to an agreement. He agreed to do my work that day.
Serpent-Breath is a lovely weapon. She was made by Ealdwulf the Smith in Northumbria and her blade is a magical thing, flexible and strong, and when she had been made I had wanted her plain iron hilt decorated with silver or gilt-bronze, but Ealdwulf had refused. “It’s a tool,” he had told me, “just a tool. Something to make your work easier.”
She had handles of ash wood, one either side of the sword’s tang, and over the years the twin handles had become polished and smooth. Such worn handles are dangerous. In battle they can slip in the hand, especially when blood is splashed on them, and so I told the swordsmith that I wanted new handles riveted onto the hilt, and that the handles must give a good grip, and that the small silver cross that Hild had given me must be embedded in the hilt’s pommel.
“I shall do it, lord,” he said.
“Today.”
“I shall try, lord,” he said weakly.
“You will succeed,” I said, “and the work will be well done.” I drew Serpent-Breath and her blade was bright in the shadowed room as I held her toward the smith’s furnace and in the red firelight I saw the patterns on her steel. She had been forged by beating three smooth and four twisted rods into one metal blade. She had been heated and hammered, heated and hammered, and when she was done, and when the seven rods had become one single savage streak of shining steel, the twists in the four rods were left in the blade as ghostly patterns. That was how she got her name, for the patterns looked like the swirling breath of a dragon.
“She is a fine blade, lord,” the swordsmith said.
“She is the blade that killed Ubba by the sea,” I said, stroking the steel.
“Yes, lord,” he said. He was terrified of me now.
“And you will do the work today,” I stressed, and I put sword and scabbard on his fire-scarred bench. I laid Hild’s cross on the hilt, then added a silver coin. I was no longer wealthy, but nor was I poor, and with the help of Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting I knew I would be rich again.
It was a lovely autumn day. The sun shone, making the new wood of Alfred’s church glow like gold. Ragnar and I were waiting for the king and we sat on the newly-scythed grass in a courtyard and Ragnar watched a monk carrying a pile of parchments to the royal scriptorium. “Everything’s written down here,” he said, “everything! Can you read?”
“I can read and write.”
He was impressed by that. “Is it useful?”
“It’s never been useful for me,” I admitted.
“So why do they do it?” he wondered.
“Their religion is written down,” I said, “ours isn’t.”
“A written religion?” He was puzzled by that.
“They’ve got a book,” I said, “and it’s all in there.”
“Why do they need it written down?”
“I don’t know. They just do. And, of course, they write down the laws. Alfred loves making new laws, and they all have to be written in books.”
“If a man can’t remember the laws,” Ragnar said, “then he’s got too many of them.”
The shouts of children interrupted us, or rather the offended screech of one small boy and the mocking laughter of a girl, and a heartbeat later the girl ran around the corner. She looked nine or ten years old, had golden hair as bright as the sun, and was carrying a carved wooden horse that was plainly the property of the small boy who followed her. The girl, brandishing the carved horse like a trophy, ran across the grass. She was coltish, thin and happy, while the boy, three or four years younger, was built more solidly and looked thoroughly miserable. He had no chance of catching the girl for she was much too quick, but she saw me and her eyes widened and she stopped in front of us. The boy caught up with her, but was too overawed by Ragnar and me to try to retrieve his wooden horse. A nurse, red-faced and panting, appeared around the corner and shouted the children’s names. “Edward! ?thelflaed!”
“It’s you!” ?thelflaed said, staring at me with a look of delight.
“It’s me,” I said, and I stood because ?thelflaed was the daughter of a king and Edward was the ?theling, the prince who might well rule Wessex when Alfred, his father, died.
“Where have you been?” ?thelflaed demanded, as if she had only missed me for a week or two.
“I have been in the land of giants,” I said, “and places where fire runs like water and where the mountains are made of ice and where sisters are never, ever unkind to their little brothers.”
“Never?” she asked, grinning.
“I want my horse!” Edward insisted and tried to snatch it from her, but ?thelflaed held it out of reach.
“Never use force to get from a girl,” Ragnar said to Edward, “what you can take by guile.”
“Guile?” Edward frowned, evidently unfamiliar with the word.
Ragnar frowned at ?thelflaed. “Is the horse hungry?”
“No.” She knew he was playing a game and she wanted to see if she could win.
“But suppose I use magic,” Ragnar suggested, “and make it eat grass?”
“You can’t.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “I have been to places where the wooden horses go to pasture every morning, and every night the grass grows to touch the sky and every day the wooden horses eat it back to nothing again.”
“No they don’t,” she said, grinning.
“And if I say the magic words,” Ragnar said, “your horse will eat the grass.”
“It’s my horse,” Edward insisted.
“Magic words?” ?thelflaed was interested now.
“You have to put the horse on the grass,” Ragnar said.
She looked at me, wanting reassurance, but I just shrugged, and so she looked back at Ragnar who was being very serious, and she decided she wanted to see some magic and so she carefully placed the wooden horse beside a swathe of cut grass. “Now?” she asked expectantly.
“You have to shut your eyes,” Ragnar said, “turn around three times very fast, then shout Havacar very loudly.”
“Havacar?”
“Careful!” he warned her, looking alarmed. “You can’t say magic words carelessly.”
So she shut her eyes, turned around three times, and while she did Ragnar pointed at the horse and nodded to Edward who snatched it up and ran off to the nurse, and by the time ?thelflaed, staggering slightly from dizziness, had shouted her magic word the horse was gone.
“You cheated!” she accused Ragnar.
“But you learned a lesson,” I said, squatting beside her as if I were going to tell her a secret. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Never trust a Dane.”
She smiled at that. She had known me well during the long wet winter when her family had been fugitives in the marshes of Sumors?te and in those dismal months she had learned to like me and I had come to like her. She reached out now and touched my nose. “How did that happen?”
“A man broke my nose,” I said. It had been Hakka, striking me in
“It’s crooked,” she said.
“It lets me smell crooked smells.”
“What happened to the man who broke it?”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I’m going to be married.”
“You are?” I asked.
“To ?thelred of Mercia,” she said proudly, then frowned because a flicker of distaste had crossed my face.
“To my cousin?” I asked, trying to look pleased.
“Is ?thelred your cousin?” she asked.
