Chapter Twelve

Cai ran. He knew he wouldn’t be fast enough—not to close the distance between himself and that fire and stop whatever hellish thing was in the offing there—but his heart was easy. Fen would aid him. Fen would find a way. His strength met Cai’s own like the confluence of two rivers. Fen had saved him twice now—pulled him up, body and soul, from the sea of his grief for Leof, and the swamps and quicksand that men like Aelfric created, reminding him lustily every day that his flesh was not a punishable burden but a joy. There wouldn’t be time to harness up the chariot, but Fen would help him catch Eldra, and together they’d fly across the spaces of the night—she would bear both of them, they’d discovered, provided Fen took the reins, an arrangement Cai had argued then acceded to, laughing and chagrined. They would get there.

The stable was empty. The lamp still glowed on the hollow in the straw where Fen had made himself comfortable and promised to wait—patiently, if not chastely. His cassock was gone, and there was no other sign of his existence.

Which meant nothing. Fen could have got cold, or gone to humour Aelfric by locking himself up in the quarantine cell where he was still supposed to spend his nights. Perhaps he too had seen the fire and gone to investigate, in which case Cai would encounter him somewhere on the track leading out across the salt flats. The light was brighter now, golden flashes dancing in the ruby glow. A massive bonfire, a waste of wood and resources where there was no need for it, out of season and fierce…

“Fen,” he called, fear trying to close his throat, but there was no reply.

Eldra wouldn’t come to him. He thought he could hear her, but the waning moon was cloudy, the field a patchwork of shadows. After leaning over the fence, whistling and jingling her harness for as long as he dared, he gave up and tore back to the stable. The pony would have to do, weary though the poor beast was after their journey home. She eyed him in disbelief as he unhooked her bridle again, but once he was settled on her broad back, she caught his sense of urgency and clattered out into the yard.

No sign of Fen on the slope down to the tidal flats. Still Cai disregarded the chill in his throat. He couldn’t have the Viking at his side all the time. Best if he remembered that now. His soul, his very thoughts, had begun to shape themselves to meet a shadow other, something outside himself, and what would he be if it was gone? A shadow too. Whatever was left after the subtraction of Fenrir.

He slapped the pony on the rump, and she surged to a choppy gallop. He focussed on the difficulty of staying aboard her, bareback, his cassock slipping underneath him. The tide was low, drawn out as far as it would go by the weak quarter moon, but the sand it exposed could turn to treacherous mud, requiring him to ride carefully from one pale stretch to the next. Whoever had built that fire must have come this way too. He was beginning to make out hoofprints and footprints in the drier places. Who would brave the flats on such a night, and what fire needed to be kindled so far from Fara and the villages?

The nebulous shape of the flames resolved itself. On a broad sweep of turf at the foot of the dunes, driftwood had been piled high, and into the centre of it someone had driven a single tall post. At the foot of the post—God, and they could have made it shorter for so pitiful a captive—a shape barely recognisable as human was huddled, bound round the waist with crude fisherman’s rope. Its feet were invisible, hidden by flames. A cloud of white hair, drifting in the updrafts, haloed its bowed head. Danan.

Cai began to shout. He was still too far off for the men and women gathered round the pyre to hear him, but one yell tore from him and then another, raw sounds he had thought only Fen could rip from him. His lungs convulsed. He was trying to hurl his voice ahead of him, make it do what his hands could not. He leaned close over the pony’s neck. Her mane whipped into his face, stinging him, and he clasped her flanks with his knees and drove her on at a speed neither of them had known she had in her. She was snorting and flecked with sweat by the time she had carried him within earshot of the crowd. Cai kept on yelling, an incoherent roar that had no at its roots but made no more sense than that.

It didn’t have to. It only had to make them see him. If they saw him, they would stop. Cai was in no doubt of this—the people in the firelit circle were villagers, the ordinary souls he met and dealt with every week. They knew him. More crucially, he knew them, and not a single one among them would have done this. They were kind, flawed, human. If they saw him, they would break whatever trance was holding them. They would cut the ropes and let Danan go.

Not one of them turned. The thunderous splash of the pony’s hooves must be reaching them by now. Desperately, in flashes between the blinding whisk of the pony’s mane, he tried to make out what was fixing their attention. Not the helpless little figure in the fire, as if she were somehow unimportant… Cai caught his breath on a sob. Had they already killed her? Tied up her body to burn, for God knew what hideous purpose? They weren’t even watching her. They were watching a dark shape perched halfway up the side of a dune.

Aelfric was preaching. Cai had never seen him in full flight before. He’d never had the right congregation—only a bunch of half-heathen monks, their minds corrupted to rebellion by Theo’s rule. No, he needed men and women like the ones before him now. Theo had never tried to teach the villagers. Cared for them, answered their questions, but even in his enlightenment believed that some men were born to be priests, and others to tend cows, and best if each remained in his station. And so the villagers of Fara were here, their eyes and minds—and, Cai could see quite clearly now, most of their mouths—wide open.

Preaching or not, the abbot was ready for Cai. He didn’t glance at him or break off his monologue until the pony was within twenty yards of the group. Then he ceased to stab the air with his claw, and pointed it straight at Cai. “Stop him!” he screamed, his voice a thin blade that sliced the night. “Stop the profane consort of the witch!” The finger swung to Friswide. “You, woman—take your children and stand in his path. He won’t run them down.”

She actually did it. She had one dirty infant by the hand, two others, half-asleep, hanging on tight to her skirts. Without a flicker of change in her vacant expression, she swung around to plant the whole fragile group of them directly in the pony’s way.

Cai hauled back on the reins. The pony chucked her head up and bunched her hindquarters. They were too close—Cai’s momentum bore him on and he pitched over her shoulder, narrowly missing one child while the pony veered off to the other side. He broke his fall with his hands, ducked his head and crashed onto the turf at Friswide’s feet.

She bent with genuine concern to help him up. “Brother Caius! What are you doing here?”

“Me?” Cai coughed and spat out bits of grass. “What are you doing? Godric—Barda—all of you, come here. Help me untie Danan and put out that fire.” He tried to run and found his path blocked by Godric, fat and serenely smiling. “Out of my way, man. Are you responsible for this?”

“No, Caius. Abbot Aelfric summoned us here. He has captured the witch.”

Cai grabbed him. He bodily set him aside, but somehow the move put him into the arms of the next smiling, muscular farmer. “Aelfric!” he yelled past them. “Tell them to let her go.” He struggled against a surrounding wall of flesh. “In God’s name…”

“It’s in God’s name that I act, blasphemer.” Aelfric leaned forwards in his sandy pulpit and transfixed Cai with a blank, triumphant gaze. “I caught her digging up dirt from holy men’s graves by light of a full moon.”

“She was gathering herbs, you idiot. Let her go before she burns. Danan!”

“There is no help for her. She will burn, and her curse will be lifted from these people. The grain will be cleansed. The apples will ripen on the bough. The children—”

“Stop!” Frantic, Cai cut across him. No grains or apples here, but he grabbed the nearest of Friswide’s infants and held it high, quickly glancing at the rash on its cheek. He’d been wrong about the fleas. “These children have scurvy. They need to eat green plants, that’s all. It isn’t a curse or a…” The child gave a wriggle of discomfort, and he took it into his arms, unable to handle it roughly even while visions of taking it hostage flashed through his head, of threatening to chuck it onto the fire with Danan. “Danan is a healer. She’d never… Wait. When did you take her, Aelfric? Last full moon?”

“Aye, and kept her where neither you nor your savage could find her.”

Cai dumped the child into Friswide’s hands. If mad, empty preaching was all that worked here now, perhaps he had some of his own. He was being hemmed in by the villagers—not angrily, but absolutely—and he struggled to get enough distance from all of them to see into their faces. “Last full moon,” he repeated. “Think, all of you, for God’s sake. When did we find the ergot in the corn? When did your children fall sick and Barda’s goat die?”

“Why, it was after full moon,” Barda said. She was the only one amongst them who had looked troubled at the prospect of burning a human being alive, who seemed to be unswayed by Aelfric’s power. She reached out and gave Godric a slap, which almost knocked him down. “It was after full moon, husband!”

He turned and hit her back. It wasn’t a slap but a punch to the face, and Cai saw he had wanted to do it for years. She was twice his size, formidable. He would never have dared touch her outside of Aelfric’s charmed circle. “Hold your lip, wench,” he hissed at her. “The abbot has told us. She worked her evil spells from her captivity, to make us set her free.”

Cai grabbed Godric by the scruff and hauled him back. “Right,” he shouted. “This woman—Danan, who pounds up rosehips to cure your children’s colds, and has never harmed a hair on anyone’s head all her life, has suddenly taken to cursing and…” He gave Godric a shake. “And what? Evil spells? God help us. Did you ever think your trees might have blossomed and your children thrived because of her? And—and when this monster stole her and hid her away in some hole beneath the ground, the very earth began to die?”

It wasn’t working. The trouble was that Cai didn’t believe his own words—not as Aelfric believed in his. It would take a madman to hold such convictions, on either side. A creature who could blight the land or nurture it according to her will… No. He twisted around to look at the pyre. Danan hadn’t moved. Perhaps the smoke had killed her, or rendered her insensible—he prayed so. She was just an old woman. Cai ran out of words and reasons. He dropped Godric like a dead rat and threw himself at the crowd.

He could hear thunder. At first he thought it was only the pounding of blood in his ears, and redoubled his efforts to tear through the thicket of bodies, the hands that were holding him back. No one was hurting him. The women were even patting at him soothingly, as if he’d been a distraught child. They were just there, solid and stupid and immovable as cattle. “Damn you all! Let me go!”

“Blóð ok sorg!”

Cai jerked his head up. No Saxon throat could produce such a sound. The thunder grew louder. The barricade slackened around him, hands falling away, mouths opening. Astonishment and fear—at last, the placid, dreadful smiles disappearing, like cobwebs in the blast of a good north wind.

Godric waved a plump paw back in the direction of Fara. He gaped like a fish, and after a couple of efforts got one word out. “Vikingr!”

“Blóð ok sorg!” The battle cry rang out again. A thrill of terror shot down Cai’s spine, stiffening the hairs on his nape. He knew the words. They were very like his people’s own, and he’d been taught many blood-hot Viking ones now, shuddering with passion in sand dunes, stables, barns. Blood and woe—yes, pure oncoming hell, bearing down out of the night. Blóð ok sorg, the long, lonely syllables drawing out, like…

Oh, God, like the cry of a wolf. For a flashing instant even Cai was fooled, the villagers’ terror transmitting itself in a wave of primal body scents. They were scattering around him. He was free now to move, to run to Danan and try to set her free from the pyre.

There was no need. The vikingr raider swept down. In his leather jerkin, his bare arms taut with muscle, he was every shore dweller’s nightmare. Eldra was surging beneath him, her movements so blended with his that they seemed like one creature. His wolf’s-head sword was buckled at his side, and in one hand he swung an axe. “Blóð ok sorg!” he yelled one last time, blazing past Cai at a gallop, sparing a second to flash him a lunatic grin. Then he drove Eldra straight at the fire.

He was as likely to decapitate Danan as save her. The blade of the axe flashed once as it fell, and a hollow thunk of metal on wood made Cai wince. He cried out in fear as Danan’s lifeless form drooped forwards, but Fen hauled down hard on Eldra’s rein, sweeping her round in a tight circle in time to grab the old woman before she collapsed. He shouted again—formlessly this time, a roar of victory and laughter—and hoisted her up like a bundle of rags beneath his arm.

The fire leapt skyward, as if in rage at the loss of its prey, blinding Cai to everything beyond it. Fen was gone, the only trace of him a dying percussion of hooves. He turned. The villagers were all staring in the same direction, the terror in their faces dissolving to confusion—and, at last, a different kind of fear, as if awaking from a dream. They began to look like themselves again.

“It was Fenrir,” Cai choked out, only then fully realising it himself. “Fen took her. He saved her.”

Aelfric let loose a shriek. There was something deathly in the sound—a kind of despair, as if some fibre within him had reached a breaking point and snapped. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live! Thou shalt not—”

The tuft of marram grass on which he’d been perched tore out of the sand and gave way. For one eerie moment he remained suspended, that clawed finger swinging to find its next target, feet poised over nothing. Then he dropped like a bundle of sticks in a sack and rolled to the foot of the dune, limbs flailing.

The villagers watched in horror. Then—easily roused, easily swayed—they began to laugh. Cai pushed through them. This time they let him, and he shouldered his way to where Aelfric lay, twitching and panting.

“No,” Cai said, desperately stifling laughter of his own. “Don’t you see, he’s not well in his head? Don’t follow his orders, but…don’t laugh. You, Godric—Blacksmith Wynn—take hold of him. Help him back to the monastery and call his brethren to take care of him.”

“No!” Aelfric lunged into a sitting position. He was like one of the fearsome creations of the Jews, the mindless, unstoppable golems who would carry out their makers’ vengeance to the ends of the earth. “The Bible commands! Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

Cai could snap too. His doctorly compassion dried. He took the abbot by his scrawny throat and shoved him back down onto the sand. “You think you know the Bible?” he snarled. “No man alive today knows the Bible. That’s what Theo taught us. A book written in Aramaic—translated through Hebrew and Greek into Latin… All it can be is God’s guide to us, not his sacred bloody word-for-word commands. Things get lost. Words change. And Theo taught us those ones straight away, to show us an example. The word is poisoner in Hebrew. Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live.”

“Is it so, Brother Caius?”

Cai glanced up. Barda was listening, hands on her hips, her expression thoughtful. She was nursing a split lip, which Godric would have cause to regret later on. “Yes. It’s so.”

“It’s very strange.”

“Not as strange as what you people tried to do out here tonight.” He let Aelfric go and got up, trying to wipe the memory of his bony gullet off his hand. “I’m asking you, as your friend…don’t follow Aelfric. Don’t follow me. Just for God’s sake try to think for yourselves. Now, I have to find Fen and see if you’ve managed to kill that old woman between you.”

Eldra’s hoofprints lay crisp on the damp sand. A direction would be easy, though the great, bounding distance between each set of prints told Cai he might have a long walk. And where would Fen have taken her? Back to the monastery and the infirmary there, if he had any sense. But the deep-gouged marks were headed south, so unless he’d doubled back among the dunes…

The four-time drum began again. It was so faint that Cai briefly wondered if Eldra’s prints had somehow retained their sound and were echoing it back to him. The uncertain moonlight was illuminating a thin stretch of the strand, the place where the incoming tide was sweeping up the beach. The percussion gained a dimension—a wild splashing, flying hooves cleaving water—and out of this premonitory sound-ghost came a shape, a moonlit vision of a man on horseback. Fen was coming back.

He was riding unburdened. Cai began to run towards him. It was too soon for him to start demanding where he’d put poor Danan, if she was dead or alive, but he raised a hand and hailed him. Alive or dead, Fen had tried to save her. Had come tearing to the rescue when Cai had given up on him, had been stupid enough for one instant to think himself abandoned. His heart leapt. “Fenrir! Fen!”

Fen didn’t slow. He and Eldra swept past him, Cai getting one more glimpse of that mad, beautiful smile. Then Fen bore back on the reins, his obedient warhorse once more responding, beginning the battlefield manoeuvre she’d learned with Broc’s chariot behind her and had used tonight to let her master get behind Danan, scoop her up and go. It was a trick to rescue comrades cut off by a skirmish. Broc also used it to round people up.

The horse was rushing down on him. Cai stepped back, already knowing it useless, trying to get out of her track. Fen was leaning forwards past her shoulder, one arm stretched out. “Blood and sorrow, monk,” he cried, his rich voice cracking with laughter. “Your turn now!”

“Don’t you bloody dare.” Cai backed up further, hands raised defensively. Once more Eldra passed him, but slowing now, turning neatly to cut off his retreat. “Fen—I am serious. You are not carting me off like a damn bag of flour… Fen! Do not!”

“Save your dignity, then. Jump.”

There was one moment when Cai could do it. The villagers were roaring with laughter. If he glanced at them, took the time to tell them to shut up and be about their business, he would miss this ride. And he didn’t want to. Even less than being borne off from the scene like a struggling sheep by this insane Viking did he want to be left behind, alone on the sand. He seized Fen’s arm. Fen hoisted him and he leapt. He landed with a ball-jarring thud across Eldra’s rump and almost slid off over her tail. He seized Fen’s belt and hung on.

Fen took off with him into the night. Cai wrapped his arms round his waist. He had no idea of where they were heading but he didn’t care—closed his eyes and pressed his brow to Fen’s shoulder to increase the feel of the unknown. Let Eldra bear them off into the void. Theo had said the earth was round, but that was hard to believe on a north-lands beach, where the moonlit horizon stretched out forever on a pure, empty plane. Let Fen drive Eldra on and on, and perhaps they would hurtle off this world’s edge. Leave behind the place where it was possible for good human creatures to set an old woman to burn, where knives of guilt pierced Cai for not having somehow taught them better, as if not only Fara’s monks but her villagers too were burdens on his soul… “No!”

Fen spared a hand from the reins. He rubbed his fingers over Cai’s tight-clenched knuckles. “No what?”

“Don’t stop. Take us away.”

“Too late, beloved. We’re already here.”

To come from a gallop to a dead stop was also a battle manoeuvre, and Eldra was good at it. She propped her forelegs and commenced a graceful skid, and for the second time that night Cai was hurled down from horseback and into the dark. This time he landed in soft sand. He scrambled to his feet in time to see Fen make an elegant warrior’s dismount and pat Eldra’s neck as if she’d done him proud. He was smiling broadly—beginning to shake with laughter.

“Fen, you…you arse!” That was no good. Cai’s own voice quivered. He tried to find the fury that should have been burning him up. “You arrogant Viking savage! How dare you sweep in and grab a…” He floundered for words, then took inspiration from his damp, sand-covered cassock. “A man of God, as if he’d been nothing but—”

“A shrieking virgin nun? That’s what you think of us, isn’t it?”

“Oh—and that’s wrong? A slander upon your good name?”

“Not at all. But not me. Not the Torleik. We only take such plunder as will be useful to us, and I chose to take a fine man.”

Cai stared at him. He hadn’t heard Torleik in some time now. He’d been starting to think those ghosts were laid for Fen, exorcised by newer, brighter experience. He hadn’t heard that proud, easy we that told him where his Viking’s blood loyalties still lay. His own blood chilled. But Fen gave him no more time to think about it. Chuckling, he advanced across the sandy crater in the dunes. “Look at you, my man of God—all on fire with outrage, your hair in spikes. You have seaweed in it.” He reached out as if to pick some out, then gave Cai the lightest shove, just enough to tumble him backwards. Cai took the opportunity and seized Fen’s jerkin as he fell, dragging him down on top. They crashed together into the sand, laughing and scuffling.

“Puppies!”

The voice stopped Cai between one playful punch to Fen’s ribs and the next. He flipped over, dumping Fen off him. Extricating himself, he pushed up onto his knees. “Danan?”

“Puppies,” she repeated sadly. “Supposedly men, and yet—puppies in a basket. It isn’t enough, you know, Caius of Fara.”

She was perched comfortably atop the dune. Her hands were folded in her lap, as if she’d come here and settled down to watch a show. Cai undid the grip Fen was trying to fasten on his girdle. “Let me go, you fool. Danan—are you all right?”

“She’s fine,” Fen answered for her, giving up and helping him to his feet. “I don’t know how. But there’s not a mark on her. She’s a salamander, or a witch indeed.”

“That can’t be.” Cai ran up the dune and knelt beside her. “Danan, my lady. You might think you aren’t hurt, but you’ve been breathing smoke. And—you’re burned, or scorched at the least. You must be.”

She sighed. Without warning she hitched up her skirts and stuck out her bony legs. “See for yourself, physician. If it will make you feel better. Your tame raider swept me off in time.”

“Impossible.” Cai inspected the gnarled toes with their goat’s-hoof nails, the ancient, calloused feet. He shot a glance at Fen. “And believe me, I wish the bastard was tame. I don’t understand this. Your lungs should be burned. You were lifeless on that pyre when I got there.”

“It seems not.”

“I called to you. Why didn’t you show me you were alive?”

“Perhaps I was not.”

He sat up. She seemed to read his bewilderment and have pity on it, or on something about him—reached forwards and brushed one hand across his hair. “Don’t let it tax your brains, boy. Perhaps I was feigning. Your villagers were strange tonight—perhaps it seemed best to me not to provoke them.”

“Strange…” Cai shook his head. “I never saw them like that. How could it happen?”

“Because they have no leader.”

“Nonsense. People shouldn’t need a leader to be good. Decent, at least.” Cai resumed his examination of the thin but healthy limbs, the flesh that should have reeked of smoke and charring but didn’t. The old woman’s skirts smelled a little of fresh comfrey leaves and bedstraws, and that was all. He knew what was coming next and didn’t want to hear.

“In a perfect world—that of Theodosius—that is true. He was perfect in his way. You are grossly imperfect…” She waited till his eyes met hers in sarcastic acknowledgement. “And better suited to your times.”

“Why does it have to be me?”

She shrugged. “Why should it be anyone? You are right. People shouldn’t need a leader. But where there are men who would lead them astray, they do. Addy hoped…”

“You do know him, then? When did you last see him? What did he hope?”

“So many questions. You exhaust me.”

“I’m sorry. But—”

“I must go. I have herbs to gather. I was interrupted, if you recall.”

“Where was Aelfric keeping you, Danan?”

“Somewhere dark and silent. Don’t scowl, boy—I found it restful.” She shook off Cai’s restraining hand and stood up. “Ah, wait. In return for this rescue, I will give you something—you and that redheaded beast. Come here, both of you.”

Fen left off checking Eldra’s limbs and came to kneel at Cai’s side. His expression was mild, as if he’d never rode up and down a beach roaring and swinging an axe. “I don’t understand how it is, old salamander,” he said, “but I am glad you’re unharmed.”

“Unharmed?” She gave him a cuff to the face. Cai flinched—anyone else would have drawn back a stump—but Fen only beamed. “I shall bear the mark of your knee in my arse to the grave.”

“There was no time to stop and help you to a more maidenly posture.”

She broke into wheezing, rasping chuckles. “Maidenly! Well, I’ll forgive it in the circumstances. Now, where is the damn thing…?” She dug like a weasel into a pocket of her skirts, threw out a half-eaten apple and a barley ear, then extracted a long red ribbon. “There. Do you know what this is?”

Cai did, but was too taken aback to say so. Fen, less inhibited, took the worn length of silk between his fingers. “Yes. Our custom is the same. This is for handfastings.” Silent laughter shook him. “I’m honoured, lady, but perhaps I’m too old for you. And my preference lies elsewhere.”

“Yes. Even my Caius here had a few girls before he was certain, but you…you knew.”

That silenced both of them. Fen lowered his gaze, and Cai took his hand. He’d grown used to having secrets pulled raw out of his head, but the process was new to Fen. Cai wanted to tell Danan to leave him be. There was something painful in the thought of Fen, young and far away from him, yearning from the first awakening of his flesh for other men.

He held tighter, and Danan nodded approval. “Aye, that will do.”

“What will? Danan, what are you up to?”

“It will help you. You must lead, and you will be the better for a good man at your side.”

Light dawned on Cai. His mouth dropped open. “Oh, God. Danan, no. Look, he is at my side. He doesn’t want—”

“Who says I don’t want?”

Cai started. Fen was still holding the ribbon. He looked at Cai with fire and cloud-swept moonlight lighting up the amber of his eyes. “Who says I don’t?” he repeated, turning his hand in Cai’s grasp so that their fingers meshed. “What better? It will bind us closer than brothers.”

The secret of the book is in the binding. Cai stared at the ribbon drifting in the offshore wind, coiling as if with a life of its own. It felt like an answer, or part of one, but it faded as he tried to follow it. Why did it leave him so chilled?

“A battlefield marriage, Fen?” he said faintly, rubbing the strong fingers between his own.

“Many such have been made. And, if it fails to suit, it’s only for…”

“Only a year and a day. I know.” But it will suit. That’s what makes me afraid. I will be here on my knees, asking for its renewal, every year and a day for the rest of my bloody life. “Aren’t we already closer than brothers?”

It wasn’t the right question. The moon-clouds won out over the fire. A sorrow whose depths Cai now knew he had barely comprehended darkened Fen’s gaze. “Please. Let her make us so.”

Cai raised their joined hands. He hoped there was nothing for him to say as part of the rite. His throat was closed, an aching pressure of tears building up behind his eyes. And Danan, after examining both of them with a solemn anxiety Cai had never before seen her display, bound the ribbon once around Fen’s wrist.

“Solstice to solstice, hand to hand, from blood-mother earth to the heart of man…”

Cai closed his eyes. He tried to let his doubts go, to lay them on the warm night wind that was stirring his hair, pushing the wool of his cassock against him in all the places where he longed to be touched. If Fen wanted this, then what could be better? The ritual words, older by far than monastery stones or even the hillfort’s walls, rolled out around him. Bud into bloom, bloom to decay, round the great track for a year and a day… Danan’s voice altered, losing its rasp of age and smoke. It gave Cai a vision of oak saplings springing up, each on its own side of a stream. Winter passed, suns and moons, and in the heat of summer each tree leaned across the stream and enmeshed its young foliage with the crown of its brother. More summers, more winters, more suns and moons, and the two had grown together, their great trunks fused, the stream parting now to flow round them. Hand to hand and pledge to pledge, from home and hearth to the bright world’s edge…

Danan stopped. When Cai opened his eyes, he half-expected to find a priestess of the Druids before him. They had not all been slaughtered or driven back to their mountains by the Romans, and she had sounded so young. But there was only an old woman, looking scorched now after all. She sat down suddenly on the sand. “No.”

She hadn’t completed the loop of the ribbon around Cai’s wrist. She let it go, and it drifted from Fen’s like a trace of blood in the water. Fen picked it up and offered it to her. “Go on, old woman.”

“No.”

“No what? Go on. It isn’t finished.”

“It can’t be. The time isn’t right.”

Fen chuckled. He made as if to fasten the ribbon himself. “Time? I may be a faithless vikingr pirate, but even I can promise a year and a day.”

“No, Fenrisulfr. You can’t. Not even that.”

Shuddering, Cai unfastened the silk binding. He took it from Fen’s wrist too, fingers clumsy on the intricate weave Danan had made. “Leave it,” he whispered.

“No! I want us to be more than brothers.”

“We are.”

“And how does she know my full name?”

“She knows Addy. Just leave it. Come on.”

“How did Addy know it?” Fen turned to face him, eyes wide, suddenly full of angry fear. “Why did he say I would get my wish of vengeance, knee-deep in water and blood? I don’t wish that anymore. I want to stay with you.”

Danan staggered to her feet. Her movement released a tang of singed fabric onto the air. “I must go,” she rasped, and broke into a fit of coughing.

“Stay. Finish the rite.”

“Fen, let her be.” Cai held out the handfasting ribbon to her, and she took it, pushing it frantically into her clothes. Cai would have helped her, but she whipped away from him into the shadows, too swift for him to follow. He took a few steps in the strange tracks she had left. There on the sand were her apple and her ear of barley corn. He picked them up. The apple was hard and green, the corn riddled with dark pods of fungus. “Danan!” he called, hardly expecting to be heard. “Is it true? Does the land die without you?”

A weird rush of laughter rippled back to him. “Of course not, stupid boy.”

Cai bowed his head. There went another miracle.

“But check your orchards and your barns. You’ll find the wind has changed.”

It did, in a buffet of air so strong it almost knocked Cai down. He stumbled, and Fen caught him hard from behind. There was a wash of freshly broken comfrey stalks, and then of ozone, and then the breeze was blowing sweetly from the sea once more.

“What was that?”

Cai turned in his arms. Fen was shivering, staring into the darkness Danan had left behind her. “Nothing,” Cai told him fervently. “Nothing. Everything’s all right.”

“It isn’t. Why wouldn’t she bind us? Why did she say—?”

“Hush.” Cai stroked his hair, then hauled him into a ferocious embrace. “Didn’t we agree she was crazy—her and Addy too? Forget them.”

They were folding down together in the shelter of the nearest dune when the hare dashed by them. It was a big one. It scudded past their hiding place, close enough to kick sand into their eyes. For a moment it sat poised at the dune crest, gilded eyes glowing.

Fen sat up, unhitching the knife from his belt. “That’s a beauty. Shall I get it for us?”

Cai had seen him fell a smaller beast from twice the distance. He grabbed his arm and bore it down. “No. No, love—not this one.”