"And he will tell his fellows that he was detected and his companion captured or killed and that you will be ready for them, coming to find them, even. His message will be that they must sail."

"You think?"

He nodded. It was plausible, might be true. The part he didn't tell her wouldn't affect Esferth, only Bern's own life, and not for the better. But there was only so much a father could do once a boy was grown, fledged, out in the world.

The woman looked at him. He heard the tavern behind him again, a rising and subsiding noise. Someone shouted an oath, someone cursed back amid spilling laughter.

"I will have to tell my father, tomorrow," she said finally.

He drew a breath, hadn't realized he'd been holding it. "But you will do that… tomorrow?"

She nodded.

"You would really do this?" Thorkell asked, shifting his stance under the weight he carried.

"Because you are going to do something for me," she said.

And so, with a sense that he was still treading some blurred border between known things and mystery, Thorkell drew another breath, this time to ask her the question he probably ought to have asked as soon as he'd seen her out here alone.

He never did ask it; his answer came in another way. She laid a sudden hand on his arm, holding him to silence, then pointed across the street.

Not to the tavern door or the alley, but towards a small, unlit chapel two doors farther up. Someone had stepped outside, letting the chapel door swing shut behind him. He stood a moment, looking up at the sky, the blue moon overhead, and then began to walk away from them. As he did, a shape detached itself from blackness and padded over to him. And with that, Thorkell knew who this was.

"He was praying," Aeldred's daughter murmured. "I'm not sure why, but he'll be going outside now, beyond the walls."

"What?" Thorkell said, a little too loudly. "Why would he do that? He's going to his rooms. Had enough of the celebration. His brother died."

"I know," she said, eyes still on the man and dog moving down the empty street. "But your rooms are the other direction. He is going outside."

Thorkell cleared his throat. She was right about the rooms. "How do you know what he's doing?"

She looked at him. "I'm not certain how, and I don't like it, but I do know. So I need someone with me, and Jad seems to being saying it will be you."

Thorkell stared at her. "With you? What is it you want to do?" "I want to pray, actually, but there isn't time. I'm going to follow him," she said. "And don't ask me why."

"Why?" he asked, involuntarily.

She shook her head.

"That's moon-mad. Alone?"

"No. With you, remember? It'll get your son out of Esferth." Her voice changed. "You swear you think it will deter them? The raiders? Whoever they are? Swear it."

Thorkell paused. "I'd say yes in any case, you know, but I do think so. I swear it by Jad and Ingavin, both."

"And you won't run away to them? With your son?"

That would be a thought she'd have, he realized. He snorted. "My son will want nothing to do with me. And I'd be killed by the raiders for certain, if these are who I think they are."

She glanced down the street again. The man and dog were almost out of sight. "Who are they?"

"The leader's name won't mean anything to you. It's someone who will want areport that Esferth and the burhs are unassailable."

"We are. But same question back: how are you so sure?"

He was used to this kind of talk, though not with a woman. "Different answer: I'm not certain. This is a raider's guess. My lady, we'd best move if you want to follow that Cyngael."

He saw her take a breath this time, and then nod. She stepped into the street, lifting her hood as she did so. He went with her, along an empty, moonlit lane that seemed of the world and not entirely so. The tavern noises receded, became sea murmur and then silence as they went.

The man below was an honoured guest, a prince, companion of the Cyngael cleric the king had been watching for all summer. Ebor, son of Bordis, up on the wall-walk by the western gate, answered a quiet summons and came down the steps to that lilting voice.

The gates loomed in the dark, seeming higher from down on the ground, newly reinforced this past year. King Aeldred was a builder. Ebor saw a man with a dog, greeted him, heard a courteously phrased request to be allowed outside for a time, to walk under moonlight and stars, feel wind, away from the smoke and noise of the great hall and the town.

He was country-born, Ebor, could understand such a need. It was why he was up here so much of the time himself. It occurred to him, suddenly, to invite the Cyngael up to the wall-walk with him, but that would be a great presumption, and it wasn't what the man had asked of him.

"It isn't quiet out there tonight, all the tents, my lord" he said.

"I'm certain of that, but I wasn't intending to go that way."

Some of the others in the fyrd didn't like the Cyngael. Small, dark, devious. Cattle thieves and murderers, they named them. Mostly that came from those Anglcyn north of here, near the valleys or the hills where the ghost wood ended, along which the Rheden Wall had been built to keep the Cyngael out. Years of skirmishing and larger battles could shape such a feeling. But Ebor was from the good farmland east of here, not north or west, and his own dark childhood stories and memories were about Erlings coming up from the dangerous sea. The people of the west were no real enemy compared to longship berserkirs drunk on blood.

Ebor had nothing, himself, against the Cyngael. He liked the way they talked.

The night was quiet enough, little wind now. If he listened, he could hear the sounds from outside, though. There were a great many men sleeping in tents (around to the north) with the fyrd here and Esferth full to bursting in the run-up to the fair. No danger presented itself to this royal guest out there, unless he found a drunken dice game or took a woman with too-sharp fingernails into a field or hollow, and it wasn't Ebor's task in life to save a man from either of those. The Cyngael had spoken with dignity, no arrogance. He'd offered Ebor a coin: not too much, not too little—a sum fitting the request.

A quiet man, something on his mind. Far from home just now. Ebor looked at him and nodded his head. He took the iron key from his belt and unlocked the small door beside the wide gate and he let them out, the man and the dark grey hound at his side.

A minor encounter in the scheme of things, far from the first time someone had had reason to go out after dark in peaceful times. Ebor turned to go back up to his place on the wall.

The other two called to him before he reached the top.

When he came back down the steps and saw who it was this time, Ebor understood—rather too late—that there was nothing minor unfolding here, after all.

The man this time was an Erling, carrying someone over his shoulder, passed out in drunkenness. That happened every night. The woman, however, was the king's younger daughter, the princess Kendra, and it never even entered Ebor's head to deny her anything she might ask of him.

She asked for the door to be unlocked again.

Ebor swallowed hard. "May… may I summon an escort for you, my lady?"

"I have one," she said. "Thank you. Open it, please. Tell no one of this, on pain of my displeasure. And watch for us: to let us back in when we come."

She had an escort. An Erling carrying a drunken man. It didn't feel right. With a sick feeling roiling his guts, Ebor opened the small door for the second time. They went out. She turned back, thanked him gravely, walked on.

He closed the door behind them, locked it, hurried up the stairs, two at a time, to the wall-walk. He leaned out, watching them for as long as he could as they went into the night. He couldn't see very far. He didn't see when the Erling turned south alone, limping, carrying his burden, and the princess went north-west, also alone, in the direction the Cyngael and his dog had gone.