CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

THE KEENING CRY ECHOED THROUGH THE SMALL HOUSE NEXT to the great church of Saint-Omer. Startled from his duties, Alric hushed the frightened children and instructed them to continue repeating the Latin he had taught them. Racing into the sun-dappled street, the monk found Turfrida clutching her arms around herself, her face streaked with tears.

“You are hurt?” he asked, concerned.

Racked with silent sobs, the woman couldn’t speak for a moment, and then she gasped only “Hereward.…”

Alric felt a pang in his heart. He had learned to trust in God whenever his friend marched off to fight, but he had always known that sooner or later Hereward’s battle prowess would fail him. “You have had word back from the Scheldt?”

Turfrida shook her head. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, she stuttered, “A vision came to me as I stood on the hill where my husband and I always walk … a raven, falling from the sky. And when I looked at my feet, the bird lay there, crawling with white maggots.”

“You think God speaks through this vision?”

“The raven is Hereward, I know it. He has met death.”

Alric forced a comforting smile and said softly, “Your husband has met death many times. Indeed, the two are close friends, and he has introduced death to others.”

“Perhaps that is it,” the woman replied, her chest heaving. She took long, deep breaths until she calmed, and then she allowed the monk to lead her back to her house, where she sat by the hearth with her uncompleted sewing. But a dark cloud hung over her that no comforting words could dispel. Her sadness would only ease when she held her husband in her arms once more. Alric hoped that time would come, and soon.

He returned to the children, but he was in no mood for any more teaching and sent them all home. For the rest of the day, he prayed in front of the church’s plain wooden altar, seeking solace among his troubled thoughts. He followed the contours of his mismatched friendship with the Mercian, from the suspicion and dislike of that first frozen night in Northumbria to the ease with which they spent time together in Saint-Omer. The monk realized he’d grown to like the surly warrior, for all his many flaws. Perhaps he even admired some of the qualities he found lacking in so many others: courage, loyalty, love, even honor, something the monk had thought to be entirely absent during their early days together. Their destinies had seemed entwined, both seeking salvation from a bloody past, both unable to achieve it without the help of the other. Now he wondered if he had been mistaken.

For some reason that Alric couldn’t understand, he woke at dawn the next day and felt the urge to go to the road out of Saint-Omer and look to the horizon. He stayed there until mid-morning and returned again near sunset.

The next day, he did the same.

And on the third day, not long after sunrise, he glimpsed a lone figure riding toward Saint-Omer at a funereal pace. The monk waited, his heart pattering.

When the figure neared, Alric saw that it was Hereward. Yet his friend looked quite different, as if worn down by a terrible weight upon his shoulders. Even when the warrior saw the monk waiting, he didn’t increase the pace of his mount.

Finally, he reined the horse to a halt. A bloody strip of linen had been tied across his bare chest, and there was dirt under his fingernails from—although the monk didn’t know it then—the grave he had dug with his bare hands. He was filthy and he smelled of the road, but Alric was shocked when he saw the fire burning in his friend’s glowering eyes.

“Say your good-byes among the children and the churchmen, monk,” Hereward said in a cold, flat voice. “Our time here is done. We sail for England.”