by Anna Elliott
But she wasn’t thinking of Marche. When she’d turned away from Piye and Daka and faced towards Octa’s camp, she had set aside all acknowledgment—all fear, even—that Marche might be here to recognize her. And now she had to concentrate on putting him out of her mind, every bit as much as—
She caught herself before her mind could again fly back to the abbey. As much as anything else, that might make her lose her courage.
All the same, each moment she stood in the darkness seemed to stretch on endlessly. The earth floor was muddy, and there was nowhere else for her to sit, so she stood in the center of the room, listening to the sounds of the encampment outside. A pair of dogs yapping and snarling at each other, their barks punctuated by men’s drunken shouts. A dog fight, she supposed, with the watchers calling out wagers on the outcome. Occasionally, too, she heard a higher-pitched woman’s voice, raised in argument or complaint or sometimes an outraged shriek. One of the inevitable camp followers, she supposed. Or a slave girl.
Isolde shivered. Any other king but Octa of Kent, she thought, would simply have bound prisoners hand and foot and staked them to the ground in a tent. The utter dark and the looming sense of the hut’s four solid walls were plainly meant to terrify.
And she was alone here—entirely alone. And, at this moment, very conscious that even if she succeeded tonight, men were going to fight and die. Doubtless fewer than would die if Octa, Cerdic, and Marche united to crush Britain. Maybe even fewer than if Octa broke any treaty he might have made with Cerdic and attacked Wessex after all. But still, the cold truth was that lives would inevitably be lost because of what she was doing now.
When at last she heard the sound of the bar scraping across the door, her every muscle jumped and tensed. It was the same man—the blond guard who’d shut her in—his broad, flat-featured face eerily lit by the flame of the burning brand he carried in one hand. He was tall enough that he had to stoop to see under the lintel of the door, and he blinked, peering blindly into the darkness before his pale eyes fastened on Isolde.
“Come with me,” he said again. “Octa orders that you be brought before him.”
Again the blond guard led the way through the encampment, this time stopping before a tent that had been set up in a central position and was larger than the rest, though still constructed of the same coarse goat hide. Grunting at Isolde to follow, he ducked under the flap of the tent, a pool of light spilling out through the opening and onto the muddied ground. Isolde’s heart was pounding as she followed the guard inside, her stomach clenching in anticipation of what she would find. But save for herself and the guard, the tent was as empty as the prison hut had been.
A single rush light burned on a roughly constructed central table, casting a dim, smoky glow over the space inside. And the rush must, Isolde thought, have been set in tallow, because the reek of the smoke was even worse than the stench of the guardsman’s uncured skin cloak or the smell of the encampment outside. A chair covered by another silvery pelt stood to one side of the table, together with a rough three-legged stool. Apart from that, the space was bare. Some filthy rushes had been strewn on the dirt floor, and a heap of skins that might have served as a bed was piled in one corner. No more squalid and dirty a space than the rest of the camp, but no less, either.
The light the burning rush cast, though, was certainly poor, and Isolde felt a faint stirring flicker of hope. She stole a glance down at her hands, clasped tight on a fold of her cloak. The marks she and Mother Berthildis had applied did indeed look like the still oozing pustules of a recovering pox victim. Enough that she herself might have been fooled, at least from a short distance. And the air here was chill enough that she could keep her cloak on without drawing suspicion. The rest—
Isolde broke off in her thoughts abruptly at a sound from outside. A low, rasping voice sounded just outside the door, growling a command, Isolde thought, to some unseen companion. Then the tent flaps parted again, and she was face-to-face with Octa of Kent.
She knew him at once, of course, from the glimpses she’d had of him in the scrying waters. And for one horrible moment, she saw him again, laughing as he rode down the screaming old woman. Saw Emyr, the weeping, shivering man whom he had tortured into madness years ago and whose suffering her grandmother had ended with a draft of nightshade. Heard Cerdic’s thin, creaking voice, You would go alone to seek out Octa the Butcher? Octa of the Bloody Knife?
Isolde focused on drawing a slow, steadying breath, telling herself that Octa—whatever name he had won for himself, whatever reputation he had carved—was a man like any other. Telling herself that she had spent seven years of pretending witchcraft to survive as Con’s high queen—and she’d done it by learning to read faces and eyes. To take a man’s measure quickly, almost at a glance. She could do the same with Octa now.
You’ll have to, she thought. Your own life—Britain’s survival—depends on it.
Octa was growling another order, this time at the blond guardsman who had brought Isolde here. Remain here, Isolde guessed he must have said, because the guard took up a position at the tent’s doorway, feet planted apart, arms folded on his broad chest. Watching, Isolde saw the big blond guardsman flinch instinctively at Octa’s address, saw him drop his gaze to the muddy rushes on the floor, and avoid his king’s gaze.
Octa let his gaze rest on the guardsman a moment, then dropped into the single chair and fixed his eyes on Isolde. “Well?” He spoke in a thickly accented version of the British tongue. “You come here to see me—why?”
Isolde heard an echo of Madoc’s words. Some say he’s mad. I don’t know. She wouldn’t have called the man before her anything but sane. But all the same, as he watched her, something moved behind his eyes. Something that made Isolde think of a wild caged beast.
The crooked scar on his jaw stood out like a livid, writhing snake, the ends of his long silver-blond braids were matted together with what looked like black pine pitch, and beneath a heavy fur-lined cloak he wore about his neck a circlet of what Isolde realized with a jolt were the joints of human finger bones.
The sight, though, was oddly steadying. Because in that moment, Isolde saw her way.
Octa of the Bloody Knife was a man accustomed to being feared. A man whose every movement, whose every word, whose every choice of dress was built around inspiring terror in those he faced. Like Fidach, Isolde thought, with his many-skinned robe and room of grinning skulls. But unlike Fidach, she didn’t think Octa would respect anyone who stood up to him and refused to be afraid.
If she had any chance at all—not just of persuading Octa to believe her story, but of ensuring he made the choice she wanted—that chance lay not in simply rejecting fear but in appearing completely oblivious that Octa expected her to be afraid at all.
Isolde drew another breath, ruthlessly pushing everything she knew about the man before her—every vile story she’d ever heard about him—aside. She tried to fix in her mind a memory of Garwen, of her round, slightly foolish face and honking voice. Then, with scarcely a perceptible pause after Octa’s question, she opened her mouth.
“My lord, have you ever been sick at your stomach? I mean really sick—so sick that you just heave up every bit of food you try to take—and just the smell of something like roasting meat or soured ale is enough to set you retching for an hour and put you off your meals for days?”
Octa’s silver-blond brows drew together. “What in the name of all the—”
Isolde broke in before he could finish, talking over him, clasping her hands over the pillow that swelled out the belly of her gown, the words flooding from her mouth in her best imitation of Garwen’s breathless prattle. Outside, one of the quarreling dogs gave a sharp bark that changed midway into a yelp of pain. A roar—of approval, Isolde supposed—went up from the men who must be watching the fight.
“Because that’s what this breeding has been like for me. Just sick enough to die, the whole way through. And my ankles always swollen, and the pains in my back
—” Isolde rubbed the base of her spine and thought of every crabbed and crusty old warrior she’d ever nursed, and there had been many of them. The old men whose sole remaining pleasures were in describing their ailments to all who came near. “It’s like being stabbed with a red-hot sword. Not to mention the—”
Octa’s brows were still drawn together in a fierce frown, and he broke in, his voice dangerously calm, “I assume, woman, that there is a point to all this. Do you think that you could come to it before I lose all patience?”
Isolde ignored the quickening of her pulse, the chill that danced across her skin. The point, she told herself fiercely again, was to appear completely unaware that he expected her to be quaking in terror. And already she thought she’d managed to unbalance him, if only a bit. Beneath the obvious impatience on the Saxon king’s face, she could see a kind of startled puzzlement, too, as though he were unsure quite what to make of her.
If nothing else, she thought, you have to be the first petitioner who’s ever come before him and made him listen to a catalog of the trials of pregnancy.
“Just as you like, lord.” Isolde summoned up a wide, tolerantly forgiving smile to direct at the Saxon king. “Not as though I’d expect a man to understand, anyway. But if you think it’s easy smiling and nodding at an old goat like Cerdic’s maundering stories about his youth when you’re wanting nothing but to lie down somewhere quiet until your insides stop tying themselves in knots, then I’m here to tell you you’re wrong. And—” She let an aggrieved note creep into her tone. “What’s more, it’s all my lord Cerdic’s fault in the first place. He’s the one that got me in this state.”
Octa was eyeing her, one hand fingering the knife at his belt. The hilt was of worked gold and as thick as Isolde’s wrist. At Isolde’s final words, though, his brows shot upwards in a look of skepticism. “You’re saying that’s King Cerdic’s child?”
Isolde nodded with exaggerated patience and gave him a look such as one might give a small, backward child. “Well, of course. Haven’t I just been saying so?”
Octa studied her with narrowed eyes. Then, abruptly, he threw back his head and gave a shout of laughter that sounded like the scraping of knives and ran like ice up Isolde’s spine. And then, when he’d stopped laughing, he fixed Isolde with a hard, cold stare and said, “You lie.”
Isolde again ignored the thud of her heart against her ribs—though she wondered suddenly what Trystan had felt, all those years ago, walking into the enemy camp with his face and arms bruised by his own hands. But that thought led her back to wondering what was happening at the abbey. Wondering whether Trystan was still lying in Mother Berthildis’s rooms, drawing slow, shallow breaths. Or—
Isolde clenched her hands, digging her nails into her palms, and made herself look at Octa blankly. “Lie? Why would I want to lie about it? It’s not as though I’d choose to be bearing King Cerdic’s child. Old wretch.” She screwed up her mouth and then spat on the ground by their feet. “Near nine moons I spend carrying the bastard’s brat—and then he casts me out. Just because I’ve caught the pox.” She gestured to the marks on her face. “Which as I’m sure you’ll agree, my lord, was hardly my fault. But no—out he tosses me like so much rubbish. So if you think I’m happy to be still carrying his child—”
Octa looked at her narrowly, his hand on the hilt of his knife. And then he smiled, a slow, unpleasant smile, his fingers tightening around the blade as though about to draw it from its sheath. “Then perhaps you’d like me to get rid of the child for you. I’ve done as much for many women of your kind.”
Isolde swallowed the bile that had risen in her throat and smiled back at Octa, a smile wide enough to crack the painted pox marks on her cheeks. No. No. You are not going to be sick. Let fear in now—let yourself think about what he’s saying and you’ll be just one more woman quaking in terror at Octa’s feet.
She said brightly, still in her best imitation of Garwen’s voice, “Well, now. I knew you were a kind one the moment I laid eyes on you. I’ve an eye for faces, you know. And as soon as I saw yours, I said to myself, that man has a good heart.” She tilted her head to one side. “I’d some doubts about coming here, I’ll admit. Because if you’ll pardon me for mentioning it, my lord, there’s a terrible number of nasty stories told about you. And the way Cerdic talks about you—well, it would fair scorch wood. But I thought, well, no man can be as black as he’s painted. And it’s not as if I’d take Cerdic’s word if he told me the sky was blue. So I—oh!”
Isolde broke off with a sharp cry, bending over double and clutching at her middle. She breathed heavily for a moment, then straightened and looked up at Octa again. “Just a stray pain, lord. They come now and again towards the end. I doubt the child will actually be born tonight.”
The mixture of disbelief, anger, and something like horrified distaste on Octa’s face might have been funny at any other time. But any amusement Isolde might have felt was canceled by the cold weight of knowing that if the story she told was a lie, there were countless, countless numbers of women in the land who could tell it and speak nothing but truth. And by the grim certainty that she might well become one of those women herself if she failed.
As it was, she watched Octa’s hand slowly relax its grip on the knife and felt nothing but a queasy wash of relief and a wish that she could wipe away the trickle of cold perspiration that was sliding down the back of her neck.
Outside, someone had started a drinking song; Isolde could hear a dozen or more upraised voices, hear the men pounding their shields with the butts of spears or swords in time to the words. Octa drew in his breath, and she could almost see him recalling the presence of the guardsman still posted at the tent’s entrance, watch him taking a grip on himself, struggling to regain control of the situation, to keep firm hold on his dignity.
He gave her a wary look, as though half expecting a screaming infant to drop from her where she stood. “Very well,” he said at last. His fingers moved over the necklace of finger bones, so that they rattled together on his breast. “You came. Why?”
He’d settled, Isolde judged, on the conclusion that pregnancy—or the pox—had turned her brain. And she judged, too, that she had this one moment—no more—to convince him that listening to her any further was worth his while. So she drew in her breath, met his gaze, and said, “Because I want you to kill Cerdic for me. That’s what I’m offering you, lord. Cerdic and all the rest of his army—all trussed up like winter geese and ready for the chopping block.”
Octa shifted position, kicking absently at the rushes on the floor, still eyeing Isolde narrowly. Weighing what she’d just said against her patent insanity. Finally he said, “How?”
ISOLDE STOOD IN THE PITCH DARKNESS of the log-built prisoner’s cell, trying to stop shivering. She’d given Octa the story she’d worked out with Cerdic: that Cerdic had been planning a surprise attack on Octa’s camp, and that his armies were massed in the bowl of the next valley but one. That sickness, the constant bane of armies on the move, had struck Cerdic’s troops, and that they were now pinned down in their encampment, made all but helpless by the same pox that had afflicted Isolde herself.
Octa had been an impatient audience. Several times he’d interrupted Isolde’s story with a sharp question or an accusation that she lied—that she couldn’t possibly know as much as she claimed. It had taken every shred of Isolde’s resolve to keep staring at him in blank-eyed wonderment or smiling like a woman deranged.
And then in the end, when she’d finished speaking and stood with the cold prickles of sweat drying on her skin, Octa had said nothing at all. He’d simply sat, staring at her, the crooked scar on his jaw livid in the dim light, his eyes flicking over her from head to foot. Isolde had been wondering whether she was going to have to manufacture another pretended birth pang to make him let her go, when he’d turned to the greasy-haired guard.
“Take her back to the holding cell. Then return here to me.”
And so now Isolde sto
od in the resin-scented darkness again, with no idea whether Octa had believed her or no—much less whether he was going to rise to the bait she’d twitched before his face. And still less idea how she was ever going to get out of this place, this prison hut and the Saxon encampment, alive.
At least she’d neither seen nor heard anything to suggest Marche was part of the encampment or even close by. But maybe that was as far as luck could take her tonight.
The air felt close and stuffy. Isolde had already taken off her cloak, and now she wished that she could take the pillow from under her gown as well. She and Mother Berthildis had stitched it in place so that it wouldn’t slip and give her away—and so it hadn’t. But now it felt hot and uncomfortable against her skin. Though certainly far less cumbersome than the actual weight of a child would have been.
Despite everything, Isolde found herself smiling a little at the recollection of the look on Octa’s face when he’d thought there was a chance of her birthing a squalling baby in his own private war tent. She rested her hands lightly on her middle. Maybe he’d be right, at that, if he assumed that breeding unhinged a woman’s mind. Because the list of uncomfortable symptoms she’d described for Octa was true. She remembered them all vividly—every one.
And yet, she thought, you’d never, never wish a single one of those miseries away if it meant giving up the joy of having your babe inside you all that while.
Isolde smiled faintly into the dark again. And then she came to with a start, as realization struck. Just now, and for the first time—the very first time, since her stillborn baby girl had been born—she’d thought of the months of carrying her without any underlying shadow of pain.
That ought to mean something, Isolde thought. But before she could catch hold of the wisp of realization and think what that something was, a sound from outside the hut made her freeze in place. She’d grown accustomed to the shouts and raucous laughter from the surrounding camp, so that she’d not been paying much mind. But now she became suddenly aware that the laughter and drunken bursts of song had stopped and that the shouts were coming from only two or three voices, no more. She heard, too, the steady thud of booted feet, the clash of weaponry being assembled and drawn on.