by Katy Moran
Penda is asking me to betray Edge.
Long ago, when I was the Ghost of Constantinople, I would have done it. But I think of Asha, and I hear her saying, You have given away your freedom. I think of the dark-eyed king who haunts my dreams. I think of Cenry, and the way he looked at me when I used my skills against him. I think of Edge, too – my cousin.
I bow my head and then look up, right into Penda’s watery old eyes. “I am sorry, my lord.” My voice comes out in a whisper. “But that is something I will not do.”
A smile flashes across Wulf’s face, quicker than a fish in the shadows.
Penda’s voice is cold, deadly. “What did you say?”
My heart is hammering and I can scarce breathe, but I am triumphant. He can do whatever he likes, and I don’t care. This time I have chosen to do good, and I shall.
“Father—” Wulf begins.
But Penda pays him no heed. “Wulfhere,” he hisses, “I’ll have no such disobedience. Take the boy outside and teach him otherwise.”
Oh, Jesu. I don’t care, though. I still don’t care. I bear whip scars on my back that I’ll carry to the end of my days. What does Penda think they did to make us row on that slave boat? Give us honey-cakes? I can stand another whipping if I must.
But Wulf is shaking his head. “I am sorry, my lord: I can’t punish Cai for being honourable.”
The silence seems to last a sennight. I can hear the river rushing outside, the women laughing in the weaving-hall, the clink and grating of metal coming from Garric in his smithy. But in here it as if the world has stopped and we three are froze around this fire till the end of time.
At last, Penda spits into the flames and gets slowly to his feet, grasping his stick. The old man walks to the door and goes outside without once looking back, and I don’t even know why, but I feel tears burn the backs of my eyes as I watch him go. He is just an old man, a lonely old man whose world is falling to flinders around him.
Wulf and I sit without saying a word for a long time. At last, he picks up a stray twig and casts it into the fire, turning to me with his crooked, half-crazed smile. And I see the Wulf of years ago, the boy who has finally bested his father.
“He’s going to make me pay for this, isn’t he?” I wipe my face with my sleeve. “I’m a brainless fool.”
Wulf laughs, shaking his head. “Well, I’ll not argue with that.” He gives me a tired smile and for a moment looks like his old self again.
We stay by the fire, and I wish I’d seen before now what manner of man Wulf is, how much courage he has. I would do anything for him.
I wish I had seen the truth before I bound myself to Penda, for I’ve made an enemy, the most dangerous one I’ve ever had, even after Thales the Knife and Achaicus Dassalena. It must be quite a skill of mine. If I don’t take care, Penda will finish me.
Some weeks later: the month of winter full moon, AD 655
IT’S DARK in here, dark and cold. The light’s gone from the day already, and the fire kicks out more smoke than heat, casting long shadows up the walls of the barn. They look like long, skinny black fingers, clutching us tight. Edge and I sit side by side, a hand span between us, leaning against a hayrick. I feel hollow inside, empty like an old bone.
Wulf has betrayed us.
They have gone: my lord, Cenry, Highrule, that snake Penda and all the rest of his men. Gone to meet the warriors of Northumbria on the banks of the river Winwaed, and I do not know who shall come back, nor when.
My mind’s caught on the leather bag Wulf left; Edge said he’d never touch it, and we made a pact not to, but I can’t help wondering what’s inside, our lord’s last gifts to us. It sits on the floor between us, unopened.
They said we were not to have a fire, that it was too great a risk with all the harvest in here, but if they must lock us in the byre like mad dogs what choice do we have? So we lit one anyway in a shard of a broken bowl I found in a dark corner. I’m glad no one thought to take Edge’s strike-a-light, and our knives. He’s better at such things as fires. It was so careless of Wulf to let us keep our blades I can’t help thinking there was a message in it: better to die by our own hands than by his. He shut us in here on his father’s order; he’ll kill us too, when Penda says it’s time.
I don’t trust his word. If he truly meant we’d come to no harm, why must we be locked up?
“We cannot do it,” Edge whispers, fiddling with the hilt of his knife.
“What choice is there?” It comes out harsher than I meant. “We’re trapped in here like goats before the slaughter, and we’re finished whichever way the fight goes.” It’s not true we’re trapped: I could get out of here without even thinking on it, but Edge couldn’t and I’m not leaving him.
“If my father’s lot win, Penda must send me back to Northumbria – and you, too.”
I laugh but there’s no mirth in it. “You heard what Highrule told us: Penda’s got fighting men from the Wolf Folk, Wessex, Powys, the East Saxons – more than three times your father’s count. Now they don’t care if Penda’s a Christian or no, all they want’s to be on the winning side. Edge, your father shan’t win this.”
Edge’s face twists with misery. “Well enough,” he says. “Well enough. What do I care, anyhow? But if Mercia takes the fight, why does Penda need to kill us?”
“Fool – how can he let us live, a pair of Northumbrian athelings? Edge, why do you think Highrule came here before they rode out? Why do you think he asked if you recalled the way from the north?”
Edge falls quiet, and does not answer. Twenty days’ ride south we rode, when you were but a little brat. Dost tha remember, Peaceblade? I hear Highrule’s words echoing in my mind. We had the sun at our left shoulders all morning, and at our right all afternoon, and close by the coast we rode so that the song of the waves kept us on our path.
He did not have time to say much else before Wulf came in.
“Must I bid farewell to my cousins so soon?” Highrule asked.
Wulf just said, “We go now.”
Highrule bowed his head at Edge and me, mocking to the last, and we sat on the floor, not looking at Wulf. I felt hollow, like a dried-out sheep-skull left to crumble in the meadow. How could he do this?
“I want you to have this.” He knelt, and tried to press the leather bag into my hands, but I let it fall.
“We want nothing from you,” Edge spat – and then the shouting began outside.
“I don’t care who you are; you’ll not keep them locked up like beasts.” It was Cenry. “They’re my friends, my brothers – does that mean nothing?”
Pride and sadness burst in my heart: that speech to his grandfather would cost Cenry dear and he knew as much, but he made it anyhow.
“May the Lady Frigya and God keep you,” Wulf said then, and if I had not been so full of misery I would have laughed: Wulf is no Christian, though he stands in Leofric’s god-house each Holy Day. He must have thought our chances true hopeless. He got up and strode out quickly, not looking back at us, and his voice was added to the storm of words in the yard, and soon Cenry fell quiet. That was the last we heard of him. Cenry at least was loyal to the end, unlike his father.
“Edge,” I say, “if we stay here it’ll be our deaths.”
He digs the point of his knife into a floorboard. “All right, then.” He speaks so quiet I can barely hear him. “Give them time to get well away north-west to Winwaed, and then we’ll go. Although how we’re to get out of here, I know not.”
I smile in the flickery, firelit dark. “Don’t fret about that,” I tell him. “You may leave it to me. Not this night, then, but the one after?”
Edge sighs. “Yes. The one after.”
If the wind were in the east, we’d not know Mildreth was having her child. But as it is, her cries are borne on the air over the great soaring hump of the hall and the yard, and to here. Poor Mildreth; she has suffered enough already, with all Leofric’s sermons about sins of the flesh and the jibes of the folk down in th
e village, and the sidelong looks of the women, all of whom you may wager are wondering if it’s their man who strayed and cursed Mildreth with this baby. Chances are they’re right to be wary. Why does the father hide his part in it unless he belongs already to another woman, and has brats of his own to feed?
“Poor sow,” Edge says. “A man who does that’s a coward, all right.”
I watch a mouse streak from one hayrick to another. Anwen must have gone down to the village with the girls; our food would not have been forgot otherwise. I could eat my own leg, I’m so hungry, and always I must keep a grip on this darkness in my mind, this crushing horror that comes with being locked up.
Edge puts his hand on my arm. “Cai,” he says. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m afraid,” I tell him. “I hate being closed in.”
He smiles. “So even you are afraid of something.”
“Just this. Just being closed in. Not of anything else.”
That’s a lie: I’m scared of dying. If I were not, I’d not be talking Edge into getting out of Repedune and riding fast away till it’s nothing but a lump on the horizon behind us.
We sit wordless in the dark.
“Cai,” Edge says at last, “what was it like on that boat? On the slave boat that brought you here?”
I’ve not told anyone of this – not Wulf, not Thorn, not even Anwen. No one at all. I do not think I ever shall. A sticky awkwardness grows in the air between us as Edge kens I’m not going to tell him aught. I hear him breathing. I even hear the soft drumbeats of our hearts. There’s quiet in the barn and quiet without: Mildreth has stopped her wailing.
“She’s had it,” I say. “Either the child’s born or she’s dead, or they both are.”
And then, out of the silence, a shrill, high cry pierces the air.
It’s thick night now, and still no one has brought our snap. The fire has burnt down to embers that glow blood-red.
“What’s wrong?” Edge asks, shredding a piece of straw. “We’ve had nothing since just gone dawn.” He turns and looks at me, his face a pale blur in the shadows. “Cai, do you think they mean to starve us?”
“No. Anwen wouldn’t, even if Penda told her to. She and Cenry were the only ones who stood up for us. No, there must be something else.”
We fall into quiet again, waiting.
I sit upright, chilly with fear: I hear footsteps moving across the yard. Two sets, light, coming slow. My fingers close around the handle of my knife and I kick Edge sharp in the leg; he’s dozing, his head lolling forward as we slump against the hayrick. I see his hand go for the hilt of his knife before he even opens his eyes. Twitchy and quick are Edge and I, and who can blame us, locked up in this nest of traitors?
“Who is it?” Edge whispers.
“How should I know, you mazy fool?”
The barn door swings slowly open. My hand’s sweating into the leather-bound hilt of my blade. I hope it’ll not slip.
It is Anwen and Thorn. I let out a breath and feel my heartbeat slow. But there is something sore amiss; I can see that now. Even in the gloom, Anwen’s face is pinched and pale, and Thorn drags her feet, a strange, glassy look to her eyes, the brightness quite gone from her face. I sense Edge tense at my side: Thorn looks wrong, as though some deep, inner spark is missing. She looks as if she has lost her wits.
“Help me,” Anwen whispers. “For the love of God, I can do nothing with her. She’ll listen to you two – just get her to drink a sleeping-draught, please do it.” She’s gripping a small vial in one hand.
We’re on our feet in a moment. “She needs to sit, for a start,” Edge says, in a cold, harsh voice. “What’s wrong with her?”
Between the three of us we get Thorn to sit on a hayrick. She moves as though asleep, slow and clumsy. Tears slip down her cheeks, leaving tracks that glisten in the shadowy darkness.
“What’s wrong?” I hiss at Anwen. I can hardly stand to look at her. I know she spoke for us when Penda said we should be prisoners, but still it burns me to lay my eyes on her: my foster-mother turned jailer.
No one had the courage to stand up to Penda in the end, no one save Cenry.
Anwen opens her mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. Thorn is rocking slowly backwards and forwards, and Anwen puts her hand on Thorn’s arm, offering the clay bottle, saying, “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry, will you not take aught just to help you sleep?”
But Thorn does not answer and turns her face away, rocking and weeping, rocking and weeping.
“What’s amiss?” Edge demands. “Tell us.”
Anwen sighs. “Mildreth,” she says softly. “The child’s father – it’s Cenry.”
We stare at her, wordless with the shock of it.
NO,” EDGE says, sharply. “That can’t be right. He would never—”
“Well, he did.” Anwen replies. “Much though I wish it weren’t so, I think it is. Mildreth’s ever been a truthful girl.”
Their speech fades as I stare at Thorn. I reach out and rest my hand on her shoulder, not knowing what else to do. She looks up at me, and all the light has gone from her face. Her eyes are dead, flat like pebbles on the riverbed.
“Come,” I say, keeping my voice low, as if I were speaking to a tricksy horse. “Come, you silly wench – you can’t let yourself be riled by a great fool like Cenry. You were not even wed to him then, and he’s got muck for brains anyhow, we all know that.”
But Thorn just shakes her head, tears slipping unstoppable down her face, and I feel a burning twist of anger unwinding deep within me.
Who do they think they are, this family?
Edge snatches the bottle from Anwen’s hands and holds it to Thorn’s lips, forcing back her head so she’s no choice but to drink.
“Take care!” Anwen cries. “You’ll hurt her.”
Edge ignores her. “Swallow,” he says to Thorn, and she does, even though some of the dark juice trickles from the corner of her mouth like blood from between the lips of someone killed by choking sickness.
I want to speak; I should say something comforting, but I cannot. I feel as though I am on fire, that I burn.
Suddenly Thorn sits up straight and we all jump, as though a corpse has just opened its eyes and stared right at us. She is looking at me. “Cai.” Her voice is flat and hollow. “You ought not to pity me. You of all folk should not pity me.”
Anwen’s hands fly to her mouth. “My honey,” she pleads. “Don’t say it. How can it help?”
It’s as if she has not spoken. Thorn’s face twists into a mockery of a smile. “No,” she goes on. “The wrong this family has done me is naught against what they did to your folk and mine, long ago. Your mother and father told you nothing of it, did they?”
I shake my head, but Thorn did not mean me to answer, anyhow.
“Penda knew your grandfather.” She speaks in a dry, rasping voice. “Cai was a spy, a double dealer. He spied on Mercia for the Wolf Folk, and all the while Penda thought Cai was his man. Cai was just like you – he moved like smoke and they say he could have talked the stars out of the sky, had he chosen to. When Penda found out, he swore to take revenge.
“Penda and his men, our dear lord Wulfhere counted among them, they’ve laid waste to many a village,” she goes on, fixing her cold, dead eyes on me. “They’ve taken the lives of many poor folk who’ve done nothing but been in the wrong spot when the Devil and his Cub rode through. The day Penda’s army killed my mother and father,” she says, “was the day they took the lives of all your kin but Elfgift. Every last one of them: your mother’s mother, her brother, and even her grandfather too. Cai was there – your father’s father – and Penda made sure he killed him himself, of course.”
I’m cold, too cold. It feels as though someone has tipped a hogshead of icy water down my back. I’m back in the hall that night with Elfgift again: Well, Cai, then you must know that a man can be a liar, and many other things as well. This is how Penda knew of my skill: I’m not the first to have it. My grand
father died for it.
There are no secrets any more. I wish there were, though. I wish there were.
“It wasn’t like that,” Anwen whispers. “Wulf tried, he tried…”
The cold’s rushed away; I’m aflame. I burn; I cannot be quenched. I feel light, full of power, as though I am formed of naught but fire and air. I hear Edge saying, “No, Cai, no,” as if from across a field, but I have not time to heed him. I shrug myself out of his grip and I run, swerving past Anwen, who reaches out to me with a cry. I’m out in the yard, shocked by the chill of the night, the great sweep of stars above me in the blackness. All blurs as I make for the stable, so fast neither Edge nor Anwen has a hope of catching me. There’s warm horse-smell, darkness. I let Maelan out of her stall and leap onto her back, wrapping my legs around her.
We’ve a run ahead, my dear heart, I think, and I hope she can understand me.
“Stop!” Anwen cries, running across the yard.
I lean forward, gripping hard, clutching tight at Maelan’s wiry mane. If she minds being rid bareback again she shows no sign of it. Swift she is this night, my darling. I hear the hiss and roar of the river, and I wheel about, setting her at it, feeling the strength of her great body as we leap.
I look back over my shoulder at the straggling houses of the village, the river’s bend, the bulk of the wood-shore looming up behind it. I will never see this place again.
From Repedune-hall north-west, into Elmet-marches
WE TEAR through the dark hours of the night, long out of the land I know from hunting. All I can be sure of is that I’m riding north, for the great star’s above me. Bleak country flashes by – flat, sweeping, with crooked trees snatching up at the night. The trees thicken now, drawing in around me, silent, watching.
It has been lit, my slow-burning anger, and I cannot put it out. I am borne up on its wings, swooping so fast my eyes water. My legs burn from the ride, from the effort of keeping my seat without a saddle, but I do not care.