Daughter of the Wolf (46 page)

‘Go away.'

‘Widia? Please?'

He had known even without Athulf's insinuations that she would be back in the world soon. She couldn't hide in her father's house forever – and he knew fine well that she wouldn't, not her, even if she could. The pain and nausea racking him came from Athulf's assault, not from her presence.

‘Go away,' he repeated.

‘Just turn round and look me in the eye and say that.'

He obeyed, slowly. The bird on his wrist swayed and rebalanced herself. He could feel the grip of her talons, even through the thick leather.

‘They should never have married me to Hirel. I should have married you.'

He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Aye, maybe. And then it would have been my place in the bed Ingeld took.'

‘You can't believe that.' She took a few quick paces towards him but he held up his free hand in warning, and she stopped. ‘I would never have listened to Ingeld if I'd had you!' There was a shrill edge to her voice.

‘Aye, but the boar put paid to that. Do you not think I've wished a thousand times I'd just stood out of the way and let it charge at the man it was meant for? That would have saved us a lot of trouble.' He was struggling to keep his own voice steady, not wanting to startle the sleek, hooded bird whose claws clutched his glove so trustingly.

‘Elfrun would grant you land now, if you asked.' Saethryth was biting her full lower lip, her eyes beseeching.

‘Aye, and maybe she would. She's a good lord, to me at least.' Widia felt a slow heat growing inside him. ‘But you were glad enough to catch Hirel, and glad enough to betray him when something better beckoned to you. And look what came of that. He and Ingeld are not a month dead and here you are like a bitch in heat. Do you think me such a fool?'

A shuttered look came over Saethryth's face. ‘Nothing came of it.'

He wasn't sure he'd heard. ‘What?'

‘Nothing
came
of it,' she said, still soft, but he knew he'd caught the words right this time. ‘Hirel never killed Ingeld.' The flat certainty in her voice sent chills down between his shoulder blades.

‘Who did, then?'

She shrugged. ‘How should I know?' She looked at him sideways, dipping her head and glancing up through her pale lashes. ‘I thought maybe it was you.'

He stared at her. There was a long moment of silence, but to Widia it felt as though the air was full of screaming voices. At last he shook his head.

‘Never even tempted to kill him?' To his disbelief an intimate note had crept into her voice, and she took another couple of steps towards him.

Widia had a sudden, vivid memory of that jaunty back, Ingeld going whistling down the slope, and the ease with which he could have thrown his knife. How many folk were speculating, same as Saethryth? Everyone, was the answer. Every soul who had known he and she had been courting, before the boar... He had to stop this. Was she going round all Donmouth spreading her filthy lies? ‘What does it matter what I wanted? I never raised hand or knife to the man, and I can prove it. I was in the mews when the word came to the hall.' He was thinking back, his thoughts suddenly frantic as a netted linnet. Had anyone been in the mews with him? Only the dog-boy, and he couldn't speak. But surely no one who knew him would believe for a moment he could have done this thing?

‘Then maybe you didn't.' Saethryth shrugged, a lazy up and down of her shoulders. ‘It was someone else, maybe someone else who wanted me. Or hated Ingeld, for another reason. But not Hirel.'

Widia shook his head. Everything pointed to the shepherd. He was not surprised that grief and shock had sent Saethryth off balance, but he found her presence unsettling, and he longed for her to go and leave him with his birds.

‘I told Elfrun,' she said suddenly, a new hardness in her voice.

‘And?'

‘That's all.' Saethryth's face tightened. ‘She didn't want to know, so I left it. I've not said anything. I wouldn't have spoken now, except for you saying it was my fault.' He opened his mouth, but she was still talking, in the same stiff, flat voice. ‘And now I'm back under that roof, with Da and Mam, and so I thought I'd come to you. I always did like you, and maybe I could forget about your face. But now I see you've changed too. Everything's changed.'

Somehow the hay had been brought in in its time, and the barley and the oats harvested, and the sun had shone on Donmouth, and the celebrations in church and hall and harvest field had all happened in the right way and in due season. The sheep had even been shorn, by the lads who had been working with Hirel and as many extra hands as they could muster, and the raw wool baled; and the women's house had been busy dawn to dusk with the rustle and thud of the looms. Elfrun knew that behind her back the gossip and the laughter had risen to something like their old levels.

But not when she was there. Never when she was there.

Nor had Elfrun ever mustered the courage to bring up the matter of the lambskins with Luda. When she found time and nerve to tell Widia the bare outline of what had happened, and asked him to go up to the sheepwick and bring the skins down from the secret place in the rafters, he reported them already gone. ‘What will you do?'

She had shaken her head. ‘Be more watchful. What can I do?' She felt the familiar tightness in her temples. ‘I've made the man drown his own son-in-law. Isn't that enough?' Somewhere around the place there was a bag of her silver, but Donmouth was big, and a little leather pouch was an easy thing to hide.

At the harvest meeting she had stood up in the assembly before king and archbishop, Donmouth and Illingham and all the hard-faced men, and for the first time found she didn't care what folk might say about her. She had reported her uncle's murder, and the drowning of Hirel, and she accepted the murmurs of shock, and approval, and the quiet words that came afterwards, when men who had known Ingeld from his boyhood stopped her to pay their respects. Never had the name of the abbot of Donmouth sounded so golden in men's mouths. She had had a brief meeting with the king in the splendour of his tent, the narrow-faced archbishop standing by. She had looked at their faces, knowing that her wellbeing lay in the palm of their hands, and murmured quiet words. For all the recent scandal Donmouth was still producing the renders and tithes king and Church demanded. They had let her go with their blessing, but she knew that with neither Radmer nor Ingeld to give her ballast her grasp on Donmouth's tiller was of the most fragile. They wouldn't take it from her yet – to do so now would look like a reprimand, and she had done nothing wrong.

But it was probably only a matter of time.

And she knew men looked at her curiously, sideways, a new calculation in their eyes.

She unhooked her cloak. Wynn had brought the new and the old tags, and riveted them back in place with sharp little taps of her hammer, squeezing them into place with tiny pliers. Elfrun had been bowled over by the skill of the girl's work. To be sure, the new one was cruder, its shape blurred, the etching and chasing nothing like so fine as its parent. But it looked much the same from a little distance; it weighed as much, it held the strap down and it flashed in the sun, and Elfrun had been effusively grateful to the gruff, defensive child. She had worn the cloak at the meeting and its red folds had been mail-shirt and shield to her.

And she would need it to keep her warm on her walk to the minster.

September was only midway through but the long days of summer were a half-forgotten memory. The ash trees were heavy with seeds and the thorn with haws, the leaves brown-edged and wind-burned, and the summer grasses, the dockans and nettles and hogweed were dying back in one great sagging mass of vegetation. The thin wind had swung round to the north-east and it nipped like a ferret, sending the dead leaves spinning before it and heralding winter, and she was gladder than ever that the harvest was safely in.

‘We'll finish this tomorrow. It's too dark.' She wound her thread round the shuttle and rested it on a cross-beam, out of the reach of the kittens. Coming out of the weaving shed she could see that although the sun had already set there was still just enough light to make out the clouds of the upper air racing, like the leaves, before the wind.

There had been no time for her to walk even as far as the minster for the last two weeks, she had been so taken up with seeing that the dead bees were strained out of the honey and checking that the bales of wool were the right weight; and then the harvest meeting; and now that there was a little breathing space she found herself longing for the calm of the church and Fredegar's clear dark voice singing the antiphons. She would be too late for vespers, but sometimes she thought she loved the night hours best. That was such a simple world. She knew what the rules were. All she had to do was keep her face quiet and her hands folded and come in with the responses at the right time.

Abarhild had not mentioned sending her to a house of nuns in all the weeks since Ingeld's murder, but Elfrun was beginning to hanker for the haven her grandmother's plan had offered. Take a bag of silver from the chest in the heddern, saddle Hafoc, ask Widia to come with her for escort, and ride the three or four days north. Knock at the gate, ask for the abbess, mention Abarhild's name, and be received into silence and darkness, where she could give up being Elfrun of Donmouth...

Another foolish dream.

The equinoctial dark had come down quickly, and it was the last night before the new moon. But she wasn't going to let that stop her. She might not be able to walk away from Donmouth altogether, but she could still walk down to the minster to share in the night offices. Perhaps she would spend the night with Abarhild, though there seemed to be nothing that comforted her grandmother these days.

And she would definitely take Gethyn.

At the thick stand of coppiced ash that marked halfway between hall and minster, she paused for a moment, one hand on the nearest smooth trunk, and tried to gather her chaotic thoughts, looking down through the clusters of bristling shoots and poles towards the tussocky grass and the salt marsh and the white-flecked sea beyond. The heavy branches of the untended standard trees were rustling and stirring with the wind; and it was a long moment before she realized that among all the slim dense verticals there was one that wasn't quite right, a tree not like the others. No, not a tree. A human figure, a dozen yards away or more and wearing much the same browns and greens as the trees, staring up at her through the dusk.

Her first thought was that it was some kind of trowie spirit, and she stepped rapidly backwards, out from under the shadow of the trees, sketching the sign of the cross like a breastplate before coming to the realization that the figure was vaguely familiar.

That girl, the one who had been with Finn, three months back. Elfrun groped for the name in vain. Something outlandish. She was too distracted by the hot, shameful memory of herself screaming like a stuck pig and throwing that valuable beaker to shatter against the doorpost.

Gethyn had come running back to her, and now he too was looking at the girl, ears pricked.

She hadn't moved. Elfrun went towards her again, back under the shade of the trees. The girl stood some way off the path, downslope, just where the trees began to thin out and mix with the long, fading grasses and brambles before running down to the salt-marsh edge. She was still looking intently up at Elfrun. There was something odd about her; it was hard to be sure in the failing light, but the darkness of her hair and her dress and the way the latter hung in thick clinging folds suggested she was soaked to the skin. Had she fallen in the stream? But that would never have got her so wet, not running summer-shallow as it still was. Elfrun frowned, and paused, and the girl beckoned imperiously. Ailu, was that the name?

‘What do you want?' She could hear the peremptory edge and she tried to soften her voice. ‘Why are you here? Are you all right?'

The way the girl was poised, her eyes wide and her shoulders tense, reminded Elfrun of those times when she had found herself face to face with a doe in the woods, that moment of stand-off while the animal assesses its danger, the knowledge that if she were to take one more step the wild creature would break free from the moment of enchantment and hurtle away into the depths of the trees.

But this was silly. Ailu – no,
Auli
, that was it – Auli was just another girl. Even if they didn't share a language.

She took another step, and Auli ducked her head and pelted away, hurtling down the hill despite having to haul her claggy, clinging skirts away from her legs with both hands.

‘Stay, Gethyn. Wait! Auli!' Elfrun didn't know why she shouted – the other girl clearly had no intention of coming back – and all she herself really wanted was to say sorry for screaming at her and Finn and throwing them out of her yards, and she couldn't do that in words Auli could understand.

Elfrun looked for her but she was gone, down and out of the trees and vanished in the fast-fading light among the tall reed-beds of the salt marsh.

Auli had been trying to say something to her, with that peremptory gesture.

Why had she been beckoning if she was going to turn and run away? And what was she doing here, unannounced and alone?

Elfrun left the path, treading carefully among the mud and brambles as she worked her way down, trying to remember just where Auli had been standing. It was darker under the thickly pressing trees, and she thought angrily that here was another part of the life of Donmouth that had been neglected. With her father away there was little building going on, and less maintenance. Luda needed to send some of the men out here, from minster and hall both now the harvest was over, to thin the coppice and set the poles aside to season. The brambles needed cutting away, as well...