Daughter of the Wolf (37 page)

‘One round to you. Is one round enough?' The bear-leader was grimacing deep in his beard.

‘Too quick.' Ingeld shook his head. ‘Where's the fun in that? You've not earned your silver yet, my friend.'

‘Best of three, then.'

Ingeld nodded tersely. Braith and Bleddyn had already started their nipping at the heels again, and grey Gethyn was watching for his moment.

Elfrun wrapped her arms around herself under her cloak, longing for the fight to end. A sudden scuffle, and the bear had Bleddyn in a headlock, gripping the dog's neck between its front paws and swinging the helpless animal backwards and forwards in a grotesquely human way. Then it rolled forward, still holding the dog, and Gethyn and Braith rushed in. The bear backed off a little, but it had its jaws clamped round Bleddyn's throat. Elfrun gasped, winded and nauseated as though someone had just slammed her in the belly. The bear-leader raised his staff, and the bear lowered his head, letting the dog drop to the ground. To Elfrun's disbelief, Bleddyn twisted himself round and scrambled back to his feet, earning whoops and cheers from the crowd. Widia and the dog-boy ran in and hauled the dogs back by their hind legs, out of reach.

‘And one round to me.' The bear-leader was unsmiling. ‘The third decides it.'

The dog-boy was feeling Bleddyn's neck and legs, his mouth pulled down at the corners. He had his back to the bear and was well within the reach of those giant paws, but he was oblivious to any threat. Elfrun looked beyond him to the crowd. The early brightness had utterly gone, swallowed up in heavy folds of mist. Damp prickled her face. She wondered what would happen if she stopped the fight. A glance at Athulf, his face ablaze with excitement, told her everything she needed to know. People would be angry, as drinking men were when you ordered the mead barrel stopped up. Perhaps if she asked – no, if she
ordered
– the dancing-boy to do some more of his rope-walking... Perhaps Finn could distract them with the exotic treasures from his pack. She sent her glance sideways, just to see if he had his basket by him, and found that he was looking at her. He raised his eyebrows again, a little smile curving his lips, and she turned her hot face away.

The dog-boy shrugged and turned his hands outwards. His face was glum, but Widia seemingly took his gesture to mean that everything was fine, because he released the hounds once more into the arena.

Again they circled.

When it happened, it was so fast that Elfrun could barely be sure, thinking back, that she had seen what she had seen.

The bear rose up on its back paws and gave a stifled snarl. The three dogs came running in together, teeth bared, aiming for the exposed belly. The bear tumbled forwards and swung head and paws together this way and that, and all three of the dogs were tossed high in the air. They landed, hard, with audible thumps.

Elfrun gasped, feeling suddenly sick. The bear-leader was running forward. Those terrible claws had raked Bleddyn across the belly, and there was blood, and now Elfrun could see the hound's pinkish-grey guts spilling out into the dust. The bear-leader was fumbling the bridle from where he had stuffed it in his belt, fastening the leash through the bear's snout and hauling his animal out of the way, and the dog-boy was crouching over Bleddyn. His face was calm but there were silent tears pouring down it. He lifted a hand, and Widia came over. Elfrun saw the dog-boy point, and draw a finger across his throat. She turned away to see Braith gazing at her, whimpering and struggling, back legs and tail dragging.

‘Spine snapped.'

She turned. Finn's golden-brown face was a hard mask, with no trace of those smile lines which had so characterized it earlier. ‘What a waste of fine hounds.'

Gethyn was crouching, whining softly. Elfrun hunkered down to join him, afraid of what she might find, but he was unhurt as far as she could tell, just terrified. She soothed him and fondled his ears, and he leaned his great bulk against her, shivering.

She was barely aware of Finn bending beside her. ‘I'll be on my way, lady,' he said, his voice barely louder than breath. ‘It seems I bring bad luck on your house. Last time a death, and today this. Now is no day for the peddling of trinkets.'

‘Bad luck! No!' She blinked, still confused and sickened. ‘You can't go. It's not your fault. My uncle—' She swallowed. ‘Besides, the mirror – I owe you for the mirror...' How could she ever pay him? The mirror was so much more than just the
perfect thing
Wynn had called it. She felt as though it had woken her up, brought her out of childhood, taught her to perceive the world differently. Not just her own face as others might see it, but the wordless messages her body sent her...

She had so longed to see him again, and now he was leaving.

He put a finger to his lips, and shook his head. ‘I'll not be going so far. Look for me, one of these days. But we need to get away.'

She glanced around at the crowd. Whether it had anything to do with her earlier orders she could not tell, but the mood was still one of shock, not yet of anger. But anger would come. He was right, though she hated to admit it.

‘Yes. Go. Get your people away. Before mine turn so ugly that I can't hold them.'

Finn nodded, and he stepped back and away. Gethyn whined again, and thrust his nose into her hand, and she crouched down and put her arms around him. She badly needed to hold on to something, and the dog's warm, solid bulk was a sudden and immediate source of comfort. She held him firmly, and rested her cheek against his fur for a long moment, for once not caring what people might think. There was a rustle nearby, and after a moment she looked up to find Ingeld and Widia looming over them. Athulf was standing by, his face tense and white, and she wondered if he were going to be sick.

‘What's wrong with this one?'

She shook her head at her uncle. ‘I think he's fine.'

Ingeld stared down at her. ‘There's no place in my kennels for a dog without good heart. I can't trust him in the hunt, not now.'

‘He has plenty of heart!'

Widia was still holding high the bloodstained knife with which he had despatched Braith and Bleddyn, and Elfrun stared at him, appalled.

‘It's kindest, lady,' he said.

Athulf nodded.

She stood up, and Gethyn, as if knowing the danger, cowered against her skirts, whining and scraping the soil with his paw.

‘
Look
at him, Elfrun,' Ingeld said. ‘Hopeless. He may have had his nerve once but he's lost it now.'

Elfrun rested her hand on the dog's back, feeling his skin shiver under the coarse curly fur. ‘You can't.'

‘I'm not wasting food on that animal,' her uncle said.

Widia was nodding in agreement. ‘It wouldn't be right to take him on the hunt, not if you can't trust his courage. Not safe for him or the huntsman. You must see that, lady.'

They were so much bigger than she, and older, and she had been bred to deference. But then she looked beyond them to see the wan, drawn face of the dog-boy, standing over the corpses of his other two charges, and she felt a surge of power compounded equally of anger, nausea and grief. She held out her hand and beckoned the boy towards her. ‘I will take charge of both,' she said. ‘They are my business now.'

Widia was about to object further, but Ingeld raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Put the knife away, Widia.' He beckoned her to one side and she went, her fingers still entwined in Gethyn's coat, still not quite trusting the huntsman. ‘I'm sorry, little niece.'

She stared at him.
Sorry?
What was that supposed to mean? But before she could speak Athulf had pushed in between them, rounding on his father. ‘What are you sorry for?' And Elfrun realized she had mistaken her cousin's feelings: he was white and pinched with fury, not nausea. ‘They cheated, those scum. We should round them up—'

‘Be quiet, Athulf.' Ingeld sounded exhausted. He turned back to Elfrun. ‘I thought they would defeat the bear, the hounds, the three of them together.' He pushed at the crease between his brows with one well-kept finger. ‘Everything they say about me is true, isn't it?'

Elfrun bit hard on her lip, but the words wouldn't stay back. ‘Why on earth did you goad Hirel like that? He's my good servant and yours, and the whole place rests on his work, minster as well as hall. And as for the dogs – the waste, the dreadful, stupid waste...' She stared down at the fingers of both her hands twined in Gethyn's curly coat. The dog was still shivering. ‘And you a priest. I should have stopped this.'

‘Waste?' She was barely aware of Athulf staring at her, still livid with anger. ‘They were ours to waste. The honour of Donmouth—'

‘I told you to be quiet, Athulf.' Ingeld turned back to her. ‘Elfrun, I'm sorry,' he said again. ‘Take the dog, and the boy, with my blessing.'

She nodded, shocked at herself as well as him, not trusting herself to come out with acceptable words.

Widia was dragging the dead hounds to one side by their back legs. She knew he would feed their bodies to the living dogs in the kennels, and she was determined that Gethyn would not be part of that banquet, as eater or eaten. Widia wouldn't let him back among the hunting dogs, anyway. He would have to stay with her.

She looked for Finn, for the bear-leader and his ward, for the girl in green, but they were nowhere to be seen. The milling crowd had scuffed the bloodstains from the soil with their feet, and the band of travelling entertainers had vanished into the sea-mist as though they had never visited Donmouth at all.

Elfrun sat in her father's great chair, its bare wooden seat hard against her bones, fondling Gethyn's ears and trying to find her courage.

After the disaster of the bear-fight, she had moved out of the women's house and into the little bower annexe to the hall that had been her father's private quarters. It was lonely, sleeping by herself for the first time in her life, but it felt right, somehow. For the first time, she could look head-on at the fact that whatever the future might hold for her, she was the lord of Donmouth and she needed to behave like it. No more tolerating Ingeld's waywardness, or Athulf's aggression, or Luda's patronizing assurances.
Learn to fight
, Fredegar had said. Well, she would.

Strange that the rest of Gethyn's coat should be so wiry, but that there was such comforting silk in his ears. He whined slightly, and nudged at her hand, and she dug her fingers around the base of those lovely ears. Gethyn sighed with happiness, and slumped against her, as though he knew just how much she was in need of comfort.

Before the news had come of her father's drowning Elfrun had felt as though she were part of a makeshift plough-team, an uneasy but functioning alliance, yoked all together and heading in the same direction. Luda, and her grandmother, and her uncle, her companions at the looms, sheepwick and dairy and kale yard, everyone doing their bit to keep the complex, recalcitrant creature that was Donmouth moving onwards, to keep everyone alive, so they could work, and eat, and sleep, and work again.

Even Athulf, with his pilfered grain, and his whales, and that cow.

Like sun and moon and planets, all in their measured dance round an earth whose absence could be coped with, because it would only be short-term.

Now she had been forced into that central space, trying to fill up that vast absence, and she found herself alone.

It was the morning after Johnsmas, and every unmarried girl in the women's house and from the steads and wicks around had been up in the hills all night, with the young men, dancing and singing round the fires they lit for the Baptist's birthday. But she hadn't gone, not this year. They would have noticed. They would have been talking. She didn't care.

She couldn't stand the giggling and the gossiping and the coarse jokes that they made when they thought she couldn't hear – or pretended they thought she couldn't hear. And then they gave her those sidelong glances, and fell ostentatiously silent.

But still, she should have gone. Because she hadn't, they would think she held herself too lofty. There was no winning, whatever she did. Behind her back, the rumour mill would grind her name and her reputation into ever finer powder.

No matter how hard she worked, the king might take Donmouth back into his own hands, and use it to reward some loyal thane; no matter how many charters she might dig out of the chest to brandish at him. He had smiled at her after that dreadful spring meeting, plied her with reassurances, but he wouldn't go on smiling forever.

And what would happen to her when Osberht's expression changed? Would she be handed over, part and parcel with the estate?

She
had
to hold on to Donmouth. And she had to hold on to it with a sterner grip than she had used so far.

Gethyn was leaning against her with all his weight, pressing her thigh painfully hard against the edge of the chair, and Elfrun slapped him on his storm-cloud flank, harder than she had intended. He looked at her with reproachful eyes and she felt a pang of guilt. ‘Sorry, boy.'

She pushed herself up from the chair. If she went to the weaving shed now, she would be there in time to give a similarly accusing look to the girls when they came in, bright-eyed and flushed, with their hems dew-soaked and skirts spattered with fallen petals. Some, always some, with the backs of their dresses green-stained.

She would do her best to channel some of Abarhild's snapping looks and acid words.

It worked.

The women and girls were tired, too, and the usual non-stop chatter was subdued and sporadic. Elfrun herself was sitting tight-lipped in front of her two-beam loom and beating the cloth down with more than usual vigour when a horn was heard sounding from the path that came down through the hills from the south-west.

‘Go and see what that is.'