The Edge of Light (7 page)

Ethelred was lying on the bed in the sweltering room, resting. He put his hands behind his head and said, “Thank God. Now perhaps the heat will break.” Lightning flashed. “Close the shutters, will you, Alfred?” he added.

“The room will be hot as fire,” Alfred answered, but left off what he was doing to go close and fasten the shutters of the room’s single window. Then he turned to look at Ethelred stretched out on the bed. “I cannot find my stomach medicine,” he said. “I think I left it in my saddlebag. I am going to the barn to fetch it.”

Ethelred sat up. “You cannot go out in this storm! Send one of the thanes in the hall.” He looked closely at Alfred and frowned, “Are you feeling ill?”

Alfred smiled crookedly. “No. But you know my stomach, Ethelred.

Strange halls and strange foods do not agree with it. I would have the medicine by me just in case of need.” He began to walk to the door.

“Send one of the thanes,” Ethelred said again as his brother picked up his cloak and went out into the hall.

But Alfred ignored the thanes sitting on the hall benches and crossed the room swiftly, looking neither to the left nor to the right. He pulled the door open, flung his cloak around his shoulders, and went out into the rain.

Lightning lit the courtyard. Alfred raised his face to the sky. The rain pounded on his skin, soaked into his hair. It felt cool and wonderful. He began to walk slowly toward the barn where the horses were stabled. Then the thunder crashed. The storm was still some distance up the valley, he thought.

The courtyard was deserted and the barn door was closed tight. Alfred opened it and stepped inside. A horse whinnied and kicked the wood of its stall. Another horse answered. “It’s all right, my beauties,” Alfred said soothingly. “Only a storm.” He left the door open to allow some light into the dark barn and walked over to rub his chestnut’s forehead. Lightning lit the world again, illuminating the barn. The stallion snorted and threw up its head. Alfred went back to the door to look out.

He loved storms. He had not forgotten his medicine at all, had only wanted an excuse to find someplace where he could watch the storm. Ethelred, he knew, would insist on hiding behind shuttered windows, no matter how hot. Ethelred did not like storms at all.

As he stood there at the door, a small figure came into view, wrapped in a hooded cloak and running across the courtyard. A serving girl, Alfred thought, then raised his brows in surprise as he realized that the figure was making for his barn. The girl did not see him standing in the doorway until she was almost on top of him; then she looked up and said, “Oh!” in a startled and oddly deep voice.

Lightning flashed again. The face under the brown hood was brilliantly illuminated: a child’s face, black-browed, with black-lashed eyes of the darkest blue Alfred had ever seen. Thunder crashed. “You had better come in,” Alfred said. “The lightning is getting closer.”

The child came in the door after him and pushed back her hood. Two long glossy braids tumbled loose, falling straight to her waist. Alfred saw that the braids were as black as her eyebrows. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in an accent that could belong only to a Mercian noblewoman.

They looked at each other. Then, “Sheltering from the storm,” Alfred replied, his clipped voice in sharp contrast to her deep drawl. “What are
you
doing here?”

She glanced inside the barn. “I came to be with the horses. They get restless during storms.”

“I see.” His face was perfectly grave. “Are you a groom?”

“Of course not!” The look she gave him was scornful. Then, as if the name should explain all, “I am Elswyth.” He raised his eyebrows in elaborate mystification, and she deigned to add, “My brother is the Ealdorman of Gaini.”

“I rather thought you might be Athulf s sister,” he replied. “One doesn’t often see black hair in Mercia.” Then, with absolute courtesy, “I am Alfred, Prince of Wessex.”

He watched as her blue eyes widened. Lightning flashed and the thunder roared almost immediately after. Inside the barn a horse whinnied frantically. Elswyth called something soothing but did not leave the door. Instead she pulled her cloak more closely around her shoulders and turned to look out into the courtyard. Alfred suddenly realized that she had been drawn to the barn for exactly the same reason as he. Lightning flashed again and he too turned to watch the storm,

For perhaps ten minutes neither of them spoke. They stood in the open doorway, letting the chill hard rain blow on them, watching the storm. Finally, as the lightning dimmed and began to move away, they turned to look at each other once more.

“Your presence certainly helped calm the horses,” Alfred said.

She had her brother’s arrogant nose, though hers was slim and elegant as well as haughty. Her eyes were a much darker blue. He had not thought eyes could be so dark and yet so blue. “And why were you not in the guest hall, Prince?” she retorted in her curiously husky unchildlike voice.

“I came to the barn to find something I had forgotten.”

Silence fell as they regarded each other speculatively. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Then, at exactly the same moment, they began to laugh.

“I love storms,” Elswyth confessed. “As soon as my mother began to close up the shutters, I slipped out.”

“I did exactly the same.” They were regarding each other now with distinct approval.

“You are the Lady Ethelswith’s youngest brother?” she asked after a minute.

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I have heard of you.”

He smiled faintly and did not reply. She leaned her shoulders against the open door and looked him up and down. She could not be more than twelve, Alfred thought. Her self-possession amused him. “I met your brother earlier this afternoon,” he said.

“Athulf. Yes.” She shrugged, “He has been attending on the king since my father died. My other brother and I have just come to Tamworth to join Athulf and my mother. I can’t see why I had to come. I usually bide in the country on our estates.”

She did not sound pleased with her present situation. “Perhaps your brother wished to give you a treat,” Alfred said.

“A treat?” She looked at him as if he were mad. “I can assure you, Prince, it is no treat to be cooped up here in Tamworth with my mother.”

Alfred’s lips quivered. He knew Eadburgh, Elswyth’s mother, and he could see Elswyth’s point perfectly.

“Speaking of my mother,” she said glumly now. “She will be looking for me. I had better get back to our hall.”

Without a backward look she walked out into the brightening yard. Alfred watched her small figure until it disappeared from view into one of the halls; then he too left the barn in order to return to Ethelred.

There was a great hunt on the day of Alfred’s birthday. Burgred knew his young brother-by-marriage well enough to know that nothing would please Alfred so much as a hunt. Hunting seemed to be a passion that ran in the West Saxon royal family. Hunting and dogs.

Ethelred had his two new wolfhounds running beside his horse when Alfred trotted his own chestnut stallion up to stand beside his brother’s bay in the bright morning sunshine. The weather had been considerably cooler since the storm, and the great courtyard of Tamworth was crowded and noisy, with nobles on horseback, and grooms and houndsmen and gamesmen on foot. The excited dogs milled around under the legs of the horses. Alfred noted with approval that none of the high-spirited Mercian horses had tried to kick a hound. Burgred’s horses were well-trained, he thought, as his eye alighted on a small gray gelding with a particularly elegant carriage. A beautiful animal, he thought, and looked to see who was the rider. His eyes widened in surprise as he recognized young Elswyth, dressed in brown hunting tunic and cross-gartered trousers like all the men in the courtyard, and sitting astride the gray with perfect ease.

Alfred’s finely drawn brows drew together. This was not a hunt for girls. What could her brother be thinking of? For Elswyth was obviously here with Athulf’s permission; Alfred saw that he was sitting his own bay right beside his sister.

The tide in the courtyard seemed to shift suddenly and Alfred looked to see what was causing the disruption. A woman dressed in a cream-colored gown and blue tunic was threading her purposeful way on foot through the mounted men and the dogs. The shift in the tide had come from the efforts of the riders to draw back from her path. It took Alfred but a moment to recognize the woman as Eadburgh, wife of Ethelred Mucill, and Elswyth’s mother.

Alfred looked back to Elswyth. She too was watching her mother draw ever closer, and she did not look happy. Before he consciously realized what he was going to do, Alfred was threading his stallion through the maze of horses and dogs, aiming in the direction of the Ealdorman of Gaini and his sister.

Eadburgh reached them before he did. “Are you mad, Athulf, to allow your sister to make such a display of herself?” Eadburgh was saying in an imperious voice as Alfred’s chestnut came within hearing range of the small family grouping. Then, turning to her daughter, she said, “You are to take that horse back to the stable immediately, Elswyth.”

Elswyth’s face was stormy. In the bright sun of the courtyard Alfred could see that she still had the beautiful skin of childhood: pearly, close-textured, flawless. Her eyes glittered midnight blue as she looked down at her mother. “Athulf said I might ride with the hunt,” she answered in a furious, husky voice. “I am a better rider than any man here! You know that, Mother. I am in no danger.”

Alfred halted his horse and eavesdropped shamelessly.

Eadburgh spoke next, her well-bred voice cold as ice. “You will be in danger from me if you do not get off that horse immediately, Elswyth,” she said.

“Now, Mother,” Athulf put in placatingly, “I told Elswyth she might come with us. Why deprive the child of her pleasure? She will come to no hurt. I promise I will stay beside her the whole while.”

Eadburgh s face was as cold as her voice. She started to reply to Athulf, but stopped as she saw another horse approaching. Then, “Ceolwulf!” she said to the new arrival. “Speak to your brother. He is allowing your sister to go on this hunt.”

So this was the other brother, Alfred thought as he walked his horse forward once more. Ceolwulf’s handsome face bore a distinctly troubled expression. He looked unhappily from his mother to his brother.

Elswyth said, “Do not seek to draw Ceolwulf into this, Mother. You know how he hates dissension.”

Alfred’s stallion came to a perfect halt beside her, and he smiled down into her startled face and said charmingly, “Lady Elswyth! I am so pleased to see you are joining my birthday hunt.” He looked from her dark blue eyes to the lighter eyes of Athulf, and thence down to Eadburgh. He raised his brows in surprise, then frowned in concern. “My lady, what are you doing on foot in the midst of all these horses? Allow me to summon one of my men to see you to the safety of your hall.”

There was nothing Eadburgh could do, as well he knew. He watched with a faint smile as she made him some sort of answer; then he gestured for a groomsman to come escort her from the courtyard. As soon as she was out of earshot he turned to her three children.

Elswyth was laughing. “Thank you, Prince. I owe you a favor.”

“You can repay me by not hurting yourself,” Alfred replied.

Her nose elevated in a gesture that was already becoming familiar to him. Athulf said with amusement, “Small chance of that. It is probably I who will get hurt, trying to keep up with her.”

Ceolwulf said unhappily, “Mother will be furious. Why must you always defy her, Elswyth?”

“Mother wants me to be a replica of herself,” Elswyth replied, “but I am not made that way.” Then, with impatient exasperation, “You cannot always please everyone, Ceolwulf. There are times when you must make a choice.”

The horns blew. Alfred saw Ethelred looking around for him, and with a nod in Elswyth’s direction he squeezed his legs gently and moved forward to rejoin his brother.

Elswyth was gloriously happy, For one dreadful moment in the courtyard she had been afraid she was going to lose her chance to hunt; Athulf would go only so far for her against their mother. But the West Saxon prince had saved her. He had done it quite deliberately, too. She had seen that clear enough. He had had an unfair advantage of her mother, and he had taken it. Ruthlessly. Elswyth thoroughly approved of such tactics. Her only regret was that she herself held such an advantage all too seldom.

The summer day was warm; too warm in the sun, but under the canopy of trees in the forest it was cool and green and perfect for the hunt. Elswyth was never so happy as when she was out on horseback, wildly galloping after the hounds. Sometimes she thought that it was only with animals that she was ever really happy. People of late seemed to make so many demands, never seemed to be satisfied with her the way she was. Even her brothers, with whom she had lived all her life—even they had changed since her father died.

But she and Silken—and here Elswyth leaned forward to pat the shining dappled gray neck of her little gelding—she and Silken understood each other completely, were always in perfect accord.

The nets had been set by the huntsmen, and the hounds were doing their work of driving the game into them. Elswyth sat her horse at a little distance from the kill. It was the chase she loved, not its conclusion. It was not so much the blood that dismayed her as it was a sense of the unfairness of it all. The deer tangled in the nets did not have a chance against the men and the spears. Elswyth favored a fight that was more even.

Half an hour later, she saw one.

The huntsmen had found a boar in the thickness of the forest along the river. A huge boar, the largest Elswyth had ever seen. They had maneuvered him into a clearing around a forest pond, and he was standing there when they came up, his back to the pond, the sun shining on his hard gray bristles and wicked white tusks. The mounted nobles halted within the cover of the trees as he snorted and pawed the ground. He was a ferocious-looking beast, Elswyth thought in awe. She had not known boars could be so big. He snorted again savagely, planted his short legs wide, and lowered his snout to the ground. His small eyes glowed red as they surveyed the men and horses before him.