Ethelred did not seem angry. His broad face, meat red above the greying wire of his beard, was unconcerned.
“It will make fewer enemies to stab us when our backs are turned, when we are fighting Sweyn and his Danes. I’m not a fool. Whatever you think.”
“Sir,” Aethelstan said, steadfastly. “I don’t think—”
“No. You are the fool; you think not at all. You should mind who you talk to, boy. Go, you bore me.” The King glanced toward the empty throne beside him.
Edmund saw this and wondered where the Queen was. There had been a whisper, before, that she was taken with some woman’s ill at the beginning of the massacre and gone into her chamber. Aethelstan was saying, stubbornly, “My lord, the people already hate the Normans.”
“The people,” Ethelred said, with a snort. His fingers pawed briefly at his face, his eyes dark with bad temper. “What people? There are no people. No English. Only Wessex men, Essex men, Angles, Mercians, half Danes, and true Danes, and all of them—” He hitched himself around in the throne, staring at Aethelstan, his head forward. “All of them would sell my kingdom for a silver penny to anybody who had one.” He smiled, his temper fading. “Why should I not then have the Normans?”
Edmund thought, The Normans take his penny, but they heed the Queen.
In the short while he had been in his father’s court he had come to hate the Queen. She made fun of him and had gotten his father to call him stupid names. He hoped she was sick. He wished she would go home.
Someone came in the door behind them; someone else called out sharply, “How many? Who?”
Edmund shivered. He thought he could hear people screaming in the distance, and then Aethelstan turned, his face stiff with anger, and marched out, with Edmund following him.
In the little hall, outside the throne room, Aethelstan wheeled. “This is crazy,” he said. Two of his chief carls came to him, saluting, and he spoke to them. “The King is tearing the kingdom apart when we most need to be together.” He paid no heed to Edmund, who was too young to matter. “He can’t kill everyone in England who disagrees with him.”
“He will surely deal with anybody he can catch,” said one of the carls. “Meanwhile—”
“Meanwhile,” Aethelstan said, “we go to Mass, like good Christians.” At last he noticed his little brother. “Edmund. You shouldn’t have come.” But he smiled, clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a brave boy, though, for doing it.”
Edmund swelled, warming in the glow of that smile. Aethelstan ruffled his hair. “Come on, now, let’s go hear a song and get drunk. And hope nobody takes us for Danes.” He shepherded Edmund along beside him, the two carls walking just behind.
As they went out of the hall, Edmund marked a woman coming in. He did not know at first what he thought was strange about her. She was a big, well-fleshed woman, of some age, in a dirty coif, her clothes rumpled. She wore wooden clogs. She walked past him as if she would go straight into the King’s hall, and to his surprise no one stopped her. He followed after Aethelstan, and his skin crept. He could not say what it was that was strange about her. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he could not see her. He wondered for an instant if he had imagined her.
Aethelstan was hustling them out the door. In the yard, a dozen Normans were mounting their horses, shouting back and forth; they ignored the Aetheling princes. Aethelstan ignored them as well. He led his men and his brother off to a hall nearby, and Edmund followed in his steps. If one thing in the world were noble and true, it was his brother. Gratefully, he let Aethelstan lead him into the warmth of the hall.
Chapter Eight
From London Raef drove himself and Leif and Laissa to walk that night and most of the next day before they could stop. North of London the open land, scattered with farms and villages hedged around with new walls, gave way soon to stands of trees, bogs, meadows, and then to forest. Old snow covered the ground and splattered the trees, a white crust poked with stalks of dead grass and patches of stony earth, everything brown and grey— the sky, the hillsides under their grey icy ridgelines. At a crossroads they bought bread and cheese from a woman going to market. Weary to the bone, they trudged along the road into the North, eyes downcast, stumbling over pebbles. In the mid-afternoon Raef hustled them down into the ditch, and a moment later a stream of horsemen galloped by, the heavy hoofs jarring the ground.
After that they moved away from the road, into the forest, until with the sun going down they came out of the trees to the bank above a river, and there they finally slept.
In the morning, nobody said much. Laissa sat with her legs drawn up and watched Raef steadily. They ate the last of the cheese and bread. When they were done she came to him and sat behind him and began to comb his hair.
She said, “In London, they were killing people.”
“The King was killing everybody he thought was his enemy.”
“You aren’t his enemy. He said so. No harm in you.”
“No, but I am the Queen’s.”
“Yes. When I was with the Queen, what happened? She turned to stone. There was something going on, but I couldn’t see it.”
Leif watched them, lounging on his elbow in the sun-dappled shade. He said nothing but his eyes were sharp.
Raef said, “There is a power in the Queen – not in Emma; Emma may not even know it’s there.”
Laissa stroked the comb through his hair. “A – a demon?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” A demon was as good a way as any to tell them. He was imagining the great field of light and time and the hole in it that she boiled up through. From somewhere else he could not imagine. He said, “Anyway, the Lady. She steals souls. She binds women’s souls to her somehow. Men, I think, she just devours.”
He stopped. It came to him that what she took of her victims was their place in the light field. His heart shrank. Now he could get some reckoning of what she was doing, what was to come. He remembered the crushed bones in the southern village, where he had felt not one soul left. In such chaos as the massacre in London, she could feed like a shark in a shipwreck.
“What can she do to us?”
“What happened to Arre Woodwrightsson’s house.”
Leif growled, stirring, his shoulders hunched. Raef said, “But I think to do things like that she must be in her host body, and her range is small. I don’t think she can hurt us now, so far from London, not like that. She has other means. And she grows with every soul she eats.”
“And we grow less?” Laissa said.
“The world grows less,” he said. He leaned his head back into her hands. He turned his gaze on Leif, fat and balding, his forehead rumpled with doubt. They were all part of the field of light, one flawless sheet of being, flowing on and on, ever changing and never dying, world without end. Except that the Lady would destroy it all.
Gunnhild had said he could defeat her, but he had found no way to combat her. Nothing he did against her worked.
Laissa said, “What’s the matter?”
He shook himself. He had been a long time silent.
Laissa said, “You… went somewhere else.”
“No,” he said. “I was here.”
“This demon, then. It isn’t Emma.”
“No. Emma is only her… vessel.”
“Why is she after us?” Leif said.
“I don’t know.” Raef put his fists to his face. “There’s nothing I can do to her. She will eat up the world, Gunnhild said, beginning with England. Gunnhild said I could stop her, and she tried to teach me, but I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t. I’ve never been able even to hamper her.”
“You got me free of her,” Laissa said. She leaned into his back, her face against his shoulder.
“You got yourself free. You freed us both, when you woke her body up – she had to get back into her host.”
“Oh,” Laissa cried. “Poor Emma.”
Leif said, “She’s making a nice job of tearing the place up already
here in England.”
“Yes.”
“Where does she fit with Sweyn Tjugas and the Norman duke?”
“They know nothing of her. She will eat them too when she chooses. She’s come very close to eating me.”
Leif’s face was seamed with frets. He looked away, and then angrily back at Raef. “You have a knack for getting us into trouble.”
“You’ve chosen this,” Raef said. “Every time you could have turned aside you came on. There is the great heart in you that knows the challenge here somehow. And you have stood fast with me. I will not forget that, ever. But it’s not for my sake. Even if I were not here, she would be, and she is the evil, not me.”
Leif grumbled, frowning. Laissa said, “Who are you?”
Raef turned and gave her a long look over his shoulder. The question startled him. Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”
* * *
In the days that followed, they went on, steadily north, along the road through forest and bog. When they cut back to the road, within a day a band of armed men passed them again, and Raef led them across the country.
They stopped for the night by a mined wall. When the others were asleep, Raef got up and went off a little, restless, thinking of the Normans on the road. He remembered when he was a wolf. He thought he could drive these men away, if he were a wolf.
He walked back to their camp, and lay down on the ground beside Laissa. The moon was rising. The wind rose, tumbling down the hillside, deeply scented. He shut his eyes and let himself roam out into the luminous dark.
* * *
Laissa huddled under her cloak, not asleep, and felt him leave. His body slackened when he left it, cooled, and quieted, a stillness deeper than sleep. She held her cloak tightly around her and wrapped one arm around her waist, thinking about what lay within and what might become of it. What it might become. She had been walking for years, and now she was with child and needed to go home, and she had no home. She prayed, but it did not calm her. She squeezed her eyes shut and sobbed. On her other side, Leif heard her, and wordlessly his arm rose and wrapped around her, and she turned her face into his shoulder and wept.
* * *
After some searching Raef came on a big white wolf and sank into it, crowding the wolf’s own small mind out of the way. He spent most of the night harassing the little band of Normans; their horses sensed him and were restless and loud the whole time, so that the sentries were always jumpy, and once or twice the whole camp came awake, shouting and running around and cursing one another. He enjoyed this. He strolled in almost to the fire once, before they saw him, and the yell was pleasing to him, although he barely got away.
Their leader was Eadric Streona, the sharp-eyed, tallow-voiced, clean-shaven Saxon who made himself so useful to the Queen.
In the dark, he caught something small and soft that squeaked when he bit it. Warm in his jaws as he ate it. The tiny brain like a gobbet of thick, rich blood. Toward dawn, he howled and howled, but nobody answered him.
Then he went back and returned to his camp and was Raef again. The others said nothing. They did not mind staying there another day to rest; Laissa was worn and lean and footsore, and even Leif had a pinched-in look. But there were nuts under the trees, and even now mushrooms, and Leif caught fish in the river as Raef slept.
* * *
Leif said, “What do you make of what he said about the Queen?”
Laissa shrugged. She was picking bits of fish from the flat rock he had cooked it on. She said, watching her hands, “She is – I know she is bewitched. In Constantinople I heard stories of people demons took. When she was with me, I know she was possessed. But what Raef said about her – I don’t understand that.” She lifted her gaze to him. “Do you think he is mad?”
Leif’s pale eyes narrowed, nestled in wrinkles. His mouth performed a slow smile. “Oh, probably. Hasn’t he always been? You married him.”
She licked her lips. The fish’s empty skin and bones lay there on the rock. She said, “He would let us go, if we wanted.”
“Do you want to leave him?”
“Where is he taking us?”
The man before her shrugged. Even after all the walking he was round bellied. He was losing the hair at the top of his head, his stubbly beard greying. She remembered what Raef had said, that he had chosen, every time, to follow him. He was a hero, Leif, without any of the hero’s shine. She loved him; she almost said so.
But Raef, surely, was mad.
She said, “Maybe it’s better to be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong reasons.”
Leif shook his head. “I don’t understand you either.” He stood up, shaking his cloak out, and hung it on a branch. “All I understand is that I have come this far and will not stop now.” His head turned, aiming his eyes toward Raef, who was lying asleep under the trees. “Call me when he wakes up.” He went down toward the river to catch more fish.
* * *
They went on the next day. They were moving along the foot of the hills now, the villages and farms farther apart, and some abandoned, burned, the fields fallow. They passed a dozen bones strewn around the road, as if animals had dragged pieces of bodies there. They stopped in an empty village, where they managed to catch a pig that had gone wild but still lived in its old muck-hole. Roasting joints of it in the fire they stuffed themselves, and Leif and Laissa slept at once.
Raef was restless and could not sleep. He got up and walked around the old village. He knew the white wolf was close by. It had been following them all day, since he had used its body against the Normans, as if he had left some knowledge of himself in it. The urge grew strong in him to be the wolf once more.
He could see no harm in it. They never had to know about it. He could look around and see if there were enemies nearby. He could scout the way forward. The moon shone above the hill. The long wind rustled through the grass. He went back to their camp, lay down, and yearned himself into that body.
He loped away across the hills, looking for something to chase and kill. At the crest of the slope he stopped to howl, calling out into the dark; wherever this howl reached, now, was his country. Being a wolf was much easier than being a man, only running and sniffing and chasing and eating, and the howling felt good, better than any man talk, the rising call into the wind for the rest of his kind. Come run with me.
As he loped along that idea grew in him: To be with others like him would feel so good, so exciting.
Then, from the near distance, an answering howl.
He stopped trying to do whatever it was he had set out to do and ran at once toward this sound. Something all through him responded to it. When he came on her, lean and dark in the moonlight, his body went stiff all over, his tail straight up and his fur on end down his back.
He strode around her prancing on his toes. She was beautiful, slim and dark as he was big and white, and she circled toward him, her head down, her ears flat. He minced closer, her odor delicious in his nostrils, rich and promising. She let him sniff her there, and he found her warm and moist and swollen, ready.
He climbed onto her, his forelegs over her shoulders, and coupled with her. This was not as good as with human beings, over in a moment, just a hot piping. But then as he slid down, disappointed, she nipped his ear and ran off, and he chased her, and they ran and chased, back and forth, until he caught her, and again he mounted her.
They ran shoulder to shoulder, the black wolf, the white wolf, and he wondered why he should ever go back to the human life.
There was something he should be thinking about. Instead he put all his power into running. They hunted together, catching hares in the moonlight. She licked the blood from his face.
At last, near dawn, after they had played and coupled a third time, he grew tired. If he fell asleep, he might turn back into a man. Even now he saw that doing so was dangerous, and he trotted back toward the human beings. The black wolf went part of the way and then veered off and was gone. He wished he could
go with her. It seemed so easy, a good life, to run, to couple, to hunt and kill and eat, no more. But he thought of Laissa, and suddenly he remembered something about Laissa he had forgotten.
The wolf slowed, reluctant to go near the people, and he left it and drew across the twilight back into his body.
She and Leif were awake. He had been lying on the ground; he sat up and went down by the fire, looking into the flames, frowning. There was something he should be thinking about. He felt different, his body strange, like a loose sack all around him. He poked at the fire with a stick.
“What’s wrong with your ear?” Laissa said, kneeling down beside him.
He put his hand up, only now realizing that his ear hurt; there was a great scab on it. He said, “I don’t know. I hurt it somehow.” He glanced at her, remembering the wolf, and felt a little guilty. He had betrayed her. His gaze fell to her middle, and once again, he felt the stir in there, the life spark.
She was grinning broadly at him. He flushed; he realized she knew, of course, better than he did. He leaned down and pressed his mouth against her clothes over her belly. She laid her hands on his hair. Silently he promised her he would not go back to the wolf.
They went on. The snow was deeper, the nights colder, and the wind blew harsh from the northwest. He stayed with Laissa during the nights. He wanted to go run as a wolf, but he stayed with Laissa. His ear itched and swelled, oozing under the scab, and sometimes the whole side of his head felt hot.
He heard the black wolf howl, calling him, and he shivered all over. Laissa grabbed him by the hair.
“Stay here,” she said, and he knew that she knew. He shut his eyes, unwilling to look at her, humiliated. All this time he had thought he hid it from her. The wolf’s howl shuddered in his mind. He had to go out running again. But she knew; she would know.
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