“By Christ’s bleeding wounds! By God’s sagging, pus-filled nutsack! Jove and Jupiter and hellfire and damnation! God blind me! For the sake of Christ’s bloody nails! Holy cock-sucking mother of a misbegotten, shit-eating, goat-fondling god!”
“That last one was Matilda’s!” Leofric cried gleefully.
Britmar had just undressed and sat on the edge of the bed when his wife strode into their bedroom, her head high.
“That was quick,” he said. “He looked as if he had made up his mind not to sleep tonight.”
Alred was supposedly heading to the King’s castle across the downs, but he would not soon arrive at the rate he was going. He was working on a poem, and that always slowed him down in his walk. Even then, he was rarely very poetic so early in the morning, and his busy mind was rather outward-looking and easily distracted.
Just then he was staring out to the south, where the sheep had gathered at the edge of the long slope down to the riverside. They were restless, and the flock drifted slowly towards the morning like clouds driven by a westerly wind.
All day long Sir Sigefrith had worked and puttered and talked and even read, but he had finally run out of strength. And strength was, sadly, what he needed if he wanted to face these dark thoughts like a man.
It was the fifth day before the Nones of May. It was Crouchmas according to the Church, or the Dismal Day according to the Scots. It was Wednesday, and all the Wednesdays of the coming year would be unlucky therefore. It was the day that the fallen angels had been cast out of heaven. It was the day that Hilda had died.
“Mama Gunnie!” Gwynn threw her arms around the neck of her old nurse.
Gunnilda laughed and kissed the girl’s cheeks. “My little lady!”
Vash had not stood in this chamber in many years. He had always come with his mother, and his mother had been dead for nearly a decade. Moreover, he remembered that he had been young enough to have wanted to hold her beloved hand, and so he thought it might have been fifteen years.
He saw the Shalla nearly every day, but meeting her here in her chamber was something else entirely. The fact that she had sent the ladies away made it all the more eerie. He could have winked at the ladies and made them smile, but the Shalla alone was nearly more than he could face. Or perhaps he only feared her reaction when he told her what he had come to say.
“Kiv doesn’t have violet eyes, does he?” Lady Gwynn’s father asked Sir Egelric.
“I did not notice the color of his eyes,” Egelric muttered.
Old Mother Curran sat on the edge of the bed, straining her old ears against the silence of the house and the rustling of the wind through the new leaves.
She did not feel at ease sleeping alone. She was supposed to have stayed with her son’s family in their house at the roadside, but her old heart had so ached for the worried father that she had agreed to stay here. She would keep the fires lit and the big house warm and waiting for the poor young bride.
Sir Sigefrith saw that the bed was unmade, so Wynflaed had been in it at some point, but he found her dozing on the couch before the fire.
It should have been a lovely scene, but he knew that if she was sitting up so late at night, it could only mean one thing: her pain was troubling her again. It seemed to him that it had been worse both times that her belly had begun to grow large with her babies, and that only made it harder for him, who wanted a big family.
“Da, someone’s here!” Wulf announced as Egelric lifted him up into the air.
“Nice try, young rascal!” Egelric said. “What are you doing down here? Where’s your nurse?”
“What happened to your hair?”
“What happened to your dress?”
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