by Katy Moran
I killed him! he thought. He’s dead. Because of me, he’ll never see his woman again, his children, his home. He’ll never drink beer again, or sit up late by the fire.
He felt cold inside.
Lark put her hand on his arm. “Don’t think on it too much,” she said. “If you’d not killed him, it would’ve been us lying cold out there, waiting to be put in the ground. He almost throttled you. But don’t you think we should tell Hild what he said, I—”
“No. Just swear you won’t say anything, not ever.”
“All right, I swear,” said Lark.
Essa fiddled with a piece of dry hay, unable to look at her. “Is Hild still angry with me?” That had been the worst of it all. Get out of my sight! she had shouted. How could you disobey me like this? I don’t want to look at you.
Lark let out an empty laugh. “Not as much as Ma,” she said. “I wish my father was still alive. He always said he’d take me out to the marsh and we’d get a mare for me, and break her in together. I hate those Mercians that killed him – may their spirits wander for ever. I hate Ma, too.”
“No you don’t,” said Essa. He could not even remember his own mother. If she were not dead, Cai would never have left him here with the Wixna. She would not have let him.
“I do hate her. I’m not allowed to be with you any more.” The words came out in a rush, and Lark held him tighter, so that he could smell the warmth of her skin. Essa wound his fingers around hers, their hands clasped. “She said we’re not to be friends, that I should be with Starling and Helith and the other girls instead of running about with you.”
“What does Hild say?” Essa asked. He felt hollow, like an old skull.
“That Ma is right – I should be more with the girls, and you with Cole and the others.”
“She was wrong not to let me go on the horse-chase, then—”
“Maybe she was, but Hild does nothing but in care of you.” Onela White-beard stood in the doorway, leaning on his stick.
Essa and Lark looked up as one, holding each other tighter. Essa felt a jolt of fear. Like his father, he could hear like a dog. How, then, had Onela approached without him knowing?
“Granfer!” Lark said. “Don’t tell Ma I was here.”
Onela smiled down at them both. “I wouldn’t be such a fool, my dear heart,” he said. “You had better be gone, though. Essa is taboo, and I do not want the dead man’s spirit to find you.”
Lark got up, her face turned away, and Essa knew it was because she was crying, and did not want him to see. He watched her run out into the yard, his best friend, feeling sure he now knew how Onela had felt when he lost his right arm at the battle of the river Idle, years before.
“Do you listen to me, Essa,” said Onela. “Tell me how you knew there was someone in the coppice. You say you ran after Lark, afraid she’d be hurt. But where did you think she’d find the hurt? How did you know the man was there?”
Essa found he could hardly frame the words. He would not have admitted it to anyone, but Essa was afraid of the old man, and had been ever since he had first laid eyes on him the morning Cai left. Onela did not speak much, because he had to save his breath for conversing with the elvish on his journeys into the spirit world, and this only made him seem more mysterious.
“Tell me how it came about, Aesc, little ash tree,” he said. “And do not you leave anything out.”
So Essa took a deep breath, and told him.
“What does it mean, though?” he said. “Has someone laid a curse on me?”
Onela sighed, and sat slowly down on the floor next to him. “Before he left, your father warned me of this. He said he sensed a streak of brightness in you that would break out when you got older. And when I saw you that morning he went, I knew it, too.”
“Brightness?” Essa said, and in his mind, he was inside the jay again, watching the meadow rise and dip far beneath him as he flew.
“I was told about the bees in the orchard,” Onela said. “Are you sure you did not wish them to fly after Red? It is a great gift you have, if used well.” Suddenly Essa felt that the old man was no longer truly in the stable with him: that his inner self had gone elsewhere. He spoke again. “I, like most spirit men, must drink strong herbs, boil roots and mushrooms to loosen the ties that hold my spirit to my body. I slip between the worlds to treat with the elvish, I fly with hawks and gulls, run with the deer, and so I can tell the best places to hunt and fish.
“Sometimes, Essa, not very often, there is one whose spirit can wander without such help. These men and women are able to bend the will of any bird or animal – they can get inside the body of a wolf-lord and make it lead the pack far from any village. They can cause eagles to fly over our enemies’ camps, or swim with the whale-folk and learn where the mackerel go. It is a great gift you have, little ash tree, and I wish I could teach you the skill of it.”
Essa stared at him, his entire body tingling. “But where does it come from? Why can I do it?”
“From what I saw that night before he left you, your father’s skills lie elsewhere – in song, and in the trickery of his speech. But both your father’s kind and ours know of people whose spirits can leave their bodies. Only I’ll wager the British tried to forget it once their Lord Jesus came to this island – they call it witchery now. And our kind? We Anglish are farmers, and have been since time out of mind, but the songs tell us that once we lived by hunting alone. And now we are forgetting these skills too. We have less need to know where the deer run.”
“But can you not teach me how to do it properly – whenever I want?” asked Essa, the dead man forgotten for a moment. He felt hot and breathless with the thrill of it. “I couldn’t have made that jay fly off the other way – and I think the bees only went after Red because he threw stones at them. It wasn’t like riding a horse when I was in the jay. I was more like a flea on a goat, just carried along.”
Onela shook his head. “I cannot teach you how to master this skill, no matter how dearly I wish otherwise.” He smiled, his eyes slanting, and Essa saw how like him Lark was. “Look on it as a gift from your mother and father. They are not with you now, but they have left you this. You must learn to manage it yourself.”
“But I don’t know what to do,” Essa said.
“Listen. You have a dog. Let her teach you. And do you go out into the woods and catch a hunting-bird, and learn to call it to your side. Learn from the beasts themselves what you can do.”
The old man got awkwardly to his feet and, leaning on his stick, he walked back to the hall. Watching him go, Essa knew that he was different now, like pig iron forged into an iron blade, sharp and true. He had killed a man, and he had flown with a blue jay above the meadow. Even if Cai came back tomorrow, Essa knew that he could not ride away with him on Melyor like a little child.
He was changed.
Two years later. The atheling
THE MIND of a goshawk is fierce and red. Through her eyes, Essa saw the marshes spread out like a sheet of beaten metal pricked through by reeds; a dark smear of woodland off to the west. Beyond the woods King Penda’s camp lay crouched in the night, lit with fires. Essa willed the goshawk to fly closer, but she knew only hunger. The trees were full of prey, and she longed to burst down through the tree cover and swoop close to the ground, down where the small creatures hid. She saw the man on horseback coming from the east, but he was nothing to her, for there was prey, and she wanted meat.
And then Essa was back in his own body.
“He’s coming, Cole!” he said. “She saw him.” They were up on the great mound of earth that surrounded the hall like a necklace, watching the fields and then the wetlands stretching out towards the dark trees marking the wood shore. Every time Essa came up here he remembered that long-ago game of Fox and Geese: playing for a knife in a Mercian hall. He remembered Cai riding across the courtyard, saying, Come up. How strange to think he’d said that, knowing what he was about to do. He should’ve let me finish my game, Essa t
hought.
“It makes my skin creep, the way you do this,” Cole said. “Where’s Myfanwy now?”
“In the woods. She’s hungry. I wanted her to fly over the Mercian camp but she wouldn’t. I saw him, though. It’s got to be him – no one else comes here.” Essa’s fingers ached with cold and he blew on his cupped hands, sending a dragon’s puff of warm air into the night. One moon had come and gone since Yule: it was Sun-cake month, when they buried yellow saffron cakes in the mud to tempt back the sun, and coax the barley to push its green tips up out of the soil. Winter was only just releasing its grip on the land.
“If I go out to meet him, do you take Myfanwy back to the barn?” Essa reached down to stroke Fenrir’s ears. She lay beside him, radiating warmth, dozing with her heavy brindled head on her front paws. She was five years old now, long-legged and strong, and he loved her.
Cole shrugged. “I can try – Myfanwy never comes to anyone but you.”
So Essa whistled, long and low. Come on, my dear one. Time to come home.
And then there she was, his goshawk, a shrew dangling from her claws. Essa whistled again and she dropped it. Circling once more, Myfanwy came down to rest on his leather-gloved hand – surprisingly heavy, as always, for one who flew so fast and graceful. Her yellow eyes were burning, full of fire, and Essa could feel the terrible strength of her claws, even through the glove. Essa had caught Myfanwy when she was just a chick, but she would never be like Fenrir, who loved him.
Cole picked up the shrew, holding it out to her, and she snatched it with her beak. He winced and jumped back. “I’m sure she’ll have out your eyes one day.”
Essa laughed. “Not this one. And she keeps the mice down in the barn, so don’t complain.”
Cole opened his mouth to speak again, but Essa laid a hand on his arm. He could hear a distant rumbling that boomed up from below ground as if something sleeping under the green mantle of earth was stirring, ready to wake. “Listen!” Beside him, Fenrir’s ears were twitching. He rested his hand on her head.
“What? I can’t hear anything.” Cole’s voice seemed to ring out louder than before. “You’re a strange one, Essa – the way you hear what others don’t, and let your spirit run with the beasts. You know what the women say? Regard his unearthly beauty, such bright hair, and dark, mysterious eyes. Mark you, his father lay with the elvish, like all the British do.”
“Oh, do you be quiet!” Essa said, laughing. Cole meant no harm, but Essa had long grown tired of people making little protective signs against the spirits whenever he passed by, and of the girls whistling at him, and whispering, and giggling. The only girl who left him alone was Lark, but it would not do to think of her, now. Silent and cold, she was, as if she froze into iron whenever he was near.
Bitch, he thought. Iron-hearted bitch.
“Listen,” he said. “I can hear it now – a horse, on the old road.”
“If you say so,” said Cole, grinning, and they fell into an easy silence. Essa had been sent up here to wait for a messenger from the palace of the king of East Anglia, the Wolf King, but, even after five years, the sound of a rider coming closer still lit a quick, hot flame in Essa’s belly.
What if it’s him? Essa thought. What if it’s Cai? I will say nothing to him. It will be as if he has been gone only a morning. But it would not be Cai, he knew that really. They were waiting for a messenger.
“There!” Cole said. “I can hear it now – do you let me take Myfanwy to the barn, and I’ll go in and tell Hild.”
Gently, Essa eased his hand out of the glove, Myfanwy still gripping the leather, staring at them with her cold, golden eyes. Cole put it on, holding out the bloody remains of the shrew for her to eat.
Essa ran down the mound while Cole shouted, “Bring them in quick – it’s enough to freeze the blood out here.”
Hild and the men were waiting for news from the east, and it was not likely to be good. A few months earlier, just before midsummer, Hild had been summoned by a messenger to her old home, the royal palace of the Wolf Folk at Rendlesham. She had ridden out, taking Ariulf and Onela White-beard as her escorts. Wishing he had been allowed to accompany them, Essa counted the days until they returned, cutting notches in the stable door. Seventeen notches later, they had come back with the news that King Seobert had left his hall and retreated into a monastery, leaving East Anglia in the hands of his royal kinsmen, the athelings. Once again, the Wolf Folk were kingless, helpless like a boat with no rudder.
“But they’re refusing to pick another king,” Hild had said, brushing the road-dust from her dress. “The court’s entirely Christian now, and they think Seobert’s been chosen by their God.”
“I knew the Christians would bring nothing but trouble,” Onela White-beard said, allowing Red and Essa to help him from the saddle. “I remember when that witless fool came with news of it from Rome, all the way across the sea he came, back before the time of Redwald, and word spread up from Kent that there was this one new God that could do the job of all ours, and better, too. I said it was a lot of mazy talk then, and now I know it is. It’s made wise men blind to what stares them in the face. Seobert’s no king, nor never was. Why else did Redwald send him out of the way to Francia? He knew the lad was no good.”
And now, months later, a messenger was due from the east, bringing more news. Hopefully, Essa thought, there’d be another king chosen, Seobert would be left in peace in his monastery, and the throne of the Wolf Folk would be secure against the Mercians again.
Essa stopped just outside the hall door, listening to the hum of voices inside. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the trembling of the earth beneath his feet again, a low rumble that sounded like a drumbeat. Sound travelled quicker on clear nights like this, when the new moon hung in the blackness like a sliver of polished silver. It had been a long winter.
They were coming down the old road, all right, coming hard and fast. He turned his back on the hall and the smell of smoked pig-meat being fried, and fish stew, and ran up the dirt track towards the village gate. There was nobody guarding it: someone would get wrong of Hild and the old men for that. He felt a shiver of unease. He could hear hoofbeats clearly now, drumming down the old road across the fields. It was daft to be riding this fast in the dark, he reflected. He lifted the great bar bolting the gateway and slipped outside: now he was easy prey for any Mercian scouting party.
Everyone in the village, including Hild, told Essa that the man whose life he had taken two years ago had surely been a Mercian scout. Coming to see how many cattle we’ve got, they used to say. Plotting another raid, I shouldn’t wonder. That was a good day’s work when you killed the Mercian, little halfling.
The Wixna had chosen to believe that Essa had killed a Mercian spy. But only Essa and Lark had heard the words the man spoke before dying.
It’s in tha face. Anyone can see—
He was no Mercian, Essa was sure. The accent was wrong, for one thing: more northern than anything else. Essa had recognized it from a long-ago trip to Elmet, where he and Cai once met a gang of Northumbrian traders travelling south from Ad Gefrin, the seat of the High King.
And what had the man seen in his face?
He was looking for me, Essa thought as he drew near the coppice. He was seeking me out.
Even now, years later, each time he came near these trees, he felt a chill down his back. He had escaped death here once – would he be so lucky a second time? He remembered the morning after the killing, waking up in the stable, and Onela by his side, saying, “His spirit is gone, and you are safe now.”
But Essa had not felt safe. The man had wanted to kill him and Essa did not know why. Don’t think on it, he told himself. Maybe he was just mazed in the head, crazy after wandering too long from other men. Maybe he was just a cattle-thief. But Essa could not make himself believe it.
Shivering slightly, he cut through the alder coppice and skirted the mere, a flat dark swathe of shining metal under the thin moonlight. It had not ra
ined for several weeks and the ground beneath his feet was hard. His own breathing sounded so loud that Essa was convinced anyone riding towards the hall would be able to hear it. There was no wind and, despite the cold, his whole body felt damp with sweat. The grass came to an end and he was standing on the edge of the narrow, muddy road.
Then they came. The thundering of hooves grew louder. He held his breath tight inside his chest and watched a man on horseback rounding the corner. He was riding hard with his cloak flapping out behind him like wings. Essa wished he had slipped into the hall or the forge to grab a flaming torch and cursed himself for not doing so. If he ran out into the road without being seen, the horse would take fright. The man raised an arm high above his head as if he was trying to snatch a handful of the night sky. He let out a wild yell that echoed up into the stillness.
This was no messenger. Essa felt a quick thrill of fear. The moon was just bright enough to catch the fine gold pin that held the rider’s heavy plaid cloak. At first it looked as if he were draped in gold the way the night was speckled with stars, and then Essa saw that he wore a great sword belt with gold strap-ends and a gold buckle. The horse slowed down and stopped. He heard ragged breathing as it snorted and stamped in the cold air. An ungelded male: a stallion. That’ll be fresh riding, Essa thought, remembering how many times they had all been thrown breaking in the milk-white marsh stallion the men had captured on that long-ago horse hunt: everyone except Essa, of course. He had never been thrown from a horse.
“You! Come out, whoever you are!” The voice was rich as if it dripped with gold like the man it belonged to.
Essa stepped into the road. This was his hall and Hild had sent him out here. “Who are you and where do you come from?” he said.
A pair of eyes stared back at him, hard and bright and grey like the inside of an oyster shell, partially drained of colour by the moonlight. They held on to him for so long that Essa noticed barely anything else about the rest of the man except that he was big without running to fat, with fair hair swept back from his face by the ride. The flanks of his horse heaved up and down, glistening with sweat.
