Daughter of the Wolf (50 page)

‘I've been hurt before. I'll live.' He turned towards the main door of the hall, the one that gave out into the yard.

‘Finn!' She was knocked by a sudden gust of panic, a longing to hold on to him, to regain some of the ground they seemed to have lost. ‘You must be starving. Come with me to the bake-house. It must be about time to give out the bread to the slaves.'

Finn stopped, one hand on the doorjamb, his back to her. ‘Indeed. My life is yours to command.'

‘What?' She pushed her hair out of her face.

‘So feed me with your other thralls. I've known worse masters.'

Elfrun felt a terrible draining despair, as though someone had turned a spigot and let all the life and mirth run out of her veins. Only a few minutes ago they had been so close, and now he had cased himself in ice and bitterness, and she had no idea why.

‘Go then.' Without wanting to she was mimicking his own bitten-back tone. ‘Speak to Luda. Tell him I said he is to give you whatever you need. Then go and sleep.'

‘Alvrun...' He pivoted.

‘Just go.'

He stared at her for a long moment, then turned and did as she had ordered, and his very compliance only made her feel worse. After he had gone she gazed at the empty doorway, numbed, a lump in her throat. Then she went into the weaving shed and sat herself down at her loom and forced herself to concentrate on thread count and colour and not bashing the cloth too hard with her batten. She stayed there in the half-light for the whole day, speaking only when she had to.

Widia came back late, with all his companions but Athulf. The mist had retreated at last, to leave a warm golden evening as its legacy. One of her women stood awkwardly in the door of the weaving shed and beckoned her out to the yard.

‘We found nothing. Oh – hoofprints, and dung, and a smothered fire. And this.' Widia jerked his head, and one of the others urged his mount forward, swinging a crushed and battered wicker basket from his back. It was Finn's pack. She didn't need to look inside to see that it had been emptied of its treasures.

‘But no clue as to where they went?'

‘Athulf's still out there. Still looking. He said he would be late, and not to worry.'

‘On his own?' She couldn't hide the shrill edge of alarm.

Widia shrugged. ‘He can look after himself.'

‘Against three armed men?' And there could be more than three.

‘Lady' – and Widia's voice betrayed that he was weary to the bone – ‘you've tried quarrelling with him before now. How far did it get you?'

She nodded, suddenly beyond all arguing. He was right. Somewhere in the last year or so the little cousin whom she had thought she knew had vanished. Athulf was a man now. He had his sword. He could look to himself.

‘Thank you, Widia.'

His face softened. ‘You're more than welcome, lady.' He paused, then said, ‘I'd like a word with you, when you've time? Something important. But not now – I need food and fire, and you're too weary for me to burden you further.'

‘Of course. Whenever it suits you.' Too saddened to be curious, she bent to lift the pack, and carried it through to the stable. The horses were still out in their summer-field and the place was quiet; at first she thought it was empty, but then she saw that Gethyn and the dog-boy were there, and as she approached the dog-boy put a finger to his lips, eyes wide and nodding his head.

Finn was lying in the straw, fast asleep. When she had first gone into the weaving shed that morning she had ordered one of the women to make a bed for him in the stable, and to dress his shoulder; she could only guess now how massively the bruising had spread, as it was hidden by the soft grey wool. He looked as calm and comfortable as he was ever likely to. Bones and hollows and corners, he had called her, but he was little more substantial than a shadow himself. She hunkered down and looked hard at his face. A gross intrusion, to take advantage of his oblivion, but she couldn't help herself. The air in the stable was warm and sweet with new hay.

‘Is this your man then?' Saethryth had come in silently. Gethyn padded up to her, tail wagging.

Elfrun rose hot-faced and stepped back swiftly, a denial on her lips, but it died unspoken.
My man
. She tried out the words, shaping them with her lips but giving them no sound.

‘I was wrong then,' Saethryth said. ‘You do understand.' She moved round to stand at Elfrun's side. ‘My da says he's some beggarly pedlar who should be whipped out of Donmouth. He says to tell you he's sent men down to the marsh to deal with the carrion. Burn them. His words.'

Elfrun nodded, carefully ignoring Saethryth's first sentences. Yes. The bodies. It had to be done.

‘Who hurt him? Who killed them?'

It was the question Elfrun had been dreading. ‘We don't know. Outlaws.'

‘So they're all saying. You know what I'm thinking, don't you, lady?'

‘Thinking?' The two young women stared at each other, until Elfrun had to lower her gaze.

‘I told you before. You should never have drowned Hirel.'

Elfrun swallowed. ‘Ingeld's throat was cut. He was stripped. Not speared and left to drown. It's not the same.'

‘But like enough. Robbed and killed.' Saethryth paused, looking down at Finn. ‘What are you going to do? He's pretty, isn't he? But he looks a cold fish. Not much life in him. That Thancrad, he's the better bet.'

Elfrun fought her fury. ‘Of course there isn't much life in him, not just now. But that isn't – isn't normal. He's wounded, that's all.' She squatted down beside him again, blocking Saethryth's view of him as though Finn needed protecting from the other woman's limpid cornflower gaze.

‘Wounded?' Saethryth laughed, the old gurgling laugh that had set Elfrun's teeth on edge for so many years. ‘That's his excuse, is it?'

‘Anyway, he's leaving tomorrow.'

‘And you'll just stand back and let him go.' Saethryth shook her head. ‘You'd better get him to take you to that house of nuns your gammer's always talking about. Best place for someone like you.'

‘What do you mean by that?' Elfrun half rose, but Saethryth just shrugged and vanished into the yard.

Just stand back and let him go...

Elfrun sat down at Finn's feet. Someone had put an old blanket over him, and his breathing was easy and regular. Her own cloak was hanging in the hall, matted and filthy, in need of careful brushing and sponging after the night's trials. She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap, looking down at her interwoven fingers, brown and grubby against the faded blue of her patched dress with its ragged and muddy hem. Her nails were a disgrace. Abarhild would have something to say – would have had, she emended. Her grandmother was so vague, these days, so lost in her memories. A reprimand would have been a welcome sign that she was engaging with the world again.

Elfrun came to a sudden decision.

She would go to the king and the archbishop, and ask them to take Donmouth hall and minster under their protection. She could do no more. She had been trying for a whole year, and all had been disaster. Rust and moth, theft and corruption and adultery, and now outlaws running free on her hills.

And what of her own fate? Elfrun lifted her head and gazed unseeing at the far wall of the stable, the bridles and halters hanging from their pegs.

A house of nuns, if the great powers agreed with Abarhild.

Marriage. Most women her age were two or three years married, one baby at the breast and another in the ground. It was more than likely that the king would give Donmouth into the hand of some proven and deserving retainer, a hard-eyed, heavy-bearded man of thirty or forty with a wife or two behind him already, her body as the seal of the bargain. Someone like cousin Edmund.
And is the maiden willing?
Of course, she could always say no, but she could imagine how coldly that would be received.

And if she did refuse, then what?

She could see the king shrugging, pointing to the open door, clear as though she already stood before him.

She could go and find service on some other estate. Her weaving skills would make her welcome in the homes of any one of a number of distant cousins. Useful, worthy women could always find a roof, until they were too old to work. And a kind household would even find the old woman a sunny corner and a rusk to mumble.

But she had grown used over the last year to having choices and making decisions. Of having men listen to her. Even if they listened and promised and lied. Even if her choices and decisions were the wrong ones. She would have to forget about all that, as a poor relation.

So then what?

The road was open to her, as Finn had seemed to know.

Elfrun felt a deep bone-weariness that was only partly to do with her long night in the open and the horror of what had happened to Finn and his companions. It was herself, her guilty conscience, and her foolish vanity and fear of what might come: these were the burdens which were crushing her. Where was her much-vaunted faith when it was needed? She looked down at Finn. His lips were slightly parted, and one lock of his hair, ashy-fair and fine, had fallen over his forehead.

As she watched, his eyes opened.

As if in a dream that turned to nightmare, she saw his face light from within, and his right hand reach out to her, and then full wakefulness and memory bring the shutters down; and he turned away, lifting his shoulder against her.

‘Finn?'

‘Lady.' He still had his back turned.

‘What are you and Auli to each other?'

She had no right to demand. She wasn't even sure why that question, of all the burning questions, had come from her lips. But she knew that Auli had abandoned Finn into her care; and although that granted her no claim to an answer she felt it at least gave her permission to ask.

He didn't respond for a long moment, and then he turned back, with a rustling of straw, and half sat up carefully, propping himself on his good arm, the blanket falling to one side.

‘Auli.'

‘Yes.' She had to bite her lower lip, to stop herself from supplying his response. Sister. Cousin. Chance-met companion on the road. Anything but the answer she dreaded.

But the words, when they came, were not any of the ones she had foreseen.

‘Alvrun, Auli is my owner.'

She stared, literally making no sense of the separate syllables, unable to combine them into meaningful words. ‘What do you mean?'

He sighed. ‘I am her thrall. I work for her. She owns me, she and her father.'

‘Her father? The bear-leader?'

‘Who, Myr?' Finn laughed scratchily. ‘No, no. Myr and Holmi and me, we're all their thralls.'

‘So who is her father? Where is he?'

‘I don't know. It was his boat that was putting in for us, but whether he was in it...' Finn shrugged and made a face. ‘A lot can happen in a summer.'

‘So when you asked me to come with you...' A slave with his eye on freedom. No wonder he had been buttering her up. Right from that long-ago encounter in the sand dunes he must have known her for what she was. A green girl with access to her father's silver, pathetically ready to lie down with the first man who called her beautiful.

Vanity. Vanity. She hadn't known it was possible to feel so utterly humiliated.

‘I think I had better go.'

‘Alvrun!'

She turned and walked out of the stable, into the autumn dusk.

The yard appeared deserted, but for the loops and skeins of hearth-smoke hanging in the still September air, and the smell of cooking. Everyone would be at their evening meal, and for this favour Elfrun was profoundly grateful. The last thing she wanted just then, hot-cheeked as she was and fighting tears, was to confront Saethryth and another half-dozen gossip-avid women, who might so easily have overheard anything she and Finn had had to say to each other. She would go back to the weaving shed – no, first she would go and beg half a loaf and some cheese. She hadn't eaten since – and she realized then that she hadn't eaten that whole day, nor the previous evening, and she was suddenly, bestially, hungry.

But she had taken no more than half a dozen paces from the stable-door when there was a thunder of hooves, loud and unfamiliar in the narrow, enclosed space of the yard.

Elfrun spun around, drawing in her breath to shout a warning and a reproof, but she wasn't given the chance. There was a rider either side of her, their hoods pulled low, and a third coming straight at her who had looped his reins and was leaning sideways from his saddle, holding a grey cloak outstretched between his hands. Before she had time even to wonder what he was about, her head and upper body had been trapped in the coarse, scratchy fabric, and it was being bundled about her. Outraged, she put up her hands to shove the stifling cloth away, but now she was being grabbed under the armpits and hauled on to the back of one of the other horses, flung to lie face down over the saddle-bow, which dug more painfully into her midriff with every long stride. She shouted and tried to heave herself sideways, but the horse was wheeling now and the lurching trot flowing into a canter and then the crazy thud of a gallop, and she was suddenly more frightened of falling off than of staying on, no matter what was happening and who these riders might be.

But she knew exactly who they were.

Who had killed Ingeld? Who had speared the bear, and Finn's friends, and Finn himself? Three men on horseback. Outlaws.

They would take her up into the hills.

Elfrun tried desperately to think, though the panic burning through her veins like fever fuddled her brain, and the saddle-bow was bruising her and winding her in equal measure, the rough wool pressed hard and stifling against eyes and nose and mouth.

They would have to slow down. They couldn't ride like this once they were out of the cultivated ground and on to the waste, not unless they wanted to break a horse's leg among the rough and the gorse. That would be her chance. When they slowed... No, let them ride a little way into the hills. She knew that landscape, every copse, every hollow. She could run and lie low.