The Edge on the Sword

by Rebecca Tingle

  Learning to fight

  “Where were you?” Flæd demanded when she reached the scriptorium entrance.

  “Went to see the smith,” Red replied mysteriously. “Follow me.” After a second’s pause, Flæd hurried after the Mercian envoy, who strode on until they had passed through the gates of the burgh wall. Here he turned and went along the wall until they reached an outcropping at the base of a watch shelter. No guards had been posted here yet, and the place looked deserted to Flæd as she watched her warder poke among the piled stones. He drew out a battered sword of medium length, a leather cap not unlike the one he himself often wore, and a heap of grey metal links which, when held up, proved to be a boy-size shirt of ring mail.

  “I told the smith these were for the king’s child. He thought I meant Edward,” Red told Flæd, “but they will fit you. Let’s get started.” With a grin Flæd wedged the parchment she had been carrying into a niche of the wall, and began pulling the heavy mail shirt over her tunic.

  “A compelling coming-of-age-story…Tingle has imagined an action-packed life for Æthelflæd.”

  —BCCB

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  The Edge

  on the Sword

  REBECCA TINGLE

  speak

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  SPEAK

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd,

  250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2001

  Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Rebecca Tingle, 2001

  Map illustration copyright © Karen Savary

  All rights reserved

  Text set in Aldus.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED

  THE G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Tingle, Rebecca. The edge on the sword / by Rebecca Tingle.

  p. cm. Summary: In ninth-century Britain, fifteen-year-old Æthelflæd,

  daughter of King Alfred of West Saxony, finds she must assume new responsibilities

  much sooner than expected when she is betrothed to Ethelred of

  Mercia in order to strengthen a strategic alliance against the Danes.

  1. Ethelfled, d. 918—Juvenile fiction.

  2. Great Britain—History—Alfred, 871-899—Juvenile fiction.

  [1. Ethelfled, d. 918—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—Alfred, 871-899—

  Fiction. 3. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 4. Anglo-Saxons—Fiction.

  5. Vikings—Fiction. 6. Mercia (Kingdom)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T4888 Ed 2001 [Fic]—dc21 00-055353

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56344-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Bryce,

  mannum mildust ond mon ð wærust,

  leodum li ð ost ond lofgeornost

  Contents

  I. ♦ Late Winter

  1. Dusk

  2. Moonrise

  3. Midnight

  4. Red

  5. In the Great Hall

  II. ♦ Spring

  6. The Marsh

  7. Mercia Rallies

  8. A Mound on the Plain

  9. Mercia Bested

  10. Treachery

  11. Truce

  III. ♦ Summer

  12. The King’s Council

  13. Battle Lessons

  14. Message to Mercia

  15. Waiting

  16. Ethelred

  17. The Race

  18. The Trap

  IV. ♦ Summer’s End

  19. Leaving Home

  20. Blood Money

  21. Fortune’s Wheel

  22. Dead Letters

  23. Hunter & Hunted

  24. Noble River

  25. Lady of the Mercians

  Historical Note

  Note

  IN THIS STORY, I HAVE USED THE REAL NAMES OF CERTAIN CHAR-ACTERS who actually existed in the late ninth and early tenth century. Writing such names is not always easy, because although the Anglo-Saxons of this time mainly wrote using the Roman letters we use today, they also continued to use several much older rune letters. In this story, I have changed the rune letters wyn (ρ), yogh (δ), and thorn (þ) and eth (ð) into the Roman characters w, g, and th, which indicate almost the same consonant sounds to Modern English readers. I have kept one letter, æsc (æ), in its Old English form, in part because there is no good Modern English equivalent, and because it represents the principal sound in my main character’s name. The letter æsc (æ) in an Old English word should be pronounced like the short a of our word “cat.” So the name “Æthelflæd” rhymes with “apple-glad,” and the nickname “Flæd” rhymes with “glad.” (As Flæd herself will demonstrate, the name of this letter, æsc, is pronounced “ash.”)

  The story begins in West Saxony—a kingdom contending with the threat of Danish invaders from the north, with restless and sometimes hostile Welsh neighbors to the west, and with the delicate loyalty of Mercia to the north and the east—a once great kingdom which the West Saxons have just reclaimed from the Danes.

  I

  Late Winter

  1

  Dusk

  CLUTCHING A GREY CLOAK AROUND HER SHOULDERS, THE GIRL hurried into the broad meadow. The river at the edge of the pasture had flooded with the winter’s rain and snow, and had overflowed its banks. Now a shallow lake shone in place of the river’s curve, and at the edge of this wetland the girl crouched down to unlace her flat leather shoes. Barefoot, she began to pick her muddy way around the water. Birds rose and landed, calling to each other across the sunset colors of the pool. The girl was shivering by the time she reached the opposite bank of the lake. Quickly she slipped between the first knotted trees of the forest and made her way toward a flicker of light.

  She was late. Against her promise, she had kept him waiting. There had been a time, she remembered as she walked the rough path, before promises and arranged meetings. Not so long ago she and her brother had been free to go out together almost every day, the two of them roaming deserted stretches of their father’s land. But those days were over now.

  Damp branches touched the girl’s legs where she had lifted her gown, and scraped across the arm she put up to shield her face. No one had seen her come to the pasture, she felt sure, and so far she had seen no living creature except the birds. She hurried faster, less careful than she had been a few moments before. The light was close now—she was almost there. In her haste, she did not notice a form which slipped from the shadow of a large tree just after she passed and began to follow her along the tr
ail.

  A fire brightened the little clearing as she entered it. With a sigh she threw down her shoes and went toward the warmth. Seated in the firelight, another slight figure wrapped in grey wool gave a startled cry and scrambled to get up.

  “It’s me, Edward,” the girl said quickly, “it’s Flæd.”

  “I knew it. Wulf and I knew it was you.” He pushed back his hood and gave her a pinched smile, looking up from beneath the fringe of soft brown hair across his forehead. Behind him a big dog with a coarse grey coat raised its sharp face in her direction, eyes glowing. “We’ve been waiting.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Flæd came and seated herself beside him, clasping her arms around her knees and leaning against the dog’s flank. “Put some more sticks on the fire, Edward.” She nudged him with an elbow. “And bring me my shoes. I dropped them over there.” She stretched out her legs as he rose, and scrubbed with her palm at the drying streaks of mud. “I’m almost as dirty as you tonight, little brother.”

  Flæd’s shoes landed with a slap by her hip. Squatting down again, Edward poked at the fire, breaking small branches and adding them. “Wulf and I have to hunt,” he said gruffly. “We can’t sit around all day and stay clean.”

  “Not many people can.” She snaked a finger toward his ribs, and he fell backward with a yelp. “You’ve lived just thirteen winters,” she tried to tease him, “and already you work so hard.”

  “You’ve only lived fifteen,” he scowled, pushing away her hand. “You don’t know so much.”

  Behind them the dog shifted. A growl rumbled through his body, and Flæd twisted around to stare out into the darkness. No movement. No sound, except the noises of the birds settling themselves for the night out in the flooded pasture. What was bothering Wulf? No one saw me come, Flæd thought anxiously, and no one but us knows about this place. At last Wulf heaved his sides in a sigh. He thrust his big head between the two humans and settled his nose on his paws.

  Perhaps Wulf didn’t like the two of us raising our voices, Flæd reasoned uneasily, drawing her knees up again and pressing her cheek against the grey folds of her cloak. She and Edward hadn’t always spoken to each other in such a strained way. Edward had always been shy, but he used to laugh with her, and the two of them used to be comfortable together. That had been before things changed.

  The trouble had started when her father decided that Flæd, his oldest child, should begin lessons in reading and writing. “If Flæd likes it,” she remembered him saying, “then we’ll let Edward try. Perhaps he’s old enough to begin lessons, too.” On her first day of lessons she had gone nervously to the scriptorium—the stone building where the monks sat to copy and decorate their pages, and where a number of valuable books were kept—brushing past Edward where he waited outside her door.

  “Will we go to the meadow today?” her brother had wanted to know, but she had only shrugged, anxious not to keep her tutor waiting.

  Abruptly, her daily rambles with Edward had ended. Flæd went to the scriptorium each day, and as days lengthened into weeks, her thoughts of Edward grew more and more wistful. She had not realized on that first morning that she would hardly see her brother anymore, that the beginning of her lessons marked the end of their wandering together. Flæd’s hours in the scriptorium were often lonely. Her teacher, Bishop Asser, one of her father’s closest advisors, was a busy man who wasted no time. Usually he would leave Flæd as soon as he had assigned the day’s exercises. Surrounded by scribes who rarely said a word to her, Flæd would bend to her task. But she learned quickly in her isolation, and soon she was reading entire words and phrases in Latin as well as in English.

  Edward himself had not disappeared. He haunted the scriptorium like an uneasy spirit. Often Flæd would catch sight of her brother passing the entrance of the room where she sat, his eyes seeking her out, then shifting away. Sometimes she would find him slouched outside the door when she emerged. Then he might join her as she walked, mumbling a few words about which animals he and Wulf had seen near the marsh that day. Flæd in turn would try to explain some detail of her day’s lesson, and although Edward rarely spoke in response to her descriptions of Latin verbs and English poetry, she saw the way he listened to her—his eyes intense, his mouth twisted quizzically.

  “Edward is ready to learn letters, too.” That was what she told her father the next time he asked about her lessons. He scarcely speaks to anyone but me, and I am rarely with him, she had worried. King Alfred had looked at his daughter thoughtfully, then told her he would send Edward to the scriptorium, as well.

  Flæd had a searing memory of the day when her brother met Bishop Asser. On Edward’s first morning Asser had sat down briskly beside his new student, taking up a wax tablet and bone stylus. With a deft hand he sketched a pair of letter shapes, explained them to Edward, and told him to make his own copies next to them. He watched, his sharp eyes on the boy who fumbled with the stylus, trying to match his teacher’s sure strokes. Again and again Edward’s hand wavered, and he tried to smooth the wax with his fingertip and draw the shapes again. The tutor observed a little longer without speaking, then rose with a gracious bow. He would leave Edward to work at the lesson until tomorrow, he said.

  Bishop Asser spoke under his breath as he hurried past Flæd’s corner. “Not as quick as his sister,” he muttered. “No time for teaching a clumsy child.”

  Embarrassment washed through Flæd’s body, hot and awful—she should not have heard those words. She raised her eyes and watched her brother still struggling over his work, scrubbing at the misshapen lines with his fist now in frustration. Did her teacher not understand that this was Edward’s first attempt at writing? If Edward would only go more slowly, a little patience…Flæd came around the table to stand behind the hunched boy, looking over his shoulder at the ruined wax.

  “I heard him.” Edward looked up at her and she saw the lines of tears on his face. “I can’t learn this.” He put down the tablet and stylus and blundered off his bench, hurrying to the door of the scriptorium. There Wulf rose like a smudge and thrust his muzzle into Edward’s empty hand, following him out toward the meadow.

  Alone beside the deserted table, Flæd reached out for Edward’s things. Ruined, Flæd thought. What can I do? After a moment she carried the tablet to the low fire burning at one end of the large room. She held it to the heat until the wax melted smooth. Carefully she wrote the letter forms in the confident hand of the teacher, and beside each one she made three imperfect copies. Then she laid the stylus and tablet on Edward’s empty bench and returned to her own work.

  Flæd’s deception had lasted only until the next day, when Edward dragged himself back to the scriptorium to sit woodenly in front of his teacher. Soon it was clear that he could not write the letters by himself, and Asser had sighed, holding the shoulder of the boy who would not meet his eye.

  “Have you forgotten your skills so soon,” he wanted to know, “or do you simply choose not to write?” Edward made no reply. “Your father warned me that I might find you a reluctant student,” the bishop continued regretfully. “Yes, he quoted a maxim, I remember. He said, ‘A young man must be taught and encouraged until he is tamed.’ For now, I suppose you are still too wild for teaching, boy. Come back when you’re ready.”

  With a shake of his head, Asser bent to view Flæd’s work. The girl shot a glance at Edward, who returned her look with a scowl of shame and relief, and then disappeared through the door with Wulf.

  She had done the wrong thing, Flæd berated herself over and over, by urging Edward into the classroom so soon. And then she had made it worse when she had tried to help. I’ll bring him back to the lessons—I’ll think of a way, she told herself each day as she trudged to the scriptorium. But any mention of lessons would send Edward scuttling away like an uncovered beetle, back to the trees with his dog. Worst of all, he almost never spoke to her now, only listening when she occasionally found him at mealtimes and spoke softly of a story or a poem she thought he
might like.

  And yet here he is, she reminded herself there in the woods as she warmed her bare feet by their little fire. When I whispered that we could meet out here tonight, he came, and he waited for me, even when I was late.

  So what should she say now, to put both of them at ease? She could tell him she’d read more from the book that she’d been describing to him for weeks, every time she ran into him in the kitchen and feasting hall. The story had brought a spark of interest to the remote expression her brother always wore. Tonight she had more of the story. She’d waited until her lesson was over, and hidden beneath the window ledge, waiting for the monks to leave. Then she had snatched down the book as soon as they had left.

  “Edward,” she offered tentatively, “I did read something today, in a certain room full of old books….”

  “You read some more of the story?” the boy guessed. In the light of the coals his face showed the dark eyebrows, narrow chin, and serious grey-blue eyes which matched Flæd’s. “Yes, you did,” he said quickly as he stared back at his sister in the glow. “Tell me, Flæd. I’ve been waiting for you to read some more.”

  A smile touched Flæd’s grave face. She had chosen the right words, it seemed. Her brother’s voice held an undercurrent of eagerness, and he seemed less guarded. “I’ll tell you what I read,” she said, wanting to draw him out further, “but first you tell me what you remember.”

  “Everyone lay asleep in the golden hall,” Edward said, rocking forward onto his knees, “and there came a monster—a horrible giant. He broke the hall doors and seized two of the sleeping warriors, and he ate them. He cracked their bones and drank their blood!” Edward shuddered happily, making Flæd grimace—she had thought he might remember the blood.

  “And I remember some more,” the boy went on. “The greatest warrior was waiting there, awake. When the monster reached for another man, the hero grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go. The monster had to tear away his own arm to escape.”