacing the banks—even some boys carrying water and a handful of women relighting cooking fires under rough shelters.

“I’ll tell the king you’ll be back by the full moon,” she said.

“Before.” He pulled his cloak tight and peered east through the rain.

“Coelfrith.”

“Um?”

“Leave the locals to their work. They have my token. They have wool to card and grain to thresh, pigs to feed and wood to gather.”

“The king needs Aberford to—”

“The king wants the Elmetsætne to come gently, horses to the outstretched hand. Leave them to their work.”

She nodded to Morud, crouched under one of the shelters out of the worst of the rain. He flipped up his hood—she wasn’t sure when he’d acquired it—and stepped into the downpour. Cygnet snorted. Hild patted her neck. She said to Coelfrith, “Don’t worry so much. Grimhun can do as he promised. I’ll tell the king you have Aberford well in hand.”

As they rode west the rain eased. By the time they crossed Brid’s Dike the sky was torn into rags of blue and grey and darker grey, light grey tatters flying one way, dark another, and the sun bursting out like a child jumping from behind a tree and running away again. Hild threw her heavy cloak back from her shoulders. The world smelt like a just-ploughed field: rich, mysterious, waiting. She wanted to shout, or gallop, or set Cygnet at a wall.

A great cloud of birds rose violently from the wood tangling the low hills just to the north of their path. Cygnet pointed her ears, and Hild suddenly, fiercely, wanted to know what hawk they rose from, and what land lay beneath them.

Morud followed her gaze skyward. “It’ll be raining again by the time we get to Caer Loid.”

“Yes. But we’re not going to Caer Loid.” She pointed at the swirling birds—rooks, jays rising like smoke, and a puff of finches, catching the brief sunlight and gleaming like seeds flung from a thresher’s basket—and laughed. “We’re going there!” She kicked Cygnet into a gallop and after a moment she heard Cian galloping after her, and Morud running, and they were all laughing.

At the trees she slowed to a canter and bent low to Cygnet’s neck. Oak, ash, hawthorn, wild cherry, all growing in a tangle. Then a hornbeam, twisting low across a beck, and Hild kicked Cygnet lightly and lifted up, over, down, and on. Cygnet’s hooves drummed fast and steady, like Hild’s heart.

The drumming softened—the ground grew wet—and they burst into a little valley by a pollarded oak, thick and gnarled, and Hild reined Cygnet in. She walked her slowly around the oak while she blew.

It was an ancient pollard, as old as anything Hild had seen. As old as the one tree that connected the fates of the three realms. It reeked of wyrd. Her wyrd.

She looked north along a winding system of beck and bog and pond. Now that she was looking, she saw the thick, even growth of old willow coppice and what might, under the moss and fern, have been the straight edge of a deliberate channel at an angle to the beck.

Cian’s gelding trotted from the trees, Morud loping comfortably beside him.

“I’ll bet that was once a millrace,” she said, pointing. Someone’s home, once.

“Here?” Cian said. “Why? It’s a bog.”

“It wasn’t always,” said Morud. “Or so they say.” Hild gestured for him to go on. “They say that in the long ago, before even Coel Hen was king, when the redcrests owned the valley, it rained in the summers, it rained in the autumn, it rained through the winter. And the people grumbled but it wasn’t their land to leave. There was nowhere to go that other redcrests didn’t own. And the water rose. The fields turned to bog and the sheep retreated up the hills. The hooves of kine rotted, but there was no field left to plough, so they killed the kine. Ducks took the place of sheep, and heron the hawk. Then the redcrests left, and so did the people, looking for a place less wet.”

“Those birds weren’t rising from a heron. And look.” Hild pointed at the oak, where fern grew all about its roots. “And there.” She pointed along the banks of the beck, east and west, where saplings and nettles grew close to the water—“And up there”—to a pond, what perhaps had been a millmere. “The water is leaving.”

Cian slid from the saddle. His feet squelched. “There’s a lot still here.” His Anglisc sounded alien alongside the rush and runnel of the beck.

“It’s the rainiest season for years.”

“It’s a bog.”

The sun poured sudden and beechnut yellow into the valley. Spiderwebs glistened. A fish plopped. She knew there would be crayfish and frogs, newts and loach, mallards in the spring, and heron and kingfisher, and, on the hills north of the wooded mene, hare and hawk. To the south, a ridge ran alongside a crooked arm of the beck, and she imagined standing there, peregrines tilting on the wind overhead. She imagined standing there last month, swifts pouring overhead on their way south to the sun, and then in May, when they returned. She wanted to see the beck in spring, the frogs’ eggs grow tails, then legs, then leap onto the bank. She wanted to see the acorns grow as well as fall, wanted to see the pigs get fat, wanted it all, wanted it here.

“It’s beautiful,” said Hild, “and I will have it.”

At Caer Loid the weather turned dry and crisp and the farmers began to arrive for the king’s feast. A man and two sons, all with spears, the man with a sturdy linden shield and a seax with a worked-leather sheath. Ceadwulf and two ceorls, with his wife, Saxfryth, wearing Hild’s ring, and their son. From the steading Hild had warned to hide their priest, four men—one shorter and slighter than the others—all carrying spears. Two brothers armed with axes, with the kind of finger rings and cloak brooches unlikely to have been earned through farming.

Coelfrith, back only two days earlier, was kept busy every moment the sun shone. He would have preferred Pyr to handle the new arrivals but Pyr was half wealh, and who knew what the prideful newcomers might take as an insult, so he put Pyr in charge of the hunting parties and other provisioning details, and toured the growing encampment, listening. This farmer wanted a space in the bend of the river, but his neighbour had taken it—his neighbour who owed him a ram and hadn’t paid. That red-faced man pointed to a bruised boy: This starveling wealh had stolen two loaves and what were they to eat now? What was the king going to do about that? And many, many demanded to speak to the king: It was why they were here; it was their right.

Hild walked with Coelfrith, watching, learning, sometimes staying for a quiet word, sometimes sending Morud—who seemed to have attached himself to her—back with a message for the farmer to come to her wagon later. She conferred with Coelfrith over which man might be invited to break bread with the king; which might be best seen with others in a group; which to be ignored. And everywhere, the Crow’s priests, accompanied by Osric’s men, questioned the farmers, taking the information to the Crow and Stephanus, who wrote and wrote and wrote.

At night, Cian took a keg of ale, and Eadric or another hound, to the fires of the new arrivals and compared weapons, and drank and boasted and learnt things that Hild might not. Hild herself, accompanied by Gwladus, talked to Lweriadd; to Morud’s wary sister, Sintiadd; to Saxfryth. She left them ale or cheese. Occasionally they gave her a cloth full of elderberries or mushrooms or wildling apples.

In the morning, she and Cian broke bread in the cold clear sunlight, sitting on their little stools by the wagon.

Cian tore another chunk from his loaf and caught up more of the paste from the beautifully turned elm bowl on the table Gwladus had thought to bring with their stools.

“What is this? Is there more?”

“Just what you see. Saxfryth brought it for me, as a thank-you, she said. She wanted most particularly for the young gesith with the bold cloak to know that it was her recipe: the first puffballs sliced and fried in goose grease then chopped and packed in butter. When I tell her you liked it she’ll want you to visit, and she’ll push out her chest like a pouter pigeon and twirl her new ring so it gleams in the firelight, and tell you how very tall you are, how long your sword, and so very sharp!”

Gwladus, bringing more bread and a pot of honey, snorted.

They ate steadily. “There’s two bandits in from the Whinmoor,” he said.

“The ones with the axes?”

“The same. I told Coelfrith. He says it’s the king’s order to leave every man his weapon until the feast tonight.”

Hild wondered who would be the unlucky gesith honoured with the duty of standing watch over the blades away from all the drinking and boasting.

“I saw a sword that might have come over with your forefathers: a hilt looking like cheese squeezed in a man’s fist.” Hild knew what he meant; she’d seen swords like that hanging in the firelight, brought down when the scop sang of times past: a ridged hilt, sometimes bound with wire, always with a name and a list of dead kings to its credit.

“I saw a Loid with an inlaid spear today,” she said. “A dot and a cross on the blade.” Ceredig’s mark.

Cian looked up from his bread and honey. “A king’s man?”

“His son, maybe. If you want to ask him, he’s with the Anglisc of that rich steading west of Saxfryth’s. They’re camped south of the orchard—or what was the orchard.”

At the noon meal, Hild saw Cian sitting with the Loid at a fire of fragrant applewood stumps, listening, nodding, whittling away at his root, while the man mimed thrusting and slamming with his shield. Behind them, slave wealh watched over by Osric’s men worked on the king’s new hall.

Tenscore men and not a few women settled down under a moon bright and white as polished chalk. The air was still and sharp, the river slow. Bonfires roared between the people and the wood, driving the dark back, keeping the wights under the trees.

They had listened to the scop’s stirring songs of hearth and hall, gold and honour, and the fate of man. They had drunk jar after jar of spiced ale, and eaten the oxen that had pulled their wagons from Goodmanham. The first beef most of them had eaten in years. Good red meat that made them feel like heroes.

The king rose, gleaming with gold, and to many of the men there—full of more beer and food, aye, and better, than they’d had in an age—he seemed a song made flesh, a hero of old, a king worth listening to. And while the king’s men passed among the crowd with mead—mead! the drink of warriors!—the scop declaimed the king’s lineage: Edwin the son of Ælla, the son of Yffi, the son of Wuscfrea, the son of Wilgisl, the son of Westerfalca, the son of Sæfugl, the son of Sæbald, the son of Segegeat, the son of Swebdæg, the son of Sigegar, the son of Wædæg, the son of Woden. A son of kings, and he stood among them like an equal. The scent of mead made them glad. Their hearts beat high.

Edwin said in a great voice, “I have never lost a battle. I have two strong sons, with many more to come. Kings—Briton, Saxon, Angle—bend the knee before me. Like the men of Lindsey, you may now look to me as lord. I swear to keep your larders full, your pasture free from marauding Mercians, your fields unburnt by the savage men of Gwynedd. I stand between you and harm. To you I extend the cloak of the king’s justice, the king’s vengeance, the king’s protection. In return I ask no more than before. Indeed, I will ask less, no more than any man can bear. But you must give it, in full and with goodwill. And your neighbours will be responsible for you and you for your neighbours. Your tithe weights must be fair, your cloth fine, your kine healthy. Smell the mead, now, men of Elmet. It is a gift from your king. Will you take it?” He lifted his great jewelled cup, a cup, surely, like one a god might drink from. “Men of Elmet, will you drink with me? Will you swear your oath?”

With a roar like a host, they shouted Yea! and Aye! and Edwin king! They drank, and drank again, and the scop and his drummers and whistle men set up a merry tune.

The bonfires burnt low and men drew into groups around smaller fires. The gesiths had their own fires near the wagons, and many farmers were already sleeping, but perhaps half a hundred lingered, unwilling to end the night. Someone was plinking on an old lyre, playing the tune of a bawdy song that he kept getting wrong.

Hild sat with Gwladus, half asleep, wrapped in her cloak, half aware of murmured Anglisc on her right, British on her left. Cian was nearby, she thought, and Morud, but she was not sure where. She drifted, dreaming of the ridge over the valley, the beck, the pond. That pollarded oak at the head of the mene was hollow…

Gradually she became aware of a conversation, an Anglisc man saying, “‘I’ll ask less,’ he said. But that black-haired priest kept asking, ‘How many sheep? How many milch cows? How many pigs?’ The gleam in his eyes didn’t promise less.”

“He’ll keep us safe,” a younger voice said. “He said so.” Hild knew that kind of voice: a stripling, ready to run to war for glory and gold, the kind of voice that ended torn out on a muddy, bloody field. “You, wealh, bring me more ale.”

The sudden silence was as sharp as salt. Hild opened her eyes. The young Angle with the glory voice looked just as she’d imagined: unkempt blond hair, downy moustaches, flushed face, muscled like a young bullock. The man he faced was a little older, a hand’s-breadth shorter: the Loid who had carried the spear of a king’s man. But all weapons were under guard for the night, by order of the king, and farmers didn’t wear the jewels of a gesith, and the young Angle didn’t know that this Loid was his own man.

Two Angles got up and stood behind the Loid—farmers from the same steading. They had hands on their eating knives.

And then Cian was there, sheathing his whittling knife, squatting easy by the fire, smiling, beer jar swinging from one hand. The Anglisc gold at his throat and on his hands gleamed, the red checks of his bold Welsh cloak glowed.

He said, “Once upon a time, if there was such a time, an Anglisc farmer built his steading alongside a Loid. The Loid owned a hen, a fine hen, that laid one egg every morning as the sun came up. Every morning the Loid’s wife would carry the egg from the coop to the kitchen to break into his beer for breakfast. One day, she looked in the coop and there was no egg. But then she saw into the Angle’s garth and there was her foolish hen, sitting on her egg.”

“You said it was a fine hen,” called someone from the crowd.

“It was the finest hen that ever clucked, though being a hen, it was not very bright, and thought an egg was a great achievement no matter on whose land it was laid.” He took a pull of the ale. “So the wife fetched her husband, the Loid, and he began to step over the ditch to fetch the hen when the Angliscman steps out of his hall, sees the hen, and picks up the egg. The Loid shouted, ‘That’s my egg!’ but the Anglisc shouted back, ‘It was laid on my land!’

“They shouted at each other—for they’d not had breakfast and were testy—and finally the Loid said, ‘My people have a way of solving disputes,’ and the Anglisc said, ‘Good, then tell me what it is because I fancy this egg while it’s still warm.’ So the Loid said, ‘I kick you in the balls and count how many times I can sing the bread song before you manage to get back up. Then you kick me in the balls and see how long it takes me to get up. Whoever gets up quicker wins the egg.’

“The Anglisc, being brave and strong, agreed to this. So the Loid went to find his boots, his best boots, with the reinforced lace holes, and put them on, and hopped over the ditch. ‘Are you ready?’ he called, and the Anglisc stood with his feet wide and his jaw set, and the Loid ran at him like a cart horse and kicked the Anglisc as hard as he could in the balls. The Anglisc fell to the ground clutching himself, gasping then howling then cursing in agony, while the Loid sang the bread song a score and twice. Eventually the Anglisc stood up and said, ‘Now it’s my turn to kick you.’”

Cian put the jar down and leaned back on his hands. The crowd leaned forward.

“And then the Loid tucked his hen under his arm, stepped back smartly, and said, ‘Keep the fucking egg!’”

The crowd roared and Cian handed the beer to the Loid, who drank and passed it to the Angle, and shouted, “Someone give me that lyre!” and someone else shouted, “Sing the bread song!” and they laughed some more.

Hild motioned for Gwladus and Morud. “Bring more food, and wood for the fire. Tell Coelfrith I said so.”

The next day, as a stream of important Anglisc, those with six or more spears to their name, swore their oaths to the king before witnesses—who included, at the Crow’s suggestion, for he had been baptised, Cian Boldcloak—Hild accepted a trickle of lesser folk, Anglisc and Loid, who came to her in ones and twos.

Lweriadd brought Morud. “Lady, has he served you well?”

“He has.”

“Then it would please me for you to take him with you when you leave.”

Morud then knelt, put Hild’s hand to his forehead, and swore the threefold oath: to keep faith until the sky fell on his head, until the earth opened and swallowed him, until the seas rose and drowned him. He was standing behind her stool on one side, and Gwladus on the other, when Saxfryth approached with her young son.

Saxfryth held out Hild’s ring. Hild folded the woman’s hand around it. “A gift.”

Saxfryth’s smile was brilliant but almost immediately extinguished by indecision and anxious looks at her son.

Hild sighed to herself. “I don’t know your boy’s name.”

“Ceadwin, lady.”

“A strong name for a strong lad.”

“He is strong, lady, very strong for his age.”

“How many winters has he?”

“Five, lady.”

“In two years he’ll be old enough to foster.”

“Yes, lady.”

“Does he have brothers?”

“Not yet, lady.”

“When he does, or when he is seven, whichever is sooner, you may send him to me, if you wish.”

“Lady!” She looked as though she might fly apart with joy, but instead pulled the boy to her and hugged him so hard he began to struggle. Eventually she recovered her wits enough to pick up her skirts in one hand and take the boy’s little fist in the other and hurry away, stopping every stride or two to turn and say thank you.

“Her husband won’t thank you,” Gwladus said as they watched her go. “You wait, she’ll kill that man this winter trying to get another son.”

“Anglisc, Gwladus. Morud needs the practice. From now on, Anglisc, both of you, until we leave this place. And Morud, you will do as Gwladus tells you.” She sat back on her stool, watching the now-distant figures of Saxfryth and the boy. “Five. Really. What am I, a wet nurse?”

“Here comes one,” Morud said in otter-splash but understandable Anglisc.

“Another,” said Hild. “Here comes another.”

This time it was the young man with the ancient sword.

He was too young and tightly strung for any greeting. He simply drew his sword, knelt, and offered it to her, hilt-first over his forearm. “I am Oeric, lady, and I would serve you.”

She touched his hand. He looked up. Brown eyes, tight and anxious. Fading pimples. Strong bone at brow and jaw. Older than Cian by a year or so, but not as tall. But then few were.

His brown tunic, restitched with sleeves and padded in an approximation of a warrior jacket, was faded and patched. He would never be able to afford the mail shirt to wear over it. A knuckle on his right hand looked as though it had been crushed at some point but he’d had no difficulty handling the sword. The blade, as Cian had said, was ancient. Perhaps his father’s father’s grandfather’s. Part of its edge, near the point, was missing and the wire inset in the grip black with age. The blade itself, though, was lovingly polished of hammer-folded snakesteel.

“Your sword, it has a name?”

“Clifer,” he said. Claw. But he didn’t offer a lineage, and Hild wondered if he’d found it somewhere or taken it from a dead man.

“How would you serve me, Oeric?”

He blinked. “Lady?”

“How would you serve me?”

“I have a sword…”

Hild nodded. A sword. What use did she have for a sword? “Are you hungry?” Of course he was hungry. He was a stripling. He could eat an ox and still have room for a sheep and a score of loaves. “Morud here will bring you a stool and Gwladus will find us something to eat and you will tell me of your family.”

“My mother is dead—”

“But first you will get off your knees.” She must ask Gwladus to find a mat or a fur to put before her stool so these people didn’t have to get down on the muddy grass.

He scrambled to his feet.

“And put the sword away before someone gets the wrong idea.”

He sheathed it—not with the unthinking ease of a gesith but with more skill than she’d expected.

Morud came back with a stool and placed it with ceremony opposite Hild. Clearly he also made some kind of face at Oeric, who glared at him.

Hild pointed to the stool. Oeric sat. He perched gingerly on the padded embroidered cushioning but relaxed quickly enough when no god flung a thunderbolt at him for soiling such fine work with his farm clothes.

Adaptable, at least. “You were telling me of your family.”

His father was Grim, son of Grim the Elder. His mother dead these six years. When his mother’s sister’s husband had gone away one day and not come back, the widowed Grim had married her. Grim had three more sons now and a daughter. He farmed a hide south of the Aire, mixed land, some barley, some oats. Pigs, of course, they couldn’t get by without the pigs, who ate their bodyweight in mast every autumn, and two milch cows. Their horse, though, had died this spring when the grass came so late. The cows’ milk had been late, too. Perhaps without Oeric to feed they might have enough for a colt next spring.

“Perhaps your father could swap Clifer for a mare in foal.”

“Clifer is mine! From my mother’s father, who had no sons.”

Gwladus brought a tray with bread, bowls of barley stew with beef shreds, and the beautiful cup Edwin had given Hild in Lindsey. The cup was half filled with mead. She gave Hild one bowl of stew, Oeric another. Oeric took a spoon from his pouch, remembered to check that Hild had a spoon, and waited for her to take the first mouthful. Manners and restraint. Hild had seen worse at Edwin’s board. She took a taste so that Oeric could begin. It needed more salt. “Does your father know you’re here?”

Oeric swallowed hastily. “I am of age!”

Hild gestured for him to keep eating. She applied herself to her own bowl. “Why?” she said, when half her stew was gone. “Why me? Why not swear to the king?”

“Would he have me?” They both knew the answer. Oeric had a sword but no mount, no mail, no men. “They say you’re powerful. That you see a man’s wyrd. That you’ve used that seax.”

Hild studied him. “And you would swear an oath?” An Anglisc oath, from a man with a sword.

“I would.”

It wasn’t usual. But neither was she. And this boy with his old, broken sword wouldn’t threaten her uncle.

She stood, and gestured for him to do likewise. She put her hand on his chest. “I am the king’s seer. I shine light on the way. I look into men’s hearts. Is your heart free to make an oath, Oeric son of Grim?”

“It is.”

His heart beat high but steady, and he met her gaze—blushing but not looking away.

She picked up the cup. “Oeric, son of Grim, I, Hild, daughter of Hereric Yffing and Breguswith Oiscinga, do swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be as your lord. I will protect you, feed you, defend your name and person while you are true.”

She took a sip and passed the cup to Oeric. He took it with both hands, shaking slightly, and she remembered the weight of Edwin’s feast cup that Modresniht long ago.

He raised the cup to her. “I, Oeric, son of Grim, swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be your man. I will protect you, obey you, defend your name and person as long as I breathe.”

He sipped the mead. Smiled tremulously.

“Finish it,” Hild said. He was going to need it.

The king’s new thegns sent to their farmsteads for tools and men, and the great clearing by the Aire rang with hammers and adzes and clattered with lathes. The king’s hall rose.

The days grew colder and the nights colder still. Hild missed the warmth of Begu sleeping by her.

They woke to hedges salted with frost that didn’t melt until noon. The king rode out with Osric Whiphand, Paulinus Crow, Coelfrith Steward, and Cian Boldcloak to tour the land of his new thegns and inspect the fortifications at Aberford. While they were gone, Stephanus paired priests and parties of gesiths and sent them north and south and east and west to root out any wealh with a tonsure and drive them from Elmet. “None must remain,” he said. “They are spies.”

Hild persuaded Pyr that none would think him soft if the Loid workers were fed and sheltered, for a healthy Loid worked faster. And besides, she spoke for the king when she said that in Elmet now there were no more Anglisc, no more Loid, there were only Elmetsætne. She set Morud to making sure all grumbles reached the right ears.

More people, Loid and Anglisc, straggled in and sought her out, some to swear to her, some just to see for themselves the tall maid who called them all Elmetsætne. The daughter of a hægtes and an ætheling, some said—no, a wood ælf and a princess, said others—though that didn’t stop them wanting to touch her hem or catch up a fallen hair for luck. Farmers, coppicers, a dairymaid. A quiet man with a bow and a huge silent dog. Half a dozen ragged children, slings thrust through their twisted grass belts, who looked to have been living on their wits for a season. And one man, Rhin, older and footsore, whose tunic was too small and worn in places that didn’t suit his body, a man who didn’t take his hood off—he begged her pardon, he said, with a glance at Morud, who ignored him, but his ears were aching in the cold.

Hild sent the man with Morud to Oeric, for a meal at least, and said to Gwladus, “Do you trust him?”

Gwladus said, “He has the look of a man more used to skirts.”

Hild nodded. She should send him on his way. But he might prove useful. “Find out what you can. Ask Morud.”

That night she called Oeric to her wagon. She sat wrapped in a wolf fur on the step, and studied him. Perhaps it was that he was getting fed regularly, perhaps that he now had a ring on his pointing finger, her token, but he looked older, more solid.

“I gave you that ring so that you could do my bidding without hindrance. Why is Gwladus telling me some of my people are hungry?”

“We have food for eight days, lady. And some of these beggars are Loid who will move on.”

“When the king returns, we’ll be leaving. I doubt it will be eight days. But even if we stayed a month, I gave orders that all my people were to be well fed and well clothed. All. Take heed. In my service there are no Deirans, no Bernicians, no Loid or Anglisc, no Dyfneint or Elmetsætne. In my household there are only my people.” Her household. Yes. “Gwladus will speak in my name in the world of servants. You will speak in my name to freemen. You are mine, as are all those sworn to my service.” Her people.

The king came back from his tour. Cian came to Hild’s wagon, carrying his saddlebag over one shoulder, and accepted the cup of hot spiced wine Gwladus brought him outside.

Morud brought him a stool, set it by Hild’s.

Cian dropped his bag and sat. He unhooked his scabbard, propped it next to him against the wagon. “We leave for York in the morning.”

“All of us?”

He glanced at Oeric, who stood a discreet three paces out of earshot. “Stephanus and his priests will stay, as will Pyr and two understewards, a score of gesiths, and those men Grimhun has at Aberford.” He glanced at Oeric again. Oeric gave him a bland look.

“How is Grimhun?”

“Happy as— Why is that boy with the old sword here?”

“Oeric? He’s…” She beckoned him. “Cian Boldcloak, king’s gesith, this is Oeric, son of Grim, my sworn man.”

The two eyed each other, but Cian’s height, the cut of his clothes, his sword and jewels clearly overmatched Oeric’s. Oeric inclined his head. Hild waved him away.

Cian sat. “He’s sworn to you? He’s coming to York?”

“Him and more than a dozen others.”

“You have a household?”

“Will you help me?”

“Help you do what? Feed them? I’m a king’s gesith, not a landed thegn.”

“Just… help me. You and the brothers Berht could train Oeric, enough so he’d be more help than hindrance in a fight.” Then she remembered the brothers Berht were with Grimhun at Aberford, for now.

He drank off his ale and held out his cup for a refill. Gwladus took it. “Have you told the king?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell him.” He took the refilled cup from Gwladus, with a nod of thanks. “The lady’s a rare one, eh?”

“Yes, lord,” she said. “Will you want stew? Some of the new… household have an odd notion of king’s property and it seems some hares wandered into a snare and then somehow got dropped in a pot.” She turned to Hild. “Should I bring three bowls?” She tilted her head slightly in Oeric’s direction.

“Yes. No, wait. Bring enough for everyone. Put up a board. We’ll eat together, this one night, the household. Tell Oeric and Morud to help.”

When they’d left, Cian cleared his throat, drank more ale, rubbed his lip with his knuckle. Eventually he bent and lifted his bag to his lap.

“I made something.”

He untied the bag, lifted out a lump wrapped in sacking. Hefted it. Held it out.

Hild took the bundle, unwrapped it. Dark wood gleamed in the firelight.

Travelling cups, three of them. Tiny things, fitting one inside the other: small, smaller, smallest. Old wood, black with age. Carefully cut with the grain, smooth as a girl’s shoulder and as warm to the touch.

“I cut them from the root of the great thorn hedge. The biggest will hold two fingers of white mead.”

She put them back together. They felt dense and weighty in her palm. She turned them, it, over and over in her hands. Old in the days of Eliffer of the Great Retinue… “Oh.” Carved under the base was a tiny hedgepig, prickles out.

“Look at the others.”

She slid them free again. On the smaller one, the hedgepig’s prickles were drawn in; on the smallest one, the hedgepig lay curled in sleep.

“One for you, one for me, one for Begu,” he said. “So we may drink to home wherever we are.”

Edwin sat on his chair under the oak, warming his hands over a brazier while Coelfrith stood patiently nearby. He seemed in high good humour.

“Clotrude is with child. My son is having a son!”

“May he be strong and lucky.”

“Of course he’ll be lucky.”

Hild bowed her head. An ætheling was always lucky. At first. “My lord…” She wasn’t sure how to say it. “My lord, there will be extra people returning with us to York.”

His hands slowed. “Extra? How many?”

“Fewer than a dozen.” So far.

Edwin turned to Coelfrith, who said, “Lord King, if we’re to make the journey tomorrow as you wish, with a dozen extra mouths the food might not stretch. As it is, by the time we reach York the horses will be skin and bone and our porridge gritty with the end of the sack.”

“We can feed ourselves,” Hild said.

“You can?” Edwin leaned back, hands on the arms of his chair, his eyes on Hild. “Hear that, Coelfrith? Perhaps I should put our seer in charge of provisioning. No doubt her seer sight would show the deer in the wood and the fish under the bank.”

“Or you could send Osric and his men directly back to Tinamutha instead of him going back through York.” It would keep him away from her mother.

The king waved away her suggestion. He looked her up and down, then smiled. “You may bring your people. But not a mouthful of our supplies, not a sip, not a bite, not for you nor any of your people. Still want them?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“It’s uncle now, is it? Ha!” He pounded the arm of his chair and laughed. “Coelfrith, bring my niece a stool, bring us a jar of mead, and either sit yourself or go pack something. And when you’re fetching the mead, get the Crow in here.” He stretched his boots to the brazier. “I’ll be glad to get back to four walls and a roof. So tell me, Niece, before that black-skirted crow gets here, how do you see Elmet?”

“Uncle?”

“The saddle’s barely off my horse and you appear to be acquiring a household. Why? What have you seen?”

“I have seen, as you have, Uncle, enough to gladden any heart. Take Aberford.”

“I believe I have. Twice.”

“Yes, Uncle. But it’s more than a fort. It’s surrounded by good sheep land. There’s water, a road—a path right to the Humber. Remember Eorpwald’s gold workshops? An overking could build folds and weaving huts by the score there, make cloaks for trade. Ship them to Coelgar at Lindsey. It would be the biggest exchange for wool in the land. The Frisians would come, and the Franks.”

He leaned down and pulled off one boot, scratched at his ankle. “Why Lindsey? Why let Coelgar’s people have a piece of it? If Eorpwald can build a wīc for trade, so can I.”

“Where?”

“York. That was your mother’s idea.” He put his boot back on, wriggled his feet, stretched again. “What else should I know?”

Her mother’s idea. “There are bandits on the Whinmoor, trees for any purpose you could name south of the river, and good cattle country beyond that.” A wīc. At York. Another weft in the great weave. “But the land’s half empty. The people… They hide. They don’t trust each other. They’d work if they felt safe. If they knew they had the king’s goodwill.”

“That’s why I brought them here.”

“That’s why you brought the Anglisc.”

The weir sounded suddenly loud.

She was in it now. “Elmet is… underused. It could grow rich.” Which means the king would grow rich. “But only if people work. Only if they know that the land they clear, the hall they build, and the corn they sow will be safe. That no one will be fighting. That they aren’t Anglisc taking from Loid or Loid taking back from Anglisc.”

“It seems you’ve already spoken for me on that, or so Coelfrith hears from Pyr: no more Anglisc, no more Loid, only Elmetsætne.”

He sounded more curious than angry. But you could never tell with a king.

“Uncle, lord King, they need to know they can’t take from each other, and that whoever the king names as their lord won’t take from them, either.” Osric and his whips. “The first two years are all work, and the winters will be hard. Why risk that, if someone will just come along and take it once the land is giving crops?” She paused. “But if you tell them protection with no tithe for three years, they’ll do it. In five years, your tithes will double.” A longer pause. He was still listening. “Tell them the king’s niece will do it, too.”

“She will?”

“Uncle, I’ve seen a place. Such a place! Two leagues north and west. A great ridge, overlooking a wooded mene. A valley with bog and beck and bramble. Somewhat wet, yes. But, oh, what it could be. What it once was. Fish and krebs, herbs and honey, a millstream, corn growing round about… It will be a land of lard and cream, of beef and strayberries and songbird pie!”

“You will show me this place.”

“I will, my king. Though it’s not on the way to York. And it’s… wet, just now.”

“People?”

“None that I saw. One of the Elmetsætne told me they all left in the long ago, when it grew wet.”

“Wet, you keep saying. It sounds like a bog. You’re daughter of an ætheling of Deira and a princess of Kent. Niece and seer to the overking. It wouldn’t be seemly for you to live in a bog.”

“I wouldn’t live there.”

“No, because you’re my seer. But you want it. Tithe free. With my sworn men here and at Aberford ready to protect it. For nothing. Because it will be an example to my would-be thegns.”

“I… Yes.”

“A birth day gift worth a bit more than that cup I gave you last year.”

“Then…”

“Then the mene wood is yours. But in exchange it’ll be your task, along with Coelfrith, to apportion Elmet to would-be thegns. Make sure they all understand this Elmetsætne notion of yours.”

She bowed. A king’s bargain. He gave her something worthless to him in return for something from her he wanted very much. But, there again, so did she.

“And tell Stephanus. He has some notion of writing it all down, scratch scratch scratch. Strange men, these Christlings. Ah, Paulinus. Come sit. We were just talking about bogs.”

“Bogs, my lord?”

“Bogs.” He turned back to Hild. “Describe it to Stephanus. To a limit of thirty hides. With no tithe for… five years.”

“Thank you, Uncle.” The whole valley!

“Only yours, mind. Everyone else gets three years. You have someone to run it?”

“I… Yes, Uncle.”

“Good. I need you by my side. And now you should go pack your things.”

When her people gathered at the board for their last meal in Elmet, Hild drew aside the man with the hood.

“Rhin. Tell me, yes or no. Are you the priest I sent Morud to warn, near Aberford?”

He met her gaze steadily—his eyes were big and red-brown, surrounded by fatigue-stained pits like those of a goshawk—but said nothing.

“That was a fine steading, a rich, strong holding where men of all kinds got along. If I said I need a man to help me make that happen in another place, a man who can read, what would you say?”

After a long pause, he nodded once, slowly.

“Let me tell you of the place, particularly of the pollarded oak at the head of the valley. Hollow, and dry…”