Chapter 4 #2
I looked across the room where Darcy had gone back to the dirt. She was making Godwin name every route into the forest. The elder resisted each question as though surrendering a tooth, but he answered.
Wystan had moved closer. So had two of the women.
“What if the river rises?” Darcy asked.
“It will not,” Godwin said.
“What if it does?”
“It will not.”
Darcy looked at him. Godwin glared as she waited until at last, he sighed.
“There is higher ground east.”
“Good. Who knows that?”
I nearly smiled.
Leofric saw it. “My lord.”
The warning in his voice hardened me. I had no time to be charmed by a stranger. Outside these walls, William of Normandy was unloading an army.
King Harold had bled his men in the north. My own fighters were weary. The village looked to me. Every soul beneath every roof. The children, the old, and the men who had survived Stamford Bridge and those too young to have gone.
Aelfwyn had once told me I counted every danger before I counted a single blessing.
I had told her danger killed folk. She had told me so did forgetting why one meant to live. I remembered the argument because I had lost it. I lost most arguments with my wife. Not that I had admitted it while she lived.
My wife had been dead two winters. I could say the words plainly now. For a long while, I could not say them at all. The fever took her in three days. Three.
I had fought men with axes, broken a man’s arm with my bare hands, had stood in a shield wall while spears struck hard enough to split oak. None of it mattered against a fever.
I stood in the doorway while Aelfwyn burned and shivered and slipped away from me one hour at a time. At the last, she caught my wrist. Her hand had been too hot.
Keep living, she whispered.
I told her I would. She grew angry. Even dying, Aelfwyn could summon fury when she thought me deliberately stupid.
Not breathing, she said. Any fool can breathe.
Living.
I had kept the lesser half of that promise. The greater had proved harder.
For two winters I had risen, eaten, judged quarrels, mended fences, buried the dead, and done every duty expected of me.
I had breathed, and yet I had mistaken it for living because no one dared tell me otherwise. Then a strange woman walked out of my forest. She argued, spoke of walking willingly into fire, and stood in my meeting house asking questions no one else had thought to ask.
I looked at the mark she had drawn in the earth. Our plan was not foolish. We had survived raids before, had hidden grain, moved animals, sent the weak into the woods, and fought men who came to steal, but the Normans were not raiders.
They had brought horses. Food. Armor. An army meant to stay.
Darcy understood that from one look at the shore. And where I saw roads, fighters, and ground, she saw the child who might vanish from a group. The mother who might turn back, one dead guide, a blocked path.
Another way to reckon survival. Not by the count of enemies killed. By the number of our own who lived. I had been taught all my life that a lord stood. My father died standing. His father before him.
The men of Ashford had stood and fought until there were too few left to stand. Songs called that courage. Songs were written by men who did not have to tell a mother why her son would not come home.
“Enough,” I said.
Darcy rose as wariness returned to her face. She expected refusal. Perhaps chains. I found I disliked both thoughts.
“The children and the old will move as planned.”
Leofric nodded once. Darcy did not as I continued.
“But before they go, every group will have a leader and another who knows the path.”
Godwin’s brows rose.
“We count them before they leave,” I said. “We count them when they arrive.”
Darcy’s shoulders loosened a fraction.
“If the first path is blocked, they must know the second.”
“Aye.”
“And signals?” She said.
I looked at her as she lifted both hands.
“Sorry. I thought we were having a moment.”
A laugh escaped Wystan.
“We will decide the signals,” I said.
Darcy nodded. “Good.”
Leofric stepped forward.
“You take counsel from her?”
“I take counsel from anyone who speaks sense.”
His face darkened.
Godwin looked pleased by that answer, which told me I would hear it repeated later.
Darcy folded her arms. “So I’m not being bound?”
“Not yet.”
“How reassuring.”
“You will remain guarded. You will answer what is asked.”
“I’ve been doing that.”
“You answer much that is not asked.”
She stared at me, and around us, my men suddenly found the walls fascinating.
At last she said, “I’m going to assume that was a compliment.”
“It was not.”
“Shame.”
Godwin covered his mouth. I suspected the old traitor was smiling.
“Take her to the meeting house chamber,” I said.
Darcy looked around. “We’re in the meeting house.”
“The small chamber.”
“Of course there’s a smaller one. I was worried this century had too much room.”
I did not understand half the things she said. The worst of it was that I was beginning to enjoy that.
“Wystan,” I said.
The boy straightened.
“You will guard her.”
His face fell.
Darcy looked at the spear. “Can he point that somewhere else?”
“I was not trembling,” Wystan muttered.
As they moved toward the rear chamber, Leofric caught my arm.
“Wulfric.”
His use of my name stopped me. He had buried three kin that month. His hardness had not been born from nothing.
“You risk much.”
“I know.”
“She may be our ruin.”
I looked toward the doorway where Darcy had disappeared.
“Mayhap.”
Godwin came to stand beside us. The elder’s face had gone grave.
“A woman who knows that much of fear did not come by the knowledge gently.”
No. She had not. I thought of the way her face changed when she spoke of burning rooms. The way she had crushed the spark in the rushes before anyone else moved. The way her hand had curled when she spoke of carrying children through smoke.
Everything else that had crawled out of the sea meant to kill us. I would take my chances with the woman who walked into fire to bring people back out.
“We use what she knows,” I said. “And we watch her.”
Leofric grunted as Godwin nodded. Neither was pleased. That made three of us.
Night came cold. The Norman fires showed against the southern sky, faint through the trees. I stood outside the hall and watched them. My father would have made ready to stand as would his father before him.
Every dead man of my blood seemed to rise from the earth beneath my feet and wait to see whether I would shame them. Then I thought of Aelfwyn. She would have looked at Darcy for half a moment, decided she was too thin, fed her, and put her straight to work.
The thought hurt. It always did. but not quite as sharply as before.
Keep living.
I had never understood what she meant. Not truly. Then a woman with a warrior’s eyes who carried no sword walked out of my forest and made me wonder whether survival itself might require courage.
For the first time in two winters, I wanted to see what the morning would bring. It frightened me more than the Normans did.
I went to my bed but did not sleep. Across the dark village, behind a guarded door, I would have wagered my sword that neither did she.