+

The moon was over the woods, Bern saw, awakening. Then he grasped that he was lying on grass, looking up at trees, beside a river in the dark.

He'd been pissing in the alley and…

He sat up. Too quickly. The moon lurched, stars described arcs as if falling. He gasped. Touched his head: a lump, the stickiness of blood. He cursed, confused, his heart hammering. Looked around, too quickly again: the dizziness assaulted him, blood loud in his ears. He seemed to be holding something. Looked down at the object in his hand.

Knew his father's neck chain and hammer, immediately.

No doubt, no hesitation, even here, so far away from home, from childhood. Small sons could be like that, memorizing each and every thing about the father, a figure larger than anything in the world, filling the house, then emptying it when he left, on the dragon-ships again. There were thousands of necklaces like this one, and there was not one like it in the world the gods had made.

He was very still, listening to the river running over stones, the crickets and frogs. There were fireflies above the water and the reeds. The forest was black beyond the stream. Something had just happened that he could never even have imagined.

He tried to think clearly, but his head was hurting. His father was here. Had been in Esferth, had knocked him out—or rescued him? — and taken him outside the walls and left… this.

As a sign of what? Bern swore again. His father had never been a man to make anything clear or easy. But if he could take any idea from being here and holding Thorkell's necklace, it was that his father wanted him out of Esferth.

Suddenly, belatedly, he thought about Ecca, who was—significantly—not here outside the walls. Bern stood up then, wincing, unsteady. He couldn't stay where he was. There were always people outside a city, especially now with the king present, and all his household, and a late-summer fair beginning soon. There was a second city's worth of tents around to the north. They'd seen them earlier, when they'd come up.

Finding so many people here had been a large issue. Ecca had wrestled with considerable anger as they'd come to understand what was happening in Esferth and near it. That supposedly unfinished burh on the coast, Drengest, was entirely complete, walls secure, defended, a number of ships already built in the harbour.

Not even remotely a place where five ships' worth of men could raid and run, which is what they'd been told they could do. And Esferth itself, which was supposed to be half empty, exposed to an attack that would shape a legend, was thronged with merchants and the Anglcyn fyrd, and Aeldred himself was here with his household guard. It was not a mistake, not a misreading of signs, Ecca had snarled. It appeared they had been lied to, by the man who'd paid them to come.

Ivarr Ragnarson, the Volgan's heir. The one everyone whispered ought surely to have been killed when he came out of his mother's womb white as a spirit, hairless, a malformed freak of nature, unworthy of life and his lineage.

It was that lineage that had saved him. Everyone knew the tale: how a volur in her trance had spoken to his father and forbidden him to expose the child. Ragnar Siggurson, hesitant by nature, too careful, never the strongest man (following a father who had been the strongest of men), had let the child live, to grow up strange and estranged, and vicious.

Bern had his own thoughts about volurs and their trances. Not that it mattered. He was desperately unsure what to do. Ecca was a shipmate, his companion on this scouting mission. A Jormsvik raider didn't leave companions behind unless he had no choice at all; they were bound to each other, by oath and history. But this was Bern's first raid, he didn't know enough yet, didn't know if this was a time when you did leave to carry an urgent message back. Should he return to Esferth when the gates opened at sunrise and look for Ecca, or find Gyllir in the wood where they'd left the horses and hurry to the ships with a warning?

Was that the meaning in Thorkell's necklace, in his being out here alone? Was Ecca taken? Dead? And if not, what would happen if he returned to the ships after Bern did and asked why his companion had left without him? And just how, in fact, Bern had gotten outside the walls? How he'd explain that, Bern had no idea. And what if Ecca rode back and the ships were gone because Bern had told them it was wiser to cast off?

Too many conflicting needs, conjured thoughts. Hesitations of his own devising (another son of a strong father?). He didn't know, standing unsteadily alone by the water, if he was… direct enough for this raiding life. He'd be dealing more easily with all of this, he thought, if his head didn't hurt so much.

Something caught his eye, south and east. A bonfire burning on a hill. He watched that light in the darkness, saw it occluded, reappear, vanish again, return. He realized, after a moment, that this was a message. Knew it could not possibly be good for him, or for those waiting by the ships… or for Guthrum's party ashore to the south.

The bonfire made his decision for him. He placed his father's necklace over his head and slipped it inside his tunic.

The necklace was meant to tell him that it was a friend (his father a friend, the irony in that) who'd taken him out of Esferth. If he was supposed to be out of Esferth, that meant trouble inside. And he knew there was trouble, they'd seen it this morning, passing through the gates amid the crowds for the fair. They had planned to stay only tonight, learn what they could in the taverns, ride back to the coast in the morning, carrying their message—and warning.

And now a message in fire was lighting the night. This was, in no possible way, a safe place to be coming ashore to raid. The burh was walled and garrisoned, they already knew that, and Esferth was thronged to bursting. He had that message to deliver, above anything else. He took a breath, put aside, as best he could, the fierce, hard awareness that his father was out here somewhere in the night not far away, and had, evidently, carried him to this place like a child. Bern turned his back on torchlit Esferth and entered the stream to cross it.

He was midway into the river, which wasn't cold, when he heard voices. He dropped down instantly, silent amid reeds and lilies, only his head above water in the dark, and listened to the voices and the pounding of his heart.

+

Alun had seen the glimmering twice on the journey east, travelling here with Ceinion. Once in the branches of a tree, when they'd camped by a stream running out of the wood and he awoke in the night, and once on a hillside behind them, when he looked back after dark: a shining at twilight, though the sun had set.

He'd known it was her. Wasn't sure if he'd been meant to see, or if she'd come closer than she'd intended. Cafall had been rest-less all through that coastal journey. The Erling had thought it was the nearness of the spirit wood.

She was following him. He ought, perhaps, to have been afraid, but that wasn't what he felt. Alun had thought about Dai, the night he died, that pool in the wood, souls lost and taken, and it had occurred to him that he might never make music again.

His mother had taken to her chambers when he and Gryffeth and the cleric had brought the tidings home. She had stayed there a fourteen-night, opening only to her women. When she'd come out her hair had changed colour. Not as a faerie's did, shimmering through hues, but as a mortal woman's did, when grief has come too suddenly.

Owyn had covered his face with a hand, Alun remembered, and turned and walked away, at first word of Dai's death. He had drunk a great deal for two days and nights, then stopped. Had spoken after, privately, with Ceinion of Llywerth. There was a history there, not entirely a benign one, but whatever lay behind the two men seemed altered by this. Owyn ap Glynn was a hard man, everyone knew that, and he was a prince with tasks in the world. Brynn had said that same thing to Alun, too. He had a new role, himself. He was heir to Cadyr.