Nicola Griffith - Hild

“It’s not—”

“Be a lamb and don’t talk. Run. Bring food—and mead, of course—and I’ll absolve you of all that sin you’ve been gathering to yourself.” He watched Gwladus pick her way across the yard, already beginning to glitter with frost, and turned back to Hild. “Now let us sit on the bales by that post.” They sat. “What is it?”

She said nothing for a moment. Around them the horses, which had stirred when she came in, began to settle back to their dreams.

“Osric knows of Cadwallon’s plot against Edwin. The plot that’s begun.”

“Begun?”

“In Lindsey. My mother told me.”

“She told you. Why?”

“I don’t know.” She clenched her hands around her belt. He assumed she wished it were her mother’s neck. He certainly did. “If Edwin finds Osric is plotting, he’ll kill him.”

“And if he doesn’t find out, Cadwallon will eventually kill Osric, plot or no. He’s Yffing, too.”

“I know that!”

“Osric is stupid.”

“Yes—”

“But your mother is not.”

“She wants me to tell Edwin there’s a plot, and stop it, and keep Osric out of it.”

Fursey nodded. “She wants him alive and to herself.”

Silence. She seemed to be staring at the post. Some stable hand or gesith, bored while waiting for his mount, had carved a stallion into the new wood. A stallion with improbable natural attributes.

“She wants me to take my knowledge to Edwin, clothed in portents. She wants me to start the war to keep that treacherous oaf safe. She is weaving a spider’s web and I must rush about at her bidding. Again.”

“Stopping the plot would save all the Yffings’ lives. Including yours.”

The child strangled her belt slowly with both hands. “That’s just part of it. She’s aiming for something… I can’t… Why is she doing this? Why is she defending him? Osric’s men could have killed me at Tinamutha!”

“Strictly speaking they were Fiachnae mac Báetáin’s men. As I was. Am.” Ah, she’d forgotten that. Well, the child needed reminding sometimes.

“You’re confusing me.”

“It’s a confusing world.”

She pulled her seax, leapt, and stabbed the post with a vicious overhand thrust. The mare in the nearest stall swung her head around and huffed down her nose.

His heart thumped like a rabbit. She was so fast. And strong. The battle-hard tip had sunk three fingers deep into the elm.

“If she had just asked! But no. She pushes me into a corner where there’s no choice.”

“It’s what women do: weave the web, pull the strings, herd into the corner. It’s their only power. Unless they’re seers.” He was proud that his voice didn’t shake.

The child massaged her hands.

“Your mother has built you a place where you can speak your word openly. Now she asks you to use that for her, and for yourself of course.”

Outside someone, several someones, crunched over the frozen grass.

He turned. It was Gwladus, now wearing a cloak against the cold—and because the russet colour made her hair shine like sunlit water, he suspected—and two housemen he didn’t know. The men stood behind Gwladus and flinched when Hild looked at them. They were afraid of the child. Fursey didn’t know whether to pity her or be glad for her. Fear could always be used.

He raised his eyebrows at Gwladus.

“You said bring a lot. And this should be enough to buy me a forgiveness. Two of them. One now and one tomorrow, for the sins I’ll gather tonight.” She smiled to herself as she stroked her cloak, then noticed the seax stuck in the wood. She gestured for the housefolk to put down the trays. “We’ll leave you to your business.”

She swept out. The men almost trod on her cloak in their eagerness to get away from the hægtes.

Hild began to work her seax free while Fursey fussed with the food. “I’m not hungry,” she said without looking up from her task, but her stomach growled.

“Of course not. But humour an old man and eat anyway. There’s pork in its crackling. Damsons, oh so plump and running with juice. And what’s this? Oh, blessings upon that girl. Horse mushrooms fried in pork grease. Hazelnut with the apples. Good sharp cheese. And, may she be thrice blessed, wine.” He sniffed. “The Crow’s special cache, unless I’m mistaken.”

She sheathed her seax and sat. “She stole the Crow’s wine?”

Was that a smile? He handed her a round of floured bread, a pot of chestnut paste—more fruit of Derwent’s Roman past—and a birch cup with a silver rim. “We’d better drink up the evidence.”

The moon was high and small by the time she sat back and sucked the fat from behind the last piece of crackling. Fursey finished the wine while she chewed on the skin.

“You look better.”

She nodded, picked the last hazelnut from the tray and crunched it. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll go to my uncle tomorrow, in the middle morning, with his counsellors about him.”

“Kings can be dangerous when surprised.”

The child pondered that. “I should talk to him privately first?”

He nodded. “Seek him all ravaged with dream. He’ll call his counsellors and you can speak in more certain terms.” And pray. Pray no one is clever enough to look beyond the child to her mother and the terrible ambition there.

Hild studied herself in the polished silver. “Wilder about the eyes,” she said, and lowered the mirror for Gwladus to dab ash in quick sweeps beneath her eyes. This time the king wasn’t puzzled and far from home. This time he was newly married and content. It would take every portent she could muster. And dreams were the most potent seeing of all.

“Wait,” Gwladus said, “hold still,” and she dipped a chewed twig in Hild’s ewer of water and streaked the ash deftly. Once, twice. “Look at that,” she said with great satisfaction.

Hild looked. She looked like a tear-streaked maid sleepless under the weight of unbearable knowledge. She smiled.

“Don’t smile. It makes you look mad.”

Hild looked at her.

“You could try trembling your bottom lip. Go on. Just try it.”

Hild lifted the mirror and tried it. Gwladus was right. The tremble turned her from madwoman to frightened maid.

Gwladus arranged her hair to an artful tousle and draped her with a heavy crimson robe: the very picture of a seer of the royal blood who leaps from her loyal bed to warn her king.

She strode from the room, calling for Burgmod.

In his sleeping apartment, Edwin, beard uncombed, sat on a stool. He had thrown a cloak over his sleeping tunic—though it was not cold, for the king’s fire never went out.

Hild stood, but not too close. Even frowsy and hardly awake enough to be wary, kings did not like those who loomed—even royal kin. Especially royal kin. Was the queen listening from the curtained bed? She must speak up, just in case.

She had dreamt of eagles, she said, like to the eagles of Gwynedd, nesting over Lindum, with one eaglet pushing its brother from the nest.

“Cadwallon!”

In her dream she had swooped through the air alongside a jackdaw that flew into a just-dyed red cloth hanging by the Lindum gate and stained its beak scarlet.

He frowned.

“A common bird tangling with royal crimson, King. In Lindum.”

“Cuelgils! That jumped-up ceorl. Intriguing with Cadwallon.”

Hild bowed.

“Go on, go on.”

And then she had woken, to hear that the vill’s newest bull calf, “the same liver brown as the Lindsey Bull, lord King,” had died, and some swore they had seen boar tracks around the pen.

This last was true, the death at least; Gwladus had told her.

Edwin turned his head and shouted, “Forthere!” The huge gesith stuck his head around the door. Hild caught sight of Burgmod beyond him, scratching at the back of his neck, tilting his helmet forward over his nose. “Is the new bull calf dead?”