The Last Light of the Sun

SEVEN

Hakon Ingemarson, by ten years his father's youngest son, enjoyed being called upon to ride west across three rivers and the vague border as an emissary to King Aeldred's court at Esferth (or wherever else it might be) from their own settlements in the southern part of Erlond.

Aside from the pleasure he took in this very adult responsibility, he found the Anglcyn royal children exhilarating, and was infatuated with the younger daughter.

He was aware that his father was only disposed to send him west when their pledged payments were late, or about to be, taking shrewd advantage of evidence of friendship among the younger generation. He also knew that those at the Anglcyn court were conscious of this, and amused by it.

An ongoing joke, started by Gareth, the younger son, was that if Hakon ever did arrive with the annual tribute, they'd have Kendra sleep with him. Hakon always struggled not to flush, hearing this. Kendra, predictably, ignored it each time, not even bothering with the withering glance her older sister had perfected. Hakon did ask his father to allow him to lead the actual tribute west, when it eventually went, but Ingemar reserved that journey for others, the money well guarded, saving Hakon for explaining—as best he could—their too-frequent delays.

They were sprawled in the summer grass south of Esferth town, near the river, out of sight of the wooden walls. Had eaten here out of doors, four of them, and were idling in late-morning sunshine before returning to town to watch the preparations for the fair continue.

No one spoke. Birdsong from the beech and oak woods to the west across the stream and the rising and falling drone of bees among the meadow flowers were the only sounds. It was warm in the sun, sleep-inducing. But Hakon, reclining on one elbow, was too aware of Kendra beside him. Her golden hair kept coming free of her hat as she concentrated on interweaving grasses into something or other. Athelbert, king's heir of the Anglcyn, lay beyond his sister, on his back, his own soft cap covering his face. Gareth was reading, of course. He wasn't supposed to take parchments out of the city, but he did.

Hakon, lazily drifting in the light, became belatedly aware that he could be accused of staring at Kendra, and probably would be with Athelbert around. He turned away, abruptly self-conscious. And sat up quickly.

"Jad of the Thunder!" he exclaimed. His father's oath. Not an invocation anyone but Erlings new to the sun god were likely to use.

Gareth snorted but didn't look up from his manuscript. Kendra did, at least, glance at where Hakon was looking, briefly raised both eyebrows, and turned calmly back to her whatever-it-was-going-to-be.

"What?" Athelbert said, evidently awake but not moving, or shifting the hat that covered his eyes.

"Judit," said Kendra. "She's angry."

Athelbert chuckled. "Aha! I know she is."

"You're in trouble," Kendra murmured, placidly plaiting. "Oh, probably," said her older brother, comfortably sprawled in deep grass.

Hakon, wide-eyed, cleared his throat. The approaching figure, moving with grim purpose through the summer meadow, was quite close now. In fact…

"She, ah, has a sword," he ventured, since no one else seemed to be saying it.

Gareth did glance up at that, and then grinned with anticipation as his older sister came towards them. Kendra merely shrugged. On the other hand, Prince Athelbert, son of Aeldred, heir to the throne, heard Hakon's words, and moved.

Extremely swiftly, in point of fact.

As a consequence, the point of the equally swift sword, which would probably have plunged into the earth between his spread legs a little below his groin, stabbed into grass and soil just behind his desperately rolling form.

Hakon closed his eyes for an excruciating moment. An involuntary, protective hand went below his own waist. Couldn't help it. He looked again, saw that Gareth had done the very same thing, and was wincing now, biting his lip. No longer amused.

It wasn't entirely certain the blade, thrust by someone moving fast on uneven ground, would have missed impaling the older prince in an appalling location.

Athelbert rolled two or three more times, and scrambled to his feet, white as a spirit, cap gone, eyes agape.

"Are you crazed?" he screamed.

His sister regarded him, breathing hard, her auburn hair seeming afire in the sunlight, entirely free of any decent restraint.

Restraint was not the word for her at all. She looked murderous.

Judit jerked the sword free of the earth, levelled it, stepped forward. Hakon thought it wisest to scramble aside. Athelbert withdrew rather farther than that.

"Judit…" he began.

She stopped, held up an imperious hand.

A silence in the meadow. Gareth had set down his reading, Kendra her grass-plaiting.

Their red-headed sister said, controlling her breathing with an effort, "I sat up with father, beside Osbert, for part of last night." "I know," said Athelbert quickly. "It was a devout, devoted—" "He is well now. He wishes to see Hakon Ingemarson today." "The god be thanked for mercy," Athelbert said piously, still very white.

Hakon saw Judit glance at him. Ducked his head in an awkward half-bow. Said nothing. He didn't trust his voice.

"I went," said the older daughter of Aeldred the king and his royal wife, Elswith, "back to my own chambers in the middle of the night." She paused. Hakon heard the birds, over by the woods. "It was dark," Judit added. Her self-control, Hakon judged, was precarious.

Among other things, the sword was quivering in her hand. Athelbert backed up another small step. Had probably seen the same thing.

"My women were asleep," his sister said. "I did not wake them." She glanced to one side, regarded Athelbert's bright red cap lying in the grass. Went over to it. Pierced it with the sword, used her free hand to tear the cap raggedly in two along the blade, dropped it back into the grass. A butterfly flitted down, alighted on one fragment, flew away.

"I undressed and went to bed," Judit went on. She paused. Levelled the blade at her brother again. "Jad rot your eyes and heart, Athelbert, there was a dead man's skull in my bed, with the mud still on it!"

"And a rose!" her brother added hastily, backing up again. "He had a rose! In his mouth!"

"I did not," Judit snarled through gritted teeth, "observe that detail until after I had screamed and awakened all three of my women and a guard outside!"

"Most skulls," said Gareth thoughtfully, from where he sat, "belong to dead people. You didn't actually have to say that it was a—"

He stopped, swallowed, as his sister's lethal, green-eyed gaze fell upon him. "Do not even think of being amusing. Were you," she asked, in a voice suddenly so quiet it was frightening, "in any possible way, little brother, a part of this?"

"He wasn't!" said Athelbert quickly, before Gareth could reply. And then made the mistake of essaying a placating smile and gesture.

"Good," said Judit. "I need only kill you."

Kendra held up her grass plaiting. "Tie him up with this, first?" she murmured.

"Be careful, sister," Judit said. "Why did you not awaken when I screamed?"

"I'm used to it?" Kendra said mildly.

Gareth snorted. Unwisely. Tried, urgently, to turn it into a cough. Judit took a step towards both of them.

"I'm a… deep sleeper?" Kendra amended hastily. "And perhaps your courage is such that what seemed a piercing scream to you was really only—"

"I tore my throat raw," her sister said flatly. "It was the middle of the Jad-cursed night. I was exhausted. I lay down upon a cold, hard, muddy skull in my bed. I believe," she added, "the teeth bit me."

Hearing that last, ruminative observation, Hakon suddenly found himself in extreme difficulty. He looked over at Gareth and took comfort in what he saw: the thrashing desperation of the younger prince's suppressed hilarity. Gareth was weeping with the effort of trying not to howl. Hakon found that he was no longer able to stay upright. He sank to his knees. His shoulders were shaking. He felt his nose beginning to run. Whimpering sounds came from his mouth.

"Oh, my, look at those two," said Kendra in a pitying voice. "All right, this is what we will do. Judit, put down the sword." She was displaying, Hakon thought, what was, under the circumstances, an otherworldy composure. "Athelbert, stay exactly where you are. Close your eyes, hands at your sides. That was a craven, despicable, unworthy, extremely amusing thing to do and you must pay a price or Judit will make life intolerable for all of us and I don't feel like suffering for you. Judit, go and hit him as hard as you can, but not with the sword."

"You are judge here, little sister?" Judit said icily.

"Someone has to be. Gareth and Hakon are peeing in their hose," Kendra said. "Father would be displeased if you killed his heir and you'd probably regret it afterwards. A little."

Hakon wiped at his nose. These things did not happen back home. Gareth was flat on his back, making strangled noises. "Teeth!" Hakon thought he heard him moan.

Judit looked at him, then at Kendra, and finally over at Athelbert. After a long moment, she nodded her head, once.

"Do it, fool," Kendra said promptly to her older brother.

Athelbert swallowed again. "She needs to drop the sword first," he said, cautiously. He still looked ready to flee.

"She will. Judit?"

Judit dropped the sword. There remained an entirely forbid-ding bleakness to her narrowed gaze. She pushed windblown hair back from her face. Her tunic was green, belted with leather above the riding trousers she liked to wear. She looked, Hakon thought suddenly, like Nikar the Huntress, swordbride of Thunir, whom, of course, his family no longer worshipped at all, having come from bloody sacrifices to the… less violent faith of Jad.

Athelbert took a breath, managed an almost indifferent shrug. He closed his eyes and spread his legs, braced to absorb a blow. Gareth managed to lever himself into a sitting position to watch. He wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand. Kendra had an odd look to her ordinarily calm, fair features.

Judit, who would one day be saluted the length of the isle and across the seas as the Lady of Rheden, be honoured through generations for courage, and mourned in poets' laments long after the alignments and borders of the world had changed and changed again, walked across the sunlit morning grass, not breaking stride, and kicked her brother with a booted foot, hard (very hard) up between the legs where the sword had almost gone.

Athelbert made a clogged, whistling sound and crumpled to the ground, clutching at himself.

Judit gazed down at him for only a brief moment. Then she turned. Her eyes met Hakon's. She smiled at him, regal, gracious and at ease in a summer-bright meadow. "Did you four drink all the wine?" she asked, sweetly. "I have a sudden thirst, for some reason."

It was while Hakon was kneeling, hastily filling a cup for her, splashing the wine, that they saw the Cyngael come walking up from the south, on the other side of the stream.

Four men and a dog. They stopped, looking towards the royal party on the grass. Athelbert was lying very still, eyes squeezed shut, breathing thinly, both hands between his legs. Looking across the river at the dog, Hakon suddenly shivered as if chilled. He set down Judit's cup, without handing it to her, and stood up.

When your hair rose like this, the old tale was that a goose was walking over the ground where your bones would lie. He looked over at Kendra (he was always doing that) and saw that she was standing very still, gazing across the river, a curious expression on her face. Hakon wondered if she, too, was sensing a strangeness about the animal, if this awareness might even be something the two of them shared.

You might have called the wolfhound beside the youngest of the four men a dark grey, if you'd wanted to. Or you could have said it was black, trees behind it, sun briefly in cloud, the birds momentarily silenced by that.

Ceinion of Llywerth squinted, looking east into sunlight. Then a cloud passed before the sun and he saw Aeldred's older daughter recognize him first and, smiling with swift, vivid pleasure, come quickly towards them across the grass. He made his way through the stream, which was cool, waist-deep here, that she might not have to enter the water herself. He knew Judit; she would have waded in. On the riverbank, she came up to him and knelt.

With genuine happiness he made the sign of the disk over her red hair and offered no comment at all on its unbound disarray. Judit, he had told her father the last time he'd been here, ought to have been a Cyngael woman, so fiercely did she shine.

"She doesn't shine," Aeldred had murmured wryly. "She burns."

Looking beyond her, he saw the younger sister and brother, and what appeared to be an Erling, and belatedly noted the crumpled figure of Aeldred's heir in the grass. He blinked. "Child, what happened here?" he asked. "Athelbert…?"

His companions had crossed the stream now, behind him. Judit looked up, still kneeling, her face all calm serenity. "We were at play. He took a fall. I am certain he will be all right, my lord. Eventually." She smiled.

Even as she was speaking, Alun ab Owyn, the dog at his heels, walked over towards Aeldred's other children, before Ceinion had had a chance to introduce them formally. The high cleric knew a brief but unmistakable moment of apprehension.

Owyn's son, brought east on impulse and instinct, had not been an easy companion on the journey to the Anglcyn lands. There was no reason to believe he would become one now that they'd arrived. A blow had fallen on him earlier this year, almost as brutal as the one that had killed his brother. He had been direly wounded within, riding home to tell his father and mother that their first-born son and heir had been slain and was buried in Arberthi soil, then drifting through a summer of blank, aimless days. There had been no healing for Owyn's son. Not yet.

He had agreed, reluctantly and under pressure from his father, to be an escort to the Anglcyn court for the high cleric on the path between the sea and the dense forest that lay between the Cyngael and the Anglcyn lands.

Ceinion, watching him surreptitiously as they went, grieved for the living son almost as much as for the dead. Surviving could be a weight that crushed the soul. He knew something about that, thought about it every time he visited a grave overlooking the sea, at home.

Kendra watched the young Cyngael come over to them, the grey hound beside him. She knew she ought to go to the cleric, as Judit had, receive his blessing, extend her own glad greetings.

She found that she could not move, didn't understand, at all. A sense of… very great strangeness.

The Cyngael reached them. She caught her breath. "Jad give you greeting," she said.

He went right past her. Not even glancing her way: straight brown hair to his shoulders, brown eyes. Her own age, she guessed. Not a tall man, trimly made, a sword at his side.

He knelt beside Athelbert, who lay motionless, curled up like a child, hands still clutching between his legs. She was near enough, just, to hear her older brother murmur, eyes closed, "Help me, Cyngael. A small jest. Tell Judit I'm dead. Hakon will help you."

The Cyngael was still for a moment, then he stood. Looking down at the heir to the Anglcyn throne, he said, contemptuously, "You have the wrong playmate. I find nothing amusing about telling someone their brother is dead, and would lie in torment eternally before I let an Erling… help me… with anything. You may choose to eat and drink with them, Anglcyn, but some of us remember blood-eaglings. Tell me, where's your grandfather buried, son of Aeldred?"

Kendra put a hand to her mouth, her heart thudding. Across the meadow, in morning light, Judit was standing with Ceinion of Llywerth, out of earshot. They might have been figures in a holy book, illuminated by clerics with loving care and piety. Part of a different picture, a different text, not this one.

This one, where they were, was not holy. The lash of the Cyngael words was somehow the worse for the music in his voice. Athelbert, who was, in fact, considerably more than simply a jester, opened his eyes and looked up.

Hakon had gone red, as he was inclined to do when distressed. "I think you insult both Prince Athelbert and myself, and in great ignorance," he said, impressively enough. "Will you retract, or need I chastise you in Jad's holy name?" He laid a hand on his sword hilt.

Aeldred's younger daughter was considerably milder of manner than her sister, and was thought, therefore (though not by her siblings), to be softer. Something peculiar seemed to be happening to her now, however. A feeling, a sensation within… a presence. She didn't understand it, felt edgy, angry, threatened. A darkness in the sunlight here, beside it.

Fists clenched at her sides, she walked towards her brother and their longtime friend and this arrogant Cyngael, whoever he was, and, as the stranger turned at her approach, she swung up her own booted foot to kick him in the selfsame way Judit had kicked Athelbert.

Without the same result. This man did not have his eyes closed, and was in the state of heightened awareness that cold fury and a journey into unknown country can both instill.

"Cafall! Hold!" he rasped, and in the same moment, as the dog subsided, the Cyngael twisted deftly to one side and caught Canard's foot as she kicked at him. He gripped it, waist high. Then he pushed it higher.

She was falling. He wanted her to fall.

She would have, had the other, older man not arrived, moving quickly to support her. She hadn't heard the cleric coming over. She stayed that way, her boot gripped by one Cyngael, body held from behind by another.

Outraged, Hakon leaped forward. "You pigs!" he snarled. "Let her go!"

The younger one did so, with pleasing alacrity. Then, less pleasingly, he said, "Forgive me. The proper behaviour here would be… what? To let an Erling tutor me in courtesy? I was disinclined to cut her lungs out. What does one do when a woman betrays her lineage in this fashion? Accept the offered blow?"

This was difficult, as Hakon had no good answer, and even less of a notion why Kendra had done what she'd done.

"I am entirely happy," the Cyngael went on, in the absurdly beautiful voice they all seemed to have as a gift, "to kill you if you think there's honour to defend here."

"No!" Kendra said quickly, in the same moment Ceinion of Llywerth released her elbows and turned to his companion.

"Prince Alun," he said, in a voice like metal, "you are here as my companion and guard. I am your charge. Remember that."

"And I will defend you with my life from pagan offal," the younger Cyngael said. The words were ugly, the tone eerily mild, flat. He doesn't care, Kendra thought suddenly. He wants to be dead. She had no least idea how she knew that.

Hakon drew his sword and stepped back, for room. "I am weary of these words," he said with dignity. "Do what you can, in Jad's name."

"No. Forgive me, both of you, but I forbid this."

It was Athelbert, on his feet, clearly in pain, but doing what needed to be done. He stumbled between Hakon and the Cyngael, who had not yet drawn his own blade.

"Ah. Wonderful. You are not dead after all," the one who appeared to be named Alun said, mockingly. "Let's blood-eagle someone in celebration."

At which point, in what might have been the most surprising moment of a profoundly unsettling encounter, Ceinion of Llywerth stepped forward and hammered a short, hard, punishing fist into the chest of his young companion. The high cleric of the Cyngael was not of the soft, insular variety of holy men. The punch knocked the younger man staggering; he almost fell.

"Enough!" said Ceinion. "In your father's name and mine. Do not make me regret my love for you."

Kendra registered that last. And the fact that the dog did not even move despite this attack on his master, and the pain in Ceinion's voice. Her senses seemed unnaturally heightened, on alert, apprehending some threat. She watched the young Cyngael straighten, bring a hand slowly to his chest then take it away. He shook his head, as if to clear it.

He was looking at Ceinion, she saw, ignoring Hakon's blade and Athelbert's intervention. Judit, uncharacteristically, had kept silent, beside Gareth, whose watchful manner was normal, not unusual.

The two Cyngael servants had remained by the stream. It was still morning, Kendra thought, late-summer, a bright day, just south and west of Esferth. No time had passed in the world, really.

"You will note that my sword is still sheathed," Alun said at last, softly, to Ceinion. "It will remain so." He turned to Kendra, surprising her. "Are you injured, my lady?"

She managed to shake her head. "My apologies," she said. "I attacked you. You insulted a friend."

The ghost of a smile. "So I gather. Evidently not wise, in your presence."

"Judit's worse," Kendra said.

"I am not so! Only when—" Judit began.

"Jad's blood and grief!" Gareth snarled. "Hakon! Sheathe your blade!"

Hakon immediately did so, then turned with the others and saw why.

"Father!" cried Judit, in a voice that might actually have made one believe she was purely delighted, feeling nothing but pleasure as she stepped forward and made a showy, elaborate, attention-claiming curtsy in the meadow grass.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," Gareth muttered to the high cleric. "Language. Profane. I know."

"The least of all transgressions here, I'd say," murmured Ceinion of Llywerth, before going forward as well, smiling, to kneel before and rise to be embraced by the king of the Anglcyn.

And then to offer the same hug, and his sun disk blessing, to scarred, limping, large-souled Osbert, a little behind Aeldred and to one side, where he always was.

"Ceinion. Dear friend. This," said the king, "is unlooked for so soon, and a source of much joy."

"You do me, as before, too much honour, my lord," said the cleric. Kendra, watching closely, saw him glance back over his shoulder. "I would present a companion. This is Prince Alun ab Owyn of Cadyr, who has been good enough to journey with me, bearing greetings from his royal father."

The younger Cyngael stepped forward and performed a flawless court bow. From where she stood, Kendra couldn't see his expression. Hakon, on her right side, was still flushed from the confrontation. His sword—thanks be to Gareth and the god—was sheathed.

Kendra saw her father smiling. He seemed well, alert, very happy. He was often this way after his fever passed. Returning to life, as from the grey gates to the land of the dead where judgement was made. And she knew how highly he thought of the Cyngael cleric.

"Owyn's son!" Aeldred murmured. "We are greatly pleased to welcome you to Esferth. Your father and lady mother are well, I trust and hope, and your older brother? Dai, I believe?"

Her father found it useful to let people realize, very early, how much he knew. He also enjoyed it. Kendra had watched him for a long time now, and could see that part, too.

Alun ab Owyn straightened. "My brother is dead," he said flatly. "My lord, he was killed by an Erling raiding party in Arberth at the end of spring. The same party blood-eagled two innocent people, one of them a girl, as they fled to their ships after being defeated. If you have assigned any of your royal fyrd to engage the Erlings anywhere in your lands this season, I should be honoured to be made one of them."

The music, still there in his voice, clashed hard with the words. Kendra saw her father absorbing all of this. He glanced at Ceinion. "I didn't know," he said.

He hated not knowing things. Saw it as a kind of assault, an insult, when events took place anywhere on their island—in the far north, in Erlond to the east, even west across the Rheden Wall among the black hills of the Cyngael—without his own swift and sure awareness. A strength, a flaw. What he was.

Aeldred looked at the young man before him. "This is a grief," he said. "My sorrow. Will you allow us to pray with you for his soul, which is surely with Jad?"

From where she stood, Kendra saw the Cadyri stiffen, as if to offer a quick retort. He didn't, though. Only bowed his head in what could have been taken for acquiescence, if you didn't know better. That eerie, inexplicable sensation: she did know better, but not how she knew it. Kendra felt an uneasy prickling, a tremor within.

She became aware that Gareth was looking at her, and managed an almost indifferent shrug. He was shrewd, her younger brother, and she had no way of explaining what it was she was… responding to here.

She turned back and saw that her father was now gazing at her as well. She smiled, uncertainly. Aeldred turned to study Judit, and then his sons. She saw him register Athelbert's awkward stance and the sword on the grass.

She knew—they all knew—the expression he now assumed. Detached, amused, ironic. He was a much-loved man, Aeldred of the Anglcyn, he had been from childhood, but he dealt out his own affection thoughtfully, and given what he was, how could he not? Their mother was an exception but that, all four children knew, was also complex.

Waiting, anticipating, Kendra heard her father murmur, "Judit, dear heart, don't forget to bring my longsword back."

"Of course, Father," said Judit, eyes downcast, her manner entirely subdued, if not her hair.

Aeldred smiled at her. Added gently, "And when you chastise your older brother, and there is no doubt in me he will have deserved it, try to ensure it doesn't affect the likelihood of heirs for the kingdom. I'd be grateful."

"Ah, so would I, actually," Athelbert said, in something approaching his customary voice.

He was not standing normally yet, there was a cramped tilt to his posture, but he was getting closer to upright. Kendra was still in awe, often, at how precisely her father could draw conclusions from limited information. It was something that frightened Athelbert, she knew: a son entirely aware he was expected to be able to follow this man to the throne. The burden of that. You could understand much of what Athelbert did if you thought of it in this way.

"Please come," her father was saying to the two Cyngael. "I walked out to greet Hakon Ingemarson, our young eastern friend, rather than wait for my errant children to bring him back so that he might offer his father's latest explanation for an unsent tribute." Aeldred turned and smiled at Hakon, to take some of the sting from that. The young Erling managed a proper bow.

The king turned back to Ceinion. "This is a gift, your early arrival. We will offer thanks in chapel for a safe journey, and our prayers for the soul of Dai ab Owyn, and then—if you will—we shall feast and talk, and there will be music in Esferth while you tell me you have answered my prayers and are come here to stay."

The cleric made no reply to that last, Kendra saw. She didn't think her father had expected one. Hakon, of course, was red-faced again. She felt sorry for him. A likable, well-meaning boy. She ought to think of him as a man, but that was difficult. It was curious: Athelbert was far more childish, but you always knew there was a man there, playing at boy-games because he chose to. And she had seen her brother riding with the fyrd.

Aeldred gestured. Ceinion and the younger Cyngael fell into stride with him, walking towards the walls of the town, out of sight north of them. Kendra saw Judit step quietly over and reclaim the sword. She hadn't recognized it as their father's. Athelbert's mutilated cap was left where it had fallen, a redness in the grass. Their own servants, who had hovered cautiously at a distance all this time, now came to gather the remains of their meal. Kendra looked west, saw the two Cyngael servants moving forward from the stream, leading a laden donkey.

It was only then that she saw that one of them was an Erling.

Ebor, the son of Bordis, never minded being posted to night duty on the walls, wherever the court happened to be. He'd even made some friends by taking watches assigned to others, leaving them free for the taverns. A solitary sort of man (much the same when a boy), he took a deep, hard-to-explain comfort from being awake and alone while others feasted or drank or slept, or did the other things one did in the night.

Sometimes a woman, walking near the walls, offering her song to the dark, would call up to him from the bottom of the steps. Ebor would decline while on duty, though not always afterwards. A man had his needs, and he'd never married. Youngest son of a farmer, no land, no prospect of it. He'd joined the standing army of the king. Younger sons did that, everywhere. The way the world was made, no point brooding on it. The army gave you companions, shelter, enough money (usually, not always) for ale and a girl and your weapon. Sometimes you fought and some of you died, though less often of late, as the Erling raiders slowly took the measure of Aeldred of the Anglcyn and the forts and fortified burhs he'd been building.

Some of the Erlings were allies now, actually paying tribute to the king. Something deep, passing strange in that, if one thought on it. Ebor wasn't a thinker, exactly, but long nights on watch did give you time for reflection.

Not tonight, however. Tonight, under drifting clouds and the waning blue moon, had been raddled with interruptions, and not from night-walkers offering interludes of love—though one was a woman. If you forced a man to make two decisions in haste, Ebor would later tell the king's chamberlain, humble and contrite, chances were he'd make a bad one, or two.

That, Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, would say quietly, is why we have standing orders about the gates at night. To remove the need to make a decision. And Ebor would bow his head, knowing this was so, and that this was not the time to point out that every guard on the wall disobeyed those orders in peacetime.

He would not be punished. The one death in the night was not initially thought to be connected in any way with events at the gate. This was, as it happened, another error, though not his.

The women were beginning to leave the hall, led by Elswith, the queen. Ceinion of Llywerth, placed at the king's right hand, had the distinct impression that the older princess, the red-haired one, was disinclined to surrender the evening, but Judit was going with her lady mother nonetheless. The younger daughter, Kendra, seemed to have already left. He hadn't seen her go. The quiet one, she was less vivid, more watchful. He liked them both.

His new Erling manservant, or guard (he still hadn't decided how to think of him), had also gone out; he'd come and asked permission to do so, earlier. Not a thing he'd really needed to do, under the circumstances, and Ceinion wasn't sure what to make of it. A request for dispensation, in some way. It had felt like that. He'd wanted to ask more about it, but there were others listening. Thorkell Einarson was a complex man, he'd decided. Most men, past a certain age, could be said to be. The young ones usually weren't, in his experience. The youths in this hall would want nothing more than glory, any way they could find it.

There were exceptions. The king, expansive and genial of mood, had already announced that they would essay the Cyngael's well-known triad game later, in honour of their visitors. Ceinion had glanced along the table at Alun then, wincing, and had known, immediately, that he would not linger for that. Alun ab Owyn had made his excuses, prettily, to the queen, asking leave to go to evening prayer, just before she walked out herself.

Elswith, clearly impressed by the young prince's piety, had offered to bring him to the royal sanctuary, but Alun had demurred. No music from him tonight, either, then. He hadn't brought his harp east on the journey; hadn't touched it since his brother had died, it appeared. Time needed to run further, Ceinion decided, a memory tugging at him from that wood by Brynn's farm. He pushed that one away.

With the food now being cleared and the restraining presence of the ladies gone, serious drinking could be expected at the long table running down the room. There were dice cups out, he saw. The older prince, Athelbert, had left his seat at the high table and moved farther down to join some of the others. Ceinion watched him set a purse in front of himself, smiling.

Beside Ceinion, King Aeldred leaned back in his cushioned chair, a pleased, anticipatory expression on his face. Ceinion looked past the king and the queen's now-empty seat to where a portly cleric from Ferrieres was brushing at food on his yellow robe, visibly content with the meal and wine he'd been offered in this remote northern place. Ferrieres prided itself, lately, on being next only to Batiara itself, and Sarantium, in cultivating the elements of civilization. They could afford to do so, Ceinion thought without rancour. Things were different here in the northlands. Harsher, colder, more… marginal. The edge of the world.

Aeldred turned to him, and Ceinion smiled back at the king, his hands clasped loosely on the tabletop. Alun ab Owyn was ravaged by his brother's death. Aeldred, at the same age, had seen his own brother and father killed on a battlefield, and learned of unspeakable things done to them. And he had accepted homage, not long after, from the man who had slain and butchered them, and let the man live. That same Erling's son was at this table now, in an honoured place. Ceinion wondered if he could talk to Alun about that, if it would mean anything. And then he thought again of the forest pool north of Brynnfell, and wished he'd never been there, or the boy.

He drank from his wine cup. This was the hour when, at a Cyngael feast, the musicians would be summoned to claim and shape a mood. Among the Erlings in Vinmark, too, for that matter, though the songs were not the same, or the mood. There might be wrestlers now, among the Anglcyn, jugglers, knife-throwing contests, drinking bouts. Or all of these at once, in a loud chaos to hold back the night outside.

Not at this court. "I now wish," said Aeldred of the Anglcyn, turning to one and then to the other of the clerics flanking him, "to discuss a translation thought I have, to render into our own tongue the writings of Kallimarchos, his meditations on the proper conduct of a good life. And then I would hear your reasoned opinions on the question of images of Jad and suitable decoration for a sanctuary. I hope you are not fatigued. Do you have a sufficiency of wine, each of you?"

A different sort of king, this one. A different way of pushing back the dark.

+

Thorkell hadn't wanted to go south from Brynnfell with the cleric and the younger son of Owyn ap Glynn and the dog. And he most emphatically hadn't wanted to continue east with them later in the summer to the Anglcyn lands. But when you cast the gambling bones (as he had) in the midst of a battle, and changed sides (as he had), you lost a large measure of control over your own life.

He could have fled once the eastern journey started. He'd done that once before, after surrendering to the Cyngael and converting to the sun god's faith. That had been a young man's wild flight: on foot, with a hostage, to finally arrive, wounded, bone-weary, among fellow Erlings in the north-east of this wide island.

A long time ago. A different man, really. And without the history he'd accrued, since. Thorkell Einarson would be known now to the survivors of that raiding party as having turned on his companions to save a Cyngael woman—and her father, the man who'd slain the Volgan, the man who was the reason they'd come inland so dangerously far. He was, to put it delicately, unsure of a welcome among his people in the east.

Nor did he feel like cutting alone across this country to find out. He had no hearth to row towards—even if a ship would take him at an oar—having been exiled from his own isle for a bad night's fit of temper after dice.

The young man who'd made that escape alone hadn't had a hip that ached when it rained, or a left shoulder that didn't work well first thing of a morning. The cleric had noticed the second of these on their way here. An observant man, too much so for Thorkell's ease of mind. One morning Ceinion had disappeared into the edge of the oak and alderwood forest that marched along north of them and returned with leaves he'd steeped with herbs in the iron pot the donkey carried. Without saying much, he'd told Thorkell to put the hot leaves on his shoulder, wrap them with a cloth, and leave them there when they set off. He did it the next day, too, even though the wood was known to be accursed, haunted with spirits. He didn't go in far, but he did go far enough to get his leaves.

The poultice helped, which was irritating, in a perverse way. The cleric was older than Thorkell, showed no signs of any stiffness of his own at dawn, kneeling during prayers or rising from them. On the other hand, this man wouldn't have had years of fighting behind him, or manning a longship oar in storms.

It seemed to Thorkell that Jad or Ingavin or Thünir-whatever god or gods you cared to name—had caused him to save that girl, ap Hywll's daughter, and then cast his lot with these Cyngael of the west, an oath-sworn servant to them. There were better fates, but it could also be said there were worse.

He'd had a better one as a free man and a landowner on Rabady, a farm of his own within sound of the sea. He'd ripped the skein of that destiny himself: killed a man over dice in the tavern by the harbour (his second man, unfortunately), taken with rage like a berserkir, using his fists. It had taken four men to pull him off, they told him after.

When you did things like that, Thorkell had lived long enough to know, you surrendered your life into the hands of others, even if the dead man had been cheating you. He shouldn't have had so much to drink that night. Old story.

He'd left the isle, taken work here and there, survived a winter, then found a raiding ship down south when springtime came. He ought to have considered more carefully. Perhaps. Or else a god had been steering his path towards those western valleys.

The lady, Brynn's wife, had claimed him as her own servant, then assigned him as a guard to a reluctant cleric when she'd learned that Ceinion had changed his plans, was journeying south to Cadyr to see Owyn, and from there to Aeldred's court. There was something between the two of them, Thorkell had decided, but he wasn't sure what. Didn't think the cleric was bedding Brynn's wife (amusing as that would have been).

He did know the lady had almost certainly saved his own life after the botched raid and the ensuing discovery that Ivarr Ragnarson had blood-eagled two people during his own flight to the ships. He'd had no business doing that: you used the blood-eagle only for a reason, to make a point. You cheapened it, otherwise. There was no point to be made when you were beaten and running home, and when you did it to a farmhand and a girl.

Ivarr, marked from birth, was strange and dangerous, cold as the black snake that would crush the Worldtree at the end of days and destroy its roots with venom. A coward, too, poison arrows and a bow, which didn't make him less threatening. Not with his grandfather's name to wield.

All of which knowledge did leave open the question of why Thorkell had signed on to that ship, joined a Volgan family raid in the first place. A blood feud two generations down. Ancient history for him, long put behind, or it should have been. Siggur Volganson's grandsons were, very clearly, not what Siggur had been, and Thorkell was no longer what he had been, either. Was it sentiment? Longing for youth? Or just the lack of a better thought in his head?

No good answer. A Cyngael farmhouse inland was a long way to go, and had been unlikely to offer much in the way of plunder. The family's sworn vengeance wasn't his own blood feud, though he'd been there all those years ago when Siggur was killed and his sword taken.

You could say he hadn't seen anything else to do since leaving home, or you could say that in some fashion the dark-hilled, mist-shrouded land of the Cyngael was still entangled with his own destiny. You could say he'd missed the sea, man-killer, fortunemaker. A part-truth, but only that.

Thünir and Ingavin might know how it was, or the golden sun god, but Thorkell wouldn't claim to have an answer himself. Men did what they did.

Right now, in the close, rank darkness of a foetid alley outside a tavern in Esferth, what he was doing was waiting for a man he'd recognized earlier in the day to come out and piss against the wall.

He'd been in the huge, slope-roofed great hall at the king's feast this evening, without formal duties, since Aeldred's servants were attending to their guests. He'd made his way to the high table during an interlude in the serving of courses, to ask permission of the cleric to go outside.

"Why so?" Ceinion of Llywerth had asked him, softly though. The man was no fool.

And Thorkell, who wasn't either, hadn't lied. Murmured, "Saw someone I don't think should be here. Want to check what he's about."

True, as far as it went.

Ceinion, thick grey eyebrows very slightly arched, had hesitated, and then nodded his head. People were looking at them, not a time or place to talk. Thorkell hadn't been sure what he'd have done if the cleric hadn't given his consent, had acted otherwise. He could have slipped out without asking permission in that crowded, noisy hall, probably should have. Wasn't certain why he'd gone up to ask.

His hip was paining him. It sometimes did, at night, even though it hadn't been raining of late. They'd covered a deal of rough ground the past few days, to come out in a meadow this morning where the Anglcyn royal children were having an outing on the grass. Thorkell had actually felt a change in the way of the world, seeing that. It was not the sort of thing the Anglcyn would have even considered, barely a day's ride from the sea, in the years when Thorkell himself was young and he and Siggur and other raiders were beaching longships wherever they pleased along this coast, or on the other side of the channel in Ferrieres. Ingemar Svidrirson had even ruled these lands for a brief time. But he'd failed to capture the youngest son of the king he'd blood-eagled. A mistake. He'd paid for it, though not with his life, surprisingly. His own youngest son was here now, it turned out, an envoy from a tribute-paying Erling. The world had altered greatly in twenty-five years. All old men thought that way, he supposed. Came with the bad hip and the shoulder. You could let yourself be bitter.

He looked towards the mouth of the alley again. Couldn't see much. He'd seen enough when they'd come through the gate today. A well-laid-out, built-up town, Esferth. The court more often here now than in Raedhill. Aeldred was building everywhere, word was. Walled burhs within a day's ride of each other, garrisons within them. A standing army, the borders expanding, tribute from Erlond, a marriage planned in Rheden. No easy raiding here. Not any more.

Which was why he was in this rat-skitter alley, instead of in the bright hall, for those truths raised an important question about the man he'd recognized when they had passed into town this afternoon with the king. The two men he'd-recognized, actually.

The questions that came to you were sometimes (not always) answered, if you waited patiently enough. Thorkell heard a noise from the street, saw a shadow, someone entered the alley. He remained motionless. His eyes had adjusted by now and he saw that this time the figure stumbling out of the tavern to unbutton himself and piss into darkness among the strewn garbage was the man he'd rowed and raided with, twenty-five years before. The one who'd gone off to join the mercenaries at Jormsvik, around the same time Thorkell had escaped home and bought his land on Rabady. Word had come with summer traders and gossip that Stefa had killed his man in the challenge before the gates, which hadn't surprised Thorkell. Stefa had known how to fight. It was all he knew how to do, if you didn't count drinking.

This particular Erling in Esferth tonight was no peaceful trader from the settled eastern end of this island. Not if he was still a Jormsvik mercenary.

Stefa was alone in the alley now. He might not have been—it was a blessing, perhaps. Thorkell coughed, stepped forward, and spoke the man's name, calmly enough.

Then he twisted violently to his right, banging hard against the rough wall as Stefa wheeled, piss spraying, and thrust for his gut with a swiftly drawn knife.

A man who knew how to fight. And drink. A long afternoon and evening's worth of ale, most likely. Thorkell was entirely sober, and seeing better than Stefa in the dark. It allowed him to avoid the knife, pull his own blade in the same motion, and sheathe it between two ribs of the other man, up towards the heart.

He, too, knew how to fight, as it happened. It didn't leave you, that knowing. Your body might slow down, but you knew what you needed to do. He'd no idea, by now, how many souls he'd sent to whatever their afterworld might be.

He cursed, afterwards, because he was in some pain, having banged his hip against the wall, dodging, and because he hadn't meant to kill the other man until he'd learned a few things. Principally, what Stefa was doing here.

A mistake, to have used the name. The man had reacted like a frightened sentry to a footfall in the dark. He'd probably changed his name when he got into Jormsvik, Thorkell decided, rather too late. He swore again, at himself.

He dragged the dead man farther back into the alley, hearing the rats scuttle and scurry and the sound of some larger animal moving. He'd just finished doing that—and taking Stefa's purse from his belt—when he heard another man at the mouth of the laneway. He stood still in the blackness and saw him enter, also, to relieve himself. There was enough light at the entrance from the torch outside the tavern for him to see that this was the other man he knew.

He said nothing this time, a lesson learned. Waited until this one was busy with what he'd come out to do, and then moved silently forward. He clubbed the second Erling hard on the back of the head with the bone haft of his knife. Caught him as he slumped.

Then Thorkell Einarson stood for some moments, thinking hard, though not especially clearly, supporting the unconscious body of the son he'd left behind when they exiled him.

Eventually he made a decision, because he had to: perhaps not the best one, but he wasn't sure what the best one would be, given that he'd already killed Stefa. He propped Bern against the wall for a moment, braced him with his good shoulder, and tied his trouser drawstrings, to let him be decent, at least. It was too dark to see his son's face clearly. Bern had grown a beard, seemed bigger across the chest.

Ought to have been more careful, his father thought. Should have known his companion had come out before him, have been looking for Stefa, on the alert when he didn't see him. Thorkell shook his head.

In some endeavours, the lessons you needed to learn might come over time and with no greater risk than a master's reprimand. If you were going to raid on the longships, you could die if you learned too slowly.

On the other hand, if he was understanding this rightly, Bern had managed to get himself into Jormsvik, which said something for a lad who had been condemned to a servant's life by what his father had done. He'd taken himself off the isle, and more than that: you had to kill a fighter to join the mercenaries.

He didn't imagine Bern would feel kindly towards him now, or ever. He thought of his wife, then, wondering about her, though not for long: there wasn't much point. A shared life gone, that one, like the wake of a longship when it moved on through the sea. You needed to steer clear of thoughts like that. They were dangerous as the rocks of a lee shore. Heimthra, longing for home, could kill a man from within. He'd seen it happen.

Thorkell hoisted his son's body over his shoulder and headed for the mouth of the alley and the street.

Men passed out all the time near drinking places, everywhere in the world. Woke in grey dawn with rat bites and purses clipped. He had reason to hope the two of them would be seen as a tavern-goer carrying a drunken friend. He was limping with the weight and the pain in his hip. That might help the deception, he thought ruefully.

It didn't, in the event, happen that way. Someone spoke to him as soon as they reached the street.

"Are you going to bring the other one, too? Or is he dead?"

He stopped where he was. A woman's voice. Across the way, from the shadows there. Thorkell stood still, cursing fate and himself: in equal measure, as always.

He looked left and right. No one nearby, no one to have heard her, a small blessing that might save him, and Bern. The tavern's wall torch guttered and smoked in its iron bracket. He heard the steady noise from within. The same sounds from any tavern, everywhere a man might go. But, shouldering the body of his son, hearing a woman address him from the dark, Thorkell Einarson felt a strangeness take hold: as if he'd entered a part of the world that wasn't quite the royal city of Esferth in the Anglcyn lands of King Aeldred—a place for which he could not properly have prepared himself, however experienced he might be.

Given that unsettling thought, and being an Erling and direct by nature, he drew a breath and crossed the roadway straight towards the sound of the voice. When he drew near—she didn't back away from him—he saw who this was, and that stopped him again.

He was silent, looking down at her, trying to make some sense of this. "You shouldn't be here alone," he finally said.

"I have no one to fear in Esferth," said the woman. She was young. She was, in fact, the younger daughter of King Aeldred, in a thin cloak, the hood thrown back to reveal her face to him.

"You could fear me," he said slowly.

She shook her head. "You wouldn't murder me. It would make no sense."

"Men don't always do sensible things," Thorkell said.

She lifted her chin. "So you did kill the other one? The first man?"

Not at all sure why, he nodded his head. "Yes. So you see, I might do the same again."

She ignored that, staring at him. "Who was he?"

He was in such a strange world right now. This entire conversation: Aeldred's daughter, Bern on his shoulder, Stefa dead in the alley. A shipmate once. But for the moment, he told himself, he had one goal and the rest had to follow, if he could make it do so. "He was an Erling mercenary," he said. "From Jormsvik, I am almost certain. Not a trader, pretending to be."

"Jormsvik? Surely not! Would they be so foolish? To try raiding here?"

She knew of them. He hadn't expected that, either, in a girl. He shook his head. "I'd not have thought so. Depends who hired them."

Her composure was extraordinary. "And this one?" she asked, gesturing towards the body he carried. "The one you didn't kill?" She was keeping her voice low, not alerting anyone yet. He held to that, as to a spar.

He was going to need her. If only to have her not call the watch and have him seized. He wasn't a man to kill her where she stood; it was true, and she'd guessed it. Too sure of herself, but not wrong. Thorkell hesitated, then rolled the dice again, with an inward shrug.

"My son," he said. "Though I have no idea why."

"Why he's your son?" He heard amusement, laughed himself, briefly.

"Every man wonders that. But no, why he's here."

"He was with the other?"

"I… believe so." He hesitated, threw dice again. There wasn't much time. "My lady, will you help me get him outside the walls?"

"He's a raider," she said. "He's here to report on what he finds." Which was almost certainly true. She was quick, among everything else.

"And he will tell his fellows that he was detected and his companion captured or killed and that you will be ready for them, coming to find them, even. His message will be that they must sail."

"You think?"

He nodded. It was plausible, might be true. The part he didn't tell her wouldn't affect Esferth, only Bern's own life, and not for the better. But there was only so much a father could do once a boy was grown, fledged, out in the world.

The woman looked at him. He heard the tavern behind him again, a rising and subsiding noise. Someone shouted an oath, someone cursed back amid spilling laughter.

"I will have to tell my father, tomorrow," she said finally.

He drew a breath, hadn't realized he'd been holding it. "But you will do that… tomorrow?"

She nodded.

"You would really do this?" Thorkell asked, shifting his stance under the weight he carried.

"Because you are going to do something for me," she said.

And so, with a sense that he was still treading some blurred border between known things and mystery, Thorkell drew another breath, this time to ask her the question he probably ought to have asked as soon as he'd seen her out here alone.

He never did ask it; his answer came in another way. She laid a sudden hand on his arm, holding him to silence, then pointed across the street.

Not to the tavern door or the alley, but towards a small, unlit chapel two doors farther up. Someone had stepped outside, letting the chapel door swing shut behind him. He stood a moment, looking up at the sky, the blue moon overhead, and then began to walk away from them. As he did, a shape detached itself from blackness and padded over to him. And with that, Thorkell knew who this was.

"He was praying," Aeldred's daughter murmured. "I'm not sure why, but he'll be going outside now, beyond the walls."

"What?" Thorkell said, a little too loudly. "Why would he do that? He's going to his rooms. Had enough of the celebration. His brother died."

"I know," she said, eyes still on the man and dog moving down the empty street. "But your rooms are the other direction. He is going outside."

Thorkell cleared his throat. She was right about the rooms. "How do you know what he's doing?"

She looked at him. "I'm not certain how, and I don't like it, but I do know. So I need someone with me, and Jad seems to being saying it will be you."

Thorkell stared at her. "With you? What is it you want to do?" "I want to pray, actually, but there isn't time. I'm going to follow him," she said. "And don't ask me why."

"Why?" he asked, involuntarily.

She shook her head.

"That's moon-mad. Alone?"

"No. With you, remember? It'll get your son out of Esferth." Her voice changed. "You swear you think it will deter them? The raiders? Whoever they are? Swear it."

Thorkell paused. "I'd say yes in any case, you know, but I do think so. I swear it by Jad and Ingavin, both."

"And you won't run away to them? With your son?"

That would be a thought she'd have, he realized. He snorted. "My son will want nothing to do with me. And I'd be killed by the raiders for certain, if these are who I think they are."

She glanced down the street again. The man and dog were almost out of sight. "Who are they?"

"The leader's name won't mean anything to you. It's someone who will want areport that Esferth and the burhs are unassailable."

"We are. But same question back: how are you so sure?"

He was used to this kind of talk, though not with a woman. "Different answer: I'm not certain. This is a raider's guess. My lady, we'd best move if you want to follow that Cyngael."

He saw her take a breath this time, and then nod. She stepped into the street, lifting her hood as she did so. He went with her, along an empty, moonlit lane that seemed of the world and not entirely so. The tavern noises receded, became sea murmur and then silence as they went.

The man below was an honoured guest, a prince, companion of the Cyngael cleric the king had been watching for all summer. Ebor, son of Bordis, up on the wall-walk by the western gate, answered a quiet summons and came down the steps to that lilting voice.

The gates loomed in the dark, seeming higher from down on the ground, newly reinforced this past year. King Aeldred was a builder. Ebor saw a man with a dog, greeted him, heard a courteously phrased request to be allowed outside for a time, to walk under moonlight and stars, feel wind, away from the smoke and noise of the great hall and the town.

He was country-born, Ebor, could understand such a need. It was why he was up here so much of the time himself. It occurred to him, suddenly, to invite the Cyngael up to the wall-walk with him, but that would be a great presumption, and it wasn't what the man had asked of him.

"It isn't quiet out there tonight, all the tents, my lord" he said.

"I'm certain of that, but I wasn't intending to go that way."

Some of the others in the fyrd didn't like the Cyngael. Small, dark, devious. Cattle thieves and murderers, they named them. Mostly that came from those Anglcyn north of here, near the valleys or the hills where the ghost wood ended, along which the Rheden Wall had been built to keep the Cyngael out. Years of skirmishing and larger battles could shape such a feeling. But Ebor was from the good farmland east of here, not north or west, and his own dark childhood stories and memories were about Erlings coming up from the dangerous sea. The people of the west were no real enemy compared to longship berserkirs drunk on blood.

Ebor had nothing, himself, against the Cyngael. He liked the way they talked.

The night was quiet enough, little wind now. If he listened, he could hear the sounds from outside, though. There were a great many men sleeping in tents (around to the north) with the fyrd here and Esferth full to bursting in the run-up to the fair. No danger presented itself to this royal guest out there, unless he found a drunken dice game or took a woman with too-sharp fingernails into a field or hollow, and it wasn't Ebor's task in life to save a man from either of those. The Cyngael had spoken with dignity, no arrogance. He'd offered Ebor a coin: not too much, not too little—a sum fitting the request.

A quiet man, something on his mind. Far from home just now. Ebor looked at him and nodded his head. He took the iron key from his belt and unlocked the small door beside the wide gate and he let them out, the man and the dark grey hound at his side.

A minor encounter in the scheme of things, far from the first time someone had had reason to go out after dark in peaceful times. Ebor turned to go back up to his place on the wall.

The other two called to him before he reached the top.

When he came back down the steps and saw who it was this time, Ebor understood—rather too late—that there was nothing minor unfolding here, after all.

The man this time was an Erling, carrying someone over his shoulder, passed out in drunkenness. That happened every night. The woman, however, was the king's younger daughter, the princess Kendra, and it never even entered Ebor's head to deny her anything she might ask of him.

She asked for the door to be unlocked again.

Ebor swallowed hard. "May… may I summon an escort for you, my lady?"

"I have one," she said. "Thank you. Open it, please. Tell no one of this, on pain of my displeasure. And watch for us: to let us back in when we come."

She had an escort. An Erling carrying a drunken man. It didn't feel right. With a sick feeling roiling his guts, Ebor opened the small door for the second time. They went out. She turned back, thanked him gravely, walked on.

He closed the door behind them, locked it, hurried up the stairs, two at a time, to the wall-walk. He leaned out, watching them for as long as he could as they went into the night. He couldn't see very far. He didn't see when the Erling turned south alone, limping, carrying his burden, and the princess went north-west, also alone, in the direction the Cyngael and his dog had gone.

It occurred to Ebor, staring into night, that this might have been a tryst of some kind, a lovers' meeting, the Cyngael prince and his own princess. Then he decided that made no sense at all. They wouldn't have to go outside the walls to bed each other. And the Erling? What was that about? And, rather belatedly, the thought came to Ebor that he hadn't seen any weapon—no sword or even a knife—carried by the young Cyngael who had spoken to him so softly, with music in his voice. It was desperately unwise to go outside without iron to defend yourself. Why would anyone do that?

He was sweating, he realized; could smell himself. He stayed where he was, watching, staring out, as was his duty here, as the princess had told him to do. And in the meantime he began to pray, which was a duty all men had in the night while Jad did battle beneath the world on their behalf, against powers of malign intent.

+

He laid his son down by the bank of the stream. Not far from where they'd come walking this morning and found the royal children idling on the grass. With time now (a little) and a bit more light, with the blue moon reflecting off the river, Thorkell looked down at the unconscious figure, reading what changes he could, and what seemed to be unchanged.

He stayed like that for some moments. He was not a soft man in any possible way, but this had to be a strange moment in a man's life, no one could deny it. He hadn't thought to ever see his son again. His face was unrevealing in the muted moonlight. He was thinking that there was danger for the boy (not a boy any more) if he was left here in the dark, helpless. Beasts, or mortal predators, might come.

On the other hand, there was only so much a father could do, and he'd made a promise that mattered to the girl. He probably wouldn't have made it out without her. Would have tried, of course, but it was unlikely. He looked at Bern by moonlight and spent a moment working out how old his son was. The beard aged him, but he remembered the day Bern was born and it didn't seem so long ago, really. And now the boy was off Rabady, somehow, and raiding with the Jormsvikings, though it made so little sense for them to be here.

Thorkell had his thoughts on that, on what was really happening. His son's breathing was even and steady. If nothing came here before he woke, he'd be all right. Thorkell knew he ought to leave, before Bern opened his eyes, but it was oddly difficult to move away. The strangeness of this encounter, a sense of a god or gods, or blind chance, working in this. It didn't even occur to him to run away with Bern. Where would he go? For one thing, he was almost certain who had paid for the Jormsvik ships, however many there turned out to be. He shouldn't have been quite so sure, really, but he did know a few things, and they fit.

Ivarr Ragnarson had not been caught fleeing from Brynnfell. Two blood-eagled bodies to the west had been the marks of his passage. The Cyngael had never found the ships.

Ivarr had made it home. Stood to reason.

Something else did, too. No thinking man bought mercenaries to raid the Anglcyn coast any more. A waste of money, of time, of lives. Not with what Aeldred had been doing—and was still doing—with his standing army and his burhs, and even a fleet of his own being built along this coastline now.

Mercenaries might risk it if you paid them enough, but it didn't make sense. You sailed from Vinmark and raided east and south through Karch now, even down to the trading stations of overstretched Sarantium. Or along the Ferrieres coast, or, possibly, you went past here, west to the Cyngael lands. Not much to be gleaned there these days, for the exposed treasurehouses of the sanctuaries had long since been removed inland and inside walls, and the three Cyngael provinces had never had overmuch in the way of gold in any case. But a man, a particular man, might have his reasons for taking dragon-ships and fighting men back there.

The same reasons he'd had at the beginning of summer. And one more now. A brother newly dead, to join a blood feud that had begun long ago.

And if this was so, if it was Ivarr, Thorkell Einarson had good reason to expect nothing but a bad death were he to run away now with his son towards the coast, looking for the ships that would be lying offshore or beached in a cove. Ivarr, repellent and deadly as anyone he'd ever known, would remember the man who had blocked the arrow he'd loosed at Brynn ap Hywll from the wooded slope.

He really oughtn't to have been so sure of all this, but he was. Something to do with the night, the mood and strangeness of it. Ghost moon overhead. Nearness to the spirit wood, beyond the margins of which men never went. That girl going out, for no reason that made sense, just following the Cyngael prince. There was something at work tonight. You raided and fought long enough, survived so many different ways of dying, you learned to trust your senses, and this… feeling.

Bern hadn't learned enough yet, else he'd not have been so easily taken in an alley. Thorkell grimaced, an expression creasing his features for the first time. Fool of a lad. It was a hard world they lived in. You couldn't afford to be a fool.

The boy was making a start, though, had to acknowledge that. Everyone knew how you joined the mercenaries in Jormsvik. The only way you could join them. Thorkell looked down at the brown-haired, brown-bearded figure on the grass. A different man might have acknowledged pride.

Thorkell didn't have time to linger, to ask how Bern had done any of this. Nor did he presume that his only son, awakening, would smile in delight and cry his father's name aloud, and Ingavin's in thankfulness.

Bern shouldn't be long from waking. He would have to hope that was so, that this isolated place wouldn't draw wolves or thieves in the next while. The boy had filled out across the chest, he saw. You could almost call him a big man. He still remembered carrying him, years ago. Shook his head at that. Weak thoughts, too soft. Men woke each morning, lay down each night, in a blood-soaked world. You needed to remember that. And he needed to walk back to the girl.

Jaddite now, or not, he murmured an ancient prayer, father's blessing. Habit, nothing else: "Ingavin's hammer, between you and all harm."

He turned to go. Paused, and—berating himself even as he did—took from his belt-purse something he'd removed when he surrendered to the Cyngael for the second time in twenty-five years. He carried it now, instead of wearing it. The hammer on a chain. You didn't wear the symbols of the thunder god when you took the faith of Jad.

It was an entirely ordinary, unremarkable hammer. Thousands like it. Bern wouldn't know it as anything unique, but he'd realize it was an Erling who had carried him here, and he'd go back to the ships with the warning that implied. He'd have some talking to do, to explain his survival when Stefa never came back, but Thorkell couldn't help him with that. A boy became a man, had his own stony way to make on land and sea, like everyone else—then you died where you died, and found out what happened then.

Thorkell had killed an oar-companion tonight. Hadn't meant to do that. Not truly a friend, Stefa, but they'd shared things, covered each other's back in battle, slept on cold ground, close, for warmth in wind. You did that, raiding. Then you died where you died. An alley in Esferth for Stefa, pissing in the dark. He wondered if the dead man's spirit was out here. Probably was. Blue moon shining.

He bent and looped the chain into his son's fingers and closed them over the hammer, and then he went away along the stream, not looking back, covering ground towards where he'd seen the princess walking in her own folly.

There was a snatch of verse in his head as he went. One his wife used to sing, to all three children when they were young.

He put it out of his mind. Too soft for tonight, for any night.

+

He is coming. She knows it. Is waiting within the trees, across the stream. He is mortal and can see her. They have spoken under stars (no moons) on the night she took a soul for the queen. He has watched the Ride go through their pool in the wood. Then dropped his iron blade and very nearly touched her by the trees on the slope above the farm. It has not left her, that moment, from then until now. No quietude, in wood, in mound, crossing water under stars with the music of the Ride all around.

She trembles, an aspen leaf, her hair violet, then a paler hue. She is far from home, one moon in the sky. A glowing at the wood's edge, waiting.