*
Earlier that evening, just as the light was fading, ?lfric had returned from riding the bounds looking pale, which was unnerving in itself because he usually wasn’t one to let his fears show. He’d spied smoke, he said, rising some way beyond the woods to the south, in the direction of one of our neighbours’ halls, and it wasn’t the thin kind you might expect to see from a hearth fire or forge, but thick black coils that made a blotch upon the horizon. We wondered what could have happened, but there was an obvious explanation. Everyone was probably thinking the same thing, but no one wanted to say it plainly.
Thorvald suggested we leave immediately and seek refuge up on the moors, just in case. ?lfric agreed, and Ketil tried to persuade his brother that they spoke sense. Orm, though, said there could be any number of reasons for the smoke that had nothing to do with brigands or the enemy, and that since we didn’t know for sure there was any danger, we shouldn’t worry. Instead, he announced, he would lead a riding party at first light to find out what had happened.
But we did worry. That night ?lfric arranged sentries to sound the horn if anything happened, and agreed to take one of the watches himself, but said we should try to keep this news a secret from everyone else. He didn’t want to cause panic. Orm ridiculed him for being frightened of a little smoke; the reeve answered that he would rather be fearful and live than die because he had been drunk and foolish. They argued loudly, and were still going at each other long after dark. I was in the chapel, praying alone by candlelight, across the yard from the hall, and even from there I could hear them hours after most people had gone to their beds. Eventually they came out from the hall, still shouting at one another.
‘Lady Merewyn was right,’ ?lfric said, and it was hearing my name that caught my attention. ‘You don’t care about anyone but yourself.’
Orm protested that wasn’t true, but the reeve spoke over him: ‘If your father could hear you now—’
Orm said, ‘I don’t care what Skalpi would think. And anyway he’s dead.’
‘The folk of Heldeby have put their faith in you,’ ?lfric said. ‘You’re their lord. They’re looking to you for protection. If you betray their trust and they die because of your recklessness, then may you perish in Hell.’
Orm shot back that he wasn’t stupid, that he was no longer a child and that he didn’t deserve to be spoken to in such a way, especially not by his own reeve. Besides, he said, he knew what he was doing.
‘I doubt that very much,’ ?lfric said.
After that things went quiet. I assumed the reeve had gone to take up his watch, and I thought maybe Orm had gone back to the hall to slump on a bench there, as he usually did.
I peered out of the chapel door. When I was sure he wasn’t about I went back to my house and to bed. I was halfway between dreaming and waking when I heard movement below. At first I thought it must be dawn and that Tova had come to lay the fire, and then I was confused since usually I had to come down to let her in. But I heard footsteps on the stairs and suddenly none of that mattered. They were heavy footsteps, but slow. Not constant either, but unsteady. I knew then it wasn’t Tova. It was him.
There were only two chambers on the up-floor: the first led to the second, and that was where I had my bower. I could hear him crossing the room from the stairs, barefoot by the sound of it, and could hear my own heart thumping as I fumbled for the knife under my pillow, the one my father had left me, with the hilt inlaid with silver crosses—
*
‘A knife?’ Guthred asks, glancing at the others. ‘You kept a knife under your pillow?’
‘For protection,’ Merewyn says. ‘I always told Tova she should do the same, just in case, although in my heart of hearts I never really thought he’d go that far. I just wanted to be ready for him, and to have some way of fending him off. I never planned—’
‘But I thought you said Tova was there with you.’
‘Not that night,’ Tova says. ‘I wasn’t there every night.’
‘That’s why I had the knife,’ Merewyn explains.
Oslac says, ‘He knew you were alone, then.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. He was drunk, worse than usual. He was so far gone in his cups that he didn’t care. I didn’t know what he might do, and I don’t think he did either. I was frightened like never before, like I never knew I could be.’
‘What did you do?’ asks the priest, but from the look on his face Tova guesses he already has some idea.