Dedication

To Regia Anglorum, from whom I learned so much about being a Saxon.

, owe almost all the worldbuilding in this novel to you.

visit SUPERIORZ.ORG for more mm books

Chapter One

Wulfstan’s doom came upon him in a music too angelic for this world. It

happened like this:

“A little to steerboard,” Wulfstan called out as he piloted his lord’s ship,

Ganet, through the shifting sandbanks outside the salt market of Uisebec. To his
right slipped past the long, low coastline of the land of the East Angles. Before,
behind, and to his left, the world was as white as the meat of an egg. A sky of
high pale clouds met a sea coloured like milk.

That was when the breeze fell off. The steerboard creaked against the side,

and the oars groaned together as they were pulled back. The wind withdrew
and, in the great silence that followed, Wulfstan heard music, ghostly with
distance, achingly sweet.

Was this Man’s music, enchanted by distance, or was it truly the voices of

Heaven’s messengers meant to speak some word that only he might hear?

He stood breathless, listening hard for what felt like an age, and his heart

thudded under his breastbone like horse’s hooves on a stone floor. No clearer
understanding came, and finally he rebuked himself—God deals out men’s
fates as He wills. It is not for them to know their wyrd until it has come to
pass. Furtively, hiding the movement behind his cloak in case Cenred should see
it and mock, he crossed himself for protection.

The gesture worked—the wind swung back, bringing with it the scent of the

shore, seaweed and smoke, the blown murmur of a horde of chatting voices and
the clap of wet rope on masts. They rounded the sandbank and saw ahead the
harbour of Uisebec, crowded with ships, seething with folk and merry with
market-day colour.

A flick of fluttering blue cloth snapped against Wulfstan’s thigh as Cenred

came up beside him. “The lord says I am to bring us in. You are to stand with
the horses and calm them.”

Cenred had a round face, smooth and guileless as a child’s, which he held

before him like a shield, protecting and defending his thoughts rather than
revealing them.

Son of a coward, but none himself, Cenred had need of armour against his

fellows’ scorn. Wulfstan felt…not sorry for him, for that would be an insult, but a
wary, tentative kinship. He too knew what it was to be, by gift of some mischief
in God, that little bit too misshapen to fit his place.

Cenred was also good looking, and Wulfstan was aware enough of his own

weaknesses to know he would not have smiled so readily but for the hint of
wickedness in those half-veiled eyes. He allowed himself to reach out and curl
his hand around Cenred’s arm in a friendly cuff of acknowledgment. Cenred’s
smile broadened in return, and his eyes narrowed until they were scarcely more
than slits of glimmering lapis against the white sky. As Wulfstan ran down the
keelboard, to the pregnant hollow of the ship where the horses were lying,
folded down and tied, it was with a red racing of blood and a tingle over his skin
as though he had slicked it all over with nettle oil.

The oarsmen put their backs into the stroke. Wulfstan threw himself to his

knees in the centre of the hobbled animals and leaned over the lead stallion’s
neck to calm it as Ganet ran rattling onto the brown beach of loam and pebble
at the very edge of high tide. Impact jarred through the ship, throwing forward
many unsecured things: a seax—the single-edged knife from which the Saxons
took their name—the tack of Ecgbert’s horse, and the youngest of the lady’s
maids Ecgbert’s wife had brought with her.

A bright young creature with a plump, dimpled smile and the edge of a raven

curl peeking out of her veil, the maid clutched at a rower to steady herself.
Laughter burst forth all around when the rower seized her by the waist and
murmured something ribald. Though she slapped him in the face for it, the smack
was playful as a kitten’s swipe, and they both looked delighted when he let her
go.

Wulfstan indulged himself long enough to sigh as he watched them—dealing

with the horses requiring nothing more now the movement of the ship had
ceased.

“Envying him?” Ecgbert’s voice startled him, made him scramble up and

brush horsehair from his tunic, trying to look brave and keen and steady.

Envying her, Wulfstan thought. He straightened his shoulders and raised his

eyes to around the level of Ecgbert’s moustache. “My lord?”

“You are of an age to marry.” Ecgbert’s smile was a tucked-in little thing,

scarcely to be seen behind his plaited white beard. “It is good that you are finally
giving it some thought.” He stroked the up-flip of his moustache, aligning all the
hairs more neatly. “In truth I’m glad to see you have the appetite. You have been
so chaste since boyhood I thought I was raising a monk.”

Wulfstan let go of his scabbard to fiddle with his belt buckle while he thought

of a way to answer his lord that did not involve lying. “Not chaste, my lord, just
private.”

He looked up to gauge the older man’s reaction to this. Ecgbert had been

young with Wulfstan’s father, that epitome of everything a man should be. He
had fostered all Wulfstan’s brothers before him and had raised Wulfstan himself

for the past ten years. Wulfstan would sooner tear off his right arm than let his
lord down.

“Well.” Ecgbert’s small smile broadened into humour. “The wise man gives

his enemies no cause to tattle. But I’ve never known a youth who could school
himself quite so well as you. Discretion is a virtue I’ve yet to master myself.”

As they spoke, servants sidled up to untie the horses’ bonds. There came the

snap of a whip and the tug of a long leading rein from the shore, and with a
violent surge and clatter, the first of the horses half scrabbled, half jumped over
the side onto the soft wet sand.

“I thought you liked my Ecgfreda.” Ecgbert’s observation came sidelong, his

lord turning away to watch the unloading.

Wulfstan slumped, noticed that the green linen thread of Ecgbert’s red shoes

had worn to snapping where he pulled them on. He sighed again. “I do, my
lord.”

“So why are you not courting her? You have my favour.”
He kept his head bowed but dared to look up through the fringe of his flame-

red hair. Favour in this matter tasted just like shame. “I do not have hers. I
spoke of it with her, but she was wroth with me. She still is—we have not talked
since.”

“Well, I will not force her. She should know her own mind. Yet you two

were shoulder companions growing up. Always at some game together. I
thought it a certain thing.”

Wulfstan hunched a little more. “I thought so too, but she—”
Ecgbert shook his head, his tone hardening. “Stand up straight, boy. For

God’s sake, how many times must you be told? You are always trying to make
yourself small. Stand up, take up space. You are a large man, let the world
know it.”

Wulfstan straightened, raising an apologetic look to his lord. Ecgbert’s

expression was an interesting blend of fatherly disapproval and fondness, and
Wulfstan noted with satisfaction that—when he did stand tall—the old man had
to look up at him.

“I would not have the world undervalue you,” Ecgbert said, watching out of

the corner of his eye as the slaves made all tidy in Ganet’s belly, curling the
ropes, passing the travelling chests and sacks out to their fellows on the bank.
He turned his face aside to watch as the Port Reeve worked his way through the
crowd towards them.

“Son of my friend,” Ecgbert finished—a little distracted, but warm—“take

advantage of my wisdom, hard won, when it comes to women. If she is angry
with you, you have done something terrible—”

“I—”
“Which, being a man, you are not subtle enough to understand. The first thing

to do is to find out what it is, and that I will help you with. Isn’t that so, my
dear?”

Judith, Ecgbert’s wife, had emerged from the tent amidships as it was folded

down around her, and was adjusting her wimple against the wind. She smiled at
Wulfstan, though he thought it was a cooler smile than her husband’s. Always
more thought, more judgment behind her eyes than ever made it out in public
speech. “What’s that?”

“We will help Wulfstan here find out what he did to make Ecgfreda angry, so

that he can put it right.”

Her smile gained undertones of honest amusement. “Is he frightened of

asking her himself? I was not aware my daughter was such a fiend, to be
approached only by messenger.”

“Lady, she won’t speak to me, either to explain or to forgive. I cannot make

reparation if I don’t know what I’ve done.”

Judith shrugged the folds of her mantle back into the crooks of her elbows

and linked her hands over her stomach. “Yet I think you do know,” she said.
“Or would, if you thought on it. It is not my secret to give away.”

She tugged at Ecgbert’s arm. “Come, my lord, here is Reeve Alfric. Let us

declare ourselves and find lodging. If we don’t get to the market soon, all the
bargains will be gone.”

With one last look to see that all in Ganet lay lashed and secure, safe to be

left in the care of the reeve’s men, Wulfstan followed Ecgbert over the side,
waited for Judith to leap down and for her husband to catch her, cushioning her
fall. Then he joined the household to walk in procession up the thronging streets
of the town to Alfric’s great hall, where they would pass the night.

As the beach fell behind him and the empty white world was closed in by

houses and workshops, the music came again—a different strain this time,
martial and noble. He could almost feel it tightening his sinews, bracing up his
soul. It was closer now, close enough to distinguish the joined voices of mellow
harp and sharp, clean pipe. Looking over his shoulder to see who was making it,
he almost stumbled on the rutted mud of the street. Cenred caught him and
hauled him upright, and laughed about it all the way into the burh.

When Ecgbert and Judith’s things had been settled in private chambers, and

a space assigned for each of the warriors in the hall, Judith unlocked the smallest
of the chests and took out two leather pouches of coin. She kept the larger for
herself and gave the smaller to her husband. “Give me a couple of slaves to carry
the bags, and I will leave you for the day.”

“We could accompany you,” Wulfstan offered, still at Ecgbert’s shoulder. He

had come prepared to do the office of a son.

Judith grimaced. “I will be half the day haggling over the salt and the other

half buying spices and Frankish wine. Neither thing being a fit occupation for
warriors. Go, spend money rashly. Gamble on the horse races. Get drunk. Fight.
Whatever it is that you boys do out of the sight of your womenfolk, of which you
like to believe us fondly ignorant.”

This was his lady in her old age, saddened by time and the suffering of life. It

came to him in a flash what a sharp creature she must have been in her youth. As
he followed Ecgbert out onto the streets once more, he spared a moment’s
regret for the prospect of a day browsing among the market stalls. He would
have enjoyed sipping new wine and running his fingers over bolts of silk brought
all the way from Byzantium.

He and Ecgbert returned past Alfric’s hall and picked up Cenred and the

other warriors who were leaning there in the porch. Dressed for peace, they
wore neither mail nor helm, and their shields were left inside, lining the walls. No
one would mistake them for lesser men even so. Tall and well fed and well
muscled, they wore the best of cloth, the highest of colours. Their belts were
gilded, their swords ornamented with jewels.

They walked together back down to the shore, the other youths coming

behind Wulfstan, jostling and jabbing him at intervals as they would have poked
at a bear to prove their courage. He took the mobbing peaceably, accustomed
to it.

“Wait,” Ecgbert said, stopping in his tracks. A fat-bellied knarr lay on the

beach beside Ganet, listing over a little on her side. Around her clustered
merchants and farmers and a selection of youths from other lords’ households,
vaguely recognised as allies across the battle lines. They were drawn up in a
loose circle. On the sand in the centre of it, a seaman with a beaten face and a
blue herringbone cloak held the leash of a young man of surpassing beauty.

If it had not been for the stubble of his hair, fallow like a new-mown wheat

field, and the iron collar about his throat, Wulfstan would have sworn he was a
warrior. He had the physique of a man trained to kill, shoulders heavy from
bearing the mail and the linden shield, deep chested for wind enough to fight all
day. The muscles had begun to pare away into slenderness for lack of use, and it
gave him a half-made look, like a coltish boy. The shaved head made the nape
of his neck stand out, vulnerable and exposed, and with no hair to hang forward
into his face, he could not veil his fine features or his downcast eyes.

He stood very still as his owner expounded on his virtues. “We captured him

in Cerniu. A Welsh warrior, haughty and proud. A prince, maybe—God knows

they have enough of them. As you can see, he is tamed well enough now, and
broken to any man’s use. It is a shame to part with him, but at my lord’s death,
his widow wishes the ship and its chattels disposed of. So come, who will give
me twenty shillings for a Welsh prince to work in your stables…or at whatever
task you will?”

Ecgbert jerked his head, and the boys cleared him a path to the front of the

crowd, Wulfstan beside him as always. “I will.”

The slave looked up. Wulfstan caught a glimpse of freckles scattered across

elegant cheekbones, and of eyes, green as beech leaves, empty as a beech-bark
cup. He shuddered within at that look. It was as though the boy were dead
already—a profound resignation to whatever might come, as though despair was
its own peace.

“You do not wish to haggle, lord?” Blue-cloak looked Ecgbert up and down.

He was obviously sizing up the retinue, the jewels in Ecgbert’s sword-hilt and on
his belt, the scars and creases on his face. Wulfstan prickled up like a hedgehog
at the thought of this man judging his lord. A foolish old man with his best days
behind him. Probably can’t satisfy his young wife and wants something
more tractable to bed.

His own thoughts were unbearable to him, drove him forward, tightened his

shoulders and his voice. “My lord is no merchant, seafarer. If he wishes to be
generous to you, why should you question it? Payment of another sort he could
give you, if he wished, did you choose to question him again.”

The boys were at his shoulder, Cenred on the immediate left, protecting his

unshielded side. Their hands had fallen to the peace-ties about the hilts of their
swords, picking at the knots that held the blades in place.

Both hands in the air, placating, the merchant stepped back, and now his

own gaze was on the wormy ripples of the sand beneath his feet, and his own
head bowed. A sick little smile flitted across the slave’s face.

“I meant no offence, ring-giver. I would be glad of your bounty.”
Ecgbert dropped a hand on Wulfstan’s shoulder as he stepped forward, and

something about the quiet exhale of his breath suggested a laugh. “It is right for a
man to aid a widow in the time of her grief,” he said. “What heart would hold
back at such a time? What does she mean to do with this wealth?”

“Cunning old bugger,” Cenred whispered in Wulfstan’s ear, his voice full of

the same laughter. “Now he gets the balm in bed and to act the man of God.”

“You don’t think he means to use the boy for…” Wulfstan hissed, horrified

to find that others shared his suspicion.

The soft chuckle raised the hairs on the back of his neck as it ghosted across

his skin. “Well, if he isn’t, he’s the only one here not thinking it.”

“But…a warrior? A prince?”
“Not a warrior now, is he?” Cenred’s laughter turned in an instant into anger.

“If he’d not been willing to bear the dishonour, he shouldn’t have let himself be
captured. Look at him standing there, meek as a maid. Even now he could be
fighting back. If he ran at us, we’d give him death. No, he chooses to be a real
man’s whore with every breath he takes. I don’t give dog-shit what he was
before. Now, he’s a coward. I hope the old man nails him so hard he can’t walk
for a month, craven little lickspittle worm.”

Spit sprayed the side of Wulfstan’s face. He jerked away and wiped it,

feeling besmirched. There was a shake in his fingers he hoped Cenred hadn’t
seen, fruits of a strange, shrill panic under his breastbone he was surprised that
no one but he could hear. That could be any one of us, if the Norsemen
caught us. They’ve broken others, do you think they could not do the same
to you?

“She means to journey to Rome,” the sailor was saying, genial now he had

the coins in his palm. “To make pilgrimage for the sake of her husband’s soul.”

The words conjured up a different world—gold and white. The mother of

God, serene and mild, and holy virgins whose maidenheads miraculously
survived all the world could do to steal them. Washed clean and made generous
by heaven, Wulfstan thought. Of course, Cenred is furious because he is
afraid. Because no matter how he denies it, he knows this too could be him.
And he would not have it so.

“Then,” said Ecgbert, smiling with the air of a man who has ground into the

dirt all those who tried to shame him, “I am all the more glad to have contributed
to her weal.”

He held out his hand for the leash.
The slave did not look up, but fixed his gaze on the rough rope in his new

master’s hand and followed where he was tugged. They walked a little, further
down the beach, away from the ships and the crowd, into the sparse dunes,
where long grass hissed like snakes over tumbled stone.

“So,” Ecgbert laughed at last. “This is the reason I am not trusted with the

coin. I didn’t ask if you spoke our language. Where are you from, boy?”

“From Petrocstow, my lord.” It was a good voice, rough around the edges

as though the collar had worn it down. “They taught me to speak Englisc in the
boat. My name is-”

“I can’t get my tongue around your foreign words. You’ll be Brid from now

on.”

Wulfstan was watching closely, but the smooth face did not alter and the

downcast eyes betrayed nothing. He had not thought his lord cruel enough to

take away a man’s name on a whim, but perhaps it was not cruelty at all.
Perhaps he meant to put an end to what had been the young man’s life aboard
ship, to mark a new beginning. Whatever his old name, it was steeped in shame.
It might be a relief to be able to put it down.

“Yes, my lord.”
“You were on an oar?”
“Yes, my lord, but trusted with the sail too. I am skilled with horses and—”
“I have no need either of sailor or stableboy, but you may make yourself

useful with Shipmaster Eadwacer while I consider what to do with you.
Wulfstan?”

“Sir?”
“Take him and see to it that he’s bathed and better clothed. Eadwacer is to

put him to use, but he’s not to be put with the other slaves just yet. We must
hold him close for a while so he does not get any thoughts of escape.”

Ecgbert pressed the rope into Wulfstan’s hand, and he closed his fingers on

it, feeling accused, somehow. Behind him, Manna gave a guffaw of laughter at
something Cenred had murmured, and Wulfstan felt a flash of bright certainty
that they were talking about him. He set his face and tugged, and Brid came to
heel like a well-trained hound.

The lads followed, but for an honour guard of two who peeled from the

scrum to stand behind Ecgbert. They closed in all around, and though Brid
remained utterly expressionless, passive to the point where he was almost not
there at all, the stink of him gave him away—the acrid, unmistakable stink of
fear.

It was Manna who shoved him first, making him stumble, catch himself

awkwardly with his hands lashed behind his back and his throat jerking against
the iron band. He made a small unf as his air was cut off, but his expression
didn’t waver from nothingness. Bland. Infuriating.

Manna reached out, caught him by the chin and raised his face so they could

all see it clearly, and now its smoothness was clearer to all as a badge of pride.
It earned him a cuff around the ear. Brid staggered quite silently, righted himself,
and Manna caught his face again, stepped up close. “This boy wants to be in the
stables. I say we fit him out with a bridle and bit, for the lord will be riding
tonight.”

Six of the boys to one slave, and all roared with laughter, except Wulfstan.

Even Cenred joined in, though he joined in with everything, too eager to be
accepted to discriminate between the group’s opinions and his own.

“Leave him be.” Wulfstan shoved Manna away. He was a wiry, sinewy

creature without much weight—the push sent him a fair distance. Wulfstan

hadn’t intended the rock that met his heel and tripped him, so that he flapped
and flopped onto the dune like a beached fish, but he couldn’t have said he
regretted it either. “It’s not your place to interfere with the lord’s belongings.
He’s under Ecgbert’s protection, and Ecgbert is a kind man and would not have
his slaves abused.”

Manna flushed an ugly purple and leaped to his feet. He unclenched his hand

from his sword-hilt with an effort, bared his teeth. “You like him! You hope
when the lord’s finished with him he’ll crawl out to you. Fucking suck-up that
you are.”

Cenred had found his bravery enough to sober and catch at Manna’s elbow.

“Enough, Manna, you let your mouth run away with you. Hush now before you
hurt yourself with it.”

Manna’s blood was too high for retreat. He gave a bright laugh. His eyes

flashed. “Like that, would you—to share the same hole as your lord? Bet you’d
bend over for Ecgbert too if he asked.”

A great silence and a moment of disbelief, when no one in the party dared

acknowledge what had been said. All Wulfstan’s tangle of emotions went away
in one great and glorious burst of skin-peeling fury. He was barely aware of
wrenching out of the hard grips of his friends’ restraining hands. The sound of
their protests was a peeping like the voices of little birds in the back of his mind
as he drove across the small space that separated them, knocked Manna’s hand
away from his weapon and locked his fingers around the fiend’s throat,
squeezing.

Manna’s face was clear and bright in Wulfstan’s vision. He watched and

treasured every change from astonishment and regret, to fear, to panic and pain.
The purple suffusing Manna’s face deepened. His tongue crept out from
between his writhing lips. At last he went limp.

As Wulfstan shook him to wake him up again—for it was much less

satisfying to throttle a man when he flopped like a new corpse—something
smashed into the side of his face and knocked him off balance. He let go as he
fell, and as he rolled to his feet, all five of the lads surrounded him in a wall of
clinging hands and concerned looks.

Ecgbert ran up, shaking his white head. “My back was barely turned and you

are murdering each other! What is this?”

“He said…” It was suddenly hard for Wulfstan to draw a breath. He worked

his lungs like bellows but could not find air to speak.

Cenred stepped into the silence, eagerly. “Manna…” He touched his tongue

to his lips as he looked for a less damning way to say it, but found none. “Said
that Wulfstan would welcome…a man’s attentions.” A hand-flip and a quick

rush to exclaim, “It wasn’t an accusation. He didn’t mean it. It was only an insult,
intended to anger, and in that it succeeded better than he hoped. Wulfstan was
furious. We couldn’t stop him.”

“Does Manna breathe yet?” Ecgbert asked, and when Cenred knelt at his

side, brought his cheek to the open mouth and nodded, Ecgbert frowned and
nudged the fallen youth with his foot, ungently. “One day many of you youths will
be men. Until that day, the wisdom of God continues to winnow out the fools
and feed them to the cold earth. Wulfstan?”

“My lord?” The anger, leaving, had taken his strength with it. He struggled

not to shake. Not to let tears come to his eyes.

Ecgbert drew his sword and handed it to him, hilt first. “For this only of all

insults you had every right to kill him. Yet he lives. Do you now wish to finish the
job?”

Wulfstan didn’t know what to do. Spare the bastard and…would people

think it was true? But…but he didn’t think he could kill him. Not now, with him
sprawled defenceless in late-autumnal light, a band of bruising around his throat
like the marks of the gallows tree.

Also, it was true. Could he really kill a man for speaking the truth?
He closed his hand around the sword-hilt. The ring on the pommel clicked as

it turned in its setting. “Cenred says it was a…” He was ashamed at how his
voice slurred. His teeth met in his cheek as he bit down, getting himself in hand.
“A joke, my lord. I didn’t find it funny. Yet neither would I kill a man for
something he didn’t mean. I will abide by your decision, if you’ll guide me.”

“I say spare him. For though he has deserved death, he is a young idiot and

may yet grow into something worthwhile. Still, he must go home to his father. I
will not have in my following a lad who would make such remarks about his
brothers in arms.”

Seeing Wulfstan’s distress, Ecgbert clapped him on the shoulder and smiled.

“Come, they say only a strong man can afford mercy, and you have proved
yourself strong today. Did not Beowulf seek reconciliation with Unferth, though
he had been insulted? He was the most perfect of men.”

Ecgbert dusted his palms down on the skirts of his tunic. “Now, Cenred,

Aelfsi, you take this piece of trash to the docks and find him a boat home.
Wulfstan, take Brid to Judith. She’ll know what to do with him. I hope not to
see any of you again until I see you at the hall this evening.”

Knowing they were past the point where pushing him was safe, the lads

wandered off behind Ecgbert, letting Wulfstan be. He breathed deep, getting
himself in hand, forcing the inner animal safely back beneath his skin. A few
more moments soaking in the peace of sea and sky, and he had become human

again.

With Judith likely out at market still, Wulfstan took his chance to thread

among the stalls and look at the wonders on offer, calming his mind with the
sights. Here came the produce of the whole world, goods from countries where
the folk lived in stone houses and went about in cloth of silver. Conversely,
goods from savage countries, where the men were indistinguishable from
monsters, shaped differently from the men of Christendom—men with single
feet, heads in their chests, scales like dragon scales on their bellies, single eyes.

Soothed, he looked at the young man trailing obediently after him and said,

“You are a traveller.”

Quick flash of those leaf-green eyes, and he realized he had been wrong—

they were willow green, not beech. “I have been, lord.”

“You’ve seen uncanny things? Wondrous things?”
He thought the soft voice took on a hint of amusement, but didn’t trust his

perceptions enough to take offence. “Perhaps I haven’t been far enough, lord. It
was little but men in different clothes. And men are all the same.”

“Not so.” Wulfstan paused before a display of knives, picked one up to test

its heft, ignoring the craftsman’s fawning deference. It occurred to him that the
lad had seen him almost throttle a man who accused him of being willing to lie
with his lord, and yet he was assumed to go to it willingly.

How did you speak across such a chasm? Perhaps you didn’t. Perhaps you

assumed that crossing that gap cut a man off from mankind. Perhaps it was his
willingness to treat the slave as though he counted for anything that had marked
him out for the taunt in the first place? Either that, or his inward nature showed
on his skin like a mark.

He had a quick, suicidal urge to ask “What is it like? I dream sometimes…”

and stifled it. He would not tell that to any creature, let alone this one with no
fondness nor ties to him. Nor could he expect to get a useful answer from one
who had come by his defilement unwillingly. “Ecgbert is a good man,” he said
instead. “You will not be mistreated here, whatever impression the lads may
have made on you.”

This time the slave’s smile was open, open like a smoke hole to give a

glimpse of white nothingness behind it, empty and unknown. “I have no fear,
lord, in as much as I have no expectations at all. Let come what will come. I will
endure it.”

Wulfstan no more knew the answer to this question than his friends had. It

tore out of him, trailing confusion like gouts of blood on its barbs. “Why?”

Brid met his gaze, and it was as though his body was empty of a soul, as

though no one was there. For a moment it seemed he would not answer, but

something in Wulfstan’s face, perhaps, moved him to say, quietly, “It seemed to
me braver to live than to die.”

A stir at the end of the street, where bodies were packed in tight between the

fishermen’s huts, caught Wulfstan’s attention. A roar of laughter and of applause
came rolling up the hill towards them. Wulfstan felt it break over him like a wave
as he stood with the slave’s words chiming within him—making something ring
inside that he had not known was there.

“What was your name?” he asked. “Your true name?”
The boy laughed—very gently, very apologetically—and said, “Brid, my

lord. That is all that is left of the truth.”

The crowd had begun parting, and Wulfstan spotted Judith, throwing

something silver-bright on the ground in front of a skinny old man. The man rose
and bowed, and next to him, a slight and slender youngster did the same,
offering Wulfstan a good view of his cap of wild gold curls and the harp in its
bag on his back.

Wulfstan’s unease slid without warning into urgency. “So here is the source

of that music I’ve been hearing all day,” he said, mostly to himself—to Brid only
as an excuse to talk out loud. “I thought it was spirits, but now, see, it’s only one
young imp and his master, drawn here to play to the crowd. Let’s go and make
them sing for us.”

He walked as fast as he wished, and Brid followed him at the same pace, so

as not to tug on the leash.

There were wives hunkered on the street, selling everything out of baskets.

There were bales of salted fish, hard as bark. There was honey-bread flavoured
with ginger, and a tray of little custards with the last of the season’s cherries
wrinkled and tart inside them. There were tablet-woven laces and edgings for
tunics, bright with new colours and intricate designs. Arrowheads, and feathers
to fletch the arrows with, and leather quivers to carry them in. There were dried
apples, and belt buckles, shoes and lampreys, eels and eggs.

All of these wares their sellers shoved in his face, urging him in loud voices to

sample, try and buy, to smell and squeeze and feel the quality. So by the time he
had pushed past them all, made his way to Judith’s side, the harper and his boy
had dodged up an alley and were nowhere to be seen.

He swallowed unreasonably acute disappointment—a desire to know at

once if these two had really been his portent, or if he should look for something
else.

Under the scrutiny of ladies in waiting, he accepted Judith’s hug before

tugging Brid forward to stand in front of his lord’s wife, sparing a moment to
worry about what she would say. “My lady, Ecgbert bought this slave, and bids

you wash and clothe him more suitably. His name is Brid.”

Judith looked the young man up and down, adjusted the set of her wimple,

the curve of her hands not quite concealing a brief expression of weariness. It
had gone by the time she lowered her hands again. “My husband is always so
thoughtful. I am too old to safely bear any more children, and I would strangle at
birth any get that threatened my own sons. This was a wise purchase. I will do
as he asks.”

To Brid she said only, “You see those two?” and indicated the slaves she

had with her, both of them dressed in undyed wool and cast-off shoes, without
weapon or ornament and with their greying hair cropped close. They were
reshouldering a great pile of baskets and sacks, while ostentatiously pretending
neither to look nor listen to the conversation.

“Yes, lady.”
“You can help them with the baggage for now, while I consider where to

house you. Wulfstan, I won’t be left with an untested slave and no sword to
guard me. You will have to spend the day accompanying me after all.”

“I’d be honoured to, lady.”
At that she laughed, the heaviness lifting from her face and her back

straightening. “I do believe you mean that, strange boy.”

He did. There was too much to look at in the market. It would have been a

waste to spend the day fighting, gambling and drinking with his companions as he
did every day at home, and miss it all. “I do,” he agreed, good-humouredly. “I
was hoping to find the harpers again. I’ve been hearing music on and off all day,
and I need to track them down just to prove to myself that they and it fit
together.”

“Ah,” she said, and her head was turned, so that some of the sigh was for

Brid, who had joined the other slaves, had his hands untied and the leash
removed. The collar remained for Ecgbert to remove or not as he pleased. “But
we are just off to the salt merchants, and they are tucked behind the dunes on
the coast. We will leave your scops behind, I’m afraid.”

As he trailed down the coast path behind her, keeping a wary eye on Brid

and an indulgent one on the gossip of the maids, Wulfstan thought back on the
day. He had disappointed Ecgbert, been accused of the unthinkable and broken
a friendship as a result. Ecgbert had disappointed and worried him in return—
manly though it was to fuck one’s defeated and enslaved enemies, it hardly
seemed Christian, or kind. It was all of a part of the day that he should have set
his heart on a music he was now going to be denied.

His fretfulness must have showed, for at length, Judith put a hand on his arm.

Evening was falling and the ladies drooping. The slaves staggered under their

blocks of salt. “They’ll be at the hall,” she said quietly. “I’ve never known a
harper to turn away from a captive audience or a free meal.”

It was true. As they were packing away the burdens in the chest set aside for

Judith’s use, he heard the tune from this morning come winding through the
twilight on the firelit smoke of the hall. He was drawn there as if under a spell,
throwing the door wider, finding a wall of backs, thicker than the reek of sweat
and fish and smoke. Somewhere near the high seat pillars, a glint of gold
accompanied a sound like honey. Plunging in, he swore to himself that this time
would count for all. With this encounter he was going to mend the whole day.

Wulfstan took a moment to let his eyes adjust. Outside, a yellow sunset filled

the streets with saffron light. Inside, only the great hearth’s amber glow and the
few smoky dishes of fish oil, hanging alight from the crossbeams of the hall,
provided any relief from the brown darkness. Talk and laughter surged all
around him, almost drowning out the soothing lilt of the harp—it stitched
together the little pauses, formed a homely backdrop for the many
conversations. Don’t be so impatient, it said, you have all night. You have
me here trapped.

As his sight grew accustomed to the dim, the colours of the wall hangings

grew deeper, richer. The gilded paint on the wolves’ heads above the door
began to gleam out. The pillars of the hall were blood-red, carved and painted
with ships and whales and sea monsters, white and green and blue. Now he
could see the guests in all their finery—the great silver brooches that held back
their cloaks, the glisten of silk and bone and gold.

Pushing past the lower tables, where common fishermen and traders ate their

meals off wooden trenchers and supped from beakers of leather, he found
Ecgbert already seated on a cushioned bench at the high table. This—stretching
from side to side of the end wall—was covered in finely woven lawn cloth, white
with bands of indigo and red. It glittered all over with glassware—claw beakers
and horns of glass held up by delicate iron supports, and conical beakers, refilled
to be drained in one gulp, because they could not be set down full.

Servants had just begun taking down the spitted boar that sizzled over the

fire in the great central firepit, and others were ladling pottage from the larger of
the two cauldrons. Its chain wound up like fighting serpents into the dark of the
roof, where it coiled around one of the beams. Ecgbert beckoned, and Wulfstan
ran up the stairs of the dais and went to the place set for him at his lord’s right
hand.

Just at the edge of the dais, between the feasting lords and their folk, a three-

legged stool had been set, and there sat the old man from the market, his eyes
closed and his head bent over the carved harp in his lap. Music spilled out from

his moving fingers like mead, soothing and sweet.

Wulfstan’s fellows were at the table already, and there was a brief uneasiness

as he sat, a shuffling to put a little more distance between himself and them. He
harvested looks out of the corners of a dozen eyes as they tried to gauge
whether the battle madness had left him. Then Cenred leaned forward and
pressed a full mug of ale into his hand, and all the backs around him eased,
slumping.

He answered a few questions, returned a few taunts absentmindedly,

watching the harper, waiting for that sensation of magic to return. This music,
beautiful though it was, and clearly powerful enough to soothe the angry souls of
a hundred young warriors eager for glory and seated together, was not what he
had been hoping for.

The old man was not meanly dressed. His garments were well made and fine,

but of a dozen diverse ages—good shoes worn shabby, a green cloak rubbed
thin over the shoulders. A cast-off tunic of indigo, too big for him, with the
sleeves rolled back so that his skinny wrists showed beneath. Dear Lord, he was
skinny. The hall’s umber light made hollows of his cheeks and his eye sockets,
gouged out the thinness of his jaw and the fragile collarbones that showed where
the ample tunic had slipped off one shoulder.

Still, there was silver at his throat, and a silver bracelet over one of his

sleeves. His face might have been that of welcome death, serene in its gauntness,
with deep scores of laughter around the mouth and eyes. He was all but bald—a
few brave hairs clinging to the base of his skull, but his moustache was a glorious
thing, a great moony sickle, the ends hanging down to brush his thin chest.

Where was his imp—his servant, his young helper? Wulfstan earned himself

a glare of disapproval from his lord by shovelling down meat and barley stew in
heaped spoonfuls, untasting, and cramming bread so fast after it that half the
portion tore off and landed on the floor. He slowed down, remembered his
manners, picked up the bread he had dropped among the fresh scented reeds
and made the sign of the cross over it to dislodge any ill-giving demons that
might have hopped on board before he returned it to his plate.

Looking up at the hall’s high wind holes, he saw it was dark outside, and

excused himself from the table to go and find an alley to piss in. That too did not
go down well with Ecgbert or with their host, Alfric, but Wulfstan was feeling
itchy and ill done by—thwarted at every turn in the one, single thing he had set
himself to do this day—and he did not take the hint of their vinegar looks.

Outside, the autumn evening had grown chill and a dew was beginning to rise

from every flat surface. A green haze hung about the silver-blue moon and
bruised all the shadows that fell around him. The day’s voices had fallen silent,

and now the town was filled with the whispering of the sea.

Finding an angle between two walls, Wulfstan hauled up his skirts and

relieved himself swiftly. This was not a time of night to be out of doors, alone in a
world that sunset had handed over to the powers of darkness. They drew close,
at night, the things that lived in the wilderness and listened with envious hearts to
the laughter of men. At that thought he adjusted his linen, tightened his hose and
turned back, no longer annoyed. Better Cenred and Aelfsi, Ecgbert and Alfric.
Better Manna, than whatever might lurk out here.

Coming in to the porch, a little too fast, his eyes dazzled from the light

indoors and his mind mazed with thoughts, he didn’t hear the other man until he
collided with him. The breath went out of him in a round thump. There was a
brief impression of long limbs, slim and bony. Then a resonant voice went “Oh!”
without any of the apology or the instant deference Wulfstan knew himself
entitled to.

He didn’t think before grabbing narrow wrists and holding on, but he did

twist so that the light of the fire fell on his companion’s face, and he did breathe
in, hard, to see he had finally caught the fish for which he had been angling all
night. For this young man had the sheepskin bag of a lyre on his shoulder and a
bone whistle clutched in his right hand.

Loose curls the colour of Byzantine gold bounced absurdly around a face as

thin as his master’s. Hard to see it clearly in the leap and cower of firelight,
Wulfstan only got glimpses, enough to believe he saw beauty, sharp and fine. A
gazehound of a man, built for speed. In the shifting bars of radiance through the
door, his eyes looked full of fire, so that Wulfstan couldn’t tell the colour, though
he tried.

The harper breathed out—a sigh that was also a laugh, and the ends of his

lips turned up. Wulfstan couldn’t be sure, but he thought the smile mocking. It lit
something in Wulfstan that snapped into sparks with a crack.

“I’m waiting for your apology, churl. Then you may step aside and let me

pass.”

The laugh was a little louder this time, and the mockery more certain. “You

ran into me. It’s you who should apologise.”

He couldn’t believe it. The creature had only an eating knife at his belt. He

was as frail and thin as straw, and a beggar in the hall. Wulfstan had never been
so affronted in his life. “Men like you get out of my way.”

He really thought the man’s eyes were that colour—all madder red and gold

with fire. The thin mouth twisted up, and underneath the laughter there was pride
like a coiled snake. The snap of it took Wulfstan by surprise, no more so than
the shove in the centre of his chest. At some point he must have let go of those

sinewy wrists, for now he found himself pushed back into the join of door and
joist and pinned there, all the other man’s weight crowded against him.

He saw stars over the harper’s shoulder shining down on him like spear tips,

and he knew he should push back—that this man didn’t have either the weight
or the training to hold him. He should push back, and hit and hit again until the
little nobody was taught how to deal with his betters. A profound helplessness
seemed to have come over him. The man was beautiful in the darkness, and his
body and his anger were hot against Wulfstan, and the thin fingers with their
calluses that had risen to yank at his hair in childish spite were slowly ungripping
and sliding down to bracket his face.

Here there was less light, their combined weight holding the door shut, the

fire inside. The harper’s eyes were dark now, but they were wide open, fixed on
Wulfstan’s, and everything behind them was sharp and hard and proud,
demanding. Though slight, he was taller than Wulfstan.

He pulled at Wulfstan’s face, angling it, and Wulfstan let him. Just at that

moment, Wulfstan would have let him do anything. He felt that someone had
taken his bones out and replaced them with honeycomb, and that as long as he
didn’t frighten this away, if only he didn’t move, he might burst into puddles of
gold, sticky sweet.

“Huh.” That small laugh again, surprised, delighted, and the harper leaned in

a touch more and the mocking lips closed hot over his own.

Breath against his mouth and the tentative press of a very daring tongue, and

Wulfstan’s mind and scruples joined the wash of thick liquid gold that was
oozing out of all his pores, making his heart thud slow and heavy and his loins
ache deep. All the resistance in him, false as it was, melted into warm oil and left
him boneless, compliant, waiting for the other man to take the lead, wanting him
to.

Who knew where it would have led, but just as the young harper had shaken

off his surprise, taken back his long hands and might have done something more
interesting with them, the door bounced against them both, and a determined
pressure began to grind it open.

Someone was coming through. The thought knocked at the gates of

Wulfstan’s mind once and was ignored. The second time it battered them down.
Someone would see! Someone would see him, surrendering his body to another
man’s use, like a slave—but worse, because he was doing it willingly. Heaven’s
Warden! How they’d laugh. How they’d despise him, all of them. How his lord
would mourn, his father too, and his mother would weep. No man in all of the
kingdoms of the Angles, nor anywhere in the world, would ever look again on
him without contempt.

Wulfstan’s hands, which had been powerlessly clutching at the wall behind

him, came up, grabbed ahold of the scop’s tunic. He lifted the man off his feet
and threw him bodily backwards. The harper twisted, cat-like, in the air, so that
he would not fall onto his back and crush the lyre he carried. He came down
heavily on his shoulder, knocking cheek and chin against the portico’s other wall.
Wulfstan had stepped forward, grabbed him by the collar and raised his fist to
land a punch in that trespassing mouth, before the door opened wide to let
through a burly fisherman and his sons. Behind them stood the boy’s master,
bent and frail as last winter’s leaf left on the bough.

The old man could move fast enough, mind. He had thrown himself at

Wulfstan’s feet in a breath, clutching in supplication at his knees.

“My lord! Please, whatever the boy’s done, leave him able to sing and to

play. They are baying for music in there and I am an old man, and tired. He must
earn our bread, or we shall go hungry. I beg you, lord…” Tears stood in the
rheumy eyes, making Wulfstan feel like a monster atop all of the raging confusion
of this moment. “I beg you. He’s a foolish child, and I have indulged him too
much. I will punish him myself. I have no doubt his wicked words deserve a
whipping. Only please don’t—”

“He deserves…” Wulfstan stopped himself. The harper had drawn himself

together in a tangle of long limbs against the wall, and looked shaken, perhaps
even penitent. Struggling with his thick head—he hadn’t regained the power of
thought—Wulfstan remembered what it was that the young man deserved, for
suggesting that one of Ecgbert’s warriors could possibly want to yield to him.
Death. If Ecgbert would let him kill Manna over the suggestion—Manna who
was a shoulder-companion, the son of a man of rank—he would positively
demand it for this nobody.

The younger man wiped blood from his nose and came to his master’s side,

which left him kneeling too, his blond head bent and his gaze fixed on the floor.
Wulfstan was left looking down on the elder’s entreating face, the bowed nape
of the younger man’s neck. “He deserves…”

What did he deserve, for taking advantage of Wulfstan’s weakness and

giving him what he hadn’t really known he wanted until that moment? What did
he deserve for being a more natural man? “He deserves a good hiding. He was
disrespectful to me and is fortunate that I am a merciful man. With another he
would not have been so lucky. That mouth of his will get him killed, if you do not
teach him to shut it.”

Without letting go of Wulfstan’s knees, so—unless he wished to kick the frail

ancient off—he was pinned in place, the old man nudged the younger, who
scrambled to his feet and eeled back inside among the crowd without a

backward glance. “I will teach him so, my lord.” He bowed, until the ends of his
long moustache trailed on Wulfstan’s shoes, and shed warm tears on his feet.
“Thank you. Where I travel, I will tell of your kindness. I will link your name
forever with—”

“No.” Wulfstan’s skin crept. “Let me earn my reputation in battle and not for

forgiving little slights. There is no glory in beating a scop, so where is the glory in
refraining? Silence will serve.”

It was an age-worn smile he got in return, soft as an old cloak. “As you wish,

lord.” Creakily, wincing as his joints straightened, the old man struggled to his
feet. “I am Anna, my lord. Anna of Cantwarebyrig. Though I have very little,
what I have is yours to command, in gratitude for your generosity.”

Give me your boy. Wulfstan’s heart spoke, or perhaps it was a devil

speaking directly to his soul. This day had been cursed from its beginning, and he
was suddenly weary for it to end.

He inclined his head, accepting the offer of service, but didn’t open his mouth

to say anything more for fear of what might come out. Anna withdrew, and
Wulfstan stood gulping for breath, his prick bruised with need and his mouth full
of the taste of another man’s spit.

When he came back in, making the flames of the fire bow as he passed, the

hall seemed suddenly bright as day. He felt every man’s eye on him.

Wulfstan knew what he looked like from the many times he had lost his

temper and seen sudden fear spark in the eyes of his playmates and friends. He
was tall and broad and heavy with muscle, and when he chose to show it,
everyone took notice. Now, some of his confidence returned, sure those who
watched him saw only a warrior proud in battle. No one looked beneath the skin
to the turmoil within. He was safe.

Servants scurried out of his way, and the local townsfolk either bowed their

heads or averted their eyes as he climbed back onto the dais, into the whirling
pool of light from the hanging bowls of fire, into the glitter of gold and the bright
colours and clean cloth of his rank.

The scops were both there before him, the older man on his stool, the

younger cross-legged beside him on the floor. Not part of the high world, but
permitted to occupy the same space—and therefore not quite part of the lower
either. The bruise had begun to show on the cheek of Wulfstan’s angelic-looking
young man, and there was a streak of blood yet behind his ear, where a hasty
cleaning of his bloody nose had smeared it. He looked down sharply when he
noticed Wulfstan watching him, but somehow his deference had an air of
mockery.

Now Wulfstan felt again that everyone must know. He felt on show,

stripped, waiting for judgment. Pushing past the two as they tuned their harp-
strings, he walked to his seat, trying not to make it look as though he fled. They
don’t see it. None of them see it. They never have, they never will.

Putting a hand on Aelfsi’s shoulder to steady himself, he hitched one leg over

the bench, then the other. His companions’ faces lifted to him without alteration,
as though they had no idea his world had changed in the brief time he had been
apart from them. He sat, and as he did so the sound of the ripest, fattest fart ever
let loose by man echoed off the walls of the hall. There was a silence, and then
everyone began to laugh as though they were possessed.

Wulfstan whirled and caught the young harper taking his fingers out of his

mouth, joining in with the laughter, the older one clouting him on the ear, though
he smiled. The poisonous little bastard! He’d done it on purpose. By some
harper’s magic, he had made the sound appear to come from Wulfstan, though
actually produced elsewhere.

Humiliation boiled up from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair and

lifted him off his seat as though a giant had hauled him up by the collar.

From his place by the Port Reeve’s side, Ecgbert said sharply, “Stop him,”

and Aelfsi on his left, Cenred on his right caught an arm each and with some
struggling forced him back onto his bench. He made two more attempts, almost
unseating them, before the rage drained off, leaving him cold and sick and
miserable.

Familiar with his moods, Aelfsi patted the arm he had been holding and let

go, and Cenred thrust a full beaker of mead into his hand, watched as he
downed it and called for it to be refilled.

Awareness came back slowly. At some point the young man had begun to

sing, and it was a voice of bronze—powerful but subtle, beautiful but strong, its
measured cadences and striding beats sweeping the listener along as if galloping
on a spirited horse. As the humiliation faded, Wulfstan noticed with grudging
thankfulness that no one was looking at him. They were all taken up in the rush
of the song, reliving a well-known story, hearing it afresh as though they’d never
heard it before.

The mingled voices of harp and lyre—the gut strings of the harp mellow and

rounded, the metal strings of the lyre silvery, shivery, triumphant—filled the firelit
shades, wound up the pillars of the hall and pooled like the smoke in the ceiling,
and everyone in that place quietened and stilled under its influence.

Ecgbert leaned forward in his place. “You feel that?” he murmured, low

enough to pass beneath the spell of the music. “They have no weapons because
theirs is a strange magic. One that can soothe a hall full of men or drive them
mad. One that can bring immortality or eternal condemnation. Whatever a man

truly is, he is remembered only as the scops choose to remember him.” He
passed Wulfstan a dish of apple dumplings drenched in honey and smiled.

“It is better to be remembered as a gracious man, one who knows when to

laugh, than it is to avenge a harper’s hurt. They are like priests. It’s easy to think
they are of no consequence because they pose no physical threat. Their power is
no less real than ours for all it lies in other things than steel.”

Sullenly, knowing he was being sullen and hating himself for it, Wulfstan

spooned a couple of the dumplings onto his trencher and ate, and the high, shrill
sweetness of them joined the melody and worked a little miracle of calm. After a
while he was able to put the spoon down and sigh, “Yes, lord.”

Yes, lord. And if you had told me this an hour earlier, I might have been

saved. I might not have run my ship quite so hard onto the rocks of fate. I
might have stayed sinless all my life, a proper man.

That was a lie too, as all his thoughts today had been lies. He was a creature

made up entirely of pretense. What else was there but to pretend to be what he
wished to be in the hopes that in time pretense became habit, and habit by
degrees became the truth?

Chapter Two

“As you see.” The hall warden smiled at Leofgar defensively as he gestured

to the floor, where bedding had been brought out and stretched in one unbroken
line from wall to wall. “We have no space to house you for the night.”

The warriors were stripping off hauberks and piling them on the tables above

their heads, lying beneath, shoulder to shoulder under their overlapped cloaks,
crammed in and companionable like badgers in their sett. A few wealthy
merchants and seafarers had inserted themselves around the walls, where it was
coldest. Leofgar thought they could make one more gap if they pleased. “They
are already so squeezed, asking them to shuffle up a little more could be no
harm. I don’t ask for myself—I can sleep outside—but my master is an old man,
and has sung himself raw tonight. You will not, surely, throw his old bones out
into the cold?”

The warden dipped his head, his shaven crown gleaming in the lamplight.

“Alfric has asked me to thank your master and to offer him this ring in gratitude.”
He held out a finger ring of gold, set with a little garnet in the centre. Behind the
garnet, a sheet of patterned metal caught the light and threw it back, making the
stone glow and glitter. It was a princely gift, but Leofgar would have traded it
with a light heart for a spot by the fire for Anna.

He was about to haggle, but his master limped to his side and took the ring

with a courteous nod of the head and a smile. You would never have known,
Leofgar thought, looking at Anna, how much more welcome would be an
invitation to stay.

Sighing, Leofgar relieved Anna of the harp bag. Swaddled tight in her

lappings of lamb’s wool, Lark was silent and smug against his back. She knew
she had played well. She at least was content.

She too would have been better off in the dry warmth of the hall, rather than

taken out into the night to face the blood-month’s chill and the cold dews of
dawn. He could see from Anna’s sharp glance that any more arguing would earn
him a switch across the back, and though the weakness of the old man’s arm
had taken the sting out of his blows a long time ago, it was his disappointment
Leofgar chiefly feared. He hoisted his own bags, took a last swallow of beer
from a nearby cup before the slaves could tidy it away and, having thus relieved
his dry throat, forced out a word or two of thanks and farewell. They would be
back for the fair next year—no sense in leaving ill will behind to welcome them.

Outside, the night was dark and silent. Clouds had ridden up out of the sea

and veiled the moon. The houses and workshops of the town showed only the
occasional line or star of amber, where firelight bled through the holes in the
walls. Otherwise the buildings were scarcely darker than the spaces between
them.

The mud squelched underfoot, churned up by feet and carts and sleds and

horses. Every footstep was a struggle against a grip that held on and pulled
back. Leofgar’s shoulders were tight from an evening of playing, and the straps
of their bags cut thinly into the aching muscles. The pit of his stomach trembled
from having sung and piped so long. Wind froze his cheeks and made his ears
sting, and he was afraid to ask how Anna fared, whose joints ached unceasingly
in anything but the hottest of summers.

He felt basely ashamed. For surely they would have found a place in the hall

if it had not been for his revenge on that boor. His master could be curling up
now on a thick mattress of straw, under their shared cloaks, warmed on all sides
by bodies and the embers of a noble fire, but for him.

They reached the end of the street, and here at least the mud became

shallower. A little light came up from the harbour, where the wide sea shone
grey. Fishermen’s huts, scarcely twelve feet long, lined the wharves, their
shingled roofs sloping down almost to the ground. Beneath the eaves, Leofgar
could have lain, rolled in his cloak and sheltered just enough from rain and wind
to fall asleep. Dark lumps swathed in cloth clustered around each building,
where other travellers had had the same idea. But that was a game for the
young, and a death sentence for the old.

“I could knock,” he whispered, feeling Anna take the opportunity to draw

close and lean on his arm. “At one of these doors. Someone will be glad to take
silver for a night’s lodging. I would have you lie in warmth.”

In the dark, the old man’s weight bore heavily down on him. He could feel a

shiver through the thin hands that grasped his biceps, and when a wind came
moaning through the streets and stirring the straw with a rattle by his feet, cold
flowed down his own spine like heavy rain.

“Every year”—Anna chuckled, though his voice was thick and rough in his

throat—“we say the same things. We will stay where we always stay. It does
well enough.”

He had taken the lead now, walking cautiously through the blind dark.

Leofgar followed, through the cluster of huts, out onto the narrow track that
took them over dunes and down into the next bay.

Proud as the devil, Anna had drawn ahead, his back straight and his step

long, the wheeze of his breath muffled behind one hand. But he stumbled on the
way down and let Leofgar catch him without a curse, and that was new this

year. New this year too was the way that—when they went on—he let Leofgar
take his elbow again and gradually bear more and more of his weight, until they
hobbled as one creature, slowly and painfully into the fumes of the bay.

This was a narrow inlet too shallow for ships. Instead, the folk of Uisebec

had built salt pans here. Hurrying clouds parted for a moment, and the moon lit
the white walls that dammed the outflow of the tide, made them glitter as though
they were drifted over by snow. Pillars of steam rose silvery up to the stars, and
the damp warmth enfolded them both as they limped closer.

The air was bitter on the lips, and salt crunched underfoot as they found the

first of the boarded walks along which sleds were pulled from the pans to the
warehouses. A sullen red glow at the most distant pan showed where a peat fire
smouldered. Slaves tended it. They looked up with faces from which life had
leached all expression, even fear, as the harpers loomed out of the night. They
were glad enough to exchange a place at the fire for music and news, and the
promise that Leofgar would take a shift at their work, let them sleep an extra
hour.

Some of the faces were new. Some they had come to know over ten years

of markets. One of these, a man called Asc, watched as Anna propped himself
up against the low wall of the pan, wringing his hands over and over, trying to
rub out the aches.

“He’s too old to be out here with us.”
“You see?” Leofgar turned to his master with a triumphant smile. It faltered

and fell away as the russet light painted all the lines on Anna’s face with a light
like blood. Some magic was at play—or some had been withdrawn—for it was
as if he were seeing ten years of hardship fall on the old man at once.

Time set its stamp so slowly on change, he thought, that you go for years not

noticing that anything new has been wrought. Then one day the scales fall from
your eyes and the world has been unmade around you. He’d jokily called Anna
“the old man” for the past decade. He’d called him “ancient one” indeed, since
Anna first stopped at the cot of Leofgar’s family and offered him a glimpse of a
life that was not all sheep. But Leofgar had been a child in those days, and
“ancient” had meant “has some grey in his beard”. He hadn’t really appreciated
that ten years of sleeping in ditches had changed them both since then.

Now he saw for the first time how haggard Anna’s face was—the way his

skin hung off, creased as a linen tunic put away damp. Age spots, bruises and
broken veins mottled the backs of his hands and his bald scalp. His eyelids had
folded over on themselves and weighed his eyes half-closed at all times. They
were fully closed now, pressed tight, and his forehead was scored deep with
furrows of pain. It hit Leofgar, like an arrow through a lung, that his master

looked not only old but frail, like a heathen sacrifice dredged out of a bog. A
skeleton clothed in second-hand skin. Death had started to show, like a fraying
edge in a garment too weak to be resewn.

Triumph turned rapidly into ashes, but he finished his thought nevertheless. It

was only truer now. “I was right. We should have paid for lodging. We can
afford it, and you should have a bed softer than this sharp ground.”

“That silver is to tide us over when I can walk no more,” Anna mumbled.

“Which is soon, but not yet. We will need it more then, for you will leave me and
find a lord to serve, and I will pay for some good wife to nurse me to my grave.”

In the heart of the fire, three round, granite rocks nestled like dragon eggs.

Asc took one between iron tongs and, lifting it out, dropped it into the nearest
salt pan, where it sank with a hiss and a bubbling. After some fishing in the milk-
white water, he picked out a second, now cold, and set it gently down at the
edge of the flames to ease into warmth before it went back into the hottest
embers. When he had done, he traded the tongs for a paddle on the end of a
long stick, and scraped the salt on the bottom of the pan—soft as new butter—
to the sides.

While he laboured, Leofgar took the tongs in his turn and brought a second

stone out of the fire. He pulled his spare tunic out of his bag, wrapped the
glowing thing in it and placed it in Anna’s lap, folding his master’s hands around
it. Anna opened one eye. Despite his weariness, there was a wry twinkle in it.

Leofgar smiled in return, painfully fond. “You know I’ll do nothing of the

kind. We will find a lord together, who will take us both. Then I will take care of
you. Are you not my father, that I should leave you behind? Don’t ask it of me.”

“Yet you left your own sire without a backward glance.” Anna smiled to take

the sting out of the words. “You are a wanderer at heart. And perhaps I should
find a lord to praise with my remaining hours and leave you to walk the earth
alone, being thrown out of mead halls for picking fights with men twice your
size.”

Distracted, Leofgar grinned. The taste of that victory remained sweet,

despite his guilt. “We scops are beholden to no one,” he said, taking out the
parcel of bread and meat and pastries he had purloined from the hall, sharing it
with Asc, Anna and the other two silent ones. “We are masters of our own craft,
who have attained skills and knowledge those butter-fed bruisers could never
imagine. Why should we scrape to them as though they were saints, or humble
ourselves as if to the holy ones of God?”

“Ah.” Anna brought his knees up so that he was more firmly curled around

the hot stone. “I thought it must be your fault that you and he were at odds.”

“He walked into me and demanded I apologise.”

“You could not have feigned regret, though it might have spared you a

bruising?”

Leofgar edged as close to the fire as he could get, so that when slow, grassy

sparks drifted out they landed on his cloak and singed it brown. He propped up
his feet against the hearthstone and watched steam rise from his shoes, as his
warming feet tingled and his ears throbbed with returning blood. It was better to
think on his adventures this evening than it was to look too closely at his
diminishing future.

“He…” It was better still to conjure up the warrior’s face in his mind. He’d

been a big man, yes, half as wide again as Leofgar and all of it muscle. But he
had a generous, feminine mouth, plump in the lips like two silken cushions. More
than that, he had worried eyes.

The mouth might have been a fluke—a moment of whimsy on God’s part—

for why shouldn’t the creator have a little fun now and again, gifting the burliest
of men with incongruous beauties? The eyes, though… He hadn’t seen the
colour, but he had seen the doubts, the thought, complicated and cautious, as
out of place in the brutal young man as his woman’s mouth.

“He seemed the sort who would take a joke,” Leofgar finished, abruptly

changing his mind. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about this after all. “I
swear, if I had thought him a complete arsehole, I would have kept my head
down and been as meek as you please. I am not altogether in favour of my own
martyrdom.”

“Just bear in mind that we will never gain a place in any lord’s household if

you cannot learn discretion. It is no shame to give every man what he wants. It is
part of a scop’s skill—to please, to praise, to flatter and to fawn. And I would
rather have a home in my old age than any amount of cold gold in my pocket.”

“I would rather have my freedom,” Leofgar mused, pushing the now-dry

stone into the centre of the fire. The salt on it burnt off in long blue flames,
wondrous to behold. “I know all the songs tell us how terrible it is to be alone,
without place or protector, a wanderer in the wilderness. I can recite the lament
of the lordless with every syllable dripping with woe. It isn’t to be alone that I
fear, it is to be caged. Bound to some man who thinks that because he feeds you
he thus owns you. That his are the words that come out of your mouth, and his
are your thoughts—that you exist only to praise and serve him. How can a man
of pride bear that? How can any real man be content as another’s servant?”

“I’ve an answer to that.” It was the slave, Asc, who spoke. “For I was

starving, and my family were starving, before I sold myself to Alfric to pay my
debts. I tell you, you can’t have ever been hungry enough, if you think you
wouldn’t embrace a few years as someone else’s chattel rather than see your

young daughter die, with the bones all but sticking through her skin, and her
bright eyes like wounds.”

He replaced the hot stone in Anna’s bundle, raked out and changed the one

in the pan, and sat again, all unselfconsciously, as though no shame weighted
down his shoulders. Leofgar thought that Asc had a dignity Anna shared, that he
himself—spiky as a hedgehog with pride—did not. If the price of that dignity
was to learn to submit to something greater than himself, whether that be famine
or old age, he had no desire to pay it.

“We all serve in the end.” Anna nodded at the slave’s words. “Asc serves

Alfric, Alfric serves Hereswith, Hereswith serves the king. The king serves God.
In the end we are all alike in needing to surrender to God’s will, for the Lord of
All works our wyrd as He sees fit, and our weal is only to do—for the fleeting
days of our mortal life—as we are given to do.”

He shifted inwards, gingerly, as though trying to get as much of himself as he

could in contact with the hot stone. Leofgar didn’t like to see the way his old
arms moved, jerking against his will, closing creakily slow, like a door whose
leather hinges have stretched and left it gouging its way through the ground.

By the side of the salt pan, under a shallow shingled roof to keep it dry, a

stack of peat waited to be burned. Leofgar brought out hairy, dirty bricks of the
stuff and made a mattress of it in front of the fire. Anna accepted his help to
struggle to his feet and limp the few paces from the wall to this makeshift bed.
Supporting him, Leofgar could feel the effort it took him to kneel down again, to
lie, straightening himself out on the dry and yielding surface. The fire shone on his
face and warmed his chest and belly. Leofgar put the stone at his feet and
tucked the pack with their clothes beneath his head to serve him for a pillow. He
lay down behind and blanketed the old man’s back with his own scrawny body,
wrapping their cloaks around them both.

The turf was soft beneath them and smelled of ancient heather and dust—

long-ago vanished summers in a time of giants. He let his arm rest about Anna’s
waist and felt the old man’s shivering slowly ebb as, in their swaddlings, it grew
warm. And I serve you, he thought. Reluctantly—for it didn’t suit him to think
himself bound by ties of obligation to anyone.

“There is no shame in serving a lord worthy of you,” Anna mumbled, his

voice drowsy. “I do not know why you need to be told the things that are
obvious to all.”

“Perhaps my mother was right.” Leofgar yawned, sleep circling him like a

friendly dog, dark of pelt, calm of eye. “She said I was a changeling child, some
elf’s get set in the place of a man—her own child spirited away to herd sheep for
the folk of Frey. Perhaps that’s why I want folk to see that I am more than I

seem to be. Because I am.”

Anna’s chuckle turned into a shallow, rasping cough. “Or perhaps it is just

your monstrous pride.”

Leofgar laughed softly, though it hurt him sore to feel the coughs go on,

shaking Anna’s ribs. He wouldn’t have known, had they not been pressed tight,
for Anna made no noise at all to betray them.

“Perhaps it is.” And it was true, for he was a monster of pride to care for his

own name and reputation more than he cared for his master’s comfort. The
sheer ingratitude of his arguments struck him dumb. He owed Anna everything,
and the old man should have everything he desired, if only the chance might
come to give it to him.

With this decided, he allowed the hound of sleep to settle on him, breathing

deep, weighing him down like a coverlet. As he slipped beneath its spell, he saw
again the dark bulk that was the warrior with the worried eyes. There was one
who had everything they both desired—the respect of every man, and a high and
noble place in a good lord’s household. Yet it hadn’t seemed to be what he
wanted.

Lust swam sinuous through his dreams like a snake in a stream as he felt

again the thrill of power and astonishment that had gone through him when the
other man—the deadly creature, sword skilled, hard handed, the maker of
widows—had given everything up to his control. He saw it. Bullying boor that he
was, he saw in Leofgar what Leofgar knew to be there, and he had given in to it
with all the gladness of a new bride.

Perhaps it had not been the brightest of his ideas to humiliate the man in front

of the entire village. The thought occurred—as these thoughts so often did—far
too late. Made him groan and squeeze his eyes tight shut and hide his forehead
against his master’s shoulder. Anna reached back and patted him consolingly on
the hand, but it did very little to take away his regret, the feeling of a wonderful
chance wantonly squandered. Monstrous pride, indeed.

By midwinter, freedom seemed not so sweet to Leofgar. The ground

glittered as he slogged uphill towards the land of the Gyrwe, the cold of it
striking up like shards of broken glass through his feet. Every step jarred aching
limbs and joints, bloodied his heels in his hardened shoes and rang out, bell-like,
as though the whole earth beneath him had turned to metal.

Snow heaped by the sides of the road. If it hadn’t been for the stakes

hammered in by the path’s edges, he would not have known where it lay in the
wide, white, featureless landscape. Ahead, a couple of trees stood out black as
calligraphy against the parchment world, and in the fields they passed, the thin

cattle already staggered, their hip bones sticking out like wings.

They had stayed at Watewelle for Christmas Day, and done what they could

to repay warm food and lodging with songs of holy mirth. But even then Anna
had been too weak to sing, and there had been very little of gratitude in
Leofgar’s heart. Two weeks later, and the feast of twelfth night saw them here,
swaying with exhaustion in the middle of nowhere.

The cold burned Leofgar from feet to knees, hands to elbows, his face gone

past pain and into numbness. Still, he was the better of the two of them, for
Anna no longer troubled to conceal his cough. Couldn’t have done if he’d tried
—it now shook him like invisible hands, racking and tossing him. It began as a
single hoarse cry and worked up until he was doubled over, gasping for breath,
making inhuman whooping noises, while tears leaked from his eyes and blood
ran from his lips.

They left a red trail in that white place, bright and festive as holly berries.
Leofgar would have wept too. Inside, the dammed tears grew into a deep

lake that filled his dreams and made him feel as though he were drowning.
Outside he simply tightened his arm around the old man and bared his teeth in a
determined smile. “They said at Chidesbi that the lord of this land lived only a
day’s journey away. Come now, it must only be a little further. Two or three
more miles, and we’ll take it slow. Lean on me, and we’ll be there just in time to
eat.”

Anna breathed out of his nose in what passed for a laugh for him now, but

didn’t open his eyes. His face had changed so over the past months of
deprivation that Leofgar sometimes woke in panic, certain he’d left his real
master behind somewhere, and this one was an elvish abomination. Then he
would study the old man and see where—beneath the marks of famine and chill
—the same gaze looked back at him, tolerantly amused.

Shame dogged him as much as hunger. Where now was his gratitude for all

Anna had taught him? What did it profit the old harper to have lavished his care
on so useless an apprentice? One who could not even keep him warm? If he had
only been more tractable, milder in temper, wiser in restraining his unruly
emotions, they might have spent the winter in a new home, slowly blossoming
beneath the care of a generous man with a warm house and a place by the fire
for them both.

The path rolled into a hollow full of snow, and at each footfall they sank into

it to their knees. Bitter, stinging cold soaked his hose and melting ice trickled into
his boots, his softened, wet feet rubbing raw as he walked.

He thought of turning round, going back to Chidesbi, but they had made it

clear their harvest had been poor and their stores were low. To try to winter

there could bring death to them.

The short winter day was already going down in gloom, and the wind pierced

them with a million needles of ice as it whispered past. Coughing, making harsh,
barking, doglike noises, Anna pushed him away, fell to his knees and, slowly
bowing forward, planted his forehead on the snow. “…can’t.”

Something snapped inside Leofgar’s head. Anger and desperation flooded

him, and all at once he was hot. He grabbed his master’s arm and pulled, teeth
clenched, until he had hauled the old man to his feet. Bending down, he got his
shoulder into Anna’s stomach and lifted with all the strength in his back.

He felt the snow should melt before him. In the blast of his fury, it should

whirl away and scatter and show him green grass. It should let him walk out into
summer and wheat fields drowsing in the sun.

It did not, of course, but the strange fit carried him to the brow of the hill, and

there—though the wind froze his breath to his lips—he saw, dark as crow wings
in the distance, the ash and smoke of a fire on the empty sky.

Fury carried him almost all the way there, past workmen’s huts and a

scattering of dwellings, past a moat and palisade crowned with silver-grey oak,
past two gatehouses on either side of the track, from which the guards came
running to lift Anna down and urge him to stop.

Their voices made piping noises in his ears, devoid of meaning or sense. He

tried to wrest his limp master from their grasp and push on past. Only a few
hundred yards away, past forge and bakehouse, weaving sheds and chapel, past
the bower house and the stables, rose up a majestic hall. The smoke billowed
out of its wind holes, and just the smell of it was warm.

With a berserk, desperate strength, he shouldered the guards aside—how

dare they keep him from refuge? They were shouting now. He dodged open-
handed blows, his ears ringing as he tried to walk on.

A man came out of the hall. He could not have been other than its lord—

cloaked in wolf’s fur, gold at his belt and his throat, and his purple tunic stitched
in wide bands of it. A tall, upright man with hair that gleamed as silver as a blade,
and a wry wisdom in his leathery, lined face. His authority hit Leofgar at a
hundred paces from his person. Poised at the edge of the spirit world as he was,
Leofgar could almost see it—a penumbra of gold, as though he carried the sun
inside his skin.

At a word from the man, the clutching hands of the guards fell. Leofgar was

left alone, with Anna, unconscious, sagging from his arms. His harper’s
eloquence deserted him, and he stood helpless as this glorious man unpinned his
fur and swung it around Anna’s shoulders, wrapping and supporting him in one
gesture.

“I am Tatwine,” he said, gently. “Lord of this place. I was only wishing for

bards on this holy night. You are very well come. Now, let me see your master
tended to, and let me take you in and seat you by the fire.”

At his nod, the guards picked Anna up between them and bore him into the

warmth. Leofgar, with tears swimming in his cold eyes, stumbled after, and
Tatwine steadied him all the way.

Leofgar didn’t know how long he sat by the fire, absorbed by the flare of the

embers, while around him the life of the hall ebbed and flowed, and feeling
returned slowly to his stinging hands and feet. He didn’t believe he had any
thoughts at all during this time, but sat mute as a stone, pushed beyond his
humanity by that final flare of strength.

Only when Tatwine returned and berated the cup bearers for not bringing

him wine, tucked a strong hand under his elbow and lifted him without effort, did
he stir out of his stupor. And that was to look up into the lord’s face without
comprehension or thanks, stock-still and wordless.

Tatwine only smiled, and carefully took the snow-melt wet hat off Leofgar’s

curls, surprising him by how much better it was without its clammy touch.

At last, Leofgar’s mind returned, bringing with it anxiety. “My master is…”
“Is abed. Come with me.”
Already Tatwine’s folk were setting out the tables for the evening feast,

twining new branches of evergreens into the wilted Christmas boughs. From the
bakehouse, a scent of spices floated into the compound and tingled the frosted
air. The horses in their stable, beneath a good thatched roof and shielded from
the wind by wickerwork screens, snorted companionably at Leofgar. A little
haze of warm fog rose above them, smudging the evening’s sudden, terrible
clarity.

For when he looked up, he saw that all the clouds had drawn apart. The

night was on them full, and acres and acres of sharp stars were poised to fall on
him with killing cold. The short journey out of the further gate, to a small
thatched hut under the trees beyond, blasted out of him the small amount of
warmth he had regained by the fire, and it came to him, slowly, that if he and
Anna had had to sleep outside tonight, they would both have died.

Anna lay in the hut, looking withered and small in a bed heaped with blankets

and a mattress stuffed to creaking with straw. He smiled as Leofgar came in, and
his weary eyes were reassuring and kind. Leofgar circled the brazier of coals in
the centre of the floor and sank to his knees at the bedside, lowering his
forehead into Anna’s open hand. Behind him, the door closed and they were
alone.

His tears dripped onto the old man’s fingers, making Anna shift over so that

he could lay his other hand on Leofgar’s head, either in blessing or comfort. “I
swear,” Leofgar said after a time, “this is where we stop for the winter.
Everything I can do, anything I can do to make this man take us under his
protection, I will do. I will not… I will not… I’m sorry.”

Cold fingers stirred his hair and rubbed his scalp soothingly. When he looked

up, Anna’s expression was wry and fond but not hopeful, and Leofgar was
shaken with a fierce determination to prove that he could do it. He could be
pliant and helpful and courteous and meek, if his master’s comfort depended on
it. He could. He would.

“Then…” Anna coughed softly and flailed for the cup set beside his bed,

where horehound boiled in wine and honey sat steaming. A swallow stopped the
cough as dramatically as a tripwire stops a galloping horse. “You should run
over what you are to play tonight. That praise-song we wrote for Saebyrt of
Ingenwic could be—”

“Altered for Tatwine,” Leofgar agreed, calling the lines to his mind, running

through the places where the new name tripped up the old rhythm, replacing the
lines that praised too-specific feats with well-worn kennings that could apply to
any good lord. It took him only enough time for the burning coals to shift and
settle once, and he said, “I have it,” drowsily, and snugged a little more firmly
against the side of the bed.

A hand tugged weakly at his hair. “Up,” said Anna, “and get in. It must be

late afternoon—you can sleep for two hours or more before they’ll need you,
and nothing to be gained by doing it on your knees.”

So Leofgar took off everything that was wet and, rolling into the nest of

blankets, put an arm around Anna’s hips, tucked his face into his master’s flank,
ignored the brief opening and closing of the door behind him, and fell asleep,
determined to wake up as a better man.

The feast passed in a blur of topaz candlelight and deep, rich colour.

Leofgar’s sleep had not been nearly enough to relieve his bone-deep tiredness,
but it was enough to give the evening a dreamlike quality, in which only the music
felt solid. Had the walls of the hall trembled and dissolved into chiselled stone,
showing him entombed in an elvish mound, he would not have been surprised.
Indeed, they did shimmer in his sight like a lady’s veil in a breeze, but so too did
the floor, and his own hands, and anything on which he tried to turn his eye.

The night was a long swirl of mead and inquiring eyes. He lost track of the

friendly faces of warriors and maidens both. One red-headed fellow stuck in his
mind only for having the same colouring as the fire, and for handing him cup after
cup of beer until the carved roof beams seemed to come alive and the wolves on
the rafters started leaning down and watching him. If any of his listeners noticed

his flubbed notes and trembling fingers, or—worse than that—the absurd tears
of exhaustion and gratitude he had to keep blinking from his eyes, they were too
courteous to mention it.

The hastily embroidered praise song for Tatwine prompted a banging on the

tables so loud he almost thought it thundered, and it was the lord himself who did
him the honour of supporting him back to his master’s side. Unwinding his
bracelet of plaited silver, Tatwine fastened it around his wrist. Dimly, Leofgar
realized this was a momentous thing—the first time he had been the evening’s
master, the first time he had been given the reward, rather than having it, and the
compliments, go to Anna. The thought had a sweet taste at first, but soon turned
so bitter he wished he could spit it out.

At some time in the evening, a servant had brought Anna a platter of good

things from the feast, buttered worts, meats and bread, and king cake rich with
fruit. It sat untasted beside the bed, for the old man was asleep. Silently as he
could, Leofgar joined him.

It took two weeks before the overwhelming kindness began to trouble

Leofgar. A glad welcome, he was used to—though not always one as
wholehearted as this. What he was not used to were the hints that they should
stay. “When this frost eases,” said the red-headed man, whose name he had
now learned was Hunlaf, “in the spring, you should come with us to catch the
early geese. I’ve heard that a skillful piper can call down the birds to the hunters,
isn’t that so?”

Leofgar was sitting by the fire with him, helping—with his dextrous fingers—

the other man to wind cord around the fletchings of his arrows. He shifted, so
that the friendly hand the warrior dropped on his thigh landed on his knee
instead, and said, “I would be glad to.”

He had promised Anna, after all, to cause no more trouble, told himself that

this would be the refuge his master dreamed of in his old age. He could not be
sure he had just been insulted. Hunlaf could simply be one of those men who
must crowd close and touch everyone with whom they talked. Besides, he was
one man, and easy enough to avoid.

Nevertheless, noticing Tatwine’s disapproving eye on him, Leofgar cut the

conversation short after that, and went to speak to Lady Edith, the lord’s
mother, from whom he was learning the history of Tatwine’s family—their
generations back to Scild and through him back to Woden. In payment for this
lavish hospitality, he could at least make an account of his host’s line, something
that would make the dry subject matter stick in the mind and let all Tatwine’s
tenants know of his connection to royalty.

Edith was happy to reminisce for an hour, with her distaff tucked under her

elbow. Her spindle lowered like a spider towards the ground, climbed back up
as she wound the new thread on, lowered again as she spun, her movements so
practiced they carried on flawlessly while her mind ranged back over years and
miles, back into the old days on their distant homeland, into forests pregnant with
gods.

Leofgar made himself useful, transferring wool from a full spindle to a niddy-

noddy and thence into balls, and gradually he found himself in the centre of the
lady’s women, all peacefully sewing or spinning together, taking up the stories
like dropped stitches from their lady’s hands and spinning them out, correcting
or elaborating.

After a little while they began disappearing to the bower house, searching

through chests and coming back with tapestries that told other stories, half-
remembered. They would puzzle over them together, and he would commit to
mind what they agreed was the closest truth, and wind it into poetry as they
worked.

It was so comfortable and useful a thing that, after seeing his master tended

to—neither better nor worse, able to rise from his bed only to sit by the fire an
hour and then return—Leofgar came back the next day, and the day after that.

On Sunday, after a morning in the small wooden church, packed in and

warmed by many bodies, Tatwine captured him, still with the smell of attar of
roses in his nostrils, and prevented him from going back. Leofgar looked at the
painting, on the far wall, of the tree of life that was Christ, and thought many
things—chiefly that Tatwine had come to ask them to leave, as was long, long
overdue. He wondered how he could beg the man to at least let Anna stay.

Over the past days, winter had eased its grip a little, and long slanting spears

of rain had washed away most of the snow, softening the ground beneath. It had
been dim and cheerless and bleak. Today, though, the rain had dried and a
wintery sun was making the wet earth gleam. The paintings of vine scroll around
the door were so very green they almost hurt his eyes, and the purple grapes
looked full of wine.

“Walk with me,” said Tatwine, “while we may. There is something I want

you to see.”

Tatwine’s holding lay in the gentle hills near Lachesslei, with common forest

bordering it to the north, and everywhere else the prosperous signs of good
husbandry. Coming out of the gates, they turned west and walked clockwise
around the partly frozen moat. A swathe of grass and scrubby trees led down to
the graveyard. Here a fleet of graves lay like upturned boats with long grass
growing over them. Most floated in the stream of the sun’s passage, facing from

east to west, but faint discolourations in the grass, so old they were no longer
mounded at all, faced north to south. Amid these, either in challenge or in hope
of doing them good, a preaching cross had been erected, and in a landscape of
faded grasses, dun mud, dun trees against an off-white sky, the cross looked like
a window into a better world, scarlet, azure and gold with gilt and paint.

Tatwine led him—slowly, as though he supposed Leofgar not fully

recovered, or perhaps as though he was gathering his thoughts—to the side of
one of the larger mounds. There, a sprig of holly with bright red berries had been
laid down, and so Leofgar knew that whoever was inside had been beloved and
was remembered.

“She was but a girl when we wed,” said Tatwine, looking down with his hard

face rueful. The lines at the corners of his mouth stood out like gashes, and his
hands were clenched around belt and sword.

“Your wife?” Leofgar encouraged him in a soft voice, because it was clear

enough to him that this was something the lord needed to say, and it was some
small measure of repayment to help him say it.

Tatwine smiled, tilting his head towards Leofgar without taking his eyes off

the grave. “Her father and I arranged it.” He waved towards the distant hills,
where ox teams had almost finished ploughing the narrow strips of fields. “Her
dowry would include the arable land my steading had so badly needed. She did
not wish to come. I was not to her fancy, this old man her father’s age, boiled
hard by life like a leather cup. Yet she did as her father asked, and I was as
good to her as I knew how. For a time I believe we were both happy. I was, at
least.”

Silence, and Leofgar came in on the beat. “What happened?”
“She died giving birth to our first child. The child died also.”
So Leofgar knew that the folds of Tatwine’s face did not conceal fury, but

grief. “The weary spirit cannot withstand fate. Nor does a rough or sorrowful
mind do any good. So I, often wretched and sorrowful, far from noble kinsmen,
have had to bind in fetters my inmost thoughts, since long years ago I hid my lord
in the darkness of the earth,” he chanted, part of him caught up in Tatwine’s
sorrow, part thinking of Anna and the fate he was finding increasingly hard to
ignore.

“Indeed.” Tatwine unclenched his hands with clear effort, frowning at them as

though he had not meant to display so much unseemly emotion. “It has been a
hard year, with this like a stone on my back, and a hungry winter. My days and
my nights have been like wounds, one atop the other. So I take your coming
here, on the holy feast, as a gift from God. I have prayed for a friend to whom I
might unbind my thoughts. Here you are.”

Leofgar caught himself in the act of stepping backwards, turned it into a

fidget he hoped would look more like one innocently surprised by intense words
than like a man preparing to flee. Why should he flee? What was there in this
that touched his skin like fire and made him recoil? Why was he, as Anna often
lamented, so cursed to think ill of all?

He composed his face into a smile. “I am…overwhelmed, my lord. You do

me too much honour. I am nothing but an itinerant musician. Not worthy to
speak to you except through intermediaries, and only to tell you how grateful I
am for your kindness. I am not of a quality that could ever hope for friendship
with such as you.”

Tatwine smiled. “That, I think, is for me to decide.” He seized Leofgar by the

elbow, his strong fingers almost crushing the whistle that Leofgar routinely
carried up his sleeve—it was for that reason, and for that reason alone, that
Leofgar flinched.

Tatwine steered him further downhill, to where the river that fed the moat

emerged and spread into a wide, still pond, full of the sinuous shadows of grey
fish. There they came out onto a short boarded quay. The slaves who had been
fishing on their church-enforced Sunday afternoon of freedom gathered their
rods and baskets and fled silently from their approach.

“Look,” said Tatwine, and gestured to Leofgar to lean over and look into the

dark water. He saw fins gleaming faintly silver on the humped backs of swirling
trout, old leaves and stones at the bottom, sifted over by the slime that was the
common destiny of all that perished in this impermanent world.

“What am I looking at, my lord?”
Tatwine laughed, surprised and seemingly confirmed in his thoughts. “I do not

think that you know what you look like, Harper. I am trying to show you what
every warrior in my hall saw, the night that you staggered through our doors,
carrying your aged master so tenderly, though you were at the very end of your
strength yourself. Look.”

Now the exercise made him feel a little sick, but he had promised himself not

to be disobedient for no reason, and so he tried. He’d seen the face before, in
polished cups and puddles. It seemed thin to him, despite a fortnight of good
meals, and the eyes regarded him warily, as though they suspected him of being
up to no good.

A stoat-like face, he thought, too sharp, too weasely. His hair was getting

too long, past his shoulders now and in danger of hanging into his harp strings,
but he admitted to being a little vain of the colour. Why should he not wear gold
when it came by nature? The softness of it stopped him from resembling the kind
of scrawny feral cat, which begs from door to door of a wic hoping for scraps,

that he often felt he was.

“I…I’m not sure I see…”
Leofgar searched his lord’s face, seeking a clue to tell him what the man

wanted from him, watched as it thawed further from command to a kind of
fondness he felt he had done nothing to deserve.

“You truly do not see it. Well, perhaps that is for the best, for it protects you

from the vanity that must have surely followed if you had. Come then, let me tell
you plain. When you limped into the hall that night, you were fair as one of the
heavenly kingdom’s angels, and slender like a reed, and delicate as a woodland
flower. I was not the only man moved by your beauty and your frailty in that
hour, but I would contest with any the right to claim myself the most affected.”

These words of praise were not at all to Leofgar’s taste. They burned him up

inside with shame and sullenness. Indeed, he had opened his mouth to say,
Being starved does not make me a modest maiden any more than famine
makes the wolves of the forest gentle, before the thought of his master leaped
up and stopped his mouth.

He bit his lip to keep the words in, and turned away. “I, um… Again, I

hardly know what to say. My lord, you have driven the wits straight out of my
head.”

Tatwine seemed not unpleased with this. He took Leofgar’s arm again, this

time carefully avoiding the whistle held snug by Leofgar’s tight shirt cuff. His
fingers were gentler this second time, but neither thing made Leofgar less inclined
to flinch.

The fingers slid up between overtunic and shirt and came to rest over the

heartbeat that pulsed in the crook of Leofgar’s elbow. From there, it felt as
though the tides of his blood spread the touch through every inch of him, itchy
and invasive.

“I have seen the great love between you and your master,” Tatwine went on.

“When you first came, and I opened the door to see you asleep in his arms, I
honoured you both for it. He must be remarkable to win such a prize as you, and
you must be remarkable to stay with one so old—now that he cannot protect
you as he used.”

Oh, Leofgar thought, knowing that his burning face—hot with humiliation—

would be interpreted as a slave-boy’s blush of womanly pleasure, so now it is
clear. He was furious with himself that he had once imagined himself welcome
because he was good at his calling—because his singing was sweet and his
music full of power. Instead he had been welcomed as the beautiful daughter of
an aged traveller might be welcomed, and vied for, and won at last by the
strongest.

Yet he had promised Anna to do anything rather than be sent on the road

again. Anything that would let his master stay and recover his strength, so that
when he did escape this place in the middle of the night and torch it on the way
out, his master would be hearty and hale beside him.

“I owe my master everything,” he said slowly, clinging to Anna even now as

a lifeline thrown from a fairer riverbank. “I was a child when he took me in, and
he has raised and fed and taught me, and given me everything that I am. We are
bound together by obligations and gratitude that can never be undone.”

“This I understand,” Tatwine said kindly, “and I admire. It is a little like my

wife and I—though she was scarcely more than a child herself, and I so much
the elder, yet in a marriage these things count for little.”

He began to amble away from the jetty, letting the slaves who had been

watching them both from the shadow of the trees drift back and take up their
fishing places once more. Since he had not let go of Leofgar’s arm, sick and
sore at heart or not, Leofgar had to follow, back up to the graveyard and the
little wreath of holly like spilled blood on the ground.

“The hurt of her passing would have been greatly eased, for me, if you had

been here,” said Tatwine. “And…” he sighed, “…you must be aware that your
master is very old and not at all well. The time is coming fast when he will join
the saints in glory. At that time, I will be to you the comfort I myself wished for,
when death came ungently into my house.”

“I had thought…” Leofgar wrestled with the desire to kick the grave marker

or to kick Tatwine or to pull his dagger and declare himself entitled to single
combat to clear his name. All three were choices he could see leading to his own
grave. “When that unhappy hour arrives, I had thought to go on pilgrimage after
and offer the silver we have earned over the years in prayers for his soul. After
that…I am a wanderer by inclination, lord. I hoped to cross the sea and visit the
Emperor in Byzantium, to see the warm places and the wonders of the world.”

Tatwine laughed as though this were a child’s dream. “We will go together,

perhaps, once you and your master have sworn fealty to me. This summer,
should he still have the strength in him to travel. The heat would do him good.”

“Sworn fealty?” It was the ultimate prize for a scop—a place in the lord’s

retinue—and Leofgar felt the impact of it as though it had been a punch to the
throat. Only his surprise must have come across, not the dread, for Tatwine
beamed, like one who sees a generous gift lavishly appreciated.

“Indeed. I spoke to your master about it before church, and he wept over

my hands in gratitude. You need have no further fear of what may come, for
your days without protection are over. You can swear to me tomorrow night,
and henceforth you will both be mine.”

Chapter Three

Outside the shut door, the rains of Solmonath drizzled and trickled from the

thatch, making a musical whispering that pleased Saewyn as she whispered
words of power over the apple in her hand. Last of the winter store, the skin
was as wrinkled as her own, but the sweetness of the thing would be that much
greater for its age.

“It does seem smaller.” Beorthread the potter glanced up at her from his

bed-shelf with hope and faith, and looked back again at the weeping sore that
covered his right flank from armpit to hip.

“It will,” she said, serene in the knowledge that—unless God chose to take

this man, which no one could forestall—the power of the chant and the salve
would soon make him well. “These nine plants have might against powerful
diseases, against the flying venom and the running venom, the red poison and the
bright poison, and the pale. Now let me make the salve a second time, and you
will see the sore flee away. By the third time it will be gone.”

With the hallowed apple in one hand, mortar on her knees and pestle in the

other hand, she was in no position to stoop down and scrape up ash. Where
was…

She tried not to sigh, disappointed, as—looking up—she found her son

crowding the potter’s daughter into a corner. Cenred’s straw-straight hair
looked golden in the light of the single oil lantern that hung flickering from the
house’s central beam, and there was something about it, something about the
hunched shape of his shoulders, the tensed arms and face turned away, that
reminded her of his father.

A giggle from the girl told her it was flirtation she saw and not intimidation,

but her own mouth dried and her heart rattled in her chest like the feet of a
fleeing deer, even so. He had begun to resemble Cenwulf so much, and not just
in the outer man. Less in flesh than in spirit, indeed.

“Son,” she said, as gently as she could manage, “I need your help. Rake me

up a handful of these ashes and put them in the cauldron, with a little water and
the fennel from my basket. Build up the fire so that the water boils. I may not put
the apple down now.”

Cenred’s sigh was unrestrained. He rolled his eyes at the girl, as if to say, I

am beset about by interfering women, but see what a loyal son I am, and
took the four steps from the end wall of the house to the firepit with as much
labour as though they were a hundred miles. “You should have put the ash on

first.”

“As I would, if I had not brought an assistant to whom I wished to teach

some of my lore before I grew too frail and it was too late. Cenred, I am trying
to give you a gift. A gift of power.”

“Women’s power.” He shrugged as though a raven had landed on his

shoulders and he could twitch it off.

“It is neither women’s power nor men’s power,” she replied, her voice calm,

though it felt that the organs inside her had grown heavy with her sadness. “It is
anyone’s power who has the gift of it, and you should have, by your blood. By
my blood.”

“You know what they whisper about me.” His round face should not have

been able to look so hard. Yet she remembered many times in the past when his
eyes had been swollen shut and his cheeks purple with bruising, and thought that
each time his father’s hands had touched him they drove hardness into his skin
like stone. “That my blood is the blood of a coward. You would mend that by
suggesting it would be better to be known for having the blood of a woman?”

It is a punishment, surely, she thought, because after him I took it into

my hands to bear no more children for my husband. Bad enough that he
should hurt this one in his heart, but no more. It is a punishment because—
when Cenwulf died—I felt glad. The Holy Lord must not have finished
teaching me the lesson Cenwulf was meant to teach, that now he repeats it
with my son.

“If I die,” she said, bending her head over the mortar, working the herbs into

a powder and mixing them with the ashes and the juice of the apple, “your lord’s
household will have no healer. More warriors will die, more babes and their
mothers, more of the common men who grow our food and more of their cattle
will die for the lack, and we will all suffer together. Do you think the elves and
the unfriendly spirits who surround us in this world of shadows will go away
when I do? Who will defend us, if you will not?”

“I will defend my people with force of arms, like a man.” Cenred retreated to

the far wall again, too angry as yet to look at the young girl he had been trying to
charm. “The church will do the rest. There is no need for you and your heathen
witchery in Ethelwulf’s England.”

Saewyn did not gasp, though the feeling of being pressed down from within

grew harder to withstand. She arranged the folds of her wimple on her shoulders
as an excuse to drop her son’s gaze and look away. It was a strange and ugly
thought, but sometimes she wondered if his father’s dying spirit had found some
way to stay on earth, to leech itself to her son’s body, drive out the sweet child
he once had been.

No, she would not entertain it. Instead, she put a faggot of wood on the fire

and watched the bubbles come up around the edges of the soot-dark liquid.
When it boiled, she pulled the sleeve of her underdress down over her hand to
protect it and lifted the cauldron off.

“I apologise,” she said to the potter, in what she was proud to say was an

encouraging tone, “for bringing into your house the secrets of my own.”

Despite the pain of his wounded side, he laughed. “Children have a venom

greater than that of any adder, and yet we are powerless to do aught but cherish
them.”

“You are not meant to be healing me.” She helped him sit forwards, so that

she could sing the charm of nine spikes into his mouth, and into both ears, and
into the open wound. She could feel his laughter under her hands when she
combined the herb and apple mix with the ash and fennel water and spread it on,
pleasantly warm.

“…all weeds may now spring up as herbs. Seas and all salt water slip apart,

while I blow this poison from you.”

A roar of laughter and the shriek of a girl genuinely in distress yanked her

attention back to her son. The wide smile on his likable face would not have
been out of place in the jaw of a wolf. Saewyn did not at first comprehend what
it was he had in his hand, white as wool, and then she saw the girl with her arms
over her head, her elbows sticking up like horns as she bent her face down into
the thicker shadows beneath the house’s one table.

Cenred flourished the white cloth at her, snatching it back when she tried to

take it, and laughed again.

The potter was trying to struggle to his feet. Saewyn leaped up instead and

hauled up the skirts of her dress with a sooty hand so that she could run across
the floorboards and wrench the poor child’s wimple from her son’s hand. The
slap she landed on his cheek cut off his laughter like a seax blade, and he looked
at her as though she were a stranger.

Shaking with anger, she didn’t care, but allowed the girl to take her covering

and wind it back around her hair. “What?” she demanded, not recognising the
bell-like iron tones of her own voice. “What do you think you… No, hush, I will
hear your reasons at home. For now you will ask pardon of this young woman,
before whom you have shamed your mother and your father and your own
name.”

Soothed by her fury, the potter leaned back heavily on his ledge, but his

spare, muscular hands clenched and unclenched beside him, and his breath came
hard.

His daughter, decently covered once more, emerged out of the darkness with

eyes tear-bright from shock. A tendril of brown hair curled out of the fabric and
fell on her forehead, and it made the shame in Saewyn writhe like a nest of
snakes. “I will, of course, not ask payment from you for any of your treatment
henceforward Beorthread.”

“That will pay for having my daughter’s hair exposed to the sight of a man,

will it?” The gentle old man was gone—he took the insult as hard as she did.

“Of course not. It will only express some of my regret that such a thing could

have happened at the hands of my kin.”

“And a daughter’s honour is worth so little?”
“No!” Saewyn seized Cenred and pushed him further into the firelight. “Tell

him you are sorry.”

Cenred’s mouth had settled into sullen lines, and his eyes were a blade-thin

glimmer. “She provoked me,” he said. “She was flirting. She let me kiss her. I
thought a girl as immodest as that deserved to be exposed. Why should she be
allowed to go on pretending to be virtuous, when she is nothing of the kind?”

Saewyn and Beorthread were both silenced, and saw the same horror in one

another’s eyes. As Saewyn wrestled with the thought that her own son could
have so inherited his father’s meanness and cast about for something to do to
make the situation less vile, a small voice spoke up from the shadow of the
darkest corner.

“I… It’s true.” The girl hid her face in her hands, starting at the touch of the

curl, hastily tucking it back in. “I did—I thought he liked me, I did let him… I’m
sorry, Father.”

At once, the standoff crumbled. The potter sagged back onto his cushions,

and he too covered his eyes. “I think perhaps you should go, Wise One. Shame
has touched us all today, but if the fault was provoked, I shall not expect further
geld for it. Sorrow is the spice of all our days once we grow old, but I did not
think to find mine here. Go.”

Saewyn packed all her jars and simples into her basket in a hunted silence,

and ushered her son out of the door before her with almost the same movements
she would use to drive out demons. That was not a comforting thought.

Outside, the rain fell and mud-month was living up to its name. Rain slicked

Cenred’s hair and dripped into the corners of those ungenerous eyes. It soaked
through Saewyn’s wimple and began to trickle cold down the back of her neck.

As she shivered, scarcely needing this to make her more miserable, a change

seemed to come over Cenred’s face—the lines of it eased. His eyes came out of
hiding and showed themselves blue and concerned. He took off his leather cloak
and swept it around her shoulders. Took off too the oiled leather hood that he
had not bothered to raise, and placed it carefully over her head.

“I’m sorry.” He smiled, and it was the face of her young son, before the

stones. “I don’t know what came over me. She was so…forward and lewd, it
didn’t seem right for her to go about in the guise of one who was virtuous. It…
offended me. Was that wrong?”

Now she wanted to embrace and comfort him, for he looked so lost, as

though he had been a long way off, watching himself act and puzzling over it. She
thought again the thoughts she had put aside earlier. “Are you so very perfect
yourself, son, that you must make yourself the right hand of God’s judgment?”

“I do try.”
She was relieved enough to laugh. “As do we all, and all fail, and all of us

therefore must lay ourselves penitent at the Lord’s feet and hope for the mercy
we are told must come.”

He took the basket from her, letting her pick up her skirts as they both ran

back from the huddle of houses where the potter lived among shared fields, into
the burh and the great hall’s warmth. The leather cloak flapped around her legs
and water dripped off the hood, and she was no more than damp when they
arrived, though Cenred was so drenched he might have crawled up out of the
moat.

She watched his face light up as his friends among the warriors drew apart to

make a space beside them for him, close to the fire, and felt love still, going all
the way through her like the spit through a roast bird, when he turned to her and
waited for her permission to join them. He is proud of me, she thought. No
matter what he says of my work, he is proud of his mother. It made
everything feel well again. A little pebble of unhappiness to swallow, instead of a
boulder.

“Will I try to teach you again?”
“I would rather not, Mother. I am not suited to it.”
You used to be, she thought, in those old days when you would trail after

me, with rips in your knees and armfuls of muddy roots, with tangled hair
and a smile that took up half your face. Before your father filled your heart
full of stones. But you are the man of the household now and I suppose a
man has to put down childish things.

And all the strivings of the world are vanity. All of it shall be lost.
She smiled and inclined her head beneath the supple gape of the hood. “As

you wish. I would not force you to go where your heart tells you you do not
belong.” I do not have that kind of influence over you any more.

It should have been a hopeful thought. It was not.

The ice creaked beneath Wulfstan’s bone skates, and the air was like a knife

in his throat. It tasted of steel. St. Polycarp’s day had come with deepening
snow, the last—so the farmers hoped—of the season. Soon there must come a
thawing, so that mud-month might soften the earth for planting. Today the old
and the soft were warming their stinging hands by the fire, and Wulfstan and the
other warriors were at play, chasing one another over the deep ice of the fish
pond, enacting skirmishes and ambushes throughout the burh, armed with
chunks of ice and balls of snow.

It was serious work, he knew, for the Vikings were growing ever bolder. No

longer content to harry the seashores, they pushed their way further up every
river every year. One day soon, he might have the chance to repay his lord for
all the time and wealth squandered on him—the chance to stand in his defence
and kill or die for him. Wulfstan believed he wanted it, but he could not believe
he wanted it as much as some of the others, who spoke of the Norse raiders the
way a man would speak of a half-cooked steak, longing to have his teeth meet in
it and feel the blood drip down his chin.

Despite his temper, which came upon him from the outside like a bolt of

lightning—as though it was as the old folk said, an inspiration from Woden, the
touch of a god’s hand and not his own spirit at all—Wulfstan did not relish war.
This… He slid to a stop in the centre of a great sheet of ice and looked out at
clear deep-blue sky and the sunlight coming up yellow from the silvered land, at
the trees with ice as thick on their branches as a flock of white butterflies, and
the air scouring and tonic. This he liked better. There was something about the
world when it forced mankind indoors and he was alone in it, that inevitably
turned his mind towards God and glory, white and gold and clean things. He felt,
on a day like this, as though he could get his fingers underneath the lid of the
world and prize it up, and see all the unseen things that spun out the fabric of the
world under its roots.

He took a deep breath of exhilaration that stabbed him in the nose with its

cold, and as he did so a mass of wet snow hit him in the back of the head.
Sliding around, not allowing himself to shudder or cough, he caught the glint of
Cenred’s winter-sun hair. Ducking down beneath a boulder on the lakeside, he
pushed off and gathered snow as he glided closer, and when his friend stood to
take aim at him again, Wulfstan got him in the face with a double fistful.

That was the end of peace and contemplation for the day. Cenred came after

him, roaring, and they hunted one another across the lake and out into the
surrounding trees. There, Cenred stumbled on a root, and Wulfstan, his blood
hot, leaped at him before he could scramble back up. They both went sprawling
into soft snow, laughing, Cenred trying to get Wulfstan into an armlock, Wulfstan
trying to pin the slighter man down with his weight. He got an arm across

Cenred’s throat, grinning, sure Cenred would have to yield, but the sly snake, by
some new trick, managed to slither out from under him, hook a leg around his
and flip them both.

He found himself lying surprised in a nest of pressed snow, looking up at a

smile that had turned strange. Instead of slowing, his heart sped, or perhaps the
normal flow of time slowed down. Cenred’s guarded eyes and Wulfstan’s flush
caused such a warmth about them he wondered they did not melt through to the
forest floor.

Cenred had stopped fighting a dozen heartbeats ago, but Wulfstan couldn’t

bring himself to take the advantage, twist and pin his opponent and claim his
victory. This felt so much better. Held down, he felt grounded, completed in a
way he couldn’t explain. As if of its own accord, his head tilted and his mouth
fell slightly open. He watched as Cenred licked his lips and made a little darting
movement forward, not quite daring to touch, and he knew he should surge up
to meet it. He should claim dominance, or at the very least equality, he should
not simply accept a kiss like a blushing maiden.

There was a puzzlement in the back of Cenred’s eyes now, and for a

moment he was sure the man had noticed his surrender and understood it. The
fear moved him to grab two handfuls of gilded hair and surge up to crush his
mouth against his friend’s, using his moment of shock to gain the upper hand and
roll himself back on top. Cenred laughed and bit him hard, kneeing him in the
hip, while his hands—as if driven by an entirely separate will—were fumbling to
untuck the swaddled layers of cloaks and tunics between them, to get cold
fingers on undefended flesh.

Sadly, the moment it had become just another fight, the joy of it had gone out

of Wulfstan. He grabbed his friend by the arms and used all his greater strength
to push him away. The skin on the inside of his lip had broken, and his mouth
tasted of blood, coppery and sickening. Cenred’s disappointment made him
want to apologise, to explain—and that was too frightening a thing to
contemplate. He couldn’t tell anyone what he really wanted, could he?

Oh, if he could only trust Cenred completely, with his whole heart. He

wanted to, badly wanted to, the memory of desire like a fever in his blood, but
he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He was ashamed to find that he too
didn’t trust the coward’s son, though the man was his best friend.

Accepting, finally, that no more kisses would be forthcoming today, Cenred

sat back on his heels and looked at Wulfstan sideways out of slitted eyes. “Why
not? Since I’ve known you, you’ve bedded no women. Why not with a man?”

“It is a sin.”
“So is anger, yet you give in to that one often enough.”

“I have a besetting sin,” Wulfstan agreed, “so it’s best I do not add to them,

don’t you think?”

“You want to.” Cenred leaned forward again and watched the changes in

Wulfstan’s face as though he were tracking a rare and shy wild animal. What he
saw there must have pleased him, because his disgruntled expression slid into a
smile. “Ha! I thought you did. Think on the offer awhile. It will only be the
sweeter for a little self-denial first.”

Chapter Four

This thought stayed with Wulfstan as the weather’s grip eased on the land. It

made him keep away from Cenred, so that those who watched muttered that
there had been an estrangement. He heard them worrying about who would
calm and restrain him now when the wolfish mood came over him. No one else
stepped in to be his friend, though no one dared be his enemy either, offering
shallow smiles and words carefully measured neither to insult nor to encourage.

By St. Carantoc’s day, Wulfstan was lonely enough to disregard the strong

hints he had been given about being unwelcome, and turn to his other estranged
friend, Ecgfreda, for company. Though he still didn’t know what he had done to
insult her, he went fully prepared to apologise for anything, if only they could talk
again.

Ecgfreda was in the brew house, amongst her women, and the place was too

forbiddingly feminine for him to dare to enter. But she came to the door when he
asked, and bidding her younger sister and her closest maid to accompany her,
she allowed him to walk her back to the bower house and stand just inside the
door.

It was warmer here than in the main hall, the building smaller but with a fire

just as large and all the walls curtained with second-best tapestries. At one end
of the fire, seeing more with their fingers than their eyes, a dozen women worked
at their looms. At the other, a round, well-fed lady crouched over a small
brazier, stirring something pink with a small ivory spoon. The scent of
frankincense was in the air, sweetening the already sweet smoke of the
applewood on the hearth. A score of faces lifted, marking them come in, and
politely lowered again, leaving them in what semblance of solitude it was
possible to have when blamelessly visible under the gaze of witnesses.

Wulfstan rolled his shoulders—he always felt their gazes like a bridle. A

harness to keep the dog from becoming a wolf. Sighing, he began, “I have been
combing my thoughts finely, to find what I could have said to you that lost me
your friendship. I can only discover that you turned your face against me when I
asked you to be my wife. Still, I cannot see how what was meant as praise
should have been taken as insult.”

He must have hit on the problem, though, for her polite smile had frozen in

place, and there was something about her eyes that reminded him of the centre
of the river, where the water flowed fastest and the ice was thin. She looked at
the carved door lintel as if for counsel and then took his elbow and urged him

back outside, bending her head down to whisper, behind the cover of a fold of
her wimple. “There is nowhere we may talk of this in peace or open the thoughts
of our minds in safety. I hoped you regarded me as your friend and I—”

“I do!” Wulfstan felt conscious that when the door was shut behind them they

could no longer see who might have edged close enough to listen through the
cracks. How long would it be before one or all of them came out on her train,
like ducklings behind their mother, to be sure she was safe out here on her own
with a man?

“I have plenty of suitors who would be glad to have me for wife,” she hissed,

leaning closer. “When I look on their faces as I serve them mead at the feasts, I
see their hunger for me, as if they would gladly starve if they could only gorge
themselves on my regard.”

Wulfstan dropped his hand to his sword-hilt. The weapon spoke through his

skin, whispering of punishment. “If you need me to teach any of them to mind
their thoughts and hands—”

She strode from the door, led him up to the narrow walk that ran along the

palisade, high above the enclosure. There they could be alone and yet fully
visible, so anyone could see that all they did was walk and talk together.

The apples of Ecgfreda’s cheeks glowed pink in the cold wind and her small,

catlike face had softened, as though his bemusement was better than what she
had thought to receive at his hands. A scent of bread and charcoal clung about
her, warm in the chill spring day as she smiled.

“It is a good thing in a husband,” she said, “to look at his wife as though she

were pleasing to him—to look as though she were sweeter than honeycake and
juicier than apple. You have never looked at me that way.”

This puzzled Wulfstan and disturbed him in equal measure. “You want men

to look at you with desire?”

Again, his puzzlement made her laugh. “Indeed, for I have a hunger to match

theirs, and I am just as much looking for a husband who makes my mouth
water.”

He stopped, with the sun white under cold clouds behind him. Geese flew

overhead in formations like ragged spearheads, their barking voices melancholy.
Barnacle geese—hatched in the sea from little slimy things that clung to rocks.
And though that was a strange thought it was no less strange to think that
Ecgfreda wanted the humiliation of sex—to yield, to have her power stripped
away and be made the recipient of someone else’s lust. Yet if she wanted it, did
that not make it something that she did, rather than something that was done to
her?

He felt, briefly but profoundly, a jealousy of her that griped at his throat and

stomach like poison. Why could she have this and go from holy virgin to
respected wife, when—if he had it—he would trip from warrior to nothing as if
falling off a cliff? If she could have it and retain her honour, why could he not?

She misinterpreted his thought as a failure to grasp her meaning. Stopping,

she drew her mantle more closely about herself and tucked her hands up her
loose oversleeves to keep them warm. “You do not want me,” she said. “It
seemed to me, in that case, there were two reasons you might have asked.
Neither of which did you credit.

“Either you did it because my father wanted it, or you did it because I will be

one of his heirs and I would make you rich. These reasons I would not despise
in a stranger, for whom they would be evidence of good sense. Yet you, I
thought, were my friend, and you should wish me a better future than barrenness
and being left to raise your concubines’ brats.”

Her figure was tall and her step stately. Her throat beneath the swathes of

white material showed long and slender as a swan’s, and he had heard men talk
of the flash of her eyes as though they were deadly weapons, as though—like
the elves—they were capable of shooting invisible arrows that punctured a
man’s skin and got beneath, to spread poison or delight. If he looked close,
however, they seemed only the pale grey of the winter sky. Full of thought,
perhaps, but remote as though he and she walked down opposite banks of a
river, shouted their thoughts but could not cross.

He didn’t like her being angry with him. “It wouldn’t be so,” he said, hotly.

“You are the only woman I would look at. There are none who please me more
than you.”

Ecgfreda’s mouth turned up in an expression half-smile, half-grimace, but her

braced shoulders dropped, and her eyes warmed. “Then,” she said, “perhaps
God has made you for the cloister, and you should not be thinking of marriage at
all. If I were so inclined to virtue as you are, that is where I would go.”

It was a strange thought—that he could give up being a warrior, devote

himself to a higher power. A strangely attractive one, but for the thought of all
those he would disappoint. “Your father—”

“If he has any wisdom, would accept that our wyrd is woven for us in our

very nature, and all our choices only tend to that end. Better to accept fate
joyfully than to fight it, for it will win no matter what we do.”

They had come to one of the many sets of oaken ladders that gave access to

the palisade from all quadrants of the burh. Ecgfreda stopped and tugged her
dress up through her tight belt to free her feet of its encumbrance. She took hold
of the handrail and backed down the narrow treads. Wulfstan came after and
found himself neatly deposited just behind the church.

“Peaceweaver,” he said, ruefully, finding himself manipulated, “have you

brought me here entirely to make a point? I think perhaps I would be happier in
a life in which I do not have to be on guard for the subtle machinations of
thoughtful women.”

“I do it for your own good,” she laughed. “As my mother taught me, and hers

taught her down a line as long as any line of fathers. Come, if you are made so
perfect for a celibate life, why not go in and speak to Father Aidan, or to God?
There is no dishonour in trading a life of striving against men for a life of striving
against the infernal powers.”

Her earlier point had now had time to sink to the bottom of the well of

Wulfstan’s thought. “I did not mean to insult or disregard you, or to treat you as
a coin to be passed from your father to me, when I asked. I meant it because I
admire and like you. You are wise and good, and you always counsel me well. I
thought that was enough.”

Her laughter settled like a young fire into warmth. “Then,” she said, “I give up

my anger at you, and if you will it, we shall be friends again, in so far as I am
allowed to be friends with an unmarried youth. On which point I had better
return to my women, or we will be seized and married against both our wills.”

She turned and left him at the door of the church, hurrying back across the

iron-hard enclosure, bent into the blast of the wind. He—feeling rejected and
hollow, relieved and unsettled all at once—burned his fingers with cold as he
pushed on the flower-shaped iron nails that studded the door, opened it and
went inside.

Even the smoke that blued the air inside smelled a little of heaven, rich and

spicy as resin. Compared with the hall it was a small building, and empty but for
the altar at one end, spread with a white cloth, on which a rood of silver-gilt
wood stood gleaming in a ray of pale sunlight. This entered the house from the
wind hole under the eaves at the west and filled the moving blue air with a single,
slanted rod of light.

It was just as cold inside as it was out, but it was many times more silent, and

Wulfstan felt that he had stepped outside the nine worlds into somewhere poised
between them. All the things that had counted outside, in here could be stripped
away as little more than dross.

He breathed in, trying to take some peace into his body via the air, and went

down on his knees, hard and painful on the laid wooden floor. As he did so,
something stirred at the back of his mind, and he would have closed his eyes to
concentrate on it had there not also been an answering stir in the far corner of
the church. There—outside the beam of light—a patch of shade next to the altar
started, stood up, and showed the pale and wary face of Brid the slave.

He had a book cradled in the crook of one elbow, and an ivory pointer in his

right hand, but before Wulfstan had time to think and berate him for this, he had
laid them both down on the altar so reverently there seemed nothing to say.

“You read?”
The boy stayed in his corner, protected by the darkness, all but invisible

himself in his dark tunic and trousers, a dark hood raised and casting shadow on
his fair face. Wulfstan noticed he no longer wore the undyed homespun of the
other slaves. There were shoes on his feet and woolen bands wrapped around
his calves to the knee.

“Father Aidan is teaching me, lord.”
The silence seemed a solid thing around them, as though they were in the

centre of a hall made of crystal, protected from the outer world.

“Why read?” Wulfstan asked, drawn again to something strong in the slave,

something indomitable. He indicated the good clothes, the slave’s filled-out
cheeks that told he was being fed as well as a free man.

“Did I not tell you Ecgbert was a kindly master? What need have you of

anything else? Or—if you do—why not do as the other slaves do and take up a
craft by which you can earn enough money to buy yourself back?”

“The truth?” Brid’s whisper had a soft edge of humour, as though he found it

strange that anyone could expect an honest answer from him. “If I bought myself
back, how could I ever redeem what has been done to me? Once a man is fallen
as I have, what way back is there?”

Wulfstan wondered what it was the Welshman found so amusing, and

guessed perhaps that it was the expression of discomfort on his own face. Was
the slave a brave enough man to risk rubbing filth into him as though tanning a
hide, just for the flinch? What could it mean that Brid found funny what all other
men feared?

“What way?” he asked. “I know not. Is there a way at all?”
Brid drifted forward on silent feet until he was almost within arm’s reach. He

put down his hood, and the stubble of his shaved head gleamed like polished
brass as he emerged into the light. His tunic was green, it seemed, the deep
green of an indigo dye over weld, expensive and far too fine for a slave.

“You ask me that here, lord? The only way is the church, which—when one

enters it—can wipe out a man’s past as though it had never been. There is no
abyss to which any of us could fall, no pitch so black, that could not be washed
away by the church’s forgiveness and made as though it had never happened at
all. That is why I am learning to read and to make calculations, to write and to
memorise the psalms and the services. That is why I am learning to keep Father
Aidan’s vestments and to clean the church and to fetch and carry for him freely

rather than taking up work for which I might be paid.”

Here it seemed the boy had once more been the pathfinder Wulfstan needed.

He might tell what the journey was like, give encouragement or warn Wulfstan
off. “You’re thinking of becoming a monk?”

He must have sounded incredulous, for Brid dared an apologetic little smile.

“I will not always be a boy, nor a youth. One day my lord will look at me and
realise that my beauty has fled like that of all mortal things. Then he will wish to
put me out of his sight. I do my best to make him fond of me, and so perhaps on
that day, if I plead, rather than send me off to labour on one of his manors in a
far distant country, he will donate me to the church. There I will find a new life
with everything cleaned, where no man will know I am not deserving of respect.
For in the eyes of Christ, the slave and the master are equal, the warrior and the
serf are equal, the king and the blind beggar woman at his gates are equal, and
all sins are forgotten once pardoned, as though they had never been.”

All sins forgiven. Wulfstan had heard this claim every Sunday and most other

days of his life. Yet he felt he had never heard it before. The thought lit a fire in
him. All sins forgiven, if they were but confessed and repented—and forgiven
meant not “treasured up to berate him with every time he put a step wrong” but
“utterly wiped out of existence”.

He could have Cenred, and afterwards God could make it as though it had

not happened at all. What a magic there was in this! What a freedom!

“You are a remarkable man, Brid,” he said, startled into giving voice to a

truth he hadn’t known was in him. “I’m sure you will end as a bishop.” And who
will know that they are being given orders by a man so soft and submissive
he let another man plunder him and live?

This time Brid did laugh, startled, with a laughter that reached those chilly,

watching eyes and made them bright. “You are a remarkable man also, my lord,
to speak so to a slave like myself. Before I was captured I never would have
believed such a recovery possible. To learn from one’s own mistakes is life, but
to heed the mistakes of others is rare.”

Now he dares give me praise, Wulfstan thought, with a sensation as though

the wind were lifting the collar of his tunic behind him and blowing along his
spine. There were many reasons why it did not do to become too familiar with
Ecgbert’s bed-boy. “Well,” he said, disconcerted, “be sure you attend my lord
with all your heart before then. So great a boon as freedom must be earned.”

Brid’s face closed like a locking box. He bowed and stepped back and all at

once was hidden again, unseen in the shadows. “All my will is set on pleasing
him, lord, for as long as I may.”

As he hurried to the hall, Wulfstan felt his own heart had become like the

chapel—a space full of secrets and silence, inhabited by a riddling presence, shy
and speechless and strong. As he plunged back into the hall where the other
youths were, as always, wrestling and boasting and drinking, he thought perhaps
that Ecgfreda was right. A warrior should not be carrying this weight of
mysteries—he should be clear all the way through, resolved, confident in himself
and his sword. Perhaps he did think too much. Perhaps he should give it all up
and enter the church, where an active mind was an asset.

Cenred looked up at him from his place on the bench, looked up with

narrowed eyes as blue as the illuminated sky on the title page of the book Brid
had been reading, and everything in him did become clear and certain, narrowed
down to a cutting edge of intent. “It will be chill tonight.” He dropped down on
the bench beside his friend and felt the warmth of the man’s sturdy thigh against
his own. “Will you share your cloak with me?”

Cenred laughed and ducked his head to whisper, “How little time it takes to

overcome your scruples, my friend.”

“Mock me and sleep cold.” Wulfstan made to rise, nettled, but Cenred

caught the hem of his tunic and urged him back down.

“Forgive me. My father was… He was a man of harsh words. I…”
Wulfstan’s resentment drained away like rain through a hole in a tent roof.

Cenred’s brow was furrowed and his gaze turned inwards. It didn’t seem he
liked what he saw. “You are not like him,” Wulfstan said quietly. “This we all
know, I most of all. Or I would not be here now, broaching this topic with you.”

“A boy sees his father’s example,” Cenred murmured, moving aside as the

servants shuffled the first of a long series of trestle tables between him and the
wall. Outside the early evening was falling, blue and chill. Cold air coiled through
the cracks under the door and stroked along Wulfstan’s fingertips. “Whether he
will or no, he learns what the man has to teach. I learned with more fear than
love, but I learned nonetheless, and sometimes, when I will it least, the habits
break through.”

His brows pinched in further, lowering, leaving his eyes showing as

cornflower lines between golden lashes. The rest of that baby-round face was
smooth and impassive as always, but Wulfstan remembered the days when it
had been covered with bruises, and he reached out and covered Cenred’s knee
with his hand, under the table, stroking a thumb reassuringly along the side of it.
This they had in common, that they were both out of true, somehow, inside. This
it was that made him more tender, more careful with Cenred, who alone out of
his lord’s household warriors, Wulfstan had never struck in anger, never laid flat
on his back with his ears ringing and the knowledge of defeat embedded in his
spine.

Now, he thought, now I will lay him flat another way. The breath caught in

his throat as a fierce flush of warmth poured from his hand into every part of him,
met the itching intoxication of want that centred in his prick and drove the chill
away as effectively as though he had been a fire giant. It was suddenly very hard
to think of waiting patiently through the feasting and the drinking for hours on
end, until he could finally have another man’s hands on his flushed and needy
skin.

The evening did not oblige him by hurrying. His temper frayed under the

endless waiting—all his life, he’d been waiting, and these last moments were the
worst. One thing only diverted him from his ball-aching hunger, and that came
when at the end of the night’s meal, Ecgbert took out his lyre and passed it
down the table for every man to play his single party piece.

When the instrument came to him, sat nestled onto his knee and into the

crook of his arm like a lover, when he struck the chords and felt the music
vibrate in the wood as though the lyre itself were alive and singing, that night
came back to him in a physical rush. The young harper’s slight arms and thin lips
made into something swordlike, something that pierced him and made him bleed
out his strength, by a spirit strong as any angel’s. He leaned his face against the
lyre, felt its hum against his cheek and wished with a vain, hollow desperation
that tonight he could have been sharing his cloak with that man.

When the song ended he could not follow it with another—he had learned

one only, to avoid being humiliated when the harp was passed around, but that
he had thought was enough. He let the instrument go to the next player and told
himself that he had not known that man above an hour before he had been
humiliated at his hands. He told himself that if they ever met again, he would take
a handful of that curly hair—was it soft or rough, it seemed important to know—
and force the man to kneel to him, and do whatever it took to put in his eyes the
wary respect that was due to a man of Wulfstan’s status.

The picture kept slithering out of his mind. He thought he’d got it—the

kneeling youth a tangle of long limbs, the face, upraised, long nose and high
cheeks, thin jaw and downcast eyes. But when his imaginary harper looked up,
his twisted smile was full of mockery, his wide, clear eyes as scorching as fire.
At the picture, rather than feel fury, Wulfstan’s mouth dried and a deep,
delicious throb went through his spine from the nape of his neck to his balls.

“You’re having pleasant thoughts.” Where no one could see, concealed in

the hall’s brown-gold light by tablecloth and tunic skirts, a hand wormed its way
past Wulfstan’s hose and began to untuck his thin linen braies from the top of
them. Rough fingertips burrowed underneath and alighted on the smooth,
sensitive skin of his upper thigh, stroking, seeking. He managed not to gasp, but

he closed his eyes and shifted closer, lost in his dreams, and for a moment when
he opened his eyes again, he was confused and disappointed to see Cenred
beside him. That broad, smug smile was not what he had been thinking of at all.

This disappointment was strange and ungrateful in him, he thought, tasting it

at the back of his throat like the blood from a nosebleed. When this was his
good friend beside whom he had grown and learned all his life, and the harper
might easily have been no man at all but some uncanny thing, an elf of the sea or
a demon or a spirit sent against him by an enemy to bring him to ruin. No mortal
man should have had such power over him, when his closest shoulder-
companion did not.

That sense of unease persisted through the evening, through jests and songs

and riddles, and into the hours when all began to soften and the servants took
the tables away to stack them against the walls. Wulfstan’s servant, Ulf, who had
been sent with him from home by Wulfstan’s mother—a strange grizzled man to
have charge of the washing and clothing and management of this younger son—
stopped by Wulfstan’s side and leaning down whispered, “Your pallet is laid out
close to the fire. Will you be wanting anything more until the morning, my lord?”

Last year, Ulf had married a marsh fisher’s daughter, and now, although

Wulfstan’s needs were tended to, and his clothing more effectually washed and
mended, the man was forever sloping off to his small cottage outside the burh to
tend his new family. Normally this gave Wulfstan a slight feeling of loss, but this
evening it was welcome.

“No,” he said, handing over his bowl and beaker to be taken away and

washed. “I will not keep you from the balm of your bed.” Wulfstan’s heart
should not have felt so heavy at these words. His body was keen enough, the
fine tremble of it audible in his voice, but beneath the need, doubt ran through the
marrow of his bones. He ignored it—he had made a decision. Now he would
act on it and not be forever changing his mind like a child with two toys.

Around him the lamps were being put out one by one, winched down to

waist height so that the sooty slave could clap a snuffer over them. The hall filled
with darkness and the scent of hot ox-fat and burned flax. Men became
shadows that felt for their blankets and sat down. The last of the servants raked
the embers of the fire together in the centre of the firepit and scattered soil over
the top of it, bedding it down to keep it live but slumbering over the long, quiet
hours when no one would be awake to tend to it. With the fire in its bed, this
final servant left, shutting the door behind him, and the darkness was absolute.

It filled with the metallic slither of chain mail being kicked off beds, the grunts

and thuds and soft woolen rustles of men putting down sword-belts and shoes,
wriggling beneath blankets. Wulfstan felt a body settle beside him, and together

they sandwiched their armour between themselves and Aelfsi, whose back
would otherwise have been touching them. Now no one was close enough to
feel what occurred between them.

As he lay down, it was in a pile of knees and elbows. Cenred was

everywhere, and Wulfstan could not seem to get his breath or his balance. One
moment he would think he had it—time had paused enough for him to catch up
—and there would be a hand on his arm, or in his hair and he was struggling
again. He’d scarcely got to hands and knees before the weight of Cenred’s
chest was on his back, and both arms wound tight around his chest, and he
couldn’t tell whether his skin shrilled with pleasure or alarm to feel the scrape
and tickle of Cenred’s sparse blond moustache against the nape of his neck, or
the touch of teeth.

Don’t bite me! He thudded down onto the pallet, straw creaking at the

impact, did not dare to say it out loud, but turned over instead, jabbing with
elbow and fist to get his friend to move. He’d just about decided to call the
whole thing off when Cenred took the hint and wriggled away, lying down close
enough, on his side, that his knees and feet touched Wulfstan’s. At the failure of
his first attack he gave a little noise, somewhere between frustration and
amusement, and instead snaked a single, careful arm around Wulfstan’s waist
and pulled himself flush, hip and belly to Wulfstan. Leaning in, after some
fumbling, he found Wulfstan’s mouth with his own.

That silenced Wulfstan’s protests, for the doubt in his bones could not

compete with the dragging friction and wet heat of that experienced mouth on his
own. He didn’t want a fight, but he did want that. He opened up and let himself
be invaded by Cenred’s hot tongue, remembering, sometimes, with a jolt of
panic, to chase it back and make sure Cenred got as good as he gave.

By themselves, his hands had gone to his braies and undone the bow keeping

them tight around his waist. He pushed them down, freeing prick and balls into
the private warmth their blankets made around them. When Cenred responded
by taking it in his hand, stroking hard from root to tip, it was all he could do not
to make a noise. Teeth buried in his lip, he arched towards his friend and his
hands fell idle to his side, giving up. It felt good to do so—to let Cenred free his
own prick and hold both together, stroking as he saw fit. It felt good to
anticipate the other man’s actions, not to know. To be, literally, in safe hands
and given pleasure like a gift, without having to strive for it.

The shape of Cenred’s mouth had changed—he could feel it against his skin

and knew it must be a smile. Cenred shifted even closer, trapping their cocks
between them, the pressure almost bruising—tight and so good. His other hand
felt up between Wulfstan’s legs, a painful bliss over the clenched fists of his balls,

and a deep, dark red need as the knuckle of his thumb pressed hard against the
flesh between balls and arse, and Wulfstan thought he would break apart, trying
not to whimper.

The questing hand prodded none to gently at his arsehole, and he barely had

the presence of mind to shove Cenred hard in the chest while his bones flew
apart and he was coming and coming over Cenred’s belly and chest. The heat
and liquid smoothness of his friend following drew all out until he was utterly
spent. He had just resilience enough to wipe off the mess with the skirts of his
undertunic before dark and satiation took him and he slept.

He was asleep when it happened again—asleep and dreaming of lying

beneath one made out of glass and fire, delicate but indestructible. It was his
harper, yes, but his harper revealed as an angelic force—a god of sorts, of music
and poetry, greater than human. So much greater than Wulfstan that there could
be no shame at all in yielding to him. Nothing more than nature taking its rightful
course…

So Wulfstan rolled over onto his belly and spread his legs, and dreamed of

fingers rubbing grease on him, that melted and slid inside and made him shiver
with the strangeness of it. When he woke to the full, aching slide of possession
and the rhythm of all but silent breaths against his nape, it took him so long to
rouse his mind out of dreams that there seemed no need to protest, all his
urgency saved for the coil of building pleasure in his belly and the way the
intrusion made him feel like a slow-worm stunned by sunlight on a rock. Too late
to protest now, without letting every man in the hall know what was going on.

He opened his eyes and saw a blue dimness in the hall and a brighter blue

triangle at the apex of the roof where night was giving way to dawn outside, and
something in his mind screamed protest even while his eyelids were closing of
themselves, weighted by bliss. His body demanded that he should relish the
surrender, glory in the perverse triumph of it. He was showing them all, now,
shouting a challenge to every voice that said this should not be done, and he felt
the looseness of his muscles and the rock of his pelvis against the ground like
defiance, heady and splendid as war.

Cenred shuddered behind him, pressing a delighted laugh into his skin, and

stopped as Wulfstan squirmed with need. In his frustration, Wulfstan’s sodden
maze of pleasure-drunken thoughts turned into a sack full of snakes. What? No!
Don’t stop! What kind of a friend would leave it there, would take his own
victory and leave his lover unsatisfied? Cenred would not. Yes, he was selfish,
always had been, but surely…

There was nothing he could say, but as Cenred pulled away he turned and

grabbed the thankless man around the waist and threw him down. Got him

pinned. Cenred twisted his ankles together and Wulfstan took the hint—he had
no time or mind for anything complicated—just thrust in the hollow between
Cenred’s thighs, coming with embarrassing ease mere seconds later.

They lay breathing hard, together, in a nest of rough blankets and the scent of

sex and straw. Wulfstan might have fallen asleep again, for when he opened his
eyes a second time it was to see Cenred’s face drawn close to his, the narrowed
indigo eyes glittering with hard-edged laughter. It was not the soft, indulgent
expression Wulfstan would have preferred, and the ice in his marrow bloomed
and spread at the sight.

“Well,” said Cenred, soft as the sounds of other men beginning to stir around

them, “long have I suspected it, but no man can say I knew until now.”

There were too many teeth in his smile, and Wulfstan’s hands were drawing

up and lacing his sticky braies before his thoughts had time to make it into
words.

“What do you—”
Over by the wall, Eadwacer was sitting up and stretching, his face and hands

white blurs in the woad-coloured dim. The enchantment of safety woven by the
darkness began to shrink and fray under Wulfstan’s hands. He had more light
now in which to see the cruelty that gave such a glint to Cenred’s smile.

“Shall I say it more plainly?” The whisper shuddered with laughter. “Shall I

tell everyone that their berserker is no wolf at all, but a vixen in heat? Shall I tell
them that I defeated Ecgbert’s favourite and nailed him into the ground and he
loved it?”

The ice in Wulfstan’s bones froze him solid—he wondered why dew did not

fall on him and the boards of the floor slick with ice. He could not… He could
not think. What was this? What was Cenred saying? It made no sense.

And he went on saying it. “I think I shall. Do you know how you have

tyrannized over us all, all these years? How we have had to walk around you as
though around a rabid dog, carefully staying out of the range of the teeth? How
you brought about Manna’s disgrace, when he did nothing but speak the truth?
How you have dared, all these years, to give me your friendship out of pity?
You, pity me? When you are a soft, suckling weakling cunt who needs a real
man to fill his hole and fuck him.”

The hissing voice passed over Wulfstan poisonous as dragon’s breath.

Slowly, slowly, the thought that he was about to be betrayed began to break
through his shell of ice.

Cenred pulled his clothes together and pushed himself up on one knee. The

light had broadened and his voice grown stronger. There could no longer be any
doubt that others were watching, others were listening. “I will,” he said, reckless

and laughing and cruel. “I’m going to tell them all how you let me—”

By some strange alchemy, the ice in Wulfstan’s bones turned in an instant

into fire, as panic made him surge up and drive his head into the hollow beneath
Cenred’s breastbone. The breath went out of him in a great whoop as the force
of the blow drove him backwards. As he stumbled on the blankets underfoot,
Wulfstan—shouting “You fucking liar! You fucking, fucking liar!”—balled both
fists and slammed them as one hammer into Cenred’s throat beneath the jaw. He
wasn’t thinking, he just wanted the mocking voice to go away and it seemed his
fists knew what to do far better than he did.

As the blow drove Cenred away, the edge of the firepit caught him in the

back of the knees. Wulfstan saw him go down. Following the great blow with a
punch to Cenred’s nose, shattering it, he hit and hit again until finally Aelfsi and
Eadwacer got his arms and dragged him away from Cenred’s unresisting form.

Then he was able to see that the black flood creeping over the soil of the

firepit, going up with a sizzle and a stink where it met the live embers in their
hollow, was blood. He went slowly slack in Aelfsi’s grasp, trembling and
puzzled, while Eadwacer pulled Cenred up, and showed, underneath him, the
long red-stained blade of the axe with which the firewood was chopped, and the
great, gaping place around the severed ends of pearly white neck bone, where
the fall and Wulfstan’s blows had driven the steel-sharp blade through the young
man’s defenceless neck.

Chapter Five

Pope Boniface’s day, and Leofgar entered the small house he shared with his

master bearing handfuls of dark thorny twigs covered with white flowers. It had
been almost four weeks now since the old man had moved from the bed, and
Leofgar’s world had narrowed down to wicker walls and fire tending, bringing
water and porridge, hauling the frail body from sheets to pot and back. Anna
remained lucid enough, but the flesh seemed to be rising from him like dew
spiraling up into sunlight, and the skin left was too big for the bones. Only the
quizzical humourous eyes still reminded him of the father he loved.

“May blossom.” Anna stretched out his fingers on the blankets as another

man would have beckoned, and Leofgar brought it close, let him duck his face
into it and snuff up the faint, fresh honeydew scent of it. “Praise be to God that I
have lived through one last winter, so I may die with such sweetness around
me.”

A tearing sensation in Leofgar’s chest made him drop the flowers onto the

coverlet and turn away. He would have walked the four steps to the other side
of the house and stood with his forehead pressed to the wall—this being his
habit when he could find no other means of escape from his grief—but that
Anna’s fingers lit lightly on top of his wrist, and he would not pull away from
them.

“I wish you wouldn’t say such things. Winter is over. The spring is come and

new life with it. Warmth and light. You will surely grow stronger now.” Rather
than run away, he knelt, so he could put the trembling hand down on the covers
and envelop it in his own. When that didn’t seem enough, he laid his forehead on
top of it and felt the long bone of Anna’s thigh like driftwood under his cheek.
“Tatwine says we may go to Rome. We may go to Byzantium. Think of the
stories we could hear there, and the songs. It’s so hot, they say, an egg will cook
on the pavements. Your bones will never ache there. We’ll go by sea and we’ll
—”

“My son,” Anna whispered, firmly. “Your days of childhood are long behind

you. Do not tell yourself lies.”

“Nnah!” Leofgar made an inarticulate noise and turned his head to press his

watering eyes into the cloth.

“For myself, I am content,” Anna went on. “And I thank you, best of all

youths, for all you have done for me this winter. It is because of you that I have
died in comfort and not in sorrow. Bring me Lark.”

Leofgar’s own bones protested as he got to his feet, as though he had taken

some of Anna’s infirmity into himself. He wished fiercely that it was true and he
could do more. Gently freeing Anna’s harp from her bag, he took the flowers
away and placed her reverently in the old man’s lap. Anna tried to tune her, but
his hands were too weak for the pegs. After a long time struggling, he gave a
sigh that might have also been a laugh, and pushed her into Leofgar’s grasp.

“For three score years she has been my voice, she has fed and clothed me.

They laughed, those first scops to whom I showed her. No one had seen the
like. They thought her outlandish, until she began to sing. After which they
scrambled to have one like her themselves. But there is no other harp like her. I
give her to you, along with everything else I possess. This is what I wish—you
will not bury me like a pagan man in finery. You will strip the silver from my arms
and the gold from my teeth.”

“No!”
Oh, what a tired gaze and yet what flinty hardness to it. “You have stayed

here for me.” Anna plucked at a string, and Lark spoke, round and sweet and
shy. “This I know. Now I give you my blessing to follow wherever your doom
leads you.” His shaking hand returned to Leofgar’s wrist and gripped on hard
while his face creased in agony and he laboured to breathe. “If it…if it leads
away from this place. If you…need sanctuary. I have—I had—a friend, Gewis.
He left the road before me and is now cantor in the monastery of St.
Aethelthryth on the Isle of Ely. He will—for my sake he will take you in if you
need it. I…I free you from my service. Go, wherever you will, and my blessing is
on you, my son. My son.”

His eyes closed and for a moment Leofgar feared the worst. Leaning

forward, he barely felt shallow gasping breaths against his skin. A kind of
madness came over him. He took a bag and a seax and ran back out to the
hedgerows to strip them of blossom.

The sun shone low and golden when he was done, and he forced may

blossom through every crack in the house walls and between every rafter, over
every surface, and through the chain of the cauldron above the fire. Just as the
round shield of the sun touched the horizon, Anna opened his eyes and saw that
he lay in a bower of blossom, little white flowers around him, thick as snow, but
blushing pink in the light of the sunset. His last breath sounded like laughter
before blood filled his mouth and overspilled, and he was gone.

Leofgar closed his master’s eyes, came back numbly to kneel by the bed

again, where desolation hit him and, despite all the preparation, took him wholly
by surprise. He pressed his face back into the bedclothes, draped Anna’s hand
over his head and wept until his chest and eyes and throat were sore. Then he

must have fallen asleep, for when he woke the hand was cold and rigid and held
him down. The leech woman, Alfscine, was pulling him by the elbow to try to get
him to leave, while one of her maidens laid out a shroud on the floor and another
carefully but dispassionately was stripping his master of all his rings and piling
them next to the harp.

“We’ll make him ready for his journey.” Alfscine used the tone she might

have used to wheedle good behaviour out of a five-year-old child. “You tell the
lord, so that he may put things into readiness. You’ll find comfort there.”

This did not have the encouraging effect on Leofgar’s mood she might have

hoped. “I am not ashamed of women’s work,” he said, his soul revolting from
the thought of having to speak to Tatwine now. “Let me help prepare him. I
am…I am all the family he has. Please.”

So the second handmaid took the news, and Leofgar escaped for that night.

No matter what folk murmured about the power of scops, he knew no song to
stop the sun. The meeting was deferred only, and a reckoning would soon be
due.

Tatwine did not summon him the next day, but let him pass the bright, windy

hours firing shaft after shaft at the archery butts, while a new song came together
from pieces of all those he knew and half knew and had ever heard before.
Perhaps the lord recognised when a man was altogether taken up in his craft, or
perhaps he had delicacy enough to allow Leofgar a time to mourn. Leofgar
would have been grateful for it, if there had been any part of him left other than
grief and music.

When he had built the walls of his house of song in his mind, before the

archery practice strained the muscles of his back and made it impossible to
pluck the harp, he retreated indoors, stirred up the fire and burned up every
drying twist of flowers, filling his room with smoke. Anna lay now in the chapel,
with candles at head and feet, and the small house was too large without him, the
bed too large and cold, the very shadows on the floor too thin. When Leofgar
ate, it was as though some unseen fiend had already consumed the goodness of
the food, and he received only a husk of it, hollow enough to harm.

He bent his head over Lark and gave her the loss, bewilderment and rage

that were coursing through his veins. Gradually, as the night fell and the cold
crept in to lie by the fire, he could feel her learning him, turning to him, becoming
his voice and not his master’s at all. It was that that broke him open and made
him lay her down and curl up small in the furs and fabrics of the bed and weep
once more, as though he would never stop.

At the funeral, horror and words of hope passed over him like clouds. Dirt

went into the grave, and he took up the harp again and sang. And if there had

been eyes that were not on him at the start of that song, they were dragged
around, reluctant, by the end. For this was a broken thing—the rhythm halting,
breaking into praises and choking off, falling silent midphrase, taking flight again
into rage and denial that were wound through with mellow beauty and the
consolations of faith.

Under his fingers, the harp shivered with shrill notes and eerie, with sobs and

growls that transmuted—as his violently seesawing mind transmuted from one
moment to the next—into soaring passages of melody and beauty, into gratitude
and even joy expressed in sweet and merry runs of notes. The household had
not heard the like before, and they looked at him now as though afraid of him—
as though he were trying to rob them of their reason to soothe his own wounds.

He caught Tatwine watching him with both shock and recognition, Hunlaf

elbowing his friend Deala with a look of amused contempt. The harper has
gone mad, he was probably whispering. Does not know how to bear his
losses with decorum, like a real man would. It was that implied rebuke that
made him smile at the end of his song, though he would rather have wept more.

Instead he carefully slackened Lark’s strings, lest she break her own back

when he took her into the warmth of the hall. He tucked her into her deerskin
bag and thanked Father Colm for an elegy he couldn’t now remember at all.

The grave was a black stroke on a green page behind him, as though God

had drawn a line to end the tale of Anna. As he drifted with all the other folk to
the hall where they would feast in his master’s memory, Leofgar found there was
some comfort in an ending properly wrought. At least now his master’s spirit
would find the eternal city. How terrible if Anna had died on the way here, and
Leofgar had had to bury him under stones, for wild beasts to overturn and gnaw.
How it would have broken his heart to think of his master lying in unconsecrated
ground, his spirit condemned forever to wander, when he was a man who had
always wanted a settled lord, a rooted home.

He had it now, and it could never be taken away. The thought helped, a little.

So did the business of the feast, when he could set himself aside and put all his
mind to entertaining a crowd whose likes and dislikes he now knew. To ask
forgiveness for the strange, inhuman music of the graveside, he now played
everything they wanted, sometimes twice, and he sent them to their sheets
smiling.

Tatwine had his bed on the high-seat dais, behind a screen. This was being

set up by his slaves when Leofgar, hurrying away, collided with the lord himself
in the porch of the hall. For a moment he was mazed in his mind, and a strange,
frantic joy came over him at the memory of the warrior with the worried eyes.
Then life poured over him like a stream of rain from the eaves and made him

shiver.

Which Tatwine felt, it seemed, for he had grabbed Leofgar’s arms as if to

steady him. Now one hand slid up and over his shoulder to curve around the
back of his neck, warm and steadying and possessive. The touch made Leofgar
shudder again as the deferred misery of the night caught up with him. Why not?
he thought, drained and defeated by grief. What could it hurt, except my
pride, and I have too much of that as my master say…said.

He breathed in sharp and closed his eyes to stop the tears from spilling. I

could be gone in the morning and leave it behind. No one but he and I
would ever know.

That is two people too many, some deeper part of himself replied, just as

Tatwine drew him in, awkwardly, to an unexpected brotherly hug.

“I had words I meant to speak to you,” he said gently. “But you are undone

and it will wait until tomorrow. What was that music? It was as though Heaven
and Hell spoke together. I doubt I will ever get it out of my ears.”

Leofgar raised his head, stunned and vulnerable and hating himself for it.

Tatwine smiled at the sight. “No, that too will wait. Take the night for grief and
sleep, and in the morning we will hunt together and remind one another that we
at least live.”

The morning dawned warm. A light rain had fallen in the night, and the weeds

that choked the drain beneath the eaves of Leofgar’s hut were fresh and green,
bespangled with silver. He dragged himself out into the open air with bow on his
back and only his bone whistle tucked up his sleeve, feeling naked without harp
and lyre both. He would not risk them, slung on his back, in a horseback hunt
through rough woods, over dyke and ditch.

Unexpectedly, Hunlaf himself brought a horse and stood patiently by it while

Leofgar checked the girth of the saddle, strapped on bags. It was a remarkable
service for a warrior to do him, who would more normally have sent a servant
for the task. It would have been pleasing to see it merely as a deed of goodwill,
but where Hunlaf was concerned there was no such thing.

“Thank you.” Leofgar tried to take the bridle from Hunlaf’s hand and found

his fingers encircled by two coarse palms. He bit back the instinctive urge to flyte
—to tell the man exactly what he thought of him, in fifteen lines of invective
verse, full of alliterative insult and scalding swear words. Instead he simply
twisted and jerked away. “Must every kindness come with an expectation of
reward?”

“You are without a protector.” Hunlaf touched the bow of his lips with his

tongue as if it helped him think, and smiled, smug as a rat with its paws in the
butter. “You need not be. I have wealth enough. I would take you.”

“I hope you are not saying what I think you’re saying.” Leofgar had lost, with

his master, the one voice that put a dampener on his pride and urged him to think
of his own safety. Anna could not now be hurt by his actions, and he was for the
first time free to do as he wished. “Because if you are, then I challenge you to
defend your implication by combat or to withdraw it.”

Hunlaf’s eyes widened, and for a moment Leofgar felt some satisfaction,

some relief from the constant grind of humiliation. But the warrior snorted with
laughter, shook his head. “You think yourself too good for me, eh? You ragged
beggar, plucked out of the snow.” He slapped the horse on the neck twice,
making it sidestep nervously, and gave another half-angry, half-amused sigh.

“Well, perhaps this is wisdom, and I’ve no need to get in the way of my

lord’s possessions. When you’re a little older, and he is done with you. If you’re
still pretty, we’ll talk again.”

Outrage that Hunlaf had actually said it burned every other dark emotion out

of Leofgar for a moment, left him a hollow creature filled with ravening flame.
“You can’t say that and not fight me! You will fight me!”

“Don’t be a fool.” Even the drooping ends of Hunlaf’s moustache seemed to

turn up in triumph as he walked away. “It is below me to fight with peasants and
women. You should be glad of that or you’d be on the ground now, bleeding
and pleading for mercy. You think too much of yourself if you suppose I’d sully
my good blade with you.”

It was not a happy party which rode out of the burh, though the day was full

of spring charm, with a washed pale sky above and flowers on every hedge and
tree. Lords-and-ladies crowded the borders and mocked Leofgar with their
prick-like pistils, stout and red. His anger, with soil thrown atop it, had nowhere
to go except to burn itself, and it smouldered on under his tongue and under his
ribs, made his answers short and his expressions sour.

Tatwine rode with a straight back, joltingly—and painfully too if his frown

could be believed. He was ever casting a disapproving eye on Hunlaf, who
responded by putting his head down and setting his mouth hard.

During the morning, Deala and Oswine tried to lift the spirits of all by a

constant stream of talk, comparing the points of the horses, sharing observations
on the countryside and the best parts of the wood to which they were going,
discussing the rumoured movements of the Norsemen and hoping that this year
the fighting would reach far enough inland for them to join in. By noon they were
hoarse, and when Tatwine stopped by a stream to allow the horses to eat and
rest—and to take a bite of bread himself—they too lapsed into silence.

The land began to rise, and they passed under silver birches with brilliant new

leaves. Leofgar strung his bow and set an arrow on the string. Servants handed
the warriors javelins and followed behind bearing quivers of replacements. Birch
became beech, and the churchlike hush of the forest came down, broken only by
the hooves of their horses. The clear light dimmed and greened.

A burst of movement to Leofgar’s right and all the ill thoughts in the world

could not stop his body from turning in the saddle, drawing, aiming and loosing in
one movement. A hare, kicking out its last moments like a drumbeat, became
their first prize.

“That was a fine shot,” said Tatwine, in a tone of jocular praise that didn’t

quite cover the uncertainty. “You did not tell me you were an archer.”

Hunlaf too, Leofgar saw with a breath of vindication, looked puzzled, as

though he had seen something that did not fit in any of the word-chests in his
mind. He did, it seemed, truly think that Leofgar’s so-called beauty could not
coexist with an ability to kill. Idiot.

“All my life, lord,” he said. “I hunted for our food when my master and I

were in the wilderness. Indeed, I wager there is no creature on middle earth I
can’t bring down with a sharp-pointed shaft to the throat.”

“Again I say ‘you did not tell me’.” Tatwine wore a quizzical look, so this

was not a rebuke, and Leofgar felt free to reply.

“I have been occupied all winter with graver matters and could not get out to

practice. I did not mean to conceal it, lord. I hope I have done no wrong?”

“Of course not. It merely came as a surprise.”
A pause, and the trees spoke in whispers around them, while Leofgar

wondered—hoped—they had learned to think of him as more than a prize to be
won.

Hunlaf gave his amused snort, and said, “Leofgar Haresbane,” and—as if

released from torment—they all relaxed into laughter.

Hare’s bane. Leofgar set his mouth and tried not to picture the next arrow

standing out from Hunlaf’s shoulder. He would get a boar, perhaps, or a bear if
he was lucky, and that would shut their mouths. Maybe, if he did, Tatwine could
be made to see that he was as much a man as any of them. Maybe his lord could
be shown enough to change his mind about Leofgar’s status, and he would
quietly revise his offer of “comfort” to that of respect.

This was Leofgar’s happy thought when they reached the clearing in which

they were to camp, left horses and baggage with the servants, left the servants
setting up tents and digging a pit for the fire. By now it was late afternoon, the air
was silvering and blue shadows creeping out from beneath the trees. Birds were
returning to their nests—plump pigeons, weary on the wing. Beasts would be
stirring from their daytime sleep, crawling out from their dens, calling out their

possession of the night. Wolf ’s bane, Leofgar thought. Yes. That would put a
stop to the warriors’ mockery. If he could get two, he could line a cloak with the
fur and have the badge of it with him always.

So, he placed himself on the end of the line of hunters who padded silently

into the thicker underbrush, let himself drift away from them while he brought
down small game—another hare, a pair of squirrels for gloves. The light
continued to dim, and though he scoured the wet ground he could find prints
only of badgers and one large fox. Before long, the leaves and twigs between
him and the other men had grown impenetrable enough so he could no longer
see them, and at that thought he paused and took a deep breath of relief.

Wise men said there were demons in the forest, elf-folk and mound-folk,

ettins and earth spirits. But Leofgar had journeyed in the waste places all his life
and did not fear such things. It was men he feared, and now he recognised the
threat by the pleasure it brought when it was withdrawn. Giving up the thought of
impressing Tatwine with his prey—evidence of manliness would take some time
to seep through the lord’s thoughts and change them, by which time it would be
too late—he simply swung up into the obligingly curved boughs of a nearby oak,
found a seat in the crook of two branches, wrapped his cloak firmly around him
and settled in for the night.

Let them suppose he was so poor a tracker as to have got lost in the dark.

They could not think worse of him than they already did. He tucked his bow
around his knee so that it would not drop if he slept, leaned his cheek against
knobbly bark that smelled of moss and tannin and worried at the thought that he
was being disloyal. He had given an oath of allegiance and had meant it.

Did that mean being willing to have his lord disgrace him? Did it mean being

willing to be used like a slave? Surely not. If Tatwine were a good lord, he
would have as much care for Leofgar’s honour as Leofgar did himself. He would
be protector and guardian, not abuser. One should not have to fear sleeping
under the same canvas as one’s own lord, as a captive had to fear the presence
of a Viking chief.

Yet, and yet, Leofgar had fastened himself to Tatwine with the bond of his

word. He had done it for Anna, and Anna was no more, but a man’s sworn
word did not change when the world changed. Nor did it depend on the
worthiness of the one to whom it was given. Would he really be proved
oathbreaker over this? Must he choose to despise himself henceforth whichever
course he picked?

He wished fruitlessly that he had his master there to talk to. Even if Anna had

known no better than he what to do next, it would have eased his mind to have
spoken it. And that would never come to pass again, for the old man was gone.

At the end of a long night of snatches of sleep and sorrow, Leofgar

straightened his aching limbs and gently let himself down from the tree. Picking
his way back to the clearing just as the others were stirring, he watched Tatwine
come blearily out of his tent with beard askew and hair uncombed, and felt a
chain come down on his neck.

It was the first time Tatwine had looked at him without softness, all the

handsome bones of his face turned mace-like and his eyes cold. “Where have
you been?”

“I was looking for wolves.” Leofgar dropped his gaze so his lord would not

see the join where truth shaded into lie. “The night came upon me unawares. I
could not find my way back until the sun rose and I could see the pillar of smoke
above the fire.”

Tatwine stepped close, caught Leofgar’s chin in his hand and raised it.

Warmth, old sweat smell and the musty, heavy scent of fur and sleep. Leofgar
was a storyteller by his craft and found it no hardship to look up with wide,
innocent eyes, as free of guile and as trusting as a spring lamb.

Some of Tatwine’s fimbulwinter chill thawed, but he still leaned in, brought

his face close to Leofgar’s and pressed privately to his skin a dagger of words.
“I did not bring you here for your hunting prowess. Tonight you will come to me,
is that clear?”

Leofgar tried to turn his face aside from the words, but the hand that held him

was like a band of iron and he could not. “It is, lord.”

“Good. See to it then, and no more playing coy.”
Leofgar’s face burned hot and his back broke out in cold sweat. His

thoughts and his body felt strange to him, as though he were playing music with
gloves on.

It took half an hour of riding in search of deer for his mind to wake up and

begin to turn over possibilities. He could not flee, though he was on horseback,
for Lark was left in the hut at Tatwine’s burh, and he would not leave her
behind. What then?

After a morning of walking their horses through the widest paths and greenest

clearings of the wood, they found a herd of fallow deer gathered in the
watermeadows around a small brown stream, narrow hooves sunk in to the
knob of the ankle among lilies and reeds.

Quietly, keeping the wind in their faces—for the deer might not know the

shape of a mounted man, but they feared full well the smell—Tatwine and his
warriors allowed their horses to drift carefully close until the older animals had
put up their narrow heads and flicked both ears towards the hunters. Leofgar
could have put an arrow in any of them from this distance, but the moment he

did the herd would spook and bound away, and he would have spoiled the shots
of the warriors with their javelins. He felt friendless enough without provoking
them so, and held the bow loosely, just for show.

Tension as the horses idled closer. All the deer had their heads up now, their

long-lashed brown eyes fixed uncertainly, but with growing suspicion, on this
intrusion of their space. A moment as breathless as the sight of an arrow in your
chest, and it broke. Hunlaf and Deala stood up in their stirrups and both threw at
once. One stag stumbled, tripped over its own front legs and fell into the stream,
the javelin embedded in its neck. Another—shaft standing out from its shoulder
—leaped three feet into the air, dislodged the spear and bounded off at
breakneck speed, white all around the edges of its eyes and its nostrils wide.
The rest of the herd flowed after it, sharp feet digging into the turf of the
riverbank as they jumped to solid ground and hurtled away.

Leaving the servants to butcher the one animal already down, Tatwine and

his warriors set heels to their horses’ ribs and galloped in pursuit of the shoulder-
sore one. Leofgar followed them, with none of the joy he might have taken in the
chase, for he had had an idea, and although it did not seem good to him, it did
seem as though it might work.

Accordingly, when they had followed the wounded stag for some hours and

its pace had begun to slacken, Leofgar looked around him for a narrow gap
between trees, and a branch at chest height. They were going a little fast when
he saw it—a hummock of stone overgrown with moss, a dip concealed on the
other side, and a young branch of an ash, that looked whippy enough to make
him fall without breaking him.

Everything in him protested as he drove his horse towards the gap. The horse

itself felt his uncertainty and fear, and began to buck beneath him. The animal’s
fear fed into his own, and back, until they were both frantic with it. This was
stupid, stupid. Was this really worth being killed over. God it was going to hurt!
Couldn’t he change his mind?

He whacked the horse hard on the withers with the springy end of his bow,

making it surge forward, squeeze through the gap—dislodging his legs. It jumped
wild over the drop on the other side of the stone, making him pitch forward,
strike his chest on the branch and fall—wheezing and panicking and certain he
should not have done this—backwards against the stone.

His skull hit moss and hard rock beneath it. There was a bloom of sparkling

brilliant colour, a sphere of silver that folded itself into itself and popped, leaving
darkness. Then even that went away.

The pain came when he woke up, the world rocking underneath him, his

cheek jolting against wet-hot horsehair, his nose full of blood and the scent of
hay. When he tried to open his eyes, the dazzle drove itself into the bone
between his brows and made his brains fall out. Darkness came again.

At some point after this unconsciousness became sleep. He was aware of

snatches of conversation, the feel of sheepskin and hard stony ground under him.
Then he woke up a second time to find himself slung like a peddler’s pack over
the back of his horse, and he recognised the road into the burh, the cart tracks
and boundary markers that said they were almost home.

Groaning as the horse’s step jostled him, he reached out an uncoordinated

hand and found the loose end of the reins looped over its neck. Tugging, he got
the horse to stop long enough for him to scramble into the saddle, lie down again
with his arms around its neck. The plan had worked—he had slept another night
unmolested. His head burned like a beacon with pain and his stomach roiled,
and he felt sick and tired of everything, ready to lie down and die. He was not
entirely sure this outcome was worth what he had paid for it.

At his signs of life, Tatwine dropped back from the head of the column to

ride beside him. The lord laid a heavy hand, that was no doubt meant to be
soothing, on the back of his head. “I might almost believe,” he said, in a
conversational tone, his voice low enough to keep the words between the two of
them, though loud enough to go through Leofgar’s ears like spits, “that you did
that deliberately.”

He chuckled, and Leofgar—surprised at how easy it was to lie, once you

had begun—gave a snort of amusement in return and groaned again at the throb
it provoked. “Not such a fool.”

“I am glad to hear it. Tonight then, with a freshly filled mattress under you for

softness.” Tatwine took his hand back, leaving a spot that felt cold by contrast
on the back of Leofgar’s neck. His tone slipped easily from gentle to flinty. “Do
not disappoint me a third time.”

“Lord,” Leofgar murmured, his face buried in the coarse black hair of his

mount’s mane. He was very thankful for whatever sight made Tatwine curse
under his breath and spur himself forward, not noticing that Leofgar had not
added a “yes” to his acknowledgement.

He remained thankful only until Deala cried “No!” ahead of him. Hunlaf spat

a curse that made someone behind Leofgar switch his horse with the ash shaft of
a javelin. He was suddenly holding on with both hands, tears of agony blurring
the still-too-bright world, as the warriors broke into a gallop and his steed tried
to follow.

It wasn’t until they were within five hundred yards of the gates that he

regained enough control of himself and his horse to look. When he did he felt the

same sensation he had felt while falling—a weightlessness and then a jerk and
shock. For there was no smoke over the burh and the gatehouses were empty.
The gates themselves stood half-wide, neither opened nor closed. Beneath the
gate on the right, wedged in-between muddy ground and oaken planks, lay the
naked body of Edgar, son of Eadwulf, stripped of armour and garments alike by
someone who had had time enough to do the job thoroughly and carry away the
loot.

The gates were open and the defenders dead. Tatwine slowed and his

companions did the like. No point in rushing now, they were already too late.

The tracks of a party of men coming from over the fields led back the same

way towards the river, noticeably deeper on the return journey. There went with
them the soft shoes of women and the small, forlorn footprints of children.

“They will have picked those who looked like they could work, or were

pretty.” Hunlaf’s constant smugness seemed to have taken a beating, and he
looked better for it as he peered down at the tracks. “Or would fetch a good
price ransomed back to their parents.”

“I can.” Leofgar’s stomach shriveled further within him at the thought, but his

mind insisted that he could not be any worse off in a group of Danes than he was
here among his own countrymen. “I can go after them with a message—find out
what they will take for ransom. They will honour the safe passage of a scop, for
fear of the ill luck that will strike them down if they don’t. And…” painful though
it was to say it, “…they will not see me as a threat.”

Tatwine’s whole body seemed to solidify for a moment. He wheeled and

smacked Leofgar so hard across the face it almost dislodged his newly settled
brains and made him fall off the horse again. His raw and aching nose began to
bleed once more. “You know,” Tatwine hissed in his face, “what your job is.
Now hush and let the men talk.”

To his eternal scalding humiliation, Leofgar felt his bottom lip tremble. He

wrenched his head around and covered his face with both hands, but he couldn’t
shake the conviction that Tatwine had seen, and that everything he thought had
thus been confirmed. His horse, unguided, headed for its place of safety, its
stable, and he let it take him along, crushed.

Wiping water and blood from his face, Leofgar dismounted by his hut. He

had passed more corpses, but not so many as he had feared. The great bulk of
folk seemed to merely be missing.

The leather hinges of his door had been torn and it gaped skewiff upon a

rectangle of darkness. Inside, the cauldron was upended in a corner, the
blankets slashed—pure meanness that. The ashes of the fire had been kicked
across the packed earth floor, and Leofgar’s pottery jug and beaker were

broken into smithereens.

The meanness of his belongings must have convinced them there was nothing

else to find in here, for when he removed the logs that concealed the hollow in
the woodpile—praying all the while—his questing hand found Lark’s deerskin
bag, and the lyre, Hierting, leaning behind her, like frightened infants huddling
together in hiding.

He clutched them to him, just as he would have done with children, racked

with relief and misery both, as his head throbbed with pulses of pain that made
their way into his eyes in the shape of stars.

Outside, folk had begun to trickle back in. Those who had been working in

the fields, those who had heard the warning shout in time to run to the woods
and hide, and had now seen their lord come back, earlier than could possibly
have been hoped. These folk came walking through the gates, stiff and blank
eyed as dead men moved by sorcery. Tatwine embraced each one with tears in
his eyes, sent them away looking stronger.

The warriors were forming the folk into work gangs—one to pick up the

bodies and carry them to the chapel, one to repair the walls. Others to check the
stores of food, to haul waste out of the well. The oldest man—a cooper by the
name of Beortwine—was sent where Leofgar should have gone, to follow the
tracks to the Vikings’ ship and see what could be salvaged there.

Fast riders galloped out to the closest villages and settlements for aid, and for

a tax of silver coins that might buy some of the lost ones back. There was hope
they would be treated well until the raiders knew no more profit could be made
from them. No one bought back ruined goods, after all.

Leofgar watched and was not given any task. So when Tatwine strode off to

examine the broken palisade behind the hall, Leofgar settled his instruments on
his back in their bags and went to visit Anna.

Already, weed-month had been at work in the graveyard, and the stark

shape of turned earth was softening beneath a fur of green shoots. Hunkering
down, Leofgar picked a rounded pebble from the black earth, brushed it off and
held it in his hand for a while. “I can’t,” he told it. “How can I stay and praise
him after this? He should have been here. Not pursuing me like some peasant’s
daughter he can order around at will, but here, protecting his folk.

“The warriors, master. They are all…they are all such shit-fed, goat-

buggering, raven fodder. I want to tell them what I see when I look at them, but
if I did it would be Aegir’s feast all over again. I’m never going to be able to
praise these men without the words tasting like piss in my mouth. I’m sorry,
master. If Tatwine would only let me do something to help, but he… I know this
was the life you hoped for for me, but I can’t. I can’t.”

Nor was this the heroic speech he would have composed for himself, had he

not been injured, frightened and angry. It had only the merits of truth.

He waited a little longer, to give Anna a chance to answer if he was going to.

But there was silence from the realm of the dead—the priest had done his job
well. So Leofgar wiped his swollen nose again, composed his face, slipped the
pebble down the neck of his overtunic, where it would ride tight, held snug by
his belt, and made a slow and cautious way over to the stables, taking care not
to be seen.

No one had unsaddled his horse yet, though it had found a manger of hay

and sucked down most of the greenish water in the trough. It lifted its head with
a look of idiot confusion and whickered softly at him, as if to say, Everything is
wrong today, but you at least I recognise.

“I won’t take you far,” he promised it, pulling up the hood from around his

shoulders, letting its folds fall forward to shadow his face. Not much of a
disguise, since every man in the burh knew the colour of it and that of his cloak
underneath, but it made him feel better. “I will leave you with someone who
knows your lord, so you will find your way home.”

Choosing a moment when the watchers on the palisade were all facing

outwards, looking towards the river for news, when inside the enclosure
everyone was head down and busy, he led the horse across the open space and
out of the gate. Messengers on horseback had been coming and going all day,
so he was not challenged when he scrambled into the saddle and set off at an
innocent-looking trot for the cover of the woods.

Boughs closed over his head and briars behind him as he turned in the

direction of Ely. “I will not take you from your lord,” he went on, reassuringly,
though the horse seemed happier here, out of the bustle and the smell of blood.
“I will not take anything from him except the silver I have earned. I am no thief.”

The horse snorted as if with laughter, and all around Leofgar the quiet

whispery voices of the trees mocked his scruples. “Wolfshead, oathbreaker,
outlaw,” they murmured at him, over and over, in time with his hoofbeats as he
fled. “Man without honour. Foresworn. Faithless. Coward.” He tried to put
them behind him, along with his home.

Chapter Six

Ecgbert sat in state on the dais, with the lawspeaker on his left hand and the

priest on his right. On Wulfstan’s right and left hand stood Aelfsi and Offa, in full
armour. Wulfstan himself was only in tunic and trousers, beltless. His head was
bared and his sword laid out in its scabbard on the table in front of Ecgbert.

It was unclear from his friends’ expressions whether they were guarding or

protecting him. He chose not to make that decision any harder for them, and did
not attempt to rise from his knees or move his hands from where they lay, palm
up and empty on his folded thighs. He did raise his head, though, to look into
Ecgbert’s face and see the weariness there. The lord, so long a father to him,
was beginning to look his age.

Wulfstan’s own father stood amongst the folk packed into the hall behind

him. Wulfric had come on summons as fast as a change of horses could carry
him from his own lands. He looked—from what Wulfstan could glimpse of him
in snatched glances—as he ever did. Tall, proud, perfect, relentless. Wulfstan
wished he had not troubled to come.

At the edge of the dais, surrounded by candles and held down by scattered

shards of burnt and broken pottery, lay the white shrouded form of Cenred. It
looked more like a strangely peeled tree trunk than a man in its tight, white
wrappings, but the priest kept a beady eye on it, ready to deal with it at once if it
stirred.

Cenred was there because he deserved to be present to confront his

murderer. Also because his mother, who now knelt weeping by his swathed
head, had screamed that she would curse every last man in Ecgbert’s service if
Cenred was not allowed to see justice done.

Saewyn had called her witnesses to recount the death of her son to those

who had not been present to see it for themselves. She had called three, but she
might as easily have gone on to question a score more. There was no doubt
about what had happened. The real question could be asked now she had
stopped talking and was wetting her fingers with tears.

The priest dipped his quill. Ecgbert leaned forwards and asked Wulfstan.

“Why?”

It was only then, after a day and a night spent sleepless, endlessly turning

over his response in his mind, that Wulfstan knew clearly he could not tell the
truth. Not in front of his father—both his fathers. Nor in front of Judith or
Ecgfreda, who stood behind Ecgbert and watched Wulfstan with identical looks

of mild puzzlement, too insipid for the condemnation of a friend-killing.

“He…” Wulfstan bit his lip and looked down—wished the anger would

come at call, or that he could control it when it did. “He was laughing at me.
Remembering that thing that Manna said, when we were in Uisebec.” Ecgbert’s
expression cleared—just a little—some of the creases on his forehead and
around his mouth smoothing. The shaft of blue light that slanted from the high
window at the other end of the hall landed in a triangle of brilliance just where
Ecgbert’s feet rested. It made his widened eyes gleam knowingly.

“It had been a cold night,” Wulfstan went on, his voice growing in strength as

he committed himself to the sin. “And we shared our blankets. In the morning,
when I was still half-asleep, Cenred laughed and said he would tell everyone that
what Manna said was true, and that I had let him…”

“Let him what?” The growl came from Wulfric behind him.
The priest dipped his quill again and looked up mildly with the same question.

“I cannot write it down if you do not say it.”

Wulfstan looked to Ecgbert and saw some compassion, some resignation.

Ecgbert nodded.

“He was going to tell everyone I had let him use me like a woman. He…”

The anger wouldn’t come, not in the face of the silent corpse. “He was my
friend. Why would he betray me like that? So many times, so many men have
spoken to me about his cruelty and said he could not be trusted, and I was the
only one who didn’t believe them. So why would he turn on me?”

Saewyn lurched back to her feet, her stained fingers clenched and her lips

drawn back from her teeth. “You have already murdered him. Now you
besmirch his name too?”

Ecgbert held up a hand and she was stopped.
“Saewyn, you are his mother and you are upset. It is a hard thing for a man

to be left childless, to live long enough to see her young in the grave. This I
understand, but you will not fling about words such as murder. This is no such
evil thing. It was done in the open with no attempt at concealment. There was
nothing stealthy about it. It was an open quarrel among young men, such as
happens in every household in every burh across the land.”

He sighed. “Did you intend to kill Cenred?”
Wulfstan suffered again the disorientated jolt he had felt when Cenred did not

get up. “No, my lord. I knocked him down. I thought he would come back
fighting. I didn’t know the axe was there. All I wanted was to shut his filthy
mouth, not to kill him. I swear.”

“So you shut him up forever, the only way you reliably could.” Saewyn made

a move as if to jump down off the dais and go for Wulfstan, and immediately

Ecgfreda and her maidens surrounded and restrained her.

Ecgbert shook his head, apparently in despair. “I presume you can call no

witnesses, Wulfstan, to confirm your words?”

“No, lord. It was whispered. I don’t know… I don’t think anyone was

awake to hear.”

“Yet”—Ecgbert smoothed down his tunic and rubbed a thumb over the

pommel of his sword—“we are well aware of what kind of man Cenred was.
His delight in malice, his taunts. There are few who have not felt these things,
many who wondered that you bore with him as long as you did.”

He turned his gaze on the lawspeaker. “I myself will be witness for Wulfstan

that he—rightly—reacts with an inspired fury at such accusations. I have seen it
myself before, and I say to you that if Cenred needled him on this point, he must
have known the wrath he would face. It is no more than just that his own malice
doomed him in the end.

“I therefore rule that Wulfstan will pay the full weregild of a fighting man to

Saewyn, Cenred’s mother, as compensation for the loss of her son. Saewyn,
you will accept it. You did your best with the child, but his father’s blood was
too strong in him, as anyone who knew him could have seen.

“There the incident will be at an end. I have no doubt that my youths will ever

be urging each other to taunt Wulfstan further on this subject, as a trial of
strength or bravery, and to you I say ‘the first youth who does, I will give over to
be hanged like a common criminal’. No more of this. I will have peace, if I have
to send you all home to your families in disgrace.”

“I have the weregild here.” Wulfric came slowly up the steps to the dais.

Opening a bulging pouch, he tipped a small hummock of silver coins onto the
table. The priest and lawspeaker counted them together and nodded, satisfied.

“It is the proper amount.” The priest returned the coins to their sack and held

it out to Saewyn, whose mouth was working, as though she would speak but
could not force it out.

“Take it,” Ecgbert insisted, sharp as the tip of an arrow.
“I do not want coin,” she managed at last, her voice tight as if squeezed

through a sieve. “I am the last of my family. It is my task to see that my son gets
revenge.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” the priest intoned, softly, but with an

undertone of hellfire. “Blood feud is a wicked pagan practice. You are angry
now, child, but you will not always be so. Take what is owed to you and repent
of your ire. If you cannot find mercy in your heart, find at least obedience, lest
you too be struck down by your own malice, as it seems was the fate of your
son.”

Saewyn cast a fold of her mantle over her head and stumbled away, blinded

by grief.

After that, it all went easier. Over the next few days, folk of all sorts sickened

Wulfstan further by coming up to praise him. Time and again he heard of liberties
taken, strength applied followed by shame. The coward’s son, it seemed, had
been driven all his life by a wish to prove himself better than those around him,
and had done so by humiliating them one by one.

Their thanks should have pleased him, but instead they only made him

sadder. How hag-ridden must Cenred have been to need to do such a thing?
And why—why had Wulfstan not been told of it before, when the knowledge
would have been useful to him, when it would have saved Cenred’s life? Never
would he have trusted the man with a secret so deadly, if he had but known.

Nor would any of these thanks have come his way if the folk knew Cenred

had been speaking the truth. They would have thanked him then, for ridding
them of one who walked in the semblance of a man but was no such thing.

Wulfstan was prevented by his father from attending his friend’s funeral. He

had put on his best clothes, his richest belt and the jewelled scabbard to his
sword. He was ducking out of the hall door to join the small procession of
villagers walking up to the graveyard when Wulfric caught his arm and stopped
him. “Saewyn will think you mock her by it,” Wulfric said. “She will not
understand that you mourn too. Come on. Let’s get a drink.”

He led Wulfstan instead to the mead hall, sent a servant for beer, and they

drank to Cenred’s journey to Heaven or Hell until the service was over and the
folk began to wander back. Most of them looking satisfied, all of them nodding
companionably to Wulfstan as they passed.

“Fortune smiles upon you, son,” Wulfric said at last. “For this amount of

goodwill, the silver of the weregild is a small cost.”

“I will repay you.”
“Of course you will. You will pay me better by giving up the killing of friends.

Once, to rid the household of a wyrm with poisoned teeth, that is no more than a
young man’s fighting mettle. But Ecgbert says this is becoming a habit of yours. I
will not pay again. I will not have you squander all my fortune over your feuds.”

“I have no intention of—”
“Good.”
Dark had fallen outside, now, and all the folk had come to huddle indoors.

Wulfstan was about to ask after his mother and brothers when a young man he
didn’t recognise jostled his shoulder. From the corner of his eye, he registered a
madder hood pulled down low, a green tunic, a springy deer-like slenderness,
such as that of a boy who has just had his first growth and sprung into height

without putting on the muscle to match. A stranger, here? When had that
happened?

The boy leaned forward so the rushlight in the centre of the table shone

beneath his hood and showed his face. Even so it took Wulfstan a long, puzzled,
blank moment to fit it to anything that made sense.

Something twisted in his head, just as the boy gave a smile at his slowness.

The raw, unfinished face suddenly became delicate, as though—having being
given the key—his mind could open the box and see what was there.

“Ecg—”
She stumbled as though drunk and elbowed him in the shoulder, and he had

the sense to finish, “—stan. What…?”

“You must come with me,” she said in a little gruff voice. “There’s something

you must see.”

“Father?” He didn’t think of saying no. She would not have gone to these

extraordinary ends for any light reason.

“Go,” Wulfric sighed. “We will speak in the morning, before I return home. I

see this is an urgent matter.”

“My thanks.”
Ecgfreda took him by the belt and tugged him out of the hall, as a single man

with a rope could pull a barge if it was but unmoored enough. She led him out of
the burh itself and on to where the woods marched almost to the lip of the moat.
“Ecgfreda, what is this?”

“Shh!” she said. “I could not have had you leave the hall and be alone in my

company if anyone had known it was me. Luckily, in my brothers’ cast-offs, no
one would look twice. Now listen.

“After the funeral, Saewyn was alone, and that seemed to me a sad thing, so

I filled a jug of wine and took it to her house, meaning to comfort her. First the
husband and then the son. She has been ill-served by fate, and it seems unfair,
since she is herself so good a woman.”

Ecgfreda turned off the path beside a stone that looked like the hindquarters

of an otter. She began to thread her way through the tangle of small boughs,
bending them quietly to let her pass, not releasing them until Wulfstan had done
the same.

“At least”—she gave him a glance over her shoulder, her profile pale against

the hood—“I thought she was good. Yet when I got outside she was shouting,
like one who will have her say even though there is no one to hear. She swore
by her craft and by the heathen gods and by all sorts of demons I will not name
that she would have revenge.”

Further in the trees, staining them to waist height with blood, a red light

flickered. Wulfstan stopped in his tracks as if nailed there. “She’s summoning
demons? Against me?”

“I don’t know,” Ecgfreda whispered. “When Saewyn had finished speaking I

watched for a while, and when she came out, I followed her here. She had a
basket on her arm with plants and knives, and something that wriggled. I
watched her set the fire and I knew she really meant it, and I came to get you.”

“Why?”
She looked at him as though he had lost his mind. “So that you could do

something about it.”

He returned the look to her. “I’m a warrior,” and I’m steeped in sin top to

toe, full of lying and killing and fornication. “I can’t go up against demons!
That’s a priest’s job. It’s a task for someone who is armoured by God and
protected by Him. A spiritual warrior not a worldly one.”

The wavering, eerie light showed him the disappointment on her face. “One

woman and a basket, and you are afraid.”

That was goading enough to prick him right through the fear. He hunkered

down, pressed through the weave of briars and branches and crept a little
closer.

There was a fire, but it smouldered with a sullen red gleam unlike that of a

simple wood fire. Its light could not fully illuminate the clearing of which it was
the centre, and he had glimpses only of something moving around the edges of
the trees.

Flash and drum of footsteps, twist and spiral of something man-shaped

circling the clearing. The smoke drifted out to him and smelled acrid and potent.
He began to hear words in amongst the footfalls—whispered words in some
tongue that was neither Englisc nor Latin. Like nonsense it sounded, long rolling
syllables of nonsense.

All the time the figure spoke, a humped black thing left in the basket by the

fire snuffled like a child asleep.

At last the dancing figure stopped, pressed its hands to its head and adjusted

its face. It walked forwards into the light, and horror tried to claw out Wulfstan’s
throat as he saw the huge great owl eyes, the beak and the crown of grey
feathers above the body of a woman. He made a move as if to run, and
Ecgfreda caught his wrist and stayed him.

“It’s a mask,” she said, though he could see for himself it was not. “Whatever

she’s going to do, you must stop her. For your soul’s sake.”

“I will not kill her.”
“She’s practicing witchcraft. I will witness as much before the court.”
His horror at the demons was not enough to whip him past his guilt. “Have I

not done enough to her already? Perhaps I…”

Saewyn, or the owl-creature that she had become, now picked from the

basket some little black thing with four limbs. With one hand, she slipped a
noose around its neck and—supporting it carefully—tied the other end of the
rope around the lowest branch of a magnificent ash.

She threw something on the fire and there was a flash like lightning. When the

whole world felt scoured by light, she let go and, as the creature fell, the noose
slipping strangling tight, she stabbed it three times over the heart and set it
twisting, so the blood sprayed out in a perfect circle around her feet.

Perhaps I deserve it, Wulfstan had been going to say, but his voice froze in

his mouth. It seemed to him that, after the light, a darkness had risen from the fire
and gone to lap at the spilled blood. It seemed to him that the witch was
speaking to it in a gentle voice. There was only a breath of time left before it
would raise its head and look at him, and his contrition did not stretch to waiting
for it.

Quietly as he could, he wormed away. When he came to the paths, he ran.

He ran and a demon pursued him, passing Ecgfreda by, unharmed, as it followed
him into the hall.

There, he went down on bended knee before both his fathers—Wulfric and

Ecgbert alike—and begged for the chance to make a pilgrimage. “To soothe my
soul and pray that this warrior madness be lifted from me.” And to get far, far
away and into a saint’s protection before Saewyn’s fiend can eat me up
from within.

Chapter Seven

For the first few days of his flight, Wulfstan spent every moment, every

hoofbeat, expecting the end to come. He exhausted himself with terror, startling
at shadows, spending the nights fully armoured, vigilant and awake.

But after a week of this, when he lay down in the shelter of a hedge and slept

for a day and a half, unmolested except by midges, he began to understand that
he had been condemned to a long, slow torment, rather than a rapid one. He
was not simply to be destroyed—he was to be played with first.

Generally, Wulfstan’s fiend followed him in the shape of a black dog—he

would catch glimpses, now and again, out of the corner of his eye. Today,
however, as he slogged his way through carr woodland, knee deep in brackish
water, it curled around his feet like an enormous eel. He could feel it down there,
grasping at his ankles with slippery loops. He could sense the crest of it pushing
the water aside, slipping beneath the fallen leaves, dark as death, strong as
sorrow.

Looking up, he tried to gauge his direction from the sun, but the gnarled

alders that surrounded him, the chestnuts that hogged every patch of drier
ground, fluttered their leaves above him with a hissing like gossiping snakes.
They blocked out everything but moving dazzle.

Outside the wood, the long days of summer were passing in the fields and

farmers were doing whatever it was that they did in the time between sowing and
harvest. It had seemed an idyllic life as Wulfstan passed it on horseback, with
the sun bright on the back of his neck and his mail folded up small in its sack of
pig-stomach, keeping itself bright in his saddlebags.

As he passed through the little holdings, the hundred-man of each would

come running with beer and bread and soft cheese. Honey, sometimes. They
would greet him and wish him well, and direct him swiftly on his way. To the
eyes of a scop, he felt sure his pilgrimage would have seemed a blissful thing,
scarcely worth the turning of a tuning peg.

Yet every time he passed through the habitations of men—every night he

begged shelter and received unquestioning hospitality—his sin followed him. It
curled up beside him beneath the softest of blankets. It sat at his shoulder at the
board and turned his meat into ash. When he wasn’t looking, it crept up tight
behind him and whispered in his ear.

As it was doing now.
Fealo, Wulfstan’s horse, froze once more, tugging the bridle from his hand,

making him fall forward, his right leg sinking deep into mud, his sword hand
grazing the surface of the water. He looked past the mirror of the water’s
surface, into the brown dim beneath, and he saw it, the sinuous thing, wrapped
around Fealo’s shins, sucking the horse down into the hell-murk below.

“Lord!” Wulfstan cried, dread like iron swallowed in his throat. “Save me.

Lord, mercifully save me.” It had him by the ankle too. He pulled and wrenched
and could not move. His fiend had whispered to the land spirits, turned them
against him. Now they too saw what he was, and they were driving him out of
this middle earth, unmaking him, unravelling him from the web of the world.

But he was a warrior. At the stab of terror, his veins flooded with fire and

hard-won strength toughened his sinews. He drew his sword and stabbed down,
again and again, and at last something beneath him yielded. He was able to haul
his foot out of the grip of the thing, though it tried to suck off his shoe. He kicked
it off and fought his way back to where the horse stood with its eyes all white
and its ears flicking with fear.

Feeling down past Fealo’s shins, parting the veil of brown leaves on the

water, he got his fine linen sleeves as soaked as his trews. Though the fire of
battle was on him, it was hard to reach down blindly, knowing that at any
second he could touch something uncanny—a wyrm of the water, perhaps, with
eyes like silver bowls and teeth as long as his arm. Even that would not be so
bad as touching his own nature, his remorse, turned into flesh and dogging his
every step.

He found he had paused. Cursing his fear, he breathed in, gritted his teeth

and lunged down. Urgh! Something slippery, something ribbonlike and cold,
unyielding as wood.

Fealo tried to rear. His cheek pressed to the long bones of the horse’s leg,

Wulfstan felt the hoof move, and the thing beneath his hands rocked, just like
wood—just like two tree roots entwined together, through the gap in the middle
of which Fealo had stepped, and which his startled recoil had locked together
around his ankle, pinioning him.

At such a foolish end to all his fear, Wulfstan laughed, but the sound had too

much weariness, too much madness woven into its weft. The strength of terror
left him, ebbing away while he cleaned and sheathed his sword. By the time he
had drawn his seax from its scabbard at his back, hacked through the water and
into the root, covering them both with mud and sap, he wondered if perhaps this
relief was not the cruellest part of the punishment. To be constantly alert and
afraid with a fear that turned beneath his hands into strength—this was the
warrior’s way and he was used to it. He was not used to being tossed, like a
child’s ball, between the extremes of dread and the hot embarrassment of

another false alarm.

There was something in Fealo’s eyes of the same weariness, as though the

horse’s spirit too had grown thin with so much travel and labour, with being
apart from all fellowship and friends. When the horse’s feet were free again,
Wulfstan led them both to the nearest long-grassed hummock of dry land and
allowed his mount to graze, while he stood with his arm about the gelding’s
warm shoulder and closed his gritty eyes a moment, wishing for sleep.

Now they were still, the sounds of their own movement silenced, the world

closed in about them. As he willed his tight chest to loosen, his lungs to take in
air, he smelled hot horse and leather, the churned-up sourness of the sludge
drying on his shoes, garlic and cress and alder leaves and the shameful reek of a
coward’s fear.

Had it been real? The thing in the swamp that he had felt pushing aside the

water. Had it turned into roots when it felt his gaze on it? If so, had his cutting it
apart killed it?

He lifted his head and saw, as he had seen all day, the tangled web of

branches that held darkness in their cage, trapped it down here to lie on the still
water. No, to kill a demon was not so simple a thing. He could sense it,
flickering in the corner of his eyes. There! A movement. Something darker than
the shadow slid into the shade of two trees as he turned his head.

Dragonflies skimmed over the pools, clad in colours too bright to be named.

The ever-present cloud of midges eddied like a stain in the air, and at the
borders of all the pools, the reeds bowed their feathery tops and hissed. The
jangle of Fealo’s harness was like a dropped plate on a flagged floor as he
tossed his head up and snorted, the only sound in a world struck dumb.

The hairs on the back of Wulfstan’s arms and down his spine stirred and

stood up as a new wave of fear curled around him. His hand fell without his
thought onto his sword-hilt. He kicked the instinct down. No. He had fallen for
this before. Again and again Saewyn’s spell had him stabbing at shadows.
Perhaps the fiend was doing something to his eyes, to his mind, making him see
things that were not there, wearing him out with his own strength. This time he
would not—

She had him so twisted round he thought it was a star at first—a star which

detached itself from the sky and hurled itself at him. His body turned, leaped
aside, threw out a hand and caught the flung spear behind the head, all by itself.
The sting of the shaft in his hand and the thrum of it, travelling up his arm, woke
up fully those parts of him that had been drowning in bad dreams.

He turned and hurled the spear back whence it came. He could see, now,

the shape of the outlaw who had attacked him—a lean and tall fellow, so

streaked with mud the patterns of his shape broke up beneath the moving leaves.
His face was green and tan and grey as wood bark. His eyes showed startlingly
white and blue in their mask, opened wide as his returned spear ripped through
his sleeve and buried itself in the trunk of the tree behind him.

He turned to try and tug it loose, and Wulfstan lunged for the shield strapped

on Fealo’s back, only to have the nervous horse kick up its heels and bolt out
over the weedy sunken path and into the mere itself. Damn! Deprived of his
shield, dismissing the lost horse from his mind, Wulfstan drew his seax in his left
hand and turned, scanning the shadows around him. A single ruffian would not
have dared challenge a seasoned warrior. He knew there would be more.

There were. The first left off tugging at his spear, drew a langseax of his own.

Another stepped out of the chestnut coppice beside him, this one stockier, more
elderly, his yellowed hazel eyes harder to see against the moving yellow-green
light. He bore a sickle in one hand and in the other a threshing flail.

Across the path a third man appeared from a clump of alders. Hatless, he

was black haired like a raven, and the tricksy light painted him with a magpie
sheen. It drew no glint from the stave he held, though—a long staff taller than
himself.

There was a fourth at the foot of the slight hill behind Wulfstan, and as he half

turned to examine that one, a fifth waded slowly down the drowned path the
way he had come. He must have walked straight past that one, senseless.

“Well,” this final ruffian said. Surprisingly, he was a youth, and looked well

fed, better groomed than his companions. Scion of some noble house gone to
bad, Wulfstan thought, and knew he was facing what could have been his own
destiny, if only his lord had not been merciful. If the boy was noble born, he
would be warrior trained. He would be the one to take out first. Then the one
with the staff.

“As you see, you’re outmatched. We have your horse already. Throw down

your weapons, strip and place your clothes and belt on the branch of that tree. It
is possible that you may live.”

Wulfstan laughed. “Boy, I have known beggars comb from their hair and

snap between their thumbnails things more frightening than you.” He did not roll
the sword around his hand to show his skill—such unneeded flourishes got a
man killed—but he was tempted. “That was a no, child, in case you were not
sharp enough to spot it.”

The youth gave a humourless, wolfish grin. “As you like,” and gestured.
As all five closed in on him together, cautiously, none of them quite wanting

to be first, Wulfstan sprang forward, ran straight at the youngster, hoping to
catch him by surprise, bear him down by the weight and ferocity of his charge.

He feinted with the sword, brought the seax up and slashed at where the boy
should be if he had twisted away as Wulfstan supposed he would. But he had
not.

Even on such soggy footing, the boy had leaped from a standing start straight

over the blade of the sword, kicking out as he did. His heel caught Wulfstan’s
jaw, snapped his head back and around. Following the direction of the blow,
Wulfstan spun, his two blades encircling him in edges of steel. As the youth came
inevitably down again, it was into the path of the sword blade. Wulfstan lunged,
felt the point jam into the open armpit, and pulled down—slicing open the skin
over his ribs. The youngster reeled away, buckled to his knees. Wulfstan
dismissed him from his mind, sloshing over the slightly firmer ground of the path
to tackle the man with the staff on the other side.

The outlaws had begun to close in now. As he caught the swinging end of the

staff on his sword blade, praying it would not shatter, he was aware of the man
who had been under the hill running in to help his comrade, the two from the
chestnuts wading towards him from the right.

Keeping the staff trapped between his blades, he ran straight up the length of

it, drew the crossed blades over the man’s hands where they held tight as he
tugged on the end. He tightened the lock and then drew the blades smoothly
apart. A fountain of crimson hit him in the face as the well-cared-for steel
severed the man’s hands and life’s blood pumped from the wrists.

He turned and faced the next. As he did, something picked him off his feet

and flung him to the ground.

What?
Rolling back up to his feet, he tried to raise his sword. His right arm would

not follow the commands of his mind. Puzzled, he looked down, and there by his
feet lay a francisca—the long-bearded throwing-axe of the Franks. He hadn’t
seen it coming, and now his arm was cold where blood from his wound had
begun to seep down the fabric of his shirt, trickle off his fingers.

Everything stilled in his mind. There were three more to come, all of them

fresh to the fray, and he could only move his seax arm.

He was going to die. At the thought, despair robbed him of his remaining

strength—to die unshriven, with his pilgrimage uncompleted, unredeemed. To
die with his sin dogging him. It would be to die forever—to go to Hell. “No!”

The terror and the panic took over—things became strange. He was

peripherally aware that he had jammed his useless arm through his belt to keep it
out of the way, dropped the seax and transferred the sword to his left. The man
who had thrown the francisca scrambled away from him, trying to fend off the
sword with a smaller axe while drawing a handseax at the same time.

Wulfstan caught the beard of the axe on the blade of his sword, twisted it out

of the other man’s grasp and punched one of the slender quillions of his hilt into
his opponent’s unsuspecting eye. Then he doubled over, fighting for breath. The
tendrils of his strength unwound and slipped away from his grasp. His knees had
turned to soup.

He staggered forward, turning to face the final pair of outlaws, and his foot

turned under him, making him lurch to his knees. Trying to hold himself up out of
the water took all the strength of his one remaining arm.

“Come on!” he yelled at the two of them. “Slave-bellied brothers of

dishonour. Come and finish me off if you dare.”

They looked at one another. The spearman had finally recovered his spear

from where it had been wedged in the tree. Now he leaned on it, with a
calculating look in his eye. The man with the flail doubled it up and tucked it into
his belt. For a moment Wulfstan thought they would take the coward’s way and
simply wait for Wulfstan to fall on his face from blood loss. It seemed for a
moment they thought so too. But the temptation to hurt him was too much, and
perhaps they thought him harmless now.

When they come within reach, I will burst up inside the range of the

spear, break the spearman’s throat with my shoulder and stab the scythe
carrier in the side.

He tried it, and he was a man made out of custard—his limbs flowed away

beneath him, planted him in the path’s edge, his mouth half underwater, half
under silt. Scalding laughter surrounded him as he flopped like a landed fish back
onto the hummock of dry ground. His battle madness was ebbing, and his
shoulder felt capped with red-hot wires.

As he lay, gaping, the spearman leaned over and prodded at his weapon

hand with the head of his spear, leaving three wounds like little mouths. Wulfstan
fancied he heard them joining in with the outlaws’ mockery. That seemed an
unlikely thing to be true. So, because he was hearing falsehoods, he also thought
it a waking dream when a flash of light hit the man beneath the chin and left him
with a comb of feathers sticking out of his neck.

As the outlaw clawed at his throat, sinking to his knees and toppling over

sideways in the muck, the man with the scythe took to his heels. Two more
arrows like thunderbolts came streaking from the woodland shadows and
hammered the man in the back.

A priest, Wulfstan thought, here at the very edge of death. If God was

merciful, the archer would be a priest, would be able to give him absolution
before it was too late. God knew he repented his sin. He did. He did. It wanted
only a man with authority to pardon it. Perhaps he might yet be saved.

Alas, the figure who came noiselessly out of the trees was no priest. He was

tall and fair and beautiful, and the sparks that swarmed in Wulfstan’s vision
seemed to cluster around his head and make his grim grey eyes and his tight
knife-blade of a mouth glow silver, uncanny and awe-inspiring. The bow at his
back curved over something hunched in the centre of his spine, like folded
wings.

An elf. Or an angel? The fight went out of Wulfstan on a tide of his pumping

blood. He was too lightheaded to be properly afraid. There seemed something
inevitable about this, something familiar, as though he should recognise a
crossroads on a path he had turned down a long time ago. His senses had begun
to leave him. How could either elf or angel ever be familiar?

The creature knelt by Wulfstan’s side and pressed a long hand to his wound.

The bolt of pain felled him like one of its arrows, so that he did not have time to
solve the puzzle or shed a tear over his own damnation.

Chapter Eight

Many times, Leofgar thought, as he took his knife to the fine linen skirts of

the fallen warrior’s undertunic, he had told his master that he did not believe in
wyrd. He revolted against the thought of fate as he revolted against the idea of
being told what to do by anyone. But if this was not proof, he did not know
what was.

Wadding half the linen into a pad, he laid it atop the bleeding wound and

weighed it down with the man’s sword and seax. There were sounds of
scrabbling behind him, and the youth—propped against a tree by the path’s
edge—breathed like a saw around a fully awake pain. He dared not do more
for…

He cast his disciplined mind back to blood-month in Uisebec, opened up his

memories of their meeting. Replayed in his thoughts all the words that had been
spoken, behind him as well as to his face. Ah. A name.

He did not dare do more for Wulfstan until the outlaws were dealt with.
Straightening, he pulled an arrow from the quiver at his belt and nocked it,

but did not draw. He turned over the first body with his foot. This man had an
arrow through his throat. The marshy ground beneath him was soggy with
crimson, but Leofgar still leaned down and felt for the heartbeat under his skin.
Nothing.

Good. That was good.
He padded to the next, from whom his fletchings stuck out like the bristles of

a hog. Backbone and skull broken, and he did not breathe. Good.

The handless man lay in his own pool of gore, as dead as meat, but Leofgar

double-checked before he allowed himself to tally that one too as none of his
concern. With those over, the harder task began.

He stooped to take up a fallen branch, threw it hard at the outlaw who lay

facedown, sobbing into the grass. “You. Look at me.”

He wasn’t sure if the man had heard him, there was no sign of it. Still,

Leofgar was going no closer than this—he could hear the breathing, he would
not be tempted to venture into the other man’s range. “If you do not look at me
now, I will shoot you without once setting eyes on your face.”

With a tearing groan, the outlaw forced himself onto hands and knees. He

looked up, and Leofgar was thrown back into a shallower past. He had seen
just such a wound after the Danes had gone from Tatwine’s burh. One of the
corpses had been an old man with his eye gouged out and hanging on his

smashed cheek. His name had been Garulf, a maker of baskets and a dauber of
walls, a father of three fatherless children.

It wasn’t horror that Leofgar felt. He knew horror from the stories. This was

something quieter, colder, bleaker. It was winter inside his skin and everything
was dying. He remembered his parting words at Anna’s grave, speaking out
against Tatwine’s warriors, the brave, coldhearted men skilled in dealing out
such atrocities.

“Can you walk, outlaw?”
No, said part of him to the rest, like pupil and master in dialogue, as though

he could learn something new by debating with himself. I can’t let him go.
Would I fill this land with wolf packs and wild animals. Destroyers of
children, devourers of pilgrims? I can’t simply spare him.

“I…” The man held his eye to him, cradling it in his palm, and Leofgar’s

word-hoard filled the moment with omens. He saw Woden one eye, sharpened
by wisdom, who had gone almost to the doors of death and returned more
dangerous for it. What was Leofgar creating in sparing this man’s life?

“Yes. I can walk.” The outlaw lurched up to stand trembling on unsteady

feet, and Leofgar pulled his bowstring to his ear in full draw.

Now was the moment to loose. He could put an arrow straight through that

socket, protect himself and many others in times to come. He should do it. To
harbour outlaws was itself a crime.

“Pick up the youth and go. The pair of you, go. Find healing. If you come

back to this life, I will kill you as suddenly as I did your fellows.”

Laughter sounded obscene among the pink-tinged pools that surrounded

him. It was the boy who laughed. Holding closed the wound beneath his arm
with one hand, while he pressed his elbow into his side to stanch the bleeding
there. “Coward,” he sneered, his teeth stained red. “Every man’s hand is against
us. If we go for help, we will receive torment. Your mercy prolongs our
suffering. You offer it simply to spare yourself discomfort.”

It stung, because it was true. “I have offered you kindness.” Leofgar jerked

his chin up to show them he grew impatient Obediently, the one-eyed man
struggled to raise the boy to his feet. “If you wish, I can take it back.”

He slackened the bow only enough to steady his hand beneath his chin, to

ease the pull before his muscles began to tremble. Staring the arrow in its point,
the boy gave a tiny courteous bow—a remnant of a better life—and leaning on
each other, the two outlaws hobbled away.

Leofgar watched them out of sight. Then he hauled Wulfstan further onto dry

land, unbuckled his belt and with much labour—the man was heavier than he
and as limp as a sleeping child—pulled off his tunic. Gathering a handful of the

most sticky cobwebs he could find from among the cow-parsley, Leofgar
pinched the shoulder wound shut and slapped the strands atop it to keep it so.
Using the second half of the length of linen he had cut to provide a new pad and
bandage, he bound it securely, knotted the ends with hands and teeth and let the
man slip back to lie against the cold damp earth.

Wulfstan did not awake during this treatment. His breath came fast and

shallow, but regular. His heart beat like a drum beneath Leofgar’s exploring
fingers. A strong life, as was right for a warrior.

Leofgar had dreamed of him, at times. And he was fascinated now to see the

differences between his dream lover and the real thing. Without intention, his
thoughts had fined Wulfstan down, taken away some of the bulk of muscle, the
convex shape of shoulders strong from bearing shield and spear, his waist less
trim and more sturdy. Long legs twice the width of Leofgar’s, well fit to run or
leap all day in battle, though he wore a coat of iron heavy as a calf.

Slackened in unconsciousness, his face looked kindly. That, Leofgar’s inner

eyes had repeated accurately. But his hair! In the dark of night it had been black,
in the dimness of the hall, brown. Leofgar had never seen it in daylight, and he
could not explain now why it took his breath from him to see it was a blaze of
copper, lying like a pool of fire on the green grass. Never had he seen such an
intensity of colour, save in the pages of monks’ manuscripts, where the gold leaf
glittered.

He touched it, and it slid, soft and warm, over a hand that had begun to

shake. Behind Leofgar’s eyes, the songs and stories that had been shocked into
silence after the attack on Tatwingham roused a little and clamoured like hungry
ghosts. There is something to praise, they said, thin and hopeful. Look, here it
is.

Slipping his cloak off, he covered Wulfstan with it to keep him from dew and

damp, while he rose to collect wood, cut away a square of turf and start a fire.

By the time it had caught enough to throw out some warmth, twilight had

come down, the tricky blue-silver light that lay trapped between day and night.
The border time, when spirits walked and other worlds might be glimpsed out of
the corner of the eye.

He could see one! A great spirit creature, white and silver, moved through

the dark tangled branches. Leofgar scrambled up onto weary feet, bit down to
prevent his heart from flying out of his mouth, and—grabbing his bow—gazed
out with the string pressed to his cheek to see what manner of monster disturbed
him now.

The thing emerged from the darkness, and he laughed aloud, for it was a

white horse, bridled and saddled, riderless. It approached the fallen man

tentatively, as though it had done wrong but hoped for forgiveness. Lowering its
head to nose at his ankle, it allowed Leofgar to catch its reins and loop them
around a nearby branch. It lapsed into quiet grazing, seemingly comforted by the
fire.

“So the absent friend returns when it is all over.” Leofgar patted its neck,

closing his eyes to fight down the clawing guilt his unwise words had called up in
him. Just as Tatwine and I only returned when there was nothing left to do
for his people but bury the dead. “At least you bring gifts.”

Searching in the saddlebags, he found a thick, close-woven fur-lined cloak.

He spread this on the ground, rolled Wulfstan into it, so the man was surrounded
by two layers of wool and one of fur.

There was also a skin of red wine and a joint of ham, a fist-sized lump of soft

cheese rolled in nettles, a heel of bread, only a little hard. Finding a pool that
looked clear of blood, Leofgar drew water and mixed it with the wine. He
dribbled a little of it from the ends of his fingers into the corner of the warrior’s
mouth. There was no movement at first, but then his throat worked as he
swallowed. His lips parted and he made a little noise, part grunt, part demanding
whine. So Leofgar did it again.

Night closed in, dark as the inside of a helmet. In the shifting yellow light of

the fire, the warrior’s hair gleamed like a glede. “Wulfstan Glede,” Leofgar told
him, taking his own pull from the wineskin, and devouring bread and ham for its
rough comfort. “Are you listening to me? I heard the sound of battle, and I ran
towards it, though I had sworn I had no stomach for any more death. I ran to the
raven’s banquet, and in righteous wrath I strode onto the field of carnage. I have
the right to give you a name.”

He edged closer. Lying on his good shoulder as he was, pillowless,

Wulfstan’s neck looked stretched and uncomfortable. So Leofgar took the
chance to wriggle his legs beneath the cloaks, and lift Glede’s head onto his
knee. Both his hands wanted to slide their way back into that hair, so he gave
them something else to do, taking the swaddled harp off his back and easing it
out of its sheepskin bag.

He played wordlessly for a while: the quiet notes, sweet and sad, of Anna’s

song. The pulse of the music strengthened beneath his hands as he found words
fitting themselves together behind his teeth, words in praise of glory in battle, of
two blades gleaming in rushes as sudden and savage as lightning. Of a strong
form, swift to slay. Of blood lust and fire and…

And everything he had sworn to himself he would never praise again.
What a twisted thing this world was, he thought as he sat wakeful into the

night—alert in case the outlaws came again. What a twisted thing he was, to

mistake his lusts for anything worth celebrating. What good was life when death
came so sudden in the midst of it? What good was he, when for all his hatred of
warriors’ arrogance, he could watch their slaughter and find it beautiful?

Chapter Nine

Wulfstan dreamed of music, plaintive in the darkness, flashes of notes

standing out from the silence like the stars in the vaults of heaven. For the longest
time, he rested in a world made up of music and warmth—several years of it, he
thought, several years of drowsing and thirst, and an ache like little stones being
pressed into his flesh on the bottom of a fat man’s shoe.

By the morning his mind had cleared but the thirst had become a torment. He

tried to crack open an eye but flinched from the burning shatter of light. Who
had broken the sky and set it to jangle down all around him like falling shards of
a broken glass bowl? “Nh!” he said, trying to cover his eyes from the sight.
“Water?”

“Ah.” The voice that replied held a faint catch of amusement, perhaps relief.

A light voice, a voice like amber—full of different shades and colours. “So you
lived the night through. Good. How do you feel about getting onto the horse?”

All of a sudden, shocking him, making him want to throw up, Wulfstan

remembered the elf. He forced his eyes open, pushed himself to his feet, felt the
wound in his shoulder tear open once more and the blood well out. So much
pain for so small a stab—it clawed down his side and up his neck into his head,
made the day swim and swing about him.

“Whoa, whoa. Stop that.” Hands steadied him. As he almost overbalanced,

a thin arm went around his chest and another around his back, supporting him on
his uninjured side. His legs trembled beneath him and, in his weakened state,
some part of him wanted nothing more than to lean into the embrace and rest.
He should fight that part, he knew. If anyone saw…

Instead, he struggled to focus, to look at the creature that supported him. He

managed little more than a brief glimpse of blond curls, the edge of a mouth
tucked in exasperation. Yet they were earthly curls that smelled of wood smoke
and damp. There was a smudge of dirt on the high cheekbone and a round silver
scar that told of a childhood chickenpox. The relief made his legs sag. “Not an
elf.”

He was a tall man, Wulfstan’s rescuer, but a slight one, and he grunted with

the effort of keeping Wulfstan upright. As he guided him over to lean against a
saddled horse, his tone gained a faint flavour of mockery. “What?”

“You. Thought you were…”
“An elf? I?” There was a pause, then forced laughter. Wulfstan had the vivid

impression that he had done another one of those things Ecgbert spoke of—

been insensitive, not subtle enough to spot something important. In tired apology,
he let his head droop to the side so that his forehead could rest against that
pockmarked cheek.

“Would I had their enchantments to hand,” said the tall young man, ruefully.

“I didn’t expect that you would forget me so easily. I felt sure I had made more
of an impression.”

“…know you?” A thought gave a skip in Wulfstan’s heart, like a spring lamb

gambolling. He steadied himself on Fealo’s neck—Fealo was here? When,
when had that…? He drew back enough to look the other man full in the face
for the first time.

The creatures that jumped for mere joy in his heart kicked up their heels in

disbelieving gladness. Pale blue—the eyes he had thought fire coloured proved
under sunlight to be the palest shade of grey-blue. Not fire but ice. They burned
him all the same.

“You,” he breathed, astonished. “How can you be here? This is…this is as

miraculous as any elf.” Because his blood was thin and his mind exalted by it,
beyond natural caution, he went on. “Were you summoned to me in dreams? I
have dreamed about you often.”

This second laugh was no less complicated, though it was a shade warmer.

The harper ducked his head, as if hoping the words would fly over him and not
land. “Come,” he said, “we can reminisce on the way to shelter. Is there strength
enough in you to get onto the horse? Here…” Wulfstan held on to mane and
saddle, while the harper leaned down and guided his foot onto a fallen log. “Up
and over.”

“I ca—”
“Of course you can. It’s all you have to do today. When you’re on, you may

sleep, and I will take us both to the house at Cotanham, where the nuns can look
after you. Just this one little thing, I swear. Then rest.”

Now they were not at odds—now he had the excuse of a wound to cover

his weakness—Wulfstan felt free to notice that he liked the harper’s voice. The
gentleness of it and the way it cajoled. He didn’t wish to be more disappointing
than he already had been.

Taking deep breaths that seemed to slice him in two each time, he called up

what remained of his strength, bent his watery knees and jumped, and between
them they hauled and manhandled him into the saddle.

The other man kept hold of him as he slipped into place behind him, and

Wulfstan found himself locked between long, slender legs, with a pair of long,
slender arms about his waist, and hands—narrow and elegant as a woman’s
hands—gathering up the reins of…of…

“’S this my horse? How did…?”
He could almost feel the smile, like a warmth on the back of his head. “Yes.

Not a brave beast, but a loyal one. It returned of its own choice last night.” The
supple voice shaded abruptly into darkness. “It came as soon as it knew it was
safe to do so. There are no heroes here, save for you, Wulfstan Glede.”

“’S there water?”
“Here.” The man shifted the reins into his left hand. His sharp hipbone

pressed into Wulfstan’s arse for a moment as he twisted to get to the saddle
bags. A moment later and he pressed a wineskin into Wulfstan’s hands.

Fealo had begun to walk gently forward, and as Wulfstan choked on a

mouthful of unwatered coarse red wine, the slosh and rustle of travel lulled him
with its long familiarity. The wine lulled him too.

“Did I ever…” Thank you? Ask you your name? I don’t remember.
He chased after the memories of their first meeting. Had the old man

mentioned his apprentice’s name? The imp had clearly found Wulfstan’s out, but
a good memory for names was part of a scop’s training. Wulfstan had no such
advantage.

As he worried about this, it came to him more and more strongly that it was

almost worth the wound to be treated with such tenderness. How good it was to
be hurt, if it meant one could lean back into another man’s strength and be
embraced and cherished without having to be ashamed.

He rolled his head to the side, until it was cradled on the harper’s shoulder,

and shut his eyes again, keeping out the painfully shattered sky. Could actually
feel the smile as the corner of the man’s mouth tipped up against his skin, and he
thought, unwelcomely, that while it was true he need not be ashamed, he
possibly ought not to wallow in the freedom and comfort of this quite so much.
What must the man think of him? He knew, more than any creature alive, the
depth of Wulfstan’s weaknesses, and they had not parted on good terms.

Should he say sorry for that? Sorry I hit you for giving me what I wanted.

I still want it. Thank you for saving my life. He really ought to tell the man
that before it slipped away. As he braced himself to actually say the words,
sleep, the stealthiest of thieves, stole his senses and left him once more in the
dark.

When Wulfstan woke again it was in a bed. Cool sheets were tucked firmly

around him, and cool stone walls rose to arching traceries over his head.
Nothing else in the room but his outer clothes lying folded on a stool, a crucifix
on the wall, and a flood of whey-blue light from a window high in the eaves
above his head.

He stirred, and the mattress crunched comfortably beneath him, giving out

the summer scent of dry grass, the aniseed and lime perfume of ladies’ bedstraw.
He was moving to check the wound at his shoulder—it felt as though a horse
had kicked him, but it was now more carefully dressed, and the dressings were
dry and white—when the door opened and a crush of folk blotted out the
torchlight of a larger room or corridor outside.

Wulfstan seized his pillow and leaned it against the wall, struggled into a

seated position, just as the first nun put down her pitcher of beer and tutted at
him for moving without permission. She and the second were at his side almost
at once, taking him under the shoulders and positioning him, and he thought they
had some lax rules in this house, that allowed the brides of Christ to manhandle
mortal men with such impunity.

One of the sisters was a round-faced girl with a smile tugging at her lips, who

looked to him like a woman who could take a joke in that direction and return
an answer. The other, however, was not. She was an elderly, stern-faced
woman with a backbone like iron and creases in her face that spoke of a lifetime
of discipline.

He took the beer she offered him and drank it down thirstily, trying not to

close his eyes in ecstasy as his body flowered from it like dry places after rain.
His guilt awoke alongside his flesh. He wondered if the older woman could see
it. If God, in exchange for all she had given up, had graced her with the ability to
dredge the sin from a man’s silences. His levity disappeared like the quickly
waning evening light.

Wulfstan submitted quietly while the older woman checked his bandages.

She didn’t speak, but she gave him a quick nod of approval once she was done.
After which the junior propped a basin on his knees and let him wash his hands
and face, handing him a linen towel when he was done. They both departed
together, and when they returned it was with a tray of meat pottage, and a
lantern.

Their brown habits and the long white veils took on notes of topaz and gold

in the lamplight, and their silence—which at first had been awkward—settled
into the serenity of the stones. It ebbed its way into the quietness of their faces
and the grace of their movements, and became more restful than his blankets. He
tipped his head back against the wall and let the quiet soothe him. No, this was a
place his sin could not follow him. Nor could Saewyn’s curse penetrate these
high and holy walls. Here he was safe even from himself.

He ate the pottage, tasting pigeon and sage, the bitter-mustard tang of

watercress and the chewy plumpness of barley, scraped the bottom of the bowl
with his spoon, willing to take more if there was any.

There wasn’t. Instead, the younger nun took the bowl, her gaze now

resolutely fixed on the floor. The older ushered her charge into the corridor,
stepped to one side and with a gesture of her arm invited a tall figure to stoop
beneath the lintel. When he straightened up, she closed the door behind him.

The silence lay thick as wood smoke between them. Faintly, from beyond

the wall at Wulfstan’s right, the sound of high, sweet voices lifted in plainchant
filtered through the mortar and raised Wulfstan’s hackles with its eerie power.
His visitor smiled but seemed as conscious of the moment as he was himself.

So there you are , Wulfstan thought, with a satisfaction as startling as the

taste of peaches. It felt like the first time he had seen the man while the light was
good, and Wulfstan was in his right mind. The first time he had seen him with
leisure to stare, with an appetite to look his fill and the chance to take it.

Slender as a willow wand and dressed in rich men’s cast-offs, his forest-

green tunic of the finest wool, his tawny cloak held by a great brooch of silver,
the young harper looked the part of importance and success. He wore his round
hat of green leather like a crown. An embroidered band of golden horses was
galloping there, their limbs intertwined.

Only on a second glance did one see the dirt of rough sleeping and the knife-

thin delicacy of famine. His slender face, all angles and hollows, had something
frail about it, thin as blown glass. Despite his big smile his silver-blue eyes
remained wary.

Not an elf, perhaps, but elf-sheen—beautiful as an elf.
The man lifted the folded clothes off the stool by the bedside and sat.
“So, Glede, you are—”
“I need to thank you, and to beg your pardon. I don’t even know your

name.”

“Leofgar.” The man leaned forward when he spoke, shrugged, and the bag

that sat between his shoulders slid into his crooked elbow. Recovered, Wulfstan
saw it was not wings at all. It was, of course, the bag that contained his harp.
“Son of…Anna of Cantwarebyrig.”

The old man, the one who had clung to Wulfstan’s knees and wept on his

feet, had been called Anna. Wulfstan sighed and supposed he understood at
least some of what haunted Leofgar’s gaze. His master had looked like a skull
even then.

“I remember Anna,” he offered, carefully, “who got between us and stopped

me from doing something I would have regretted. Is he…?”

“It was a hard winter.” Leofgar’s brows pinched together, and his eyes

swam for a second before he covered his face with both hands so that Wulfstan
would not see him weep. “He has gone to his eternal reward.”

The silence returned, soft as feathers, while Wulfstan gathered his courage.

Then he reached out and curled his hand around Leofgar’s upper arm, making
him startle and quickly swipe his tears away on his cuffs.

“I’m sorry. If only there were more men, like him, clever and brave enough

to get between me and the target of my anger, to softly reason me out of it. At
least one of my friends would be alive, who now is dead, if there were.”

Leofgar looked in his face, intrigued at that. Not at all as horrified as

Wulfstan felt he ought to be. Even so, why was he telling this? He knew nothing
more of this man than his pride and his readiness to resort to cruel tricks to get
revenge, if he thought himself wronged. Why spill any more guilty secrets than
the one huge shame the harper already knew?

Perhaps because the harper already knew. How much worse could Wulfstan

make it by telling all? And the thing clamoured in the back of his throat, raged to
be set free, confessed. Perhaps, God willing, forgiven.

“You have had a hard winter too?” Leofgar asked, with just the right amount

of sympathy to make his curiosity seem kindness. “I thought you no longer
seemed quite the fool you once were. The Lord has tempered you?”

“If you think murder is the Lord’s work.”
A clatter, as Leofgar leaned back with too much haste and banged the legs

of the stool against the wall. There his flight stopped and his instinctive alarm
turned into thought. Wulfstan swallowed hard against hope and fear alike, and at
length the harper leaned towards him again, elbows on knees, gaze very clear.

“I have known men who were the kind to do murder. Coldhearted, clear-

thinking men with a great deal of patience. You seem to me quite the opposite.
Hot-tempered, impulsive, untimely.”

Wulfstan twisted his beer mug between his hands. “It’s true,” he said,

accepting some comfort. “I shouldn’t say murder. I struck him down in the open,
in a moment of fury, because he had given me the worst of all insults.”

He picked at his nails, aware of the scop’s head angling, as though an angel

on his shoulder had whispered to him and he tilted his head to listen. The pale
gaze felt terribly heavy on the top of his head.

“You treated with him as you did with me?”
If clear sight was a mark of his profession, he was a master of it. I did,

Wulfstan thought, and the cut of the realisation was so deep and clean it hardly
hurt. Dear God, do I make a habit of this? If Anna had not intervened,
might I not have killed you too?

No. No, I would not. No matter how out of my wits I was with rage, I

would not. “Except that you did not betray me. Not even though I gave you a
beating.”

He had allowed that to pass unremarked at the time. But thinking on it, now

he saw it as an act of lavish, undeserved mercy. “Why did you not?”

Leofgar’s gaze dropped to the frame of Wulfstan’s bed. “It was nobody’s

business but our own,” he said. “If you had not finished it with a blow, I would
not have taken even the small revenge I felt I was owed.”

Wulfstan laughed and felt more solid than he had done in days, not only his

physical wounds soothed. “I admired that, later.” He smiled. “More so now
when I understand what kind of risk you took, baiting my temper like a dog with
a bear. Did I ever tell you how glad I was to have met you, both then and now?
Did I thank you for saving my life?”

“No need.” Leofgar rubbed a thumb along the swaddled neck of his harp,

bending his head down to her like a mother cuddling her babe. He did not return
the sentiment and say he was glad to know Wulfstan, but he did not leave either.
Under the circumstances, Wulfstan thought, that was more than he would have
dared ask.

Quiet again for a while as Leofgar stretched out his long legs and nodded a

little in his seat. A flap of soft-shoed feet pattered past the door and down into
the chapel. Leofgar made to rise to go to his own bed, and the fear of him
leaving made Wulfstan blurt out, unbidden, “Can you undo a curse?”

Leofgar froze in place. He insinuated a hand into his harp bag, as though he

needed to touch the singing wood in order to think clearly. “I cannot.” He raised
his left hand in what could have been a blessing, but was probably just a caution.
“The man you killed had a wife skilled in wiccecraft?”

“A mother. Saewyn is her name. I am sad to be her enemy, because I have

always admired her. She has raised the land spirits against me—as she has every
right to do—and I am dogged by darkness at every step.”

Leofgar’s look now was that of a sober and deep-minded man, experienced

in such things. “I cannot remove curses,” he said again. “But I can tell you this;
that the land spirits have no strength that is not loaned to them by Almighty God,
and I do not think there exists any curse in the nine worlds that is stronger than
the word of the Heavenly Kingdom’s Maker.”

He had a slash of a mouth, the scop—his narrow lips the only flaw in his

beauty. Yet Wulfstan liked the way they quirked up at the side now, as if to
mock his own pretensions to holiness. “I am not a wise man, Glede. I am a man
who remembers and retells the deeds of others. Should I sift through my hoard
of tales for you, there is only one treasure I can find to bring out. It is the truth
that God will shape our lives to whatever end is most pleasing to Him. The
demon in the dark may rend our bodies, but it cannot snatch our souls out of His
hand.”

“It’s the rending I’m chiefly worried about,” Wulfstan said, in an effort at

levity. He lied of course.

The night’s chill had begun to seep through the stones. Outside, only starlight

showed in pricklings of white on a black sky. A circular blur and flapping at the
window was the little leathery wings of bats. Or Wulfstan hoped it was only
bats. He shivered, felt the meal sit heavily with him and the strength—such as it
was—seep slowly out of his bones.

The torch flared and flickered, and in its tawny light there was something

ironic, something hard and dark about Leofgar’s face. He had no reason to
doubt the man, every reason to trust him, and he should, he knew, feel safe. But
he was sure that though the land spirits would not prevail against God, yet God
would favour a grieving mother over the man who had killed her child.

Some of this must have shown on his face, for Leofgar stirred, shoving his

bag back onto his shoulder and standing. “I have given you no comfort. I’m
sorry. I am glad to see that you do well and have taken no permanent hurt from
your journey.”

He took the one step needed to reach the door, paused there with his hand

on the latch and gave a complicated smile. “I depart tomorrow on pilgrimage to
the shrine of Aethelthryth at Ely.” The smile strengthened, gleaming out like light
from a drawn blade. “I too am glad to have known you, Wulfstan Glede. Who
knows what may come to pass if we meet a third time?”

It was a man’s place to seize the world and shape it to his desires. Despite

his shortcomings in that area, Wulfstan could not watch the bard turn—angular,
like a grey heron stalking gracefully along the borders of a swift stream—without
holding out his good hand and saying sharply, “Wait! I too am on pilgrimage to
Ely. I should be well enough to ride tomorrow, or the day after. I have not
thanked or rewarded you—”

“I do not need to be paid.” Oh, that was as cold as the night, or more so,

and for a moment Wulfstan felt like laughing. He’d met some proud bastards in
his life, but they had all come at the other end of a sword. Whence came this
one’s swelled head?

“I did not offer to. I thought we might be companions on the road. If there

are wolfsheads and sea raiders out there—”

“I could protect you?”
Wulfstan was aware the challenge was wrong-headed—that he should be

angry at the thought of needing protection. He should laugh at the thought that so
skinny a man, with a head packed full of words, could fight off anything that
Wulfstan need be afraid of. But he had told Leofgar everything, so it didn’t
matter if he admitted this too. “Mmm,” he murmured, sliding down into the warm

embrace of his blankets, ready for a great deal more sleep. “I should like that.”

It wasn’t until the morning, when he woke clear-headed and almost strong,

and was enduring having his arm redressed and hung from his neck in a sling,
that he remembered Leofgar’s surprise at his words, and the shy, sideways smile
he had worn when he took the lantern from its holder and departed.

He was all Wulfstan’s weaknesses rolled into one person, and Wulfstan had

invited him to spend God knew how many days alone with him in the wild. He
should not have been feeling quite so sick with excitement at the thought. But oh,
he was.

Chapter Ten

Leofgar woke in the cold hour of dawn, in the empty hall where he had sung

for his supper the evening before. A small town had grown up around the
nunnery, to ease the holy sisters’ dealings with the outside world—farm their
lands, keep their buildings in repair, sell the wine and beer they brewed, and
house some of the many pilgrims on the way to the abbey.

To these townsfolk he had given both simple fare and fine—the riddles for

them to roar over with ribald laughter, and a snatch of the tale of Grendel so that
they would shiver with delighted dread as they went to their beds. Their
enjoyment warmed his heart and got beneath his skin, gilding his bones. They’d
laughed and listened, and pressed the best of their food and the headiest of their
ale on him, and he’d felt like a king. And this morning he had wakened in the
ashes of last night’s fire, remembering that he was little more than a beggar.

Brushing the dust of the floor from his hair, he leaned over the firepit to break

open the mound of ashes he had raked together before sleeping. In there, a few
embers glowed reluctantly at him. It was enough so that, piling on kindling and a
couple of faggots, he soon had the fire leaping once more.

The nuns had offered him another cell in the infirmary, but they had looked

reluctant about it, since he was hale. So he had turned the offer down and gone
where his unholy tales would bring him a welcome.

The folk had been glad of him for a night. They might be glad again if he

stayed one more day—but after the third day he should be gone. It did not do to
stay too long when one ate but did not work.

Sighing, he dipped water from the barrel into a cauldron and set the cauldron

on the hall’s hanging chain to heat over the fire. So it was back to this life, was
it? Wandering from stead to stead, staying a day or two and moving on. Bringing
news and novelty, and leaving before they grew stale.

He washed his hands and face in the warm water, wishing for soap, then dug

some of last night’s stew from the second pot, where it had been set to cool in
the corner of the firepit. Had he been wrong to choose this? When he had
achieved the dream of all wandering minstrels—to be taken into a lord’s
household, made his man, given his protection and his generosity, sheltered by
his honour, inspired by his glory, had he been too hasty to throw it all away?

No.
He beat the dust from his cloak, then began to wind the long strips of

speckled yellow tablet-weave around the arch of his foot and the calves of his

legs, to support his ankles and protect his trousers from all the thorns of the
wilderness. Slipping his shoes on after, he sighed again. Why, when he had
dreamed of the freedom of this life—when he escaped luxury and warmth in
favour of need and the cold earth—did he feel so flat about it? He thought the
life would welcome him back like a family embracing a soldier home from the
fyrd. Instead he felt thin and chill and unfulfilled.

Do you miss Tatwine? Perhaps for all you desired him not, you liked to

be important to him? Perhaps you could have worked at it more willingly;
fought your own fears for his friendship?

He tried to think of it, see it, in his head—himself yielding. Lavish would have

been his reward, unstinting his lord’s love. Could he have…?

No.
Dressed, and with his resolve confirmed, he picked up his belongings, lifted

the locking bars off the hall door and went out to stretch in the porch. The
business of the village had already begun: a russet-haired boy taking pigs to the
forest to forage, two barefoot girls on the green driving the red cows down to be
milked. Over where the ground turned boggy, an old man was piling eel traps
into a net bag while his son hauled a coracle onto his back. The nunnery doors
were being opened for those who wished to go in and, with only a wall and grill
between them, share in the nuns’ service of prime.

Well, this was a pilgrimage after all. It could not hurt if he were to do the

same. He could ask after Wulfstan once it was done. The thought modulated the
melody of his soul from minor to major, and he was smiling as he set out for the
gate.

He heard the horses, cantering fast along the narrow strip of dry path, and

thought no evil—he smiled. The smile fell from him like a dropped beaker and
smashed by his feet as one of the riders called out, “Leofgar! Stop where you
are or I shall drop you where you stand.”

His limbs hardened around him. They were made of wood—he had to ease

them in their sockets with a chisel in order to turn. Behind him, three warriors on
horseback gleamed in dawn’s light, all in silver mail and in helms. Deala with his
bow drawn and Hunlaf with his coppery eyelashes casting a red glow over his
coldly satisfied eyes.

The last was Tatwine himself, black browed and boarlike, down to the way

he snuffed the wind as though he could scent the harper from a hundred yards
distance.

His voice was soft. “Leofgar. We will speak.”
Leofgar looked around himself, saw fishermen, housewives, weavers,

goatherds. No help to be had there. He could run, he supposed. Faster than a

horse? Than an arrow? Ah well. ‘Faithful are many, but many are
froward.’

He bowed his head. “My lord.”
Tatwine slid from his horse with a dark laugh. “Oh, am I?”
Leofgar’s guilt closed his throat, bowed his chest inwards, squeezing all the

breath from his lungs. He felt weak and abased, and wished he could reach the
anger he knew was there, hidden in the back of his mind like a sword in its
scabbard.

Tatwine took him by the chin and turned his face, trying to force him to look

into his lord’s eyes. That helped a little, by stirring his stubbornness. He let his
gaze slither across the man’s tanned cheek, looked sidelong at the ground.

“You swore an oath,” said Tatwine, in that terrible, gentle voice. “You knelt

before my chair and raised your hands to me. I took them in my own, and you
swore you were my man, to command as I saw fit. All you had, such as it was,
you gave to me in return for my care.” His fingers tightened, the nails digging into
the soft skin beneath Leofgar’s jaw. “Did I not care for you? Did I not give you
praise and money, horses and fine clothes? Did I not take you with me where I
rode, or incline my ear to you when you would speak?”

What to say? There was nothing he could say. Not here in public, at least,

where other men had begun to put down their tools and turn to look. He was a
faithful enough servant at least not to voice his true complaints where any other
man might hear.

Tatwine’s hand clenched and the ring on his smallest finger split the side of

Leofgar’s mouth. “Did I not?”

It was only a small, weak voice he could summon to reply. “Yes, you did.”
Now the fingers let go, but there was no time to breathe in relief before

Tatwine backhanded him across the face so hard he stumbled to one knee in
front of Hunlaf’s horse. He kept his head bowed, not wanting to look up at
Hunlaf’s enjoyment.

“Why do you repay me like this? Running off like a slave, without a word,

just when I had most need of you. Why, Leofgar? I had not taken you for an
oathbreaker.”

Leofgar struggled to his feet, only to be slapped straight back. Both times,

the sharp stone of the ring scored long cuts in his cheek. As he knelt the second
time, not trying to rise again, the blood fell in fat drops onto the dust of the village
square. “You know why,” he told it, in an undertone. “Surely you know?”

He kept his voice low enough to be private between the two of them. He

didn’t believe Tatwine truly wanted an explanation. This was a drama, such as
the Romans put on in their stone bowls, acting out a tale with their bodies to

make it live. This was a play for the sake of his retainers and the onlookers and
Tatwine’s pride.

That being so, Leofgar knew the part he was supposed to act. So when

Tatwine came close once more, he bowed forward abjectly and pressed his face
into the dirt in front of the man’s shoes.

There was a laugh above his head—Hunlaf’s, he thought. He could almost

feel the sharpness of Deala’s arrowhead as though it pressed into the back of his
neck, and he wondered, his bowels twisting within him, if this was to be his last
moment on middle earth. If it would hurt.

Tatwine made a noise too quiet to be called a laugh, too exasperated for a

sigh, and hunkered down next to him to say, in his own low whisper, “If you had
humbled yourself for me when I asked, we would not now be having this
unpleasantness. Why now and not then?”

It was hard to speak, with the corner of his mouth pressed into dry grass and

dirt. “This is not what you asked of me before, my lord, and you know it. Do
you really want to broach this subject here in front of the very doors of a house
of God?”

Tatwine stood up and looked. Relieved of the burden of his notice, Leofgar

raised his head, saw the sisters clustered around their gate, watching. A dull
resentment crept out of his secret heart at the thought that he had been shamed
in front of the same gentle souls who last night had been full of smiles for his
rescue of Wulfstan.

At the thought of Wulfstan, the resentment became shame again, and pain,

for there he was, framed in the archway of the door, the bridle of his horse in
hand, his shield arm in a sling. He had a redhead’s half-translucent skin, and as
Leofgar watched—wishing to be anywhere else, wishing that this man out of all
men should not have seen him abase himself like this—the blood flooded into it
in a furious tide, and his red-brown eyes glittered. “Eala! What is this?”

Hunlaf wheeled his horse and set it between Wulfstan and his companions.

Tatwine leaned down again and pulled Leofgar to his feet by the hair, shaking
him. “What this is is none of your concern, friend. I have no quarrel with you. Be
gone about your business ere you make it otherwise.”

Wulfstan slapped Hunlaf’s horse hard on the nose. As it danced away from

him in surprise, he pushed his way past, making Deala retreat a dozen paces so
that he could cover them both with the same arrow.

“The harper is a friend of mine, and I want to know by what right you abuse

him as you do.”

Dragging Leofgar behind him, Tatwine stalked to his own horse and took

from his saddlebags a braided leather rope that he twined hard around Leofgar’s

unresisting wrists. Tatwine shoved him at the saddle, an unspoken command to
get on. Deala’s attention was divided—one arrow, two targets. Perhaps he
could run…

If he did, he knew that Wulfstan would take on all three of them to give

Leofgar time to get away. Wulfstan was wounded, and these three were no half-
trained wolfsheads, such as he had found in the forest. It would be a bitter
match, and one or more of them would be killed, and Leofgar would not have
that, his own pride be damned.

He got on the horse.
“This man is my faithless and renegade servant, whom I shall punish as I see

fit.” Tatwine mounted behind him, crushing him up against the saddle horn. He
leaned down, and in a soft, disappointed voice whispered in Leofgar’s ear. The
heat of his breath made Leofgar’s skin shrivel beneath it. “Tell him not to get in
the way. Unless you want him killed. These days I would not put that past you.”

Leofgar looked down into Wulfstan’s face, seeing puzzlement and fury.

Disappointment too. He mourned.

“My lord speaks the truth,” he managed, trying to accept his wyrd with the

bravery he had advised last night. “I will not be able to accompany you on your
pilgrimage after all.”

Damn his training. He was already making this sound inevitable, adding a little

rueful laugh to his voice. “I did tell you I was no kind of holy man.” There—
flippant, reassuring, when what he wanted to say was Don’t let them take me! I
don’t think—I don’t think I can— He couldn’t even finish that sentence in his
own head.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, after all. Perhaps they could talk, he could

plead. He could even submit. Captives of battle, taken for slaves, they learned to
live with it. Surely he was no weaker than they? The thought made his eyes burn
and prickle. He blinked them furiously and sniffed, managed to smile again and
looked down to see a Wulfstan gone white, white knuckles clenched on his
sword-hilt, his lips bloodless.

“I hoped for mercy from the Maker of Men, but I deserve this, Glede. May

you at least get what you wish and not what you have earned. Farewell.”

Wulfstan did not move as Tatwine and the others rode past him, though

Leofgar hoped, feared, wanted, did not want him to do so. He stood in the road
motionless behind them and watched as they broke into a trot. When the path
took a right-hand turn to avoid a loop of river, and Leofgar could look back,
Wulfstan was still there, gazing after them.

Leofgar did not feel altogether abandoned until they passed into the trees and

lost both the sight and the hope of him.

Chapter Eleven

They rode all day at a gentle pace, save for breaks to let the horses graze

and one for the warriors to eat. At these times, Leofgar sat by the side of the
road with his gaze on his bound hands, and said nothing, happy—in so far as the
word happy could apply to his mood—to be utterly ignored. It was a state that
could not last.

Nor did it. By the time the summer’s light was fading, they turned off the

road and into a thicket surrounded by strips of fields. There, Hunlaf and Deala
set up tents—Tatwine’s campaign tent, that he had used in better days on the
disastrous hunt, and a single felted woolen sheet that reeked of sheep-fat. This
they strung between two trees. Deala crawled beneath it. Wrapping himself in his
cloak, he either fell asleep at once or did a good job of appearing to.

Hunlaf delivered Leofgar to the door of Tatwine’s dwelling, and his grey-

green eyes had never looked more like amused stones as he pushed him inside.
“He’s been a fucking bear ever since you took off. What you face is of your
own making. Hope it’s good and hard, boy. Hope you make it worth our while,
having to chase you down like an errant bride.” The second shove was harder,
in the middle of his back. It knocked the air from his lungs, knocked him
forward, through the entry porch of the tent and into the central chamber
beyond.

Hunlaf laced up the door, and Leofgar heard him retreat, scuffling down the

bank of brambles to stand guard, facing the road. There was enough light in the
sky for his shadow to faintly be guessed on the tent wall, standing at rest,
pointed helmet, pointed spear and all.

Leofgar swallowed and straightened his back, taking his eyes away from the

distraction and looking to where Tatwine sat on a low stool. At his feet lay a
mattress stuffed with straw plundered from the nearest field, piled with pillows
and coverlets of fur. “Sit,” he said, and indicated it with a brawny hand.

One man outside, Leofgar thought, one in here. Could he get out, run, before

either caught him? What? When the door would take minutes to unlace, and he
had no knife to cut through the walls? Could he do it by wriggling between the
pegs? No—Tatwine would be on him before he got his head out, and that kind
of wrestling was exactly what he wanted to avoid. He turned it over in his mind a
little longer but could see no alternative. He folded up and sat down, cross-
legged, in the centre of Tatwine’s bed.

“Why?” said Tatwine again. His hands were cradled around a cup full of

steaming wine, and he had taken off his mail, was shown forth as a man neither
old nor young. The bulk of good living hung on a frame hardened by war. His
silver hair was the colour of steel, but his beard and the hair on the backs of his
hands were black as coal. He was not a man who could easily look gentle, even
when—as now—he was trying.

“You cannot truly not know.”
“If I knew, I would not ask. Tell me. Tell me why you fled from me, as

though you had never called me lord.”

It didn’t help, at all, to look at that scarred and grizzled face and see hurt,

genuine, puzzled, heartfelt hurt. Leofgar washed his face with his bound hands
and tried, again, to smother the choke of dread in his stomach. This was his lord
—he deserved the truth. So he began with the easier of the two things. “Part of it
was the Danes, my lord. We came back from hunting and…and everyone was
dead. It was, under God, your task to save them—you and your hearth
companions. Your task, and you failed.”

No other man would dare say this, Leofgar knew. That he would say it now,

disgraced and in bonds, spoke well of his trust in Tatwine not to deal out
random violence to one who had the right, by law and custom, to speak his
mind. Still Tatwine gave a sharp bark of shock, and the wine in his cup leaped
up and sloshed over his fingers. “I know. I know I failed. That is why I desired
comfort from you.”

“I had none to give! How could I praise absence, abandonment, ignoble

death? I had no words! I didn’t understand how everything I had been taught to
trust in could prove so worthless.” He shook his head, trying to force the revolt
of a whole soul into speech. “I told myself that God would make all clear to me,
that he would unstop my mouth, and I fled. I fled to him, not from you. I saw
your need and I had nothing to give. I was struck dumb.”

Gently, Tatwine set down his cup and slowly he slid from the stool, one

knee, and then the other onto the bed. He was taller than Leofgar, three times
the width in fat and muscle, and his rough hand eclipsed the whole side of
Leofgar’s head when he tried to cradle his cheek. “I do not mind you silent,
Harper. For words were not the comfort I wanted.”

Leofgar flinched away, trying to suppress the overwhelming lurch of nausea

and terror, while his mind—his damnable, curious, poet’s mind began throwing
up questions and confusion as a smoke screen, or perhaps a distraction. Why?
Why was this so terrible? He would not deny that if it were done in secret, never
to be revealed to man nor beast, he would be willing to try it with Wulfstan,
should he have had the fortune to travel with that warrior a little longer. So why
not make it easy on himself, yield, get it over with as gently as could be done,

and be forgiven into the bargain?

His body and his mouth had other ideas. “Don’t. Please.”
Tatwine paid no heed, slipping that cradling hand into Leofgar’s collar,

grabbing at tunic and undertunic both and pulling Leofgar towards him.

He turned his face away from the kiss. “My lord, you cannot ask this of me.

It is forbidden by Holy Church. You imperil your soul, and mine.”

Tatwine laughed and reached down with the other hand to flip up the skirts

of Leofgar’s tunic and grope for the tie of his trousers. “So many things are sins
—anger, covetousness, lying, yet we all do them and expect to be forgiven. Why
is this sin so different?”

Leofgar had to struggle to get the words past his teeth, they had locked

together, grittily grinding. And yes, that had been merely an excuse, and he knew
it. Many a lord kept boys for his use as they kept mistresses, and were yet in
good odour with the church—sins of the flesh being, after all, far less grievous
than sins of the spirit.

He grabbed Tatwine’s wrist, tried to force it away from him, but it was like

trying to push away a plough horse. All his strength did nothing but slow it. The
man’s fingers found the bow of his waistband and slipped it undone.

Leofgar’s lungs were going like bellows, now. He felt lightheaded and sick to

his stomach. Abandoning pious excuses, he tried the truth. “Do not do this to
me! I am a man as you are and no boy. I will not submit to being used like a—”

“If you are a man”—the meaty hand pushed down his trousers and tightened

bruisingly on his undefended arse—“then stop me.”

A part of Leofgar’s mind was detached enough to note the irony of this.

What do you think I’m trying to do? Words are my weapons of choice.
Always have been. But that rough, possessive touch choked off any possibility
of saying them.

Panicking, using the lift Tatwine’s hold gave him, Leofgar got his feet under

himself again. He clubbed his bound hands down on Tatwine’s surprised skull
and at the same time lunged upwards with a bony knee, catching the warlord on
the bridge of his nose. There was a crunch as it worked. It worked—he had
time for a fierce thrill of triumph as Tatwine reeled back in surprise, and the crest
of it, like a wave, carried him on as he leaned down and plucked the eating knife
from its sheath on Tatwine’s belt.

Throwing himself backwards off the bed, he rolled, knife tucked in-between

his bonds, leaped to his feet by the tent wall, stabbing. The little knife was good
sharp steel, pattern welded like a sword, and it bit the heavy wool of the tent like
a wolf biting on a sheep. He sliced it down with all his strength. There, a door, a
way out!

Tatwine, recovered from his shock, threw himself across the space between

them. He was smiling widely, the blood from his nose reddening his teeth. His
eyes were alight with enjoyment as he caught Leofgar’s ankle with his left hand,
punched him behind the knee with his right, and yanked.

Leofgar’s legs slid out from beneath him, he found himself lying on his

stomach, being dragged back bodily onto the bed. The smell of cornflowers
from the mattress was the needle-thin point that broke him open enough to beg
—enough to forget whispering and lowered voices outside. Tomorrow he might
care that Hunlaf and Deala must be close enough to hear, to know what was
going on. A half hour ago he would have cared. For now he let go his last
restraint and yelled it: “NO! No, no, no! Let me go.”

The knife-hilt was hard in his hand. He could turn, drive it into Tatwine’s

throat or between his ribs. He could do it…

And kill his lord? The man who had given him everything? The man who was

only acting on custom, to claim that which was his due. Just because Leofgar
was some kind of freak was no good excuse for a sworn man turning against his
master.

I want no master. I don’t want… Despite the depths of his revulsion, he

could not force himself to hurt the man as hard as it would take to make him
stop. “Please don’t do this! Please!”

Tatwine pinned him down with a hand on the back of his neck, and robbed

him even of the possibility. He scrunched closed his eyes and concentrated on
cornflowers, the smell of them. What else was there, stuffed into this mattress?
Sweet drowsiness of red poppy. Straw, lots of straw, and mugwort, the
physician’s favourite, mightiest of the nine magical herbs…

He was not going to notice anything else, neither the chill of the night air on

his bared back, nor Tatwine’s weight landing ungently on his spine like a rock. It
was perverse of his mind—honestly, he could almost laugh at it—to choose this
moment to begin running through the fates of men as though his life depended
entirely on rightly remembering every word:

One shall be found at the feet of his lord
With his harp he shall win a harvest of wealth;
Quickly he tightens the twangling strings,
They ring and they swing as his spur-shod finger
Dances across them: deftly he plays.
Another shall tame the towering falcon,
Hawk in hand, till the haughty flier
Grows meek and gentle; he makes him jesses,
Feeds in fetters the feather-proud bird,

With dainty morsels, the dauntless soarer,
Until the wild one is weakened and humbled,
Belled and tasselled, obeys his master
Hooded and tamed and trained to his hand.

Chapter Twelve

Wulfstan watched as his harper was stolen away, standing in front of the holy

house as if he had accepted this. He had not. He waited until the tail of the last
horse was hidden behind hedges before taking his bloodstained tunic from his
saddlebags and ripping it up into four pieces. Bending down, he carefully
wrapped each of Fealo’s hooves in the soft cloth. There was no real thought in
his mind. He saw that Leofgar must not be a pilgrim at all, but only a runaway
making off without his lord’s permission. He saw too that this did not relieve him
of his debt to the man, and he—under a mother’s curse as he was—could not
afford to make demands on another man’s sanctity.

Had not Leofgar admitted, last night, that he was not a holy man nor a wise

one? Well then, Wulfstan could not claim to have been lied to. And he owed the
man his life. Time, perhaps, to repay.

Once Fealo’s hooves were muffled, he mounted and set off in pursuit of

Leofgar’s party. Here Akeman Street cut through marsh and fields reclaimed
from the marsh by dykes. Built up by the race of giants, it lay old and strange
and straight over the land for miles. He could not lose them on such a path. The
only difficulty there was to follow without being seen himself.

Through the day he simply followed the road, leaning over his horse’s neck

to check from side to side whether any tracks left the beaten path and
meandered out into the wild. Off the great hog’s back that supported the road,
the ground swiftly became boggy. Muddy islands choked with twisted alder
gave way to reeds in great rustling sheets, standing up from water that reflected
the empty sky.

Here and there he passed a marsh dweller’s hut, on stilts in the brackish

ponds, thin blue smoke curling out of their thatch. Once a woman came out to
watch him pass, and he asked, “Did a party of warriors come past? With a
harper amongst them? Where did they go?”

She waved an arm to indicate the road, and shouted, “Along awhile, lord.

Going slow but steady. You’ll catch up with them if you canter.”

Waist deep in the watery mud beneath the pylons of the house, one of the

woman’s children—probably a girl, though it was hard to tell—ladled a clump of
oozy grass into a slingshot and pelted the path in front of Fealo’s feet. Fealo
danced back, snorting in fear of this flying thing. Another warrior might have
taken this as an insult, sloshed his way into the marsh and cracked the child’s
head against one of the pillars of the house.

Wulfstan was drawing breath to warn the woman of this—to suggest she

might keep her offspring in order for their own sake. From the lightning strike of
fear that showed on her face, she had got there before him. Her house had
doors in every direction. She moved the wicker screen from the bottom of one
and leaned out into the clammy dark to shout at her daughter, her voice steely
with suppressed panic.

As she harangued one child, a second—this one a naked infant—came

crawling and rolling out of the opposite door. She had a brood of imps, he
thought, noting the look of determination on the baby’s face. He was still
foolishly smiling when its hand went over the edge of the platform, it fell forward
and, jerking its body in shock, kicked itself over the side and fell into the marsh.

The soupy water closed over it without making a splash. Caught up in

arguing at the other side of the house, the woman’s head didn’t turn.

“Goodwife!” Wulfstan yelled, and waded in to the muck, keeping his eyes

fixed on the spot where the baby fell. “Your child!”

It was a pale blur beneath the murk when he got there. He seized it fast,

though it was slippery, and raised it out. A little boy, who bawled at his bruising
grip as soon as he was out in the air to do so.

Both woman and daughter had run to him by this time, so he could hand the

wet and outraged infant up to its mother and let her deal with soothing it. “My
lord, my lord!” she said, taking it and crushing it to her chest, turning its face to
press her cheek to its. “Thank you. Thank you! How could that…? The screen
should have…”

On all four doors a similar wattle screen had been set against the underside

and tied with coarse string, as a precaution against just this mishap. This one had
come undone. The child must have pushed its way through, too fearless and
curious for his own safety.

“What can I do to repay you?”
Wulfstan waded back to the path. Inappropriate laughter struck him as

though blown in his face by a demon. He struggled to keep it inside. “Nothing.
Nothing, just keep a closer eye on your brood in future. Not all warriors are
such mild men as I.”

Perhaps the laughter was carried on something in the air, for she caught it too

now. “Oh, I will, lord. I do not think my daughter will forget this fast. Bless you,
sir. Thank you. Good luck to you in your quest.”

So he returned to the hunt for Leofgar with a mother’s blessing, and though it

did not counteract his curse, he felt a little stronger for it nevertheless.

At noon he chewed on some salted meat and gave an apple from the nuns’

store to his horse, riding on. It was not until twilight that things began to change.

Wulfstan dismounted when the shadows crept out from beneath the

hawthorns and slithered under Fealo’s feet. Leofgar’s captors would not keep
on going through the darkness. They would find somewhere to camp, and thus
he must be nearing them. He walked on, conscious of every footfall and every
whicker from his steed.

Rings on his bridle chimed faintly as Fealo champed, and every so often the

horse would put his nose down and lip at the side of Wulfstan’s face, slicking his
cheek with horse spit. He began to lunge to the side, trying to pull Wulfstan over
to the verges where he could crop the long grass and lean down to drink his fill
from the narrow ditch that ran alongside the road and drained it.

Finding a place where grime had choked the ditch, Wulfstan carefully led

Fealo across and down into a thicket of willow. He left the horse haltered there
to graze and drink and recoup his strength, but he did not unbridle him. Not yet.

The waning light had darkened when he donned his helmet and came back

onto the road. Tilting back his head he snuffed the air and smelled smoke.
Grimly pleased, he pulled himself heavily up on the willow’s gnarled branches
and saw, not too far off, an area of sky painted faint madder red from the
underglow of a fire.

Quietly as he could, clutching at the skirts of his mail so that they should not

rustle, he walked through the darkest shadows to the edge of that stain of
flames.

The light showed the outline of a man on watch, hand on his spear.

Wulfstan’s own hand went, without thought, to the horn that hung from his belt.
He had closed his fingers on it and pulled it free, was halfway through lifting it to
his lips before he caught himself. Ancient custom required that he announce
himself with a horn blast or be accounted a thief. His honour revolted over the
thought of sneaking into another man’s camp to take something of his without
giving his name, without offering him a chance to fight back. Could he do that?
Could he sacrifice one more piece of his warrior’s virtue and have anything left
of it when the deed was done?

Yet the manly way was to challenge and fight all three, openly, without

deceit. Could he do that? Take on three hale men-at-arms, and he with a wound
in his shoulder barely healed, strapped tight and sore?

A few steps back from the sentry, halfway down the ditch that lined the road,

a fallen tree branch had lodged and stuck. Wulfstan stepped onto it, and across,
picking his way among the trees to the sentry’s left, worming around until he was
behind the man and could see the two tents in their clearing—the soldier’s
shelter and the lord’s pavilion lit from within by lantern and brazier.

The silver banding of the horn dug into his fingers. This was wrong. It was

wrong to come in here like a wolfshead, like an evil spirit. His honour, such as it
was, would not bear it. No, he would announce himself, they could talk. There
was surely some negotiated settlement they could come to that did not mean he
should utterly abandon the niceties of civilized—

“No!” Leofgar’s voice split the silence, ringing with horror and denial. “No,

no, no!”

He didn’t hear words in the reply, just the tone of voice, the self-satisfied

deep growl of a hunting wolf on its patch, but he was already moving. Gently,
gently, silently. Biting his lip to keep from yelling a challenge, and letting all
thoughts of his own dishonour fall from him like rain from swans’ feathers, he
worked his way further around the clearing until he was directly behind the large
tent.

Light shone straight as the road from a gash someone had made in the

canvas. Wulfstan shoved the little knife he shaved with—sharpest of blades—
back into his pouch. Encouraged by the thought that someone had already made
a doorway for him, he looked once round the edge of the tent. The sentry still
faced the road, the second man lay swathed and sleeping under his awning.
Good.

“Don’t! Please!”
Bile rose in his throat, and rage trembled in his fingers. No one on this middle

earth had the right to make his harper plead. No one!

Swallowing rage and curses, his hand not so steady as it might have been, he

took hold of the edges of that gash and pulled it apart, squinting through the
flood of lantern light that poured out. He took one glimpse—Leofgar, face
pushed into the pillow, clothes in disarray, the man atop him, crouched bearlike
and laughing, laughing very quietly, his brown teeth bared.

One glimpse was enough. Wulfstan tore the fabric asunder, took two steps

and swung at the man with the only thing he had in his hand. The round
mouthpiece of the horn, bound with silver, hard as aurochs’ bone, caught his
enemy beneath the ear and knocked him out.

He sprawled forward, all his weight coming down at once on Leofgar’s

back, and Leofgar gave a tiny noise of despair that made Wulfstan wish with all
his soul that the rescue had been harder—that he had been given better excuse
to hack the limbs from his friend’s lord and burn the wounds shut and leave him
a living stump as the Vikings were wont to do.

He strode forwards and kicked the man off his friend. Even as he did,

someone in the outer camp called “My lord?” with a note of concern, and he
wondered how much had been heard, how much suspected.

Leaning down, he grabbed Leofgar by the collar. The slighter man had gone

somewhere inside his head. It took hauling him up and shaking him before his
face creased in confusion, then it cleared and sharpened and he was himself
again.

“Quickly!” Wulfstan whispered, “I think they’ve heard me.”
“They’ll have seen…” Holding up his trousers with one hand, Leofgar made

a quick sweep of the tent, resisting as Wulfstan tried to haul him bodily away.
“Your shadow on the walls.”

“I’ll—” Wulfstan moved to douse the candle that stood upright as an angel in

its waxed horn lantern.

“No!” Leofgar interrupted him, his resolute look turning to panic as he

fumbled amongst the chests and heaps of discarded armour around the
perimeter of the tent. “Where is she? I can’t go without her. Where did he put
her?”

“My lord?” The voice was closer now and sharper. Wulfstan considered

gentleness but thought he knew this mood—he’d seen it before after many
battles, when the spirit had been tried beyond its endurance. The querulous need
for one thing, one thing only, to make the broken right again. With warmth, rest
and food, it would pass, and he could not indulge it and force a fight they might
both lose.

He grabbed Leofgar by the hips and hoisted him over his shoulder—he was

a light man, easy to carry, even squirming, through the rip in the tent. Some
inkling of the danger must have bitten through his fell mood, for he didn’t fight the
hold or the rescue. Indeed, he went very, very quiet, lying like the dead over
Wulfstan’s shoulder.

If there had been more time to think, perhaps that too would have worried

him. But as he wormed his way out into the night he was all too conscious there
were hands unlacing the tent door behind him. One could not fit even one
recitation of the Grace into the time they had before the alarm was sounded and
the pursuit on, and Wulfstan didn’t have the time to think.

Carrying his burden straight into the woods, he headed, fast as he could,

dodging branches and brambles, through the darkness towards the road. When
he reached it, Leofgar squirmed in his hold. “Put me down.”

“You’re not going to run back?”
There were no clouds in the sky, and from one end of the world to the other,

the flat land was covered by a sheet of stars. In that steel-coloured light,
Leofgar’s voice was uncanny, cold and pitiless as the sky. “I go back on my
own terms.”

Curst creature , Wulfstan thought, tempted for a moment simply to drop the

harper on the packed ground and walk away. He felt hard done by, angry. He

had given up much and hoped for some gratitude, not this eerie passionless calm.

He told himself again that every man reacted to shock in his own way and

forced himself to gentleness, letting the harper down to stand beside him, slight
and taut as a bowstring. “Of course. But a wise man would not go now. They
are armed and angry and expecting us. Quickly now. We’ll get to Fealo, we’ll
outdistance them.”

Suiting his actions to his words, he moved off. When he was sure Leofgar

was following, he began to run. There was as yet no sound of pursuit, and as he
leaped the ditch to find the small hollow where he had concealed his horse, he
wondered at it.

“Quick. Onto the horse. We’ll go back to the priory, ask them to shelter us.”
Leofgar set a hand to Fealo’s bridle, stopping him, and turning the horse

away from the road, further into the wilderness of carr, the wet reeds and the
mud, the saw-edged grasses and the clumps of fern and willow. “No. Deala and
Hunlaf will try to wake Tatwine—that buys us a little time. When they are sure
he’s well, they will seek us along the road. So we should not be on the road to
be found. In the middle of the night, they cannot search the wild wood. The
darkness beneath the trees will be our shield.”

Wulfstan didn’t like it. He would rather go back to the safety of man’s walls

and the protection of the holy women. He didn’t want to tell Leofgar that he was
afraid—that every step he took away from the human world, every step into the
place of spirits, the untamed land, was a step that unmanned him. So he
clenched his hand around his sword-hilt and followed the harper into the dark.

After little less than the time it would take to say seven paternosters, the

night’s silence was shaken by the sound of horses on the road behind them,
hooves thundering and spears rattling by the saddle. Wulfstan did not know
whether to be impressed or annoyed at his companion’s wisdom. Annoyed,
perhaps, for he would rather have been caught by mortal man than by the land
spirits and the water spirits, the ettins and elves that awaited him out here.

They walked and waded through mud and drowned land for what felt like

half the night, Wulfgar following the glimpses in starlight of Leofgar’s tall form,
willowy as the reeds. At last it occurred to him that the man’s gait was strange,
his head was down and his limbs moved almost like the limbs of a puppet cut
from wood. As they climbed onto one of the infrequent hummocks of drier,
wooded land, he leaned forward and caught Leofgar by the belt, stopping him as
instantly as a thunderbolt.

The harper turned, gave him a look of terror, out of eyes that seemed to have

drunk up the night sky, were as equally grey and luminous and full of stars. The
sight sent a shock through Wulfstan, a blaze as of lightning from head to foot,

that made his spine sing and all the members of his body wake up and give voice
in harmony.

Since that first moment, there had been something about Leofgar that

overawed him, that frightened him. But the fear pleased him. Two breaths, tight
and gasping, passed as his mind showed him what he would do if Leofgar
narrowed those uncanny eyes, stepped forward and pushed him up against the
tree behind. The tree would pin him, and he would be helpless. It would not then
be his fault if Leofgar put his narrow hands on him, wrung pleasure out of him as
he would wring it from the strings of his harp, and took what Wulfstan could not
quite bring himself to offer…

“Wulfstan? What is it?”
He shut his eyes and covered them over with his hands to stop off the source

of temptation. For if he did, if he somehow encouraged that to happen, what
guarantee was there that it would not end as it did with Cenred? He had a habit
of punishing those who gave him what he wanted, and he could not bear for it to
happen again. His very heart would break in two if anything he did was to harm
Leofgar, whether or not the man proved as false as Cenred had. Even if he too
laughed, after.

“It is nothing. Forgive me. Do you not think we’ve walked enough? Let us

stop here, eat. Sleep. You have been wronged and—”

“You think I am not man enough to carry on despite it?”
“That’s not what I—”
“Or you think I am some kind of boy who needs to be cosseted, because I

do not carry weapons like you?”

“No! I’m just tired, Leofgar. I want to stop.” Happily, his wound chose that

moment to twinge, so the flinch and the movement to press his hand against it
and warm the pain away were not feigned. They did the trick. Seeing Wulfstan’s
weakness, Leofgar’s mouth relaxed and his lips came out of hiding. His
shoulders slumped.

“I’m sorry. I had forgotten your wound. I had…I am not…”
Wulfstan turned away from the halting attempts at explanation. He didn’t

want to see the well-spoken man stutter like a dolt. It hurt to watch.

Under the trees, he found a litter of small branches and piled them atop each

other to make a drier seat than the bare ground. When he lowered himself to sit
there, wrapping his cloak around himself to keep out the night wind, Leofgar
came slowly to perch beside him.

It was like watching a half-trained hawk return to the hand, Leofgar sidled in,

sideways, alighting at first as far from Wulfstan as he could get without falling off.
Accustomed to the skittishness of raptors, Wulfstan made no move at all and

was rewarded by the man shuffling a little closer, bringing up his feet beneath the
hem of his cloak and huddling beside him, for all the world like a bird on a cold
branch, head sunk in its hunched shoulders and its feathers ruffled.

As if to complete the picture of misery, a cold drop of water hit the end of

Wulfstan’s nose, two spattered his cheek, and a moment later it was drizzling
with the grey endless relentlessness of the grey endless fens.

Leofgar pulled a length of his cloak over his head, wrapped his arms around

his knees and laid his right cheek against them, so that he was looking away from
Wulfstan when he said, “I should not be so surly. You came in time.”

He would never have asked the question, didn’t know what to think of the

answer. Ventured on “good” because it seemed appropriate. His own mind was
mazed in strange thoughts, aware that he would not have fought his own lord, if
the same sacrifice had been demanded of him. Ecgbert could have had him for
the asking, though he could not imagine the man ever lowering himself to do so.

The falling rain made no noise, but the long leaves of willow above their

heads streamed with a hiss in the wind. The sky’s sheaf of silver stars, the spray
of heavenly milk were both veiled now behind cloud, and it grew very dark, too
dark indeed to see more than an indigo outline of Leofgar’s pale cheek, and the
faint glitter of one open eye. Through the shoulder pressed against the man, he
could feel him shiver in the deepening cold as his thin summer cloak soaked up
water and chilled against his skin.

Leofgar’s voice was oddly remote, as though it did not come from the

miserable piece of flesh abandoned there in the dark, as though it belonged to
some forlorn angel, cast out from Heaven, too proud for Hell, condemned to
wander this earth alone until he be taken back.

“He has my harp.”
“What?”
A swallow, as if the name stuck in his throat. “Tatwine. He took my harp.” A

shift of tone told Wulfstan the next thing was not of the same order of agony,
though it too was resented. “And my lyre. But my harp, she… My master gave
her to me, almost with his last breath. Ten years I was walking beside him, from
hall to hall, enduring the scorn of the warriors and their women, singing praises to
those who despised us. Years while I learned names that go back to Woden, the
wisdom and the runes of the scop-craft, while I stored my mind with words and
kennings and histories and tales. Ten years, and he did not beat me once, though
I deserved it.”

With a crackle of wood beneath them, the hunched ball that was Leofgar

pulled itself tighter together. Wulfstan untucked the ends of his own cloak and
draped his arm and a quarter circle of red wool, lined with wolf’s fur, over the

harper’s narrow shoulders. For a moment he went rigid as a stone. But the
comfort did its work and there was a slight yielding. Leofgar turned his head, so
that he was facing Wulfstan, but carried on talking to his knees. Meanwhile a
damp and heavy warmth grew up between them, loosening Wulfstan’s tired
limbs, as well as his grip on his unruly thoughts.

“The harp was his,” Leofgar went on, “as it was his master’s before him.

She’s holy to me—the voice of our lineage. I will not be the one who silences
her. I must have her back.”

Wulfstan so liked the tone of determination from him, so liked the feel of that

trim waist in the crook of his arm and the long and sinewy torso tucked against
his own, that it took him long moments to follow what the man had actually said,
and a kind of jealousy slipped his guard, pricked his tongue with unconsidered
words. “You can’t think of going back there! He will have the two of them hold
you down and watch, next time.”

The shoulder pressed against his went stiff again.
“He will have to, to prove his lordship. You challenged him, Leofgar. He will

have to prove himself the stronger man now—”

“I know how this works!” The voice had turned to ice. It crackled along the

edges with sharp icicle spines. “Do you think I—looking like this—do not know
exactly how this world works for boys and women and slaves? I am none of
those things, and I will not let fear rule me. I am a man and I will act as one. Let
the thieves who have taken my wealth from me beware, for I will not!”

The cloud was still heavy overhead, but Wulfstan’s sight had grown used to

the dark enough to see the narrowed eyes and the hard swordpoint lines of
Leofgar’s face. He’d long known he was formed wrong, and so it came as no
surprise that these thoughts of being held down and forced, horrifying as they
were when applied to Leofgar, made his own belly seethe with want and his
breath come short. Leofgar’s anger was a beautiful thing to him, one that would
lash him like a penance and clean him, perhaps, as prayer would.

His thoughts—as mentioned before—were tangled as a mess of net thrown

up on a beach after a storm. He could not blame them when his right hand of its
own accord rose to touch the fine, sharp bones and cold skin of Leofgar’s face.
He leaned in and kissed Leofgar unwarily, trying to draw the crackling anger
behind the harper’s lips into Wulfstan’s yearning mouth.

Taken by surprise, Leofgar did not react at first, his lips cold and damp

against Wulfstan’s. Then he gasped, jammed his pinned elbow into Wulfstan’s
ribs, drew back his other hand and slammed the heel of it into Wulfstan’s throat.
As Wulfstan doubled over, coughing, there was a flurry of movement, too quick
to see—like a cricket’s jump—and when he could breathe again and had

dashed the tears from his streaming eyes, Leofgar was gone.

He leaped up. A faint rustle of water to the right might have been the sound

of someone’s stealthy wading. “Wait!” he cried, blundering downhill and
plunging after it. “Wait, please! Leofgar! I didn’t mean that the way it seemed.
Wait!”

Shouting and splashing meant he could no longer hear the ripple of the

harper’s light tread. He could see his hand in front of him, but little more than
that. “Leofgar! You were supposed to—” fuck me. You can be my man—I’ll
be your boy.

He couldn’t shout that out here, where the Heavenly Father alone knew what

was listening. He couldn’t let the woman who somehow still dogged his steps
with her magic know he had killed her son unjustly. Couldn’t let the world know
that his cruel friend had been right all along. Not even here, alone in the wild,
was he willing to be that honest.

“Please come back! I didn’t…I don’t…”
So, again, he allowed integrity to fall out of his hands like a shield pierced by

too many javelins. “Leofgar!”

Silence now in the marsh, but for the whisper of reeds and the slosh and suck

of his own footsteps. He stumbled forward in stubborn hopelessness, neither
knowing if he yet followed his fleeing friend, nor how to find his own way back.
The water closed over his footsteps, and the night lay blind over all.

Chapter Thirteen

Leofgar had laughed when Wulfstan first called him an elf, thinking it strange

that the warrior should share his mother’s imaginings. He supposed now, though,
there had been some reason behind the thought. Lacking other protections—a
lord’s shepherding fist, a settled man’s neighbours and friends—he and his
master had been forced to roam parts of the world that did not welcome
humans. Even in this land, which St. Guthlac had called “a howling wilderness
inhabited by demons” Leofgar felt at home.

Now he walked silently through the land sunk beneath the wave, swinging

round to come up beside the line of the road and have it there at his right hand,
on its hog’s bristle of ground, as comforting as a city wall in winter when the
wolves are howling without.

It felt good to exercise all his caution in walking, in blending into the

background and reading the land through the soft soles of his shoes. These were
now so soaked he felt like a frog, web-footed, welcome in both worlds.

It felt good to be alone, where he knew his own worth, where he knew the

only touch on his skin would be that of the wind. His cheek felt flayed, his mouth
foreign to him. He wanted to scrub it off, get his own skin back, feel like his own
man again. Yet he could not stop touching his tongue to the place where
Wulfstan had kissed him, and the night wind chafed the damp. His body was full
of lightning, his lungs full of anger and his spine like a steel rod—like a sharp
steel sword. It hurt him to walk. All his bones were sharpened steel, and he
could feel them cutting him apart from the inside out.

There was such a rage fizzing under his skin, he wondered for a moment if he

had been possessed—it felt larger than he. So the berserks must have felt,
gnashing their shields as they went to war, as though they had to kill or they
would burst, blown up like a fool’s bladder with anger like air.

Why? Why must he look like this? Why must this happen? Anger tangled

with tears. If he could not hit someone, perhaps he could weep some of the
poison out? But no, a wise man keeps these things within his mind—life is hard
and changeable, and who can respect a man blown about by every wind of
thought?

Yet…yet. Oh, Heavenly Kingdom’s Guardian, he had perhaps been

prepared for Tatwine’s action. Leofgar had known it was coming when he
followed his master’s advice and stayed. He’d braced himself. He understood
why he should not resent it—the man had the right—and there, Leofgar was at

fault. He could admit it. He knew of Tatwine’s intention and, knowing, he had
stayed too long. Wulfstan, though…

His foot glanced off a stone set invisibly beneath the water. The ankle turned,

and he went down on one knee, wetting his legs to the skirts of his tunic and his
arms to the elbow. This little indignity was one too many. He broke the silence of
the last few hours with a cry of mingled misery and pain.

“Piss-drinking son of a sow! Kiss a cow’s arse, you devil-begot bench-

boaster. You shit-witted, cunt-bitten coward!”

Even now, a part of him—the scop’s mind in him—noted the line,

remembered it for future use when he should be in need of a handy phrase at
flyting. The rest too felt a little better for it. He rose and squeezed the water from
his tunic, allowing himself to stop for a moment. Fatigue and regret hit him
together like a spearhead to the breast.

He couldn’t say, after all, that he hadn’t been expecting something of the sort

from Wulfstan either. It would be a lie to insist he had not thought of the man, of
lying skin to skin with him with no clothes between. He should not, perhaps,
have taken out on Wulfstan all the anger he felt for Tatwine. They could have
worked something out, surely? Found a way to please one another that did not
disgrace either.

He raised his fingers to feel where his chafed lips had become red and rough

from the wet. The kiss hadn’t been, now he cast his mind back, so much a
command as an invitation—not so much taking as offering.

If possible, his heart sank lower. Wulfstan was a pox-addled pustule to have

tried anything at that point, but if only Leofgar had kept his composure as a man
was supposed to do, they could have spoken, come to some kind of agreement,
spent the night warm, curled in two cloaks and one another’s arms.

Now, with trackless miles and darkness between, that chance was lost. At

the thought, he wanted very much to retrace his steps, find Wulfstan and try that
conversation again. But who knew where the man had gone, following Leofgar’s
wraith through the dark? Leofgar would not find him for blundering about equally
blind.

Sighing, Leofgar resigned himself to his wyrd, sent up a prayer to God to

twine his path once more with Wulfstan’s, and left it at that, returning his mind to
thoughts of his harp.

The drizzle had dried, but clouds crouched low over the land. When he

looked up at the line of the road, it was easy to see the blush of madder-red light
on the underside of the sky where someone had built a roofless fire. A mile or so
back from where he stood, but doubtless he had walked further in his rage than
he had meant to.

Now he untied his last weapon from his belt—the slingshot he used to hunt

small birds for meat. Picking the stone out from under his shoe, he wedged it in
the use-worn hollow of the leather and slipped another two down the neck of his
tunic. Thus armed, he began creeping up the wooded slope of the road, making
his way towards the light.

His plan comprised of three parts. Firstly, to find out whether that was

Tatwine’s camp. Secondly, if it was, to get the harp back. Thirdly, to accomplish
points one and two and get away without being caught. It was the third that
slowed his steps and called upon all his caution and woodlore to go unseen. It
was because he had rubbed his face with mud and stood quite silent in the lee of
a twisted oak, with all his senses heightened, that he smelled them first.

A reek like that of foxes came to his nostrils. He breathed deep, silently,

tasted wood smoke, wet ash, years and years of sweat soaked into coarse wool
with the fat still in it, wet sheep, wet man. He froze, and the owners of the stench
went past him, almost as stealthy, but that they were whispering.

“We should get them now.”
“No.” A dogged voice, a youth’s voice with the cadence of an earl’s son and

the shake of sickness. Leofgar opened his mouth wide to breathe more quietly,
for he recognised it from his meeting with Wulfstan. It was the outlaw boy, come
back with more of his kind. “Something stirred them up. They’ll be on edge.
Let’s give them time to take off armour, calm themselves and sleep. Then we’ll
get them.”

Leofgar let them go past and followed after, watching as they took up places

around the circle of firelight. The man in the clearing did not see them, his eyes
blinded by the fire. It was Deala on guard now, Hunlaf asleep, Tatwine closeted
in his tent with no lantern burning, sleeping, or brooding on what should be done
with traitors.

Watching from the outside, watching the wolves close in, Leofgar didn’t

know what he should feel, could not think of a story that fitted enough to guide
him. He knew what he did feel, and that was outrage. Protectiveness. These
scum should not harm his lord, nor his warriors. Not if he had anything to do
with it. But how to stop them without falling at their hands, and without putting
himself back into Tatwine’s power?

Chapter Fourteen

Saewyn had been buying a second horse in Cotanham when Wulfstan

emerged from the shelter of the nuns’ house to interrupt the capture of a
runaway harper. She ducked her head so that he would not see into the shadow
of her hood. She had paid for a whole set of new clothes before leaving home,
and by alternating pieces, turning her lined cloak one side out or the other, she
could pass—at a distance—for five or six different folk. She could shift her sex
from one to the other, simply by pulling up or letting down the length of her
skirts.

This disguising had been useful over the long period when she had followed

him, waiting for the curse to strike, driven to see it happen, to make sure for
herself that appropriate vengeance had fallen. It was hardly needed today, for he
didn’t look around himself once. He only stood, watching as his companion was
dragged away, before he muffled up his horse’s hooves and set off in pursuit.

It was easy to pursue a man, or a party of men, when there was only one

road for all. This she knew herself. It seemed a great deal less easy to do
anything once they were found.

Exasperated, she thrust the whole asking price of the horse into the seller’s

hands. They had barely started to bargain, and he looked at the coins with deep
suspicion, and then at the mangy nag on the other end of the leading rein.

“Even I must admit he’s not worth this.”
Saewyn laughed, because it was better than screaming her woes into his

face. “If he does what I want him to do, he will be worth every penny.”

Maybe he knew what she was because of the scent of herbs. Or maybe he

saw from her eyes what she was about, for he pressed one penny back into her
open hand and retreated with a white-eyed unconvincing smile. “Take him and
go.”

So she followed the warrior back whence he’d already come, and if it was

harder to hide two horses on the road, there were two reasons it did not matter.
The first that this was another change of guise, from mounted follower to horse
drover. The second that, oblivious as always, he was simply not looking.

His blindness showed her that the curse was working. She’d felt the words

and the sacrifice come together to create a great making—she’d felt it, she
knew it had worked. Yet if it had not been for little things like his inability to see
her, or the haunted look she had seen on his face on the rare times she had come
close enough to tell, she would have said the spell had failed.

He should be dead by now. He should have died before he passed out of

Ecgbert’s lands—bucked off by his horse, challenged by one of the other
warriors for some petty reason the challenger would not remember later, struck
down by elf-shot, savaged by illness or wolves.

The outlaws had been late arriving, but she’d been sure that they were her

instrument. Hidden by spell and clump of trees, she’d watched them attack him
and felt a kind of salty blood-warm glee at the thought that finally here was
Cenred’s revenge, and it was perfect.

She had felt her net tightening, and there had been a kind of horror in it

alongside the triumph. Not enough to make her look away, only to make her feel
sick afterwards, when some unknown hand had lifted up the edge of the
enchantment and allowed him a rescuer.

He should have died in the night from blood loss. Should have died the next

day from infection. Should not have regained his strength overnight with the ease
of youth and innocence.

Wulfstan had stopped. Saewyn cut her thoughts off at the root and stopped

too. The nag was glad to do so—he’d already gone halt on the dry road.
Picking up his feet, she saw his hooves looked greasy, felt soft to the nail. She
would have to use him tonight before he became too lame to travel with her.

Meantime it didn’t hurt to allow him to rest and sup some water from the

ditch of the road, nibble on the mallow that bordered it. Hidden between the two
horses, she could lean on his shoulder and watch Wulfstan as he spoke with a
fisher-woman in her house out in the marsh.

His face was very open—afraid, but not for himself. She saw with indignation

that his haunted look had faded. Out here, where—as he believed—no one he
knew was looking at him, he had lost some of his perpetual twitchy wariness and
seemed disposed to smile. She watched the fisher-child insult him, saw him
answer it with a good humour she had not expected from him.

A babe fell into the water. She had hardly time to dart forward and jostle

against the horse’s inquisitive face, before he had pulled it out and restored it to
its mother. At the sight she almost choked on the oily swell of her hatred for him.
How dare he? How dare he so casually fish that woman’s child out of the mire
and laugh so dismissively over her gratitude, when he had pushed Saewyn’s
under and held him there till he drowned?

She lost a short time to grief. When she came back to herself, trembling, he

was gone. No matter—her heart was the harder for her anguish, and he would
not be difficult to find again. So something had strengthened him against her
spell? A talent he had in himself, or a patron in the spirit world had protected
him? She would have to reinforce her working with a second, stronger curse.

A short way off the dry refuge of the road, some small wooded islands raised

themselves above the level of the water. Kilting her skirts well above the knee,
she headed out towards one of them, tugging the reluctant horses behind her.

It mattered not which one she chose. She tied her own horse to one side of

the tiny isle, laid her saddlebags over her shoulder and led the lame horse over to
the other. There, she took out her heaviest seax and lopped down a sturdy tree.
Peeled of its bark, its trunk was as wide as the circle she could make with her
two hands. Large enough to take the runes, which she began to cut into it while
she still had the light.

Working from the bottom of the stake to the top, she stained each secret

word of power with her blood. As she did so, she felt her skin recoil from the
thing she made, all the openings of her body screw themselves tight, afraid its
touch might enter her.

It didn’t matter where she set the thing up because it would draw Wulfstan to

it as a hook draws in a fish. Her own spirit recoiled from it as it came into
existence under her hands. She thought it ugly, with an ugliness that should not
be allowed to exist in the world. She wanted it gone—wanted to score a knife
through the careful runes and undo them. She wished indeed to kick it into the
water and get far away, somewhere clean.

But the hatred in her desired to come out. In this stake she would give it

somewhere to live, a place that had no heart to be appalled by it, no head to
second-guess. A container into which she could pour every scrap of her malice,
and from which it would flow into her victim, pure and unstoppable as the
plague.

She dredged it up, every last bit, and put it in the stake. Finishing the thing

quickly, so that her scruples and softheartedness had no time to mount a
counterattack and stop her, she topped it with its gruesome crown and stumbled
away to be sick.

Let the child-killer survive that, if he could!

Chapter Fifteen

Leofgar was a man like any other. Wulfstan knew as much. Indeed, he had

seen him held down and nigh broken only hours ago. Yet with Leofgar gone,
when Wulfstan’s agony of remorse had worn itself out, what came creeping on
its heels was the return of his fear. Elf he might not be, but Leofgar had kept
Wulfstan’s curse at bay with nothing more than his presence. This did not
surprise Wulfstan. Harpers were known to have strange powers. All that lore
and knowledge, all that training, gave a man as sharp a mind as a flint’s edge,
and a sharp man’s mind was the deadliest thing in all creation.

Wulfstan stumbled to a halt, hearing the ripples of his footsteps rustle away

into silence. The dome of the sky above him was dark, and the earth beneath
was black. The wind was cold on his face, and the smell dank. Wet soil, wet
flowers, reeds rotting in the pools. Something moved by his foot—or perhaps he
only thought it did—but there was no Leofgar to turn his thoughts to joy. He was
alone again with the thing that followed him, and it was stronger for the repeated
betrayal.

He croaked out Fealo’s name, hoping the horse would hear his voice and

whicker. His throat had closed and his breath trembled in his mouth. There was
something—he felt it—something watching him. Quite close, he could almost
hear it breathing. The sense of its presence pushed at him, squeezed him like a
louse between fingernails. His mind filled with thoughts of himself cracking, the
blood-burst and the bones sinking in this unconsecrated ground to be gnawed on
by eels.

Drawing his sword, he turned a full circle, wanting to see the thing that

followed him. It would almost be a relief, by now, to see it full in the face. No
more hiding, no more pictures in his head. No more… It could not possibly be
as bad as the things he conjured up in his own mind.

Or could it? He wanted to see, but he did not want to see. His horror sat

bitter on the tongue, coppery-sickening like blood. Because it could be worse
than he thought. It stood to reason it would be worse than he thought, by the
same measure that a demon’s thoughts are worse than those of a man.

The sword-hilt slipped in his grasp, and he felt that the marsh boiled beneath

him, as though he stood in a nursery of dragons, slippery bodies writhing
between his ankles.

Behind him, the cloud opened slowly, and the moon’s colourless light slipped

through. He had time for the mere wraith of relief before he saw them moving

towards them—silver things flying above the water. Long, sinuous silver things,
rolling and twisting like wyrms above the dark mirror of the mere.

“Ah!” he shouted, and splashed backwards before they could touch him.

Stumbling, he turned on his heel and ran, ran like the coward he was, fighting for
each step through sucking mud as high as his knee. Filth splattered him and
terror drove him on beyond his endurance. The wetland sloped a little upwards,
and he came swaying, near to swooning, up onto another island.

There he fell to his knees, raised his head to thank God for small mercies,

and saw it rise like a gash in the world, a pillar of Hell, right in front of him. Flies
swarmed around its long pole, stirring so that the stake seemed to move, and the
runes carved there flickered between black and rust. On top of it—his gaze
drawn up against his will—the severed horse’s head still had a fringe of neck. Its
eyes were fly-bitten, but its mouth was open as though it screamed.

The moonlight grew stronger, but around the spite stake he thought that

darkness twisted like smoke and issued out of its mouth in a cloud.

“Nnh!” Wulfstan said again, a shameful whimper and, curling into a ball, he

covered his face, waiting for the land spirits to tear him apart piece by bleeding
piece. His throat felt raw and pain stabbed him deep under the shoulder blade,
deeper yet between the lips of his wound and under the heart. A weight crushed
his chest and his breath came shallow and painful, while nausea and dread
combined prickled his clammy skin.

Tiny silver lights, elves perhaps, encased his head, floated everywhere he

looked, and he thought desperately of his pilgrimage, clung on to the holy lady
with all his strength.

Aethelthryth, noble lady, holy lady, lend me your aid. Permit me to live

until I can ask for your forgiveness.

He waited for an answer, and as he waited, the light picked out the decaying

thing on its tree of evil with an ever more gruesome hand.

Do you even know what you’re seeking forgiveness for? The thought

came clearly to him, in a bright, fierce tone he was sure was not his own. He
would not be thinking this now. He would simply be cowering, waiting for the
blow to strike. Startled into life, his mind stirred sluggishly after an answer.

For being nithing. For being like a woman.
The other voice in his head was most unimpressed. Oh, it is a terrible thing,

surely, to be a woman. Perhaps I should go and leave you to handle this
like a man.

“No!” he shouted aloud. “No. Lady, please, not that.”
She did not speak again, and he was not surprised. But his thoughts, once

diverted into this strange channel continued to flow in it, taking him to places new

and unexplored.

God had, for some reason, chosen to make him nithing—to make him soft,

like a woman. It followed then, didn’t it—his thoughts were slow and troubling,
leading him to a place quite opposite from what everyone else believed—but it
did follow, that to deny God’s will for him was a sin. To kill to cover it up, that
was a sin too. God had made him the way he was, and it therefore could not be
so very evil. To lie about it, however, to conceal his nature from Leofgar, that
was the sin.

Gradually, as he remained uneaten, undestroyed, the pains in his chest eased.

He found he could raise his head. Sitting back on his haunches, hands on his
thighs, he looked at the spite stake with a new eye. It stared back, helping him
see himself more clearly, helping him understand.

He had not meant to kill Cenred. Ecgbert knew that, everyone knew that.

Even he knew it, though he had not allowed himself to feel it. Saewyn should
have accepted the weregild, and he…

He should have admitted what he was.
The thought came with a moment of lightness, as though a fire leaped up in

him, warm and golden. In that moment the spite stake was nothing more than a
piece of carrion held up by a stick. He could see where the uncanny open jaw
was propped that way by a couple of stout twigs driven into the roof of the
mouth.

Very daring indeed, he got up and on tiptoe poked the skull with his

scabbard. Nothing happened, so he wedged the metal tip of it beneath the head
and pushed hard. It slid stickily upwards, teetered at the sharpened top of the
stake and fell with a splat. It broke open on the ground, cold matter and brains
leaking out.

Stunned, Wulfstan drew his sword and made a tentative cut, and another.

Before long, he was stabbing and stamping on the thing with fierce joy. All his
life he’d believed these things could kill. All his life! What else had he believed
that had now been proved to be utterly wrong?

The thought of Aethelthryth recurred. The holy lady! She had answered his

prayer. By her strength he had done this, and she was a woman. Why, if a
woman could be so mighty, should anyone consider it shameful to be
womanlike? Why should he?

It felt like hours he knelt with his heart and mind afire with these new

thoughts. At last they burned down from flames to embers, and he saw how
filthy his hands and arms were, how covered in cold horsemeat his stamping feet.
Walking down to the marsh, he washed himself clean, and in the friendly silver
light saw the hog’s back of the road go winding past towards Cotanham on his

left. On his right stood the small wooded hillock on which he had left his horse.

By the time he had waded back to Fealo, rooted in his saddlebags for the

last of the bread, he was ready to sleep. He wrapped himself in his cloak,
stretched out on the pile of logs, which was a little less damp than the ground,
and told himself he would find Leofgar tomorrow, under the sun.

As he lay, becoming slowly aware of an absence of fear, the fretful breeze

teased at his long hair and tugged at the edge of his cloak. The night was silent
around him, silent enough so that when the wind on his cheek began to bring
music, he heard it quite clearly.

It would have curdled the blood in his veins—such a desolate music, without

rhythm or reason, changing from joy to despair between one note and the next.
This was devil’s music, he thought for a moment, with a brief stab of accustomed
panic, the sound of fiends pretending to make merry in the distance, their sorrow
constantly breaking through their pretense at joy.

He would have thought all of these things—he did, briefly—and then his

sleep-muzzied head remembered that it had heard this music before. Elegant
hands had drawn its witchery out of a box of wood and gut as he lay trying not
to die of the stab wound in his shoulder. Leofgar’s song.

His fear became joy, and he rose and followed the sound, knee deep through

the sucking marsh, slogging onward with all his strength returned to him and
nothing but thankfulness left in his heart.

Ere long, the ground raised into carr woods. There the night was pitch-black,

and Wulfstan walked with his arms outstretched, feeling like a blind man for
obstacles. The song came louder now. He turned, following, and walked hard
into a tree, losing his footing and stumbling with a crash into the undergrowth.

“What the hell was that?” A voice whispered it from just ahead of him. Not a

voice he knew.

“Shut up!” but this one was. A wave of outrage and anger lifted the hairs on

the back of Wulfstan’s neck as he recognised the lazy, confident, well-spoken
voice of the youth whose wolfshead band had attacked him mere days ago.
Leofgar had told him he had offered the boy mercy, a chance to go away and
heal, and yet here he was again, skulking through the night to kill and steal like
the vermin he was. “It’s probably one of the lads. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

“I don’t…” the other man whined, while above their heads the music stepped

from height to height into a screech that set a distant wolf pack ahowl. “Ceorl. I
don’t like it. There are creatures about—you can hear them, they’re
everywhere. I don’t…I want…let’s just forget about this lot, they’re protected.
It’s not worth—”

“You fucking coward.” The crack of a blow was followed by the harsh

breathing of an injured man and a very angry one. “We’re doomed and damned
already. If these are fiends, well, so are we. Let them be afraid of us! It’s three
men, with horses and mail and swords, and two of them are asleep already.
Easy prey and we can live off the spoils for years. I’m not letting elves or fiends
or anything get between me and it.”

“But…”
A soft sound and the other man took in a breath like shock, like betrayal.

“You’d draw steel on me?”

“I’m not having you get in my way either, understand?”
“Oh yes.” A whole world of understanding in the tone. “I get it now. Always

were too fucking good for the rest of us.”

The crashing of a scuffle. Wulfstan wished he could see clearly enough to put

his sword through both of them while they were distracted, but though he
strained his eyes until ghost stars swarmed in them, the night was sounds and
smells and cold and nothing more.

He took the chance to walk away, following the music, and as he did so, the

cover of the wood thinned a little and enough light sifted down from the clouded
sky for him to see the loom of trees before he blundered into them. Oddly, this
improvement in his sight made him more afraid rather than less. Shadows could
be guessed now, and there was only enough light to see the shadows, not
enough to tell whether they had moved.

Something spoke in his ear in a long wailing ululation of nonsense words that

made him think of Saewyn, but this was not her voice. It was tantalisingly
familiar, beneath a veneer of horrifying strangeness. His blood turned to water
for a moment, but the saint must have been with him, for his mind was clear, and
into it there came a memory of Leofgar laughing, casting his voice out to speak in
places where he was not.

“Leofgar?” he whispered, with a leap of the heart like a tongue of fire, “Is

that you? Where are you?”

At the same time, light bloomed on the world—a great, silent unveiling of the

moon and an unfurling into existence of everything around Wulfstan. Now he
could see the little clearing in which a single guard stood watching over a
campaign shelter and a well-appointed tent. He could see the dozen glints of light
from spearheads and knives that ringed the clearing, and he could see as a dozen
different gazes suddenly locked on the source of the music—a cloak-swathed
shape with a bone whistle in one hand and a slingshot in the other, unwisely
come out into the open while the night was so dark and betrayed now by the sky
itself.

Leofgar stood like a stag at bay in front of the hunters, while Wulfstan shook

off shock and shoved through grasping brambles, trying to come to his side. He
had yet not pushed out of the tangle of trees when Leofgar tipped his head up
and the moon made him all steel from those metallic curls to the wide grey eyes.
Wulfstan hesitated, hidden there on the eaves of the wood, because Leofgar
looked unearthly, in solitude drenched in silver.

Then in a voice too bull-like to come from his slight form he shouted, “Deala,

Tatwine, awake! Hunlaf awake! Your enemies surround you, awake.” He
broke, long legged like a fleeing deer, towards the shelter of the trees, at least
three of the outlaw band following.

Chapter Sixteen

A thrown spear buried itself in the earth just behind Leofgar’s heel. He

almost turned and picked it up, his instincts screaming at him to find something to
defend himself with—aware of all the eyes on him and the unfriendly light. Yet he
was no warrior, his talents lay in other areas, and he would be no match in plain
fight for any of these brawl-hardened outlaws.

He wished vainly for his bow, but a backward glance showed Tatwine

emerging from his tent, armed and armoured in steel. Their gazes locked and he
felt as though he’d run out over a cliff and ran on still, fruitlessly, with only a long
drop under him. He was not going back for the bow, not even if it meant his
death.

Shocked to see him, Tatwine said only, “Leofgar?”
“Outlaws!” Leofgar shouted, and jumped into a shadow as though it were a

pool of clean water. “Twelve, I think. There were more but they ran from me.”

Deala scrambled out of his shelter, came running to Hunlaf’s side. Tatwine

joined them, forming up, back to back, with their shields overlapped like fishes’
scales. Leofgar would have shouted Give me my bow! but the outlaws—only
the bravest, the most desperate left, now their more sensitive friends had been
scared away—were coming out of the tree screen themselves, in a wide ring of
ragged clothes and sharp weapons and sharper smiles, and he knew his lord did
not have time to break for the tent and arm him.

The treacherous moon saved him this time, gleaming off the edge of a sickle

as it swept out of the tree cover towards him. Without thinking, he fended the
blow off with his bone whistle. The blade drove itself into the hollow where the
marrow had once been, and stuck there. Leofgar pulled hard on the stuck
weapon, let the outlaw’s own thrust bring him closer and then ran up beneath his
arm and snapped the elbow over his shoulder.

The outlaw was a young man as thin as Leofgar, and he screamed with

abandon—no warrior training there either, clearly. Leofgar didn’t have time for
pity. He worked the sickle free of his poor, ruined whistle, and slit the boy’s
throat with it in one move. He turned to face the next man, the one armed with a
langseax and wearing some tatters of mail.

Under Leofgar’s breastbone, there was a little glow of satisfaction at the

thought that he had angered all of these men enough for them to single him out as
the first to die. The last few hours had been the greatest performance of his life
—walking from spot to spot, outlaw to outlaw, feigning conversations in the

dark behind them. Making strange noises and uncanny music, the sound of
hooves and ghosts, and when that had softened them up, following it with the
smack of stones from the sling. Pinches from demon fingers, the arrows of the
elves.

More than half the band had fled long before his unwise attempt to wake

Deala with a pebble from his slingshot had brought him out into the open to be
revealed. I defeated a dozen tonight. A score, perhaps. At the thought he felt
at peace and ready to die. So he was smiling when he brought his sickle blade
up and drew it, ringing, across the belly of the second outlaw.

The mail turned the blow effortlessly—the edge went skittering along the

rings to slide off harmlessly on the other side. This outlaw’s face was daubed
with mud—he got only the impression of a flattened nose and eyes like the point
of a spear before a crushing blow beneath his ribs picked him off his feet and
launched him backwards into the domed foliage of a holly tree behind him.

He tore through spiky leaves, breaking branches in his fall, landed on his

back and bruised his head. Pale sparks swarmed before his eyes, and he heard
the man cursing, trying to brush aside the sheltering branches and come closer in
to land another blow.

Rolling over, Leofgar got up on hands and knees and scrabbled away, all his

warm satisfaction turned into panic, and the realization that no, he didn’t want to
die. He didn’t want… All he wanted was…

As if Leofgar’s heart had called him up, there came a shout and a thud from

outside the sheltering arch of holly. The outlaw’s body, pumping hot blood from
the throat, crashed through the boughs to fall limp just where Leofgar had lain.
He crawled out of shelter and saw the back of a third outlaw turned to him, and
beyond the outlaw’s axe the never more welcome face of Wulfstan Glede, his
usual soft, open expression exchanged for fury.

Leofgar had seen Wulfstan fight—the efficient brutality of it, as though it was

a task he hated and got over as quickly as possible—and he knew this
wolfshead was no match for the warrior. But he had had enough of being
rescued. So when the outlaw leaned forward to parry the thrust of Wulfstan’s
sword, Leofgar hooked the sickle around the man’s inner thigh and pulled back.
It sawed into the great vein there. A rush of blood, black as ink, and the man
was down within seconds.

Let the warriors worry about how honourable it had been to attack from

behind. Leofgar would be the one to make up the song of this night, and he
could have it remembered however he chose.

When his enemy fell like a stone before him, and he recognised Leofgar,

Wulfstan’s taut concentration gave way to a look Leofgar could scarcely

interpret. Relief at first, and then something akin to tenderness, a plea. His
implausibly full mouth softened, and as he panted, eyes bright with the ardour of
battle, the tip of his tongue crept out to lick his lips.

Leofgar didn’t think, any more than he had thought when they first met. He

grabbed Wulfstan by the collar, dragged him into the holly—delighted by how
unresisting, how eagerly he came—pushed him down against the slender twisted
trunk and straddled him. He took handfuls of hair like fire and kissed and bit
Wulfstan’s mouth as if it had done him harm.

A time passed when all he could think of was spit-slippery warmth and the

hips held tight between his thighs, and the gorgeous little pleading whimper
Wulfstan made when he flipped up the man’s skirts and ground down on the
single layer of linen over his straining prick. Even the thought that he was sharing
this refuge with a dead man, newly cooling, only made everything feel better,
because they were alive.

A battle cry came in the distance, and he heard the clang of metal against

shield. He made himself draw away while he yet ached. Touching the plump hot
pillows of Wulfstan’s mouth with careful fingertips, he said, “I have a harp to
find, and a lord to save.”

Here beneath the leaves it was again altogether dark. He could only hear

Wulfstan’s hope. He would have liked to see it. “Later?”

“God willing.”
“You would save him, despite what he tried to do?”
“There are things a lord cannot ask of a man, and things he can. To stand by

him in battle—I owe him that, by my own oath.”

“Though he may try to do it again?”
Leofgar’s glee faltered at the thought, but determination replaced it. “If he

does, you and I will have to stop him. I have no doubt that together we can.”

Wulfstan smiled beneath his fingers. “I like the sound of that ‘together’. I am

not without demons, but against demons you have no fear. And your enemies
are but men—I am not afraid of them.”

Leofgar felt the smile take wing and latch itself to his own face. It was but a

little agreement, an acknowledgment that they were stronger together than apart,
but he had been terribly alone since Anna had gone, and this was a balm. “Let us
face the seen and the unseen together.” He took the chance to lean in and lick
the warmth from Wulfstan’s lips. They parted for him, obligingly.

“Lead on,” he said, because for all his pride he was without his bow, and it

was only sense to send the fighter out ahead of him.

In the clearing, Tatwine, Deala and Hunlaf fought back to back with deadly

and untiring skill. There were now only five men against them, the others lying

like driftwood on the ground. It was a simple matter for Wulfstan and Leofgar to
drift silent and unseen out of the woods, for Wulfstan to drive his long blade
through their spines from behind while they were distracted trying to defend
themselves from before.

With no fear for any of them, Leofgar hid his sickle’s gleam in a fold of tunic

and stepped from shadow to shadow, keeping hidden. Skirting the final battle,
he insinuated himself into Tatwine’s camp, and into his tent.

The sight of the bed turned his stomach, took the strength from his knees, but

he pulled his gaze from it and rummaged through spilled furs and tunics. Nothing.
The sound of battle slackened outside, blows now interspersed with panting and
insults, and he knew time was short. They had to be here! Had to. He scoured
the tent, and they were not.

Coming out, with tears and panic stirring, he saw the wood piled up beside

the campfire. Such a mound of it! His despair turned coat, turned into hope as
he remembered that he had once hidden Lark in a woodpile himself. He ran to
the pile of twigs and brack and brushed the top of it aside. There she was,
demure in her thick fur coat, with Hierting curled up beside her like a little sister.

“Oh!” he breathed, and pulled them from the litter, and might have wept and

grinned until his face hurt, except that he heard Hunlaf and Deala talking, their
voices growing louder, their footsteps approaching.

Holding the two hearpes to his chest with one arm, Leofgar backed away

into the tree cover. In their shade, it was as dark as sin, and he had to feel his
way between boughs—gauging direction from the growth of moss—until he was
looking out once more on the moonlit clearing, where the last outlaw, silently,
desperately fought off Tatwine and Wulfstan at once.

The outlaw fell in a curtain of red rain. Wulfstan glanced up at Tatwine’s grim

face and settled his sword more firmly in his hand. Shifting his stance, he
watched Tatwine with the intent focus of a man waiting for a deadly duel to
begin.

What was he doing? Leofgar’s thoughts, aglow over the recovery of his

hearpes, were slow to follow the threads. It looked as though Wulfstan was
gathering himself to fight Tatwine.

Hunlaf and Deala were still in sight, making certain the outlaws were dead.

The sound of heaving breaths, the gurgle of blood in slit throats, and the
whickering of picketed horses, distressed by both noise and smell, punctuated a
great silence as Tatwine and Wulfstan looked at one another and each
wondered what they saw.

Does he think I need avenging, like a despoiled maiden? Leofgar thought,

outraged and frightened for him. Because much good that will do me when

the three of them strike him down. “Glede!”

Wulfstan knew better than to break Tatwine’s gaze and look behind him, but

something in his posture shifted, told Leofgar that he was listening.

“Glede. Please, no more. It’s done. We should go.”
Backing away, Wulfstan sheathed his sword with a snick of hand-guard

against scabbard.

Tatwine raised his head, but Leofgar could tell from his face that all he could

see was a black whispering of trees. “Leofgar? Come out here. We need to
talk.”

Talk? Leofgar thought, keeping his mouth open only so that he could breathe

more silently. Oh, of course you want to talk now. Five, perhaps six more
steps before Wulfstan passed into the shadow of the trees, but until he did there
remained the chance that Tatwine might rush him, attack him simply to get
Leofgar to stay.

Wulfstan took another step, and Tatwine called out, “Deala! I want him

lamed. Bring him down!”

Deala was wrenching the gold tooth from an outlaw’s jaw and had put his

bow on the ground beside him. By the time he had picked it up, found an arrow
and aimed, Wulfstan had turned on his heel and bolted into the safety of the
shade.

Leofgar caught him on the way in, laid his fingers on the man’s mouth to quiet

him, and led him by the belt through the inky black—Leofgar feeling their way.
Wulfstan stumbled once or twice, but on the whole he was careful footed, and
their slight noises were covered by the rustle of the wind, and the movements of
fox and boar and badger in the undergrowth.

Though Tatwine did plunge into the wood’s edge to follow them, they left the

babel of his blundering miles behind them before they dared come out into the
light and cast about for where Wulfstan had picketed his horse.

Wulfstan bore a bemused look, half-shocked and half-delighted, that would

have sat well on a schoolboy who had just pulled his first prank on his monkish
tutor. “I see now why the Welsh are always making cattle raids along the
borders,” he said, grinning. “That was a hundred times better than any teaching
game set up by the master-at-arms. We showed them our mettle, truly enough.”

Light in the east and dew settling on them. It didn’t seem worthwhile to make

a fire, for the birds had already begun to sing. Leofgar’s blood called for
movement, and his mind agreed it would be better to get further away before
they could sleep in safety.

“We did,” he agreed, his spirit yet ablaze with the joy of battle. “He will have

expected as much from you, but if this doesn’t teach him that I am a man, I

know not what will. I have proved, tonight, I am not the soft little cringing
catamite he supposes. I am no contemptible butter-slick boy-whore to open for
his pleasure. I could not be so vile, and now he knows it.”

Leofgar smiled broad and bright at Wulfstan, hoping to hear him agree.

Wulfstan looked away, and his mouth closed so tight his generous lips looked
pinched. He unhobbled Fealo with brusque gestures, gathered up the reins in
silence. “You may as well put the hearpes on the horse and walk unburdened,”
he said at length, his voice gone cold. “And since you are not lost, you had
better lead us all.”

Taking the reins, Leofgar shuddered involuntarily as his own blood cooled to

match Wulfstan’s sudden chill. The delight of life began to seep away and other
things took up its place—memories of blood and rape and desperation. He
walked on, his thoughts circling around that moment under the holly bush. Once,
as a child learning the flute, he could not make his fingers stop the holes
properly, and the screeching and the rusty whistling and the silences had been
like to drive him mad. Then one day, for no reason he could see, practice fell
into place and the thing began to sing under his hands.

The moment under the holly had been like that—as though all the mistakes of

old had finally led to a perfect note, and all that was left was to play.

What had changed since then to turn Wulfstan to stone? Leofgar reviewed

his words, and weariness entangled him. Oh. He had boasted that he was no
boy. So Wulfstan would now be looking back on that moment and thinking it a
lie. He would be wondering what profit there was in keeping Leofgar company,
if all he got out of it was combative kisses and perhaps a hand no more talented
or obliging than his own.

Wulfstan had discharged any debt incurred when Leofgar saved his life.

Leofgar had told him outright he had no chance of gaining him for a ganymede.
When he was not lost, he would leave, and Leofgar could not, for all his word-
skill, think of any reason to offer him to stay.

Chapter Seventeen

Under the rich yellow light of a clean-washed sun, mist lay over water and

trees. The reeds swayed and changed colour as the billowing air showed forth a
dozen different shades. On either side of the road, small birds peeped in the
stalks of purple mallow and the feathery umbels of pignut. The day smelled like
mead diluted with ten parts of water—distantly honey-sweet.

Wulfstan tried to be soothed by all of this, but failed. When he forgot them,

his eyes would slide back to Leofgar who walked beside him. In this world of
beauty, Leofgar was the crown. The dew sparkled on his hair, moisture
darkening the gold to the colour of ripe barley. His hands on the reins were long
and slender and fine boned. The way they worked fascinated Wulfstan, whose
own seemed clumsy to him. So precise, so delicate.

Somewhere in the battle or in the struggle with his lord, Leofgar had lost his

round green hat, so he was capped now only with curls. It was easier to see the
angelic sternness of his face. Those eyes, grey under starlight, were ice-blue
beneath the sun. So often luminous and speaking, they were now cast down in
weariness, and his bruised face was still and emotionless, drawn in fine lines, his
hard, ungenerous mouth set thin.

He really was a tricksy, elflike creature, Wulfstan thought, ambivalent and

hard to understand. Last night, in the battle, they had seemed to be of one mind,
easy together as old friends. They had both yearned to be of one body too,
reached out for what they needed and found it perfectly supplied in the other,
like a key discovering the lock made for it.

Then Leofgar had let slip what he really thought of men of Wulfstan’s kind,

and it was no more generous than what Cenred had thought. Wulfstan didn’t
know who to hate more for it—Leofgar or himself.

Once they passed the place they had hidden in the marshes, the road began

to worsen. Swans came sailing up beside them, as the mound on which the road
was supported lowered towards the water. Puddles stretched from one side to
the other. Water rippled all around and geese honked overhead.

To the west, an island of wheat fields and gardens upheld a distant village

wreathed in smoke. They could see horses and cattle at graze in meadows
spangled with flowers, but between the end of the road and the first rise of the
island lay at least a league of water which neither they nor Fealo could swim.

“I thought this was too easy.” Leofgar turned to give Wulfstan a cheery smile,

as though he knew Wulfstan’s mood was black, but did not know why. As

though he hoped to jolly him out of it by his own example. “Didn’t we pass a
fisherman’s hut a mile back? Let’s go there and ask him if there is a route
across.”

They turned back, and at Leofgar’s expression of false cheer over true

confusion, Wulfstan understood that it was he who was the contrary, changeable
creature here. He saw that Leofgar had hoped they would end their journey in
the same spirit of unity in which they had battled, and did not know what had
happened since to make that stop.

“As you like,” he said. Then he felt ungracious and offered, “Perhaps he will

offer us hospitality too. My stomach growls for hunger like a wolf.”

So they turned around and picked their way back to the reed-thatched hut

that was the last dwelling they had passed. It stood on pilings out in the fen, and
two long, flat boats were moored underneath it, clopping gently at the supports
as the waters moved them. There was no sign of life outside, but smoke filtered
out of the thatch and made the whole hut seem on fire.

Thinking that a scop would be greeted with less fear than a warrior, Wulfstan

let Leofgar slosh out to it and swing himself up the netted rope steps that hung
from the door. This, he pushed open to let a great billow of smoke and warmth
puff out as he clambered within. Wulfstan followed only when a dirty-faced child
looked out afterward and beckoned him.

Inside the hut, the marsh dwellers offered Wulfstan a reed mattress on which

to sit cross-legged, while the thick smoke of the peat fire made his eyes stream.
Mopping them in the crook of his elbow, he accepted a leather cup of small
beer. When his eyes had recovered enough to pick out details in the sullen red-lit
dim, he watched Leofgar bargain for passage across the water to Ely.

The fenman with whom Leofgar spoke was little more than a youth himself,

beardless but tanned like old leather. His wife had a child in the crook of one
arm, while with the other she wove withies into swift-built eel traps. In the well of
the roof, where the smoke was thickest, bundles of smoked fish hung head
down and regarded Wulfstan with brown-tarnished eyes.

When he had drunk the beer, the wife took his cup away and refilled it with

hot salty eel stew from the cauldron in the centre of the fire. In silence she
passed him this and accompanied it with a hank of horse-bread so roughly milled
he could see the hedgerow gleanings embedded in the wheat.

Soaking it in the stew to spare his teeth, he chewed mightily and assessed the

place for possible threats.

Leofgar held the husband’s attention with brilliant smiles and wide, friendly

gestures, exaggerated rather than false. Still the woman’s attention was rarely off
Wulfstan, and the man’s regard returned to him whenever Leofgar faltered. They

were afraid of him, of his sword and his silence. After Leofgar’s unknowing
contempt, it pleased him to see it.

Perhaps it was the fear, or perhaps it was Leofgar’s offer of one of his many

rings that made the man say at last, “Well, lords, if you can keep the horse under
control, we’ll try it. Best if we take you across to Welingeham. It’s a little
further, but you can get along the causeway at Bealdread’s Hill there, and after
that it’s dry land all the way.”

“We are grateful for your wisdom.” Leofgar looked like he meant it. He

seemed just as at ease here amid the mean folk as he was at a banquet, as
though he made no matter of high degree or low.

But if that was so, why did he make so great a matter of man and boy?
When the fisherman passed Leofgar’s offered ring to his wife, she put her

child down in the nest of rushes beside Wulfstan and reached for the single plain
chest that sat against the wall. Unlocking it with the key at her girdle, she took
out a small leather pouch and worked its stiff mouth open. Wulfstan’s sleepy
vigilance moved over the other small items of her treasure with disinterest.
Halted, pricked by something sharper. His heart fell and then raced as he looked
again.

Yes, he recognised that brooch. An old thing made of polished brass that

gleamed like gold in the low light, it had a raised bow to hold the many folds of a
cloak, and at the end its foot was shaped like the head of a horse with blank
eyes and big nostrils. He’d seen it gleam like a spite stake in firelight before he’d
turned and run from Saewyn’s spell.

“A woman came here,” he said, staring intently at it.
The fisher-wife threw the thin band of Leofgar’s ring into the purse, pulled it

up tight and thrust it back into the chest as if she expected him to snatch it from
her. The husband’s hands stilled on his net.

“Peace,” Wulfstan said. “I do not dispute your right to the trinket. Only tell

me about the woman who gave it to you, for I know it. It belongs to the mother
of…a friend of mine. We keep missing each other in the wilderness. When did
she pass this way?”

The fisherman and his wife exchanged a speaking glance. Wulfstan wondered

if Saewyn had known he would come here too. Wondered if she had bribed
them to do away with him. She must have a poor grasp on his abilities if she
thought either of these wretches could be any threat to him.

Unless of course…he looked down at the empty cup of stew with a new and

terrible suspicion. She was a herb-wife, she would know how to poison a man
quietly, in a way that didn’t show. There had been so many rumours on her
husband’s death. That vile man had died of an ague Saewyn had treated with her

drenches and her brewings. Many had muttered that she might have slipped
henbane into the mix, though all agreed that if she had, it would only be what he
deserved.

“She came yesterday, my lord,” said the fenman, his hands beginning to work

again. “I took her as I will take you. She may yet be at the nuns’ guesting house
in Alrehethe. If she is not there, you will surely catch up with her at the abbey.”

Wulfstan contemplated the possibility of poison further. Examining his gut

revealed no discomfort, and the stew had been ladled out from a pot from which
everyone else had also eaten. They did not appear the worse for it either. No,
Saewyn had hounded him with magic, surely it was with magic she would
continue to work, not knowing that St. Aethelthryth protected him.

The thought actually surprised him. As they edged the nervous horse into the

larger of the two flat-bottomed boats, made him lie down and tied him in place,
his ears flicking and his nostrils wide at the smell of old fish, Wulfstan was
amazed to find that since meeting up with Leofgar again he had forgotten the
curse altogether.

With Fealo strapped tight, there was no room in that boat for passengers. It

went on ahead of them, while the fishwife, her baby in a wicker basket on her
back, motioned them into the other. She took up a long pole and pushed them
through the encircling reeds, out into the open water, following her husband with
ease.

It was hard to watch mother and child together, the baby’s head lolled in

trusting abandon between its mother’s shoulder blades, without new thoughts
about Saewyn. Once, Cenred had been that tiny, that helpless, that dependent
upon his mother. Once, she had nursed him and taught him and gloried in his
small achievements. If he had been cruel, if he had betrayed Wulfstan—or been
about to—why should that matter to a mother? She had lost everything, and her
pain must be infinitely greater than anything he suffered at her hands.

“You are very solemn today.” Leofgar sat cross-legged on a tangle of moss-

green ropes. Not wanting the damn hearpes on a different boat from himself, he
had taken them off Fealo’s back and had not yet given over cuddling them with
a tenderness that made Wulfstan jealous. “Have I done something to insult you,
or make you think I did not appreciate everything you have done for me?”

To insult me? Yes, you did that. Wulfstan’s mind turned from one trouble

to another, fortunately unable to battle more than one at a time.

Yet you sit there, looking like… Oh, Leofgar was lithe and sharp, and his

hands were large for all they were fine. Wulfstan was endlessly troubled by the
thought of them, imagining the sure, talented fingers in his mouth, in his arse.
Though it had ended badly, Cenred’s touch had only confirmed to him what he

wanted. He could not look at Leofgar without wanting it again, and more.

But Leofgar’s words had hit him hard, revealing the depths of the harper’s

contempt for the “soft little cringing catamites” who desired what Wulfstan
desired. Though—it seemed clear enough from what had passed between them
so far—he would lie with Wulfstan willingly, give him what he yearned for, and
be pleased and proud to be man enough to do it, he would despise Wulfstan
after, just as Cenred had.

It was not possible to tell Leofgar why he felt insulted without admitting he

was just such a catamite himself—without inviting that contempt.

Wulfstan had rather have Leofgar’s respect than his body. He just wished it

were allowed to have both. “Do you remember I told you that the mother of the
man I slew had vowed revenge upon me?” he said, hoping to cover the deeper
concern with the nearer.

“I do. She put a curse on you, you said, and it has been following you…”

Leofgar stopped himself, tilted his head with understanding brightening his eyes.
“She has been following you? Or should I say, it is she who is now ahead of
us?”

“I think so.” Wulfstan looked over his shoulder at the wife slowly but steadily

poling the punt past the island garden they had seen from the road. She didn’t
look as though she was listening, but he took the chance to lean in closer to
Leofgar just in case. “The night you went back to face Tatwine, I came late after
you. There was a…” The memory of it was a chill but not the unreasonable
panic it had once been. “There was a spite stake. I was drawn to it because it
had been set up for me.”

Leofgar’s eyes widened. He closed a hand around Wulfstan’s wrist

protectively. His gaze moved fretfully as he thought—always a dozen thoughts
before he spoke, so unlike Wulfstan, so clever. The clasp firmed into one of
congratulations, and he smiled, bright but sweet. “Yet here you are, alive, with
your mind whole, and no longer jumping at shadows. So you have faced the
spirits on your own and defeated them? You will not need me any more.”

“Never that.” Wulfstan’s smile came involuntarily. “Or say rather that if I do

not need your company, still I want it very much.”

A glad glance as Leofgar looked swiftly into his eyes and away—as though

he wanted to see something but scarcely dare look. “That’s…” and he looked
out to where a family of reed warblers were cheeping warning at the boat, “…
something I want too.”

Even for one who earned his bread by them, it seemed such words were

hard to get out. Wulfstan understood it—they were big words despite their
simplicity. Each one was a stone in the river that divided them. Put enough down

and they might be able to walk across, dry shod.

Wulfstan studied the bard’s profile, as Leofgar looked out to where their

punt and the larger one before it were rounding the shoulder of the island.
Another smaller isle came into view behind it, dark with turned soil and bright
with ripening fruit trees. With the blaze of the water behind him like gold foil,
Leofgar could have been an illuminated angel, except that his expression was full
of doubt.

“I was not alone,” Wulfstan went on, hoping to soothe Leofgar’s doubt with

his own certainty—hoping to share with him a little of what he had understood in
the night of his terror and his salvation. “St. Aethelthryth was with me. I could
feel her presence, and it gave me the courage I needed to destroy the spite and
return the spirits to she who sent them.”

If talking was hard for the scop, it was a dozen times worse for him. He was

not a man who spoke his thoughts—or he had not been so. He was a man who
had always beaten his problems down with fists.

Cenred’s dead face flashed bright in the coffer of his memory. He could

almost smell the gore again, see the beautiful pearly white of fresh bone. Yes,
and look how well his fists had served him. Words had power, he knew that.
Perhaps it was they, frustrated at being unspoken, dammed up and rising from
day to day with greater pressure, that caused his berserker rages. If the thoughts
could not come out in speech, perhaps they came out in violence.

If he could not steel himself to let them out now in words, perhaps one day

soon he would find himself waking up with his hands tight around Leofgar’s
crushed throat.

“I have been thinking about myself tossed between these two women like a

ball in a game.” He tried approaching it obliquely. “Why do I think myself strong
when it is Saewyn and Aethelthryth who contend together, and I am merely their
token? It seemed to me that if those two women could reorder the world
between them, command the unseen powers, and kill or save me as they
pleased, then we men are overproud of our strength. What matter our
unyieldingness when we are but pieces in a game that others play?”

Behind him, the fishwife belied her silence by snorting with amusement.

“Happy is the house where the wife is wise.”

Leofgar laughed too and looked at Wulfstan with fondness, though it was

apparent he had little idea why Wulfstan was speaking of this. “The old tales are
full of women trying to stay the hands of hasty men,” he said. “But I could give
you twice as many where they goaded them to strike.”

“There is my point. We think women weak because they must yield in the

flesh, but in the spirit they wield us like weapons. Which is the stronger? The one

who acts or the one who causes him to act?”

“Do you say this for me?” Leofgar looked baffled, unsure if he should be

pleased or insulted. Clearly Wulfstan’s words had been coloured by his mind—
like light passing through stained glass—to such an extent that what he had heard
was as much his own creation as it was Wulfstan’s.

They drifted on almost silently, save for the splash as the end of the pole

plunged into the water, and the clop of tiny waves against the sides. Above their
heads a huge overarching sky curved from horizon to horizon in a dome as pale
blue-grey as Leofgar’s eyes. Where it touched the ground, it met only the flat,
smooth surface of the mere.

Though shapes yet moved beneath the transparent surface of the water,

Wulfstan no longer felt fear of them. Let them be pike or droves of eels, or a
slimy wyrm such as those Beowulf fought in the mere of Grendel. If they
attacked, he would resist them or die in the attempt, but he would do so with the
holy lady’s protection for his soul, confident they could do no worse than death.

The meaning of Leofgar’s question came slowly to him and reluctantly. He

had to piece it together out of small clues. Leofgar still huddled close to his
hearpes, wary and protective, stroking them with petting and comforting
strokes. Wulfstan began to wonder if Leofgar gave Lark and Hierting
reassurance because he wanted it himself. Could it work that way?

Perhaps Leofgar remembered being held down, being overwhelmed, not

having the physical strength to resist. Such a thing must rankle in his mind, and he
so proud. Oh yes, that made sense—Leofgar thought Wulfstan had said his
piece about women to reassure Leofgar that he did not need to be ashamed. He
had missed the point entirely.

“I have never thought you weak,” Wulfstan said, surprised that it needed to

be said at all.

“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“But you…” Leofgar cast a look back at their boatman, who was apparently

intent on threading them through the roots and reeds that girdled their destination
for today. She had already proved she was listening in, no matter how seriously
her round, freckled face scowled at the view. “You have valued me for the same
reason my lord valued me. Now that I have had time to reflect on all that has
happened recently, I must say that my answer to you would be the same as my
answer to him. Though perhaps a little more regretful.”

A strange sensation. At the thought that—veiled as it was—Leofgar was

discussing the possibility of having sex with him, the whole of Wulfstan’s lower
body gave a deep, delicious throb, though his head was dismayed.

The larger punt slid to the side of a wooden jetty, and two farmers in cloth as

russet as their fields came to help the fisherman unload Fealo. Their own boat
came up beside and was caught by helpful hands, drawn against the firm planks.

There was something about the place—a place where Wulfstan could stand

with one foot on water and the other on land—that made him think of himself.
Had he not been balanced thus, halfway between one thing and the other, all his
life? And was it not about time that he chose?

As they were jumping out, he committed himself to the holy lady’s protection

and feigned a stumble. Leofgar caught him before he went backwards over the
edge of the jetty into the water. With this excuse he could press close for long
enough to whisper in the harper’s ear, “What I want from you is quite the
opposite of what Tatwine did.”

Damn it was hard to say. His voice tried to hide in his throat, and his breath

to climb back down into his chest and go to ground. Battle and swordplay had
not called for the courage that these few words required. The truth, though it
might cost him everything. “I want you to be him. I will be you. But I will not
fight. I would not fight you, because I… It’s what I want.”

When he had pushed it past the hardest point, it came out all at once in a

rush, like a baby. Like a baby it landed steaming and stinking in Leofgar’s
unprepared hands. Leofgar took one look at it and recoiled, leaping away to
stand as far as he could get from Wulfstan, rigid with shock and disapproval.

Of their own accord, Wulfstan’s fists clenched.

Chapter Eighteen

Leofgar had not meant to back away, but Wulfstan’s reaction made him glad

he had done so. The warrior straightened up, all the diffidence leaving his form.
Suddenly his strength, his calling, was all too apparent in the way he held himself
—head up, back straight, the big muscles of his shoulders bunching like a bull’s
as it paws at the ground. He took a step towards Leofgar, all coiled threat and
grace. “Do not dare—”

An extraordinary feeling rolled over Leofgar—fear, sharp and exhilarating,

and power with it, reckless, golden and mouth-watering sweet. The fear simply
made the challenge more worthwhile.

Instead of retreating further, he closed the distance between them, put a hand

flat on Wulfstan’s chest. Imagining reaching inside it for the heart and squeezing it
between his fingers, he shoved back. “Don’t tell me what I dare.”

Solid contact through his hand sent a shock of warmth up his arm. He swore

he could feel the heartbeat just as though the organ itself pulsed in his hand…and
he almost forgot the onlookers, almost grabbed Wulfstan and threw him up
against the nearest tree.

Fate saved him, for there was no tree available, only the drop off the side of

the boardwalk into murky water, and that would not have served at all.

In later moments he would wonder what he had been thinking, to be so close

to kissing—with a punishing kiss, as brutal as he could make it—an enraged man
with a sword. At the time it was an unwary little boy who got between them and
tugged at his skirts, breaking the spell of violence and sex that wound them both
around.

“Are you going to the causeway, masters? I can show you if you like.”
Startled into sense, Leofgar looked away from the hell-bright heat of

Wulfstan’s gaze, down to the boy’s venal, dirty little face.

“Yes,” he said, his voice strained. He coughed, working a throat that was

parched as if he’d breathed in fire, and tried again. “Yes. Do so at once please.
We would like to reach the guest house in Alrehethe before nightfall…if that is
possible?”

“Oh aye.” The imp grabbed the bridle of Leofgar’s horse and grinned at an

older slave who had just managed to scrabble up from his resting place in the
hedgerow.

The older man crossed his emaciated arms across his breast and gave the

boy a look of long-term rivalry. “This is my job, mayfly. Run back to the

charcoal burners where you belong.”

“You got the lady”—the boy stuck out his tongue—“and a shilling for your

trouble. I get this one. I’ve got to eat too.”

The slave ran a thin hand across his shaven head and looked from Leofgar to

Wulfstan. His gaze lingered on the sullen embers of anger on Wulfstan’s face. He
licked his lips and, keeping the boy between himself and the warrior’s wrath,
reached up to touch Fealo’s stirrup straps. “It was a farthing, masters, that I got
from her. Don’t let the boy bilk you, for he’s a good-for-nothing layabout, and
you, I can see, have troubles of your own.”

Undoubtedly this concern had something cunning about it. When Leofgar

pressed the sharp half moon of a hapenny into the man’s hand, the slave could
not quite conceal his satisfaction. Leofgar appreciated both his timing and his
flare for turning a situation to his advantage. He appreciated too the way this
conversation had poured cool water on the fire of Wulfstan’s mood. If there was
one thing both poor child and slave knew how to do well, it was to soothe the
anger of more powerful men.

Leofgar could practically feel the thunder on Wulfstan’s brow thinning and

the berserk mood falling away. Although the storm of it had brought out an
opposing lightning in Leofgar’s blood, this had not been the place for it. If he had
given in and kissed, he would only have shamed Wulfstan or himself. Neither of
them would easily have stood for that.

When the slave knelt and offered his linked hands as a stepping stone to

mount, Wulfstan shook his head, as one dazed who slowly comes back to
himself. His knuckles pinked on his sword-hilt as his grip eased, and his back
bent a little, until he had half resumed his usual stance of well-intentioned
tolerance. “Lead on,” he said, the growl in his voice now more for show than for
warning. “We’ll walk behind.”

So the boy, with Fealo’s reins in hand, preceded them down cow tracks

edged with white archangel, and they came after, Wulfstan first, Leofgar
following, in strained but no longer deadly silence.

How could what Wulfstan have said be true? Leofgar could not puzzle it out.

How could a man so proud—so manly, so deadly, strong as an ox—be at the
same time so weak, so soft as to want that? How could a man so worthy want
to make himself worthless?

A tart voice in his mind spoke up to mention that Leofgar was another of the

same inside-out sort. The matching half of the pair. For he looked the part of the
eromenos—frail and helpless and beautiful—and yet wanted fighting men to
acknowledge him as their equal. Except that surely all men should want to be as
he was, and none should want the shame that Wulfstan wanted.

He turned over in his thoughts what Wulfstan had said to him when he was

newly wounded—that he had killed one who had tried to be the man to his boy.
That, Leofgar had thought was nothing surprising. Of course Wulfstan would
want to make it clear to him that he might play at perversity—the way he had
when they had kissed that first time—but that he was as appalled at the thought
of taking it further as any proud man would be. Leofgar had supposed it was a
warning, not to let his thoughts stray in that direction again.

Now the confession took on a different shape. So Wulfstan’s friend had

given him what he wanted, and he had killed him for it anyway? To keep him
silent? Or to try to scratch the sin out as one might scratch out a word on
parchment? To try to make himself innocent again?

The ground was slowly rising beneath them, and the edges of the fields came

closer. It was possible to look out and see the mere all around the little island on
which they stood. Geese whirred overhead. On the water, small coracles of
withies and tarred skins plied busily. Men were fishing, hunting ducks, spearing
eels with long three-bladed spears designed for the purpose.

Ahead of them, something dark drew an unnatural line across the water to a

far larger land on the other side. Even from here, Leofgar could see the town
that wreathed the end of the causeway in smoke.

They would stay there tonight, resting well for the first time in weeks. The

two of them would share bedding for warmth and companionship in the hospital
run by the brides of God. At the thought, a heat writhed in Leofgar’s belly like a
clutch of mating adders.

He stepped off the path for a moment, ran up one of the banks until he could

see Wulfstan’s face. The man’s anger seemed to have gone, but his normally
open expression was cold, his gentle, perplexed eyes gone hard.

Stern resolution looked good on him, just as the rage had done, and Leofgar

could not get weakness into the same phrase with that. His strength and his
desire to yield? The two notes were discordant with each other. Leofgar could
not see any way of looking at them that made them harmonize.

The causeway was a great work, though it did not rival the ruins left by giants

in this well-loved country the English called their own. A double row of stout
posts had been driven deep into the peaty ground. Thick ropes were secured
between them, hanging down in a kind of cradle. Over the ropes, supported by
them, high off the water had been lain a trackway of planks end to end. Two
planks across, it was wide enough for a man to walk the path without breaking
stride—as though he were on a mown lawn or an ancient road.

For horses it was trickier. At the base of the hill, where isle turned back into

mere, Leofgar paid off the child and watched him pelt away fast as his short legs

would take him.

Wulfstan was still avoiding Leofgar’s eye. Leofgar had to touch him on the

elbow to make him look. When he did, there was a moment much like those
when—travelling beneath thunderclouds—the wind blows them apart and lets
through a startling ray of sunshine, more golden for the dark. His frown eased,
and the fullness of his mouth returned like a rose blooming.

“I can lead Fealo.” There were many things Leofgar wanted to say, but they

would be better said in the dark, between the two of them alone. “I have done
this before, I will show you.”

“You make it sound as though I had never left my burh.” The break in

Wulfstan’s clouds thinned and closed, leaving it darker than before. “Just
because I said…I do not need your protection or advice.”

Touchy whoreson.
Had he been patronising? Had he lowered his expectations because of

Wulfstan’s confession—instinctively begun to treat the man as he would treat a
woman? Surely not? “Peace,” he said. “I had thought only that I have traveled
much with my master, and you lead a more settled life with your lord. I thought
that it might be strange to you.”

“I need no cosseting.”
Sullen, Wulfstan looked more childlike than frightening, and there was a look

of falsehood in his doubtful eyes, brown as a peaty stream. It made Leofgar
wonder, trained as he was to read the needs and preferences of his audience,
though they spoke against them or not at all. What a complicated man his
companion was. It must be hard to live with blood that gave your mind the lie.

“I intended none.” He sighed and led the way anyway, glad to put the

shadow of Wulfstan’s turmoil behind him, if only for a while.

They slipped and slithered across the damp planks, coaxing the nervous

horse all the way, always in danger of sliding off to left or to right and drowning
in the bog. By the time they made it onto the firm ground beyond, Leofgar had a
shake throughout his whole frame. His limbs felt shaped out of pondweed and
slime—slippery, untrustworthy, liable to slide apart at any moment.

Wulfstan avenged himself by taking Leofgar’s arm and holding him up. He

hoisted Leofgar into the saddle with all the ease of one who has had a pleasant
amble and could now fancy a race. Leofgar rolled the eyes of his mind and
allowed it, partly to ease the feeling between them, partly because the help was
welcome enough.

The light dimmed, and the sky became an ocean of madder red and weld

yellow. Starlings rose from the reeds like a fog, swirled and danced under
heaven so thick it seemed the clouds came down to fill the twilight with chatter.

The smoke of the town of Alrehethe guided them, and by the time it grew too
dark to see it, they could smell the dwellings—the welcome reek of folk—and
pick out the red-gold star of the firebasket that hung outside the hospital.

It lit a dozen men, half of them nuns. Clearly none of these ladies had bound

themselves to silence. They were speaking shrill and angry with a party of
travellers who, by their ribbons, had already been to St. Aethelthryth’s shrine
and were now on their way home. When the nuns saw Leofgar and Wulfstan,
the foremost flung up her hands in exasperation and made him grin. God had
some fierce brides—more outspoken and masterful than many a man would
want to wed.

“Oh, and now there are more.” She glared at him as though her trouble was

of his making. “Here, this is what I will do. There are no more beds in the
hospital, no matter how close you cram. The wives in your party may come in to
the nunnery and sleep with the sisters. For the men, you will have to make do
with the stables and storehouses. I can do no better than that. Half of you may
come into the refectory now and eat, the other half may come in afterwards
when we have room to spare and more food cooked.”

Leofgar wondered what Wulfstan would make of being thus hustled about by

a woman since he made so much of being talked down to by a man, but
Wulfstan seemed perfectly fine with it, going so far as to smile for the first time
since the boat trip.

A half loaf and a weak bowl of barley pottage later, they found themselves

being guided through the gardens by a fat porter with a torch. Thin drizzle had
settled in and hissed through the flames of the torch, settling like seed pearls on
every woolen garment. So Leofgar was grateful to be shown the door of a little
hut, built off the ground on four large stones and packed with sacks of dry stuff
—by the smell it was herbs—and amphorae against the back wall that smelled
of no kind of wine.

The porter restacked the sacks to reveal a couple of feet of bare floorboards

and cast down there the thin pallet and single blanket he had carried from the
hospital store. When he had done this, he sighed and thrust both hands up
opposing sleeves, resting his arms on the swell of his belly. “It’s not much, but
it’s dry.”

Leofgar waited a beat for Wulfstan to stand on his dignity and speak first, as

was his due. Nothing. So he grinned, happily as he could, and said, “After all the
nights in ditches, this is a feast-hall. Our thanks.”

“God be with you.” The man squeezed through the door and shut it behind

him. In the darkness, they heard his footsteps drawing away. Leofgar laughed,
huh, because he was shut up in the dark with a man who had killed his last lover,

and he didn’t know whether to be aroused, afraid or faintly sick. Whichever was
appropriate, he was all three.

Chapter Nineteen

Wulfstan took off his belt and, crossing his hands over one another, took

hold of the bottom of his chain-mail byrnie. Leaning forwards, as though he was
trying to touch his toes, he pulled the back of the garment up and allowed its
own weight to make it slither all the way off, turning inside out as it did. Groping
for the fallen pile of rings, he set it on top of one of the sacks.

It was too dark in here to see Leofgar, but he could hear the other man

breathing, feel the warmth that sprang from his skin. At times as he also
undressed, Wulfstan would feel an elbow knock his arm, and once the press of a
hip as Leofstan unbalanced. Surprising how intimidating that mattress was
beneath their feet. Or perhaps not surprising. But he wouldn’t have the scop say
of him that he was as cowardly as his desires implied.

“You are still here,” he said, as he knelt down and spread his warm but

slightly damp cloak over the blanket. The utter dark smelled like the fabulous
east—of thyme and bitter wormwood and poultices brewed from beeswax and
vinegar. The reeling reek of it all threatened to make his nose run with stinging
sweetness. “I thought you might have found a reason, today, to continue your
journey alone.”

“You thought I would leave you?” came the voice in the dark, melodic and

expressive. The intonation spoke first of surprise and then indignation. A pause
for thought followed. “Huh. Perhaps I should not be so fretted by that. The truth
is, I did not know myself until this moment that I would never do that.”

Never. Wulfstan chuckled to himself in something that was sharper edged

than true laughter. There was a strange thought—that Leofgar would never
leave. That they would never part. It caused him a pain that hurt so much it was
almost pleasant. Or perhaps it was a pleasure so great it had grown into pain.

“When I confessed my desires to my friend,” he said, conscious of Leofgar

standing by his side, turning about like a dog trying to get comfortable in a
hollow by the fire, “his first thought was to tell everyone. His first desire was to
expose me to humiliation and laughter.”

“And you killed him.” Finally the scop found his perfect spot. His cloak came

down atop the other covers, and he followed, wriggling under the pile of bedding
like an eel into a pot. There was a note of what Wulfstan considered altogether
ill-judged humour in his voice. “It is good to piece the puzzle together at last. The
guilt, the mother’s curse… The reason you did not kill me.”

I would never! Wulfstan’s turn to be indignant, but the scop gave him no

space to say it, running on with, “Do you think she’s out there still? Your
avenger?”

Wulfstan lay down himself on one elbow, turning to face the voice. He had to

crowd close, for the bedding was wide enough for only one man. To be warmed
by it, they needed to cling to one another in the middle. He felt out, and his
exploring hand found the hardness of Leofgar’s ribcage. Trying not to caress, he
slid his fingers up the bones and over, pulling the other man to him. The wave of
heat that went through him could have had very little to do with the thin cloaks.

“Cenred’s death was an accident.” He wanted to get this clear once and for

all. “I was enraged past the point where I could control my own deeds. I think I
would have stopped before I killed him, if it were not for an ill-placed blade. I
did not kill him on purpose to cover up my weakness, this I am prepared to
swear before God. I could have lied, and my word would have been believed
over his.”

Leofgar lay in his arms without horror, not even trembling, and though the

darkness made it easier to speak, it was the harper’s calm that let him see deep
into himself as he did so.

“This is what I cannot…I cannot understand. He was my friend, and for one

night my lover. And in the morning he tried to destroy me. Was that not betrayal
enough to give me the right to be angry? Was that not vile in him? Yet—if he had
spoken—everyone would have looked at us and thought I was the despicable
one. I trusted him like no one else on earth, and he meant to abuse that trust for
his own amusement.”

A touch on Wulfstan’s face resolved into the pressure of long, strong fingers.

They wiped the corner of his eye and took away the tear that had stood there.

“I don’t understand how that can be fair.”
Leofgar’s fingers went creeping into his hair, spiderlike, combing it back from

his forehead, slipping, sliding through until they came to rest on the nape of his
neck and drew a shiver from him. He wanted the other hand to pull aside
encumbering clothes and skate down over his skin, wanted Leofgar’s fingers to
breach him and play him the way he played that thrice-accursed harp. But this,
all of this, the darkness and the long steel and sinew hug, the drowsy sensuality
that said Yes—there will be nothing to regret. Have this for once, what can
it harm? All of this he had experienced before. He knew it lied.

“What I do not understand,” murmured Leofgar, breath on his cheek, “is

how you can want what I had rather face outlawry—to live all my days as an
outcast—to avoid. I cannot get the memory of it out of my head, and it is not a
good one.”

How selfish was Wulfstan that he had not thought of this before? He was not

the only one in the bed to have good reason to flee it. Nor was he the only one
trying to trust again after betrayal. Strange though it was to think, for all his
strength of will, the harper would be no match for Wulfstan if Wulfstan changed
his mind, chose to take Leofgar by force. Close together as they were, hot shafts
pressed between their bellies, it would take a far more stupid man than Leofgar
not to be aware of lust and danger.

“I wanted to tell you what I was,” Wulfstan said. “So you would know you

had no need to fear me.”

“You think much of yourself if you suppose I ever did.” The words cracked

across his face like a whip strike, narrow and stinging. They made him laugh with
delight, turn his head and capture the teasing lips that had been brushing against
his cheek. Leofgar stormed in and took possession, greatly aided by the fact that
Wulfstan was all too eager to give it away.

“Mmm,” he purred, agreeing with everything and anything that would make

the kiss go on. But Leofgar flicked him hard in the corner of the mouth with his
fingernail and made him break away.

“I should tell you that you also have no reason to fear me,” the harper said. “I

do not understand your desire. In truth it disturbs me that one such as you should
wish for such a thing. Still I owe you more than my life, and I have no wish to
bring you shame. I will not denounce nor condemn you. Not even in my heart.”

Sweet but bitter were these words to Wulfstan. At the acceptance in them,

he felt a joy mingled with relief. Though Leofgar lied freely in the course of his
work, it did not occur to Wulfstan to disbelieve him. His instincts, had he listened
to them, had told him all along not to trust Cenred; they said nothing of the sort
to him about Leofgar.

About Leofgar they said, Here, here is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Keep him close, and if he will not stay with you, go with him. They said this
through an ache in the chest and loins, and through his skin, which yearned
towards Leofgar’s touch like a dry man for a long drink. Through the long
winter, they had said it through his dreams, and the idle way his mind turned
back to the harper, despite every reason to flinch.

“You’re kind,” he said, “and I thank you. But…am I not the glove to your

hand? I would think you should be glad and not disturbed to find one with a
nature so perfectly shaped to your own. Or is it the fact that I am not some
cringing little catamite that troubles you? Would you like me better if I was?”

At the tone of anger with which he opened this speech, Leofgar grew tense

against him, but by the end of it his rigidness had relaxed again. The hand on
Wulfstan’s neck drew him in closer and tucked the top of his head beneath
Leofgar’s pointed chin.

“I would not. But it would seem more in keeping with the way things are.”

His voice was very gentle and quiet, but with a faint hint of amusement. In earlier
times, Wulfstan might have fretted at the implication of laughter. By now he
knew the kind of ordeal that would take the note out of Leofgar’s voice, knew
he did not want ever to hear it gone again.

“It is strange,” Leofgar said, and if he was laughing, he was laughing at

himself. “All my life I have known that things would have gone easier for me if I
matched what I appeared to be. All my life I have felt I was some sport of
God’s, created out of irony, alone among men. Now here you are, and you are
my opposite. Out of all the men in the world, how likely that I should meet one
so perfectly made for me? There is something at work here bigger than
ourselves. Our wyrds have been woven together, and it is useless to fight it.”

Against the thatch above their heads, the rain pattered and trickled, and the

damp air brought out deeper scents from the stored herbs. Leofgar’s voice was
like honey turned into light—a haze of gold—and Wulfstan gave in to the call of
his blood and wormed a hand up the back of the harper’s tunic so that he could
rest it on the springy curve at the base of his spine, and tell the little bones there
between his fingers like a rosary.

“Perhaps our souls got mixed up and put into the wrong bodies?” Wulfstan

said, turning it over in his mind. “You would have made such a warrior—proud
and fearless and clever—and I… There is a slave I know. He is content to be
my lord’s boy while his beauty lasts, and he prepares now to become Christ’s
after. I have envied him both things, though terror sat on my chest day and night
at the thought that anyone might find out.”

Leofgar returned the favour, one long hand coming up to slide along

Wulfstan’s ribs while the other returned to petting his hair. It delighted Wulfstan
to think that the harper liked his red hair, shared with Judas the betrayer as it
was. It delighted him almost as much as the ability to speak the truth—to have
this man know all and not reject him.

“For a killer you are a gentle soul.”
The amusement had a tender edge, and abruptly Wulfstan felt mysterious

tears prick at his eyes. “I have been so afraid,” he confessed. “For so long. I
have tried to press myself into any other shape but this, but it… It springs back.
There is no getting rid of it.”

Leofgar tugged at Wulfstan’s chin, raising his head for another kiss, this one

sweet and slow, with an easy possessiveness about it. Leofgar knew now this
thing belonged to him, he didn’t need to fight to prove it, but could settle down
to cherishing it instead.

“I am not sure that I want you to,” he said, when it was done. “You challenge

everything I thought I knew about mankind, but that’s a good thing. The world is
stranger, and thus God is greater, than I supposed. I am glad.”

This too brought tears to Wulfstan’s eyes. Joy shook his bones and scoured

them at the knowledge that this time he had shown himself and he had not been
destroyed.

Perhaps it was pressing his luck too far to slide his fingertips beneath the

waistband of Leofgar’s trousers and turn his face aside, burying it in Leofgar’s
thick, unruly hair. Asking too much to murmur, “Will you fuck me, please,” with
the scald of a blush all over him from want and uncertainty mingled.

Leofgar pushed against him with an abrupt, frustrated hardness. His hands

tightened almost to the point of pain. “I want to, but I can’t. I can’t dishonour
you like that—”

The joy suddenly muted to the point where Wulfstan could feel anger over

the top of it. “I thought we’d agreed it would be no dishonour?”

He drew his hands away, and Leofgar turned over, stiff as a wooden doll,

giving him his back. His voice was sullen, hard done by. “My head may agree,
and God knows, my body is keen enough. Yet I would wake in the morning and
think I had done you harm, and I will not do that. If you’re mine to protect, I
must protect you from myself also—”

Oh, and now the patronising bastard was back to treating Wulfstan like a

woman, was he? Wulfstan could have punched something, was surprised at
himself when he did not.

“Even when I don’t wish it?”
“Even then.”

Chapter Twenty

St. Aethelthryth’s foundation could not have looked more beautiful than it did

that day of fore-calm. All about Wulfstan and Leofgar, as they strode the final
miles from Alrehethe to the foundation of Ely, fields of wheat were rustling,
slowly ripening from emerald to yellow-green. For a long while the path snaked
along a narrow ridgeback of land between two waters, and the edges of it were
a deep black, where peat was being cut out and stacked to reveal a strong soil.

The foundation itself was the largest complex of buildings Wulfstan had ever

seen. Two separate clusters of dormitories and chapter houses, refectories and
scriptoria gleamed like the may blossom. On the right side the monks laboured
and on the left side the nuns. The church in the centre between the two had been
washed with yellow ochre and painted with circles and zigzags in blood red and
lapis blue. For a long, incredulous moment, it looked to Wulfstan as though the
whole building was made of gold and garnet, hammered and inset like a king’s
buckle.

He and Leofgar came into the enclosure—into the scent of gardens,

honeysuckle and roses—just as another party was leaving. This was a far bigger
affair than they had encountered in Alrehethe; there were maybe three score of
travellers on foot and almost as many again on horseback or in light wains.

They drew aside to let the pilgrims pass. A warrior, armed and gleaming

silver, rode at the forefront of the procession. A flag bearer went in the centre,
with the cross of St. Michael snapping above him. A cleric walked at the back,
garbed in fine white linen and swathed in a green silk chasuble. Every voice was
singing as they trundled out, and on every face was hope.

It looked like a pilgrimage, except that they were leaving the shrine, and on

impulse Wulfstan walked along with them awhile to lean down and ask a farmer,
“Where do you go?”

“To Rome,” the man replied, his expression a heady mix of terror, glee and

reprieve. He feared the journey, but he was glad to be on it.

“My apologies.” Wulfstan trotted back to where Leofgar waited for him in

the lee of the public stables, a monk at his elbow with Fealo’s reins in hand. “I
wanted to know what made them look so otherworldly. So happy but so
afraid.”

“It is a perilous journey. Many of them set out to their deaths.” The monk

gave an imperturbable smile. “They leave all the cares they once had in this
world behind them. To put one’s life down as if it were so much rubbish and

pick up a new one in which you have made no mistakes—this is a great matter
and a good one, as I have known myself. I was not born a monk, after all.”

“Yet here we are at the end of our pilgrimage.” Wulfstan cast an almost

fearful gaze at Leofgar, for there was a part of his life he no longer wanted to put
down. Not now, when they were so close to one another that the last barrier to
their being one did not seem impossible to conquer. “What happens after it?”

“The lucky ones die on the way.” The monk bowed his head to them both

and took Fealo to be stabled, fed and watered. “So for them there is no ‘after’.”

The remark made Leofgar laugh. Aglow with his smile, surrounded by

sunshine and a thousand flowers, he was so beautiful it made Wulfstan forget to
breathe, forget to think, shot through with a bolt of longing either to be
possessed by him or to be him, for to be any other man was to fall short of
perfection.

So he was looking down and blushing pink to the roots of his amber hair

when Leofgar took his elbow and leaned in close. Pink became red—he could
feel the shades by the increase of heat. “Go and…”

Wulfstan raised his head to see that kindness had joined the amusement in

Leofgar’s winter-sky eyes. The harper tilted his head, observing, and tenderly
tucked the lining back beneath Wulfstan’s collar and smoothed the hair back
behind his ears, landing a little butterfly kiss on the angle of his jaw. All of this in
public, where anyone coming or going might see.

Wulfstan quailed for a moment, and then he realized that anyone who was

watching would suppose Leofgar to be his boy. Would think Wulfstan only a
tolerant man, who indulged his creature’s feminine gentleness because it pleased
him to be so doted upon.

Was Leofgar truly willing to have them think that? With his pride—why?
“Go and be pardoned,” Leofgar finished, his whimsical look fading into grief.

“I must seek out my master’s friend and tell him some sad news. I will meet you
back here when the bell rings for compline.”

At the words, the feeling of light and delirious hope—the feeling of having

pieces that would slot together and build joy if only he knew which parts to pin
first—slowly gave way to unease. He stood watching the harper walk, with that
loose and springy gait of his, to the porch that opened into the men’s side of the
double monastery. Watched him talk to the gatekeeper, all smiles and a weaving
of hands and words that Wulfstan was beginning to believe was as powerful as
any sword.

Only when he had gone inside did Wulfstan shake himself, take up the cloak

of dread that had settled on his shoulders, and make for the church. With
Leofgar gone, his own shade came on him heavily, made him remember Cenred,

who—if he had only trusted him a little less—might still have been his friend.
Cenred who had no champion but him, who might—for he had made other
jokes equally cruel in his time—have been lying when he threatened to expose
Wulfstan.

He had been hot, Wulfstan thought, as he passed into the dimness of the

church, finding it empty and quiet now the departing throng had left. He had
been hot with anger towards Cenred for betraying him. Then he had been
terrified of Saewyn and caught up by Leofgar’s troubles. There had been no
time to get past the hurt of Cenred’s actions and feel instead the grief of losing a
friend.

Nor had he had time to wonder what it might have been in Cenred that drove

him to betrayal—to push and push his only friend into sin entirely so he could
expose it after. That was, in this place where a host of painted stars shone down
on him, a sad thought.

In here, he walked in a wonder of art. Windows beneath the shingled eaves

were filled in with glass, some of it tinted by strange design. Light filtered through
the manifold colours, spilling on the floor like discarded jewels. The little
rainbow-cousins drew lines on the forest of wooden beams that held up the
ceiling, and picked out painted faces up there in the roof. Beneath Wulfstan’s
feet, the floor had been laid utterly smooth, flagged and beautified with tiles
covered in flowers.

The church itself was vast enough so that there was room for a smaller

pavilion within. Wulfstan ducked inside and found himself faced with a great
picture of the first abbess, St. Aethelthryth. Dressed in royal purple, with a veil
as white as snow, she held up in one hand a picture of this very church, her other
hand outstretched to bless him.

The artist had given her a closed, serene face with downcast eyes, not at all

like the fierce presence who had comforted him in the mere. Perhaps there was
something in the way she gripped her little abbey that spoke of her
determination. He looked at her fondly, knowing she had seen him at his worst
and that therefore he had nothing to fear from her.

In front of this picture lay a deep slab of stone, knee high, in which some

person unskilled with the chisel had attempted to cut the outline of a woman.

Wulfstan stopped before he bumped into it, overwhelmed by the thought that

here she was. Here lay the bones of the woman who had saved him from dark
magic and despair, the one whose might convinced him he need not be ashamed
for his desires. For if she could be both womanly and inflexibly strong, why
could he not do the same?

“Lady,” he said, quietly to the tomb. “I came to ask you for forgiveness for

slaying my friend. You know what is in my heart. You know I didn’t mean to kill
him. I still did.

“He was my closest friend, and I was his only friend. I don’t know why he

chose to betray my trust, when I had handed my heart and my good name to
him, but I know his life had been hard and his spirit hurt by it. I think, perhaps, if
others had been kinder to him, he might have been kinder in return. A wounded
dog will bite. This I know myself.”

In a little voice very like his own, except that it came unexpected and said

what he would never have thought, the saint whispered into Wulfstan’s mind.
“He lived as you have lived. Believing himself worthless. Terrified of being
exposed. His anger and yours were brothers, though his was colder.”

Wulfstan sank to his knees before her grave, feeling something light,

something clear and brisk and bracing. He thought it was the truth. “Lady,
instead I ask you to forgive Cenred for turning on me thus. He did not have time
to confess and be absolved—and that is my fault. Let him not be sent to Hell for
that. Put upon me all his sins and transgressions. Allow me to repent for him. If
there is punishment due him, let me take it and bear it myself.

“Let him be made spotless so that he can be accepted into the heavenly

kingdom, and I will be your…” …handmaid, he wanted to say, but couldn’t get
it out, “…servant for now and the rest of my days.”

For a long while, he sat with his hand on the casket. Tears dampened the

stone around his fingers. At length he received the feeling that he had said all he
needed to say. The deed was done and over, the offer heard and granted.
Sniffing, he let out a deep heartfelt sigh and rose. He felt lighter rather than
heavier, though he bore Cenred’s lifetime of sins as well as his own. Who would
have thought they weighed so little?

At the doorway he looked back. Briefly, as the flames of the oil lamps in the

corners of the shrine danced at his movement, he thought he saw the solemn face
smile. But that was a foolish fancy brought on by hope. He mocked himself for it
as he bent to stoop through the shrine’s low door, with his face turned towards
the square of dazzling light where the church’s gate now stood open to the day’s
warmth.

As he blinked in the glare, he felt something hard and cold steal along the

side of his throat. A slight but tall presence, cloaked in a brown so dim he could
scarcely see it in the indoor twilight, resolved out of the shadow where the side
of the shrine met the wall. Trying to look down brought a thin, sharp pain just
above the great vein in his neck, and a warm line tickled down his skin to soak
into his collar.

“Would you rob me in the Lord’s house?” he gasped, shocked rigid.

“No,” said a woman’s voice. With her other hand, she put back the hood of

her cloak. Shards of green and red light picked out tear tracks on a gaunt and
set face. Saewyn. Of course.

“I would not rob you here, murderer. But I would gladly slit your throat.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Saewyn almost slew him out of sheer astonishment at how easy it was. Her

hand moved as though controlled by the spirits, and pushed the sharp tip of the
knife through skin. She had cut out wens enough before, shaved the skin from
either side of a hare lip so it might heal closed, to know the feel of steel through
flesh. She knew too that if she drew back now—now that he was alert to her
presence and the danger—he would not give her the chance again.

Her son deserved vengeance. She could almost feel Cenred’s spirit in the

muscles of her arm, driving them to strike and strike deep. The blood would hit
her face like a wave and drench her. It would trickle into the cracks of the
coloured floor and steal under the lintel to pool around the saint whose mercy
this child-killer had dared to depend on.

Doubtless she would be imprisoned and tried after, but she cared not for

that. Cenred’s weregild sat heavy in the bag over her shoulders, pulled down the
strap with a weight like a hand. She could scatter it in the flood of gore and
show thereby her contempt for Wulfstan’s money and his apologies.

But when she had pictured this, all the rest of the journey after her wiccecraft

had failed, she had not expected her prey to have tears drying on his cheeks
when she ran him to ground. She had not imagined she would pause in hiding
and hear him plead for her son’s soul. She had not thought that while her arm
would remain eager, her heart would be sore and tired.

Even before the wiccecraft mysteriously stopped working, her heart had

begun to betray her. Her mind filled with the memory of him plucking the fisher-
child out of the marsh, laughing off its mother’s gratitude. Old memories of him
smiling at Cenred, encouraging him when others held back, play fighting with him
by snow and sunshine, worked a shape-shift in her head.

“You…loved my son,” she said. The knife wanted blood, wanted to strike

deep. It nosed forwards almost against her will, but she restrained it.

“Yes.” Wulfstan didn’t move to defend himself, his hands knotted in his tunic

skirts, his back still bent. Though he could have saved himself simply by
straightening up, something in him, perhaps, called to the blade, accepted the
justice of it.

“You are the only one, except for me, who has ever wept for him.” Saewyn

could barely breathe—her chest was full of black emptiness. She held a cold
winter sky inside her skin.

If she let the grief out, it would come as screaming. She would hurl

blasphemies at the High One for His inexplicable goodness that felt so much like
pain—His kindness that had left her to choke on her tears every night for the
greater part of her life. Still, though she would swear and spit at God, it seemed
she would not go so far as to kill in His holy place.

Yet I could have done. She drew the knife back. I held him helpless in my

hands. If he now receives his life back, it is as a gift from me.

That felt right. She was after all pledged to preserve life, not to destroy it.

This decision was truer to her own spirit, even if a part of her screamed to strike
and strike again. Besides, if she cut him down now, before he had a chance to
atone for Cenred’s sins, it would not only be Wulfstan she consigned to
perdition. If she was to slay him, it should be after confession, absolution, not
before.

Released from her blade, Wulfstan moved into the shadows beside her to

allow the first of a new trickle of pilgrims to make his way into the shrine. He
wrapped the cuff of his undertunic around his hand and pressed two fingers to
the small wound in his throat to stop it bleeding. “Cenred was my friend. I did
not mean—I wish you would believe this—I did not mean to kill him. I would
not have harmed him for my life.”

He looked as breakable as Saewyn felt, in this place where the invisible

pressure of angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, filled all the shadowy
silences with echoes of immortal song. There was nothing very warriorlike about
the pleading in his eyes. If anything it reminded her of the potter’s daughter,
when Cenred had taunted and exposed her. Had she not warned her son not to
meddle in the judgements of God?

“But he was cruel.” Her voice came out small, like the squeak of a mouse.

“My son was cruel. And one day he baited the bear in its den and reaped the
inevitable reward.”

She would not weep. Not in front of this her son’s killer. Not though he

himself was wiping his nose on his knuckles, with his face scrunched together
like a winter-stored apple and tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes.
“Cenred couldn’t help that,” he said.

Laughter moved through her like a storm wind, and she sheathed the knife

and seized hold of Wulfstan’s arm. It trembled as her own did. He looked down
at her with a sharp surprise that could not have been more intense than her own.

“Perhaps a clean death, a fighting death, was a mercy after all.” She felt

something fall from her—a dark creature with long talon-tipped arms. Having its
weight removed was like learning to stand all over again. “What would have
become of my son in a household from which he had removed his only friend?
Ecgbert always loved you. His wrath would have been on Cenred from the

moment you were destroyed. He would not have rested until my son was made
as worthless as he had made you.”

There had been little fondness in the faces around Cenred’s grave, she

remembered, but there had been respect. He died as a warrior, not as a
coward. He died with honour, unlike his father, and she thought perhaps that
would have been all her son had ever hoped for.

Wulfstan pulled away from her and in the process moved out into the light. A

tall man topped with fire, who had long been doing a good job of looking
invincible but now seemed to have stopped trying. “You know…”

Do I know that you are soft? She had to laugh again, this time a little less

bitter. “My son was no liar. He would not have said you yielded to men if he had
not had it proved.”

There was another sad thought—to what a depth this man must have trusted

her son. To what a depth had Cenred proved himself unworthy of trust. How
did I fail you so much, my son? How did I teach you so little?

“And you do not condemn me for that alone?”
To her they all looked like boys these days, but this look would have seemed

childish on a man as ancient as she. Hopeful, baffled, yearning.

“I have been wondering how you destroyed my spell.” She grieved quietly

for all the misfits in the world. “It should not have surprised me. In the old days a
man with an inclination like yours would have been welcome to learn runecraft
and wiccecraft. He would have been something in-between man and woman.
Taunted, yes, but feared too.”

She wasn’t sure how the saint or her Lord would take such talk inside their

house, so she led the way out. Wulfstan fell into step beside her, like a son with
his mother, and that was so wrong and right together there was no word to
describe it.

“Not everyone hears the saints,” she went on, despite or because of it. “Not

everyone hears the spirit of God or the other spirits. You have a talent I might
have trained if I had seen it earlier.

“I was so sure Cenred had it. Yet because it is often a sign of…” How to put

this gently? Unmanliness would not do. “It is often a sign of strengths other than
those praised by men of weapons. Because of this, my son wanted nothing to do
with it.”

They came out of the church into the bustle of the courtyard, sat down

together on the wall that ringed the well, where dozens of folk were pushing
past, drawing up water to wash and drink either at the ending or the beginnings
of their journey.

A monk went past at the head of a duckling-like parade of noble children.

Each clutched a wax tablet in their hand, and so Saewyn supposed they were
being led to the scriptorium to learn their letters. How many of them would die
before their parents? Most, perhaps, for children were frail and Heaven a better
fate for them than suffering long on this middle earth.

Wulfstan sat quietly beside her, with an air of apology as though aware that

his body took up too much space and that folk who did not know him feared
him on sight. By God’s strange sense of humour, he was everything she had
hoped for and been denied in her son. “Do you mean…” he asked, cautiously.
“Do you mean my…shame…is something shared by others? A sign of some
merit within?”

Warriors, she thought, and corrected herself, for she too had been blind.

People. So foolish. So slow to think good of themselves or each other. As
full of poison as an adder’s fang. “I mean that your trait is often a sign of
power. Those who fit in the world’s way see only things visible. Those who do
not fit see the unseen. You could not have sent my curse back on itself without
that power. You have no shame. True, you are not a man as others measure
manliness. That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

He made a strange choking noise and pressed the heels of his hands into his

eyes, his fingertips clutching at his hair. “Do you comfort me? You? When I have
done you more injury than any man on this earth? Why?”

A just question, as painful as a hot poultice on an infected wound. “I lost my

son a long time ago,” she said, and knew the truth of it as she said it. “In the end
is not death the fate that awaits all of us, whether it comes soon or late? And you
are the one who wept for him. You carry his sins. In a way, you are all that is left
of him in this life.”

Tears trickled down his wrists as he lowered his head further. “I am sorry. I

am so sorry.”

Unnatural mother as she was, she felt suddenly a great pity for him. She was

a healer after all and did not like to see a wound left untended. “I forgive you.”

Hard words, but they shed the rest of the burden from her back, made him

take his hands away from his eyes and look up, watery and amazed. “You do?”

“I do. You came here seeking forgiveness, I give it to you. Now what?” He

looked so broken there, without the ever-present simmer of his anger, no longer
pretending to be what he was not. “Will you come home? I would teach you, if
you did. I would also tell Ecgbert that my son was no liar. Cenred is owed that.
If you returned, it would be to a home that knew what you were.”

As he soaked the last tears away on his sleeve, his face hardened and

cleared, as though he could deal with threats far more easily than with mercy. “If
I do not return?”

“Then your father and brothers, your mother and your lord will know that

you ran away. But I will keep silent and let them remember you as best pleases
them, for they will also have lost a son, and I am not cruel.”

His look of bewilderment prompted her to lean forward and place a hand on

his forearm, so bulky, so strong and so helpless as it lay on his knees, open
palms upwards like those of a beggar. “It is not punishment I desire for you but
honesty. You have spoken to me freely here. If you would not feel able to speak
as freely in your own lord’s hall, your lord’s hall is a prison to you.”

“I understand.” He frowned and studied those empty hands. “I have already

told St. Aethelthryth I would serve her for Cenred’s sake and my own. Yet my
lord must not be left without a geneat because of my vow. Would you…” He
peered into the darkness of the men’s buildings, as if trying to see the copyists at
their work inside.

“Weregild is too poor a thing to repay a man’s life. Yet when my father dies,

I will come into lands. If I were to make them over to you, would you take them
and rule them, provide my lord an armoured geneat from the wealth of them, and
be the man I could not be for Ecgbert? There should be money enough in the
land to hire a knight and keep you in your old age, as a son should.”

Sometimes, she thought, though it was an idea life and fate had tried to beat

out of her over the years, one gave and was given back in equal amounts. It had
been so long since it had happened to her, she had given up hoping for it. So it
came as a lightning strike out of a clear sky.

Perhaps she should have expected it from a man who—untrained, instinctive

—caught the deadliest working she had ever made and flung it straight back. But
to receive good for good, mercy for mercy…so long. So long since that had
happened before. The shock, the joy and the anguish of it were at last far too
much to bear.

This time it was she who pulled out the pins from the front of her wimple,

drew it down to cover her face and, in the white shelter, wept and wept for
unexpected endings and irony and the kindness she had almost forgotten the
race of mankind was capable of. Such a gift, such a burden, such a terrible thing
to have to repay.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The monk, Gewis, had greeted Leofgar like a long-lost son, throwing arms

around him for Anna’s sake, no matter the many long years it had been since he
and Leofgar’s master had parted.

“This is sad, but not unexpected news,” he said—once Leofgar had told his

tale—and lowered himself to kneel on the packed dirt floor, next to the stack of
pipes where Leofgar’s guide had found him. “For Anna was an old man, and the
winter was harsh. I feared for him, out in it. I am glad to hear he had shelter at
the last and an easy passing.”

Like Anna, Gewis retained the hardened, wrinkled skin of a man once much

outdoors. Even in the shapeless garments of the Benedictine order, he managed
to give off a faint impression of fussiness, his tonsure very neatly shaved, his belt
and sandals waxed to a shine, and the fall of his cloth smoothed as if with a hot
stone.

“We were young men together when we learned our trade,” he said now,

reaching out and laying a hand on one of the red-painted pipes. Hollowed from
what looked like a single tree, the two halves held together by shrunk leather
bands, the pipe had a fipple hole at one end, as though it were God’s whistle.
There were a dozen of them, of various sizes, and an apparatus of bellows,
pedals and ropes that, even amidst Leofgar’s sad duty, fascinated his eyes. He
had heard an organ once, in the church at Cantwarebyrig, but he had never seen
one thus undone, with all its inward parts exposed.

“And we agreed to stand as godfather, should either of us have sons.” Gewis

snorted, his melancholy lifting. With some bitterness, Leofgar supposed that
Gewis’s sorrow was a shallow thing. To him, no doubt it was all the same
whether Anna was in Lundenwic or the Lord’s country, Haedenham or Heaven.
They wished each other well, but they were used to being apart.

“We told ourselves we would each take a different circuit,” Gewis said,

smiling. “If he had a son, I would foster and teach him. If I, he would. But swiftly
the road grew too hard for me. I wanted more than to shuffle around the same
small tread wheel, singing the same songs for the same people, keeping my head
down lest the youths should take a fancy to hurting me, though I lived to praise
them. My voice grew tired of telling tales of feuds and war and killing, and I
wanted to find a music that told of other things.”

He looked at Leofgar and seemed to read his astonishment in the fall of his

chin, because he smiled. “Ah. You have felt that too? Well, here I have five

score voices of men and women to use as my instrument. And when it is fully
made, I will have this noble organ with which to thunder my song into the world.
I will have better things to praise too.”

Old love came up from the depths of Leofgar’s soul, gleaming like new. At

the last, when Tatwine was most demanding, when the terror and the anger lay
hardest on him, he had thought Anna grown selfish in his old age. He had thought
his master blind or uncaring of his needs. Yet here, after his death, Anna proved
that he understood Leofgar’s heart enough to send him to someone who could
soothe it.

The knowledge choked his words, left him watching Gewis with wide eyes,

his hands twisting together in his lap.

Gewis smiled at him a second time, more gently. “For Anna’s sake I regard

you as my godson and my responsibility. Tell me what I can do for you and, if it
is within my power, it will be done.”

Parts of the organ lay on tables around the small room in which they sat.

Sawdust had drifted into the corners of the floor. From the low ceiling, all
around the edges of the room, hung carpenter’s tools, and planks cut into shapes
for the abbey’s use. An old rood screen which had dried and cracked, but still
bore paint and gilding, leaned against the side of the door, which opened onto a
small garden and beyond that a slope down, leading back into the marsh.

Peace came through the door, bringing a faint watery scent with it. The

burden Leofgar had been carrying since he pledged fealty to Tatwine slid off his
shoulders. He put it down like a sack in the corner and hoped to sneak out after
and leave it there until it rotted away entirely.

“What I want?” he said, speaking as much to himself as to Gewis. He had

spent so much time running away, fighting, adjusting to Wulfstan’s sudden
presence in his life. There had been none left over to wonder what he would do
with his new, masterless life.

“I want so many things. Like you, I think there must be something better to

praise, and I want to find it. But I don’t wish to leave the road yet. I want to see
far-off countries—to cross the waters and walk through the ancient forests
whence our people came. To go to Rome and Byzantium and learn the songs
and wisdom of their people.

“And I want to do all of this with a friend by my side.” He looked sidelong at

the dapper old man and wondered quite suddenly whether the rules of such
friendships were different inside the cloister. He had once heard a rumour that
God held every man, slave or free, male or female, of equal importance. A
strange and puzzling idea, fit perhaps for a utopia that could not exist outside
these convent walls.

“You have a friend in mind?”
Leofgar laughed, for thinking of Wulfstan made his heart lighter. “I do.

Chance met—if chance it was—on the road. He is in search of something here
too, redemption, or a better purpose. A very untypical warrior, it seemed to me,
though a deadly one. Can a man have the heart of one thing and the outer
appearance of another, without becoming that which he appears to be?”

“It depends on the strength of the heart.” Gewis opened the door more fully.

A shaft of mild yellow sunlight struck through like a spear and glimmered on the
gold leaf of the broken screen. “It is best if seeming and being become one, but
the change can happen either way. You will not praise a warrior’s dedication to
death—his willingness to protect, to set himself as a shield in front of his people,
but you travel with one? Does he know you despise him?”

“I do nothing of the sort!” Leofgar felt stabbed by the accusation, shocked at

receiving such a blow from so old and seemingly harmless a man. “I have said,
haven’t I, that he is not like the men who see their prowess with the sword as
superior to all other learning. He’s not like those who make you bow or be
broken. He is…”

This wasn’t Leofgar’s secret to share, but it clawed to get out while it could.

He didn’t know if he would ever again have anything like a father to turn to, and
he was weary of trying to puzzle this out on his own.

“If anything he is too soft,” he dared. “Too yielding to be a proper man. If I

was to have contempt for him…” …which I don’t. I do not. “It would be
because of that, not because he is the killer he was raised and trained to be.”

Gewis gave a smile that should have been reassuring, but for the flicker in his

moss-green eyes. Leofgar had the feeling that Gewis had understood both the
said and unsaid meanings of his words, as a true scop should.

“You think yielding is weakness?” Gewis walked over to that broken screen,

taking away the bucket of brushes that stood in front of it. With a shoulder
braced under one edge, he angled it so that the picture came more fully into the
light.

It blazed as though it were painted out of suns and showed Leofgar Christ on

the cross, his feet pinned together with one long nail, his hands spiked separately
and the blood running down his wrists.

“Do you think he was weak?”
Leofgar recognised Anna’s teaching style. Because he recognised it, he

reined in the pious, unthinking “No!” that was his first response. Anna had
drummed it into him to think of reasons for his responses before he gave them.
Thus he replaced rote denial with, “He was…is the maker of all things that were
made. Everything that is takes its strength from him, and without him all would

fall to nothingness. So he is stronger than all things. No, I don’t think him weak.”

Gewis smiled at the crucifix as a cloud outside cut off the sun, and the

goldwork became less dazzling. “Yet he chose to be stripped and pierced and
shamed before all men, to lose all honour and his life with it. Out of this utter
defeat, he brought forth victory not only for himself but for all the world, for
those who had died before him and those who would die after.”

Leofgar’s understanding of the world twisted at the words, the way a riddle

twists in the mind just before it gives up its answer. Something had changed,
something been done afresh. He had comprehended something in his heart and
his guts that had not quite reached his mind yet.

“Weakness is strength?” Leofgar tried to fit the revelation into words, but the

phrase made no sense.

Gewis laughed and smoothed down the long white hair that ringed his shaved

crown.

“Yielding is not weakness,” Leofgar tried again, and although some part of

him clamoured that this was as nonsensical as the first, another part—the
changed part—sighed in relief. This was not quite right either, but it was closer.

Abruptly, he wanted to go racing down the slope at the end of the abbey

garden shouting it at the top of his lungs. It didn’t fully express what he had
understood, but it would do, and such a fierce flood of joy and relief,
understanding, revelation and goodness accompanied it that he wanted to tell the
world and keep telling them until they understood it too.

A stir at the inner doorway brought a scent of candles and cabbage into the

room. Dark shapes crowded through the narrow entrance and emerged as three
strapping young monks.

Gewis edged to the end of the largest organ pipe, giving him a look of

apology for the interruption. “Happily you have come at the perfect time to hear
this noble instrument give voice for the first time. Lend me a hand there, and we
will take this into the church.”

So Leofgar hitched Lark and Hierting more firmly onto his back and took an

end of wooden pipe. The other monks disposed themselves along it, sharing the
weight, while the carpenter and his lad walked alongside as idly as lords.

Rather than take it out of the inner door, through the scriptorium and the

dormitories, they processed with dignity into the gardens and around the outside,
acquiring curious onlookers along the way. When the pipe turned the corner of
the men’s building, onto the open space before the church, Leofgar saw the
great trough of stone that lay there, filled with water for passersby and horses
alike, now shining up at the sky a deep reflected blue. On the benches by its
side, he saw Wulfstan sitting with a motherly woman in a faded blue dress and a

white veil.

At the sight of Wulfstan, Leofgar’s heart again surprised him with joy. They

had been apart scarcely two hours, and yet something in him had grown thin and
faint with hunger in that time. Wulfstan was as food to him, made him breathe a
sigh of relief and feel strong again.

When Wulfstan heard the clamour of all the folk surrounding the little

procession, he looked up and, seeing Leofgar, broke into a smile like summer.
Leofgar had the glad thought that Wulfstan felt the same famine and the same
need for him.

Placing the first pipe down in the corner cleared for it, they went back for

another. Gewis roped in half of the crowd to carry bellows and boards, pipes
and pedals for him, sending the youngest monk to run to the cellarer and fetch
beer for his impromptu labourers.

By this means, it took no time at all for all the pieces of the organ to be

deposited in place. Perhaps the onlookers would have stayed to watch it
assembled but that immediately afterward the monks and nuns of the community
began filing into the church for the office of None. That chased away the idlers
and those who had turned up simply for the free beer, and left only a few
pilgrims and pious townsfolk to fill in the spaces left by the clergy.

Leofgar had never seen so many holy people in one place—the floor could

not be seen for dark woolen habits, and he was awed by the beauty of the
plainsong, men and women chanting together as though lifted and lapped by a
musical sea.

Halfway through the short office, Wulfstan pushed through the crowd to

stand next to him. If they wriggled a little, they could put themselves behind the
propped-up pipes and hear the service without being seen. The smile passed
between them again, Leofgar feeling it over all of his skin like strong sunlight.

There was something different about Wulfstan—a lightness in his eyes and his

step that had not been there before. At the sight of it, the better part of him
rejoiced, but the worst feared that he would no longer be needed, that he had
been replaced.

Under cover of the pipes, Wulfstan slipped his arm around Leofgar’s back.

The warmth and the scent of him were like springtime after too much snow. This
time nothing—no feeling that he should be appalled, no doubt about his own
intentions, no guilt because what he wanted would lead to Wulfstan’s shame—
nothing walled Leofgar away from accepting that comfort. It seemed strange to
him that everything in him could be so changed with one single thought, and yet it
was, and he was not fool enough to cling to shadows when the morning had
come. So he leaned in until he was flush against the other man’s side and smiled

until it ached.

Wulfstan startled at the intimacy and gave him the same wondering,

unconvinced look with which he had received the kiss in the courtyard. Clearly
he did not know what to make of this sudden conversion. Leofgar lost the
second half of the service altogether under imaginings of how he would prove his
change of heart as soon as he could get Wulfstan alone. God did not strike him
down either for inattentiveness or for lust. So he felt he had tacit permission to
go on, and go on he did.

When the service ended, the monks and nuns filing out took guests and

onlookers alike with them. The abbess, a slim, shrouded figure, rose from her
gilded throne, and she and her ladies passed through the further door into a small
room beyond. Gewis and his carpenters came out of hiding, and in the echoing
emptiness left behind, they coupled together the organ with rapid competent
ease.

“That went well,” Leofgar said, surprised, when Gewis at last sat down in

front of the instrument, and the boy pumped the bellows enough to get a note
from each pipe. Such notes too, making the air shake in his lungs and the ground
vibrate beneath him. Harsh, strident, bellowing notes, like great cymbals
crashing. They punched him in the chest and grabbed his throat and shook him
like the hands of giants.

“We have practiced this so often I have dreamed of it going together, piece

by piece, every night this past fortnight.” Gewis’s eyes were white rimmed with
excitement, and there was a frantic note to his smile. The look he directed at
Wulfstan seemed as though it would have been curious if it had not been held
under and drowned in the larger glory of finally having the voice of God at his
fingertips.

Leofgar knew exactly how he felt—the sound of the organ enraptured him.

He thought of his song for Anna, and the fierce passages where he had tried to
convey the magnificence of that man’s soul—the blinding ferocity of its light—
through the poor thin notes at the top of the harp, the squeaky shrill of an
overblown whistle.

Before he had formed his thoughts into words, Lark was in his hands. At the

sight of the harp, Gewis sat down gently on the six-legged stool before the
organ. His expression of triumph softened with memories as he reached out and
traced the well-worn carving down her throat.

“Our master carried this. Anna’s master and mine. I had almost forgotten.”
Leofgar laid his cheek to her arch protectively, but forced himself to say,

“You would make a claim to her?”

“No,” Gewis laughed, though it was a melancholy sound. “I have now this

beast for my own. You are the last of our line to tread the gleeman’s path. It is
right she should be yours. Why bring her out now?”

“I made a song for Anna. Listen.”
Despite what must have been an overweening desire to finally play his new

instrument, Gewis fidgeted only two measures at the beginning of Leofgar’s
refrain. By the time he came to the triumphant notes, plucked high and shrill from
the smallest strings, Gewis was leaning forward, listening intently. That musician’s
part of Leofgar that stretched out to a fellow scop and linked them so that the
song could flow back and forth reached out now to Gewis’s listening heart. It
rejoiced when the old man frowned hard to fix the notes in his memory then
turned and laid his hands on the keys.

The carpenter and his boy had both disappeared, but Wulfstan seized the

bellows instead and worked them smooth and strong.

Leofgar closed his eyes and played sorrow, sad and sweet, that turned into

gratitude, that turned into…

Joy thundered in the roof and broke Leofgar’s heart apart, hearing the sound

he had never thought to hear in waking life. They played together, Anna’s friend
and his pupil, and the first song the great organ of Ely abbey ever gave tongue to
was his own music, his master’s elegy, his greatest work.

When it finished, he had to wipe away the tears that were snaking down

Lark’s soundbox. And it was because he was exalted on heavenly music and
dazzled with sunshine on tears that he did not recognise the three men who had
opened the church door and stepped inside. Not, at least, until Wulfstan
unpicked the peace-ties around his sword and drew, and Gewis rose and
recoiled from the blasphemy with a shout.

Leofgar had barely time to look up before Wulfstan had pushed him behind

himself. When he did, he saw Hunlaf and Deala, standing shoulder to shoulder
between Leofgar and the way out.

Gewis picked up his robes and went running to the door through which the

abbess had vanished. With numb hands and galloping heart, Leofgar put Lark
down carefully between the organ and the wall, where she would be neither
knocked over nor stood on by accident.

He stood and brushed himself down to be sure he was neat—why die

slovenly, after all? Despite Wulfstan’s gestures that told him to run, despite the
remembered feeling of helplessness that made his lips and his fingertips cold, he
forced himself to walk forward and look steadily up into the face of the third
man, his lord, Tatwine.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Leofgar’s body betrayed him as he came up beside Wulfstan. He could feel

even now the press of Tatwine’s weight on his back. The skin of his flanks
burned with remembered touches. His breath came thin and fast. He smoothed it
down as he had smoothed down his skirts, tipped up his chin so that Tatwine
would see he was not cowed—such a practiced liar he was—and said,
“Wulfstan, this does not need to be solved with steel. Not here in the sanctuary
of peace.”

Hunlaf’s gaze was cold as a dragon’s but, at the words, his hands gave off

picking at the knot of his own peace-ties. Deala had taken his bow off his back,
but now he set one end down on the tiles, unbent, and wound the slack string
around his fingers.

Tatwine stepped forward, his hair glinting like steel on the breadth of his

shoulders, and all the silver ornaments of belt and baldrick gleaming alike.

At the movement, Leofgar retreated three steps, back towards the altar. He

should have run to it, should have had his hands on it before opening this
altercation. He should have claimed sanctuary before acknowledging the three of
them, giving them power over him.

He had not done so. And if he broke and ran for it now, Hunlaf at least

would follow, grab him by the belt and lift him off his feet, like as not. Leofgar
would wait a long time before he provoked such a scene in a place like this—a
place that had the trembling echoes of glory lodged in its stones.

“My lord,” he said instead, calmly enough, without either the accusation that

would have pleased him or the apology that would have pleased Tatwine.

“You keep calling me that.” Tatwine laid a hand on Wulfstan’s wrist, pushing

down. Wulfstan hesitated long enough to show he did this of his own will, not
forced, and slid his weapon back into the scabbard. The threat of bloodshed
eased. “I don’t think you mean it. You have a strange way of keeping your
oaths, scop.”

“There are things no man can command of another, lord or not.” Leofgar

was proud of his voice—not a hint of shake or fear, only certainty and
righteousness. A weak-minded man would doubt himself at the rock-solid
strength of Leofgar’s certainty.

Tatwine only smiled and smoothed down the ends of his moustache with

finger and thumb. “Is that so? Yet I do not remember you setting conditions to
your obedience at the time.”

“Some things do not need to be said.” Some things indeed could only be said

in secret, for surely Tatwine did not mean to openly discuss this in front of
Wulfstan, who was a stranger to him. In front of whoever else might wander in
from the busy town outside to pay homage at the shrine. In front of the saint
herself, whose bones lay beneath their feet.

Perhaps Tatwine caught this thought by watching it swim in the back of

Leofgar’s widened eyes, for he gave a snort of laughter and stepped back,
looking up to admire the painted angels on the ceiling and the bright, fresh
colours on the new assembled organ. Reaching out, he set an inquisitive hand on
one of the keys, produced only a wheeze of wind, not strong enough to make
the pipe speak. His face changed from hard humour to curiosity at the sound.

“We heard the song from outside. It’s how we knew we had finally run you

to ground.” A sober look from his pale eyes. “We had heard that song before,
the night we were attacked by outlaws. Deala tells me he shot at many who
were already running away. Hunlaf says the men he fought were more afraid of
the shadows than they were of him—that half their minds were mazed in horrors,
walking in the forest, and their hands were clumsy because of it and their backs
left open.”

He pulled out the six-legged stool and sat, propping his sword on his knee

like any king drawn in red ink and bedecked with gold in a manuscript. “After
we cut the last of them down, we found bodies in the woods around, not slain by
our steel. When I returned to my camp, I found my two hostages gone.”

Tatwine dropped a hand onto Lark’s pillar, where she lay in her careful spot

beside the organ, and Leofgar started forward altogether against his own will.
Tatwine nodded as though he had just confirmed everything he had thought.

“My two hostages which I see are now back with their master. You did not

simply shout to warn us, did you? You woke us and you defended us. You
drove those wolfsheads away, and thereby saved our lives, did you not?”

For some reason he had not expected Tatwine to put it with such generosity.

Sneaked back and stole from me, Leofgar had expected. Saved our lives,
though that was indeed what he’d done, he had thought would be too painful for
the warriors to admit.

“I did. Wulfstan and I both.”
Tatwine looked Wulfstan up and down—there was a great deal of up, for

Wulfstan stood like a pillar with his head high and his great shoulders braced.
His hair looked brown, outside the sunlight, its embers invisible for now, waiting
to be called forth glowing by sunlight or candle. “Wulfstan, son of Wulfric of
Colneceastre? I know your brother Herewulf. He commanded one of my ships
when I delivered them into the king’s fleet for the shipscot of us both. A stern

man and silent.”

Wulfstan looked awkward at this introduction. His back bent a little and

straightened again, as though the thought of his family was a weight on his neck.
“He is the eldest,” he said, “and so has little time for mirth.”

Tatwine had turned the church into his hall, Leofgar thought, watching him

lounge on the stool as if it were his own high seat. Now he was looking between
Wulfstan and Leofgar with an air of understanding and a bitter cast to his mouth.
Leofgar ran the past month through his fingers as if feeling for wear, brought to
mind the first time Tatwine had seen Wulfstan—running out of the hospital in
Cotanham to protect Leofgar, being ridden down in the process, yet coming
back that very night to snatch him from under Tatwine’s plundering hands.

There was a story in that. Not the true story, but a story that would fit

everyone’s beliefs better—a story that would bring honour to all, except the
storyteller himself. But it was not the storyteller’s place to demand to be among
the heroes. His place was to guide the threads, unseen, like Wyrd herself.

But what a huge lie to tell in the house of God!
With Tatwine’s eyes upon him, the warriors between him and the door, with

Wulfstan radiating readiness to do battle, Leofgar put out his left hand and
slipped it into Wulfstan’s right.

Wulfstan jumped, taken by surprise, but his grip tightened and he gave a look

so proud, so melting sweet that Leofgar thought no words would be needed
after all. Understanding dawned clear on Tatwine’s face.

“So you two are…?”
“We met two years ago in Uisebec.” Leofgar squeezed Wulfstan’s hand tight

to tell him to keep silent. “He offered me his protection and I was too proud to
take it.” That at least should ring true. “All the year after, I regretted my
stubbornness, and so when we were both there again this year I pledged myself
to him.”

“Then why—”
“How could I leave my master, who had brought me up from childhood?”

The ring of truth in that too—let Tatwine hear it and suppose it chimed over all.

“When Anna wanted to come north, of course I had to come with him.

When he found, in you, the kind lord he had dreamed of all his life, how could I
dash that hope out of his hand when he was dying? So I gave you my allegiance.
I could not give you my heart, for it had already been taken. If I had been
free…” I would have run as though the devil was behind me. “But I was not,
and I would not be foresworn.”

Some freak of poetry moved Wulfstan, unrehearsed but perfect. He leaned

around Tatwine, gently lifted Lark from under his palm and passed her to

Leofgar, who hugged her tight.

Tatwine’s gaze as it rested on him felt lighter than before, and Leofgar tried

not to be angry at the fact that he had to achieve this with lies, when the truth had
been so roundly ignored.

“Yet you could have simply told me,” Tatwine said, very quietly, very

disappointed. “Why all the rigmarole with hiding and hurting yourself and running
away?”

This at least Leofgar could answer with the bite appropriate to a hard truth.

“Because in my life it has been a rare thing for any man to believe my words. I
have grown used to being ignored and passed from one hand to another, like a
communal harp to be made to sing as each man pleased.”

“You didn’t think I would listen.” Tatwine took hold of the ends of his

moustache and tugged them, as if that would explain the downturn of his mouth.
“Yet you still came back and fought for me, and brought your friend with you?
Come here.”

Leofgar made no move. He thought himself tolerably brave, but he had no

wish to come within grabbing distance of Tatwine ever again.

“If your vow holds you, come here.”
Swallowing, he took hold of his pride in both hands and, using it as a stick to

support him, walked slow and stiffly forwards, dragging Wulfstan along with him.

“Kneel.”
This was harder, but he managed it by remembering the golden Christ in the

workroom, telling himself he knelt to it, not to the man who had held him down
by the hair, almost tearing out a fistful in the process. His head ached at the
memory, but he knelt and did not cringe even when Tatwine’s large hand came
down on that exact spot and stroked it.

“I release you,” his lord said at last, after a long pause during which Leofgar

thought he was enjoying himself too much. “I release you from my service and
from obedience to my commands. Yet because you have saved my life, which is
the deed of a man, I name you my gesith, and you shall have shelter and aid at
any homestead where my writ rules.”

He lifted his hand, and Leofgar scrambled away from it, a little faster than

was polite.

As he did so, the inner door banged open, and the abbess herself strode up

the aisle, ahead of two lay brothers with staves in their hands. Gewis scurried
behind. Rescue, thought Leofgar, come hilariously too late, but appreciated
nonetheless.

“I have heard of a sword drawn in this holy place,” said the abbess, as soon

as she was close enough to do so without shouting. A younger woman than

Leofgar had expected, she had a thin, sharp face that might have been beautiful
had it had a little paint on it, and an expression less calculated to freeze the
blood.

Tatwine smiled at her, half with the automatic condescension of a killer to

one who has never lifted a blade, half with the wariness of a man who
nevertheless acknowledges the presence of a power he does not understand. “A
misunderstanding, lady, and all put right.” The condescension was less veiled
when he looked behind her to the men with staffs who followed. “We ask your
pardon for disturbing the peace of this sanctuary.”

She was a woman used to authority, Leofgar could see it in the way she

gathered their gazes and weighed them. Her stare seemed to pick him apart from
the skin to the bones and leave no secret untold within. He smiled to confirm
Tatwine’s words. Hunlaf nodded, Deala’s shoulders lowered, and Wulfstan
slumped under her regard.

“You have my pardon,” she said, in return for this submission. “For I see that

the saint has been among you, resolving your quarrel. It is not my place to hinder
her mercy. But I wish to speak further to the man at fault. Which of you was it?”

“Me, lady.” Wulfstan raised his head, but Leofgar noticed that his gaze was

focused on the abbess’s chin, where the material of her cap tied with a thin white
thread.

“Come aside with me then.”
An uncertain moment, as Wulfstan obediently followed her into the saint’s

chapel, and Leofgar dithered between following and feeling as though he should
wait for Tatwine’s dismissal. Tatwine solved his dilemma by reaching out and
once more ruffling Leofgar’s hair in a way that made him prickle all over and
want to hiss like an offended cat.

“You should have told me.”
“I should,” Leofgar replied, meekly enough. I should have told you

falsehoods from the start, not trusting you to listen. You failed me, my lord,
and now you have chosen to believe an easy lie in place of a hard truth.

What good would it do to say these things? Perhaps that was what Anna had

tried to tell him at the salt pits—that one praised what other people found
praiseworthy, because if one did not, they did not listen. That folk could not hear
the voice of one speaking in a different tongue.

It seemed a poor, defeated lesson to learn, but it fitted well enough with the

job of a scop, which was to tell well-crafted tales which no one now knew were
true or not. To use those tales to create peace and pride and comfort in the
minds of the listener. Did it matter if those things came at the cost of a lie?

Something in him said yes. Truth mattered. It mattered in itself. It was whole

and glorious, as objectively good as a jewel in the hand. But if truth caused
strife, created pain, opened wounds now given the chance to close—was it still
good? He wished he could be sure.

“I should have told you,” he repeated, sighing. “I did not know, then, the

breadth of your kindness, and I was afraid.” Could he say this, with the imprint
of Tatwine’s hands like ink under his skin? He breathed in hard again and
acknowledged to himself how very much worse things could have gone if
Tatwine had not chosen to relent now. “I see now how much I have to be
grateful to you for. Wherever I go, I will sing your praises.”

It was the right thing to say. Tatwine beamed, and Hunlaf smirked a little in

approval. “And come back and tell us of your travels and the great world
outside these isles. You may not be my scop any more, but a gleeman will
always receive glad welcome in my home. Doubly so if it be you.”

“I will come if I can, lord,” Leofgar promised, and made a dozen plans in the

back of his mind that led to him being unable to. Perhaps Tatwine saw that too,
for his smile was a harder thing as he turned away, and with a gesture of his right
hand gathered up his retainers and was gone.

Leofgar turned, gave Gewis a quick, wide-eyed look as if to say he would

explain all later, and ran to the open door of St. Aethelthryth’s shrine, bursting in
just as Wulfstan and the abbess rose together from their knees where they had
been praying beside the grave.

The abbess, who must only have been his own age, but had the poise of a

king’s daughter, gave Leofgar a smile that made him feel like a naughty child
being humoured. “Be at peace. I have not hurt your friend.”

That was clear enough from Wulfstan’s face. Leofgar took a half step back

at the sight of it. He had grown used to a Wulfstan whose eyes were full of
secrets, doubts and fear, and he almost did not know this man, who looked so
clear and so glad.

“What have you done to him?”
The abbess raised her dark eyebrows at his tone, but he couldn’t feel sorry

for it. Was Wulfstan his own man? The thought pierced his belly like a
spearhead—what if Wulfstan, who already dwelt in the spirit world more than
half of the time, had decided to put down all of his worldly cares and enter the
cloister? What if he had taken Leofgar’s rejection of him last night to mean they
had no further chance of taking life side by side?

“Don’t look so frightened,” Wulfstan said, and his face was gold leafed with

joy. “I told her that I wanted to pledge my life to the saint. That I have many sins
to atone for. And she—”

“Received his sacrifice.” The abbess smiled, and Leofgar felt the chill of last

winter’s killing cold again all the way down to the marrow of his bones.

“No. You were going to… I…” It had been such a comforting thought while

he lay fretting in Tatwine’s burh—the freedom and the solitude of the road. Now
he had it, he saw at once he didn’t want it any more. Not without Wulfstan. He
didn’t want anything, any more, if it were without Wulfstan.

Words choked him. His mouth moved of itself once or twice in silence, and

then the string of his thought snapped, and he turned on his heel and prepared to
walk away.

Wulfstan caught him by the elbow as he was halfway through the door.

“Stay,” he said, wonderingly—and his red-brown eyes were full of new
understanding, as though he had understood from Leofgar’s devastation exactly
how much he meant to him. Of course, when it is too late.

“The monastery needs warriors to accompany the pilgrims,” Wulfstan said,

and as this did not fit into the shape Leofgar had prepared for it, he was slow in
understanding what it meant. “To protect them on their journey. They have
bookland set aside to provide for such warriors.”

A little inkling of it, like a fresh breeze stirring the ashes of a burned-down

house.

“You said you wanted to see the world,” Wulfstan urged, his presence warm

against Leofgar’s side. His hand raised as if to touch Leofgar’s face, but fell
back at the abbess’s rustle of skirts. “A scop pays his own way wherever he
goes, so we could journey together, I protecting the pilgrims and you entertaining
them. We could do it together. What do you say?”

Flung straight from the worst possibility to the best, Leofgar swallowed

disbelief that tasted of tears. He wouldn’t believe it all at once, for perfection
was an elvish thing. It ought to be approached cautiously, in case it might be
frightened off.

All the same, his laugh sounded suspiciously like a sob when he let it out, and

there was a shocking lack of art to his words. “Do you offer me everything I
want—the road and you and the world’s wonders, all at once? They say there is
no certainty in this world but death and the love of God, but I am certain my
heart could not want for more than this. I say yes. Of course, I say yes.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The rest of the day, Wulfstan spent in the scriptorium, watching a young

Briton labour over three copies of the documents he would have to sign to
transfer his land to Saewyn, and those which would give him possession of the
rents of part of the abbey’s bookland. It was a long, patient process, and he did
not envy the clerk his crabbed crouch over the desk, his inked fingers and
narrowed red-rimmed eyes.

About an hour into this process, Leofgar wandered away. Wulfstan felt

certain he would find him again lurking around the organ with Gewis, talking
scop-craft and shared history.

The space at Wulfstan’s elbow felt too empty without Leofgar there, but he

couldn’t begrudge him his friends. In truth he couldn’t begrudge him anything at
the moment. They had not spoken about this thing between them—well, a little
perhaps, last night, but the words had been insubstantial. Nowhere near as solid
a thing as Leofgar’s sworn agreement to stay with him, to travel with him.

All of a sudden, he could look forward to the future as to a feast. He was

happy to wait the long day away quietly on a stool while the quills scratched
around him, if it meant that tonight he lay down with a man he could trust, and
tomorrow he rose and faced the world beside him.

When he had signed the rolls of parchment—“make your mark here, beside

the cross,” the clerk said, impatient with his graceless fumbling—he gave one to
Saewyn and watched her leave with a satisfaction like that of standing again for
the first time since a broken leg. It ached, but it felt well.

After which he had had enough of holding his joy secret and tight inside, and

hunted Leofgar down so that he could share it. The scop was not in the church
after all, but out at the stables talking with the stablemaster.

A flush of pleasure, pink as the evening sky, rose over Leofgar’s cheeks as

he saw Wulfstan approach. His half-moon of a grin looked too wide to fit on so
narrow a face. “I have been saving coin,” he said, secrets dancing in his eyes,
“and bargained for a corner of the hayloft instead of a pallet in the hostelry. I
hope you will not mind?”

“Let me show you how to get up.” The ostler took them inside, through the

stalls where horses snorted curiously at them, to the ladder at the side of the
building. Climbing this, they crawled and wriggled into a heap of straw, warm as
summer but sharp as scratching nails. The ostler leaped down, leaving them
alone together a bare forearm’s depth below the ceiling—the loft was packed so

high with hay.

Wulfstan had just leaned in and pinned Leofgar tight beneath him when the

creak on the steps said the ostler was coming back. They sprang apart and
grabbed the blankets passed up to them with what must have been a suspicious
show of innocence.

With the blankets below them, the straw no longer pressed against their skin

like cat’s claws. Wulfstan remembered with a stab of delight that he didn’t have
to pretend to be what he was not. Unpinning his cloak he flung himself down on
his back on the bed, smiled invitingly up at his man. Outside, the darkening sky
was slipping into blue, and Leofgar’s form was drawn in shades of silver and
indigo. So inhumanly beautiful it was hard not to think of him as being part elvish,
if the blood of mankind and that of the ylfe was capable of mixing.

The thought of Leofgar as an uncanny creature, older and stronger than man,

gave him a delicious thrill that only built when the slighter man came crawling
over him like a hunting wolf. He smiled and tilted up his throat in offering for the
teeth.

Leofgar lowered himself down to pin Wulfstan where he lay, and his weight

—the sharpness of his hip bones that dug into Wulfstan’s flesh harsh enough to
leave bruises—made Wulfstan turn into liquid light again and lose track of where
his body ended and began, except where it was pinned down by his scop’s.

Kissing him until they were both gasping, Leofgar ravaged his throat with

suck marks and bites. This was enough, Wulfstan told himself. He could push up
against the rough slide of clothes and come from friction and kissing, maybe a
hand. Nothing shameful. Leofgar need not fret over anyone’s dishonour—he
need not protect Wulfstan from a shame Wulfstan no longer felt. This would be
enough.

These thoughts were false. But it was a falsehood Wulfstan could live with.

He could bear the small frustration of sex in which his body cried out in empty
yearning to be filled. He’d lived with it this long already, why not continue? A
small sacrifice for such happiness as this.

Then Leofgar was kneeling up, a black shape against a dark blue sky, and

tugging off his tunic, and everything in Wulfstan gave a sharp, delighted throb. He
fumbled with his belts, forced limbs gone heavy with need to grasp his skirts and
pull them over his head. The clothes joined the pile atop them both, and the heat
restored that beautiful flush to Leofgar’s fair skin—a thing he could feel rather
than see, a hot silky slide across his chest and loins as they lay back down
together.

It had been a day of wonders and dreams, so he crooked his knees and

spread his legs and felt the harper settle between them, just as though he were a

guilty thought brought to life. Except that Wulfstan felt no guilt.

He was, however, a little afraid, and it didn’t help to reach up and feel on

Leofgar’s face the curve of that almost-cruel smile he remembered with such
confused lusts from their first meeting. “What…what…?” he gasped around a
tongue gone thick with longing. “Last night I begged you and you refused to
‘dishonour’ me. Yet this afternoon suddenly you kiss me in men’s sight and care
nothing for what they think of you. You told that…ah, oh do that more…you
told that lie to Tatwine. And now… What changed?”

Leofgar’s quiet laugh was fond and so very sure of itself that another wave of

heat went through Wulfstan just at the sound. The long fingers he had watched
with utter fascination were now working their way inside him, and at that
thought, at that feeling, he didn’t give a damn what Leofgar said, as long as it
went on.

“Yielding isn’t weakness,” Leofgar said, as though it was a whole treatise of

thought bundled up in a single phrase. Wulfstan was far too distracted by the
growl of the voice to worry too much about whether it was making sense. “So
how can it dishonour either of us?”

There was only enough light left to guess at the complex of emotions on

Leofgar’s face, something like laughter beneath the need and fierce possession.
Even this close to driving himself home in Wulfstan’s body, like a sword into the
sheath made for it, he found something amusing. “You aren’t listening to me at
all, are you?”

“Mmmn?” Wulfstan ventured, because the truth was that he wasn’t. He was

not at all in the mood to share this moment with discussions about philosophy.
“Just… Please.”

Leofgar laughed and bent down to kiss Wulfstan’s open mouth, and when he

rose again he was as predatory as Wulfstan could have wished. It was a long
time before either of them spoke again, though he groaned enough, and he
thought the shout of joy his body made at last should have been heard in the
highest heavens.

It wasn’t until he had wiped them both down with the corner of a blanket and

curled into Leofgar, tucking his head under Leofgar’s chin and feeling the scop’s
long arms pull him in tight, narrow but strong as bands of iron, that he had the
ability to think again. What came first was dread.

For all Leofgar’s words, how would he act once the deed was done? The

soreness he had left behind him was warm inside Wulfstan. Wulfstan’s body told
him he was at peace. He floated in bliss like warm water, all his muscles lax save
for the smile on his face. The little voice within feared that Leofgar would do as
Cenred had done and—now he had proved his triumph, he would want to tell it

to the world.

He had, after all, spent such a great deal of time and effort to try to prove

himself a man, and this—fucking a warrior who could take him apart with one
hand—this would show everyone his strength of spirit and of will.

“Still nothing to say?” Leofgar asked.
Darkness had fallen, save for the suggestion of a distant moon, and Wulfstan

could see very little of Leofgar, but he could feel the two long hands knotted in
his hair, making small, soothing circles on his scalp. He could hear amusement
and concern both in Leofgar’s tone. Never again, he thought, would he take
pleasure in a voice that didn’t laugh, just a little. To the fear of exposure was
added the fear that Leofgar would leave in the morning, and nothing again would
compare favourably with him.

“Come, it wasn’t that bad, surely? I dare say I can do better with practice.”
Wulfstan liked the sound of that, with its promise of a future, but they had

spent so long running on assumptions, he wanted it out, plain. “I don’t
understand. I wish I knew why you had changed. You no longer despise me for
this? You no longer care if men see you and suppose you are mine—my boy.
What happened?”

Leofgar gave a soft exhalation of laughter which ruffled the hair on Wulfstan’s

crown. “I spoke to Gewis,” he explained in drowsy tones. “He pointed out to
me that God himself did not despise the choice to be helpless, nor trouble to
defend himself from shame. Why should I claim to be greater than God? I am
proud, yes, but I am not that proud. And I know that you could not bear your
folk to think you any man’s boy, whereas I have spent this last five months with
Tatwine thinking me Anna’s. It didn’t kill me.”

He heaved up onto his knees, letting cold air drench the inside of the nest

they had formed together. Wulfstan might have protested but for the hand under
his elbow that tugged him to come up too. He obeyed because it was Leofgar,
and he adored and trusted him more than any other man alive.

“My shoulders are strong enough to bear the burden of gossip and censure,

when yours are not. So I will do the office of a man, and protect you from them
by taking them on me. Give me your hands.”

“Oh.” Wulfstan saw their posture in his mind. He knelt before Leofgar with

his head bowed and his hands raised, the palms laid flat against each other.
Tears came to his eyes as he felt Leofgar enfold his hands with his own—the
gesture of a lord to his man. An oathtaking. A way to vow, in the sight of each
other and of God, that he would take Leofgar as his protector for the rest of his
life. “Oh yes.”

“Speak,” Leofgar said, quiet and calm, his smoky dark voice full of natural

authority. “Tell me what you promise.”

“My lord.” Wulfstan sniffed, for his joy filled him so completely it squeezed

tears from his eyes. This was why Leofgar was worthy—to think of something
so perfect, that allowed them both to cherish and rely on one another without
dishonouring either of them. “My lord, accept me, Wulfstan Wulfricing, to your
service. Receive my sword, my honour and my love, and use them to your
glory.”

Without letting go of his captive hands, Leofgar leaned down and kissed him

on the forehead. It was a surprised laughter that trembled beneath his words this
time, a laugh as at a wondrous and unexpected thing. “I accept you, Wulfstan. I
promise to return love for your love, protection for your honour, generous
reward for your service. Let this oath bind us from now until death release us.”

Outside, a late party of travellers passed with a lantern, and the light showed

him glimpses of Leofgar’s gold curls and the dazzled, hopeful look on his face. A
reflection of fire caught in his grey-blue eyes and made them blaze, and his smile
grew until it rivalled the moon.

Wulfstan lay back down and pulled his lover, his lord, back down with him.

Fear, departing, left him incredulous, amazed.

“So,” Leofgar murmured against his collarbone. “Rome. Byzantium. The

market places and libraries and scriptoria of a dozen countries.”

“And bandits.” A yawn broke free of Wulfstan’s control, but he felt too

warm, too blissful and too full of hope to waste the moment sleeping.
“Shipwreck, bad water, plagues and famine.”

“What do we have to fear from bandits?” There was sleep in Leofgar’s voice

too, stubbornly held back. He traced the line of Wulfstan’s spine as though he
was reading it, brushing his fingers along the line to point up the words. “We will
kill them all, and I will make you a different song every night lauding your valour,
and sing them until the pilgrims beg me to stop.”

Wulfstan snorted softly. “You’re a fool.”
“My Lord Fool to you.”
It lay in his heart like an ember, and every time Leofgar mentioned it, it flared

into life and warmed him anew.

“Sleep now.”
“I don’t want to,” he said. “I want to savour this joy for as long as I can.”
“Yet have we not sworn to be together until death?” Leofgar asked,

mocking-stern. “That means the joy will be there tomorrow. And all the
kingdoms of the earth with it. We have a lot to look forward to, so let us not do
it dropping down tired with a thick head and no appetite. Sleep.”

Since it pleased him to obey, he did.

About the Author

Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up

in the wild countryside of the Peak District. She studied English and Philosophy
before accepting employment with the Crown Court where she worked for a
number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with
her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid
being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon

shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up
an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to
operate a mobile phone.

You can find me in many places, but chiefly at

www.alexbeecroft.com

.

Look for these titles by Alex Beecroft

Now Available:

Captain’s Surrender

Shining in the Sun

Too Many Fairy Princes

Under the Hill

Bomber’s Moon

Dogfighters

Happily ever after doesn’t always come quietly. Sometimes it puts up a

fight.

Too Many Fairy Princes

© 2013 Alex Beecroft

Kjartan’s family is royally dysfunctional. He’d prefer to ignore the lot of

them, but can’t since his father has set him and his brothers on a quest to win a
throne Kjartan doesn’t even want. Worse, his younger brother resorts to murder
and forces Kjartan to teleport—without looking where he’s going.

Art gallery worker Joel Wilson’s day has gone from hopeless, to hopeful,

then straight to hell. One minute he’s sure his boss has found a way to save the
floundering business, the next he’s scrambling to sell everything to pay off a loan
shark. If anyone needs a fairy godmother right now, it’s Joel. What he gets is a
fugitive elven prince in a trash bin.

They’ll both have to make the best of it, because fairy tales run roughshod

over reluctant heroes. Particularly when there aren’t enough happy endings to go
around.

Warning: This sweet romance contains a starving artist trying to scrape

together a living, extreme sibling rivalry, royalty behaving outrageously,
and elves being unreasonably beautiful, grotesque or deadly.

Enjoy the following excerpt for Too Many Fairy Princes:

He reached out to the nearest bin and grabbed the handle, paused before

lifting it. There was still time to walk away. Hadn’t he got enough trouble of his
own already?

Well yes, he did. A moment of sharp joy surprised him with its cutting edge.

Did he really have anything left to lose? No. That meant a certain freedom.
Wherever he went from here, it could hardly get worse. He grabbed the bin with
the other hand too, lifted it away, and stood for a long time looking down,
sucker-punched into silence, even his mind shutting down in the face of the
impossible.

Because he was far too much of a Tolkien fan not to recognise what he saw.

He was just not enough of a dreamer to believe it. Oh yes, he’d told himself,
“You never know.” The folklore had always been there, surprisingly consistent
from country to country. People in Iceland believed enough to still leave
sacrifices for the creatures, but…

But Joel hadn’t realised how firmly he disbelieved until this moment, when he

found himself looking down on what was unmistakably an elf.

Of themselves, his hands came up to cover his nose and mouth. He

rebreathed his own air, warm and reassuring, for a while, as his already queasy
stomach curled and turned over.

It was white, the creature. Whiter than paper, its face and outstretched hands

gleaming like snow under moonlight, and its hair behind it like a comet’s trail,
silver as a falling star. The tunic and trousers it wore must once have been
equally white—even now they glimmered with threads of silver. Its moonstone
belt and baldric gleamed and flickered as it breathed.

But the knees of the trousers were torn out, and spatters of blood showed

stark around them. Rips and long scuffs of dark London dirt cratered the
radiance of the tunic, and everywhere it touched the ground it had soaked up the
decomposed brown liquid from the bottom of the bins, sticky and stinking and
wrong.

“Nhn,” said Joel at last and lurched closer as if tugged. He bent down,

caught—in the middle of the reek—a faint scent like primroses after spring rain.
Saw the long, twisting burn, raised and livid on the skin of the creature’s hand
and arm, and his face with the brows still creased in pain and lashes like silver
wire and lips as white as clouds. “Oh…”

It didn’t require belief to reach down and carefully, carefully in case his skin

stung it, or his strength crushed its spun-glass delicacy, to brush his fingertips
along its cheek. A little colder than human skin, a little sleeker, but the firmness
was the same, as though bones and muscles still filled it out from within. He
curved his hand around the half-open mouth and felt its breath like a cool breeze
against his palm.

“All right, this is…this is officially not happening,” he told it as he knelt down

and got a hand under one of its shoulders. Oh, not good. Where he couldn’t see,
his fingers sunk into a wet mess of blood. He almost dropped it, shifted his grip
clumsily, and hauled the torso into his arms. “I want you to know I don’t believe
any of this, but you’re hurt and I guess I can’t take you to the hospital. And I
can’t leave you here. So…”

With one arm around the creature’s back, he wormed the other under its

long, slender legs, firmly told his trembling body to shape up, and lurched to his
feet. It weighed more than he’d expected from something so ethereal—less than
a healthy young man, but about the same as a slender young woman. At the jerk
of the lift, its brows pinched in further. It gave a little musical gasp of protest or
pain.

“Ssh,” Joel murmured, almost involuntarily protective. Something that

beautiful ought not to look so distressed. It violated the moral code of the
universe. “It’s all right. I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”

A few burdened steps to the archway, and he paused as he made sure no

one was around to watch him bridal-carry this white and alien thing into his
home. Then out into the street, a struggle and fumble with his keys as he tried to
open the door without dropping his burden. Another quick look around and he
made it into his flat unobserved, kicking the door to behind him, snapping on the
lights with his chin.

“All right,” he said again, lowering the long form of his guest to lie sprawled

and filthy over his faded yellow duvet. “Everything’s going to be—”

The moment the wounded shoulder touched the bed, the creature gave a

raw, gasping whine of pain. Its eyes flew open, wide, gold—gold like the eyes of
lions and just as pitiless—and it shoved him hard in the chest with its uninjured
hand. He flew across the room as though a horse had kicked him, slamming into
the sink and falling winded to the floor, nothing but vacuum inside him for a
moment until the paralysis of shock wore off and he could whoop in a bitter,
resentful breath.

A faint footfall and light on his downcast eyes. He looked up, found the

creature standing disdainfully over him, a knife of glass in its left hand, the right
still cradled against its chest. “You touched me! You touched me! You filthy,
sacrilegious…”

The knife glittered white shards of light into Joel’s aching head. He should

force himself up. He’d defeated one knife fighter today already. Why not
another? He should…

Inexplicably, suicidally, and desperately badly for his badass image, he put

his head in his hands and started to cry.

Kjartan’s knife whispered to him. Just there, where the ear stood above the

jawbone, there he could push in the point and a single curving cut would all but
sever the impious creature’s head from its backbone. The blade’s voice sang
under his fingers with a sweet, thin tone that rang around his aching head and
seemed to boil his eyes in their sockets.

But for all the stories about humans, for all the warnings about their

treacherous nature, their uncanny abilities, not even he could persuade himself
that this one—crouched in a huddle on its knees before him with tears leaking
out from behind its sheltering fingers—was honestly a danger to him.

The knife whined with disappointment as he slid it back into the sheath

strapped to his arm, and that was hard enough. But when it fell silent, all his
pains gave tongue, and the knowledge of agony went over him like a sheet of
lightning. He staggered backwards and his knees collided with a soft sleeping
platform. Sinking down to sit on it, he saw the stains where he’d lain, and the

stench of human on the bedding was the same stink as that of the man before
him.

He let you rest on his bed.
Kjartan groped for his knife again, fingers hard against the reassuring bump

beneath his sleeve. There were two explanations for that, and one of them he
liked very little. “What do you want from me, human? I warn you, I am a prince
of my people. If you touch me again, uninvited, I will skin you and write satirical
verses on the leather.”

The man choked on his tears and coughed the water out. Then the cough

became a laugh, and the laugh became a spasm, his brown face flushing purple,
his eyes shining out with a kind of fear. It persisted so long Kjartan became
afraid that he was under some sort of paralytic spell. So painful to watch was it
that he drew back his uninjured hand and slapped the man hard on his cheek.

Oh, how strange. He looked at his hand—the skin had felt rough as though it

was covered all over with fine bristles. The laughing fit having stopped, the
human now knelt, breathing hard, blinking its reddened eyes and watching him.
Kjartan deemed it safe enough to shuffle forward and indulge his curiosity by
peering at its face. It did! It had little black spikes all over its jaw that caught the
light and glinted like jet. He reached out and touched them with exploratory
fingertips. They were not made of stone, but apparently of coarse hair. They had
a grain, like a dog’s hair, smooth if he stroked one way, resisting him if he pulled
the other.

The creature looked up at him with a new kind of fear in its muddy brown

eyes and a curiosity that matched his own. How strange to think that just as it
was wondrous to him, so he was wondrous to it. A delightful thought.

He smiled, and it echoed the expression. It had not yet tried to kill him, or

imprison him and put him on display, or overpower and ravish him, one of these
three things having been what he expected when he woke to find it leaning over
him. Now he wanted to know what it would do. If given its will and choice.

“Um…” it said, rubbing the heel of its hand across its eyes to dash away the

tears. “So you speak English. That’s going to make things easier.”

His deadliest enemy will become his heart’s desire.

Brothers of the Wild North Sea

© 2013 Harper Fox

Caius doesn’t feel like much of a Christian. He loves his life of learning as a

monk in the far-flung stronghold of Fara, but the hot warrior blood of his
chieftain father flows in his veins. Heat soothed only in the arms of his sweet-
natured friend and lover, Leof.

When Leof is killed during a Viking raid, Cai’s grieving heart thirsts for

vengeance—and he has his chance with Fenrir, a wounded young Viking warrior
left for dead. But instead of reaching for a weapon, Cai finds himself defying his
abbot’s orders and using his healing skills to save Fen’s life.

At first, Fen repays Cai’s kindness by attacking every Christian within reach.

But as time passes, Cai’s persistent goodness touches his heart. And Cai, who
had thought he would never love again, feels the stirring of a profound new
attraction.

Yet old loyalties call Fen back to his tribe and a relentless quest to find the

ancient secret of Fara—a powerful talisman that could render the Vikings
indestructible, and tear the two lovers’ bonds beyond healing.

Warning: Contains battles, bloodshed, explicit M/M sex, and the proper

Latin term for what lies beneath those cassocks.

Enjoy the following excerpt for Brothers of the Wild North Sea:

He’d left a lantern burning in the barn, hung safely from a rafter while he

worked. The ox dam had taken hours about her labour, finally depositing one
slithery bundle into the straw, the second one coming so fast after it had almost
dropped into Cai’s hands. Now the pair were on their feet, their eyes wide in the
lamplight, their matching expressions of astonishment so absolute that Cai began
to laugh. “There they are. One of each. The bull looks a bit like Eyulf.”

“Don’t wish that on him.” Smiling, Fen went to look them over. Neither they

nor their mother flinched at his approach. His touch was careful, almost tender,
as he felt the little limbs, brushed drying afterbirth out of the silky coats. Cai was
surprised. Fen had liked Eldra, but she was a war machine. His pleasure in these
domestic young was unforeseeable, so far a cry from the man who had wanted
to slay Addy that Cai struggled to fit the two images together in his mind. You
don’t know him, his fading sense of self-preservation warned him. Knowing
should come before love.

But it was too late for that now.

Fen looked up. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Tired, maybe.”
“They’re fine little beasts. Shouldn’t she be up and feeding them?”
“Aye, that she should, the lazy old girl.” Cai slapped the ox dam’s rump. She

turned her placid head in his direction but lay still, chomping serenely. “She
thinks she’s earned a rest. Come on, your ladyship. Hup!”

Fen took hold of one great curving horn. “You heard him, Dagsauga. On

your feet.” Immediately the beast gave a snort, spread her hooves on the
packed-earth floor and lurched upright. Her calves needed no second invitation,
wobbling over on uncertain legs, bumping bony brows against her udder.

“All right. What magic word was that?”
“Just her name. All female oxen are called Dagsauga in my country, or

Smjőrbolli.” He paused as if struggling for the Latin words, then said in Cai’s
own language, “Daisy. Buttercup.”

Cai gave a snort of laughter. “Viking raiders call their oxen Buttercup?”
“No. Viking farmers. We only raid in season, and then we tend our homes

and crops, just as you do. So that takes care of the little heifer. What are you
naming the bull?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. He’s just a farm beast—he’ll go to market when

he’s weaned.”

“Still, you should name him. It—”
“Yes, I know. It brings down the spirit on him. Well, we’ll call him Yarrow,

then, if that isn’t too ordinary.”

“No. Very suitable.” Fen gave Dagsauga an encouraging pat. Then he rested

his hands on his hips and looked around him into the barn’s golden shadows.
“It’s late. Will you be missed in church? Or the dormitory hall?”

Why are you asking? The words burned on Cai’s tongue. He had kept his

distance. Yes, he and Fen had been busy, but there had been times, solitudes.
Fen had made no move. It was one thing, Cai supposed, to seize a man after a
storm, or on a wild island with no one to care for but the gulls. “No. I told
Aelfric I’d be out here all night, making sure the calves are safe. And you?”

“I told him I was going out to hunt.”
Cai swallowed. They both still deferred to Aelfric, paid lip service to his

authority, and so kept within the terms of their uneasy truce. He wasn’t here
now, and the night—for both of them—was secured. “Hadn’t you better get on
with it, then?”

Fen raised one finely marked brow. “With what?”
“With your hunt. While the moon is still high.”
“Caius…”

It was low and soft, a plea not to be teased further. Cai surrendered, letting

go a breath. “Sorry. I thought maybe we had to be shipwrecked first.”

“Everything’s changed here. You’ve been busy. I didn’t wish to…disturb

your balance.”

“My balance?” Cai chuckled. “What happened to the man who knocked me

onto my arse in the dunes?”

“Still here.”
“And offered to do to me things I was stupid enough to refuse?”
“Still offering.”
The barn was large, extending off behind Dagsauga’s stall into deep, fragrant

spaces. The year’s first cut of hay was loosely piled and drying all around,
muffling footsteps to silence. Cai unhooked the lantern from the overhead beam.
He held it ahead of him and concentrated on that, on following his own light.
Lupine shadows leapt and crouched all round him—some his own, others cast
by the man moving noiselessly behind him, and soon Cai couldn’t tell which was
which, and fear clashed with the arousal mounting inside him. Why was he
afraid? He could handle himself—handle Fen if he had to. He’d done it before.
Their very first meeting had been a fight, and Cai had won.

He would lose against the man restored to health. The conviction of that

made every tiny hair on his shoulders and spine rise, as if Fen were already
touching him, brushing his palms down his naked back.

In the barn’s furthest reach, he eased the lantern into a niche in the

stonework. Then he turned. Fen was standing a few feet away from him, waiting.
A cassock was as impractical for hunting as for delivering cattle, but for Aelfric’s
sake he and Cai had conscientiously worn them, traveller’s and raider’s clothing
folded away out of sight, since their return. Either Fen was getting used to his or
had found one that fitted him better. He wore it with an insouciance that was
anything but holy. He was beautiful.

Cai cleared his throat, which seemed suddenly full of golden motes of dust

from the hay. He said, dryly, “What are you waiting for?”

“Did it ever occur to you, Abbot Cai—these things I could do to you, these

things you want and fear so much…?”

No use in denial. “What about them?”
“They are things that you could do to me.”
Cai’s lips parted. He felt all expression drain from his face, and suspected

that he looked about as bright as Yarrow, and twice as astonished. Fen was
holding out a hand to him. Cai ignored it. He closed his eyes—strode blind and
bruising-hard into his arms.

The freedom offered was all Cai had needed. Spectral thoughts about

greater or lesser men, comparative physical strength, evaporated in Fen’s heat
as they landed in the hay. Cai wasn’t sure who had knocked who onto his arse
this time, and it didn’t matter—he clutched Fen’s shoulders, rolled luxuriantly
with him, letting the pent-up wildness surge and surge.

Magic in the blood. Danger in the streets.

A Case of Possession

© 2014 KJ Charles

A Charm of Magpies, Book 2
Lord Crane has never had a lover quite as elusive as Stephen Day. True,

Stephen’s job as justiciar requires secrecy, but the magician’s disappearing act
bothers Crane more than it should. When a blackmailer threatens to expose their
illicit relationship, Crane knows a smart man would hop the first ship bound for
China. But something unexpectedly stops him. His heart.

Stephen has problems of his own. As he investigates a plague of giant rats

sweeping London, his sudden increase in power, boosted by his blood-and-sex
bond with Crane, is rousing suspicion that he’s turned warlock. With all eyes
watching him, the threat of exposure grows. Stephen could lose his friends, his
job and his liberty over his relationship with Crane. He’s not sure if he can take
that risk much longer. And Crane isn’t sure if he can ask him to.

The rats are closing in, and something has to give…
Warning: Contains m/m sex (on desks), blackmail, dark pasts, a

domineering earl, a magician on the edge, vampire ghosts (possibly), and
the giant rats of Sumatra.

Enjoy the following excerpt for A Case of Possession:

“Vaudrey! Vaudrey! Crane, I mean.” The visitor peered through the

window. “There you are. Nong hao.”

“Nong hao, Rackham,” said Crane, and went to let him in.
Theo Rackham had been something of a friend in China, as another

Englishman who preferred local society to expatriates. Rackham was himself a
practitioner of magic, though not a powerful one, and it was he who had
introduced Crane to Stephen Day a few months ago.

“This is an unexpected pleasure. How are you?”
Rackham didn’t answer immediately. He was wandering about the room,

peering at the maps tacked on the plastered walls. “This is your office? I must
say, I’d have thought you’d have somewhere rather better than this.” He
sounded almost affronted.

“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s in Limehouse. You’re rich. Why don’t you act like it? Why aren’t you at

grand parties in the West End instead of slaving away in the Limehouse docks?”

“I do act like it, on occasion. This coat wasn’t cut on the Commercial Road.

But my business is here, not the City, and certainly not in the West End.”

“I don’t see why you have a business at all. You don’t need any more

money.” There was a definite note of accusation in Rackham’s voice.

Crane shrugged. “Frankly, my dear chap, I’m bored, and I would not be less

bored in the West End. I need something to do, and trading is what I’m good
at.”

“Why don’t you go back to China, then?” Rackham demanded. “If you’re so

bored with England, why are you still here?”

“Legal business. My father left his affairs in the devil of a state. It’s taking

forever to resolve, and now I’ve got distant cousins popping up out of the
woodwork demanding their cut. Why do you care?”

“I don’t.” Rackham scuffed a worn leather toe against the skirting board. “I

suppose there’s been no recurrence of your troubles?”

“You mean the matter in spring? No. That’s all resolved.”
“Day dealt with it.”
“He did.” Crane had been afflicted by a curse that had killed his father and

brother, and Rackham had put him in touch with Stephen Day, a justiciar, whose
job was to deal with magical malpractice. Crane and Stephen had come very
close to being murdered themselves before Stephen had ended the matter with a
spectacular display of ruthless power. Five people had died that day, and since
Crane had no idea if that was general knowledge or something Stephen wanted
kept quiet, he simply added, “He was highly efficient.”

Rackham snorted. “Efficient. Yes, you could say he’s that.”
“He saved my life on three occasions over the space of a week,” Crane said.

“I’d go so far as to call him competent.”

“You like him, don’t you?”
“Day? He’s a pleasant enough chap. Why?”
Rackham concentrated on straightening some papers against the corner of

Crane’s desk. “Well. You were with him at Sheng’s last week.”

“I was,” Crane agreed. “Did you know I’ve taken a thirty percent share

there? You must come with me again sometime. Tonight, unless you’ve anything
on?”

Rackham, who never turned down free meals, didn’t respond to that. “What

did Day make of Sheng’s food?”

Crane repressed a grin at the memory of Stephen’s first encounter with

Szechuan pepper. “I think he was rather startled. It didn’t stop him eating. I’ve
never met anyone who eats so much.”

“Have you had many meals with him?”
“I’ve bought him a couple of dinners as thanks. Is there a reason you ask?

Because really, my dear fellow, if you’re after any particular information, you
know him better than I do.”

“I know he’s like you,” Rackham said.
“Like me.” Crane kept his tone easy. “Yes, the resemblance is striking. It’s

like looking in a mirror.”

Rackham gave an automatic smile at that. Stephen Day had reddish brown

curls to Crane’s sleek and imperceptibly greying light blond, and pale skin to
Crane’s weather-beaten tan; he was twenty-nine years old to Crane’s thirty-
seven and looked closer to twenty, and mostly, he stood a clear fifteen inches
shorter than Crane’s towering six foot three.

“I didn’t mean you look like him,” Rackham said unnecessarily. “I meant…

you know. Your sort.” He switched to Shanghainese to clarify, “Love of the
silken sleeve. Oh, come off it, Vaudrey. I know he’s a pansy.”

“Really?” This wasn’t a conversation Crane intended to have with Rackham

or anyone else. Not in England, not where it was a matter of disgrace and long
years in prison. “Are you asking me for my assessment of Day’s tastes? Because
I’d say they were none of my damned business or yours.”

“You dined with him at Sheng’s,” repeated Rackham, with a sly look.
“I dine with lots of people at Sheng’s. I took Leonora Hart there a couple of

weeks ago, and I defy you to read anything into that. Come to that, I took you
there and I don’t recall you gave me more than a handshake.”

Rackham flushed angrily. “Of course I didn’t. I’m not your sort.”
“Or my type.” Crane let a mocking hint of lechery into his tone and saw

Rackham’s jaw tighten. “But even if you were, my dear chap, I can assure you I
wouldn’t tell your business to the world. Now, is there anything I can do for
you?”

Rackham took a grip on himself. “I know you, Vaudrey. You can’t play

virtuous with me.”

“I don’t play virtuous with anyone. But since Stephen Day’s love life is no

concern of mine—”

“I don’t believe you,” said Rackham.
“Did you just call me a liar? Oh, don’t even answer that. I’m busy, Rackham.

I’ve got a sheaf of lading bills to reckon up and a factor to catch out. I assume
you came here for something other than lubricious thoughts about mutual
acquaintances. What do you want?”

Rackham looked away. His sandy hair was greying and his thin face was

pouchy and worn, but the gesture reminded Crane of a sulky adolescent.

“I want you to make me a loan.” He stared out of the window as he spoke.
“A loan. I see. What do you have in mind?”

“Five thousand pounds.” Rackham’s voice was defiant. He didn’t look

round.

Crane was momentarily speechless. “Five thousand pounds,” he repeated at

last.

“Yes.”
“I see,” said Crane carefully. “Well, I’d be the first to admit that I owe you a

favour, but—”

“You’re good for it.”
“Not in petty cash.” The astronomical sum mentioned was ten years’ income

for a well-paid clerk. “What terms do you have in mind? What security would
you offer?”

“I wasn’t thinking of terms.” Rackham turned, but his eyes merely skittered

across Crane’s face and away again. “I thought it would be an…open-ended
agreement. Without interest.”

Crane kept his features still and calm, but the nerves were firing along his

skin, and he felt a cold clench in his gut at what was coming, as well as the first
upswell of rage.

“You want me to give you five thousand pounds, which you in effect propose

not to pay back? Why would I do that, Rackham?”

Rackham met his eyes this time. “You owe me. I saved your life.”
“The devil you did. You made an introduction.”
“I introduced you to Day. You owe me for that.”
“I don’t owe you five thousand pounds for it.”
“You owe it to me for keeping quiet about you and Day.” Rackham’s lips

were rather pale and his skin looked clammy. “We’re not in China now.”

“Let’s be clear. Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“That’s such an ugly word,” said Rackham predictably.
“Then it suits you, you pasty-faced junk-sick turd.” Crane strode forward.

He had a good six inches on Rackham, and although he was often described as
lean, that was in large part an illusion caused by his height; people tended not to
realise how broad-shouldered he was till he was uncomfortably close.

Rackham realised it now and took a step away. “Don’t threaten me! You’ll

regret it!”

“I haven’t threatened you, you worthless coward, nor will I. I’ll just go

straight to the part where I break your arms.”

Rackham retreated another two steps and held up a hand. “I’ll hurt you first.

I’ll ruin Day.” He pointed a trembling finger. “Two years’ hard labour. You
might be able to buy your way out of trouble, perhaps, but he’ll be finished.
Disgraced. They’ll dismiss him. I’ll destroy him.”

“With what, tales of a dinner at Sheng’s? Go to hell.”
“He goes to your rooms.” Rackham moved to put a chair between himself

and Crane. “At night. He came back with you after Sheng’s and didn’t leave till
ten the next day, and—”

“You’ve been spying on me,” Crane said incredulously. “You contemptible

prick.”

“Don’t touch me! I can ruin him, and I will, if you lay a finger on me.”

The Reluctant Berserker

Alex Beecroft

Manhood is about more than who’s on top.

Wulfstan, a noble and fearsome Saxon warrior, has spent most of his life

hiding the fact that he would love to be cherished by someone stronger than
himself. Not some slight, beautiful nobody of a harper who pushes him up
against a wall and kisses him.

In the aftermath, Wulfstan isn’t sure what he regrets most—that he only

punched the churl in the face, or that he really wanted to give in.

Leofgar is determined to prove he’s as much of a man as any Saxon. But

now he’s got a bigger problem than a bloody nose. The lord who’s given him
shelter from the killing cold is eyeing him like a wolf eyes a wounded hare.

When Wulfstan accidentally kills a friend who is about to blurt his secret, he

flees in panic and meets Leofgar, who is on the run from his lord’s lust.
Together, pursued by a mother’s curse, they battle guilt, outlaws, and the
powers of the underworld, armed only with music…and love that must
overcome murderous shame to survive.

Warning: Contains accurate depictions of Vikings, Dark Ages magic, kickass

musicians, trope subversions and men who don’t know their place.

eBooks are not transferable.

They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this

work.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the

writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any

resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

Cincinnati OH 45249

The Reluctant Berserker

Copyright © 2014 by Alex Beecroft

ISBN: 978-1-61921-743-0

Edited by Anne Scott

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and

reviews.

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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

electronic publication: February 2014

www.samhainpublishing.com

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