“Punch me! Punch me!” Cynewulf cried as he ran into the new hall.
Alred laughed, though he could not begin to guess what had possessed the Old Man to make such a demand until he had rounded the corner himself and seen Sigefrith and Caedwulf sparring before a low fire.
Queen Eadgith was not sleeping. The morning was already bright, and she could hear the servants coming and going in the corridor that ran beneath her bedroom. Breakfast was already over. But the Queen was still in her bed.
She knew her husband had risen hours before, at dawn, though he had not awoken her then. As she did almost every morning, she had opened her eyes onto a vacant pillow, a blanket pushed back to reveal wrinkled sheets, an empty place.
Anna came hurrying over the stile into the weedy pasture where Dunstan always awaited her.
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting!” she panted.
Dunstan was not quite hurrying, not quite sneaking, but still he hoped to return to the hall at Bernwald as soon and as inconspicuously as possible.
He did not think it likely that he had been away for so short a time that his absence would have gone unnoticed. It was illogical to think that the time he had spent waiting for Anna, which he had made as long as possible, could now be miraculously shrunk to as short a time as possible merely because he shouldn’t have gone at all—merely because the wait had been for nothing.
Gunnilda had already had the time to fall asleep, but she was alert enough to wake when she heard Ethelmund come in through the front door. She waited as the creaking floorboards betrayed his wanderings downstairs, and she waited as his slow tread brought him up the steps. She pulled the blankets up and closed her eyes to pretend to sleep… but he turned the other way and went down the hallway.
She thought he must have been going to Colburga’s room to tell her the news. He had gone out that evening to speak to Alfred’s father and formalize the marriage arrangements that until then had only been a tacit agreement between the two families.
A fine chapel of two stories took time to build, but the chapter house at the nascent abbey had recently been completed. For now it would have to serve as everything except a church. Later a dormitory would be built above it, and a calefactory and refectory beside it, but in the meantime the monks slept and ate and met in this one building.
Of monks there were already four. Father Brude thought that there would be the twelve that the Rules required even before the chapel was completed, and indeed when Brude had gone north to establish the abbey under the bishopric of Whithorn, he had suggested that he would not return alone.
“Do you know what I feel like?” Sir Egelric asked his wife without preliminary greeting.
Lili put down her sewing and squinted up at him. “Like an old mule who has had a sack full of twenty spitting tomcats lashed to his back all day?”
It had not been Wynna’s idea, but as she often did, she came along.
Osgyth’s mother seemed to think that the girls were less likely to misbehave when Wynna was with them, and Colburga’s father simply didn’t allow her or Wynna to go out alone, as if two fifteen-year-old girls could be chaperones for one another. Thus it was that Wynna Hogge, who had scarcely had three such ideas of her own in all her life, could often be found doing something she shouldn’t. But so far she had not yet been found.
“Morning, runt,” Leofric said. He did not think it would have been kind to call it “good.”
“Morning, indeed,” Sigefrith muttered without looking up from his desk.
King Sigefrith had galloped up the road and over the bridge so quickly, so suddenly that the guards could not have stopped him if he had been an enemy. As it was, they moved anxiously around him as if frightened of him.
The horse was too exhausted for such a mad dash at the end of the long journey, but Sigefrith would not have cared if the animal had been lamed for life. He did not think he would even have cared if the horse had foundered in full gallop and broken his own and his rider’s necks.
“He doesn’t have to get you on a battlefield, you know. He’s King—he can knight his horse if he likes.”
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