Nicola Griffith - Hild

Onnen pushed Hild forward. The visitors, both slight, with magnificent moustaches and the air of brothers, turned.

“Ah,” said the taller one in British. Strange British, from the west. “You have your father’s hair.”

Yffing chestnut, her mother called it. And her outside one big prickliness like a chestnut, too , said Onnen. Or a hedgepig , said her mother, and they would laugh. No one was laughing now but Ceredig, and it was his laugh-because-I-am-king laugh, the one for important visitors, to show ease in his own hall. Everything a king does is a lie , Onnen said.

And then the stranger looked beyond Hild. “And who’s this?”

Hild twisted to look. Cian had followed her into the firelight, ready to snatch her back, as he’d done in spring, when the ram had charged as she got too near.

“He is nobody,” said her mother, in Anglisc. “My woman’s boy.” And as she turned—with that long, careless grace that made men look, made the strangers look—Onnen put her arm around Cian and tugged him gently back into the shadow. But this visitor was quicker than most.

“Wait,” he said. “You.” He crooked his finger, and Onnen and Cian stepped back into the light. “Your name?”

“Onnen, lord.”

“And this is your son?”

“He is, lord.”

“And yourself, Onnen, you were born here?”

“Indeed, lord. Six and twenty years since.” She stood a little prouder. “I am cousin to Ceredig king.”

“You’re all cousins in this benighted wood,” said the second stranger, but he was already turning away and beckoning for the first to do likewise. And Hild understood that although her mother and Onnen had told nothing but the truth, the visitors had been fed an essential lie.

Quiet mouth, bright mind.

“Edwin Snakebeard will come to avenge Hereric Yffing’s death,” the stranger was saying to Ceredig.

“Of course he’ll come. He’ll come from the south with Rædwald’s war band to claim Deira and lay his rival kinsman’s death at my door. The excuse he’s looked for. Or made.”

Onnen tried to herd Hild away, but Hild rooted herself to the floor, the way puppies turned limp and heavy when she tried to pick them up.

Ceredig was still talking “… this hall is burnt about my head, will there be a place for me with the king of Gwynedd?”

The stranger shrugged: maybe yes, maybe no.

“So. I’ll fight, then. As I must. And make for Cadfan of Gwynedd an excuse, in his turn, to swarm north with fire and sword against the Anglisc. But tell you, Marro, to Cadfan king, aye and young Cadwallon, that one day he’ll have to face this serpent, this king-killer, in the open. Tell him that.”

Marro said, “I will tell him.”

Gwynedd , Hild thought. Marro. Cadwallon.

Her mother was looking at her. “Hild, go with Onnen now, to your sister. Comfort Hereswith for me.” And Hild’s mind closed seamlessly over the names as though they’d never been.

Hereswith was eight. She had their mother’s hair, the colour of linden honey, and their mother’s round, pretty face—usually. Tonight, when Onnen pulled aside the embroidered curtain, Hereswith fell on her, weeping, babbling in a mix of Anglisc and British: What would happen now? Where would they go? Had it hurt when their father died? Would they starve? Where was their mother?

Seeing Hereswith weep started a tickle deep in Hild’s chest, and then her nose ran, and then she howled as Onnen unfastened her cyrtel and tucked her next to Hereswith on the horsehair and sweet-gale mattress, promised them warm milk, and stroked her chestnut hair. Her dead, dead da’s hair.

Hild shut it out, imagined she could hear nothing but the wind in the elms, blowing where it would, a soft roar under the moon.

She woke to Hereswith’s slow, steady breaths beside her and her mother’s murmur above. She kept her eyes tightly closed.

“… can’t flee to Frankia, not with the storm season almost on us.”

“The Hwicce might take us in,” Onnen said. “They took Osric. And he’s ætheling.”

“Only a cousin. And soon enough he’ll be riding to Deira to show Edwin Usurper his belly and kiss his ring.”

“Like the whole isle.”

“Like the whole isle.” A faint click as Breguswith slipped her fine-work whorl off her spindle and laid it on the ivory-inlaid casket that held her treasures. “Ah, Onnen, Onnen. He was to be king. Not poisoned like a dog.” And Hild knew they were talking now of her father.

“We are alone in this world,” Onnen said.

Faint rattle as her mother unfastened her girdle and hung it carefully on the hook driven into the wall post for that purpose. Hild imagined the hanging things one by one: the knife in its woven sheath, the seeing crystal, the needle case, the fire steel and tinderbox, the purse with chalk and thread and spare hairpin…

She woke again when her mother said in her voice of iron, “We will go to Edwin. He has won.”

Hild felt a light touch on her hair but willed herself still and copied Hereswith’s breath: in and out, in and out. Her mother smelt of smoke and heather beer.

“As king his nieces will be valuable to him.”

“Your dream?”

“My dream.”

“She’s so young—”

“She’s Yffing. Needs must. She’ll be ready. They both will. In their different ways.” And then the touch of the hand on her hair was gone and Hild heard the faint tck of her mother unpinning her hair, followed by the two women moving about the room, and the hff of the rush light blown out.

Hereswith inched closer to Hild, whispered fiercely in her ear, “That stupid dream—the light of the world! Ha! That was when she still thought you might come out a boy!”

The next day Hild could eat nothing, waiting for this usurping uncle, this Edwin, to come. But no one came; it was a day like any other but for two things. First, when the time came to wash and then rinse all three children’s hair, Onnen added oak gall to the rinse water for Cian’s turn.

“You rinse mine with vinegar,” Hild said, peering at the tub of black water, talking as much to distract herself from her misery as anything else. She hated the washing and rinsing of hair. No matter how she tried, there was always water down her neck. And no matter how warm the water was at the beginning, by the time it wormed between her shoulder blades, it was cold.

“And mine,” Hereswith said. “For the smell and the shine, you said. Why can’t we have oak gall, too?”

“Because it would make your pretty honey hair dark.”

“Daddy called me honey. But not Hild. She doesn’t have honey hair.”

“What makes your hair and Hild’s hair shine, and what makes Cian’s shine is different. His hair is different.”

But it wasn’t, Hild thought, it wasn’t. Her hair and Cian’s were even the same colour. Or had been, before the oak gall.

And then, while they were shivering like wet rats, Inis, the king’s man, came by. “You’re wanted,” he said to Onnen. “You and the boy both.”

Onnen took all three of them, because wet unhappy children had a tendency to quarrel when unminded.

The middle fire in hall was burning bright, and Ceredig king wore his ceremonial wolfskin cloak and most splendid torc, though there was no one else there but two housefolk standing by the wall.

Onnen and the three children paused just inside the doorway.

“Come,” the king said, and Onnen gathered Cian under one arm and Hereswith under the other, and approached. Hild walked alongside Cian, her hand in his belt, as she’d been taught. She was nervous because Onnen was nervous, but also curious.