Hild

15

IN YORK, the first day of Blodmonath dawned unseasonably mild. High, bright clouds coated the sky as evenly as egg foam. Larks and starlings gathered in flocks on the stubbled fields on either side of the Fosse and every now and again lifted in rushes for the south. To the north, just beyond the louring yew woods, darker rain clouds drifted towards the walls of the inner fort, threatening the rebuilding.

The wīc would grow in the fork of the Ouse and Fosse between the fort and the outer wall. The span of outer wall between Dere Street and the Ouse had long ago fallen into ruin. Edwin had cleared the rubble, redug the ditches, and drained the land. His two new Frankish stonemasons, rebuilding the walls of the inner fort, were notoriously finicky about the damp and the temperature of the strange sandy mud they mixed to stick the stone together. They worked slowly. Edwin fretted. To defend a wīc a fort must be strong. They’d have to make do with a hedge to protect the northeast end of the wīc field.

Hild rose without waking Begu or Gwladus. She wanted to see the laying of the great hedge.

What seemed to Hild to be half the women and men of the vale of York worked in the field that would be the wīc. Children ran about with jars. No one seemed to care about the possibility of rain. They were happy to carry their billhooks and hand axes and knives to the scrubby flatland and work for good portions of food and beer while their children herded their pigs in the wood south of the river to fatten on the early mast fall. This year there would be enough for every pig. There would be bacon and ham and sausage to feed every family all winter. There would be plenty of pork fat to soothe chilblains and fry the mushrooms soon to sprout in the east pasture and along the ditches of the west fields. One or two old women muttered now and again, and shook their heads—such mildness was uncanny, and trouble would come of it—but old women always said such things.

Coelfrith’s woodsmen had already laid out the hedge lines, driving in elm stakes every two feet and marking scrubby trees for saving with splashes of ochre. The strong young men and strapping women grubbed up all the other bushes and saplings. Old men chopped the torn brush into manageable pieces for later. Younger women and unmarried girls cut wands of hazel, and nursing mothers and old women plaited the hazel into great open weaves.

The woodsmen set to work on plashing the marked trees. They lopped a branch here, a branch there—Hild tried to spot the pattern for their choice, but they worked too fast—and with a casual flick of the axe cut the tree almost through at the base and bent it over to weave between the stakes.

The dark, shaped saplings lay all one way like a cat’s just-licked fur. “They point away from the river,” she said to Detlin, the chief of the leathery little men with the hand axes.

He spoke without pausing. “Sap only flows uphill. Point ’em downhill and they’ll die. Just as they will if these splits don’t have time to close up before the frost shoves its fingers into the wood. So I’ll thank you to step aside, lady.”

Hild stepped to one side but didn’t stop watching as he cut and bent hawthorn, sloe, hazel, blackthorn, ash, and the occasional rowan.

“It’ll be pretty in spring,” she said. The thorn blossom would look like snow. In summer there would be sloes for the birds. Bright red rowan berries in autumn and winter.

“Rowan’s for luck,” he said unexpectedly.

Hild nodded. The uneasy weather had them all thinking of luck.

Detlin moved up the marked line. Hild stayed where she was, enjoying the scent of cut wood and torn earth. The combination was as rich and tangy as brine. Another rush of birds poured overhead, flying before the clouds, moving south. Perhaps they’d fly over the East Anglian fens. Perhaps Hereswith would see them. And Fursey. Perhaps it would remind her sister of the need to build a nesting place overseas.

By the time the rain reached them, the hedge was laid in an elegant line, the woven hazel binders laid over the pleachers, and Detlin sawing the stakes off neatly just above the binders.

It was beautiful: The bare hedge glistened thick and sinewy as a dark snake with the white-sliced stake tops like a dotted pattern along its back.

Hild joined the rest of the women, who, along with the old men, were tidying away the loppings, chopping them and bundling them with the grubbed up brush.

The drizzle came and went, a pulsing rhythm of damp that no one much minded, but they wanted to be done before the heavier clouds to the north and east arrived. They began to hurry. Hild helped an old woman and her broad-shouldered daughter tie a bundle of brush. One whippy thorn branch ran over her forearm.

“Gast!” Right over the still-pink scar left by Cian’s sword.

The old woman grinned toothily. “Watch the thorns, missy.”

Hild pressed the arm against her hip, to stop it stinging.

“Your fine dress, too,” said the daughter. Her mother cackled.

Hild wore her oldest overdress, too short by a hand’s width, but still no doubt finer than anything the old woman had ever seen. Gwladus wouldn’t be happy with the new stain. She thought Hild should look like a queen even when shearing sheep. Why try to look like a farmwife? You’re taller than any two of them end to end. They all know who you are.

The old woman, looking behind Hild, stopped cackling. “Eorðe’s tits. Just what we need.” Hild turned: Coifi and two of his priests, wearing their white and green, walking towards the new hedge with great ceremony and deliberation.

They all looked at Coelfrith, who looked at the brush, at the approaching storm cloud, at the priests, and sighed. He motioned everyone to stop and step back to let the priests pass.

The daughter wiped the rain off her face with a meaty forearm and grabbed a jar from one of the runners.

By the westmost root of the hedge, near the road, Coifi used an ox’s shoulder bone to dig a hole, in which he put a rowan branch and a bird—a wren, Hild thought, but couldn’t tell from where she stood—and then the bone. His priests pushed dirt over bone, bird, and branch, and Coifi poured mead on the mound. Then he raised his arms and began to sing a prayer to Woden, for luck and blessing.

“Wish they’d put aside those fancy cloaks and do more than sing,” the daughter said.

Her mother huffed. “Have you ever seen a priest work?”

“The Crow’s priests are just the same,” Hild said, and the daughter passed her the jar. Ale, old and sour, but Hild was thirsty.

The rain picked up. Coifi sang faster.

As soon as the priests were mincing back to the road and thence to the safety of the walls, the women got back to work. The dirt was turning to mud, and the wood was slippery and cold; there was a lot to be done before dark.

Men threw the brush into carts. One was heading for the byres, tree hay for the cattle, the other for half a mile beyond the little river, the east fields and newly coppiced ash grove, to make thorny barriers against browsing deer and strayed goats. Hild and the women followed the field cart.

The daughter spat when they reached the outer field: The old brush barrier, settled and dense, still needed tearing out. A long, hard job, and dark was coming.

They sat on the edge of the ditch to gather their strength. A flock of blackbirds fell out of the sky from the east. One landed heavily, just one hop from half an ear of fallen barley, but it seemed stunned, too tired to move. More birds struggled in: redwings and fieldfares, all young or female, all exhausted. Fleeing weather, Hild thought, or even battling it over the North Sea. So that’s what the larks and starlings had been trying to get ahead of: a big storm or a sudden plummet in temperature. Either promised trouble for the new hedge and half-built tower. She stood.

“Leaving the rest to us, then?” the old woman said. “Creeping off to a hot bath and a warm fire?”

Hild grinned. “And don’t forget the bread dripping with grease, a sizzling slice of beef off the spit, and dried fruit with honey.” No one liked to be lied to. “I’ll send you something.”

“I’d love a bit of roast,” the woman said, and looked old and tired and used. “Never had that.”

“Tell them it’s for Linnet and her mother,” Linnet said.

“I’ll tell them it’s for everyone,” Hild said. “But I’ll tell my woman you’re to get the hero’s portion. A gift of the king himself.” They looked sceptical, but she knew once they saw it, they’d sing the praises of the king and his seer for a year. “But it might be some little while.”

“I don’t doubt we’ll still be here. Better send torches, too.”

“I will. First though, I’ve to tell the king weather is coming.”

“Weather’s here,” Linnet said, pretending to wring out her dress.

“Something more. Worse.”

“When?”

“Not tomorrow. But soon. Maybe tomorrow night, or noon the next day.”

“Bad?”

“Stay indoors if you can.”

“And the pigs?”

“Keep them close until you know the shape of it.”

There were plenty of torches fluttering and roaring under the leather awning the king had put up over his half-built tower—but the only men visible were gesiths bundled in cloaks against the wet. The Frankish masons had downed tools again. Hild decided to find Gwladus first. Her uncle would be irritable, not in a mood to listen to a dirty ragamuffin trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. She would have to look every inch the seer.

Hild stood to one side of the king’s hearth, glad of the heat on her tired legs.

“So,” said the king, “you’ve come. I’ve sent messages all day.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Where were you?”

“Watching the hedge-laying.” She accepted a cup of wine from Wilnoð, and smiled her thanks at the queen.

“At least that’s up,” Edwin said. “Or so Coelfrith tells me.”

She sipped, and nodded. “It’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful, ugly, who cares. It’s done. It’s the wall I care about now.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Good. Do something about those masons. If they’re not moaning about the sand, they’re complaining about the damp or fussing about the mallets. The wrong size, they say, the wrong weight, the wrong balance. Mallets!”

“They’ll work tomorrow because there’ll be no working for anyone soon. Bad weather is coming.”

Pine resin spat in the hearth.

“You’ve seen this?”

“The birds told me. Bitter cold, or fierce wind, or a hurtle of hail, I couldn’t say. But it’s bad, and it’s coming.”

Edwin swore and kicked his chair. “I want that tower up by Yule!”

Hild reached past her mother and Begu for the breast of mutton cooling in its own fat. She tore the top layer of skin away with her teeth and juice dripped on her overdress. Gwladus sighed—but quietly, Breguswith had a heavy hand—and passed Hild a torn loaf to soak up the worst of it.

Oeric stood by the door, relaxed enough to have set aside his sword, but not willing to sit with Hild with others present. Hild wondered what was wrong with his face, then realised he was trying to grow a beard.

Breguswith was talking. “… just hen birds, you say?”

Hild nodded.

“And tired? What about the chaffinches? No matter, we’ll have one of your people set a watch for the cock birds on higher ground tomorrow. Do any of them know enough to tell the difference? You need to train one of your swelling household in birds.”

“I can go myself if it comes to it,” Hild said. She would take Cian and Oeric. They could get in some practice away from prying eyes.

They discussed birds and clouds and other weather portents. Begu chipped in with a story about a magpie attacking a hen, or so she’d heard, she’d been very little, but she remembered her mother’s woman, Guenmon, saying—Guenmon, Hild remembered Guenmon, didn’t she?—saying it was because the magpie knew there’d be nothing left with the cold snap coming…

When Breguswith left—no doubt to find Osric—Hild held out her wrist for Gwladus to unfasten the carnelians. “Did you and Morud take that food to the east field?”

She nodded. “Though I could have done with Oeric’s manly strong arm to help.”

Oeric, staring stolidly ahead, blushed the colour of the coals. Hild reminded herself to have a word with him about not stooping to Gwladus’s lure. Lintlaf could kill him without breaking stride.

The sky was again high and white and the afternoon even warmer than the day before. At the east field, there was no sign of the flocks of exhausted redwings and fieldfares. She wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. Even Linnet and her mother, standing stiffly by the old grey matting of brush they’d piled to one side to be dragged to the walls and chopped into kindling chunks for the bread ovens, were calling her lady and giving her yes and no answers. Perhaps it was her gold, perhaps it was the presence of Cian and Oeric, though they were behaving like boys, throwing stones at a bare white branch poking from the brush.

She shaded her eyes against the high white brightness and studied the fields. Nothing but the tidy stubble, looking picked cleaner than the day before.

But as she turned to go she heard the rippling whistle, Per-r-r-r-rit, of a snow bunting—a month early—and hoped Detlin had driven the fence stakes extra deep.

The moon rose, a thin sliver. The torches by the wall roared. The Frankish masons shouted at their men to hurry. Another layer of carefully shaped stone rose above the foundation. It didn’t match the Roman work: different stone, different style.

Hild gestured to the chief mason, a burly, big-bellied man with no moustaches, his hair white with stone dust, who trotted over, a Christ amulet bouncing on his chest.

“Will it be wet or cold we should worry over?” he said.

“Both.”

“Both! Christ protect us! The king will be unhappy. The mortar is very difficult. If it’s to be wet, it’s one mixture, for cold, another.”

“Both,” she said. “Cold. Then wind. Then bitter cold. Cold enough to break iron. The first cold will come tonight. Tie everything down, and get the Crow to pray.”

“How long will it blow? Will it be wet?”

She stared at him. “Why don’t you ask your Crow to ask your Christ?”

He went back to his men. In the odd flare and pool of torchlight she watched him wave his arms, exhorting them to greater effort, pointing to her, telling them she could visit terrible consequences upon them if they didn’t give their best. Then they all crossed themselves.

Two chaffinches huddled together on top of a heap of stone. Young birds by their colour. Their first winter.

The wind died. The pour of the rivers in the distance seemed muffled. Something ghosted by her, flickering palely through the torchlight, then there was just one finch on the wall.

An owl, noiseless as a feathered cloud, glided away in the moonlight, a songbird in its left foot. Fate goes ever as it must.

The rain puddles of the day before turned hard and milky white. Frost loosened the last leaves clinging to the oak and elm in the west forest. They dropped silently, startling the pigs rooting through the leaf mould for nuts. The masons, bundled in hoods and wraps, directed men to pack the walls in straw and tie everything down twice.

The king sent word for people to gather in hall. The queen opened her bower to her women and Hild. The king, trusted gesiths, and queen’s men, including Cian and Bassus and Lintlaf, disposed themselves about the bench in front of the hall side of the bower curtain. Helping Begu settle their bedding next to her mother’s reminded Hild of the early days, when Edwin’s household had been small enough to sleep together in one hall.

After noon, the wind began to pick up, sliding like a filleting knife between wool and skin. Black-bellied clouds sailed over the horizon from the north and east.

The gale ripped the last acorns from the branches, wrenched the branches from the trees, and tore the trees out at the root. Pigs, and a woodcutter and his family, died, crushed.

Then came the hail, angling over the fields, beating birds and foxes to death, thrashing the river to froth. Women and men who had to walk from the hall to the kitchens, or who emptied night soil on middens, came back battered and bloodied. After that, no one left. The hail turned to rain, then snow. The wind died then picked up. Two thrushes flew into the great hall and fluttered around under the rafters until they found a place to hide from sight. The next morning they woke half the hall with cheerful—but loud, so very loud—song. A gesith threw a beer mug at the great crossbeams, but it was still half full and splashed another, who rose with a roar, eating knife in hand, and stabbed the man next to him before he was fully awake.

Breguswith and Hild, wrapped in otherworldliness, left the queen’s bower to stride through the midden that the hall had already become and tend the man’s wound. Hild held his skin together while her mother sewed as impersonally as she would a torn shift.

It lasted three days. In hall, men drank, women whispered, and the scop sang himself hoarse.

The hall stank: No one wanted the door open. Drunk men wouldn’t go outside to expose their most tender parts to the weather. They pissed in corners. Many vomited and came back for more mead. Mead and song drove away the fear of famine, fear of homelessness, fear of the dark. The pain in their throats from shouting their own names, boasting of battles, affirming their ancestors—who had lived in the dim distant past and got through this, aye worse than this, who laughed in the teeth of a gale—made them feel human, alive. The sting of mead on raw throat made them feel brave. The stink of the piss and the gnawed bones and their unwashed muscle made them know their animal strength. Piss on the weather! Fuck the winter!

They rutted behind benches, arm-wrestled between torches, and laughed at their burns, lost themselves in the sight and sound and smell of people like them, their people. Them. They were all one.

By the third day they were maudlin. By the third night, resigned to their wyrd. What would be, was. This was the way it was because this was how it would be. They were threads in fate’s great weave, snowflakes in the gale of the world.

Hild, wrapped in two cloaks, stood by the crushed byre and sipped the cold, brilliant air carefully, afraid it might give her lung crackle. Men were hauling away timbers. The butcher was directing his man to bring an axe; nothing else would cut through the frozen carcass of the milch cow—and then they’d have to get moving on the pigs in their pen. But he spoke quietly, and the men stepped softly, afraid of the eerie quiet: The rivers had frozen.

Then Oeric was by her elbow to tell her some woman by the name of Linnet would like a word, and Linnet herself was bowing and bobbing and promising her anything the lady would name, anything, for, thanks to her warning, her boy was still alive—still cheeking her, Eorðe bless him. Her boy and their pigs, while their neighbour’s girl was dead, stiff as a smoked fish, and the man of the house weeping and silent and both pigs missing. But she was all right, her mother, too. Her mother sent all thanks, though she did want to know how in Eorðe’s name they would feed their pigs, with the whole forest floor littered with fallen tree stuff, the acorns buried knee-deep…

Then the Frankish mason was asking if the lady had a moment to be so kind as to tell him when it might be warm enough to get back to work on the wall…

“Oeric,” she said. “Find Coelfrith’s man. Tell him the rivers will flow again by moonrise. Tell him that unless the king wants his fine wall standing around a city of the dead he must send men to help clear the forest for the pigs. Besides, the remaining cows will need the fodder—half the hay was lost with the byre. Tell him today, understand? Not tomorrow. Then bring Cian to me. Tell him to bring any who’ll listen. And bring Begu, and Gwladus and my bundle.”

She turned to Linnet.

“I’m glad you and yours are well. The king’s men will set to work on the forest. I’ll come to your neighbour. We’ll walk by the hedge and see how it does.”

Within days, the byre was mostly rebuilt, a new milch cow installed—Hild wondered what farmer now wore a silver ring while he suffered the scolding of his wife—and the scop had a new song. The gesiths went back to drinking—the mead was unspoilt—and wrestling, heedless of Coelfrith’s men who rode out, grim-faced, to the steadings round about and of the constant refusal of beggared farmers at the king’s kitchens.

The hedge had survived. Hild suggested to Coelfrith that Detlin be sent a present—a sturdy knife, say, with a copper inlay, something he could boast about—so word of the king’s generosity to good craftsmen would spread. It was one way to counter the rumours of disaster spread by starving men turned away by their lord.

Edwin didn’t care about his reputation among the lowly, and Paulinus encouraged him.

“What does their opinion matter?” he said. “They aren’t baptised. If any want to test my lord King’s rumoured weakness, they’ll meet a wall as implacable as nightfall, bristling with half a thousand spears.”

The new tower began to rise again. The mason swore on his son’s head that the king would have it, aye, and a rebuilt east wall by Yule.

Yule, the queen said, would be the most magnificent ever seen in York. She had Bassus select men to accompany him on the hunt: venison, she said, and boar, swan and blackbird pie, enough to make the undercroft burst at the seams.

Meanwhile, she and James set about rehearsing music in hall, and once again the place was stripped of all its soft furnishings while the choir sang. The scop sulked. The queen laughed at him, and said she and the lady Breguswith were planning the most magnificent new tapestry for the east wall, to hang behind the king’s table, and he should make a song about that.

Breguswith looked to her store of herbs. Hild saw that these were heavy on the comfrey and garlic and other wound-care medicines but said nothing. The seas were now closed to trade, which meant Osric would come down from Arbeia for Yule. She’d winkle out her mother’s secrets soon enough. There could be no war in this weather. Meanwhile, she had secrets of her own.

She wrote a letter to Rhin and sent it with Morud. “If he’s not about, put it in the hollow oak and come back.”

Morud came back with a reply: Rhin had ten and seven men and women with him now, and six children, and had cleared two fields. The goats and pigs were doing well. The cold had not found its way to the mene wood. “And he says, lady, that he has dug out the millrace and found the old millstone, but thinks the building of a new mill to bear the weight of that stone might be beyond him.”

Morud watched her sort yarn but made no move to leave.

“What else?”

“It’s said that Stephanus”—he looked around for a place to spit, thought better of it—“Stephanus, on orders of the Crow, is now beating priests before driving them off.”

“What else?”

“I didn’t meet all of Rhin’s new men. My guess is one or two of them will be wearing hoods for a while.”

At least Rhin was being careful.

Later she walked to the west wall, listening absently to the birds: thrush, sparrow, winter wrens, and tits with song so high she could barely hear it, in the distance a quarrel between resident rooks and a flock of winter incomers. Beyond that the steady, reassuring roar of the rivers. Clouds slid by in layers of grey and white: no sun, but no rain, either. A good day.

The mason could advise her about the mill. A mill would be a fine thing, a steady source of income for her household in years to come. A hen for a sack of meal. A milch goat for three of flour. She had no idea how many farms were growing corn round about, though perhaps more would if there was a mill.

Paulinus was there, looming over the chief Frank: a hole in the light, a hole in life, next to the white-dusted mason. His mate was mixing mortar on a board with a paddle, slush-scrape-slough, pretending not to hear anything. Hild stepped quietly to one side of a pile of stone and elm timbers, out of sight, and watched Paulinus. Paulinus, beater of priests, spurner of beggars.

“No, my lord Bishop,” the Frank was saying. “I would, but I daren’t. You’ll have to find help for your church elsewhere. The king wants his wall by Christ Mass.”

“God looks kindly on those who help His servants.”

“Yes, my lord. And I would. But it’s the Anglisc king’s word.”

“The Anglisc Hel is a dark, cold hole, I’m told,” Paulinus said. He was thinner, if that was possible, formidable in his black robes, with the massive amethyst weighting his left hand. In the winter light, its purple glimmer was otherworldly. “But the hell you will go to if you thwart God’s will is not cold. You will burn. Have you ever watched a pig roast? First, the stink of singed hair. Then the eyes melt. The skin bubbles. The fat runs into the coals and the flames burn higher, higher, higher. Imagine if the pig, by some blessing or damnation, still breathed.”

The mason began to sweat.

“Imagine.” Slush-scrape-slough. “Breathing your own fat turned to smoke with lungs that sear and crackle. For eternity, mason. Eternity. Weigh that against a day, perhaps two, of advice for a new building dedicated to the greater glory of God, the God who saw us all safely through this terrible time.”

Hild stepped into the Crow’s line of sight. “A time your god didn’t see fit to warn you of,” she said.

His eyes glittered like jet. “My God has no truck with demons.”

Hild nodded at the mason to get back to work. He looked from one to the other, the bent Crow with the power of damnation and the young giant with the uncanny eyes and the ear of the king, and chose his mate and the mortar.

Hild met the Crow’s gaze. Beater of priests, spurner of beggars. He didn’t move, but the cross on his chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

In the stripped great hall Hild had barely finished telling the king about the Crow’s attempt to frighten the masons before Edwin turned to Coelfrith. “Bring the bishop. Now.” He glared at James the Deacon, who was about to launch his choir into another round of endless practice. James herded his boys out of the hall.

Edwin and Hild had nothing to say to each other. The king chewed at a callus on his thumb and Hild merely stood, still as a heron waiting for a fish.

Paulinus arrived, attended by two priests, and Edwin didn’t bother with courtesies.

“Bishop, this will stop. I’ve Penda and Cadwallon circling like wolves. I need men. I get men by showering them with gold. I need gold at hand, gold I’ll take from trade. For trade I need a wīc. A safe wīc. I need walls. I need towers on those walls. Until that stone is laid, my masons will do nothing else. Nothing. Do you understand?”

Paulinus focused his black eyes on Hild. “My lord, this is not a conversation for women.”

“She’s not a woman,” Edwin said with half-shuttered eyes. “She’s my seer.”

“Christ admits of no seers.”

Hild said, “He has prophets.”

Edwin waved her to silence. “Priest, you forget that this is my hall, and the Christ is not yet my god.”

Hild had heard that tone before. She still dreamt it: We’ll eat the horse. The Crow heard it, inclined his head, and backed up, step by step, until he reached the door, turned, and hurried away.

Edwin turned to Hild. “That man and his god are useful to me. Don’t annoy him unnecessarily.”

In the ash coppice, Cian and Hild fought in light rain. Hild’s legs were splashed with mud. Cian had a bruise swelling on his sword arm. She still hadn’t found a way to defeat his shield.

They talked in bursts as they swung and parried.

“Coifi’s offered the Crow use of his carpenters,” she said. “And some prime timber for the building of a new church.” On church, she lunged for his right knee.

He deflected her staff into the turf. “Seems only a month ago he was plotting to smother the Crow in his sleep.”

“I doubt the Crow sleeps.” She slipped slightly in the mud but distracted Cian with a low sweep at his ankles. He jumped back. They circled each other. “Coifi is a worm but he’s not stupid. Everyone knows the king will take baptism at Easter, and then what use will it be to be a high priest of Woden?”

“High priest of sheepherders and cheese-makers.”

Begu, hair already braided for bed, knelt on the bed behind Hild and combed her hair. “It feels like an age since I’ve done this.”

“Gwladus does a good job.”

“Not as good as me.”

Hild closed her eyes, enjoying the steady rhythmic tugging, the crackle of flame, the wool-and-weld smell of Begu, her chatter.

She talked of Wilnoð’s growing belly, Bassus’s foolish grin, the queen’s lessons about Christ—they were spending less time on letters than Hild, more on women’s things, the rhythm of blessings and baptism, of when a woman was deemed clean and when she had to avoid sacraments. So much to learn before Easter…

“… Eanflæd is eight months old now and chewing the queen to tatters. She’ll give her out to nurse soon enough. Not before time. The king needs a son.”

“The king has two,” Hild said, half asleep.

“A proper son, Wilnoð says, one born to a Christian marriage. You should come and see how we’re getting on with the tapestry. Your mother set up the weave. She was boasting of you today as we worked. The pattern-making mind of the world, she said.”

“Mmmn.”

“We miss you.”

“I’m right here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I miss weaving with you, too.” And she did, a little.

“No, I don’t think you do. But it’s not your wyrd. I know that. Ha, here’s a knot Gwladus missed.”

Snow arrived two days before Yule, along with Osric, who brought with him a larger retinue than usual. Hild watched them dismounting, greeting king’s gesiths: the usual unsubtle testing and jeering. If they were to fight Edwin, Osric’s men knew nothing of it. No, the retinue was to impress the other thegns. He wanted Elmet. As she left the stables she had to stand aside for a herd of fat pigs being driven up Ermine Street and through the southeast gate. A gift from Stephanus in Elmet, the herder called to her when she asked. Coelfrith would be happy.

That evening she was brooding over Osric when Morud came to her with a gaunt man wearing nothing but grey rags tied together with twine.

“From the lea west of Caer Loid,” Morud said. Then, in British, “Tell the lady what you told me.”

The gaunt man looked at Hild sideways but didn’t dare speak. Morud elbowed him aside. “Aunt Lweriadd said they took our pannage. The Roman priests. ‘King’s pigs only in the king’s wood,’ they said. But without pigs what will we eat?”

Hild thought of Stephanus, well fed, writing his careful letters with columns of numbers for Paulinus. Osric would be an even more demanding master. She said, “You will go to my wood.” Her voice was harsh; the Loid cowered. She took a breath, said more softly, in British, “First, you will go to the kitchens and eat. Morud will take you.”

Fighting with Stephanus meant fighting with Paulinus, which Edwin had forbidden. But how many men could her mene wood support?

Hild walked with Æthelburh along the north bank of the great river, trailed by Bassus—much heftier than he had been, and wearing a new red cloak, Wilnoð’s work—and Oeric, with his wisp of beard, new war hat, and steel-ringed leather tunic.

“My husband keeps his plans for Elmet close,” the queen said. “But you know why he’s letting Paulinus drive the wealh priest from the countryside.”

“Spies, yes.”

“And for the friendship of the bishop of Rome. An alliance that was foretold before he was king.”

“Paulinus told me Christians don’t believe in prophecy.”

The queen kicked a little stone into the river. “Not in prophecy by women.”

They said nothing for a while.

“Perhaps I will give you a Yule gift,” the queen said. “Perhaps my husband will give me all those pigs and perhaps I will give them to you and you may herd them to your wood for slaughter.”

“Thank you.” Coelfrith would be unhappy, but she didn’t care.

Behind them the two men were talking about how to pad a war hat properly.

“Will there be war in spring?” Æthelburh said.

“No.” Cadwallon needed to consolidate his new kingdom. Penda was still reining in the West Saxons. “At least not here. Not in spring.”