Bloodline

by Katy Moran

  “So, Essa,” said Egric. “Are you going to tell us how you ended up at Ad Gefrin? I’m curious. After all –” he laughed – “I only sent you out for a night, and you’ve been gone nearly two months. What happened?”

  Essa told them the whole tale from the moment he’d left the fortress with Wulf, right up to his landing in Gipswick that morning. When he had finished, Egric and Anno were staring at him in awe, the king gazing at the candle flame. Elfgift’s face was stiff with horror, Cai’s expression flat, giving nothing away.

  “Why did he not kill you at once?” Elfgift said. “He had men following your father and you for years. And yet you walked straight into his hall and he did nothing?”

  Essa stared down at his stew. Was that really true? All those years, moving from place to place, they had been running from Godsrule’s men? And once, that summer afternoon in the beech coppice, one of them had found him.

  “He said he would have killed me,” he told Elfgift. “But he had lost so many men he thought I might be useful after all. Yet I think he would kill me if he saw me again. Or he’d try to.”

  Elfgift smiled, and suddenly looked very young. “Why?” she said. “What did you do? Godsrule always was easy to bait.”

  Essa shrugged. Now was not the time to tell them all that he had struck the High King, his own uncle, in the face.

  “More to the point,” said Egric. “Why did you see fit to ride up to Northumberland in the first place? When your duty was to come here, to me.”

  Essa stared down at the table again. “We thought it would be better to go to Godsrule, and see if he would send a message to Penda, ordering him not to attack. But when we got there, he would not. And I thought it might garner you some time.”

  Egric’s cousin Anno was laughing, his shoulders shaking. “I like that,” he said. “Just leave it to the children.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be Wulf if Penda ever finds out what you did,” said Egric. “He’ll kill him. He has courage, that boy.”

  Essa shrugged. Now the dream he had shared with Wulf and Anwen seemed like a foolish game. That morning in the gully, he had been sure that anything was possible. Why had they even thought they could change the tide? No one could stop this war.

  “I think you were all brave,” said Elfgift quietly. “And lucky to escape alive. There aren’t many can outwit my brother.”

  “So does this mean he’s in line for the throne at Ad Gefrin?” said Anno, looking at Cai and Egric, as if Essa wasn’t even there.

  “Yes,” Essa said, angry. “What’s it to you?”

  Anno laughed. “Temper!” He turned to Egric and Cai. “What I mean is, you should get him married off. He’s useful.”

  “No!” said Elfgift.

  Cai was smiling. To Essa he said, “If you don’t stop acting like a boorish fool, I’ll flay you alive.” He switched languages: “There’s plenty of time to think of that later.”

  Essa felt heat flash to his face and stood up. All he wanted to do was get out of that place, away from Cai. He was about to leave, and answer for it later, when Seobert spoke. “I am humbled by you, Essa,” he said in his quiet, calm voice. “I shall ride out with my men, and may God forgive us all.”

  Everyone stared at him, stunned. Essa felt a surge of hope, his anger forgotten.

  “Egric, Anno – at dawn, rally the men and make sure all are fully armed,” said Seobert. “I will ride out with you, and we shall see if they’ll flock to my banner still. Essa, you shall ride with us too. We leave the following morning. And let us hope we reach the border before Penda’s son. It’ll be a bloody battle.”

  The Wolf Folk had unsheathed their claws at last.

  To the border

  ESSA was awake before dawn, out in the stables. He was meant to be collecting a horse, but instead he found Fenrir curled up near some of the other dogs in one of the stalls by the door. He squatted down beside her, scratching her behind the ear till she woke up. One eye open, she licked his hand. They sat there for a moment, Fenrir nudging at Essa’s fingers with her nose. He remembered that day, long ago, when he had sat in the stables in the village with Meadowsweet, and Fenrir was just a puppy, so new in the world that birthing fluid still clung to her fur. Meadowsweet had known then that he was sorrowing, aching inside. And now Fenrir knew that soon they would be leaving one another.

  I wish I could take you when we go. But you’ve come far enough with me, my honey. I can’t take you to this fight. You’ll just have to wait here for me till I come back.

  She whined softly, licking his fingers again. She knew.

  “Oi, is it you wants a horse?” Essa looked up and saw a skinny boy only about eight summers old, leaning over the stall-gate. “That your hound?” he said. “She’s a lovely one. Wish I had a dog like that.”

  Essa smiled. “Will you look after her for me, while I’m at the fight? You can take her to catch a hare, if you like.”

  The boy nodded eagerly, staring at him in awe. “We’ll catch a hare all right! She’s a beauty. Do you come with me, then, and we’ll find you a mount.”

  He was given a chestnut mare, a beautiful creature with a nice long step, and went out into the yard to wait for the others.

  They rode out behind Seobert: Egric, Anno and Essa. Anno gave Essa a quick glance up and down as he rode up, looking riled to find him there. All the way across the yard and out of the gate, Essa had a tight feeling in his chest, wondering what would happen if the men simply paid no heed to Seobert. What if the will to fight had drained out of them after weeks of waiting for his word? Seobert’s face was calm, peaceful, but Egric and Anno sat stiffly in the saddle, hardly exchanging a word or a look. Essa’s chestnut mare was tense beneath him. He leant forward, rubbing gently in circles behind her ears till he felt her steady. It’s all right, my sweet.

  The air was thick with wood smoke seeping from banked-down campfires, and trails of white mist hung low above the grass in the field. The few men he could see walking about at this time looked as if they were floating above ground like spirits.

  Nobody will notice us, Essa thought. Egric will blow the horn, and everyone will just ignore it. It’s too late: we’re too late. They won’t fight – they’ve given up.

  But, in the end, Egric did not even need to blow the horn. They were only just into the first camping field when, suddenly, men came walking towards them out of the mist.

  “Hey, what’s to do?” someone shouted. “It’s barely dawn—”

  But then they saw Seobert their king, riding amongst them. More men came, then more. There was no shouting, no yelling; Essa could not even tell how they all knew Seobert was there. But all the same, they came. Soon, they were surrounded by an ever-growing crowd of men, all silent: men with swords, men with daggers, men with bows on their backs, men with nothing but the scythe from the barn wall, who would be the first to fall but did not care now that their king was riding out with them. Soon Essa would be home – back in the village. His longing for Lark ached in his belly, and he knew then that if he came through this battle, he was going to swing her up into the saddle and they would ride away together.

  And then someone began to cheer, and the fields around Bedricsworth god-house came alive with the sound of it: a great, ragged, burst of noise. They were riding to meet Penda, all the way from the coast to the western edge of Wolf Folk land.

  They were going to fight.

  The race back across the marshes took two whole days. Essa forced himself to concentrate on the ride so he didn’t have to think on anything else. His thighs ached after so many days out of the saddle, his share of water was meagre, and the food was almost as bad as he and Wulf had eaten on their great journey. He never wanted to see dried fish again. He had heard stories of armies sweeping across the land, gasping to drink the blood of their enemies as they bore down on them like flocks of dragons. The stories did not tell the half of it. They never spoke of the boredom, the waiting. But he had not ridden with so many men before – the pou
nding of the horses’ hooves was like the beating of a great war-drum, and it stirred his heart.

  Gradually, the land grew more and more familiar – he began to recognize particular stands of trees, places where the marshes thinned out or spread into shallow, weed-filled ponds. Soon he could see the great earthwork stretching across the horizon, the one Cai had shown to Essa when they first arrived at the village: the Wolf Folk’s westernmost border. Behind it was the village – he could not see it yet, but it was there: the hall, the smithy-shed, the orchard and the grain mounds, the hounds asleep under the ash tree. He could see it all so clearly in his mind’s eye it was almost as if he were really there. I’m going home, Essa thought. He felt tears start and hoped anyone watching would think it was only the wind making his eyes water.

  After all this time, he was nearly home.

  The men with the fastest horses reached the Wolf Folk’s western defences in the afternoon of the second day. Close up, the wall was huge, a massive bank covered in patchy grass. Essa left the chestnut mare and crawled to the top, keeping low down so he could not be seen.

  Lying on his belly in the grass, he saw the green earthen village walls, coiling round the hall like a sleeping dragon. Smoke from the big fire in the hall streaked the sky with grey. And he wished more than anything that he were there with Cole and even Red at his side – and Lark. Don’t let me die before seeing Lark.

  Figures as small as ants moved about on top of the walls and his stomach knotted – it could be Lark he was watching or, if the village were already taken, Mercian soldiers. He squinted at the horizon, watching for campfire smoke, clouds of kicked-up dust, anything that might give away the presence of the Mercian army. But there was only the great, flat marshlands and the village, and then the woods in the distance.

  He ran back down and found Egric and Cai leaning against the grassy wall, talking fightcraft with some of Egric’s other ring-bearers. These men smirked at Essa: everyone had heard the story of his mad cross-country chase with Wulf, but he could see they were also suspicious of him. Cai did not even look at him.

  “Essa, why are you in such a hurry?” said Egric. “Do you save your strength. You’ll need it.”

  “My lord, someone should ride out to the Wixna and tell them we are here.”

  Egric laughed. “You, I suppose.”

  “I must go to the village, my lord, please!”

  “Got a girl in there or something?” said one of Egric’s men. The others laughed, made lewd jokes.

  Essa looked desperately at Egric.

  “Essa, if someone goes over there and the place has already been sacked, which it could have been, all we’ll do is let the Mercians know we’re here – they’re sure enough hiding back in the woods. It’s not worth it. I would give a lot to go myself, but I cannot. We ride out at dawn, so save your strength for something useful.”

  Essa looked at his father. Hild was in the village: Cai’s foster sister. Surely he would go?

  Cai stared at him impassively; Essa turned away. It was as if a wall had grown between the two of them – a thing woven of elf-magic, like something out of a song. Even if they won the battle, Cai was a stranger now: a man who had loved just one person in all his life, and cared nothing for anyone but Elfgift. Essa remembered seeing Cai bid her farewell. They had stood in the courtyard at Bedricsworth, locked together, her head on his shoulder, her hair spilling like fire down her back, as if they were the only two people in the world and everyone else was in the way.

  Essa wished he could tell his father that he understood. He longed more than anything to hold Lark so. Even if it was the last time he ever saw her, and he was riding to his death, then once would have been enough.

  To pass the time, one of Egric’s older men set up a target, marking a cross on a willow tree with hare’s blood. These men had fought many battles – some of them had even fought on the banks of the river Idle all those years before, when Redwald put King Edwin on the Northumbrian throne, and when old Onela White-beard had lost his right arm.

  “I was younger that day than you are now, lad,” said one grey-haired man with a long beard that hung down his chest in two plaits. He clapped Essa cheerfully on the shoulder. “And half as good a shot, too. You’ll be telling your grandchildren all about the day we kicked Penda and his Mercian dogs back west where they belong.”

  Essa knew they were trying to make him feel better, but the old man should have been at home, warming his bones by the fire. He should not have been sitting in the middle of a bog waiting to ride to his certain death. Essa smiled, but he could barely look the man in the eye. It was his fault they were here. His fault for not persuading Godsrule to send riders to Mercia forbidding Penda to fight and, failing that, to send fighting men to Seobert’s aid. He had failed.

  He collected his arrows and went to sit alone by a willow growing almost out of the side of the great wall. There was nothing to do now but wait for night to fall – and with dawn would come the fight.

  He leaned back against the ridged bark, listening to the wind singing through long, trailing branches until night fell. He was in a strange space between sleep and wakefulness: he heard someone call his name – it might have been Cai – but could not make his lips form a reply. He saw bats darting from tree to tree. He was cold, and wrapped his heavy cloak tighter around his shoulders, trying to seal all the gaps, but the wind’s cool fingers still found a way through, chilling him to the bone. When he moved, he could feel the scab on his right-hand side pulling against his skin. He remembered Anwen bending over him in the bothie, spreading the wound with honey.

  In the weak moonlight, Essa stared down at the ring on his finger: Wulf’s ring. Mercian gold. We tried so hard, he thought, but here we all are anyway – the Wolf Folk on one side of the border, the Mercians on the other, and the village stuck in the middle. The new moon of Eostre is on the rise but we’ll never see her fullness. We’re all going to die.

  He could not let it happen.

  Everything seemed so clear then: the men of the Wolf Folk had come too far for this; for weeks they had waited, despairing, as the king they loved refused to lead them into battle. Now Seobert had finally come, riding out at the head of his clan as they tore across the marshes, they could not just sit here waiting till the Mercians chose to attack. He could not just do nothing while the village and all the people he cared for sat helplessly trapped between two armies.

  He had to act – and almost at the same moment he realized this, he felt the twist deep in his belly, and a flash of joy as he flew free of his body, higher and higher, up into the night sky.

  Where am I going?

  He caught the sense of an owl, swooping low above the marshes, and knew it had seen a water vole twitching down in the roots of a willow, but he did not become the owl, he went higher and higher till he could see the flatlands spreading out below him.

  What am I?

  There was the long line of the Wolf Folk’s wall stretching out like a grass snake basking in the sun. To the east, the marshes gave way to the rolling marches of East Anglia, and then the vast, glittering sea: the path of his grandfathers, of Elfgift’s people.

  He was the silver serpent, the dragon, keeper of the night sky.

  Higher and higher he went, swooping along on warm shelves of air, slipping through water-beaded skeins of cloud. To the west of the Wolf Folk’s border, there was Wixna-land and the village, a drift of smoke rising from the roof of the hall. There was light in the smithy. The orchards were dark, Long Acre empty – the cattle had all been herded in with the goats and sheep; he could just make them out, dark shapes all clustered at one end of the corral by the stable.

  The Wixna fields and meadows gave way to the woods, and beyond that to another flat expanse of glittering marshland. There, he could see it now: Penda’s camp, a dark hump, and the pale cluster of tents. He remembered the saltwater tang rising gently off the old sailcloth, and the stink of the skins. Beyond the camp, the forest stretched west to t
he plains of the Magonsaete, and the gates of Powys.

  Essa remembered the British boy and his sister, and the vow he had made to himself. One way or another, he would find a way to stop Penda.

  Well, if he could not stop him, he could at least give the Wolf Folk a fighting chance.

  And there they were, the Mercian army, waiting hidden in the trees, just as Egric had guessed. Though he could see keenly even from a great height, he flew lower.

  It was like climbing down into the grain mound at the end of summer, when almost a whole year had passed since the last harvest. In the lamplight, you’d scoop barley into your bucket and, stirring it about, would see a maggot. Then another. Then the whole contents of the bucket would seem to shift as one, crawling with maggots.

  The forest was full of men, seething with armed fighting men. The sight of them was terrifying. Like the Wolf Folk, they had lit no fires, but Essa could just see them moving quietly about amongst the trees. For a moment, it seemed the forest itself was shifting, moving east, like waves lapping a beach on an incoming tide. It looked as though there were almost as many men as there were trees.

  He felt a thrill of cold fear.

  The race was over. He had won it by a breath, getting to Bedricsworth just in time, but now Wulf was back – he must be – and the Mercians were coming. They were coming and Egric’s men were sleeping.

  With a jolt, Essa sat up straight, the bark of the willow tree digging into his back. He was on his feet in a moment, running to the thicket of crabbed hawthorns in the lee of the wall where he had last seen Egric and his father. Blood pounded in his ears as he picked his way through the maze of sleeping bodies. Some men were not even trying to sleep, but sat together in small groups, talking in low voices, others sat alone. He passed Seobert, kneeling with a large group of men who had flocked around him, and were very quietly chanting the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. When he heard that, he felt quite wild with fear for a moment, because he knew then that everyone was afraid of dying, and because their king was more like a god-man than a war-leader. It would take more than a few prayers to defeat an army so huge it made their own look like a hunting party.