Ralf shook his head, pleased. They didn't know everything, these women. "He killed a captain in a challenge, midsummer.

He's inside Jormsvik, one of them now. Well, in truth, he isn't inside, at the moment."

"Why?" She was holding herself very still.

"Off raiding. Anglcyn coast. Five ships, near two hundred men. A big party, that. Left just before I did." He'd seen them go. It was late in the season, but they could winter over if they needed to. He had made and mended weapons and armour for many of them.

"Anglcyn coast," she repeated.

"Yes," he said.

There was a silence. He heard the bees.

"Thank you for your tidings. Ingavin and the goddesses shield you," she said, turning away, the serpent still about her neck and shoulders. "Wait here. Sigla will bring you something."

Sigla did. Generous enough. He spent some of it at an inn that night, on ale and a girl. Went looking for property the next morning. Not that there was so much of it on the isle. Rabady was small, everyone knew everyone. It might have helped if his parents had still been living, instead of buried here, but that was a waste of a wish. One of the names Sturla had given him was that of a widow, no children, young enough to still bear, he'd been told, some land in her own name, west end of the isle. He brushed his clothes and boots before going to call.

His son was born the next summer. His wife died in the birthing. He buried her back of the house, hired a wet nurse, went looking for another wife. Found one, and younger this time: he was a man with a bit of land now. He felt fortunate, as if he'd made good choices in life. There was an oak tree standing by itself near the south end of his land. He left it untouched, consecrated it to Ingavin, made offerings there, lit fires, midsummer, midwinter.

His son, fourteen years later, cut it down one night after a bad, drunken fight the two of them had. Ralf Erlickson, still drunk in the morning, killed the boy in his bed with a hammer when he found out, smashed in his skull. A father could deal with his family as he chose, that was the way of it.

Or it had been once. Sturla One-hand, still governor, convened the island's thring. They exiled Ralf Erlickson from Rabady for murder, because the lad had been asleep when killed, or so the stepmother said. And since when had the word of a woman been accepted by Erlings in a thring?

No matter. It was a done thing. He left, or they'd have killed him. Well on in years by then, Ralf Erlickson found himself on a small boat heading back to the mainland, landless (One-hand had claimed the exile's property for the town, of course).

Eventually, he made his way back down to Jormsvik, for want of a better thought. Worked at his old trade, but his hand and eye weren't what they had been. Not surprising, really, it had been a long time. He died there a little while after. Was laid in the earth outside the walls in the usual fashion. He wasn't a warrior, no pyre. One friend and two of the whores saw him buried.

Life, for all men under the gods, was uncertain as weather or winter seas: the only truth worth calling true, as the ending of one of the sagas had it.

When the king's fever took him in the night there was not enough love—or mercy—in the world to keep him from the fens and swamps again.

Drenched with sweat upon the royal bed (or pallet, if they were travelling), Aeldred of the Anglcyn would cry out in the dark, not even aware he was doing it, so piteously it hurt the hearts of those who loved him to know where he was going.

They all thought they knew where, and when, by now.

He was seeing his brother and his father die long years ago on Camburn Field by Raedhill. He was riding in icy rain (a winter campaign, the Erlings had surprised them), wounded, and shivering with the first of these fevers at the end of a brutal day's fighting; and he was king, as of twilight's coming down upon that headlong, fever-ravaged flight from the northmen who had broken them at last.

King of the Anglcyn, fleeing like an outlaw to hide in the marshes, the fyrd broken, lands overrun. His royal father hideously blood-eagled on the wet ground at Camburn in blood and rain. His brother cut in pieces there.

He didn't know about them until later. He did know it now, a late-summer night in Esferth so many years after, tossing in fever-dream, reliving the winter twilight when Jad had abandoned them for their sins. The blades and axes of the Erlings pursuing them in the wild dark, the northmen triumphantly crying the accursed names of Ingavin and Thünir like ravens on the rain wind…

+

It is difficult to see with the rain lashing their faces, a heavy blanket of cloud, night coming swiftly now. Both good and bad: they will be harder to hunt down, but can easily miss their own way, not able to use torches. There are no roads here across moor and tor. There are eight of them with Aeldred, riding west. It is Osbert who is nearest the king (for he is the king now, last of his line), as he always is, and Osbert who shouts them to a jostling halt by the pitiful shelter of a handful of elms. They are soaked to the bone, chilled, most wounded, all exhausted, the wind lashing.

But Aeldred is shivering with fever, slumped forward on his horse, and he cannot speak in answer to his name. Osbert moves his mount nearer, reaches out, touches the king's brow… and recoils, for Aeldred is burning hot.

"He cannot ride," he says, leader of the household troop. "He must!" Burgred snaps, shouting it over the wind. "They will not be far behind us."

And Aeldred lifts his head, with a great effort, mumbles something they cannot hear. He points west with one hand, twitches his reins to move forward. He slips in the saddle as he does so. Osbert is near enough to hold him, their horses side by side.

The two thegns look at each other over the wracked body of the man who is now their king. "He will die," Osbert says. Aeldred, son of Gademar, is twenty years old, just.

The wind howls, rain slashes them like needles. It is very dark, they can hardly see each other. After a long moment, Burgred of Denferth wipes water from his face and nods. "Very well. The seven of us carry on, with the royal banner. We will try to be seen, draw them west. You find a farmhouse somewhere, and pray."

Osbert nods his head. "Meet in Beortferth, on the island itself, among the salt fens. When we can."

"The marshes are dangerous. You can find your way through?" "Maybe not. Have someone watch for us."

Burgred nods again, looks over at their boyhood friend, this other young man, slumped on his horse. Aeldred in battle was deadly, commanding the left flank of the fyrd with his house-hold guard. It was not the left flank that crumbled, not that it mattered now.

"Jad curse this day," Burgred says.

Then he turns and six men follow him across an open field in the dark, one carrying their banner, moving west again, but deliberately, not as quickly as before.

Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, left alone with his king, leans over and whispers, tenderly, "Dear heart, have you even a little left? We ride for shelter now, and should not have far to go."

He has no idea if this is true in fact, no clear sense of where they are, but if there are farms or houses they should be north of here. And when Aeldred, with another appalling effort, pushes himself upright and looks vaguely towards him and nods—shivering, still unable to speak—it is northward that Osbert turns, leaving the elms, heading into the wind.

He will remember the next hours all his life, though Aeldred, lost in that first-ever fever, never will. It grows colder, begins to snow. They are both wounded, sweat-drenched, inadequately clothed, and Aeldred is using the last reserves of an iron will just to stay on his horse. Osbert hears wolves on the wind; listens constantly for horses, knowing, if he hears them, that the Erlings have come and it is over. There are no lights to be seen: no charcoal burner by the woods, no farmers burning candles or a fire so late on a night like this. He strains his eyes into the dark and prays, as Burgred had said he should. The king's breathing is ragged. He can hear it, the rasp and draw. There is nothing to see but falling snow, and black woods to the west, and the bare, wintry fields through which they ride. A night fit for the world's end. Wolves around, and the Erling wolves hunting them in the dark.