Chapter 4
Four
WULFRIC
The stranger stood in the smoke of the meeting house and told me she could not fight my war. For one foolish breath, I nearly laughed.
Not because I found her amusing, though she had managed that twice already and I did not care for it. I nearly laughed because every other soul beneath my roof seemed convinced she had come to tell us exactly how to fight it.
Leofric had been muttering about sorcery since the moment she walked out of the trees. Godwin thought her some kind of spy. Wystan, who had very nearly put a spear through her from fright, now stood by the door watching her as though she might vanish in a puff of smoke.
And yet the woman herself stood beside my hearth and said plainly that she knew nothing of war.
“I don’t know your enemies,” she had said. “I don’t know your roads, your stores, how many men you can put in a fight, or where you’d make a stand.”
The fire cracked between us. Twenty faces turned toward me, waiting to see whether I would silence her. I did not. She looked absurd among us. There was no kinder word for it.
Her hair was dark and wet, hanging in loose ropes around a pale face scratched by thorns.
Her strange blue coat shone where the firelight caught it, the cloth smooth as water and made by no loom I knew.
Beneath it she wore blue leg coverings fitted close enough that half the old women in Ashford had already decided she was either a witch or foreign.
Her boots were stranger still. Brown. Soft-looking. Made without proper leather soles, yet sturdy. Everything about her should have marked her as weak.
Instead she stood with her feet planted apart and her hands open at her sides, as steady beneath the eyes of armed men as any warrior I had known.
“But I know what fire does,” she said.
Something changed in her face then. It was small. A shadow behind the eyes. Grief.
“I know what fear does. I know how quickly a plan falls apart when people panic, and how to move children, old people, and the injured before that happens.”
No one spoke. The smoke from the hearth crawled beneath the roof beams and made my eyes sting.
Outside, the village bell had stopped ringing, but Ashford was still in motion.
Men were gathering bows and spear shafts.
Women were packing grain, salt, dried beans, and whatever else could be carried.
The herds had been brought closer. Hunters watched the southern road and the forest tracks.
We had not sat idle waiting for this woman to teach us how danger worked.
My father had taught me before I had hair on my face. His father had taught him. The men of Ashford knew where horses found bad ground, which streams could be crossed after rain, where a dozen men could hold a path against fifty, and how much grain could be hidden before riders reached the village.
We knew war. All too well. What we did not know was her.
The stranger looked from face to face.
“I can’t tell you how to fight your war,” she said. “But I can help you keep fear from fighting it for you.”
Silence settled over the hall. I had buried half a season’s worth of friends. I had walked the length of England with a spear on my shoulder, fought Norsemen in the north, and come home with men limping beside me to find the sea gone white with Norman sails.
I had no strength left for one more problem. Yet here she stood.
Darcy Patterson.
She had given her name flat and certain, the way a fighting man gives a watchword. The second name sat strangely in my mind. I had never heard its like.
Neither had I heard a woman say she went willingly into burning houses.
Wystan had looked at her as though she had just confessed to dining with demons.
I was not certain the boy was wrong.
“What are you?” Godwin asked.
The question came low and careful from beside the wall as her mouth tightened. I had already asked nearly the same thing. I suspected we would ask it many times before any answer satisfied us.
She looked down at her own strange clothing, then back at the elder.
“I told you. Where I come from, when buildings burn, there are people whose job it is to go inside.”
A murmur went through the room as Leofric crossed himself.
Darcy noticed. “Really,” she said. “That isn’t helping.”
A few of the younger men laughed. Leofric did not.
“You expect us to believe folk pay you to walk into fire?”
“Not enough, apparently.”
I did not understand the answer but I understood the manner of it. She had the look of a person standing near a cliff edge and making jests because looking down would be worse. I knew something of that.
Godwin leaned forward. “Why?”
Darcy’s eyes went to him. “Why what?”
“Why go in?”
Her expression changed again. The sharpness softened, not into gentleness, but into something quieter.
“Because people are still inside and if I don’t go in, they die.”
No one laughed then.
I watched her. The woman spoke no Christian tongue I knew, and yet somehow we understood one another. She wore clothing no loom could make. She had appeared from the direction of the Norman landing half drowned and alone, and she knew fear too well.
Leofric wanted her bound. The whole weight of the choice sat on me. That is what it is to be lord. Every man may offer counsel. Every woman may whisper what ought to be done. In the end, one man decides, and afterward the dead belong to him.
Godwin rubbed one hand over his beard.
“We have sent the youngest children with their mothers to the northern wood before.”
Darcy turned to him at once. “How many?”
His frown deepened.
“Near thirty, mayhap.”
“Near?”
A few heads turned as Godwin bristled.
“We know our own children.”
“I’m sure you do. Does one person know all thirty have arrived?”
The room went still. Leofric’s mouth hardened.
“You question our care of our own blood?”
“I question what frightened people do when plans go wrong.”
Her answer came without heat. She crouched near the hearth and reached for a charred stick.
Wystan shifted as she glanced at him.
“If I intended to conquer England with charcoal, I’d have started earlier.”
The boy flushed as a ripple of reluctant amusement went around the room.
Darcy drew a line in the packed earth. “This is the village.” She drew a second line, even more crooked than the first. “This is the forest.”
“That is a terrible map,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment.
“Do you always make fun of strangers during invasions?”
“Only those who insult my village with poorly drawn maps.”
For the first time, her smile came fully. It changed her face. Not into beauty. She was already striking enough in her strange way, dark-eyed and pale-skinned, with a mouth made more for arguing than obedience. The smile made her look younger, more carefree. I looked away first.
She turned back to the dirt. “The children go here.”
“Aye,” Godwin said.
“Who leads them?”
“Three hunters know the paths.”
“And if one hunter is killed?”
Nobody answered.
She drew another line. “If the main path is blocked?”
“There is another,” I said.
Her head came up. “Who knows it?”
“Many.”
“The children?”
“No.”
“The mothers?”
“Some.”
She nodded. She was not showing us our ignorance. Instead, she was searching for where our knowledge might break.
“What signal tells them the main path is unsafe?”
I looked at the men around my fire. Men who could hold shield to shield without flinching, who knew the sound an arrow made before it struck, men who could find their way home beneath clouded skies.
Not one had an answer.
Darcy sat back on her heels. “That’s what I know.”
Leofric snorted. “You know how to ask questions.”
“A surprisingly useful skill.”
“You mock us.”
“No.” Her voice sharpened. “I’m trying to keep someone from realizing halfway into the forest that her child is missing and turning back while everyone else follows her.
I’m trying to keep thirty people from trying to use one path because nobody told them there was another.
I’m trying to make sure one dead man doesn’t take the whole plan with him. ”
The fire popped and a spark jumped into the rushes. Darcy moved before anyone else. Her foot stamped down once. Hard. The spark vanished. She stared at the black mark a moment too long. Then she straightened.
“I’m not saying your plan is bad.”
Leofric gave a rough laugh. “It has taken you long enough.”
“I’m saying every plan can go wrong.”
That silenced even him.
She looked at me. “You know how men attack.”
I did not answer as she went on.
“You know where horses can move and where they can’t. You know the paths, the woods, the places worth defending. I don’t.”
I had expected pride from her. Instead she gave us the edge of her knowledge and marked clearly where it ended.
“But if you tell me what you plan to do, I can help you find the places where people will panic, get separated, go back, freeze, or follow the wrong person.”
Godwin’s fingers began tapping against his knee. A nervous habit that he stopped when he noticed me watching.
“You speak as though you have seen much panic,” he said.
“I have.” She met his gaze.
“At war?”
“No.”
Leofric folded his arms. “Then what is this knowledge worth?”
Her gaze snapped to him. “I’ve carried many children out of burning rooms.”
The room quieted.
“I’ve watched people run toward danger because someone they loved was still inside.
I’ve watched them refuse to leave because they were frightened of losing everything they owned.
I’ve seen men twice your size become helpless because smoke turned the world black and they couldn’t find a door three feet away. ”
Her hand curled once then opened.
“I know what fear does.”
That was the moment I believed her. Not the strange cloth, the stranger speech, or the way she had appeared from the coast. But I believed she had walked through fire. Some truths mark a person too deeply to be false.
Leofric leaned toward me. “Bind her.”
He spoke quietly. Only I and Godwin heard.
“She knows too much of our paths already.” His jaw tightened. “She comes from the enemy.”
“She ran from them.”
“So she says.”