‘Are you still awake?’ she hears Merewyn whisper later. How much later, Tova doesn’t know. The lantern has burned itself out. Somewhere out in the night the kew-wick of an owl out hunting. Otherwise, silence.
They lie back to back, huddled together on the wooden boards and bundles of straw that pass for a bed, rolled up in layers of wool and linen to guard against the cold that creeps in through the cracks in the walls and seeps up from the ground.
‘I’m awake,’ Tova replies, though she wishes she weren’t. She could hardly eat and now she can’t sleep either. Every time she closes her eyes she is back in that woodshed with the tall Norman standing over her. She feels his rough hands on her as he tries to haul her to her feet, and she feels the panic rising, the sickness brewing in her gut.
‘Tova?’
Merewyn must have been dozing; her words sound slurred. At least one of them has been able to get some sleep.
Tova asks, ‘Yes?’
‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’
‘About what?’
‘About the Normans. About what they’re doing.’
What can she say? She knows only what Merewyn knows, after all: no more and no less. She doesn’t want to believe it, but that’s not the same thing.
Instead she says, ‘Why would he lie to us?’
If it’s all true, she supposes, it might explain one thing. It would explain how they’ve been able to get this far, and why nobody from Heldeby has come after them.
A numbness spreads through her. If the enemy arrived in force this morning, not long after she and her lady fled . . .
Then what?
She can hardly bear to let the thought form in her mind. She never cared for ?lfric, or for Ceolred or H?sta or Saba either for that matter, but what about everyone else? What about red-faced Ulf the cook, or Leofric the swineherd’s son, who always had a smile for her, with whom she shared a drunken kiss beneath the willows after the Christmas feast and who was too shy to even speak to her for a week afterwards? What about timid Eda the alewife, more gentle a soul than anyone else she has known, or hoary-haired Thorvald the priest, reckoned by everyone to be easily a hundred in years? Are they all dead as well?
She’s already accepted they can’t go back, but what if there’s nothing now to go back to, even if they wanted? Everyone she knew, everyone with whom she once lived and worked and feasted and fasted—
No. She mustn’t think that way. She doesn’t want to believe it. They’ll have got away, she decides, fled up on to the moors, high up the valleys, where the enemy won’t find them.
‘Merewyn?’ she whispers, wondering if the same thought has occurred to her too, but all she hears is the sound of her lady’s breathing, soft and slow. ‘Merewyn?’
Her lady stirs but doesn’t wake. Tova doesn’t have the heart to disturb her. She shifts, trying to make herself more comfortable on the hard boards.
Will Beorn be as good as his word? Will he still be here, she wonders, when dawn comes, to take us to Hagustaldesham? Or will he take the chance while we’re sleeping to slip away unnoticed?
She doesn’t know, and the longer she lies there asking herself such questions, the less sure she is what exactly she’s hoping for.
Second Day
‘Girl.’
She wakes with a start. Still dark. A figure looming over her – a creature of the night, a shadow-walker, come to claim her. To carry her off. Her heart leaps and her stomach sinks and she’s about to let out a scream when something clamps across her mouth. A leathery hand that smells of horse dung and something sharper that can only be blood. She struggles, trying to free herself, but she can’t.
‘It’s me, girl,’ the shadow says. Insistent, impatient. ‘It’s me. Beorn.’
She recognises the name but doesn’t know how. For a moment she can’t work out where she is or what she’s doing here, why she isn’t in her usual bed at home, with Cene curled at her feet, and why her bones feel so chilled.
The moment passes quickly. She remembers. How they came to be here. Why they’re running. The Normans. Everything.
Beorn.
She blinks to clear her watery eyes. The scars on his face, those deep-set eyes. Tentatively, as if afraid she might still let out a cry, he lifts his hand away.
‘What?’ she asks between breaths. She sits up, trying to escape sleep’s clutches. ‘Are they here?’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s time for us to go. Wake your lady. I’ll gather what we need. Eat what you can; once we’re on our way I don’t intend to stop. We leave as soon as it’s light.’