Avelynn: The Edge of Faith (24 page)

Cormac addressed Alrik. “There must be recompense.”

“There will be.” Alrik took in the dead, including Hengest, who had taken his last breath.

“Baroc needs to pay,” Cormac said.

Alrik laid his hand on Cormac’s shoulder. “He will.”

The Vikings stormed back to the halted army. They pushed their way to where Hyffaid and Gwgon stood.

“Where is your man Baroc?” Alrik hadn’t bothered to wipe the dried blood from his face or hair.

Baroc stepped forward. “I’m here, Viking.”

“You left the field. Four of my men lie dead.”

“My duty is to my king. My men rushed back to protect our—”

Alrik moved fast. Baroc’s sword fell to the ground, still gripped in his hand. Baroc’s cry pierced the forest, and he dropped to a knee. Blood spurted from the stub of his wrist, and he wrapped his cloak around the wound.

Hyffaid unsheathed his sword. “You dare raise steel against my own blood.”

Welshmen pressed forward. Vikings, high from battle, banged the steel of their blades on the iron bosses of their shields.

On impulse, I scanned the sky, expecting to see the Maidens of Odin swooping down, ready to take the dead to feast in Valhalla. Only sixteen Vikings remained after that attack, and while I knew they could hold their own for a time, they were outnumbered, with no means of escape. None of us knew the land, and Raven’s Blood sailed somewhere off the coast. A cooler head must prevail.

Gwgon jumped into the fray and held up his hands. “Peace, Jarl Alrik. Peace, brother Hyffaid.”

The clamor receded and men waited for the next move.

Alrik pointed to Hyffaid. “Baroc knew we would be ambushed. He hung back like a quivering child. Do his actions speak to your own cowardice?”

Hyffaid opened his mouth as if to say something, but Gwgon spoke first. “I assure you, Alrik. We only learned of the ambush when your man rode into our midst. We sent men to survey the area, ensuring no other dogs lay in wait, but we discovered the news too late to aid your cause.”

“I demand restitution.” Alrik said.

“And what of my claim, Jarl Alrik? You attacked my own cousin.” Hyffaid’s round face blossomed to a mottled crimson.

“Out of respect for our alliance, I spared his life. My brothers would not have done the same. Should I reconsider my retribution?” He stode toward Baroc, who leaned against a tree, his skin slick with sweat. Baroc tried to stand taller, but everyone knew there would be little contest.

I wanted to scream at Alrik to stop, but feared that challenging him in front of all these men would only fuel his need for violence.

Gwgon stepped in front of Baroc. “You have my word, Alrik. This will never happen again. Hyffaid and I will pay each warrior’s blood price. Will that appease your men?”

Alrik glanced at Cormac. Cormac responded. “It is a start.”

Gwgon nodded. “From this point on, as a show of good faith, Hyffaid and I will march by your side.”

Hyffaid’s color didn’t retreat, but he nodded his agreement before storming off.

“We need to see to our dead.” Alrik slipped his axe in the loop of leather at his waist.

“Of course. Lampeter is a short march away. We will ready pallets.” Gwgon’s body sagged as if it breathed a sigh of relief.

I didn’t blame him. There weren’t many times I’d witnessed that hostility driving off Alrik in waves, like the heat from the sun on a scorched, dusty field, but when I did, the feral berserker beneath the calm surface of tenderness unnerved even me.

Alrik grunted and returned to his men, the march forward continuing without further delay. Tension laced the air as the army trudged along the unprotected road, but at least the animosity between Vikings and Welshmen diminished. Gwgon and Hyffaid flanked Alrik as they led the cortege, the dead men carried in honor behind them. By the time we trudged across a small ford on the River Teifi and reached Lampeter in Cantref Mawr, everyone seemed relieved and ready for mead and feasting.

The Vikings built a great pyre and laid their dead on a wooden platform. I stood by Alrik’s side as towering flames consumed their bodies. Ravens called from the woods. Alrik turned to the sound. “Odin is pleased.”

All around me, men smiled at the omen, the mood shifting at once from grief to celebration. Horns lifted and drink flowed. Rhodri’s attack would further strain Alrik’s relationship with his men. They didn’t want to be here, and while their coffers continued to fill, the weight of the whole might cause the tenuous balance to buckle. The spectre of darkness swirled around me. The wedge, the chasm that would drive Alrik and me apart could come from any direction, and I felt as though I teetered on the very edge of it. Would Alrik’s men be the catalyst? Would the divide between the Vikings and Welsh deliver the final blow? Would Marared and her threats be our undoing? Or would Osric and Demas’s reach pluck me from my intangible veil of safety? The more I dwelled on my predicament, the more desperate I was to circumvent it. I needed to do something.

I left Alrik and his men to celebrate the lives of their dead and retrieved my locked chest, sneaking away to the welcoming trunk of a large oak tree. On a small rise, it overlooked the camp and would afford me some warning should someone seek to find me. Alrik would be engaged until the wee hours of dawn. This was the perfect opportunity to look over Plegmund’s absconded letters.

I laid them out in front of me, sorting by sender. The majority of correspondence passed between Demas and Osric, but there were a few missives addressed to powerful earls throughout Wessex. On the surface, the letters seemed benign, but invariably, there would be a passage of gibberish. I applied the code used in Muirgen’s book, but it did nothing to clear up the ambiguity of the phrases.

Muirgen had once shown me how to write in a way that only bright light or a candle’s glow could reveal the secret. I held the paper up, squinting into the sun, but there was no evidence of faint scrawls between the lines of written text. The margins, however, caught my eye. On a few of the letters, there were holes perforated in the parchment.

I ripped up a patch of grass beside me, creating a writing tablet of sorts in the dirt, and grabbed a small twig. I picked one of the encoded gibberish words and applied a series of letters based on the method Muirgen had taught me. When shifting the letters by a placement of three didn’t work, I worked my way through the Latin alphabet, trying every possible combination.

Sunlight faded, and I still hadn’t discovered the letters’ hidden messages. I wondered if perhaps Osric had used the English letters instead. I frowned. I would have to try again. Down at the camp, the flames of bonfires danced in the wind, lighting my path. I found the wagon with my belongings and tucked my chest deep beneath a few of my other possessions. I was about to leave to look for Alrik when I spied Cormac bustling in my direction.

“Everything all right?” I asked, searching his pale face in the waning light.

He held out his arm. A nasty gash dissected the flesh. “Bloody fish.”

“How exactly did a fish do that?”

He huffed. “Trying to snare the thing in my net. If it hadn’t evaded my efforts, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You should have someone look at that.”

“Pah. That’s what Alrik said. Waste of time if you ask me. Nothing to it.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. Where’s the tent?” As always with a moving army, there was a healing area set up. Men in close proximity to weapons, combined with copious drinking and carousing, made for a volatile and rich environment for head wounds, severed fingers, lacerations, broken noses, swollen knuckles, and gut and bowel unrest. The women of the camp took it in turns to tend the daft fools until late in the night.

He grunted and lifted his chin. I walked beside him. When we stuck our head in, Sigy looked up and assessed us both. “You there.” She dismissed Cormac to sit on a rough bench beside a few other men, all with different injuries, wearing similar frowns on their faces. “Avelynn, you can help clean up this lout.” She handed me a damp cloth and shoved me in the direction of a Welshman. The tip of his finger dangled, the end cut clean through to the bone. I swallowed hard and looked at him apologetically. He shrugged and held out his hand. I wasn’t certain what to do.

“Squeeze the damn thing and stop the bleeding,” Sigy said without bothering to look up from her ministrations.

I applied pressure, expecting the man to jump or wince, but he looked almost bored.

Given Sigy’s renown for healing, she was clearly the matron in charge. I wondered where Marared was, but Sigy answered my unspoken question as if reading my mind. “My daughter has no patience for such things.”

A shiver ran up my spine. The woman’s acuity was frightening. At first, it unnerved me to work in such close quarters with her. I didn’t trust her, or her daughter, but I became engrossed in her ability, marveling at her knowledge. There was not an ailment for which she didn’t present a cure, nor a wound she couldn’t plaster and heal. I didn’t know if she shared her daughter’s inclination to remove me from Alrik’s side, but I figured if I kept her in plain sight, she would be less likely to attempt anything in front of so many witnesses.

By the time the candles burned low, the oil lamps flickering in spent puddles of fat, Sigy and I were the last of the women to remain. The others had long since shuffled off to find succor in the arms of their beloved men. Cormac was the last hapless victim, and as soon as we tended to his wounds, I would leave and find Alrik. We’d spent far too much time bickering and being short tempered with one another, and after the day’s violence, I longed for his embrace.

Sigy wiped the sweat from her brow. “Hold still,” she barked at Cormac. She threaded lengths of thorn between two overlapping pieces of skin to hold the wound closed. I watched with interest as she applied a poultice of bugle and calendula to the jagged seam.

“It will stop the bleeding, and the wound will not fester,” Sigy said, catching me spying.

I nodded, trying to take it all in. As much as I wished to learn the healing arts, I had a hard time remembering the plants and their uses. There were too many of them. Muirgen had tried to teach me leech craft as well. Her continued patience with my relentless confusion had been admirable.

The thought of my grandmother reminded me of what I’d lost. I looked eastward. Somewhere over the waves of endless Welsh hills and valleys lay Mercia, and south of that, Somerset. Wedmore. Home. I wondered if I would ever see it again.

Sigy held her hand above the wound and whispered a charm.

“Away with you.” She shooed Cormac off the chair. He smiled sheepishly at me and left the tent. The man had gone as white as bleached wool, muttering with each pass of the thorn through his skin.

Sigy walked to the wash bowl and scrubbed the blood from her fingers. “You wish to say something?” She had her back to me, but it still felt like she watched me.

“The words you chanted over Cormac’s wound spoke of Woden and the Lord.” The Norse called the God Frey, “Lord.” “A convenient happenstance in case a Christian should overhear.”

I caught the edges of her lip curling into a small smile as she turned in profile to dry her hands. “Cormac is a Viking. I catered to the crowd, but how is it you know such distinctions? Is what they say about you true? Are you indeed a witch?”

I flinched and tried to mask my fear. “I am betrothed to a Norseman. I am well acquainted with the Norse gods.”

She shook her head. “There is little point denying the charge, my dear.” She sat on the chair, her eyes slanted, studying me. “Who taught you?”

“I am not a witch.”

“No? Gil told me of your little trip to the coast. Hard to dismiss those events. But even still, you’re wanted on charges of treason, murder, and witchcraft. Are all the claims false, then?”

I gripped the hilt of my sax. How long had she known?

“What are you afraid of? That I would call in the English, demand the price on your head?” She tidied up the tent, discarding the mess left after sewing up Cormac. “While it may yet come to that, I had hoped we could reach a compromise. You see, whether you realize it or not, you and I are on the same side.”

“And what side is that?”

“You wish to leave Wales in the arms of your lover, and I want you both to leave. I care little for your past, only your present and how it affects my plans. My daughter has made no secret of her desire for Alrik, and I’ve made no secret of my intent to see her married to a king.”

“An intention that includes poisoning him?”

She stopped what she was doing and studied me. “Why should any of our dealings here in Wales affect you? You are not of this place. You don’t have any stakes in the outcome of our affairs.”

“I have friends here now.”

“Ah, yes, and when word of your history reaches the populace, do you think your friends will be able to protect you? Hyffaid, Gwgon, and his sister will need to distance themselves from you if they wish to remain in control. They already walk a tightrope by inviting the Norsemen into our midst—an unpopular decision, I might add. The day’s events stand testament to that. They will have no choice but to leave you to the fickle mercies of the mob.”