had stopped his handful of bowmen from shooting at me, and then he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Here!” he shouted at me. “Tomorrow’s dusk!” Then his oars bit water, theWindViper turned like a dancer, the blades dragged the sea, and she was gone. I retrieved WaspSting and went to join the fight, but it was over. Our crews had massacred that one Danish crew, all except a handful of men who had been spared on Alfred’s orders. The rest were a bloody pile on the tide line and we stripped them of their armor and weapons, took off their clothes, and left their white bodies to the gulls. Their ship, an old and leaking vessel, was towed back to Hamtun. Alfred was pleased. In truth he had let six ships escape, but it had still been a victory and news of it would encourage his troops fighting in the north. One of his priests questioned the prisoners, noting their answers on parchment. Alfred asked some questions of his own, which the priest translated, and when he had learned all that he could he came back to where I was steering and looked at the blood staining the   deck by my right foot. “You fight well, Uhtred.”

“We fought badly, lord,” I said, and that was true. Their shield wall had held, and if they had not retreated to rescue their ships they might even have beaten us back into the sea. I had not done well. There are days when the sword and shield seem clumsy, when the enemy seems quicker, and this had been one such day. I was angry with myself.

“You were talking to one of them,” Alfred said accusingly. “I saw you. You were talking to one of the pagans.”

“I was telling him, lord,” I said, “that his mother was a whore, his father a turd of hell, and that his children are pieces of weasel shit.”

He flinched at that. He was no coward, Alfred, and he knew the anger of battle, but he never liked the insults that men shouted. I think he would have liked war to be decorous. He looked behindHeahengel where the dying sun’s light was rippling our long wake red. “The year you promised to give me will soon be finished,” he said.

“True, lord.”

“I pray you will stay with us.”

“When Guthrum comes, lord,” I said, “he will come with a fleet to darken the sea and our twelve ships will be crushed.” I thought perhaps that was what Leofric had been arguing about, about the futility of trying to stem a seaborne invasion with twelve illnamed ships. “If I stay,” I asked, “what use will I be if the fleet dares not put to sea?”

“What you say is true,” Alfred said, suggesting that his argument with Leofric had been about something else, “but the crews can fight ashore. Leofric tells me you are as good a warrior as any he has seen.”

“Then he has never seen himself, lord.”

“Come to me when your time is up,” he said, “and I will find a place for you.”

“Yes, lord,” I said, but in a tone that only acknowledged that I understood what he wanted, not that I would obey him.

“But you should know one thing, Uhtred.” His voice was stern. “If any man commands my troops, that man must know how to read and write.”

I almost laughed at that. “So he can read the Psalms, lord?” I asked sarcastically.

“So he can read my orders,” Alfred said coldly, “and send me news.”

“Yes, lord,” I said again.

They had lit beacons in Hamtun’s waters so we could find our way home, and the night wind stirred the liquid reflections of moon and stars as we slid to our anchorage. There were lights ashore, and fires, and ale, and food and laughter, and best of all the promise of meeting Ragnar the next day.

  Ragnar took a huge risk, of course, in going back to Heilincigae, though perhaps he reckoned, truthfully as it turned out, that our ships would need a day to recover from the fight. There were injured men to tend, weapons to sharpen, and so none of our fleet put to sea that day. Brida and I rode horses to Hamanfunta, a village that lived off trapping eels, fishing, and making salt, and a sliver of a coin found stabling for our horses and a fisherman willing to take us out to Heilincigae where no one now lived, for the Danes had slaughtered them all. The fisherman would not wait for us, too frightened of the coming night and the ghosts that would be moaning and screeching on the island, but he promised to return in the morning.

Brida, Nihtgenga, and I wandered that low place, going past the previous day’s Danish dead who had already been pecked ragged by the gulls, past burnedout huts where folk had made a poor living from the sea and the marsh before the Vikings came and then, as the sun sank, we carried charred timbers to the shore and I used flint and steel to make a fire. The flames flared up in the dusk and Brida touched my arm to show meWindViper, dark against the darkening sky, coming through the sea lake’s entrance. The last of the daylight touched the sea red and caught the gilding onWindViper ’s beast head. I watched her, thinking of all the fear that such a sight brought on England. Wherever there was a creek, a harbor, or a river mouth, men feared to see the Danish ships. They feared those beasts at the prow, feared the men behind the beasts, and prayed to be spared the Northmen’s fury. I loved the sight. Loved WindViper. Her oars rose and fell, I could hear the shafts creaking in their leatherlined holes, and I could see mailed men at her prow, and then the bows scrunched on the sand and the long oars went still. Ragnar put the ladder against the prow. All Danish ships have a short ladder to let them climb down to a beach, and he came down the rungs slowly and alone. He was in full mail coat, helmeted, with a sword at his side, and once ashore he paced to the small flames of our fire like a warrior come for vengeance. He stopped a spear’s length away and then stared at me through the black eyeholes of his helmet. “Did you kill my father?” he asked harshly.

“On my life,” I said, “on Thor,” I pulled out the hammer amulet and clutched it, “on my soul,” I went on,

“I did not.”

He pulled off his helmet, stepped forward, and we embraced. “I knew you did not,” he said.

“Kjartan did it,” I said, “and we watched him.” We told him the whole story, how we had been in the high woods watching the charcoal cool, and how we had been cut off from the hall, and how it had been fired, and how the folk had been slaughtered.

“If I could have killed one of them,” I said, “I would, and I would have died doing it, but Ravn always said there should be at least one survivor to tell the tale.”

“What did Kjartan say?” Brida asked.

Ragnar was sitting now, and two of his men had brought bread and dried herrings and cheese and ale.

“Kjartan said,” Ragnar spoke softly, “that the English rose against the hall, encouraged by Uhtred, and that he revenged himself on the killers.”

“And you believed him?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted. “Too many men said he did it, but he is Earl Kjartan now. He leads three times more   men than I do.”

“And Thyra?” I asked. “What does she say?”

“Thyra?” He stared at me, puzzled.

“Thyra lived,” I told him. “She was taken away by Sven.”

He just stared at me. He had not known that his sister lived and I saw the anger come on his face, and then he raised his eyes to the stars and he howled like a wolf.

“It is true,” Brida said softly. “Your sister lived.”

Ragnar drew his sword and laid it on the sand and touched the blade with his right hand. “If it is the last thing I do,” he swore, “I shall kill Kjartan, kill his son, and all his followers. All of them!”

“I would help,” I said. He looked at me through the flames. “I loved your father,” I said, “and he treated me like a son.”

“I will welcome your help, Uhtred,” Ragnar said formally. He wiped the sand from the blade and slid it back into its fleecelined scabbard. “You will sail with us now?”

I was tempted. I was even surprised at how strongly I was tempted. I wanted to go with Ragnar, I wanted the life I had lived with his father. But fate rules us. I was sworn to Alfred for a few more weeks, and I had fought alongside Leofric for all these months, and fighting next to a man in the shield wall makes a bond as tight as love. “I cannot come,” I said, and wished I could have said the opposite.

“I can,” Brida said, and somehow I was not surprised by that. She had not liked being left ashore in Hamtun as we sailed to fight. She felt trammeled and useless, unwanted, and I think she yearned after the Danish ways. She hated Wessex. She hated its priests, hated their disapproval, and hated their denial of all that was joy.

“You are a witness of my father’s death,” Ragnar said to her, still formal.

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