Hild

2

IN SOME WAYS, Hild’s new life was not so different. Her days, the court’s days, were ones of constant movement from royal vill to royal vill: Bebbanburg in the lean months for the safety of the rock walls and the cold grey sea, and Yeavering at the end of spring, when the cattle ate sweet new grass and the milk flowed rich with fat. Then south to the old emperor’s wall, to the small towns built of stone, and a day at Osric’s great house in Tinamutha, and a boat down the coast to that wide river mouth, wide as a sea, and up the river to Brough in early summer, and then, sometimes, Sancton, and always to Goodmanham’s slow river valley at summer’s height—the rolling wolds crimson with flowers, the skeps heavy with honey, and the fields waving with grain. Then the twenty-mile journey to York, with its strong walls, its river roads for carrying the last of the sweet apples and the first of the pears, and its high towers in case of bitter war, winter war.

The king and his court spent a month here, a two-month there, eating their way through the local offerings, levying and taking tribute, listening to local troubles and rendering judgement.

“But why?” Hild said when they had to pack up and leave Sancton, again, just as she’d got to know the rooks in the beech spinney and the frogs by the south pond, and one particularly fine old hornbeam whose bent boughs even she could climb. She watched her mother and Onnen folding dresses and rolling hose, and threw her own box of treasures on the floor. “I don’t want to!”

Her mother’s irises, pale blue as forget-me-nots under unseasonable frost, tightened, though her voice stayed even. “You will pick those up.”

“No.”

“Very well. Then we’ll leave you—”

“I’m the light of the world!”

“—and when we’re gone the wolves will come, and the foxes, and the wights.”

Hild wasn’t afraid of foxes, perhaps not even of wolves, not in summer when they were well fed. But wights…

Her mother was nodding. “They will breathe on your face as you sleep and you will be trapped in a cold dream forever and ever and ever.”

Hild picked up her box, began searching for her treasures—the wooden brooch Cian had carved and painted for her, the shark’s tooth Hereswith had given to her last Yule, her magic pebble that fit just right in her hand. She frowned. The pebble seemed smaller than it had.

“But why?” she said.

“Why what?”

“Why do we move all the time?”

“It’s how it is.”

“But why?”

“Because otherwise we’d eat ourselves out of house and home.”

Hild pondered that. “When Fa was ætheling, we didn’t send all the gallopers first.”

“An ætheling is one of many, a maybe-king,” Breguswith said. “Your uncle is the one king. He travels with five hundred people. The king can’t just pack a loaf and a sack of salt and head for the horizon. He must first send a message to his reeves: How was the harvest? How are the roads—and the wood supply? Where is the honey flowing, where are the royal women needed for the weaving, where do bandits need to be warned away, and where is the hunting good? Then he must gather food and other supplies for the journey. And then his galloper rides ahead—tells the vill steward to begin brewing beer, slaughtering cattle, strewing rushes. Only then may we travel.”

“And when we get there,” Onnen said, “we eat them out of house and home and move on.”

Hild set her pebble aside. It was just a pebble. “But why can’t we stay? Why can’t Uncle Edwin have a home like everyone else?”

“The whole land is his home.”

“Yes, but why?”

“He must be seen.”

“Yes, but—”

“And he can’t simply have a steward on each estate sending him tribute. Because a steward, unless reminded by the presence of the king, begins to think himself a thegn. He begins to see the land as his, to wonder why he shouldn’t send only a portion of his food, his ale, his honey, to the king. The revolt always begins when the steward wants to be king. A lesson the Franks never seem to learn.”

But Hild was no longer listening. She was playing with her special pinecone, remembering the tufty red squirrel she had frightened away the day she found it.

Every summer Edwin took war on the road with his war band, tenscore gesiths, sworn to death or glory, and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handfuls of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts—though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankish work—or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted alike. Hild’s mother told her to stay out of their way. “Our time is not yet come. For now we live like mice in the byre. Everyone knows we’re here, but we’re not worth attention. Quiet mouth, bright mind.”

Breguswith taught her the gathering and drying of herbs, and began to spirit Hereswith away for mysterious lessons that, when her sister tried to share them with Hild, made no sense.

They were sitting with a tablet weave—the simple band weaving that would do for a border on a neck or cuff—and Hild was telling Hereswith about how swallows never came until the white butterflies born from colewort were outnumbered by the black-and-red jewel-winged kind.

“Beat the weft,” Hereswith said.

“But I beat it just after I turned,” Hild said. “It’ll spoil the pattern.”

“Do as I say. I’m older.”

And Hild, because Hereswith had that sulky look that meant she was unhappy, tapped the cross threads down to lie more densely across the warp threads. She smiled tentatively at her sister, who said, “Ma says there are different ways to smile at people.”

“How—”

Hereswith overrode her. “If the king notices me, I do this.” She straightened her spine and smiled a proud, glad smile that shocked Hild. “Try it.”

Hild shook her head.

“Try it.”

“No. I’m not happy.”

Hereswith laughed. “That doesn’t matter! Well, never mind, I expect you’re too young to understand.” She turned the tablet.

Hild beat the weft. The pattern was already spoilt. She might as well please her sister.

Hereswith nodded. “Good. And this, too: If you think you’re going to smile at a gesith’s boast, you must let your hair fall to hide your face. Like this.”

“I know that one!” Hild remembered her mother’s words exactly—the light of the world must remember everything. She repeated them proudly: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

Hereswith blinked. Her face curdled. She leaned forward, punched Hild in the arm, and burst into tears. “I hate you!” She flung the tablet weave to the dirt and fled.

Hild picked up the weave, mystified. What was all that about? She would ask her mother. Or maybe not. Lately whenever she put a question to Breguswith she got answers that made no sense—if she got answers at all. “Where do swallows go in winter?” had merited a pause in the grinding of herbs, followed by a question in turn: “Winters are uneasy times. Why does the king hold feasts at Yule?”

“Because it makes people happy?”

“A king doesn’t care if the folk are happy. He cares that they think him strong. Pass me the bitterwort.”

Hild passed the bitterwort. She thought about winter, and home, and strength in one’s own hall. “Oh,” she said. “Stronger than anyone else. Like not having a steward who stays in the vill.” It came out wrong, but she knew what she meant.

So did her mother; she always knew the words Hild couldn’t find. She smiled but said only, “This root was pulled too early. Bitterwort is best harvested in autumn.”

Hild grew taller. Her milk teeth loosened. Now she could cross her legs and balance on her hands, and she could name all the king’s hounds and all his horses. She had worked her first perfect tablet weaving, and she remembered enough of the names of the heroes of Gododdin to argue with Cian when he named them as they fell under his wooden sword. Sometimes Hild worked alongside him, exercising with a rock in each hand, as boys who hoped to be king’s gesiths must. Sometimes she swung a stick sword; she had learnt long since that it made him happy for her to pretend to be Branwen the Bold, just as it made her happy for him to be still when she was watching and listening. They remembered: We are us.

But she could climb now, and sometimes when Cian wanted to play hero and she did not, she ran to a tree—she had favourites in every place—and climbed up among the leaves and stayed silent as he called. And if Onnen wanted to wash her hair and the weather was foul, there was a rooftree and its sloping rafters to clamber to. No one ever looked up, not even her mother. This was her secret. But she liked trees best. Hidden in the leafy canopy, sometimes she stayed so still and quiet even the birds forgot she was there.

Like today, a hot day for late spring, bright but sullen. It would rain later. Meanwhile, it was cooler inside the leafy hideaway of a pollarded ash drowsing by a woodcutter’s trail. She settled comfortably against the fissured bark and watched dumpy little siffsaffs hop from their half-built nests among the nettles and peck about in the leaf rubbish for soft stuff to line the nest.

She sat there, breathing the cool leafy air, so still that a sparrow hawk, intent on the siffsaffs beneath, landed on a bough by her face and turned its marigold eyes to hers. They regarded each other for an age. It blinked, blinked again, then tipped forward from its hidden perch, flapped, and vanished into the trees on the other side of the trail.

The court left Sancton before the siffsaff eggs hatched. Hild hoped the sparrow hawk wouldn’t eat them.

The summer’s war had ended early and the household was at Goodmanham. Hild was six years old—tall, strong-faced (All bone, her mother said, like your father)—when one hot day her mother took Hereswith away and when she came back she wore a small girdle with various cases and boxes attached. She showed them to Hild one at a time. She was to get her own pin beater from Queen Cwenburh, the edgeless sword of some long-dead ætheling. She was to help the other women in the weaving hut. And wasn’t this gilded needle the very picture of beauty? The queen’s own cousin was to be her gemæcce: one to weave and weep with forever.

Hereswith looked happy, and Hild was glad for her—at last her sister had something of her own, something to compare to being dreamt of while in the womb. Then Hild grew even happier when she realised that all the women, including her mother and Onnen, would be so busy fussing over Hereswith that she and Cian might now find time to sneak away to the bottomland at the foot of the sacred hill south of the vill.

The bottomland, unlike most of the wolds, with its chalky soil, was dark and damp. Hild led them through an old wide dike full now of a tangle of oaks and holly and thorny crabapple, then over the bank mostly hidden by fern—Cian had to push the wooden sword through his belt, despite the imminent threat of marauding armies, and use his hands to scramble up—to the boggy dell with its quiet pool and the mossy boulder by the shallow end where the sun showed the muddy bottom. All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.

“I don’t like this place,” Cian said, and he spoke, too, in British, their preferred way when alone. “It smells of wood ælfs, and there’s no room to swing a sword.” He then proved himself a liar by pulling his sword free and lunging at an invisible opponent. It occurred to Hild that both Hereswith and Cian now had their paths. She had only her mother’s dream. “I shall make you a sword,” Cian said, “and we shall continue our fight in the gash.” He pointed to the fallen alder which, from long experience of these matters, Hild understood to be, in his mind, the top of the banked war ditch.

She did not sigh, though she disliked the trench-warfare game. It meant the firing of the furze, which meant many pauses while Cian waved imaginary firebrands and tested the imaginary wind.

“Make me a spear instead, and you can be the hero Morei while I play the great oaf on the top poking at you and soon to be raven food.”

That way she could stay on the water side and, during the brand-waving and wind-testing, she might study the pool and all the little things that came to its edges. Besides, he would have to go all the way back to the oaks for a long, strong limb.

While he was gone she settled back against her boulder and closed her eyes. If it were night she would smell the perfume of bog myrtle, which her mother called sweet gale. At night, wood mice would sit atop the fallen tree, wiping dew from their whiskers in the moonlight. At night, she might see the water sprites she was sure lived here. Meanwhile, she worried with her tongue at her front tooth, which hung by a thread.

Soon enough Cian had her spear. A fallen ash branch, thicker than her wrist, with a pronounced bend. Cian grinned and said, “Oh, I’ll slaughter a score of you spear wielders! Close your eyes now!” and leapt away. Hild sang the agreed-upon three verses—Adorned with his wreath the chief… adorned with his wreath the leader… adorned with his wreath the bright warrior—then she parted a fern on the alder and peered down. Silent. Still.

A cream-striped caterpillar humped its slow way over the mossy bark. Hild picked it up and looked for a place to put it safely out of the way of the coming battle.

In the end she chose the base of the bird cherry at the rocky end of the pool. It was old, for a cherry, with that odd, gnarled look of such trees that weren’t likely to reach the age of oaks and elms. With the haft of her bent spear she poked at the soil by the root. It was lighter and drier than the soil by the other end of the pool. She poked a little more. Her shoulder jostled her tooth.

“What are you doing?” Cian, standing on the fallen alder, looking sweaty and cross. “How can you abandon your post to dig?”

Hild, whose tooth hurt, spoke crossly in her turn. “How can you play the same game over and over?”

“It’s not a game!” Cian’s face pinked. His eyebrows, she saw, did not match his hair. “What are you doing that is so important?”

Hild, feeling perverse for no reason she could name but that she was sick of playing war, said, “I am digging with this stick.”

“It’s a spear.”

“It’s a stick.” And she stroked deliberately at the great kink in the wood, then pushed the blunt tip into her palm and showed him: no blood.

He rubbed his lip with his knuckle. “When we fight as heroes, it’s a spear.”

Please, his eyes said, please.

And just like that she didn’t want to hurt him anymore; she wasn’t sure why she had, only that she, too, wanted to say, Please, please. She settled on her hams by the root she’d been poking at.

“I’m following the root to see if Eochaid the slave is right and there is a rainbow at the tip, or if my mother has the right of it, and at the centre is the root of the world tree and the one-eyed god.”

“You’re forever finding things out.”

“I’m the light of the world.”

“Finding out the how and the why of things is for gossips and priests,” he said, not so much scornful as puzzled, not by the fact that she did it—she had always done it—but that they should be talking about it.

“Gossips and priests, yes, but also artisans and kings,” she said. “And was Morei not familiar with the ways of fire?”

“True,” Cian said, craning for a better view.

“And, indeed, heroes of old sometimes had need to bury their hoard.”

He scrambled over the fallen tree and landed next to her. “I will help.”

He found himself a stick—his sword was a sword only—and they dug, the sun warm on their backs.

“It goes ever down,” he said after a while.

“We will dig more tomorrow.”

He stood and stretched, said to the horizon, “And now will you be a hero with me and take the wall, shoulder to shoulder?”

“Am I to be Branwen again?” And she couldn’t help the sigh in her voice.

“Be who you like,” he said, ever the generous lord. “You choose.”

“Owein,” she said. “His sword was blue and gleaming, his spurs all of gold—”

“No, I am Owein. I am always Owein.”

“Then I will be Gwvrling the Giant: He drank transparent wine, with a battle-taunting purpose; the reapers sang of war, of war with shining wing, the minstrels sang of war—” She spat out her tooth. It lay white and red on the turf at her feet. They stared at it.

Hild bent and picked it up. Her tooth, from her mouth.

“Soon you will grow another, and stronger.”

She nodded.

“You must put it in your belt, or a sorcerer could steal it for a spell.”

She pushed it into her sash.

“You are bleeding.”

She wiped her mouth with her hand. A tiny, bright smear.

“Bright was the blood,” she said, the next part of the verse of Gwvrling the Giant.

“And bright was the horn in the hall of Eiddin!” Cian said, relieved. He held out his digging stick. “Gwvrling must have a sword. Come!”

And they scrambled over the tree trunk and swung their swords at invisible foes together: Y rhag meiwedd, y rhag mawredd, y rhag madiedd—in the van are the warlike, in the van are the noble, in the van are the good.

As usual, after a while they found it more exciting to swing at each other, and, as usual, Hild got hit more often because Cian’s reach was greater than hers, his sword longer, and he had a shield.

After one particularly hard smack at her shoulder, Hild jumped back. “Let us swap arms for a while.”

She had never dared ask before, but today she had bled, like a real Yffing. Cian considered, then held out his sword for Hild’s stick and slid the shield from his arm.

They leapt together again, and Hild found that taking a blow to a shield was a much finer thing than a blow to the ribs. She hacked with enthusiasm.

“Swap back now,” Cian said, panting a little.

“Just a while longer.”

“I want it. It’s mine.”

Hild didn’t want to give them up, and the wanting turned her mind smooth and hard as a shield wall. “It is yours, absolutely and only yours, given from the hand of Ceredig king. No one of this earth could dispute it. I do not dispute it. I ask for your great favour, a hero’s generosity.”

Cian blinked.

“And as we fight you may think secretly to yourself, Those arms are mine, I have but to say the word and they are in my hand again, I have the power to take them back anytime, anytime.”

He rose up on his toes, and back down, thinking. “Anytime?”

“Anytime.”

“It is mine?”

“It is yours. That is your secret power.” Holding secrets, her mother said, made a man feel mighty.

“Well, then. You may keep the shield for a time.” He lifted his stick and charged. They battled for a while.

Once again, Hild stepped back. “Now here, back to you, are your sword and shield.”

And he took them, returned her stick, and smiled. “These are mine. But you shall borrow them again. Tomorrow. Tomorrow when we come back to dig your hole.”

She nodded.

“It’s hot,” he said.

They sat by the pool. Hild slid her stick in and out of the water. The cherry leaves whispered in a slight breeze.

“You like the water.”

“I do.” She laid the stick aside and watched a waterbug dimple the surface and skate across it.

“And you’re not afraid of the sidsa?”

Her mother’s word for sorcery or witchcraft, not the immanence, the wild magic of these hidden places—there was no Anglisc word for that. Sprites live in rivers and springs, and are not to be meddled with, Onnen said. “I’m not afraid.” She was the light of the world. Besides, her mother said it was still water that was bad. She frowned slightly, as Breguswith did, and said, in Anglisc, “Still water is not to be trusted. It shines and it gleams, but is not what it seems.”

They both giggled. It shines and it gleams, but is not what it seems.

“And yet it is so… magic,” Hild said, in British. “Watch.” And she slid her stick in again at an angle. “See how the water breaks it?”

“I do!”

“And yet when I pull it out, it is whole.” She slid the stick in and out, in and out. Whole, broken, whole, broken. “What spirit breaks and remakes? Or is it only a glamour? Now, listen.” The cherry leaves whispered again, and again more strongly as air moved over them and the pool. “Feel the breath of it? Now look you down there. The mud seems rippled, does it not?”

“It does.”

“Yet it is not.”

“It is too. I can see it.”

“Then put your hand to the bottom.”

“The sprite will eat me if I disturb her magic.”

“She will not. I will give her an offering.” She drew her tooth from her sash and threw it into the pool. The soft silty mud closed over it and it was gone.

“You have given yourself to the sprite!”

“I have offered my tooth, of which I’ll soon have more.” But she touched her tongue to the raw place on her gum and hoped the new tooth wouldn’t belong to the sprite, hoped it didn’t mean she would drown one day when the sprite reclaimed what was hers. “Put your hand to the bottom.”

He rolled up his shirt sleeve. Slid it gingerly into the water.

“Now lay your palm on the bottom. And tell me, is it rippled?”

“It is smooth.” He patted the muddy bottom, sending up a swirl of brown. Hild had a sudden fear he would find her tooth and bring it out.

“Gently, gently. You may take your arm out now.” She lifted her face to the sky. The wind had died once more. “The beast begins to sleep again, and so forgets to weave its spell. See you now, the sand is smooth in appearance as well as fact. It is only when the water sprite breathes that it casts its veil on our eyes.”

Cian rubbed his arm dry on the turf, then on his tunic. “Tomorrow you shall show me more magic.”

“Tomorrow I shall show you the great frog who swallowed the heart of a hægtes.”

But the next day the Goodmanham steward declared it an auspicious time to harvest the rest of the flax—the base of the stems had turned yellow—and every able-bodied member of the community, young and old, was drafted, even the visiting thegns Wilgar and Trumwine. Men pulled the plants whole from the ground; housefolk, mostly wealh, gathered and tied the stems into bundles, then leaned them into stacks to dry. They laid cloth on the ground and shook the already dried bundles until seed rattled out; children carefully folded the cloth and carried it to the women who funnelled the tiny golden-brown seeds into jars and sent the cloth back to be laid again; at which point other wealh pulled the bundled stems through the coarse-toothed ripples set like arrowheads into posts to pull free the empty seedpods. It was thirsty, scratchy work; the children, highfolk and urchins alike, ran to and fro with jars of gruit—heather beer.

From the resinous scent of it, it was her mother’s special batch, heavy with sweet gale, which Hild already knew would lead to loud laughter and the energy to work all day. Many of the women did not drink and sent her instead with empty jars to the river.

Her mother scooped out three fingers of salve, handed the pot to Hild, and warmed the greasy stuff between her palms. When she worked it into Wilgar’s back, Hild thought he looked like a bristly black hog smeared with lard before going on the spit. She put the pot at the end of the bench out of the sun and watched her mother kneading the slablike muscles, pushing into his fat with her thumbs, running along lines of sinew like a saddlemaker pushing the needle through thick leather.

“Crops must have been good the last two years,” Breguswith said to him as he groaned with pleasure. “You’re plump as a prime bullock.”

He agreed that the gods had been kind and the weather favourable. They talked for a while about the crop in his valley to the north and his farmers, and after a while she slapped him on the arm and handed him his warrior jacket.

Wilgar eased the jacket back on, squinting against the late-afternoon sun. He twisted this way and that. “It feels better.” He sounded surprised.

“You’ll do,” Breguswith said.

They watched him head back to the hall and brace himself for Trumwine’s punch in the shoulder in the doorway.

Breguswith said, “The man is getting fat,” in the kind of voice that meant she was thinking more than she was saying.

Hild looked in the pot. “Will there be enough left for the women?”

Breguswith wiped her hands on her apron. “Do you see any women?”

There were only housefolk hurrying with yokes of beer buckets and platters of bread to the hall. She shook her head.

“Why you suppose that is?”

She pondered. “Because girls don’t show off?”

Breguswith huffed in amusement, sat on the bench, and wiped now at her forearms. “You’re not wholly wrong, but there’s more. Men’s arms are stronger than ours. That strength is their weakness. They forget—” A gust of laughter rolled from the hall. The drinking and boasting had begun. Breguswith stood. “I’ve things to see to. We’ll talk another time. Watch women and men, put yourself inside them. Imagine what they’re thinking. And remember what I’ve said.”

Two days into the retting, the river was sluggish and the air still and heavy with the ret stink. Breguswith and Onnen were inside the undercroft of the great timber hall, sorting cloth into bales for merchants and bales for the household, and Hereswith and Mildburh were in the weaving hut tying weights to the warp on a piece of tabby. Hild was long since tired of watching women and men from the loft in the byre and under a bench in hall (the rooftree at Goodmanham was low, close enough to the fire pits to make her cough and choke the one time she had tried it). All they seemed to do was lie to each other; the women did it while giggling and the men while boasting. She had no idea what that had to do with strength.

So today she forgot about it and, with Cian, followed the king and his household—his advisers, the various bands of warrior gesiths and their war hounds and sight hounds, the priests and petitioners and housefolk—into the meadow. The dogs settled down in the shade of a stand of alders in the bend of the river, and Hild, with Cian behind her, cautiously held out a fist to Gwen, the huge scarred wolfhound bitch whom they fed sometimes, when they could, and who consequently allowed them to approach on occasion. Gwen sniffed, then lifted a lip at Brannoch, the leader—a boarhound, and mad, though not as mad as the brutalised war hounds—and after some grumbles he licked his chops and lowered his nose to his paws, and the children sat themselves slowly, and Hild dared to lean against Gwen’s flank, and they all settled in to half doze and half listen to the run of the river, the whine of flies, the laughter of drunken fighting men, and the king’s petitioner.

Edwin, a compact man with chestnut hair, a grey-threaded beard, and heavy rings on both arms, sat on his carved stool under the oak, his chief steward Coelgar at his ear and his advisers about him, with his chin on his fist and his eyes on the petitioner, a one-handed local thegn, rewarded with five hides by Æthelric Spear years past for service rendered as gesith, who complained that a local widow had set eel traps in the river: his river, his.

Æthelric Spear. Hild’s grandfather. Hild paid closer attention.

Edwin had his face turned to the man, and smiled and nodded in the right places, but after a sentence or two his feet began to move this way and that on the turf. Hild plucked herself a blade of grass, sucked on the fat end, and pondered him. His gaze roved over his household: the priests—a bishop from the British west (spy of his foster-brother Cadwallon ap Cadfan, her mother said), a soft-voiced Irishman (bearing news of the Dál Fiatach and their hopes for the Isle of Vannin), Coifi, the ambitious young priest of the great temple, a woman who tended the well of Eilen (or tended first the needs of the scruffy local priest of Saint Elen, some would say)—the warrior gesiths (calling for more ale, more mead, “More white mead,” “White mead, at this hour!” the houseman muttered as he broached a second cask and gestured for a wealh to remove the empty), the confidential adviser from Eorpwald, the sulky new king-to-be of the East Anglisc, and his two sons, the young æthelings Eadfrith and Osfrith (no daughter, no future peaceweaver as yet). Edwin’s gaze moved from one to another and back again, head tilted. Hild had seen a dog look at his master that way when trying to guess which hand held the bone.

Gwen woke from some dream with a muffled bark and shook Hild off into the grass and scratched mightily, and stretched, and set the whole pack to shaking and stretching and scratching, and Hild after a moment tried it, too: the long stretch with both arms, then the legs, one at a time. It felt good. The push of her feet against the turf, the long line of her back. She did it again. Cian, next to her, copied her, limb for limb. Then he tried to scratch behind his ear with his right foot and fell over, giggling, and then, though she knew it was impossible, she had to try, too. They howled with laughter, and the dogs bayed and one, confused, snapped at another, and soon they were snarling and foaming and the warriors shouting and flinging arm rings as bets. One hound clamped another’s muzzle between its teeth and, neck rigid, haunches bulging and shining with effort, hauled it, screaming and bleeding, across the turf, clods of dirt ripping free as both fought to push in different directions. Hild was glad when Domnach, the Irish dog boy, came running with whip and raw meat and beat the hounds into whining submission. She stared at the bloody trails gouged by both dogs.

The king used the distraction to send the petitioner away with a fine knife and no decision.

Hild was seven, in the stone undercroft of the palace at York, helping her mother count the tuns of honey. Her mother told her she would be seated at the high table for Modresniht, one of the twelve winter feasts.

“You’re to sit by the king. The queen, too. If she’s well. You’re to talk to him.” She counted on her fingers again. “That makes three dozen. Do you have the tally sticks?”

Hild held up the smooth, notched sticks. You’re to sit by the king. You, not We. But she had learnt to say nothing until she understood. She would think about it later.

She loved the undercroft. It was vast and cool and mysterious, room after room, with water running along the southern wall in a sharp-edged gravel-bottomed channel. One room, with thick walls, no windows, and a stout, banded door, was full of treasure, but Edwin kept a man outside it at all times, even during feasts, and Hild had never seen the hoard of gold and garnets that Cian—one early evening, as they ate small wrinkled apples and hard cheese and fresh hazelnuts—assured her were heaped in piles on the tile floor. Hereswith had snorted and said Cian had never seen it, either. And then the two of them fell to throwing nutshells at each other and pulling each other’s hair. They did that a lot now, since Cian had carelessly months ago boasted that his father was a real king, with a real kingdom, and Hereswith shouted back that Ceredig was the chief of a tiny wealh forest who, even now, was being hunted like a wounded boar through the wood he’d once called home for killing her father, and Hild’s, who if he’d lived would one day have been overking of all the isle.

Hild had ignored them and concentrated on keeping a stick tucked under her arm like a distaff while she ate. Her mother could do anything with a spindle or a distaff in her hand, and Hereswith and Mildburh were already working on a diamond twill. She hated the idea of not knowing how to do something when it was time.

Besides, everything they said was wrong. Ceredig was not Cian’s real father. And Hereric was an ætheling who had been poisoned in exile and no one cared anymore. Even the men who had come with them from Elmet were deserting them. Her mother was bitter, she knew, but she understood: How was a man to measure his worth without a noble lord to fight for and receive rings from? It was a fall to be a should-be king’s gesith and then a mere fighting man hired to protect a woman and children. Eight had come with them from Elmet. Six now were oathed to Edwin: gesiths again. Only Burgræd and his stripling son were left, and Hild knew by the way the son stood stiff when Edwin was near that he was pulling away in secret.

Hild shivered. It was cool in the undercroft built under the redcrest palace, and shadowy, with pictures of old-fashioned people in robes painted on the walls—painted on the walls! The robes had a border dyed a purple her mother could not reproduce with her lichen. At the western end was a stone table and niches. An altar, Onnen said: whether to Mithras, to the Christ, or to the goddess of the spring, nobody knew. Hild resolved to bring an offering when her mother was busy.

Much of the palace was broken and patched with timber and thatch, but anyone could see it had once been magnificent. Edwin, it was said, planned to restore its former glory.

“… and, little prickle, when you sit by the king, you must talk. You don’t talk enough.”

Quiet mouth, bright mind.

“Oh, this is cloudy.” Breguswith dipped her finger in the honey, sniffed, and gestured to Hild to come close so that she could wipe her finger on her daughter’s brown tabby sash. She pointed to the lid, leaning against the wall. “Pass me that.” She banged the lid back on, fished chalk from the purse at her belt, scrawled a mark, and shook her head. “If Cwenburh would only… No matter. If we strain it well, it might do for mead. Help me roll it over there by the— Bend your legs, not your back.”

A memory of stretching like a dog, the push of feet on turf and flash of teeth, flicked across her mind like a leaf on a gust of wind. She tried to catch it back but it was gone.

They moved on to the wheels of cheese. Breguswith slipped her knife clear of its sheath, paused. “I shall lend you my second-best brooch.”

For Modresniht. “So I’m to be a princess again?” And Hereswith? But that was too many things to think about at once.

“You always were. Pull this tight.” Breguswith sliced the outstretched cheese wrapper, resheathed her knife, and began to unwind.

“Not a mouse in the byre?” She took the linen wrappings as her mother unwound them. They smelt sour.

“That time is ending.”

“Tell me your dream again.” She needed to hear the familiar story. One more time.

Her mother considered, then nodded. “One night, in the days when my belly was as flat as a loom and your father was out hunting more than deer, I dreamt of a light, oh such a strange and beautiful light, and the light turned into a jewel—”

“What kind of jewel?” Hild felt four years old again.

“A great glittering gem.”

“What colour?” She loved this part, loved the ritual of the broad, slow Anglisc, pouring like a river in its valley.

“Luscious as your lips.”

“Yes, but what colour?”

“Like your skin with the sun beneath it, with a glow like a blushing pearl. Like a garnet shining through milk.”

“A carnelian!”

“A carnelian. The best, biggest, brightest you ever beheld.”

“As big as a king’s token?”

“Bigger.”

“As big as an overking’s token?”

“Bigger.”

“As big as a redcrest emperor’s?”

“Bigger and brighter than the moon. It hung before me, then it sank into my belly, which swelled, and a voice said, ‘Behold, the light that will shine on all the world!’ And the light shone from my belly, brighter than the best beeswax tapers burning in their sconces of burnished bronze.” And then, in a more normal voice, “And the next day the midwife told me I was to have a child.”

“And who was the child?”

“Hmmn,” Breguswith said, just as she had when Hild was very little. “A baby goat?”

“No!”

“A lamb?”

“No!”

“A heckled little hedgepig?”

Hild chortled and her mother smiled. The smile, as usual, didn’t last long.

“And so, little prickle, you will sit on Edwin’s left hand and you will smile and talk as well as eat. You will make him notice. It is time to give your light to the world.”

You. Your light. The shadows around her loomed longer and darker. She didn’t know what her light was. “Will Hereswith be there?”

“I didn’t dream of your sister.”

“I want Hereswith!”

“Well. Well, perhaps. Yes, I don’t see why not. Yes, indeed. Hereswith.”

“And Onnen.”

Breguswith laughed. “Oh, not Onnen. She’s wealh.”

“And Cian?”

“No. Now come, smell at that cloth and tell me—”

“But what will I do?”

“You will accept your wyrd. If Cwenburh isn’t well… Ah, but who knows?”

Hild had no idea what the queen had to do with anything. Her wyrd. Light of the world.

“Come, tell me what you think of this cheese. Fit for a king or merely his pigs?”

Hild put her wyrd from her mind. “It’s stinky.”

“Indeed. But look, the rind is firm enough. And a good rinse in brine and a fresh wrapping and it may last a while longer. But it should have been rinsed and rewrapped long since. What is Cwenburh thinking?”

After the cheese they moved from the food room to the room of skeins of yarn and bolts of already woven cloth. One bolt, wrapped in plain undyed hemp, stood in the corner on its own. Breguswith pulled down the corner of the outer wrapper.

“Do you see this colour?” It was finely, tightly woven wool as lustrous as linen, a brilliant red. “Fit for a queen. But with your hair blue is better.” She dismissed the roll. “I have the very thing. When we have it cut, I shall work a border with gold.”

“Gold?”

“I have a ring in my chest. Wulf shall beat it thin for me and cut it. Your wrists and neck will outshine the queen.”

“We have gold?”

“There is always a bit hidden away.”

“I don’t want our gold.” That wasn’t exactly what she meant but she didn’t always know how to say gauzy but strong things in Anglisc.

“I dreamt of you, you are to be the light of the world. Of course you shall have gold. What is the matter with you?” Breguswith reached for two skeins of weld-yellow flax and tilted them towards the light, examining the yarn.

“Is it a good ring, and heavy?”

“What use would I have for lightweight trifles?”

“Then give the ring to Burgræd’s son, have him swear on it.”

“Burgræd?”

“His son.”

Her mother put the yarn down. “His son, you say?”

Hild nodded. “Burgmod. He is… drifting.”

“Towards the king?”

“I think so.”

Breguswith’s face stilled and her finger moved very slightly as she ran some calculation. “He is of an age,” she said eventually. “But it will wait until the sixth night… Yes.” Her smile was the kind of smile Hild had imagined on the water sprite’s face as she pulled her down and drowned her. “Yes. You shall have your gold and Burgræd his.”

“His son, Burgmod.”

“Him and his son both. And Hereswith shall bring her gemæcce to Modresniht.”

“Mildburh.”

“Child, I know their names.” She picked up the two skeins again. “Yes, it’s time to declare ourselves. We shall make a striking group at the feast. Now, tell me whether and why we should choose the left-spun yarn or the right.”

Hild, in fact, did not choose either. Her mother chose for her—armsful of both—and with Onnen wove a beautiful spin-patterned pale yellow underdress with wrist- and throat-work in blue and glittering real gold. Her long, rather old-fashioned—as was right for a child, light of the world or not—sleeveless jacket was as blue as the summer sky just after sunset, and fastened with a great wheel-like gilt-copper brooch whose rim was as large around as her closed fist, like a hand on her chest it was so heavy, for all that it was mostly copper.

Every time she swallowed, she gleamed. Every time she lifted a hand, she glittered. Every time she breathed, she glinted. She was breathing fast; her legs trembled; the glitter and gleam and glint became an endless shimmer.

She stood behind the hanging in the doorway between the kitchen corridor and the hall proper, thirty women and girls waiting beyond her. They did not talk to her. With Cwenburh still ill, she was to be cupbearer. “But Hereswith is older,” she’d said when her mother prepared her, but her mother had taken Hild’s face between her hands and said, “This is your wyrd.”

Beyond, in the columned hall, the scop was finishing his praise of Edwin’s vast holdings, the whiteness of his sheep, the richness of his soil: the necessary preamble to the introduction of the women of the household to begin the Modresniht feast. The hall had been quiet at first, less to listen to the scop than because everyone was hungover from yesterday’s Yule feast. As the informal jars of heather beer began to empty and housefolk brought in the wooden platters of intricately woven and spiced breads with their little pots of fruit butters and jams and herb pastes, stomachs and heads settled and conversation began to rise like a tide. The scop’s chant moved majestically from folk and fold to hearth and hall, wealth and wine, his rolling Anglisc now transmuted into the language of flame, and gold, and honour.

Hild’s legs trembled. She stood as straight as she could.

“Soon now,” her mother said.

Hild nodded but couldn’t speak. What if she dropped the cup? Or spilled it? Or tripped? What if she took it to guests in the wrong order? The omens would be calamitous.

“Hold out your hands.”

She obeyed.

“It’s heavy,” Breguswith said. She put the great cup in Hild’s hands. Hild sagged. She had never held anything so weighty.

It was as wide around as her rib cage, not gilded bronze but pure gold, with silver and gold filigree, studded with garnet and beryl and blue enamel. It was empty.

Breguswith gestured to a houseman in a work tunic, who passed her a red-glazed jar. She unstoppered it. The stinging scent of white mead made Hild blink.

As Breguswith began to pour, a houseboy lifted the hanging cloth and a rush of housefolk carrying stoppered jars flowed around Hild and into the hall. “Hold still!” Breguswith said.

Hild did her best. The boy still held the curtain. The housefolk in hall were spreading out along the wall behind the benches, ready with their jars. The scop’s voice rose.

The weight of the cup was unbearable. The noise was unbearable. The heat was unbearable.

Her mother was smoothing Hild’s hair back from her forehead, tucking it securely behind her ears. She was saying something. “… since a maid without a girdle was cupbearer? Never, is my guess. It’s a job for a queen but today, O my light, O my jewel, it is you. Today you are queen in this hall. You step first, with me just one step behind, and your sister and her gemæcce…”

She wanted Onnen. She wanted Cian. She wanted the queen to rise from her sickbed and take this cup from her.

“… Edwin first, then the guest at his right, the guest at his left, then across the hall to his…”

She wanted her mother to have dreamt of Hereswith as jewel and light. She wanted the king to be dead, dead, dead so that someone else’s closest female relative would do this.

Even over the din of conversation, the scop’s voice rang with that triumphal note which, whether in Anglisc or British, meant it was time.

“… here at your shoulder. But you step first, you step first. Step now, Hild.”

From behind her she felt the women smoothing their dresses, checking their wrist cuffs, and flicking their veils one last time. The houseboy was looking at her. Her hands felt slippery on the gold. It was too heavy. Her hands were too small. She would drop it.

The boy stuck out his tongue. She blinked. He crossed his eyes.

“They’ll get stuck,” she said in British. He nearly dropped the curtain in surprise, and it was with a private smile she stepped into the hall.

It had been the principia of the Roman prefect, then the palace of the king of Ebrauc, and was now the feasting hall of Edwin, king of Deira and Bernicia. It was too big, too high, too hard. More stone than wood. Wealh. Really wealh, in a way Ceredig’s smoky great house had not been.

It was not smoky here. She could feel the air stirring about her. She dare not look up from the cup in case she spilled, but she knew the roof would be too far up, in too much shadow, to see. Perhaps there were windows up there. But she wasn’t cold.

Wood coals glowed in a series of pits down the centre of the room. You could lay a herd of cows on those coals, end to end. Torches roared and rushed in their brackets along the high second-storey wall (how had the housefolk lit those? ladders?) and matching torches burnt less vigorously along the inner colonnades, behind the benches where the men sat in two long—long, long—rows facing one another across the fire pit. The walls were draped with tapestries and smaller hangings brocaded in gold and stitched with jewels. The shadows gleamed.

In the centre of the right-hand row was Edwin’s bench. He wore red. Four huge bands glittered on his left arm, three on his right. Royal bands. Every time he reached for bread, muscles in his neck and shoulder bunched and corded. Any one ring would, she knew, make her cup seem light. His sons, Eadfrith and Osfrith, sat on his right; Lilla, his chief gesith, on his left. As Hild approached slowly with her cup, Edwin looked at her and put down his bread. The scop played a dramatic chord on his lyre. Many turned to look and saw the girl in yellow and blue, carrying gold. Conversation dropped from deafening to loud.

Hild moved with as much grace as she could muster until she stood before Edwin and slightly to his left so that her back was not quite turned to the guests—British in Anglisc clothes—across the way.

“Edwin king,” she said as loud as she could, and because her voice was higher than any other voice in hall it cut through the din and the hall quieted more. Now she could hear distinctly the hiss and roar of the torches. “My king,” she said. And her carefully prepared speech fled. What could she say before so many that any would want to hear? “Great King. For you, a drink.” And she held out the cup. She nearly lost her balance.

Edwin, smiling, stood, leaned over the table, and took the cup in one hand. “I will lighten it for you,” he said, and took a great swallow. The gold at his temple and throat and arms, pinned to his chest and along his belt, winked. He handed it back. Hild took it carefully. Then she turned to the eldest ætheling, Eadfrith, who stood and drank, then to his brother, Osfrith. All around her, men began to stand. Her arms ached, but she held the cup out straight, as though it weighed nothing. She moved down the bench to the chief gesith, held it out.

“Ah, empty it for the maid, Lilla,” Edwin said. “She can barely hold it.”

The gesith laughed and swallowed once, twice, three times, then turned it upside down to show it empty. The crowd roared. Hild stood straighter. The weight of the brooch at her chest was terrible. She looked over at the houseman behind Edwin’s chair.

“The cup is empty,” she said.

He ran with his jar all the way down to the end of the bench and all the way back up to Hild, where he knelt and poured into the proffered cup. How did he do that without seeming to look?

She said clearly, using her stomach the way the great hounds belled when hunting, “Fill it high. Then bring your jar, in case our guests have a great thirst.” She knew full well that now the guests would feel it necessary to empty the cup twice over, and then she would go back to Edwin and he would have to maintain Anglisc prowess and drink more than those British in Anglisc clothes. And wasn’t that the point of a feast, to drink and sing? She remembered Ywain in Ceredig’s hall saying, Ah, if you make men drink they will sing, and if they sing, they are happy, and if they are happy, they throw gold to the harper and compliments to their guests. And Onnen had told her who was among the guests.

She spilled not a drop, and when she got to the guest bench, she held the cup to the head guest, who stood, and his entourage with him. “Dunod ap Pabo,” she said. “Drink and be welcome.” Then, quietly, in British, as he took the cup, “If your lady wife were here, I would give to her greetings as a friend of Onnen, who is cousin to your wife’s brother, Ceredig ap Gualloc, who was king in Elmet wood.”

He paused, shot a startled look across the hall.

“Drink, my lord. And tell me, for Onnen, is he well?”

He sipped and swallowed, nodded slightly.

She switched back to Anglisc. “If you drink more the cup will be easier for me to hold and you will have my gratitude. And,” in British again, “the housefolk have said that the mead from the hall jars is not of a strength of that first poured for the king. He will be amazed at your steady head.” She grinned. “Though who knows who has paid which man to say what in the hope of foolishness?”

They took a moment, the grown man in clothes foreign to him and the young girl in splendour she could barely carry, and understood each other. He laughed.

“You are a strange little lass,” he said in Anglisc, for all to hear.

“I am the light of the world,” she said, clear and high, and the scop, always sensitive to dramatic possibility, drew an uncanny chord from his lyre, and at that moment a great gust of wind made the torches on the upper level gutter then flare.

The hall fell silent.

“I drink to you, little light!” He drained the cup, upended it, and the men beat their palms on the boards and the scop nodded to his whistle man and his drummer and they plucked a few measures of a lively air and, while the other women now moved to fill drinking horns along the benches, she could recross the hall without too many people paying attention.

But as she approached Edwin he gestured to a houseman, who ran down the benches, and up, and said, “The king desires that you sit with him for the feast if, being a little maid, you are not too tired. And he desires me to take the cup from you now, so that you may walk with ease to his bench. Your lady mother and sister may join also, should you wish it.”

Hild looked at Edwin and nodded. “Yes. I thank the king. But my sister can carry the cup. The girl with honey hair and the green dress.”

Another houseman ran to bring Breguswith to Edwin, and Hereswith to Hild, to take the cup. Hereswith, twelve years old, brilliant in beryl green, with a silvered-tin brooch at her breast, gave Hild a complicated look as she reached for the cup, but looked startled when she felt its weight. “Thunor!” she said. “That’s heavy.”

“Hold it tight,” Hild said, and she was glad to have a sister to walk beside her down the hall. The housefolk watched them closely. The boy who had stuck his tongue out at her poked his head through the curtained doorway and the houseman standing there—the kitchen chief, Hild saw—shooed him back. The chief seemed tense.

Hild understood: He couldn’t serve until the cupbearer sat. “Let’s go faster,” Hild said.

Breguswith timed her arrival at the head table to match theirs. Edwin stood, the æthelings and Lilla with him, and a fuss was made of seating them all: Hild, as cupbearer, to the king’s immediate left, her mother and Hereswith and Mildburh between the princes.

The minute they sat, housefolk poured into the hall with roast pigs in apple-scented crackling and tubs of roasted vegetables and great wooden bowls of soup. At other tables, Hild saw, the men and their women shared the soup, passing the table bowl back and forth as they would a drinking horn, but at the king’s bench, each guest was brought his or her own birchwood bowl.

Her mother gave her a meaningful smile—Talk to the king!—then turned to Osfrith. Hereswith looked at Eadfrith and nodded as though they had always sat side by side, and he said, “How do you, lady?” though his voice squeaked a little and his spotty skin reddened. The scop began a pleasant tune, with an endless feel to it, like spinning, and Hild understood she would be here a while. She wished her feet touched the floor.

The king lifted his bowl and slurped. He wiped his beard with a heavy-ringed hand, wiped his hand on the cloth running along the edge of the table, looked at Hild. His eyes were mostly blue around the pupil and mostly green around the edge. She lifted her own bowl; without her feet to steady her, it seemed heavier than it should. The soup smelt of parsnip and cream. The steam rising from it was hot. She blew on the soup, took a tiny sip, blew some more.

“A princess does not blow on her food in my hall,” said the king, with a smile.

Hild nodded, then remembered she should talk. “Then what must I do? The soup is too hot, yet if I sit and wait, the whole will grow cold.”

“An ætheling or a princess must never wait. Our food comes to the table just so.” He clapped his hands twice, clap-clap, and lifted her bowl. A houseman appeared at his shoulder with a fresh bowl. “See? Try that. Yes, perfect. And if it gets cold you learn to clap”—clap-clap—“for another.”

Another houseman appeared. Hild recognised him as a friend of Onnen’s.

The king ignored him. “A king’s table is always watched. They will have seen you blow; when you clap they understand your needs.”

The houseman stood right there, while the king talked in his presence the way he wouldn’t even talk before his dog unless he gave it a fondle of its ears. Then he drank his own soup again.

She tried not to see her mother’s swift glance up the table. She swung her feet to and fro, thinking.

“I like your tunic, lord King.”

He turned to her, puzzled.

“It is a very fine red.” She tilted her head. “Though with our hair colour, blue is better.” She couldn’t interpret the look on his face. “I could help you pick the colour, next time.”

“You could?”

“I could.”

“Well I thank you for that, little maid.”

“I am seven. Not so little as I was. Though I do wish my legs were longer and would reach the ground.”

“By all means, let us fix that.” Clap-clap. This time Hild watched. The houseman peeled himself from the wall and as he approached, another from farther along the room took his place. “Bring the maid a cushion.”

When the man left on his errand, Hild said, “Do you not know my name, King? It is Hild.”

“Hild,” the king said. “You are a strange little maid.”

“So Prince Dunod says.”

“What do you know of Dunod ap Pabo?”

“That he would be sad for his wife if her brother were to be killed.”

“He told you this?”

“No, King, but what sister wouldn’t grieve for her brother, and what husband wouldn’t hurl himself at the wind to try to keep his wife happy?”

Edwin leaned in. His pupils were expanding, drinking the blue centre from his eyes, until all was green and black. “You have seen this?”

“My king?”

He wrapped his huge hand around her right wrist. “Tell me true, now. You have seen Dunod ap Pabo go to war over the death of Ceredig ap Gualloc?”

Hild blinked.

Edwin shook her slightly, and it took Hild back to a time she couldn’t quite remember, the day her world changed, when her father died, and she saw the grey snakes of hair in Edwin’s beard and heard a voice: Tell Cadfan that he or his son shall have to face this serpent one day.

“Cadwallon,” she whispered. Edwin let go as if scalded. “Cadfan’s son. Your foster-brother. He will have to face you.”

“Hild,” he said. “Now I know that name. You are the one in the lady Breguswith’s dream, the jewel who will light the way.”

Hild nodded. His face looked very strange, so pale that his eyes seemed to shine and crawl like summer flies.

“You will light my way.”

She nodded again. Talk to the king. “Yes, King. Though any light must have fuel to shine.”

“Fuel, is it?” The colour began to come back to Edwin’s face, and, along with it, a knowing look.

Hild felt encouraged. “Yes, King.”

“And what do you ask from me as your… fuel?”

“You are king, and do king things. My sister learns to weave. My—that is Cian—my mother’s… my mother’s gemæcce’s son, learns the sword. I want a path.”

“A path? That is your price?”

Price? She was aware of a houseman approaching bearing her cushion, but dared not pause now. “I want to learn, to wander and ask and think and listen like… like a priest or a prince.”

“Not gold?”

“Gold comes to priests and princes.”

Edwin threw back his head and laughed. “So now we get to it. Gold.” He stood, looked over at his scop. The scop’s rippling music stopped, and he struck two peremptory chords. “Hear me!” the king shouted. “I have a challenge.” Every warrior in the room came to attention. A feast challenge meant gold for the winner. “Though, as it is Modresniht, my challenge is for a maid.”

Puzzlement. Settling back of the men, leaning forward of the women. Breguswith’s eyes shone like blue glass.

Edwin stripped the lowest band on his left arm, wrapped both hands about it—they barely met around the circle—and lifted it over his head. It was soft yellow gold, thick as his thumb, worth a hundred cattle, two hundred, five hundred. He turned slowly, so it reflected light to the farthest ends of every bench. Then he threw it onto the table.

“Hild, princess and niece, jewel of Deira who will light our way in wisdom and prophecy, the gold is yours. To claim it, you must only fill our feasting cup to the brim, and carry it and the ring to our guest’s table without spilling a drop, and then back again.”

Hild stood, beckoned to a houseman, pointed to the cup. Her mother’s eyes glowed so hot they might melt. Gold, acknowledgement of her status, and a path. All for one trip across the hall.

It was impossible. The cup and ring together weighed more than half of what she did.

“Hild,” said her mother, and beat gently with the palm of her hand on the table as her daughter passed her. “Hild,” said Hereswith as her sister walked by.

“Hild,” said the women along the table, and then “Hild!” shouted one gesith, and now the drumming was like the surf at Bebbanburg, loud, unstoppable. “Hild. Hild. Hild.” There wasn’t a one among them who didn’t want to see her win an ætheling’s ransom from the king. She walked on the wave of sound the length of the tables and back up again until she stood before Edwin, on the other side of the board.

The arm ring winked hugely in the light. The white mead shimmered in its great cup. Her arms would not carry both.

Men’s strength is their weakness— A dog, snapping teeth—

The houseman lifted the cup. Hild raised one hand: Wait.

Neck rigid, haunches bulging. Furrows in the turf. Stretching the line of her back. Bend your legs…

She looked at Edwin. “Edwin, King, I will carry your gold. I will carry it as a princess does, as a crown.” And she bent her head—but also her legs.

When Edwin put the heavy ring on her head, Hild locked her knees and straightened one inch, two. It was like carrying the world. But she pushed with her feet and lifted and lifted until her spine was as straight as a plumb line and the weight poured through the muscles along her spine and in her thighs and calves and feet. She gestured to the houseman and turned to face Dunod and his folk. Then she accepted the cup.

This was for her path, for her freedom, for her life and family. To make her dead da proud. She was strong. She was royal. She would set her will. She would do this.

So she fixed her gaze on Dunod, on the glint of the gold around his throat, and she began. The drumming rose and, from the men, stamping and cheering. From the women, a ululation. And the sound swept her across the room, between the fire pits, to Dunod’s table.

“Do drink it all, lord, if you will,” she said, and he did, in one long draught, and his men shouted and he bellowed, “Hild! Light of the world!” and Hild took the cup back again and, again, was swept across the hall to Edwin’s table. It seemed not so difficult to walk a clear path.