The Edge on the Sword Read online

  Flæd accepted a bowlful of porridge from a kitchen worker’s hands and found a place by the hearth. He had come in with her again, she saw with a sinking feeling. There he was, in the corner beside the entrance. Flæd watched the man scrutinize each newcomer who entered the room. When his square face turned toward her, she quickly looked away and began to spoon up her porridge. Her guardian was so large he seemed oafish, and he was not young—perhaps as old as forty winters. This was the person who would stalk behind her every day from now on. Everyone would stare at her. Edward’s dog would growl. This warder would follow her to chapel, to meals, to her doorstep when she returned to her chamber—how could anyone fail to notice her presence with this great, awkward shadow trailing along with her? Flæd felt a rush of humiliation as she thought about it.

  Above the busy sounds of the kitchen came the high, clear sound of a bell marking the third hour since sunrise, calling the monks to prayer. Flæd stood up with a start. The third hour already? Filled with dread, she began to push her way across the busy room. With a little yelp of frustration she dodged her warder, who had risen and stepped into her path when he saw her coming. At last she reached the doorway and ran out into the street.

  The rain was in her hair and on her face again before she could pull up her hood, wetting her cheeks like strange, cold tears. She kept running, sliding in the mud and almost falling, but she didn’t care. If she was absent when her lesson was supposed to begin, Asser would go about his other work. She had not been late before, but her father had warned her that she must never keep her teacher waiting. He was a busy man who must never feel unduly burdened with teaching her. Flæd hurried on, fighting back the burn of real tears.

  She pushed past the heavy scriptorium door and entered the vaulted room with ragged, echoing breath. Her shoes slopped soggily on the flagstones of the room, and the nearest writers, who were just preparing to leave their work for prayers, edged the corners of their parchment away from her dripping clothes. Flæd skirted the room, looking for her teacher, who usually prayed quickly and came directly here to meet her. Was he late today, just as she was? Her eyes found the shelf where she usually stored her writing tools and gospel primer. Empty. Could Asser have come already and taken away her things when he saw she had not arrived? Flæd stopped in confusion and despair, tears now brimming in earnest.

  “Flæd.” Edward’s voice sounded over the rustle and murmur of the scriptorium and she jerked her head like a startled animal. “Here, by the window.” There sat her brother, peering at her anxiously. Wulf stretched long and calm beneath Edward’s bench, his damp black nose dripping. On a stool at the low writing table sat a brown-robed cleric she didn’t know. He stood as Flæd tried to smooth her trembling face.

  “Lady,” he said, inclining his head so that she saw his tonsured scalp, “I am called John. Bishop Asser has suggested that I should teach you for a little while.” He was a very young priest, Flæd could see, a round-faced man whose voice was soft and deep. “Your brother and I have brought your things to the table. Will you join us?”

  “Where were you?” Edward demanded under his breath as she took her seat at the table and drew her book toward her. “I told him you were never late for our lessons.”

  “How would you know that? You never attend our lessons,” Flæd whispered back sharply, feeling baffled and short-tempered. Still shaking from her race across the burgh, she tried to arrange her muddy shoes beneath the table. She took up her wax tablet with one dripping hand and found the last ruled line where her lettering had ended the day before. The new tutor was called John. Father John, she ought to call him. She should try to review yesterday’s lesson. John…Father John would question her about those verses.

  But it was Edward’s voice which interrupted her thoughts. He spoke quietly: “Who is that man who came in with you?” Flæd looked up abruptly from her book. “Over there.” By the doorway her guardian sat, colorless as the stonework around him. Rainwater had run off his clothes and darkened the floor and wall in the corner where he had placed himself. Flæd ground her palm against the bench in vexation, shivering as the chill of the scriptorium seeped into her wet clothes. Was this how it would be? Would he truly follow her tiniest movement, even into this sanctuary? She ought to talk to her brother alone, tell him about this man and the arrangements the king had made, as soon as they could escape again to their place in the wood….

  No. There would be no more escapes with Edward. There would be no more time alone, and at the end of the summer, she would have to leave Edward, her books, everything. That was the meaning of the man in the corner.

  Bitterly she turned away from her warder and her brother. The new tutor began speaking, and she tried to focus on her tablet again, preparing for a test of her skills.

  But the priest was not talking to her. He was talking with Edward. She watched as their new teacher carefully stroked Wulf’s jaw and chest in greeting. The dog looked him clearly in the eye, then looked away, lowering his head to rest on Edward’s foot.

  “Has he always been in your care?” the tutor asked, and Flæd heard Edward begin to talk about Wulf’s puppyhood.

  What was happening here? Edward sat, a little disheveled by the rain, cross-legged on his bench. His head was stretched forward from his shoulders like a bird, and although his eyes roved around the walls and windows of the scriptorium restlessly, they sometimes raised to the young priest’s face.

  Was this the little brother who scarcely spoke to anyone, hardly even to her these days? Edward began to tell John of a special snare he had devised to catch swift game when Wulf was still a puppy. Flæd watched the boy’s hands make lines and circles on the tabletop, showing how the trap worked. He showed me that trap when he made it, she thought in consternation, he showed only me Still nodding, the priest pushed the wax tablet toward Edward’s hands. Asking another question, he tapped the tablet with the bone stylus, offering it to Edward and bending over to see the shapes the boy began to draw. He moved away as Edward’s words faded and the boy concentrated on making a picture.

  “Lady,” the priest addressed Flæd softly, performing a little bow, “will you show me the lesson Bishop Asser gave you yesterday?” Tearing her eyes away from her brother, Flæd turned back to her own tablet. In some ways, at least, this new teacher was predictable.

  He stayed, unlike Asser, to read Flæd’s lesson with her and offer his quiet corrections. Father John’s main attention, though, was for Edward, with whom he continued to talk about hunting, about the woods, about Wulf. As she sat with them at the table, Flæd could sense an eagerness in Edward which she only remembered seeing by firelight or moonlight when they were talking alone together. Watching him, she felt confused, and a little dejected. She turned a little to one side and tried not to think about her brother as she wrote out her lesson, making the strokes on her wax match the carefully ruled lines of writing in the book she copied. The book’s rulings were measured according to prick marks along the sides of the page, and were scored into the parchment without ink, using only the pressure of a metal stylus. Behind the dark letters the lines seemed to disappear.

  I am like those lines, Flæd thought as she worked. Edward hardly sees me, nor does Father John. She was disappearing already, she decided. Even before her betrothal was known to others, she felt herself fading beneath the words of a promise her father had made to another man. Deliberately she continued to fill her tablet.

  By the time the bell rang to signal the ninth hour since sunrise, she had finished all the work her new tutor had given her. Outside the sky had cleared. In the slanting afternoon light the scriptorium writers continued working. Edward and the young priest were talking about another drawing Edward had made on the wax tablet.

  “Here is the Hunter, high in the west.” Edward pointed to the upper left hand portion of his picture, where he had marked the constellation as he and Flæd had seen it last night. “And the Dog here, just south of him.” Edward moved his hand slightly to the le
ft of his drawing.

  The tutor smiled. “It seems that you and your dog appear in everything you tell or show to me, sir.”

  “My teacher should call me Edward.” Edward flushed. “Wulf and I,” he continued with less shyness, “are not the same as the Hunter and his dog. But I can put myself in that picture.” At the bottom of the tablet Edward’s sketch showed how a tree-lined path followed the edge of a pool which Edward had covered with tiny wave-marks and ripples scratched into the wax. Carefully, beside the pool Edward added a figure in a boy’s short tunic and leggings, accompanied by Wulf’s shaggy outline. Then beneath the human figure Edward marked a vertical line with three horizontal strokes intersecting it, top, center, and bottom. “That is a drawing of me,” he said, looking up at the young priest. “And that is the letter that begins my name, Edward.”

  “Indeed, that is the first letter,” returned the tutor. “Do you know the others?” Edward nodded. “And will you draw them for me next to the E?” Edward bent over the tablet to begin forming the first descending stroke of the letter D.

  Across the table from them, Flæd felt a lump rising in her throat. She watched the muscles of her brother’s smooth cheek flex in concentration, saw the letters she had taught him appearing on the wax. I wanted him here because I thought he needed other companions, she realized with unexpected bitterness, I wanted this. Flæd reached out to touch the priest’s sleeve.

  “Please, I have finished,” she said in a low voice. “May I go?”

  “Of course, Lady.” He spoke very quietly, leaning away from the boy. “Until tomorrow, then?” Flæd nodded, and went out past the warder, hearing him rise to his feet behind her with a creaking of leather.

  The mud of the morning had turned to a soft clay that took a foot’s perfect imprint but left shoes and hooves clean. Flæd walked along a high ridge of earth pushed up to the side of a wheel rut. Men and women passed her carrying bundles of fuel and loads of woolen cloth. People led horses, spoke to each other, prodded small bunches of sheep along the roadway between the wooden buildings of the burgh. But Flæd saw little of this. Her mind lagged behind, thinking of her brother and the new teacher working so comfortably together in the scriptorium. Edward hardly looked at me all day, she brooded. Nor had their new teacher seemed particularly interested in the king’s daughter. Only her unwelcome guardian had fixed his attention on her. It wasn’t fair.

  In her room someone had opened the shutters, and a square of sunlight fell across the coverlet. Flæd sat down in the middle of it, pulling her legs up under her skirts.

  Her warder was there of course, settling himself on the stone stoop. The door frame partly covered his face, but Flæd could see the bristling short hairs of his head and beard as he leaned back into the afternoon shadow from the roof. People passing along the street glanced at the stranger as they went—who was this man seated almost inside the chamber of the king’s daughters? Flæd curled herself together more tightly. Tonight her father would announce her betrothal, she thought with resignation. Then everyone would know.

  In the doorway her warder had begun to clean the dried mud from his boots with a knife. Flæd watched the muscles of his lower arm cord and strain as the knifepoint dug through the caked earth. An unusual grey bracelet was clasped around the wrist of his knife-hand. Made of heavy, ugly metal, it did not seem like a decoration. Neither was it an archer’s protective band—it was on the wrong wrist, and it was not broad enough to cover the vulnerable veins and tendons a bowstring or an attacker’s weapon might slash. The bracelet glinted a little on his arm as he worked in the shadow. Strange, Flæd thought, unsuitable for this man.

  Then, with a chill, Flæd understood what it must be. Her eyes flicked to the man’s neck. Yes. Another narrow metal band showed just above the neckline of his heavy leather overtunic. The man wore tokens of slavery.

  Disbelief mingled with affront rushed through Flæd’s mind. There were slaves among the royal household’s servants, as there were in most social circles of the West Saxon kingdom. But rarely were they trusted with the care of very important people. Hadn’t her father valued her safety any more than this?

  Flæd shut her eyes. I don’t understand, she thought miserably. Maybe Father will explain later. Too many things had wounded her today, and she had little strength left for this last indignity. I need to be like a stone, like ice, Flæd told herself doggedly. Edward has someone else now, that’s good. I thought he should. And maybe the new teacher already knows I’m going away. Why should he spend much time with a student who will be leaving soon? It wasn’t a happy feeling, the numbness that began to replace her hurt, but numbness was all she wanted right now.

  The knife scraped on dirt and leather—a mineral, monotonous sound. Flæd lay back on her bed and turned her face away from the doorway where the man sat working over his boot. A few seconds later she spoke over her shoulder.

  “What is your name?”

  The man looked up at his charge, huddled in her patch of sunlight.

  “Red,” he said gruffly, and looked away.

  5

  In the Great Hall

  “WHERE WERE YOU AT THE EVENING SERVICE, FLÆD?” Æthelgifu demanded. “You haven’t been there for two nights in a row.”

  “I was here. I didn’t feel well.” Stonily Flæd drew a long gown of rust-colored wool over her head, but she felt the ice inside her begin to soften a little. She knew her sister wanted her to share in her earnest prayers each evening, but she was sure that thin Dove also appreciated the warmth of a larger body kneeling beside her in the frigid chapel.

  “You said you would help me make a stick horse today!” Ælfthryth accused, wriggling away from a woman who struggled to put a comb to the little girl’s wild blond hair. “You said you would!”

  “I did say that, little elf.” Now Flæd’s composure was melting away in earnest. She imagined herself for a moment making the toy for Ælf to ride, fastening dry grass along a green stick of willow to make a mane, with a tuft of long rushes at the other end for a tail—all under the watchful eye of her warder, the man named Red. Flæd hugged the little girl to hide the dismay she suddenly felt. “Tomorrow, I promise, if the rain stays away, well make you a willow horse.”

  “Do you know who the guest will be tonight?” Dove asked. “I’ve asked everyone, and no one seems to know.”

  “The only new person around is that man on our doorstep,” Ælf said loudly, and then clapped both hands over her mouth. The man outside could certainly hear through the cloth draped across the doorway. “Who is he, Flæd?” she whispered.

  “Hush, little one,” Flæd said sadly, turning away from the serving women’s curious glances. “We’ll talk about that another time.”

  Ælf was cornered by the woman with the comb, and Dove was led away to see if a blue gown Flæd used to wear might fit better than the ones she kept outgrowing. Flæd combed out her own hair with nervous fingers and bound it neatly again into a single braid. At her shoulder she pinned the silver brooch, wishing she could just stay in this room tonight, wishing she could curl up on her bed again and try not to think or feel. “Come,” she forced herself to say to her sisters as she retrieved her cloak from the bed. “I mustn’t be late.”

  The three girls and their attendant women set out for the hall. Tonight the lowest-ranking servants and laborers would tend their masters’ homes, but everyone else would come to feast with the king and his family. A few townspeople still hurried along the street as the royal sisters walked between the shuttered houses. Some of them noticed the silent, bulky guardian following close behind the little company of women and girls.

  The great hall was one of the burgh’s newest buildings. It was built of the same yellow stone quarried to make the burgh’s first church with its adjoining scriptorium, and the partly finished ramparts around the settlement. Eventually the royal family would have a great house of stone as well, but for now Alfred sent all the new blocks to finish the protective wall. The hall was a pl
ace of luxury in the heart of the young burgh, with rich cloth-hung walls and a vast open hearth. Heavy beams spanned the high ceilings, where smoke swirled far above the folk gathered at the benches and tables which filled the room. Torchlight and rushlight brightened a guest’s view from the entrance all the way to the king’s seat at the opposite end of the hall. When he feasted here with his townspeople, Alfred occupied a tall-backed oaken chair carved with twin dragons which wove in and out of each other’s coils and then swallowed their own tails. A smoothly polished red gem formed the gleaming eye of each beast.

  Noise and warmth rushed to greet the sisters as they entered the hall and walked between the crowded tables toward their father’s seat. At the end of the hall the sisters turned aside with their serving women to take their usual places on a bench where Edward, little Æthelweard (held on a servant’s lap), and Father John were already seated. With a wave Alfred indicated that Flæd should take the empty seat beside him and Ealhswith. The blood surged in Flæd’s cheeks as she walked to join her parents at the raised table.

  Luckily, the noisy feasters spared little attention for Flæd. This late winter meal of meat, of round barley loaves, of honey collected in autumn, and of sharply aged cheeses was welcome to the townspeople tired of dull winter fare.

  Soon Ealhswith rose and with both hands took from Alfred a broad silver cup of mead. Flæd watched her mother circle the high table where the king’s closest retainers and advisors sat, ceremoniously offering the cup to each guest with words of greeting and thanks. Flæd tried to catch Edward’s eye, but found him in conversation with the young priest John, who was offering a sliver of meat to Wulf beneath their table. With a pang Flæd turned back to her meal.

  “Dear friends of my hearth, and people of this burgh,” Alfred called out, rising from his seat. The hall quieted as the king drew breath to continue, and Flæd quickly dropped her eyes, wishing she could hide somewhere. “I welcome you to our hall, to share this meat and bread.”