by Katy Moran
Wulf laughed humourlessly. “Well, yes, but that didn’t stop him from burning Ad Gefrin to the ground, did it? Essa, my father killed the last High King. The only reason he didn’t take Edwin’s place is because Kent, East Anglia, Wessex – all the powerful kingdoms – are gone to the way of the Lord or whatever it is you call it, and they won’t pay homage to my father. Why else do you think he hates you Christians so much?”
“But now you’re one!” said Anwen, sounding as though she were about to cry. “And so am I!”
And then the three of them were laughing, lying back on the grassy bank and howling with laughter until Essa’s belly ached and his jaw hurt. He felt weak, as though he were made of water. This was madness, lurching from misery to resolve to wild laughter, all in the space of a moment and somehow consumed by all three at once.
They lay watching wisps of cloud chase each other across the big sweep of blue sky. “Up till now,” Essa said. “Everything’s been laid out by others – Egric, our fathers, everyone but us. It’s time we chose ourselves what’s to be.”
“So what’ll we do?” Wulf said. Anwen nodded, and although Essa knew they had saved his life, he felt responsible for theirs, for getting them through this mess safely. They were together now, the three of them, bound to one another.
He looked down, and saw Anwen and Wulf were holding hands, and he was glad Anwen no longer looked at him in that hungry way she had done at Caer Elfan. It made him think of Lark, though, waiting with the rest of the village for the Mercian attack. If only she was here with him, and he knew she was safe. He sat up, raking his hands through his hair.
“We must try stopping this war,” he said. “If we can bring a messenger from Northumbria, that might work. King Godsrule won’t want this – he surely knows that if Penda takes all Anglia, he’ll look to the north next. The Christian kings might refuse to wear Penda’s ring, but sooner or later he’ll take their lands if he’s not stopped. And it was an East Anglian king that put Godsrule’s family on the throne, so there’s a debt of allegiance too. Penda must be as fond of his gold as the next man – if Godsrule threatens to double his taxes, he’ll stop. Won’t he?”
Wulf sighed. “I don’t know. Sometimes he does, sometimes not. A few years ago he decided he’d had enough of paying tribute and sacked the place. His moods change. He’ll not be an easy man to stop. And we don’t even know where Godsrule is – my father moves around from hall to hall all the time. Godsrule won’t stay in Ad Gefrin all year. He could be up on the border with Dál Riada for all we know.”
Essa shrugged. “But if we go to Ad Gefrin and Godsrule’s not there, they can tell us where he’s gone to, or get a message to him.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Wulf. “So we trek around Northumbria looking for the High King like children chasing a frog? In the meantime, my father gives me up for dead and takes Anglia anyway. And he’s my father. How can I just turn on him?”
“But Essa’s right,” said Anwen. “We’ve got to try and mend this mess, Wulf. They’re all using us; we don’t mean anything to them. If your father would have killed you for bringing Essa back as your ring-bearer, what does that say about him? He doesn’t care for you – he’s just like the rest of them. All they care about is themselves, how much power they’ve got and squabbling over their borders, as if anyone cares. And I bet that Egric’s just the same, Essa.”
Essa did not answer; he knew she was right.
Wulf stared at her, stunned, his hair hanging over his face. She leant across and brushed it out of the way, but he hardly seemed to notice. Essa looked down at the ring on his finger, and took it off, holding it out to him.
“I – I can’t.” Wulf said. “I can’t take it.”
“I don’t want you just to take it,” Essa said, heart pounding. He suddenly recalled the moment he’d knelt before Egric in the hall, so low his forehead touched the floor. “Do you give me yours.”
Wulf stared down at the grass again, and sat like that for what seemed like half a day. No one spoke, even Fenrir sat silently watching, and at last flopped down in the shade, head resting on her front paws, one ear twitching. Close by, Essa could hear a lark singing.
Finally, Wulf looked up, and when he did, he had taken his ring off, and it was lying flat in the palm of his hand. Mercian gold, Penda’s gold; it should have been poison. Essa half expected it to burn his skin when he picked it up. But it did not. It was just gold: a cold metal ring that slid down his middle finger, slightly looser than his own ring.
It meant that all had changed. They turned to each other, Anwen watching, solemn-faced for once, and clasped hands, gripping each other’s fingers hard, as if that would make it a stronger pact.
Essa tried to think of something to say. Cai would have known, and a stream of brave and noble words would have slipped forth from his tongue, each one of them probably a lie, knowing him. But at least he would have known what to say. In the end, Essa just said, “All right. All right.”
And it was Wulf who said, “Ad Gefrin, beware, and beware, the High King.”
And then he laughed.
From the far west of Mercia to the north-east
“DOES anyone really know the way?” Anwen said. “Essa – surely you’ve been to Ad Gefrin with your father?”
It was the following morning. Essa had been out with Fenrir the evening before and walked till he felt the life coming back into his legs. He had watched the sun dying on the western horizon till the cloud, seething up from behind the mountains they had left behind, was suffused with golden and crimson light. He had shielded his eyes, watching Fenrir streak through the long grass after a hare, and for a heartbeat he knew her joy at the chase and her hunger for blood. That night he had slept a deep, dreamless sleep.
Essa shook his head. “No, never.” He had often wondered what it was like – everyone had heard tales of the High King’s palace nestling in the green fells: the great wooden hall, patterned with beaten gold. He had heard of the sparrow flying from one end of the hall to the other, and the bishop Paulinus telling Edwin, the old High King, that the sparrow was like human life, flying from the unknown to the unknown. That Jesus Christ had the answers. Cai had been the one who persuaded old King Redwald of East Anglia to stand by Edwin when he took refuge at the court of the Wolf Folk, an exiled prince in fear of his life, and put him on the Northumbrian throne. Essa banished the thought from his head. Cai had plotted his last intrigue, and now he was dead.
“My father told me Ad Gefrin was the brightest light in Britain, until Penda put it out,” said Anwen.
“They rebuilt some of it, didn’t they?” said Essa.
Anwen nodded. “I heard it will never be the same again, though. So what’ll we do? We’ll have to find the Magonsaete and ask them – they’ll know.”
Wulf smiled awkwardly. “No need for that,” he said. “I was there when we burned it. I’m Penda’s son, remember? I’d say it’s north-east of here. Sun at our left shoulders, days and days to ride. It’s a long way.”
The air smelled different on the way north: it was cold and sharp, edged with the smell of heather and gorse. They galloped across untamed moorland under vast skies skeined with cloud. They skirted green forests and rode along fellsides that plunged dizzyingly down to dark, deep lakes. On the shore of one of the lakes, they stopped at a little village hugging the water’s edge, and traded one of Anwen’s new linen dresses, sewn for her wedding, for twice-baked bread, dried fish and some of last summer’s dried apples and berries. The people were dark-eyed and wary of Wulf, even of Essa, despite the fact he spoke to them in British. The dried fruit tasted dusty, but Essa knew they would welcome the sweetness later.
It was the wrong month for travelling, so they came across no others, but the song of spring was everywhere: frogs shuffling in the bracken, calling as they moved from bog to puddle, larks wheeling above the heather, their urgent, bubbling song lasting from dawn till dusk. Late in the afternoon of the seventh day, the clouds gathered in
grey fists and threw down rain. The rain did not stop; Wulf and Anwen complained bitterly but it suited Essa’s mood.
He was wracked with misery, aching with grief at the loss of his father. His dreams were plagued with visions of Cai choking out his last breath, drowning in his own blood. His dreams showed him the village, too, the way he had first seen it – just a hump on the horizon as he sat before his father in the saddle. But the hump was growing larger: now there was smoke, and he could make out the flag mast by the gates. The air was filled with blood-freezing screaming and the stinking sweat of men hungry to kill.
He was riding with the Mercian army.
Penda had released his hordes, and Essa was riding with them.
When he woke each morning, bathed in sweat, Essa had to remind himself that it had not happened yet, that it was just a dream, that he would never betray Hild and the village, even though he had double-dealt with almost everyone else. We’re going to stop it even happening, he told himself. Penda’s men won’t ride out this time. But the fear that it already had happened never left him. What if Penda had not waited for Wulf to return with Anwen? Essa had to push the idea to the back of his mind, and think only in terms of their present: finding shelter, summoning enough strength to ride.
A few more days passed, and their supplies started to run low. There was no sign of a hall, village or even a shepherd in his bothie to trade with. They were somewhere in Elmet now, one of the northern kingdoms of the British loyal to the High King, but harried constantly for tribute by Penda. Essa remembered Dai and his sister, the British spies. They had been from Elmet. Did their family know what had happened to them, he wondered.
“We’ve not seen a single village since the lake,” Anwen said miserably. “I wish we could sit by a fire just to dry out our clothes.”
“These people move like smoke,” Wulf told her. “They’re always on the run from my father’s men, and their villages are hidden. We’ll see no one if they see us first.”
A lot of the food they’d packed at Caer Elfan had been used up during Essa’s illness; they ate just once a day now: a piece of sausage or dried fish, a handful of oats boiled in water if they could find enough dry twigs to get a fire going. It was not enough.
“I wish I was a horse!” Anwen said, watching Grani, Balder and her white mare cropping the grass. They all laughed, but they were hungry, and getting weaker.
“I knew we should have bought more at that village,” Wulf said one night as they laid out their damp bedrolls. Once again, they had been forced to give up the struggle to light a fire in the rain. There was no way of drying out, no fierce heat to draw the ache of the day’s ride from their bones.
Essa shrugged. “What with? The clothes off our backs?” But he was cursing himself, and the Mercian who had cut his flesh in the first place.
“God’s wounds!” Anwen stared bitterly at the wild, empty moorland sweeping away from them on all sides, now rendered eerie by the oncoming night. “Why does Godsrule have to live so far away from everywhere?”
Suddenly, Fenrir whined and stood up, shaking out her wet fur. Her body went rigid.
Instantly, the three of them huddled closer together. Essa was fixed by a nameless, bone-chilling fear.
“What is it?” whispered Anwen, screwing a corner of her blanket into a tight coil. “What’s she heard?”
Essa had already guessed, but when he heard it next, he was still unprepared for the jolt of fear that shot through him – an unearthly howling in the distance that made his bowels freeze and his scalp prickle. The sound grew louder, tearing across the night sky: wolves. He reached out for Fenrir, and caught her flicker of desire. They were her kin, and she wanted to run with them, but she was afraid for her companions. And she was afraid of her kin, too, because they had never known the warmth of a hall, and they were always hungry.
That was the other thing about fire: it kept wolves away. And they had no fire.
Essa sat silently, huddled in his damp cloak, running his hand along Fenrir’s flank, teasing out her rain-sodden, tangled fur with his fingertips.
“They won’t bother us,” said Wulf. “Sounds like they’re a way off.”
Anwen nodded, but Essa was not comforted and knew Wulf was not either.
“I wish we had spears,” Anwen said, sounding much younger than usual.
Wulf put his arm around her shoulder. “Don’t be afraid. It isn’t wolves. It’s just the Great Lord, riding around the night sky and howling away with his ghostly warriors. The Wild Hunt, they call it, when Woden takes to the skies with the battle madness upon him. He’ll ride the length of the hawk’s path by morning, wielding his hammer till his battle-rage is sated, and then he’ll go back to his learning and his poetry as though it’d never happened. He’s tricksy, but he’s the greatest of the Aesir, is Woden, and he won’t hurt you, Anwen, see. Have you heard the story of how he found the first song?”
Anwen shook her head, and Wulf began quietly telling her the tale of Woden hanging upside down in the branches of Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights till the knowledge of the runes came to him: fiery butterflies alighting in his mind’s eye.
Essa had heard the tale before, hundreds of times. But even if it had been a new story, and the most gripping ever told, he knew he would have been unable to listen. The lonely howling of the wolf-pack was growing quieter.
He looked away awkwardly as Wulf crouched next to Anwen, squeezing her shoulder, stroking her wet tangled hair. He stirred the damp pile of kindling with a hawthorn twig, trying to wake the flames, knowing it was useless. Wulf and Anwen had lain naked together behind the deerskin curtain: they wanted to be alone, and here they were, stranded on a moor with him and his dog.
For a moment, he wished he could leave them, go to Ad Gefrin by himself, but then what would stop Wulf riding back to his father? They had made an agreement; swapped rings. They would go together, to the High King. And yet, a cold little thought trickled into Essa’s mind: Can I really trust him? All Wulf’s life, he had been trained to obey Penda’s every word. Yes, they had swapped rings, chosen to take their own path and stop this foolish war before it even started. Yet Wulf was sixteen summers old. Was a few days really enough to undo the fear and loyalty Penda had wrought in Wulf’s heart since the day he was born?
But no one else knew the way. They were in Wulf’s hands.
And that night, Essa dreamed again, only this time, the Mercian army were over the village walls, the great hall was burning, and neither Hild, nor Red, nor Cole, nor Lark were anywhere to be seen.
Northumbria
MORE than twenty days after leaving the bothie, they were riding across rain-soaked green fells, and Essa sensed they were close.
“It ought not to be long now.” Wulf’s face was set and serious, and Essa knew that in his mind he was watching Ad Gefrin burn again. He could see children running screaming, women and men fighting, hacking at the Mercian army with sword, axe, staff, anything they could lay their hands on. “Ah, Frigya,” said Wulf, after a while. “They say it’s always the same with the first fight. It haunts your dreams even after you’ve fought more battles than you have fingers and thumbs on each hand, and killed more men than you can count.”
Essa nodded but did not answer. It would be the same with his first battle, and unless King Godsrule put a stop to Penda, Essa would be fighting Wulf. Then he felt hoofbeats shaking the ground and looked up sharply, scanning the horizon. Anwen turned, watching too.
“Is it just our skill?” Essa said in their own language. He kept his eyes on the rich green hillside rising up before them.
Anwen shrugged, answering in a rush of silvery, songlike British. “An old skill, it is. British or nay I’m not knowing.” He was growing used to her strange accent now, and the words closed around his heart like comforting hands.
“There’s someone coming,” he said to Wulf. “Listen.”
“How do you hear so sharp?” said Wulf. “It gives me the cold chills. Well, you
know what they say – you British mate with the elves, don’t you? No wonder you’re strange. It’s elvish blood.”
Anwen laughed. “Two sets of hoofbeats.”
Then they heard a horse crying out, the sound of human voices, laughing.
“Outriders,” said Wulf. “Well, I don’t blame them for being cautious after the beating they took from my father’s men.”
“What if they know you?” Anwen twisted the reins in her hands. She leaned forwards, peering at the two approaching riders. They were fair-haired, easy in the saddle.
“They won’t. I was barely more than a child.” Wulf rubbed his fingers in the short growth of bracken-rust beard on his face. “I must be twice the size, too.” He laughed. “If there’s anyone left alive who knows me for Penda’s son, I’ll be dead before I can blink so it shan’t bother me.”
Anwen smiled but her white fingers twisted the reins around and around.
“Too late now,” Essa whispered. “They’ve seen us.” They rode on, the horses picking their way up the steep fellside until they were within hailing distance of the outriders.
“Who comes?” shouted one of the horsemen. He was bigger than his companion, but both were broad-shouldered, with long pale red hair whipped about in the wind.
“Travellers with news, no more!” Essa yelled. He sounded strong, sure of himself, but his guts were sloppy with fear.
“Ride in, ride in!” called the outriders, and they stayed their horses until Essa, Wulf and Anwen had reached them.
They were young men, hardly older than Wulf – both had freckled faces flushed with colour, and pale eyebrows. They gripped their reins with strong, broad-fingered hands. One looked several years younger than the other, built on slighter lines, and his hair was a deeper red, more like Essa’s. He fidgeted about in the saddle, as if he hated to be still. When they noticed Anwen, they both slumped slightly, the breath sucked from their lungs by the sight of her.
