Daughter of the Wolf (18 page)

‘What?'

She had been wondering if this was Illingham's retribution. Every night since the raid on the Illingham granaries a few weeks back she had been waiting, startled out of sleep by every night-bird's shriek, waiting for the smell of smoke, the screams, the thunder of hooves and the clash of steel. Was this the beginning?

But she couldn't put her fears into words. ‘Where's his mother?'

‘At her sister's, with the new baby. She doesn't know yet.' He let out a long ragged breath. ‘I was just out the back, I told Wynn to go in and stir him up a bit. She and I, we'd been away for a week getting a new load of ironstone. He came in at dawn, singing. I was outside – I shouted at him to get the fire hotter. Thinking back' – he closed his eyes – ‘I shouldn't have sent Wynn. I should have come in myself. I could sense he wasn't right, but if I'd known how drunk...'

Drunk. Was it possible? Cudda was much the same age as Athulf, and she still thought of him as one of the children. But he wasn't a child any more.

None of them were.

Elfrun steeled herself to crouch at the boy's side. She had no idea how long she stared at him. Hard to tell blackened and curled skin from the charcoal embedded deep in the burns. Disturbing smells of singed hair and roast fat. His skin had been seared away... When she came to herself again, she was longing for her grandmother to arrive, endlessly calculating how far Wynn had to run, how long it would take to harness the oxen, how slowly they would lumber along the rutted track... Her mouth trembled and she pressed her fingers against it, fighting back the tears.

‘I had the right of it, didn't I? You can't help him.'

Half his face was untouched. But the other side... How could he keep up that steady drone of agony, with his lips blistered and eaten by fire?

Elfrun was used to pulling thorns out of the children's feet, salving eyes; under her grandmother's guidance she had even splinted a broken arm. And she had helped with Widia. But this...

This was different. Far, far worse even than Widia's hurts.

Tentative, she extended a hand to touch the unburned shoulder, wanting to offer the boy some comfort.

Neither she nor his father was prepared for the scream that seemed to erupt not from his lungs but from every pore of his body. Elfrun scrambled backwards to find the smith close behind her.

‘Rutting Mother of Christ, that's all we needed. That'll bring folk running.'

Did he want folk to keep away? Elfrun stared at him, blinking hard, trying not to cry.

Abarhild would know what to do.

Abarhild wasn't here.

She pressed her fingers against her forehead. What had Abarhild told her? ‘Raw onions,' she said under her breath. ‘Eggs. St John, holy apostle...' Thank heaven it was only October, and the hens were still laying. ‘To lay on the burns.'

But she would need to clean him first, to extract those blackened lumps from where they had burned themselves into his flesh. She stared, and swallowed, and began to steel herself to touch him again, as ready as she could be for another world-shattering scream. And then she drew her hand back. She would harm as much as she healed. She didn't know where to start.

‘Don't you go fainting on me, lady,' Cuthred said. ‘I've enough on my mind. I told you you can't help. Nothing anyone can do.' The man's voice had a savage pleasure in it, as though he were glad to be proved right.

‘We have to wait,' she said.

So they waited, for what felt a lifetime. There was nothing else to say. Cudda's breaths were a steady drone of pain.

Footsteps, and the doorway darkened at last.

‘The child said I was needed?' Fredegar sounded breathless, urgent, a world away from his habitual dry, level tone.

Elfrun gestured wordlessly.

The priest took a few paces into the forge and his dark, narrow face contracted further. ‘
Jesu Maria
.' He crossed himself on a long out-breath. ‘A blessing I brought my oils,
domina
.'

‘You came so quickly, Father.'

‘I rode Father abbot's mare.'

‘You rode
Storm
?' Even in the middle of her shock Elfrun was taken aback.

‘Your grandmother's coming in the ox-cart.'

‘There's nothing you can do, mass-priest.' The smith's voice was gruff.

Without so much as acknowledging his words, Fredegar pushed past them and knelt at the boy's side.

‘It hurts if you touch him,' Elfrun said hesitantly.

‘I'm sure it does.' The priest sat back on his heels and stared down at the boy. The moaning had slowly dwindled in the aftermath of that scream. Now all they could hear was painful, harsh breathing, blended with the occasional whimper. Fredegar had a satchel with him, and he opened it to take out the long white band of his stole. He draped around his shoulders, his lips moving. Next he took out a small wooden box. The smith and Elfrun watched in tense silence. He put the box down on one side, and the satchel on the other.

‘Can I help, Father?' Elfrun felt she had to ask.

Fredegar ignored her. His whole face had shut down, lips tight and thin, brows drawn down over the dark, liquid eyes. He was looking intently at every inch of Cudda's burns, moving in closer. She watched the flicker of his gaze taking in each detail, and his face not so much as twitching. His hands were hovering above the boy's skin, fingers splayed, assessing but never making contact.

‘I need a knife,' he said at last, without looking up. ‘I forgot my own, in my hurry. At least a finger-length blade, narrow and sharp as you can find. Have you such a knife?'

‘I do. But it's not as sharp as it might be.'

‘Put on a new edge then.'

The smith turned away to the massive wooden slab where sickles and knives of all kinds lay waiting his attention.

Elfrun wanted to ask a dozen questions of both men but she didn't dare open her mouth. Apart from Cudda's ragged wheezing the only sound was the steady hiss of the whetstone.

Fredegar shuffled his way down the length of the boy's body. Below the knees, Cudda was unburned. Elfrun had a sudden, blinding vision of how it had happened, the muzzy-headed boy stoking the fire, stirring the glowing bed of charcoal, turning, tripping, falling, sprawling head-first, bashing his head perhaps on one of the upright stones that shielded the fire from the wind, too numbed by the drink to heave himself up again...

Drunk.

If he had been drinking, he would have been doing it in company.

Silently she withdrew and made her way to the forge's opening, where the smith circled the blade on the stone.

‘He'd been out with Athulf again, hadn't he?'

‘That's it. Him and his little friends.' Hiss, hiss, hiss. ‘What did my lad want with them? He's got his place, his life, here with me at the forge.' Hiss, hiss, hiss. ‘He's got nothing to prove, not like some. If I told him once, I told him a hundred times.'

Elfrun thought of the treasure-house represented by the hall's buttery. Fragrant ale. Thick sweet mead. Southern wine from over the sea. It didn't matter which of the lord's barrels they'd been tapping. Any strong drink would go fast to the head of an empty-bellied lad raised on small beer.

And how a boy whose life was mapped out from the first breath might respond to the promise of adventure.

Fredegar had opened his box and taken out two little phials. Elfrun turned back to watch the priest's elegant, economical movements.

‘You're giving him the last rites,' she said suddenly.

‘The rites for the sick and those for the dying have much in common.' His voice was flat.

‘So you think we can save him, Father?'

He ignored her and went back to the prayers, his rapid Latin barely audible.

‘Father?'

Elfrun tried to keep her breathing steady. The burns were bad, yes, but they could heal. He would lose the sight of his eye, and the sinews of his right hand looked to be burned away, but Cudda had a chance of living. She could light a candle. Three candles. Beeswax ones. St John for burns, St Agatha, St Lucy... Lucy was good for eyes.

‘I've got you the knife, Father.' Cuthred was back, and seemingly chastened into greater courtesy. ‘What would you be needing it for?'

Elfrun too was puzzled by the knife. This wasn't some pus-bloated wound, or a boil that needed lancing. She tried to think through the care the boy would need, and her brow cleared. Of course. They would have to cut his clothes free. No balm could possibly be applied to that mess of ravaged skin while charred cloth and burned wood were still embedded deep in the flesh.

Voices were audible outside the forge, and the rumbling creak of a cart. A spring tide of relief flooding through her, Elfrun ducked outside and went round the building to where the surface was hard enough for the wheels. ‘Grandmother!' At last. The driver was already helping the old lady over the side-planks and on to the wet grass, handling her as though she weighed no more than a hank of wool. The girl, Wynn, was scrambling down in her wake, still corpse-pale. Storm, Ingeld's precious grey mare, was hobbled and cropping the grass beyond.

‘Burned, Wynn said.'

Elfrun nodded.

‘Bad? Don't say anything. I can see it in your face.'

‘Your basket, lady.' Wynn was at her side, her face taut.

‘Carry it for me, girl. I'm stiff as a board this morning.'

Another appalling scream tore through the misty air. They all froze for a long moment. Elfrun caught the old lady's eye, and turned to hurry back round to the forge. ‘My grandmother's here—'

The two men had their heads bent over the boy. The smith was sitting cross-legged. He had lifted his son's head in his brawny hands. That must have been why Cudda had screamed again. Fredegar was kneeling. The glow from the fire-pit lit them from below. Elfrun could only see the unburned side of Cudda's face. He looked so young, with his fair curls and smooth chin. As she watched, incapable of movement, Fredegar lifted the knife, its newly honed blade sparking in the light. He paused, his head on one side, for a long deliberate moment, looking down at the unspoiled skin of the boy's exposed throat, the extended tendons, the Adam's apple, the hollows at the base of his throat and above his collarbones. Then, almost casually, he lowered his hand and slid the knife home.

Elfrun had gone blundering out past her grandmother, not waiting to answer the old lady's anxious questions, just gesturing wordlessly behind her, her face too stiff and shocked for tears.

But tears were coming now. She had been walking blindly down from the smithy to the river's edge and then turning east, along the shore where the water ebbed and flowed salt and sweet in turn. She only realized how far she had come when she stumbled on the edge of the stream that came down from the summer pastures and marked the boundary between hall and minster. She wanted to be alone, and here was as good a place as any, down through the trees and along the shore to where the treacherous reed-beds gave way to dunes, and the narrow confines of the river to the wide horizons of estuary and sea. The stream ran out on to the sand in wide braided rills, spilling and soaking away before it ever reached salt water.

Elfrun found it hard admitting even to herself that her strongest feeling was relief. That early mist had cleared, but the morning was a chilly one despite the fitful sunshine, with the wind coming straight in off the sea, and she wrapped her father's cloak more firmly round her as she slithered down through the dry sandy hillocks towards the beach. The tide was on the ebb, exposing a great half-moon of fine wet sand, its smooth gleaming surface interrupted by the broad streaky banks of old cockle shells that testified to the riches waiting to be harvested. Oysters here as well, and razor clams. This hungry autumn, they were all reliant on ebb-meat, but it took a lot of search and struggle to make a meal's worth. A few children were usually to be seen picking their way over the sand-flats with baskets on the ebb of the tide, but the hour was early and low water some time away, and Elfrun was thankful to see that the place was still deserted.

She found a sheltered hollow and sat down, looking out to the endless sea, swallowing hard. She wasn't sure what had frightened her most, Cudda's fearful burns and that unbearable drone of pain, or the calm, lethal way in which Fredegar had responded. Something about his patient assessment of the boy's agony, and then the way he had struck, reminded her of the windhovers, the way they trod the air, winged bodies a blur but head quite motionless, waiting for their moment to kill.

Kill.

She hunched forward, the air driven out of her as though by a sharp blow to the guts. How was it a mass-priest's part to kill? She had thought Fredegar a true priest, not like her uncle the abbot with his hunting dogs and his feasting.

But Fredegar had stopped Cudda's pain. She had wanted to stop it, but she had been able to do nothing. Even her grandmother wouldn't have been able to spare the boy months of hurt, perhaps a lifetime of it. And a certain lifetime of humiliation. No future at the forge for a one-eyed man who could use only his left hand. No more running with Athulf and his band. A lifetime of charity. Pity, if he were lucky; otherwise contempt. A burden, a deadweight, existing on the margins of other men's tolerance.

So why was it so bad, this thing that Fredegar had done?

What kind of man could kill with that dispassionate detachment, as though he were snapping the neck of a hare the hounds had mangled but left alive?

She wrapped her arms around herself, fighting feverish nausea. Poor Cudda. Poor, poor Cudda. And Cuthred, and the family. They had lost a couple of newborns in recent years, too. Cuthred would have to take a stranger in to train up under the forge's roof. That was something else a good lord would oversee.

A good lord. Athulf saw himself as the leader of men. Always having to prove himself, pushing at the edges, mocking her authority. No good lord would have left a drunken child to stumble into danger like that.