So is she. She hugs it closer for a while longer, rubbing its neck and murmuring soothing noises, before at last she’s able to tear herself away. It runs around her feet and leaps up at her.
‘Sit,’ she says, and she keeps on saying it until it obeys, while she replaces what’s left of the bacon in her saddlebag. She climbs back into the saddle. At once it’s up, coming after her, its tail still wagging.
‘Stay,’ she tells it, and once more to be sure: ‘Stay.’
It gives a whimper but does as she says. As they ride away it barks once, twice, three times in protest. But she doesn’t look back, and it doesn’t follow.
*
The day is growing old, the shadows lengthening. They lead their horses down into a hollow where ash and beech and hazel and birch grow close and tangled, where the musky scents of damp leaf-mulch and decaying tree flesh fill the air. This path is ill travelled; they go in single file. In places it’s so overgrown that Beorn has to lay about with his axe to clear a path.
Above, a branch creaks in the wind. Somewhere amid the low holly bushes a twig snaps. Is there someone there?
‘I don’t like this, Beorn,’ Tova says. ‘Are you sure we’re going the right way?’
‘We’ll be through these woods soon enough. Just keep up.’
A rustle of leaves, a light drumming upon the earth, a flash of mottled brown. For a moment her breath catches in her chest. But it’s only a deer, bounding through the trees.
Stop it, she tells herself. Or else it won’t be the Normans that kill you. You’ll end up worrying yourself to death.
From above, a chorus of jeers. She looks up, sees perhaps a dozen crows, flapping excitedly as they peer down at her from their perches along the gnarled, twisted limbs of a broad-bellied oak. She makes the sign of the cross to ward off the evil they carry. Are they the same birds as those corpse eaters they saw earlier? Are they following them, waiting, waiting, waiting for one of them to drop? Hoping for fresh meat to claw and rend and tear to shreds and gorge themselves upon? As if they hadn’t already had their fill.
She glares at them as she passes beneath. They settle back down, hunched within their feathers, and watch back with cold, jet-glistening eyes. The Devil’s messengers, her mother used to tell her when she was younger. She remembers how she was scolded when once she brought home a chick that had fallen from its nest, so small that its feathers were still downy, not yet black but charcoal-grey. Creatures of evil, her mother said. She’d made Tova, who was no more than seven years old at the time, hold it underwater in the rain barrel behind the kitchen until it stopped moving, all the while standing over her, watching to make sure it was done.
Tova shudders, and not because of the cold. How long is it since last she thought about her mother? How many years now since she died? Five? Six? She doesn’t remember any more.
Two broad-bellied oaks stand like sentinels on either side of the path, their stout limbs outstretched, branching into fingers that reach out to form an arch. She doesn’t have to look too hard at the knots and cankers to make out noses, eyes, ears.
Behind her, another rustle, another crack. She spins, searching in the direction of the sound.
Nothing.
She stares back up the path, past the twisted trunks and the fallen boughs, past the holly and the brambles, into the shadows. Breathing as shallowly as she can, she listens.
Nothing.
Show yourself, she thinks. If you’re there, show yourself.
But of course no one does. It’s her imagination again. Her lady is calling, telling her to hurry up, and she turns and follows.
*
Almost dark. Another day gone. Another day survived.
The woods are behind them, the moors even further. These gently sloping plains could belong to another kingdom entirely; they’re nothing like the high, craggy hills that Tova has grown up beneath. She has never felt so far from home in all her life.
Beorn says that, come the morning, they’ll need to start looking for the Tees river. There’s a place called Griseby, which is the lowest fording point and ought to be no more than a few hours’ ride from here. If they’re lucky they’ll be able to reach it before the Normans do, although the foreigners are fast riders, some of them almost born in the saddle.
‘And if we don’t?’ asks Merewyn.
‘Then we’ll have to follow the river upstream until we find a ford.’
‘And if they’re all guarded? What’s your plan then?’
‘Then I don’t know. We’ll find some other way, I suppose, even if it means . . .’
He trails off as he stops in his tracks, a frown on his face.
‘What is it?’ Tova asks. Earlier, she barely had the strength to keep going, but now that it’s nearly night-time and the rain is returning, she doesn’t want to stop. Not until they’ve found shelter. If they keep still for too long then she thinks she’ll freeze stiff, and not be able to move again.
But then she follows Beorn’s gaze towards a half-collapsed barn at the bottom of a hollow some way off the track ahead. And she sees what he sees.