“Do not tell mother we got cut.” His voice made clear his plea.
“I will not tell her,” she returned, and allowed some heat to shade her answer. “You will be the one to tell her. I have never told tales and never will, you know that. Besides, do you think you could hide such a wound? Your arm will be stiff and sore for days. You will have to show the wound to her.” She looked to Ceric. “Yours too.”
Burginde was back, a large basin of water in her hands, which she set down next to the friends.
Ashild was cutting the linen she had brought into lengths, silently bemoaning its loss for such a foolish reason. Burginde was not so restrained. “’Twas your dear lamb of a mother wove that linen,” she lamented. The women washed away the drying blood so they might see the true extent of the cuts.
“It clots well, the bleeding slows. But they are too broad. They must be sewn,” Burginde judged, turning her head to Ashild.
Ashild swallowed, trying to push back her fear. She took the cup of ale from her brother’s left hand and swallowed a sip; her mouth felt dry as dust.
The older woman now looked at Hrald. “Poor Jari,” she fretted, clucking her teeth. “For years he shadows you night and day, and then this.”
She watched Hrald wince the deeper at her words, then went on in a brighter tone. “Still, if friends such as you hurt themselves this bad, he will be proud of what you will do to a foe.”
Ashild was turning to the Simples chest. “Mother has steel needles; I brought them,” she said, to which Burginde nodded her approval. Bone needles were thicker, and would make a larger hole as they pierced the skin. They were also prone to break. Ashild took linen thread from the chest, scraped it along the lump of beeswax there, and threaded up both needles; she knew Burginde’s eyes would not allow her to do so quickly. She gave one threaded needle to Burginde, and left the second stuck in a piece of linen. She would let Burginde do any stitching.
Ceric spoke to Ashild. She had shown her willingness to cover for them, but he could feel she was angry, and upset as well. Yet he would risk asking a service of her.
“If it must be sewn, will you not be the one to do it,” he said.
“I am not a good needle-woman,” she returned.
But her mother’s old nurse had decided for her. “This one for you,” she said, tilting her head at Ceric’s wound. “I will work on Hrald’s; it is worse.”
She had no choice.
“My seams are never straight, I warn you,” she told Ceric. She could not help a slight and rueful smile as she said it. She slipped a leathern thimble over her finger, so she might protect it as she pushed the needle.
They set to work. Ashild never had cause to sew a wound before. It was horrible to hold the needle and pinch the flesh closer so she could puncture it with its sharp point. She wondered why Ceric did not flinch every time she did so.
Finally she stopped in her work and asked. “Does not the needle pain you?” She was halfway up the trackway of her lacing; five stiches in, five more, she reckoned, to go.
He was looking straight ahead. “I hardly feel it, for the pain of the wound,” he assured her. “I think I feel the drawing of your thread through; it is strange.”
“I am glad to hear this,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. She turned to look at Hrald. Burginde was still bent over her work. Hrald had dropped his head back against the wall the grain bin rested against. His eyes were closed, and his jaw clenched in pain.
Ashild turned back to Ceric’s wound, made her next stab through his flesh. Hrald had hurt Ceric, given him a cut that would mark his sword arm for the rest of his days. Then he had gone on to hurt himself, even more so. Either wound, or both, could fester, and either friend, or both, die. And she stood before Ceric, who thought he loved her, as she drove needle and thread through his skin, trying to seal a wound her own brother had driven.
The wound now felt like one mass of searing heat to Ceric. He closed his eyes, then opened them at a sound. He turned his head to look at Ashild. The gaze of her blue-grey eyes was steady on her work. Tears flowed from those eyes, sparkling as they ran to her chin. He watched her a moment, almost in wonder. He lifted his left hand to her face, and she turned it to him. The pad of his thumb wiped the tears as they welled from her right eye.
Their eyes met, hers wet with tears, his glazed with pain. She bit her lip and turned her face back to her stitching.
Ashild is weeping for me, Ceric thought. She cries for Hrald too, I know this; but her tears are flowing for me as well, and for what she is doing. My arm feels as if it were on fire, but she is holding it with tenderness. She is touching me, as a wife would.
The pain, and his thirst, and the thought of this made him feel faint. He closed his eyes and lay his head back against the wall as Hrald had done.
He did not know when she finished. He opened his eyes to the touch of a hand upon his brow. Ashild was standing before him, holding a bronze cup in her hand. After what he had been thinking the gentleness of her tone no longer surprised him.
“Drink this, Ceric, it is mead.”
He took it in his left hand and looked over at his shoulder. His arm had been wrapped in strips of linen; he had not felt it happen.
He wanted to take a sip of the rich mead and then pass the cup to her so she might drink from it too, as a man did with his bride at their wedding-feast. He lifted the cup, the honeyed sharpness of the aroma rising upward. The sweet strength of it filled his mouth, a savour deeper and more enlivening than any mead he had ever tasted. His eyes closed a moment, holding the flavour, relishing the gesture. Then he opened them, moved the cup away from his own lips and towards Ashild.
But she had left him. She had moved over to his side where Hrald sat.
Ceric straightened himself and saw that Burginde was still bent over Hrald’s arm, laying green bracts of some herb over the sewn gash, then binding it with linen.
Ashild wrung out a piece of cloth in the basin and wiped her brother’s face. His skin looked white, and was cool and damp to her touch. He opened his eyes to her.
“Hrald,” she told him, “here is mead.”
He smiled, which gave her heart. His voice, though, was almost a croak. “Mead?”
Mead was both costly and potent, and their mother and aunt alone held the keys to the storeroom where it was kept waiting by in small crocks. She smiled back. “I have my ways,” she said, teasingly. In fact she had gotten her busy aunt to hand her the entire set of keys from the keeper at her waist by claiming she must fetch a silver salver for her mother. She had poured out a quantity of mead into an ewer before returning the keys to Æthelthryth. Then she had stopped in the hall, rifled through Ceric’s saddle bags for a tunic, and taken one of Hrald’s, as well.
Neither friend could lift his right arm without crying out in pain, and the women struggled to dress them.
“You will never be able to eat,” Ashild proclaimed, now both were on their feet.
“We will be Tyr-hands tonight, like Jari,” Hrald answered, trying to jest despite his furrowed brow. After two deep gulps of mead his head felt fuzzy, and his painful arm as though it were further away from his body.
“At least let us get mother, and Worr too,” Ashild urged, “so you might tell them now, and not in the noise of the hall.”
Hrald and Ceric exchanged looks. There was nothing for it; Ashild was right. Better to tell them now and have it over with.
Burginde, clucking all the while, was moving around them, balling up the bloodied remains of their tunics, ordering the contents of the Simples chest, and finally tipping out the reddened basin water into the dust outside. A few drops of blood flecked her gown, and Ashild’s right sleeve at the wrist hem also showed red. “You fetch them; ’twer always a better liar than me,” she told Ashild.
Chapter the Eighth: Not So Easily Bought
FATE favoured them. The Lady of Four Stones and the horse-thegn of Kilton did not make the fri
ends show their wounds that night, trusting the word of Burginde and Ashild as to their nature. Hrald and Ceric took their place at table, trying to master their pain and make light of it. But both Ælfwyn and Worr insisted on being there when the wounds were re-dressed the following day. Then they saw the true extent of the gashes, worse than either the young men or the women who had helped them had let on.
Ælfwyn gasped, her hand lifting to her mouth as she pulled back the final turn on her son’s bandage. She steeled herself with a deep breath, and flicked away the woad leaves clotting the wound. Ælfwyn had seen sword wounds and spear cuts aplenty in her first years at Four Stones, but seeing her own son’s arm riven in this way was a fresh and heart-rending moment. She allowed herself no tears, though, instead praising Burginde for her stitch-work. Ashild was there too, unwrapping Ceric’s arm, and Ælfwyn and Worr turned now to it. The edges of both gashes were clean, but swollen, the trackways of the linen stitching straining against the risen flesh. A clear yellowish liquid had dried about the wounds, and no fresh blood flowed.
“I will rinse them with betony water; Wilfrede the dyer taught me that, years ago,” Ælfwyn finally said.
The horse-thegn of Kilton had watched silently. He now spoke his thanks to Burginde and Ashild. “May we always have as able healers as you.”
He canted his head at Hrald, and then at Ceric. Men did get hurt in training, and these two had been amongst them. “Better first blood at the hands of a friend, than an enemy,” he noted.
Ceric nodded back, meeting Worr’s half-grin with one of his own. But after a moment Hrald looked away, the guilt of self-reproach all he could feel.
Two days had passed since then. The fiery sting of pain had steadily subsided, though using their arms, or even trying to lift them, hurt.
“I wish I could see it,” Ceric said of his wound.
They were alone in the treasure room, and had unwrapped the fresh linen which Burginde had just replaced. He had tried to twist his neck and pull the shoulder towards him, only to occasion more pain. Hrald thought a moment, then fetched a polished silver disc from a shelf by the bed. It was the shelf that his father had kept his small belongings on, and now which he used too. Hrald had just begun to shave his face once a week, and the reflecting silver disc was his.
“Here,” he said, holding it up and away from his friend’s arm. The gash was as long as a finger. Hrald could barely look at it, but understood why Ceric wanted to.
Ceric saw the way the slash angled upwards, and saw too the cross-laced path of Ashild’s stitching. The white linen thread she had used was brown with dried blood. He took a good look, then nodded.
“Now yours,” he said, taking the disc from Hrald’s left hand.
Ceric had not seen Hrald’s wound before, and now paused a moment before he lifted the disc into Hrald’s view. His own wound was a clean slice. The one Hrald had given himself was more a jagged rip, longer and broader than that marring his own arm. Ceric could not keep a low whistle from sounding under his breath.
Hrald looked at the reflection in the shimmering metal. Then his lids dropped over his eyes.
“You could have just pricked your finger,” Ceric said about Hrald’s act, and the mingling of their blood. It sounded a jest, but he did not mean it as one. The wound was ugly and far worse than his own.
Hrald nodded, tried to smile. He had not reminded Ceric of the warning his father had given them as boys, but it had sounded in his ears every night as he tried to fall into sleep, knowing that Ceric too was in pain.
“At least Worr was right,” Ceric said now, beginning to bind Hrald’s arm back up. “Better first blood by a friend than an enemy.”
“Remember setting snares with Tindr?” Hrald asked.
“Já,” answered Ceric, falling without noticing it into Norse. The jostling of riding pained them, and so they often walked, as they were today by the stream which ran behind Four Stones.
“I remember it well.” He looked to the forest on either side, where he and Hrald had spent so much time at play the Summer he had spent at Four Stones. “Did you ever set them here?”
“Já, I did, at first,” Hrald said, brushing the tops of the tall grasses they walked through with a stick held in his left hand. “I like being in the woods alone. And building them made me think of Tindr showing us how to do it – all the days we spent with him.” The hand that held the stick fell still, and he too looked towards the trees. “But coming home with one hare – not much to feed a hall with.”
Ceric laughed. A week had passed since their wounding, and though their arms were sore and tight, the burning throbbing they had known was but a dark memory.
As they went on they found they were not alone. Two maids, perhaps not older than Hrald, were sitting a little distance ahead on a fallen tree trunk at the water’s edge. Their backs were to them, their shoes and stockings scattered on the ground where they had been pulled off. Now both maids rose, and hiking up their skirts above their knees, began to walk about in the cool water.
Ceric paused, grinning as he watched them, and Hrald too stopped. The maids spoke to each other, sometimes laughing and stomping their feet to splash the other. One held her gown bunched so high that they saw much of the backs of her white thighs.
The friends moved closer, and one of them stepped on a dry tree branch, causing it to crackle. The maids whirled round. One scrambled to the grassy bank. The second flushed red and dropped her skirts where she stood. The light blue of the hem deepened in hue about her as the water soaked it.
“Hrald,” said the one on the bank. She was smiling brightly at him. Both maids were daughters of the men of the hall; Ceric had marked them before this.
Hrald had coloured slightly too, and returned the maid’s greeting. The one still standing in the stream composed herself enough to ask how both their arms were healing.
“I heard you hit each other with the skeggox,” posed the one on dry land. “Is that true?”
The friends laughed their denial, and went on.
“Comely maids,” said Ceric, when they had passed out of earshot. “The one on the grass likes you.”
Hrald scoffed, but it put him in mind of a question to his older friend.
“Have you had a woman?”
Ceric took it in stride. “Not yet. You?”
“O – no.” Hrald felt his face warm. His thoughts had certainly been much occupied with the subject. “Mother and Wilgot preach to me about remaining chaste.”
Ceric had heard the same, and nodded.
Now Hrald laughed, and went on.
“In Spring a serving woman, one of the younger ones, showed her bottom to me,” he admitted. “I was in the treasure room, and she slipped in, which is forbidden anyway. She said nothing, just smiled, then turned and pulled up her gown. I almost laughed, but I think she meant it. I just stood there, and then Burginde walked in and saw; she howled like a cat. She slapped the woman’s face, and then marched her out by the ear.”
Ceric gave a short laugh at this. “I reckon that many will wish to be first with the young lord of the place,” he teased. They were both quiet for a moment, then Ceric spoke again.
“I will, when I get home,” he said. “When I wed Ashild I want to know what I am doing.”
Hrald did not know what to say to this, except to nod in agreement.
After a short space he asked, “So you will wed her?”
“I have always meant to wed her.” Ceric was certain of that. He felt she was already promised to him, already almost his wife. A feeling flooded into his breast, an echo of what he had felt when she had sewn up his arm, that she was touching him as a wife would.
“I think you should speak to her,” Hrald said.
His tone was uneasy enough that Ceric slowed. Surely she knew his desire; he had already told her. Then he thought of something else.
“Is there another she would have – other than me?” he asked his friend. “I
know you will give her much treasure to bring with her, but I will meet any bride-price you set.”
Before Hrald could answer Ceric spoke again.
“Guthrum has sons, I know. If he dies soon…” He could not quite bring himself to say it, to ask if Ashild would chose him over one who might be the new King of the Danes.
Hrald shook his head. “Asberg says he has sons enough, but none worthy to be King.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Three of the sons, yes. They have been here.”
“Do they know Ashild?”
“Of course.”
“But you do not think she would choose one of them?”
Hrald tried to laugh. “And I do not know if they would choose her.” Hrald looked about him, shook his head. “Ashild can be – contrary. She sometimes turns from even what she herself wants.”
“Why?” Ceric demanded, trying to understand. “Why would a maid do that? She can have nearly anything she wants.”
“She is hard on herself. And she is…restless.” He gave another short laugh. “Mother says she should have been a boy.”
It made little sense to Ceric, and yet bothered him.
“I will ask her. Ask her to wed me,” he decided. “Modwynn told me to wait, but I feel sure she wants Ashild for me. As I do.”
Hrald invited his sister to join him and Ceric for a walk next day. Their route took them along the pounded clay road leading to the valley of horses, but ended much earlier, at the groves of fruit trees shading one side of the road. The apples were still green and hard, but the plums were ripening, and two or three small boys stood ready with handfuls of pebbles to deter the sharp beaks of passing birds. The groves were cool and pleasant to walk in, and Hrald soon absented himself for his friend’s sake, taking his own meandering path through the trees.
Ashild saw this, noting her brother’s studied withdrawal. She felt a curious amusement, paired with a flutter of discomfort. Ceric wished to be alone with her, and Hrald knew it. There was ease in the friendship between the three of them, and something deeper too since the day of the sparring. She had discerned their secret, one she joined fully into when she slit the guard protecting Ceric’s sword blade. Her actions had made her worthy of their trust. But it was more than this. Today she felt she knew what Ceric would say, and thought she was ready for it.
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