Daughter of the Wolf (2 page)

Her grandmother stood in front of her.

Abarhild said nothing.

She didn't need to. Her face, framed in its neat white linen, was set even harder than usual, and her bony hands were clamped one over the other on the silver-gilt mount that capped her blackthorn stick. Elfrun eyed the distance between her grandmother and herself: she knew full well how fast and hard Abarhild could strike. And how she would be blamed for Athulf getting into trouble.

The silence lengthened and deepened. Elfrun could feel the hot blood mounting from somewhere near her heart until it had flooded her already flushed cheeks, her palms moistening where they clutched Mara's reins, her heart thudding and blocking her breath. One of the horses let out a long, stuttering fart, and Elfrun heard a stifled snigger behind her, but she didn't dare turn to see whether it came from Athulf or one of the stranger boys.

Abarhild lifted her staff, and Elfrun braced herself, but her grandmother was only gesturing, not lashing out – not yet. ‘Athulf, take that animal. You' – she stabbed the staff at Elfrun – ‘come with me.' She turned and began stumping her way up the field in the direction of the Donmouth tents, whose bright roof-poles and finials were visible above the hedge, never once turning to see whether her orders were being obeyed.

Elfrun thrust Mara's reins blindly at Athulf. ‘You knew. You saw her coming.' Her breath stuck in her throat. ‘You could have said.'

Her cousin just smirked. She turned, hot and wet-eyed with anger and humiliation, and hurried after Abarhild.

Her grandmother began speaking as soon as Elfrun fell into step, marking each word with a vicious stab at the turf. ‘You – are – fifteen – years – old.' She stopped, and turned, the sunlight flickering on the gold crosses embroidered on the border of her veil. The Gallic accent that still buzzed around the edges of her grandmother's voice, even after fully fifty years in Northumbria, was stronger than ever when Abarhild was angry. ‘Is this sin, or just stupidity?' Her eyes were watery, pink-rimmed and folded deep in her wrinkled face, but Elfrun knew she missed nothing. ‘I thought you were going to show the world your bare arse.'

Elfrun clapped her hands defensively to her buttocks. ‘You did not!'

But her grandmother was shaking her head. ‘You have no idea, do you? Look at you' – another stab with the gnarled blackthorn – ‘bringing disgrace... Strangers...' She clamped her mouth and breathed in through her nose. ‘Nearly sixteen.
Pro Deo amur
– for the love of God, Elfrun, where is your dignity? In your good blue dress, too. And in the field next to the king's tents. This is absolutely the last time I want to have to say this to you.'

Abarhild glared at her granddaughter, looking for a sign that her words were getting through to her. Elfrun was a good girl at heart; Abarhild was convinced of that. Never been beaten enough, though, or given the responsibility she needed. Elfrun's father had always been too easy on his only surviving child, and since the girl's mother had died...
Spoiled
, she thought now, looking at the wild hair escaping from what had earlier been neat brown plaits, the spatters of mud across Elfrun's wide forehead, her cheeks' hectic flush – a flush begot, Abarhild suspected, by excitement rather than shame; and her mouth tightened again.

Elfrun bowed her head and bit her lip, doing her best to look remorseful, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

Biting back her anger, Abarhild turned and started walking up the slope again, her stick thumping into the grass and the keys chinking at her belt, and Elfrun hurried to catch up.

She knew fine well her grandmother would want to see compunction and penitence before any reconciliation or absolution could be offered; and she did feel a scruple of genuine shame. But more, much more, she was angry with Athulf for not giving her some warning. It would have been so easy – a wink, a jerk of the head... She dug her nails into her palms. She would get him, later.

Abarhild never talked about
Athulf's
dignity.

‘What was that? Did you say something, girl?'

‘Sorry, Grandmother.'

‘What?'

Louder this time. ‘Sorry!' And somewhere, deep down, against all desire, she had to admit that the world would agree. Abarhild was right; she was getting too old for these games. But admitting it, even to her private self, felt like a betrayal, a little death.

Abarhild huffed. ‘I'll have more to say about this later on. Just now there's no time. Your father wants you.' A third, lesser sniff. ‘Clean and well turned-out.'

‘Where?'

And now Abarhild did swing her stick, but it thwacked only into the flesh of Elfrun's calf, not the bone of her ankle, and she knew from this that the worst of her grandmother's wrath was on the ebb. ‘He's on his way to attend on Osberht. You're to wait with him, until you're called.'

‘The king?' Elfrun's eyes went wide. ‘What about?'

‘You'll find out soon enough. Something particularly concerning you.'

‘Is there something wrong with the wool? The lambskins?' Their home of Donmouth was famous for them, their number, their quality, and the way they were processed, both with and without the fleece. Both king and archbishop relied on them, and there was a constant demand from the fine leather-workers in York. The wool, raw, spun or woven, might be Donmouth's mainstay, but the lambskins were their fame. Under the tutelage first of her mother, and now of Abarhild, Elfrun had been learning not merely the spinning and weaving that every girl started mastering as soon as she was tall enough to hold a spindle, but all the complex economy of wool and parchment, milk and cheese.

Her mother used to joke that all Donmouth's glory balanced on the back of a sheep.

But why would the king ask for her, if all he wanted was to talk about lambskins?

She opened her mouth again but one look at her grandmother's face deterred her. By now they were almost back at Donmouth's little cluster of cheerfully striped canvas. Abarhild's lips were pursed and her brow drawn tight; and it hit Elfrun that her grandmother was as much in the dark as she was herself.

Her scalp was smarting from the tugs of her grandmother's fine-toothed antler comb, her face and hands were glowing and abraded from the coarse linen towel, even her fingertips stung from the gouging Abarhild had been giving her nails. And dressing her down all the while, listing her seemingly endless faults of morals and manners while Elfrun squirmed under her grandmother's glare and the interested regard of the other members of their party.

Especially Saethryth's. The eldest daughter of the Donmouth steward, she had been roped in to dab the mud off the blue dress, and Elfrun still felt hot at the memory of the other girl's disingenuous cornflower gaze, directed alternately at the spatters of filth on the wool and at Elfrun herself, fidgeting in her linen shift under her grandmother's litany of shame. It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been any one of the other girls, but Saethryth's angelic fairness always had Elfrun feeling angular and grubby. And Saethryth's talent for well-aimed and malicious comments was second to none.

Elfrun had hardly had another moment to wonder why the king might want her.

Now, her grandmother chivvying her as she might a wayward ewe, they were walking as fast as Elfrun's stiff leather shoes would allow her on the dewy grass to the thronged open area outside the king's tents. To her great relief her father was there already, seated on the bench nearest the entrance to Osberht's tent. She could pick him out from any crowd in that blood-red cloak. A gift from the king only a few days earlier, and far and away the gaudiest thing he owned, he was wearing it over the much more characteristic wolf-grey tunic which was the last thing her mother had ever woven, soft and light with all its worth in the fineness of the weave. His only glitter came from the silver tags weighting the woven bands that fastened the cloak at his shoulder.

But, plainly dressed though he might be, in his daughter's eyes Radmer of Donmouth shone brighter than any half-dozen of the more gaudily clad dish-thanes and riding-men who hovered wasp-like around the king's court, bullion glinting silver and gold at shoulder and wrist and throat, and on the sword-belts they insisted on wearing even if the swords themselves were packed away.

No weapons in the king's presence, not at spring and harvest meeting. Stakes were too high, old feuds always simmering too close to over-boiling. Northumbria might have been at its fragile peace since Elfrun was little more than a toddler, but she had heard the threats chewed over and spat out in the hall often enough. Internal dissent, brooding exiles, sea-wolves and the warlords of Mercia and Wales, Pictland and Dumbarton. The king's cousin, Alred, banned from coming south of the Tees since his rebellion seven years earlier. She knew fine well there were stories of disloyalty and over-leaping ambition attached to some of the faces she could see here, too. But she found it difficult to take any of the hard-edged talk seriously. With her father at the king's side, what could ever come to hurt them?

Radmer was gesturing to the bench beside him. No smile, but the lack of a frown was enough to fill Elfrun with relief. She knew only too well the drawn brows – worse than any spoken reproof – that would have greeted her if she had arrived in her former muddy and tangled state, and she felt a burst of still half-sulky gratitude to the old lady stomping along beside her.

Abarhild lowered herself on to the bench in silence, back straight and mouth still clamped.

‘Mother.' Radmer bowed his head, still fair rather than grey in the spring sunlight, and she nodded.

Radmer looked beyond her, at Elfrun's demurely bowed head, the neat, pale parting in her rich brown hair. ‘Daughter.' She came to stand in front of him, hands folded, gaze still lowered. ‘The king has summoned me,' he said quietly. ‘And he said you should come too. Something to our advantage.' Radmer set his hands on his knees. ‘Well, I've been here for a while, and still waiting. There are legates come from Canterbury, and Archbishop Wulfhere is with them. But Osberht's steward said he'll see us next, whatever it is.' He reached out his hand and gave hers a brief pat. ‘How have you been amusing yourself? Not frowsting in our tents, I hope, not on a day like this?' She lifted her steady brown gaze to his, and he smiled reassuringly.

Elfrun could feel the auger gaze of her grandmother boring into her. ‘Watching – watching Athulf with the horses. Racing.' Not quite a lie, even if truth fell down through the crack between her words.

‘Did he win?'

She wished suddenly, passionately, that her father had seen her ride. Radmer might have been – no, he
would
have been – angry, but no one had a better eye for horsemanship. And she was as good as Athulf, she knew she was. Better. The way the wretched boy had been sawing at Apple's mouth... ‘He – I—'

‘He did well,' her grandmother said. ‘The other boys were older.' She shot Elfrun an inscrutable look. ‘And he was riding Apple, not Mara.'

‘Athulf.' Her father sounded thoughtful. ‘Now your uncle Ingeld's home from York, it's time he took that lad in hand. Promising boy, but he's been left to run wild for far too long.'

‘He should be trained for the Church.' Abarhild's tone was flat, uncompromising. Elfrun stared at her grandmother. Sulky, whining Athulf, a cleric?

And it seemed her father shared her incredulity. ‘That puppy? Less fitted even than his father.'

Elfrun braced herself for the blast. But Abarhild had set her withered face hard, the lines between mouth and chin deep and oppressive. ‘The boy is our responsibility. What's the alternative? Will you make him your heir?'

‘Promise him the hall?' Radmer turned on his mother with a swiftness that startled Elfrun. ‘Ingeld's brat? I'll be damned first.'

‘Why not? Who else is going to take over Donmouth after you?'

‘Don't bury me, Mother.' Radmer glanced from his mother to his daughter, and then turned his stare back to the king's tent. ‘I'm not dead yet.'

‘Radmer! Don't ignore me. You need to do something for Athulf.'

‘Why?' Her father's voice was flat and hard as stone. ‘Ingeld got him. Let Ingeld look after him.'

Abarhild levered herself to her feet and stalked away, her very shoulder blades eloquent of disapproval.

Radmer was drumming his fingers on his knee. ‘As though I haven't done enough for Ingeld already.' He bared his teeth, white and strong in the silver-blond beard, but there was no smile in his eyes. ‘Sit down, daughter, and learn the virtues of a king's good servant from watching me.'

‘What are they?' The bench stood on uneven ground, and it lurched a little as she sat.

Radmer snorted. ‘Obedience. Patience. Anticipating every need. And never asking questions.'

It sounded very like Abarhild's standard lecture on being a good granddaughter, and Elfrun wanted to say as much, to see if she could make her father smile. But Radmer was no longer paying any attention to her. His whole body had stiffened, like a wolf that scents the hunt on its heels. She followed his gaze across the thirty feet of open grass that served as an antechamber to the royal tent, but she could see nothing.

Just men.

But as she watched she realized a bustle of activity had been starting up across from them, like one of the little sand-devils that whirled on the beach at Donmouth on windy days; and then the clump of men parted left and right to let a solid figure, his bald head gleaming in the sun, emerge to walk across the grass towards the king's awning. Although he paced steadily his eyes went sweeping this way and that: Elfrun could see his gaze flickering over every face, and stopping, sudden and hard, when they sighted her father. But he never broke his stride. Elfrun only realized how massive he was when he stood next to the king's steward. This newcomer overtopped the tall steward by half a head, and was broad in proportion. With that lumpy, lowering brow he only needed the addition of a pair of polled horns, and he could easily be mistaken for an ox. On its hind legs. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle the giggle that threatened.