"You… you were man enough to save me," she said.

He shrugged. "From behind him."

"What matters that?" she said. Her capacity to speak, to think, was coming back. And she had a thought. It frightened her, so she spoke quickly, before fear could take hold. "Lie with me now," she said. "Give me a child. No one else will want me then. You'll have to."

What she saw in him, that moment, in the last fading of the summer daylight, and remembered ever after, was fear, and defeat. It could be read, the way some clerics read words in books.

He shook his head again. "Na, that'll not do. I'm cripple, girl. They'll not wed you to me. And how could I fend for a wife and little ones now?"

"We'll fend the both of us together," she said.

He was silent. The axe—dark with Raud's blood—held in his left hand. "Jad rot it forever," he said finally. "I'm done." He looked at the dead man. "His brothers'll kill me now."

"They'll not that. I'll tell the cleric and reeve what happened here."

"And that'll matter to them?" He laughed, bitterly. "No. I'm away this night, girl. You clean yourself, say nothing. Maybe take a bit of time before they find this. Give me a chance to be gone."

Her heart was aching by then, more than her side, a dull, hard pain, but there was—even in that moment—a part of her that had begun despising him. It was like a death, actually, feeling that.

"Where… where will you go?"

"As if I have the least idea," he said. "Jad be with you, girl."

He said that over his shoulder, had already turned away.

He left her there, walked north, back up the grassy path the way that she had come, and then on, beyond the pasture. Jadwina watched until she couldn't see him any more in the twilight. She got herself up, reclaimed her hazel switch, and began leading the cow back home, moving slowly, a hand to her side, leaving a dead man in the grass.

She decided, before she'd reached the first houses, that she wasn't going to listen to Eadyn. He had left her lying there without a backwards glance. They had been pledged to be married.

She went home exactly as she was, Raud's blood on her face and hair and hands, all over her clothing. She saw horror—and curiosity—in people's faces as she took the cow through the village. She kept her head high. Said nothing. They followed her. Of course they followed her. At her door, she told her father and mother, and then the cleric and reeve when they were brought, what had happened, and where. She'd thought she'd be beaten again, but she wasn't. Too many people about.

Men (and boys, and dogs) went running to look. It was well after nightfall that they brought back Raud's body. It was reported how he had been when they'd found him, trousers down, exposed. Two of the older women were instructed by the reeve to examine Jadwina. Behind a door they made her lift her skirts and both of them poked at her and came out, cackling, to report that she was intact.

Her father owned land; the smith was only a smith. There was no one to gainsay her tale. Right there, under torches in front of their door, the reeve declared the matter closed to the king's justice, named the killing a just one. Two of Raud's brothers went north in the morning after Eadyn. They came back without having found any sign of him. Raud was buried in the ground behind the chapel.

And it had been some time during those warm, end-of-summer days that they had learned of the Erling raid and the death of the earl, the king's good friend.

Jadwina hadn't been inclined to care, or listen very much, which is why she was never certain about the course and timing of events. She remembered agitation and excitement, the cleric talking and talking, the reeve riding out and then back. And on one of the days there had been a black billowing of smoke west of them. It turned out to be, they learned, a burning of slain Erlings.

The king himself, it seemed, had been right there, just beyond the trees and the ridges. A battle almost within sight of where they lived. A victory. For those whose lives had not been utterly undone, as Jadwina's had been, it counted as entirely memorable.

Later that same year the smith's wife died, an autumn fever. Two others of the village went to the god as well. Within a fourteen-night of burying his wife, Gryn came to Jadwina's father again, this time for himself. This was the father of the man who had been pledged to her and had assaulted her and been slain for it.

It didn't seem to matter to anyone, certainly not her father. There was a kind of cloud, a stain over Jadwina by then. She was sent to him that same week, to the smithy and the house behind it. The cleric spoke new blessings over them in chapel; they had a cleric who liked to keep abreast of new things. Too much haste, some said of the marriage. Others jested that, with Jadwina's history, her father didn't want to see a third man maimed or killed before getting her off his hands.

No one ever saw Eadyn again, or heard tell of him. Gryn, the smith, as it turned out, was a mild-humoured man. She hadn't expected that in someone so red-faced, and with the sons he had. How could she have expected kindness? They had two children who survived. Jadwina's memories of the year she was wed softened and blurred, overlaid with others as the seasons passed.

In time, she buried her husband; took no other mate. Her sons shared the smithy, after, with their older half-brothers, and she lived with one of them and his wife, tolerably well. As well as such things can ever be, two women in a small house. She was buried herself, when the god called her home, laid in the growing chapel graveyard, next to Gryn, not far from Raud, under a sun disk and her name.

+

Three things, Alun was thinking, remembering the well-worn triad, will gladden the heart of a man. Riding to a woman under two moons. Riding to battle, companions at his side. Riding home, after long away.

He was doing the third, possibly the second. Hadn't thought about the first since his brother died. His heart was not glad.

He saw a sudden branch and ducked. The overgrown path they'd chosen could barely be called such. These woods had no formal name in either tongue, Cyngael or Anglcyn. Men did not enter here, save for the edgings, and only by daylight.

He heard his unwanted companion following. Without turning, Alun said, "There will be wolves in here."

"Or course there will be wolves," Thorkell Einarson said mildly. "Bears, still, this time of year. Hunting cats. Boars." "With autumn coming, boars for certain. Snakes."

"Yes. Two kinds, I believe. The green ones are harmless."

They were a fair distance into the forest already, the light entirely gone, even if it might still be twilight outside. Cafall was a shadow ahead of Alun's horse.

"The green ones," Thorkell repeated. Then he laughed—genuine laughter, despite where they were. "How do we tell in the dark?"

"If they bite us and we don't die," Alun replied. "I didn't ask you to come. I told you—"

"You told me to go back. I know. I can't."

This time Alun stopped his horse, the Erling horse Thorkell had found for him. He still hadn't asked about that. They had reached a very small clearing, a little space to face each other. The leaves overhead let a hint of the last evening light come down. It was time for the invocation. He wondered if it had been done before in these woods, if Jad's word had ever reached so far. It seemed to him he felt a humming, just below hearing, but he was aware that that was almost certainly apprehension and no more. There were so many tales.

"Why?" he asked. "Why can't you?"

The other man had also reined his horse. There was just enough light to see his face. He shrugged. "I am neither your servant, nor the cleric's. My life was saved by Lady Enid at Brynnfell and she claimed me as hers. If you are correct, and I believe you are, Ivarr Ragnarson is leading the Jormsvik ships there. I value my life as much as any man, but I gave her my oath. I will try to get back before they do."