Hild

5

MULSTAN, LORD OF MULSTANTON, wiped his beard, sent the cup down the table, and watched the strange maid. She was turning those blood beads of hers again, turn turn turn. At least she wasn’t wearing that huge knife tonight. A maid the same age as his little Begu with a slaughter seax!

He’d made them all welcome, of course, the maid, her wealh woman and son, even that Irish tutor-priest, or hostage, or whatever he was. When your king arrives in a blood-splashed boat and departs in a hurry leaving behind a favoured kinswoman and her household for whom he demands hospitality, you give it. It doesn’t matter that she’s only ten. It matters that she’s the subject of a prophecy and has the most direct and uncanny gaze of any maid you’ve ever seen, and that one wrong word to the king would mean being staked out for the ravens. So you give her your own bed and the highest place at table—for this was a country hall, after all, not much removed from its British roots, where women feasted alongside their men—and try as hard as you might to remember to show the boldness and generosity expected of an Anglisc thegn looking to gain favour with a king whose fortunes were on the rise. Or who might be dead, depending. No, no, he was alive, for the trade boats were getting through and there’d been no reports of Anglisc slaughter from Bebbanburg.

He was old, near forty; his first wife and children had died in the great sickness before the maid was born, and when his first lord and king, Æthelfrith, died and he was released from his gesith’s oath, he had declined exile north of the wall with the æthelings and had, instead, settled in to farm this once-rich land by the sea. When Edwin took the throne, he had charged Mulstan to oversee the safety of the small trading harbour and to take the tithe for the king of all goods that came and went across the sea. And eventually Mulstan was happy to marry the beautiful Enynny and build himself a good solid farmstead in the woods by the beck, just half a mile from the tideland estuary full of oysters and mussels rounding into Streanæshalch, the Bay of the Beacon, with its harbour that saw trade from Pictland and the North British, from Lindsey and the East Angles, and even the people of the North Way, whose narrow ships brought furs and amber across the North Sea and down along the chains of islands and along the coast of Pictland. Last year they’d had a Frisian ship creeping up from its more usual harbour at Gipswīc.

He swallowed more beer. Swefred was playing that song again, the one he liked about hearth and home. Couldn’t play half as well as that odd Irish priest the maid brought but at least he could understand the words. None of that Irish caterwauling. Ah, he missed his wife. By Thunor, he missed both of them. Though this Onnen woman who’d come with the maid—

The maid had stopped fiddling with her beads and was looking at him. “My lord Mulstan.”

He swallowed the wrong way and coughed. Had she read his thoughts about her wealh woman?

She waited patiently, which made him nervous. Royalty were rarely patient unless they were toying with you. At least she was talking now. For the first weeks she’d been mute and round-eyed as an owl. He’d seen gesiths with that look after their first shield wall.

“Who is the man who plies the withy beds?”

He wiped his beard. “I beg pardon?”

“The man. On the withy beds.” She cocked her head slightly, as though listening to a voice only she could hear. “He has a dog.”

“Black-and-white dog?” He slapped the board. “The willow man!” He immediately felt foolish. Of course the man in the willow withies was the willow man. “Irish,” he said, trying not to look into her fathomless eyes. Seen too much, those eyes. “Man to an envoy taken hostage so long ago no one remembers.” He’d never really thought about it before. Perhaps the envoy had died of sickness, perhaps he’d been freed but forgot to take his man with him. “But it’s said the man found his way to the priest of the tiny British church by the ruined beacon tower on the cliff. Long time ago, that. Never been a priest up there in my time. No doubt the priest had him work in the willow withies. But that was years ago, and now the willow man’s just the willow man. He doesn’t say much.”

Like you, little maid. But the willow man didn’t say much because no one much understood him. He just planted and pruned and harvested white willow and brown willow and buff willow, softened and dried it, boiled it and stripped it, so that now a person could visit the willow man’s bothy and exchange food or cloth or a copper pin for willow fit for any willow purpose and it was the finest for two days’ walk. The willow man lived in a world where he talked to no British, for long years had taught him the pointlessness of it; a world where the Anglisc were wights—and perhaps to him they were.

That priest was giving him one of those lean and wicked smiles. Must have said that last bit aloud. Had to watch that.

He tipped his beer horn. Empty. Onnen filled it and smiled. Thunor bless the woman. “Anyway, the willow man communes only with his dog and his boles and poles and stools and rods. Though he’s Irish, he seems harmless enough.” Of course the maid’s tutor-hostage, Fursey, was also Irish, some princely priest the king had taken in the bright clash at Tinamutha. Fruitless war, that. What was Fiachnae mac Báetáin, the king of the Ulaid, doing attacking his betters so far from home? And why had the king let such a little maid get mixed up in the blood and slaughter? “I hope the priest won’t take that amiss.”

Fursey rose and suggested smoothly that his lordship should pay no mind. For all knew that some Irish, especially the wicked Ui Neill, were known to be mad, to succumb to drink, to get too close to their horses and beat their dogs, and who could blame an Anglisc lord for not knowing the difference?

Hild, who had been living on this wild moor by the sea for some weeks now and, tutor or not, new friend Begu or not, was homesick and heartsick, listened but said nothing. More and more now she could tell the difference between what was real and what was a mix of memory and nightmare; more and more she felt sure that if she spoke she would be speaking to the living, not ghosts. Often now, Fursey’s instruction on letters and Latin seemed like something of this world and not the next. But still the effort of deciding whether or not it was right to speak would bring the memories: the Irish rising like a tide, the slip and slide in the mud on the mouth of the Tine, the cries of Osric, where is Osric? answered by ever more howling Irish. She felt the bruises still of the scramble into the boat, the fighting for space, the rock and tilt of the boat as an Irishman grabbed the gunwale with both hands…

She turned away from that memory. She would make friends with this willow man who also didn’t like to talk.

She crouched in the grey-brown sedge on the edge of the rhyne and watched. It might be spring half a mile away, down in the valley along the beck, but here, high on the marshy moor by the sea, it was a harsh, colourless world. Here there was no greening blossom, no curve of burbling stream or round river rocks. The rhynes ran spear-straight into the horizon, the willow beds running between them, all under a tin-grey sky. Steel-coloured water lapped and slapped against the dirt banks, and the willow canes, not yet in leaf, rattled and shook like tally sticks.

She wished Begu could be there, but Begu had been careless about keeping warm in the rain and she had been breathed on by sidsa and her nose was dripping. Onnen—who somehow had taken over Mulstan’s hall within a day of their arrival seven weeks ago—had ordered her to bed with a hot stone. So Hild had left her seax and belt with Begu, on the grounds that the willow man might be frightened by it, and wore her old sash instead. Then she had set out under the wide, scudding grey sky and found him here on the rhyne, the ditch between the withy beds, cutting white willow poles and stacking them in bundles, upright, in the water.

She had been watching the white-haired man and the black-and-white dog all morning. They were never apart. They knew she was there.

The willow man had looked at her sidelong once or twice and talked to his dog, whom he called Cú, or Dog, but more loudly than he would have if they’d been the only hot-blooded things on the moor.

The water slapped, the canes rattled, and man, girl, and dog all looked at the sky—clouds piling together, no longer tin but lead—then at one another. Hild, encouraged, stood, came closer—oh, her shoes were more mud cake than leather now—and pointed at the willow man, at his crinkly white hair, and said one of the Irish words she knew, “Bán.”

And he laughed, showing a toothless mouth, then loosed a torrent of Irish at her. His accent was strange. She understood three words of it, ingen (maid), saxain (Anglisc), and occoras (hunger), and shook her head. “Mall,” she said, “mall” (slow), and he said it all again. “Mall,” she said again and furrowed her brow while lifting her eyebrows: Please. And Cú tilted his head and whined, and then Bán spoke one more time in a jumbled Anglisc-British-Irish mix, and Hild listened with her whole skin, the way she listened to rooks in the field or wind in the trees. She understood, she thought. He was asking her if she was hungry.

She sat in the mud—Onnen would scold her raw—offered a fist to Cú, the first dog she had allowed near her since she watched Od eat the guts of Osric’s man, and repeated back to Bán as well as she could, with the words he had used, that she, the Anglisc maid, whose name was Hild, had hunger, a little, but that when she returned she would be very well provided for. And he nodded, but shook his fingers dismissively in that Irish way, just like Fursey, and tutted, and unfastened the sack at his waist and offered her half his cheese and a bite of onion, and a dip in the coarse grey salt collected in the seam of his sack.

When he waved the cheese Cú went painfully still and drooled and looked sad, as dogs do, and Hild and Bán laughed together and settled comfortably on the edge of the high bank between withy beds, where it was a little drier, and shared the cheese while Cú followed the movement of hand to mouth, and looked sadder and sadder. Both Hild and Bán were wise in the way of dogs, and they gave him none, and he stopped looking sad and instead went to sleep. And after, Bán let her climb into his flat-bottomed boat and coast up and down the rhyne with him while he used his little sharp knife to slide up along the grain of the growing willow rods, faster than she could see at first, and snick snick snick cut the little buds off the growing poles so they wouldn’t come in crooked. Overhead the clouds scudded and darkened and closed tighter than a lid upon the world, and again they glanced, man, girl, and dog, at the sky, and Hild persuaded him to come to the kitchen at the hall of Mulstan.

At the door, it was Guenmon, not Onnen, who gave her muddy shoes a look, Guenmon who raised an eyebrow at Bán and then said to Hild, “Don’t sit. Either of you. You’re all over mud.”

“He’s my guest.”

“Guest, is it? Well, Onnen would have my hair if she saw me feeding you in that state. And you dressed like that. Though it’s nice to see you’ve taken off that sword-knife.”

“I give him guest rights,” she said, and she gave Guenmon the look she’d perfected in the months she’d been apart from her mother, months of having to demand the rights of prince and priest and light of the world while in the guise of a rangy, chestnut-haired girl with a strong-boned face. And Guenmon, as everyone did when faced with that swelling gaze, sighed and gave in. “There’s some of my pasties, you know where they are, and I’ll fetch ale. But you’ll sit on the stoop til that mud dries, or Onnen—”

“Will have your hair, yes.” Hild took off her shoes, pulled a stool close to the shelf, stood on it—carefully, for her hose feet were wet—and lifted down the basket with the napkin-wrapped pasties. She handed one to Bán, took one for herself. “Where is she?”

“With the little mistress.” Guenmon set a poker to heat in the fire and then, despite her earlier words, took down two of the better copper cups and one wooden one, and from a walnut chest—she unlocked it with the latch-lifter that would usually hang on the belt of the lady of the hall—took a glazed clay pot of precious spice and added a pinch to each cup.

“Is she well?” Begu had looked miserable—dripping nose, sore throat, earache—but sturdy this morning. Being breathed on by sidsa could be a chancy business, yes, but usually only for infants and the very old.

“Nothing staying warm won’t cure. But that Onnen does fuss…” She shook her head and poured ale from a jar into the cups, and Hild understood this to be a comment on Onnen’s solicitousness for the lord’s daughter, and by extension the widowed lord himself. The lord, too, had been extravagant in his courtesies to Onnen, and the people of the hall—servants and highfolk alike—looked on with those wry smiles that Hild had seen grown-ups exchange before at these times. Perhaps they would mate. She had wanted to talk to Cian about it last night but Cian was being unaccountably surly, and Begu was already tucked up in her very own linden-wood bed. Onnen had sniffed at that when they’d first arrived—a ten-year-old girl, daughter of a country thegn and a deposed British lordling’s daughter, with her own bed and feather mattress! Wasteful, wasteful to build a whole miniature bed for a child—but had changed her tune quickly enough when Mulstan had made them all so welcome.

Hild understood and suspended judgement, as she had learnt to do in her strange position as the light of the world in a maid’s clothes. And yet she was ten, only ten, her heft only that of her gaze and words and bearing, especially on days like this when she had set out in her plainest short cyrtel and hose and left all her fine stuff safe and dry in Begu’s room.

So as Guenmon knocked the ashy scale from the glowing poker and plunged the hot tip into the first copper cup and sang a verse of a wealh song Hild didn’t know while the drink heated, Hild munched on her mutton pasty—Guenmon had a way of adding tarragon and vinegar that gave it a wild, hilly tang—and was grateful for warmth and food and the possibility of a new friend, one who didn’t belong here either.

Bán had finished his pasty and was looking about him. Cú was sitting quiet and well behaved, though there were suspicious-looking crumbs at his feet.

Guenmon handed out the ale. Bán sipped with caution, Hild with delight: mace and ginger! She watched the willow man lift his cup again, noted the calluses on his wrists, the suggestion of a thick scar around his throat as he swallowed. Mulstan didn’t use collars for his wealh, but Bán had been in a slave yoke at some time. And his tunic was threadbare. Did he even have a cloak? It might be spring but on the moorland and beach there would be two months yet of cold wind.

“Good ale,” she said, and Guenmon nodded as though such praise was her due.

“Ready yesterday, from the finest malting we’ve had this six-month or more, if I do say so myself.”

“Might we spare a jar or so?”

Guenmon folded her arms.

“And perhaps we have some cloth set by for rags that we might piece for a cloak.”

“And some sausage for the dog, while I’m about it?”

“Bán would no doubt be grateful,” Hild said, with a smile for Bán, who had recognised the word dog. She really wanted to talk to him. “Where’s Fursey?”

“Now how am I meant to know the whereabouts of that smooth-tongued, shave-pated Irish spy?”

And for a moment she sounded so like Breguswith that Hild missed her mother and sister fiercely.

Hild stood on the headland in the light mist of dawn with her toes hanging over the edge of the grassy east cliff. The edge of all things. Between day and night, between sky and earth, sea and land. The air smelt of iron and salt. Like Tinamutha. She rested her hand on her seax. No, not like Tinamutha: no stink of mud and marsh flats. No boats on fire. No armed men cutting their way towards her and the king. Just iron and salt. Her hand drifted from the seax. Behind her, behind the ruined stone beacon and the tumbledown wattle-and-thatch church, she heard cowbells. Their dull clank was almost tuneful, occasionally harmonious. She had never heard of such a thing, but now that she had, she wondered why every cow in the world didn’t have a tuned bell around its neck.

As the mist began to dissolve she could see the dark, wet beach. Long-legged birds speared shellfish, and women with sacks collected coal and driftwood, dodging the surf that ran up over the sand like the froth in a milkmaid’s pail. The sky showed as blue as twice-dyed linen. The sea was restless, glinting like napped flint. It, too, would turn blue if the sky stayed clear. Three ships were being loaded at the harbour on the mouth of the River Esk. Mulstan must be right. Her uncle must be winning. Though she didn’t know why she’d had no word.

From the harbour, the river wound back through blossoming fruit trees and tangled copses choked with bramble. An arrowhead of black-barred geese flew out of the east, feathers rosy in the rising sun and yellow beaks tinted somewhere between marigold and pink—the same colour as Hild’s carnelians that were now safely nestled in their carved ivory chest. Unless Begu had borrowed them again.

Hild turned to make sure. Begu was talking to the young son of the cowherd, one hand on the cow’s back, one on her hip. No beads at either wrist. She patted the cow as she talked, one of the small black cows favoured in these parts, less milk animals than meat-makers. The goats were the milkers.

Begu looked a bit like a goat: a long, thin face with teeth grown every which way and wide-spaced eyes. Her hair was brown-blond, like a goat’s, and always coming undone. She had a fondness for farm animals, as Hild liked creatures of the wild.

Except geese. They were landing on the beach and running, honking, wings spread, at women and sandpipers alike, until the beach cleared and the raucous things could pick the sand clean, and shit on everything, and leave still quarrelling. She hated geese, they made her anxious, she didn’t know why.

“Hild!” Begu waved her over, bouncing in place she was so eager. She was always eager. “Cædmon says he has a book. A book!”

Hild walked back to them. “Where?”

The boy, Cædmon, blushed behind his freckles and shock of dark hair and muttered something.

“Don’t be silly,” Begu said to him. She looked directly at Hild. Her eyes were hazel. “He thinks you’ll take it. You won’t, will you?”

“The book is Mulstan’s.” This was his land, and Cædmon was his wealh. She waited. Eventually, Cædmon looked up through his ragged fringe. Cut with a knife. “What kind of book is it?”

He shrugged, looked out to the horizon.

“I wish to see it.”

“It’s not here.” His voice was like the cowbells, soft-metalled and dull, but with music buried in it somewhere.

“Where is it?”

Another shrug.

“Where did it come from?” He shrugged again. “Where did it come from?”

“It was the priest’s. He died. We buried him with his beads, but his wife took the book.” Hild nodded. Books were precious, she was learning, especially the ones with gold and jewels. “Then she died. We buried her.” He gestured at the creamy-blossomed blackthorn hedge around the oval graveyard. The gate had fallen down. “Da took the book. To keep it safe for the new priest, he said. But there is no new priest. And Da’s forgotten about the book.”

The cows were grazing close to the gap in the hedge. It was wicked to let such a place fall into ruin. “It’s good land up here,” she said. “Good grazing. Water. And you could see trouble coming for miles.”

“Trouble?” Begu laughed her tumbling laugh. “There’s no trouble up here!”

There was always trouble in the world. She thought of fighting at Tinamutha in the flaring torchlight by the dock with the Irish, and Osric’s men strangely absent. The scramble for the ship. The gesiths for whom there was no room on the last boat forming a wall with the dogs on the quay, dying one by one as Edwin and his party fled.

Not here, she told herself. Not today.

“Still, it should be farmed. If no priest is coming, the land should be given to someone to steward.”

“It’s grazed,” Begu said, patting Cædmon’s cow.

“Yes, but are these the lord’s cattle?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

“How many?”

“Most.”

Hild’s mother and Coelgar both would have known exactly, and from them, Hild would have known. Accounts must be kept, obligations fostered. “Cows shouldn’t graze by the dead. They shit on everything.”

But Begu seemed immune to her reputation and just shrugged. “There’s a hedge around the graveyard. Mostly.”

Hild gave up and said to Cædmon, “What does the book look like?”

He made a frame in the air with his hands. Small.

“What colour is it?”

“Cow-shit brown.” They all grinned.

“Can I see it?”

He squinted at the sun, handed his switch to Begu, and said in his careful Anglisc, “Watch the cows.” He plunged down the scrubby hill towards the river.

“It is good land,” Begu said, turning slowly and looking at the headland as though she’d never seen it before. “More than just grazing. Eel traps in the river. Hares on the edges of the woods. Mushrooms and mast in the woods. Cows, sheep, oysters, seagull eggs… Do you want to see the secret spring?”

“A spring?”

“Of course there’s a spring.” They started walking. “You thought there was just that pond? Huh.”

“It’s not a bad pond. You could put fish in it.”

“Why? There’s lots of fish out there.” Begu waved in the direction of the sea.

Bebbanburg was by the sea. It could withstand the Irish because it had everything you could possibly need inside an unbreachable wall. But Begu was smiling at her and Hild couldn’t think how to explain without making that smile falter.

“Here.” Begu stopped by a stand of ferns, knelt, and used the cattle switch to move them to one side. Hild smelt mint. “It was Sirona’s spring once, long ago.”

Hild didn’t know Sirona. She didn’t know half the wealh gods of well and wall and wood.

It was a rocky pool as wide as the biggest soup cauldron at Bebbanburg. But deeper. A blade of grass turned slowly, sunwise, on the surface. A little horn cup stood on a shelf of rock among the ferns. Begu dipped it in the spring and poured a thin stream out to the spring and the goddess, then handed it to Hild. Hild sipped.

“It’s so cold!” She sipped again. “It tastes good.” Like fern and mint.

“It’s the best water in the world, my mother said. We used to come here in summer when it was hot down below. She told me stories of how she came here as a lass.”

Hild rolled the little horn cup between her hands. It felt old. She imagined Begu’s mother, Enynny, and Enynny’s mother, and her mother, and her mother before her, back into memory, sitting here by the ferns drinking the cold, minty water and talking quietly in British. So many. All gone into the mist. She felt a twist inside, a longing for a family and home that never was. “Do you miss her, your mother?”

“Yes. I think so. It was a long time ago. I was very little.”

“I miss my mother.”

“But you’ll see her soon. You’ll see. My fa says no one can take Bebbanburg.” Hild didn’t say anything. “What’s she like?”

“Tall.”

“You’re tall.”

“She’s very tall. Taller than the king.”

“Is he very small?”

“He’s as tall as Mulstan.”

“No! Then she must touch the sky!”

Hild laughed. “Nothing touches the sky. Except birds.” It was easy to talk to Begu. Perhaps because she said such strange things, perhaps because Hild got the sense she never took people seriously.

Begu flung herself down on her back in the sun. “What do you suppose the sky feels like?”

Hild put the cup carefully back in its niche and lay down, too. The grass was damp. They looked up and up at the blue sky. “Like mist. Like a blue veil. Like a cobweb.”

“Do you suppose it goes up and up forever? A world of blue?”

“And of black, at night.” When things that weren’t birds flew.

They were silent. The ferns whispered in the wind. Far away the sea hissed. Geese honked. Hild shivered.

“Perhaps geese are part of your wyrd.”

Hild looked at her.

“What? You don’t like them. I’ve marked that.”

“They’re loud and dirty.”

“So are goats. They all taste good, though.”

Hild turned back to the sky. She listened past the geese to the gulls crying in the distance. The sound seemed floatier up here, unlike the sharp piercing cries on the beach. The wind sounded different, too. No tall trees to rustle and shiver and speak. But then what was that rhythmic creaking?

“What’s—” The creaking deepened, stopped, was followed by a loud bellow and a wrenching crash. She sat up.

“The cows!”

They ran.

A cow, tempted by the tender grass among the graves, had tried to push through the fallen gate in the blackthorn hedge and got stuck. It was still stuck; it was thrashing and bellowing, destroying the hedge and driving thorns deeper into its neck and the tender pink udder. Blossom lay on the grass like snow.

“Keep them together.” Begu threw the switch to Hild and ran straight to the distressed cow.

Hild advanced on the cattle. “Sweff,” she called softly, as cowherds did. “Sweff sweff.” She walked slowly around them so they bunched together but not so tightly that they panicked. “Sweff sweff.” They began to lower their heads. One bent to the grass and tore a mouthful. Another swished its tail. This wasn’t so hard. It was not unlike reassuring dogs. She wondered what it was about the sweff sound, the shape or the fall, that the cows found so calming. “Swip,” she said, in the same tone. The browsing cow lifted its head. “Swip swip swip,” she said on a falling note. Eye rolls, a nervous snort. “Sweff sweff,” she said, with the proper rise and fall. They relaxed, though not as much as before.

“What are you doing?” Cædmon, one hand still on the sapling he’d been using to haul himself up the steep slope, one holding something wrapped in sacking. “Why are—” He caught sight of the cow stuck in the hedge and swore. “Gast!”

With Begu talking to her, the cow had calmed but was now lowing piteously. Begu was pondering the thorns. Cædmon dropped the sacking bundle, knelt by her, and patted the cow on the neck. He glanced at Hild. “Look to the others.”

“They’re fine now you’re here.” They were: all grazing peacefully. She wanted to look at the book, see if she could puzzle out some words. “You should take her collar off.”

Cædmon shook his head; he seemed as immune to her reputation as Begu. He pointed at the pierced udder. “This is what hurts most.”

“Won’t she kick when you pull the thorns?”

“She might. But we have to get every single one or in a few days she’ll leak yellow and stink.”

She wasn’t a big cow, but she weighed more than all three children put together. Hild longed for Cian’s old wicker shield or, better still, the one of sturdy wood and hide with the painted boss the Bryneich had given him last year. She took a deep breath and knelt. Down here the hooves looked huge and sharp, and they were covered in the shit the cow had loosed in her panic. She set the book aside. “Where should I begin?”

An hour later, by the foot of the daymark hill, Hild and Begu put down their burdens, the collar and its bell—for Cædmon said the cow would need salve round her neck, not a collar, and Hild wanted to look at the bell—and the sack-wrapped book, and did their best to tidy each other up. Hild unbraided Begu’s left plait, and with the leather tie held in her teeth combed the hair through with her fingers, picking out thorns and blossom petals and bits of grass.

Begu tried wiping her shoes on the grass.

“It won’t help,” Hild said, replaiting.

“It might.”

“It won’t. They can probably smell us from here.” She tied off the plait, unbound the other. “Keep still. There. Now you do mine.”

“Yours are fine and tidy. I don’t know how you keep them so.”

“I have my fa’s hair. Not soft like yours.”

“I like how yours feels, wiry and strong. Like you.”

No one had ever said that to her before.

“What’s wrong? Are you worried about the cow shit? I won’t let Guenmon shout at you.”

Guenmon was a beginner compared to Onnen, but being protected, and by someone who only came up to her chin, was so novel to Hild that she had no idea how to respond.

Fursey pursed his lips and turned the little brown book over and over in his hands, then knocked the cover with his knuckles. His fine black robe gaped a little at the neck, showing more than usual of the splotch of spilt-wine birth stain that ran from his left shoulder to his jawbone. “Cowhide over wooden board. Home-tanned skin at that.” He opened it, shut it, opened it again. “A breviarium psalterii. And in a terrible hand, something a peasant might write. Is this anything to do with that Irish serf you wanted me to speak to?”

“It belonged to a dead priest. What’s a”—she paused to sound it out carefully—“breviarium psalterii?”

“A shortened kind of Psalter. Like this.” He took his own book, bound in fine-grained black calfskin, from his waist pouch and opened it one-handed to show her. Psalms. He’d shown her them before. She nodded. Looked at the dead priest’s Psalter in his other hand.

“But the letters are different.” The letters were rounder and fatter, blacker. She held out her hand, and Fursey gave it to her. She hefted it, opened it again, peered at it. Fursey had been teaching her to read, but these letters were all run together; she couldn’t tell one word from another. There were no dots and other marks over certain letters, the way there were in Fursey’s book.

“It’s old,” he said. “Versio Ambrosiana. It was old before your dead priest took his vows.”

Curled in the crook of the big lime by the beck she leafed through the book. The dappled light swam over the ink that was fading to brown. In a terrible hand, something a peasant might write. There were peasants who wrote? If her uncle found out it would irritate him, that a peasant could do something his seer could not. Yet.

It would irritate Eadfrith, too. Even as their boat had crossed from the muddy surge of the Tine to the chop and heave of the sea, and men out of their wits moaned and the less injured laughed at their hurts when they remembered they should and looked as though they’d be grateful for their mothers when they didn’t, Eadfrith had been badgering his father about Fursey, who lay tied like a hog on the plank half deck between them.

Eadfrith kicked the priest on the thigh. “Why does she get him? Does she get the hostage price, too?”

Fursey, who was awake but gagged and so—uncharacteristically as she was to learn—silent, watched one then the other as if he was in hall at a scop’s contest.

“She gets nothing but charge of an annoying god mouth who will explain the value of the book.”

“But why can’t I have him?”

“You didn’t earn him.”

“Nor did she.”

“He’s mine to dispose of as I please.” Eadfrith said nothing, but drew his foot back again. “He’s not yours to damage. Unless you want to buy him from me?”

Eadfrith hadn’t done well in the fight—few had, it was more flight than fight—and had no bounty to show.

“No? Just as well. You’ve no need of books. You have a blade.”

While father and maybe-heir measured each other’s gaze, Fursey met Hild’s, raised his eyebrows, and looked pointedly at her seax.

Edwin missed nothing. He leaned down and said in that pleasant we’ll-eat-the-horse tone, “She might wear a blade but she also wears skirts, priest, like you. So she will learn. Teach her. But not about your Christ. There’ll be others for that, in time.” And to Hild, “While he eats at my expense, see you learn the full use of these books, if any.”

In the crook of the lime tree by the beck Hild closed the book. Fursey was now eating—and drinking, always drinking—at Mulstan’s expense, not her uncle’s. The gift of kings, her mother said: to make others pay. Another saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Women make and men break. She frowned. What about men in skirts, where did they fit? Skirt or sword, book or blade…

“It’s a strange book,” she said to Bán in Irish, and he said, “Is it?” in Anglisc, because Hild had decided that was best. With Fursey unwilling to translate, that was how they would learn the most, one from the other. She would speak Bán’s tongue and he hers, so that when she left—for she would leave by summer, surely—when she was gone, he could talk to the folk at the hall. And she would know more of how Fursey’s tricky Irish mind worked.

They were walking along a track raised between the rhynes. It was spring even here now, minty green leaves on everything, and the air full of the scent of blossom that in the valleys would already be tiny fruit. Assuming Osric’s men had joined Edwin’s, that their march up the coast had gone well, and that they had broken the host around Bebbanburg, the court would be moving to Yeavering, to the sweet green pastures and the constant wind on Goat Hill. But if they had, why was she still here? Why had no one come? Perhaps the Irish were still at sea. She reached for her seax but found her sash instead of her belt, and remembered she had lent it to Cian. It’s still mine, she’d said, but you may have the use of it, for a while. Only not when we play, because it is very sharp.

As they walked, Cú would run into the meadowsweet, comfrey, and reeds that lined the banks, and sniff and scratch, and sometimes whine, and then Bán would go look and untangle the tall golden withies from one another so they would grow straight. The golden willow grew fastest, he said, but the black willow was best for baskets. He had to shape “basket” with his hands twice before he found the word, but although Hild knew what he was trying to say, she didn’t interrupt. She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn’t get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, hurrying to get their words out. Like the strange Psalter.

“The Psalms are all written together,” she said. “No beginning and no end, all in one long rush. Fursey says it’s to imitate the long breath of god.”

“Father lord Fursey is a godly man,” Bán said absently, in Irish, and then stopped to test the suppleness of the withy. “Not now,” he said to himself. “Not yet.” They walked on.

“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is how, if it’s the breath of god, it’s a different breath to Fursey’s little book. Fursey says there is only one god, but surely that’s wrong.”

“It is not. There is God, only God, and God lives in everything. In the air and in the earth, in the rhyne and the willow, in you and in me and in Cú. How can there be two when God dwells in everything?”

Hild was glad she was speaking in Irish, because in Anglisc gods lived in particular places. In Anglisc it made no sense to say god was everywhere. Gods were called Thunor and Eorðe and Sigel, and they lived in their own places, in oak, or a deep well, or the sun. She wished Fursey were allowed to talk to her of his god. “If your god lives in your dog, why don’t you kneel before him?”

“Because God is in me, too.”

Hild pondered that as they walked. The sun was warming her back. “Once I met a British Christ bishop, Anaoc. He said prophecy was demon work. Is his Christ the same as your Irish god, and Fursey’s?”

“There is only one Christ.”

“Then if his god is in everything, too, where do the demons live?”

Bán looked at her helplessly, then said, “The willow in the yard will be dry now. Will I show you how to strip the bark?”

In the kitchen garth that had become the children’s place at the end of the afternoons once the kitchenfolk had taken the herbs they needed for cooking, Hild finally found a way to tell the story of dogs and gods and demons in Anglisc to Begu and Cian. She had no idea why it was so much harder for her to talk in Anglisc to anyone but Begu, it just was, though these last weeks she was learning how to let the words come. It helped if there was no weightiness behind them, no import; if they were only words with no life or death hanging in the balance.

While Cian hefted his exercise stones up and down, up and down, and Begu wove daises together, Hild finished her story, and Cian laughed. Hild was glad. He hadn’t laughed for a week.

“Gods and demons in dogs and worms!” He dropped his stones and smoothed his hair back from his forehead—it was now entirely the same colour as Hild’s and as long as any warrior’s. Hild saw Begu looking at it and wondered if she would think Cian’s hair felt nice, too. “So when I cast my line into the river and catch a fish,” he said, “and the fish eats the worm, will the worm gods have to fight with the fish gods?”

“And when we eat the fish,” Begu said, “will the gods inside us fight the gods inside the worm inside the fish?” Her plait was coming undone, again.

Hild said, “And will the demons then fight the other demons or band together against the gods like the Gododdin and the men of Rheged did against the Deivyr and Bryneich?”

And then of course having mentioned Cian’s favourite song, which she did deliberately, nothing would do but that they reenact the drinking of the wine and mead of Morei, then the fighting in the fosse with a bold and mighty arm, and the falling, always the falling in the fosse, the funeral fosse. But once they’d all fallen, they wiggled like worms in a pile, then like worms possessed by demons, then like people and dogs and demons and gods all fighting it out, and laughed until the dust on their cheeks turned to mud with their tears, and Begu’s hair was one big knot. And Hild, for a while, was not the bringer of light who predicted the death of a queen and the siege of a fortress, not the seer tasked with learning to read, but just a child.