Matilda confirms her suspicions
“Oh, Alred,” Matilda sighed, nestling into her husband’s shoulder. “That’s all very nice, but wouldn’t you like to have another baby?”
“Very nice? Very nice? I can do no better than very nice these days?”
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Leofric and Sigefrith worry about sensibilities
Alred strode into the hall to find Sigefrith and Leofric laughing before the fire, a jug of wine close at hand. He froze, furious at the incongruity with what he was feeling just then.
They turned to him, still grinning, and Sigefrith asked, “What news?”
Egelric gives Druze a knife
Egelric sat alone on his stump. He had no horse and he had no dog. Nor did he have a sword; he was armed only with a guardless dagger that Matilda had pressed on him at the last minute. He had warned her that the creature would only steal it in the end anyway. But he hoped to learn something from it before then.
He had thought that he was beginning to grow hardened to the horror of it all. He had met the elf face-to-face three times now. But hours of silent watching in the cold and still of the night had brought back all of his fear. His palms were wet, his mouth was dry, and a feeling of dread coiled and uncoiled itself in his stomach like a wakening serpent.
Alred tries to see nothing
“Beloved, thine eyes are like drops of dew before the dawn, reflecting all the thousand stars!” Alred cried as Gunnilda opened the door to him and little Margaret.
“Beloved—oh! What was I going to say? Beloved, your nose is like a hump-backed snail, what feeds among the wilted lettuce!”
Sigefrith tells Theobald his plans
Theobald clenched his fists and swallowed. Githa was murmuring something happy about this unexpected visit, but Theobald could only hear the blood pounding in his ears. He had intended to ride down into Lothere for Holyrood Day, so if Sigefrith had something so important to tell him that it merited riding up into the hills only a few days before, then that something could only be very, very bad.
And there was a stranger with Sigefrith: an older man who had seen a lot of sun and, from the keen-eyed, strong-armed warrior look of him, many battles. What could this mean?
Leofric comes to see
“Look at you, Dogface, grinning like a bear with his mouth full of bees!” Sigefrith laughed as Egelric let him and Leofric into his small house.
“I don’t often get a royal visit so early in the morning,” Egelric replied. “I have to laugh because I’m always telling Baby that she needs to get dressed as soon as she wakes up, and when she asks why, I tell her it’s because we never know when the King will drop by.”
Matilda ponders the fleetingness of a man's affections
Matilda returned Margaret to her cradle and stretched out on the bed again, leaving the candle lit. She listened to the girl root around in her blankets a while until she fell asleep.
But Matilda could not sleep. She had been so wide awake that it had been she to wake Margaret, looking for a distraction. The baby had not been hungry, but she had dutifully nursed a while.
Matilda looks a little green
“Good morning, you beau—” Alred’s greeting was cut off abruptly as he bounced into the hall and saw the circle of faces staring back at him. “—tiful people…” he finished in a mumble.
Matilda grabbed his arm. There was a woman and a child she didn’t recognize—an eerily dark-skinned woman and child. But there was also a man’s face that called up a dim feeling of lost happiness in the first instant—and that was what made her clutch at her husband’s arm—followed by a rush of memories. And that made her cry out, “Leofric!”
Sigefrith meets an old friend
Sigefrith bent over the scrap of parchment, sketching in a tower that would be high enough to see both down into the valley and out onto the rolling country on the other side of the hills. From the location of the old fort, it wouldn’t be possible to see his castle or to see any of Bernwald lands at all, but he thought Nothelm should be visible. And certainly from that fort one would be able to see the river and the narrow lakes, and across the valley to the peak of Thorhold on the other side.
It was an excellent location for a fort, blocking the only access to the valley from the east. Theobald’s ancestors had known what they were about. But modern castles of stone had scarcely been dreamt of at that time, a century or more ago. Sigefrith would build the fort into a castle that would put the Normans to shame.
The Queen visits Colburga
“Colburga, darling!” the Queen purred as she came into the bedroom. “Aren’t you looking enormous today?”
Colburga sighed. Brandt had just left, Cenwulf was out, and she had been hoping to spend a few hours alone. They scarcely left her alone now. And she needed time alone to think—and to mourn—and when there were visitors she had to put on a brave face.
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Chapters“Now we shall never have a little house, as you used to say, just you and I.”
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