"I have always been… most curious."

He sighed. So great a strangeness, the world altering moment by moment as the stars turned above them. Was it slow, or fast, that movement overhead? Did it depend on who was asking?

He said, "And tonight is… being curious?"

"And for you, is it not? What else is there for it to be?" A different note in her voice now, under the music.

He was gazing at her. Helpless to look away. Small, even teeth in the wide, thin mouth, pale skin, achingly smooth, the changing hair. Dark eyes. And vestiges of wings. Once, they could fly.

"I don't know," he said, swallowing. "I'm not wise enough. I feel as if I could weep."

"Sorrow, again," she said. "Why does it always come to that, for you?"

"Sometimes we can weep for joy. Do you… can you understand that?"

A longer silence. Then she shook her head slowly. "No. I would like to, but this is your cup, not ours."

The… otherness, again. This sense that he was both in and entirely outside the world he knew. He said, "Tell me Esferth and the others will be there when I go from here?"

She nodded, calmly. "Though some of them won't be."

He stared. A hard thumping of the heart. "What do you mean?" "They are starting to ride out. There is anger, men taking horse, bearing iron."

He sat up. "Holy Jad. How do you know?"

She shrugged. The question, he realized, was foolish. How could he understand how she knew things? How could she answer him? Even in the tongue they shared, the language her people had taught his.

He stood up. Began putting on his clothes. She watched him. He was aware, might always be aware now, of the haste of his doing this, seen through her eyes. The way he and the others lived. "I must go," he said. "If something has happened."

"Someone died," she said gravely. "There is sorrow. The aura of it."

The speed of their dying. He looked at her, holding his tunic in both hands. He cleared his throat. "Don't envy us that," he said.

"But I do," she said simply; small, sleek, shining otherness in the grass. "Will you come back into the wood?"

He hesitated, and then a thought came that could not have come a night before, when he was younger.

"Will you sorrow if I do not?"

Her eyebrows lifted again, but in surprise this time. She moved a hand, same gesture as before, as if reaching for something. Then, slowly, she smiled, looking up at him.

He pulled on his tunic. No belt, because of the iron. He turned to leave. He hadn't answered her question, either. He had no answer to give.

He looked back from the glade's dark edge. She was still sitting there on the grass, unclothed, in her element, sorrowless.

+

The voices in the darkness began moving away to the north. Bern remained where he was in the stream. He had a thought, broke off a reed; might need to submerge himself. He heard shouting, men running. Someone rasped a curse, an obscenity directed at Erlings everywhere, and the scabrous, pustulent whores who gave them birth.

Not a good time for this Erling to be discovered.

He'd been right, then. The signal fire had meant nothing good at all. It was still burning. More shouting now, farther away, towards Esferth, where the tents were: the tents outside an over-flowing city on the eve of a fair. A city they'd been told would be almost empty, one that they might even loot in a raid that would give rise to songs for generations to their glory, and Jormsvik's.

Glory, Bern decided, was going to be hard to come by now.

He thought quickly, keeping his breathing shallow and slow. Skallson's party had gone east from the ships. A waste of time, some had thought—and the same had been said about Bern and Ecca going into Esferth, once they had learned about the fair. But if they were to leave here—and it seemed evident they were—without anything taken at all, at least learn something before they went, it had been decided.

Salvage pride, a flagon's worth, by carrying home report of Aeldred's lands. They might be mocked a little less by their fellows for returning empty-handed, swords unreddened, no tales to tell. A wasted journey at raiding season's end. His own first raid.

Right now, Bern thought, mockery might be the best they could hope for, not the worst. There were worse things than fire-side jibes in winter. If that bonfire was an alert, it most likely meant Guthrum Skallson's party had been found. And from the fury in the Anglcyn voices (still heading away from him, Ingavin be thanked) something had happened.

And then he remembered that Ivarr had been with Skallson's party. Bern shivered in the water, couldn't help it. You shivered like that when a spirit passed, someone newly dead, and angry. In that same instant he heard a soft splashing as someone entered the stream.

Bern drew his dagger and prepared himself to die: in water again, third time now. Third time was said to mark power, sacred to Nikar the Huntress, wife to Thünir. Three times was a gateway. He had expected death in the night waters off Rabady. And again in the dawn surf outside Jormsvik. He tried to accept it once more, now. An ending waited for all men, no one knew his fate, everything lay in how you went to your dying. He gripped his blade.

"Stay where you are," he heard.

The voice low, terse, barely audible. Utterly and entirely known all the days of his life.

"Spare me the knife," it went on softly. "I've been stabbed at already tonight. And keep silent or they will find and kill you here," his father added, moving, unerringly, towards where Bern was hidden, submerged to his shoulders, invisible in darkness.

Unless you knew he was here. Not a mystery, then, this part at least. He'd gone straight into the stream from the place on the bank where his father had left him. Not magic, not some impossible night vision, brilliant raider's instinct.

"I didn't think they'd offer me wine," he murmured. No greeting offered. Thorkell hadn't greeted him.

His father grunted, coming up. "How's your head?" "Hurts. Want your neck chain back?"

"I'd have kept it if I wanted it. You made a mistake in that alley. You know the saga: Have thine eyes about you / in hall or darkness. Be wary ever / be watching always."

Bern said nothing. Felt his face redden.

"Two horses?" Thorkell asked calmly.

His father's dark bulk was beside him, Thorkell's voice close to his ear. The two of them together in a stream at night in Anglcyn lands. How was this so? What had the gods decided? And how did men take hold of their own lives when this could happen? He realized his heart was thumping, hated that.

"Two horses," he replied, keeping his voice steady. "Where's Ecca?"

Small hesitation. "That what he was calling himself?"

Was calling. "Right," Bern said bitterly. "Of course. He's dead. You know, the same poet says: No good ever, whatever be thought / was mead or ale to any man. Are you drunk?"

The backhanded blow caught him on the side of the head.

"By Ingavin's blind eye, show respect. I got you out of a walled city. Think on it. I went to warn him, he drew a blade to kill when I used his real name. I made a mistake. Is your horse a good one?"

A mistake. One could weep, or laugh. Killing the second man on the isle had been the mistake, Bern wanted to say. He was still trying to wrap his mind around what was happening here. "My horse is Gyllir," he said. Struggled to keep anything out of his voice his father might read as youthful pride.

Thorkell grunted again. "Halldr's? He didn't come after you?" "Halldr's dead. The horse was for his burning."

That silenced his father, for a moment, at least. Bern wondered if he was thinking of his wife, who had become Halldr's, and was widowed now, alone and unprotected on Rabady.