The Saxon Lord's Bride (Love Through Time #3)

Prologue

WULFRIC

Every day before he broke his fast, Wulfric stood in the doorway of his hall and counted the things that could kill his people.

Not aloud. A lord who muttered at the dawn would soon have his folk whispering that grief had cracked his wits.

So he counted in silence as morning crept over Ashford in a thin wash of silver.

Three cows were coughing in the lower byre.

Two sacks of barley had gone damp where the roof leaked over the store loft.

One broken cart axle. Five men still limping from the fighting in the north.

A dozen boys old enough to think themselves men and young enough to die proving it.

And to the south, hidden beyond wood and field, the sea, were rumors no man in Sussex wished to hear.

Below him the village stirred. Smoke rose from the thatch, hens scratched and fussed in the mud, and a pig rooted beneath a fence as if it meant to reach Denmark by midday.

Ashford sat tucked in a fold of land between forest and slope, too small to matter to kings.

Once he had counted that a blessing. Now he wondered if any such place remained in England.

Aelfwyn would have told him to stop staring holes in the morning and come eat before he turned sour enough to curdle the ale.

He heard her voice so clearly he turned his head, foolish as a green boy, but the hall stood empty behind him.

There were rushes on the floor, shields along the wall, and the fire still banked low and red.

A loaf of bread wrapped in linen sat on the table beside a wedge of hard cheese and a jug of small ale.

Two winters she had been gone, and still she crept up on him when he least expected it.

“My lord?”

Godwin stood at the bottom of the steps, gray beard neatly combed, though the rest of him looked as if one of the tavern wenches had spent the night using him for sport.

“What trouble now?” Wulfric asked.

“’Tis the Reeveson sons. At one another again.”

Wulfric closed his eyes for the space of one breath. “Land?”

“A goose.”

“Saints preserve us from men with too much blood and too little work.”

Godwin’s mouth twitched, though he was wise enough not to smile. “The goose is dead.”

“Then the goose has found peace before the rest of us.”

By the time Wulfric reached the muddy lane between the baker’s house and the Reeveson yard, half the village had gathered, wearing the solemn faces of folk who claimed to hate a quarrel and yet never missed one.

The goose lay in the middle of the lane, its neck at a sorrowful angle, white feathers splattered with mud.

Osric Reeveson had one hand fisted in his younger brother’s tunic whilst Edwin Reeveson had blood on his lip and murder in his eye. Their mother, Hild, stood nearby with her arms folded, face red from the bakehouse and from her formidable temper.

“He killed my goose,” Edwin said.

“It was in my barley,” Osric snapped.

“It had strayed near your barley.”

“It had its beak in it.”

“How much barley can one goose take?”

“Enough to vex me.”

Wulfric looked from one brother to the other, then down at the dead bird. “And now it vexes no one.”

Hild made a sharp sound. “It vexes me, my lord. I meant that goose for Martinmas.”

“Then you shall have it sooner.” Wulfric turned to Osric. “You will pay your brother half its worth in barley, and your mother will take the bird for her pot.”

Both men opened their mouths, but as Wulfric raised his hand, they shut them again with a snap.

“And if either of you draws blood over fowl again while men whisper of war on the coast, I will set you both to mucking the lower ditch until winter freezes your toes together.”

A few of the villagers murmured their approval. Hild’s mouth turned up at the corner before she hid it. She had buried a husband and raised five sons, and had no patience left for foolishness unless it arrived with a hot meal.

The matter now settled, the crowd drifted back to ovens and churns, fences and milking, the hundred small labors that kept hunger from the door for one more day.

Wulfric watched them go. Every one of them looked to him to keep them fed and safe, and there were days the weight of it sat on his shoulders like a wet cloak.

A small hand tugged at his sleeve. “Lord Wulfric?”

He looked down to see Tova, Anya’s youngest, standing barefoot in the mud, hair escaping its plaits. She held up a wooden horse with one leg missing.

“Can he be mended?”

Wulfric took the horse. The carving had been Aelfwyn’s work. She had made toys in winter, when the nights grew long and her hands could not bear idleness. He knew every nick in the little thing.

“Aye,” he said. “If the wood has not split too far.”

“Mother says you mend too many things yourself.”

“Your mother speaks too much.”

Tova’s eyes went wide.

Wulfric lowered his voice. “But she is often right.”

The child considered this, solemn as a judge. “She says you do not eat enough.”

“Then she is right twice, which will make her unbearable.”

Tova grinned, showing the gap where a front tooth had been. “She is already unbearable.”

Wulfric looked over the girl’s head to where Anya stood outside her doorway, trying and failing to pretend she had not heard. A faint smile touched the woman’s face before she turned and went back inside.

He tucked the broken horse into his belt. “Come to the hall after supper. He may have four legs again by then.”

Tova ran off, satisfied, and Wulfric stood still until the ache in his chest settled back where it belonged.

Aelfwyn had wanted children. They had lost one babe before her belly had begun to show, and another before there was time to speak of it beyond their bed.

After that she stopped counting the months aloud.

He never knew whether the silence eased her sorrow or deepened it.

With Aelfwyn, courage and kindness had always worn the same face.

“My lord.” Godwin’s voice was soft.

Wulfric turned. “More geese?”

“Nay.” The humor had gone from the old man’s face. “Riders. From the south road.”

Not cows or barley or a broken axle. Something far worse.

Wulfric strode toward the edge of the village, where two men rode in beneath the ash trees.

Their horses were lathered, their cloaks stiff with salt, and their faces gray.

He knew one of them, Eadric, a fisherman’s son from the coast who sometimes brought eels, news, and a tongue too loose for either.

The other man was a stranger, blood dried black along his sleeve.

Eadric slid from the saddle, and would have fallen if Wulfric had not caught him by the arm.

“Speak.”

“Ships.”

The word tore out of him.

“So many the sea was dark with them. Normans. Horses. Men in mail. They have landed near Pevensey, and there may be more behind. We saw the fires before we fled.”

The village went quiet around them. No hens. No hammer. No children calling from the lane. Even the pig stilled beneath the fence, as if the beast had more sense than half the men in England.

Godwin crossed himself. “William.”

“Aye.” Eadric swallowed. “The duke has come.”

Wulfric looked south, though the forest hid the sea. King Harold had marched north to break the Norseman at Stamford Bridge. Half the men who followed him were dead or weary, the roads churned to mud by marching feet, and now William had come while England still drew breath through broken teeth.

The songs would make courage of it. Songs always did. They never sang of damp barley or frightened children, of old women with bad knees or lame men or dead geese, or of the way every face in a village turned to its lord, thinking he was made of stone.

He was not, but he had learned long ago how to stand as if he were.

“Ring the bell,” he said.

Godwin hesitated. “For council?”

“For all.” Wulfric raised his voice so it carried down the lane.

“Bring in the outer herds. No one goes to the fields alone. Hunters to the forest paths. Osric, Edwin—fetch every spear fit to hold and every bow with a sound string. Hild, set the women to packing meal, beans, cheese, salt, whatever can be carried. Anya will know who needs help moving.”

Folk began to move, and in moving, in having a purpose, they steadied. Give fear nothing to do and it would gnaw through a village by nightfall. Give it work, and sometimes it pulled the cart.

Godwin stepped close. “Do you think they will come this far?”

“I think men who cross the sea with horses and fire do not mean to stand upon the shore and admire it.”

“You mean to fight?”

Wulfric looked at the village. At Tova, standing in her doorway with one hand wrapped in her mother’s skirt. At Hild, already shouting orders. At the Reeveson brothers, grim-faced now, the goose forgotten. At the hall Aelfwyn had filled with laughter, candles, and her truly terrible singing.

There was no one else to ask. That was the whole of being lord. Every soul in Ashford could turn to him, and he could turn to no one at all.

“We prepare,” Wulfric said. “We stand if we must. We move the weak if we can. And if the damned Normans come to Ashford, we make them pay for every step.”

Godwin nodded, sorrow sitting deep in the lines beside his mouth. “Your father would have said the same.”

His father had died in a shield-wall, brave and dead and of no further use to anyone. Then he thought of Aelfwyn, fever-bright and fading, her fingers curled around his wrist.

Keep living, she had whispered. Not breathing. Any fool can breathe. Living.

He had not yet learned how.

The bell began to ring, iron on iron, calling Ashford in from its morning.

Wulfric tightened the belt at his waist and felt the small wooden horse tucked there. Broken, but not beyond mending. Not yet.