Iylaine did not know where she was, but she knew she was underground. The walls of her little room were paneled with tiles of smooth stone, but in the passage outside they were rough and glistening with damp. In some places they were built up from crudely hewn blocks reinforced with rotting beams, but in others the corridor was carved out of the living rock. She could almost sense movement in the walls, as if she were near the flanks of a slowly breathing beast.
Egelric held his aching head in his hand. It was all he could do.
He wondered now whether his mother had sat like this on the nights when he had been cruel. He had always thought her heartless, capable only of inflicting suffering but never suffering herself. Now he feared that Iylaine thought the same of him.
“Oh—Iylaine!” Lady Luitgarde said with a timid smile.
Iylaine had only been walking through the screened passage on her way to the dining hall, perhaps, or to the kitchen stairs, but she stopped in the doorway out of a sullen sort of obedience. “What?” she snapped.
Egelric had not learned how to read until he was a man, and furthermore he had observed that writing was not the same thing as reading. He could have read the letter he was trying to write without much difficulty, but writing it in the first place was a challenge.
However, he always wrote his own letters when he wrote to his cousins. He would not send letters to his family written in his steward’s hand. But he would come down to the empty study after supper and write alone, so that no one—and especially not Luitgarde—would see how he struggled.
It was that brief moment of the day when the sky was still bright though the sun was already gone, and the clouds were still lit with pink and crimson from below. It was that brief moment when the day teetered at the brink of night before it plunged into the deepening blue, before the crimson drained away, before the stars came sparkling out like flecks of moonlight on dark water, before the moon itself was bright.
The wedding had been everything a bride could desire. Though it was the second marriage for both parties, still a gentleman’s second wedding was far finer than what young Gunnilda had had when she had married Alwy Hogge.
It was also far finer than anything her sisters had had, and if her own memory had not been enough to tell her so, her two surviving sisters were there to remind her. Indeed, instead of helping her to undress, they were wandering about the bedroom and exclaiming over how fine everything was.
“Alred!”
Alred looked up. Lili’s voice came down on him from above, as befitted an angel’s greeting.
Asleep, nearly dreaming, Edris did not call into question the presence of the man who stood murmuring over her baby’s cradle. Rather, she lay wrapped in a feeling of deep contentment, secure in the knowledge that everything was as it should have been.
Then she remembered that if everything was as it should have been, everything was not as it actually was.
Leofric studied his new grandchildren with a rapt attention that was not only due to his own new love for them, though that alone could have kept him staring for hours. He was also trying to memorize them for his wife’s sake: he had promised her a detailed report as soon as he returned home.
Sir Sigefrith was so taken up with the importance of the day’s events that he was not surprised to find his godfather sitting in his hall when he returned home. The King sat working at the table, with his steward and Cenwulf’s beside him and a pile of books and parchments before him, but he was clearly waiting for Sigefrith to arrive.
“There you are, runt. Did Malcolm find you, or did you make your own way home?”
“A little advice from a man who once got his nose broken for ‘enjoying the company of a chaste and charming young lady’—propriety is not as much fun as even the appearance of the contrary, but it is less damaging to the face.”
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