by Harper Fox
“Stay. Finish the rite.”
“Fen, let her be.” Cai held out the handfasting ribbon to her, and she took it, pushing it frantically into her clothes. Cai would have helped her, but she whipped away from him into the shadows, too swift for him to follow. He took a few steps in the strange tracks she had left. There on the sand were her apple and her ear of barley corn. He picked them up. The apple was hard and green, the corn riddled with dark pods of fungus. “Danan!” he called, hardly expecting to be heard. “Is it true? Does the land die without you?”
A weird rush of laughter rippled back to him. “Of course not, stupid boy.”
Cai bowed his head. There went another miracle.
“But check your orchards and your barns. You’ll find the wind has changed.”
It did, in a buffet of air so strong it almost knocked Cai down. He stumbled, and Fen caught him hard from behind. There was a wash of freshly broken comfrey stalks, and then of ozone, and then the breeze was blowing sweetly from the sea once more.
“What was that?”
Cai turned in his arms. Fen was shivering, staring into the darkness Danan had left behind her. “Nothing,” Cai told him fervently. “Nothing. Everything’s all right.”
“It isn’t. Why wouldn’t she bind us? Why did she say—?”
“Hush.” Cai stroked his hair, then hauled him into a ferocious embrace. “Didn’t we agree she was crazy—her and Addy too? Forget them.”
They were folding down together in the shelter of the nearest dune when the hare dashed by them. It was a big one. It scudded past their hiding place, close enough to kick sand into their eyes. For a moment it sat poised at the dune crest, gilded eyes glowing.
Fen sat up, unhitching the knife from his belt. “That’s a beauty. Shall I get it for us?”
Cai had seen him fell a smaller beast from twice the distance. He grabbed his arm and bore it down. “No. No, love—not this one.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Caius! Brother Caius!”
Fen yawned and sat up. Quickly Cai put a hand on the top of his head and pushed him down again. He didn’t want that fox-bright hair appearing among the ripening ears of wheat, giving their game away.
“It’s Hengist. He might want something.”
“He always wants something. And if I leave him alone for long enough, he finds it all by himself.” Cai picked out the ripest apple from the four they’d brought out for their midday meal. It was hard to choose. The orchard had given with such abundance that they’d had stock to sell, after drying all they needed for their own winter needs. The apples weren’t big, but they had blushed a sunrise pink no one at Fara had ever seen before, and they tasted of summer distilled. Cai offered the best of them to Fen, who snarled playfully and snatched an enormous bite. He held it between his teeth, eyes shining an invitation. Cai chuckled and groaned—after a moment gave in and tried to seize the morsel back. Their mouths met. Juice ran sweetly down Cai’s throat. Brother Hengist’s running footsteps faded off into the distance.
They didn’t have much time. The villagers’ wheat lands too had ripened with such unexpected vigour that the Fara brethren had broken off their own labours to come and help fetch it in. Today was the equinox, daylight and darkness in balance, the time for second harvest, and after this only the third one, the Samhain-tide slaughter of beasts. Then Cai’s world—monastery, village, the handful of men and women who gave it its pulse and its life—would crouch down for winter, provided for, safe. Fen and Cai had been working in the fields below the village since dawn. Soon they would have to get up, join the others, form up into the scything line and cut their refuge down with their own hands.
“Caius! Brother Cai!”
God, Hengist was coming back. That was too bad. Cai had lost the fight over the apple and was flat on his back. Fen was pinning him down, growling softly, sharp incisors skimming his jugular. Every brush, every barely restrained bite, was jolting Cai closer to the brink. He couldn’t speak. If he opened his mouth, he would give them away with a howl. He buried his face in Fen’s cassock, clutched at his backside, at the taut surging muscle thrusting down on him again and again. The homespun fabric was in the way. If they came like this, they would leave marks. And Cai wanted to feel him—needed, had to have, that long, hot shaft pounding up against his, even if Hengist had found them and was standing looking on. He tore the cloth out of the way. Fen, unleashed, gave a cry and an unrestrained shove, driving against him with all his strength. Cai arched his back, ecstasy squeezing his eyes shut. He convulsed. Behind his eyelids the sun turned crimson.
Brother Hengist’s footsteps faded again. Cai could hardly distinguish them from the slowing thump of Fen’s heart. His head was on Fen’s shoulder. Fen was running unsteady fingers through Cai’s hair, the bites transformed to kisses to his brow and lips, just as devastating. More—the wolf became gentle, all wildness spent.
“Stop,” Cai whispered. “Stop. We have to go back to work.”
“Did I hear Hengist again?”
“Yes. He’s gone.”
“Was it just the rushing in my ears, or…did he sound a little desperate?”
Cai had thought so too. But his own blood had been rushing, and he hadn’t cared. He didn’t care now. He pushed up onto one elbow, suddenly resentful. “What of it? Why is it my problem? Why do they always come calling for me?”
Fen smiled. It was a particularly beautiful, lazy smile, and it left Cai in no doubt of his thoughts. He snapped off the head of one scarlet poppy and tucked it behind Cai’s ear, so that neither of them could take him seriously. “Is it because they love you and trust you? Poor lamb.”
“Well—isn’t it enough that I doctor them, work for them all day long? Do I have to…?” There it was again, that word Addy and Danan had spoken, the word he heard echoing round his own head all day long and on Theo’s lips in his dreams. “Why should I lead them too? All right, men need leaders when there’s someone around who wants to lead them straight to hell, but Aelfric’s locked up. He can’t do anyone any more harm.”
“Locked up?” Fen’s derisive snort sent a quiver through Cai, a glitter of unlikely new arousal. “Oh, yes. Because you’re such a hard-arse, aren’t you—holding him captive in his own rooms, with meals brought to him daily, and his clerics for company any time he wants them.”
“What would you do with him?”
“He’s a serpent. I would crush him underfoot, then chuck him off the cliff.” Fen ruffled Cai’s hair, knocking the poppy aside. “It would cost us less too.”
“Oh, I don’t begrudge his keep. He’s out of the way. I should be too.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the equinox. Everything is in balance—summer with winter, night with day. I think men find their balance too, if they’re not being dragged off to one side or the other. I give it all up.” Cai bestowed one last, lingering kiss on the corner of Fen’s mouth, then helped him up. “Come on, before we get scythed.” Together they made their way out of the waist-high forest of gold and onto the track. “I’m not going to lead. There’s no point to it, and leading means I have to pick a—”
“Caius! Brother Cai!”
Fen broke into laughter. Cai groaned and raised a hand in surrender to poor Hengist as he trotted once more across the wheatfield. “Third time lucky, Brother. Here I am.”
“Oh, Caius.” The late-autumn heat had been almost too much for the bulky cook. “I’m glad I found you. I didn’t want to frighten any of the others, and yet…” He looked shyly at Fen. “May I speak to you alone?”
Cai was surprised. The brethren of Fara treated their raider as one of their own now, their fears of him forgotten. “There’s nothing you can say to me that Fen can’t hear, surely, unless…” Cai paused. Hengist suffered badly from piles and was mortified by them. “Unless it’s a medical matter. Do you need some more celandine oil?”
“No. Er, no, but thank you. It’s Eyulf.”
“Is he sick?”
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“No.” Hengist shuffled his feet. “Two or three times today he’s come to me, though. He’s been standing on his toes and making faces, doing his sign for…” Contracting his brows, Hengist managed a pale imitation. “His sign for Vikings. Your pardon, Brother Fenrir. And he keeps pointing out to sea.”
Cai went cold. He tucked his hands into the sleeves of his cassock and took a few steps down the track. From here, Fara’s great flank blocked the seaward view. He wanted to tell Hengist not to fear—that Fara had been stripped of all of its few assets in the raid that had brought Fenrir to their shores, that there was nothing left to take, not even the memory of a legend. But the truth was that this season often brought down a last flurry of raids before winter weather set in, and the monastery’s grain stores were full.
“All right,” he said at last. “Thank you. I should think Eyulf’s been having his nightmares again, but we’ll post extra lookouts tonight.”
He watched Hengist jog away back to the crowd of villagers and monks gathering in the field for their afternoon’s labours. When Fen came and put his arms around him fiercely from behind, he didn’t look at him.
“I am not going to lead,” he said grimly, “because leading means you have to pick a side.” Bitterness rose up in him, sharp as bile. The balance of the equinox was fleeting, wasn’t it? And after it came the long nights. “Where will you be, Fen? If the raiders come—which side?”
Fen’s grip tightened. “I will be at yours.”
Feint, parry, thrust. Cai had let the battle drills slip over the past weeks, in the flurry of the harvests, but Eyulf had given him a healthy reminder. The poor lad was perched on top of a crumbled wall now, scowling and twitching and glaring out to sea. Cai hadn’t been able to get anything more from him, and three days had passed since the harvest. He might have seen a vikingr sail on the horizon, or only a passing merchant ship. Or maybe some memory ghost had risen up in his addled brain to scare him, but Cai wasn’t taking the chance.
Feint, parry… He was partnering Marcus, another of Aelfric’s cleric’s. Laban hadn’t been seen since the night of the pyre, despite the best search Cai could spare for him, and the rest of the Canterbury men had come to a clear decision over which side their bread was buttered on. They visited their captive master when he asked but kept their distance—wore brown robes and took up quiet roles in monastery life. Marcus was good with a sword. Roman blood in him to match his own, Cai thought, clapping him on the shoulder and pointing out to him the man he should take on next.
That left him face-to-face with Fen. They didn’t fight in the drill yard, unless it was to demonstrate something, both of them usually kept too busy instructing the others. But they both had done the rounds of every other man this afternoon. They squared off against each other mockingly. Fen was wielding his wolf’s-head sword, Cai his favourite from the hillfort forge. No one trained with his blade sheathed in sackcloth these days. That time had gone.
Fen leapt, and Cai took the force of his blow down at the root of his sword, jarringly, sparks flying. Muscles wrenched in his back with the effort of defence. Bright anger splashed through him. He knew what Fen was doing—their encounters, demonstration fights, had become too ceremonious. They were too well matched. They would end up in a dance out here, each aware of what the other would do next, their shared glances sending signals of brotherhood, not challenge. Now Fen had hurt him—deliberately called up the fire from his blood. “Very well,” he growled. “Guard yourself, Viking.”
Fen took his first sword cut on the rim of his shield. He made it look easy, though Cai could tell from the force of his recovery that the strike had told. He pounced back at Cai with battlefield violence. Their weapons clashed again. An equal strength, Cai would have sworn, and yet in the moment when his own would have run out, there it was—the simultaneous melting of Fen’s.
“Don’t you hold back on me!” Cai ordered, slipping out from under the lock.
“Do you think I would dishonour myself?”
Cai grunted under the impact of a new attack. “You might try not to dishonour me. Fight me! I have to know.”
“What? You’ve already faced me in battle.”
And run you through. Cai missed his next thrust entirely and almost fell. “Not a fair fight. An ambush in the dark.”
“The best way to deal with my kind, I promise you.”
“Don’t…” Whipping round, Cai blocked three rapid feints. He did it well, but the fourth brought Blóðkraftr’s tip to his throat, and he froze, gasping.
“Don’t what, monk?”
“Call yourself that. My kind.”
“Don’t tell me with one breath to be what I am, and with the next forbid it.”
Up on the wall, Eyulf uttered a long, dismal groan. Instantly Fen put up his sword. Cai swallowed. A delicate stinging told him the blade had just broken his skin. Marcus had leapt up onto the remains of a parapet and was gazing off to the horizon, shielding his eyes against the sun.
“Marcus,” Cai called, not taking his gaze off Fen’s. “What can you see?”
“I’m not certain. There’s a fret, and… Wait. I see sails.”
“What shape are they? How many?”
“Square. Five. No, seven. No—oh, Domine adiuva me…”
“Marcus?”
“Yes?”
“If you see more than seven, kindly keep it to yourself.”
Marcus remained silent. Cai straightened up. He sheathed his sword and turned to the white-faced men dropping their drill postures and looking out to sea. “Brethren of Fara!” One by one they fixed their attention upon him. He felt it like separate weights, barbs sinking into his flesh. “How many times have we seen Viking fleets on their way to the fishing grounds north of here? And even if it isn’t so—even if they’re bound for shore—it’s broad daylight, and they’re a long way out. When have we ever had this much warning? Every man here knows his task.” No one stirred a muscle. Eyes fixed unblinkingly on him, as if he on his own could make the nightmare disperse. “What’s wrong with you? Come on!”
Fen touched his shoulder. The caress was hidden, warm, the press of a palm to his spine. “Fear wipes men’s minds,” he said softly. “Fear can drag them to hell even faster than Aelfric would want.”
Cai took one long breath. “Wilfrid,” he began, if not with kindness, then calmly at least. “Don’t be afraid. You know the men appointed to you. Take them now, and herd the goats and the sheep into the caves at the foot of the cliffs. Gareth, you and Cedric tell the villagers to do the same, then help them pack what they can carry and send them on their way inland. They should head towards Traprain Law—my father might take them in, if worst comes to worst. Hengist, have your men carry all our grain, our fruit and salted meat into the cellars. And you, Marcus, stop gawping and do as you’ve rehearsed—gather all our weapons at the armoury and see they’re clean and ready. Well, what are you waiting for? Go!”
They turned and filed out. Even Eyulf knew his place in this emergency and ran off after Hengist to help carry the grain. Cai looked after them. There was order and purpose in their departure. He didn’t fool himself that it weighed in the balance against seven or more Viking sails—the fret had closed in now, sealing him off from the truth—but he’d done what he could. In the silence of the drill yard, the sea wind moaned. “I’ll go and fetch Dagsauga and the ox calves. If I set off with them now, I might get them to safe pasture by dusk. Do you think Eldra will be of any use to us?”
“In a foot battle? No. I could do some damage, but they’d cut her out from under me.”
Oh, you assume you’d be riding? But there was no point in challenging Fen’s arrogance there, not having been on the receiving end of those battlefield horsemanship skills. “I don’t want to use her like that.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then can you take her out to the fields beyond the Coldstream ford—you know, the place where we…”
“Er, yes.”
“And
take the farm ponies on leading reins. The further we spread our assets around…”
“Yes. And yes, I will come back.”
Cai flinched. “I never asked that.”
Fen stepped up close to him. He brushed one fingertip across the tiny cut on Cai’s throat, then passionately took his face between his hands. “Your eyes ask it. Your bloody beautiful mouth asks, in all the words you don’t say, every time you look at me. Caius—you and your brethren took me in. You saved my life. You could have tied me up in a wickerwork boat and shoved me out to sea, but you didn’t. You gave me food, clothing, work to do. My own kind abandoned me. Who am I going to fight for, if these sails don’t pass by?”
Cai unfastened his sword belt. He couldn’t bear the dragging weight of it round his hips. He struggled out of it and dropped it on the turf. He’d have torn a strip off another man for treating his weapon so, but he was blind with tears. He had cut Fen too—a thin red line across his cheek only now starting to bleed. He leaned his brow against Fen’s, and Fen took hold of the hair at his nape and held him strongly. The wind spiralled up from the cliffs—a raider’s wind, inshore, rich with scents of autumn. It vortexed around them where they stood motionless, a season’s first leaf-fall blowing in its wings.
Chapter Fourteen
One man too many. It was better than one too few, but Cai couldn’t work it out. The night had come down black and hard, and in his urgent tracks from lookout posts to armoury to storerooms, he didn’t have time to worry too much about the unknown figure. It was quick and thin, familiar somehow in the glimpses he had of it. Only when Cai rounded the stairwell of a firelit corridor and crashed right into the fragile shape did he realise. He snatched back the cassock hood before the stranger could try to dodge past him. “Oslaf!”
“Yes. Forgive me, Cai.”
Forgive him? Cai could have kissed him. He still looked frail, but a few weeks of his grandmother’s care had taken the death-shadows from his eyes. “What in God’s name are you doing here? Why have you been hiding from me?”
