The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) (12 page)

‘They?’

‘She’ll be guarded,’ Stiorra said patiently.

‘And she just mounts the mare and rides away with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the guards at the gate don’t stop you?’ I sneered.

‘That’s the task for your men,’ she said.

‘Suppose she doesn’t want to ride away?’

‘Oh, she does,’ Stiorra said confidently, ‘she doesn’t want to marry Eardwulf! He’s a pig!’

‘A pig?’

‘There isn’t a maid in Gleawecestre who’s safe from him,’ Stiorra said. ‘Lady Æthelflaed tells me that no man can ever be trusted, though some can be trusted more than others, but Eardwulf?’ She shuddered. ‘He likes to beat women too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh, father!’ She smiled at me pityingly. ‘So you see? I’m riding with you to Gleawecestre.’

And so she was, because I could think of no better plan. In my mind I had half thought of waylaying Ælfwynn as she walked to the church, but Stiorra was right, the short walk would be well guarded by Æthelred’s men. Or I could have gone into the church itself, but that would have been desperate because the big building would be filled with Æthelred’s allies. I did not like putting my daughter in danger, but till I arrived in Gleawecestre I could see no better idea.

I had thought to arrive in Gleawecestre that day, but finding carts took time, and giving men careful instructions took more time, and so we were delayed until shortly after dawn on Saint Æthelwold’s feast day. I had also hoped to have six carts, but we had found only three in Cirrenceastre and those three would have to be enough. I had sent them westwards the night before. The men driving the carts would have to spend an uncomfortable night waiting for the town gates to open, but by the time we left Cirrenceastre two of those three wagons should be inside the walls. They were all loaded with hay, and the men were instructed to tell the gate guards that it was fodder for Lord Æthelred’s stables.

It was a typical March day. The sky was grey as iron and the wind cold off the hills behind us. Osferth had taken his ten men back to Fagranforda, where they would load their two wagons with belongings, and, accompanied by Father Cuthbert, set off northwards with my men’s families. Æthelstan travelled with them. The wagons would make their journey slow, perhaps too slow, and ten men were hardly enough to protect them if they found trouble, but if all went well I would catch up with them before nightfall.

If we survived the next few hours.

Stiorra rode beside me, swathed in a great brown cloak. Beneath it she wore cream silk and white linen, silver chains and amber brooches. We had chosen a young mare, and brushed the animal, combed her, polished her hooves with wax, and woven blue ribbons in her mane, but the road was staining the hooves, and nasty spits of rain bedraggled the carefully tied ribbons. ‘So,’ I asked her as we rode down from the hills, ‘you’re a pagan?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Why?’

She smiled from beneath her cloak’s thick hood, which hid the stitchwort that made a coronet about her black hair. ‘Why not?’

‘Because you were raised Christian.’

‘Maybe that’s why.’ I growled at that response and she laughed. ‘Do you know how cruel the nuns are?’ she asked. ‘They hit me and even burned me because I was your daughter.’

‘Burned you!’

‘With a spit from the kitchen fire,’ she said, and pulled up her left sleeve to show me the scars.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demanded.

‘I told Lady Æthelflaed instead,’ she said calmly, ignoring my anger, ‘so of course it didn’t happen again. And then you sent me Hella.’

‘Hella?’

‘My maidservant.’

‘I sent her to you?’

‘Yes, father, after Beamfleot.’

‘I did?’ There had been so many captives taken at Beamfleot that I had forgotten most of them. ‘Who is Hella?’

‘She’s behind you, father,’ Stiorra said, twisting in the saddle to nod at her maid, who followed us on a placid gelding. I winced with pain when I turned to see a snub-nosed, round-faced girl who looked nervous when she saw me stare at her. ‘She’s a Dane,’ Stiorra went on, ‘and a little younger than I am, and a pagan. She told me stories about Freya and Idunn and Nanna and Hyrokin. Sometimes we sat up all night and talked.’

‘Good for Hella,’ I said, then rode in silence for a few paces. I did not know my own daughter. I loved her, but I did not know her, and now I had thirty-three men with me, thirty-three men to wreck a wedding and escape a town full of vengeful warriors, and I was sending my daughter into that wasps’ nest? What if she was caught? ‘Christians don’t like pagans,’ I said, ‘and if Æthelred’s men catch you they’ll hurt you, persecute you, hound you. That’s why you were raised Christian, so you wouldn’t be in danger.’

‘I might worship your gods,’ she said, ‘but I am not noisy about it.’ She opened the cloak and showed me the silver cross hanging over the pretty silk dress. ‘See? It doesn’t hurt me and it keeps them quiet.’

‘Does Æthelflaed know?’

She shook her head. ‘As I said, father, I am not noisy.’

‘And I am?’

‘Very,’ she said drily.

And an hour later we were at the gates of Gleawecestre, which had been decorated with leafy boughs in honour of the wedding. Eight men guarded the eastern gate where a crowd was trying to enter the city, but they were being delayed as the guards searched a line of wagons. One of my wagons was there, but those men were not trying to enter. They had parked the big cart with its load of hay just to one side of the road. They ignored us as we pushed through the waiting crowd, which, because we were mounted and armed, made way for us. ‘What are you searching for?’ I asked the guard commander, a big man with a scarred face and a black beard.

‘Just taxes, lord,’ he said. Merchants sometimes hid valuable goods beneath piles of cheap cloth or untreated hides and so cheated towns of the proper payments. ‘And the city’s busy,’ he grumbled.

‘The wedding?’

‘And the king being here.’

‘The king!’

‘King Edward!’ he said, as if I should have known. ‘Him and a thousand others.’

‘When did he come?’

‘Yesterday, lord. Make way for Lord Uhtred!’ he used his long spear to push people aside. ‘I’m glad you’re alive, lord,’ he said when the gate arch was unobstructed.

‘I am too,’ I told him.

‘I was with you at Teotanheale,’ he said, ‘and before that.’ He touched the scar on his left cheek. ‘Got that when we fought in East Anglia.’

I found a coin in my pouch and handed it to him. ‘What time is the wedding?’

‘They don’t tell me, lord. Probably when the king gets his royal arse out of bed.’ He kissed the shilling I had given him. ‘Poor girl,’ he added in a lower voice.

‘Poor?’

He shrugged as if his comment needed no explanation. ‘God bless you, lord,’ he said, touching the rim of his helmet.

‘I’m not here,’ I said, adding a second coin.

‘You’re not …’ he began, then looked at the armed men following me. ‘No, lord, you’re not here. I haven’t set eyes on you. God bless you, lord.’

I rode on, ducking beneath a great spread hide that was hung above a leather shop. Edward was here? That made me angry. Edward had always expressed a fondness for Æthelstan and his sister. He had put them under Æthelflaed’s protection, just as he had placed Father Cuthbert under mine, and I thought he had done that to protect them from those men in Wessex who resented their existence. Yet if Edward had come for this wedding it could only mean that he had given way to Æthelhelm completely.

‘He recognised you,’ Finan said, jerking his head towards the guard at the gate, ‘suppose he sends warning?’

I shook my head. ‘He won’t,’ I said, hoping I was right. ‘He’s not loyal to Eardwulf.’

‘But if Eardwulf knows you’re here?’ Finan said, still worried.

‘He’ll set more guards,’ I suggested, but still pulled the hood of my cloak further over my head to shadow my face. It had begun to rain more persistently, puddling the filth-caked street which had lost most of its old paving stones. The main gate to the palace was straight ahead, not far, and spearmen were sheltering beneath its arch. The church was to the left, hidden by the thatched houses and shops. We splashed over a cross street and I saw one of my big wagons half blocking the road to the right. The third one should be waiting near the palace.

The city was crowded, which was hardly a surprise. Every man who had attended the Witan was still here, and they had brought house-warriors, wives, and servants, while folk from a dozen nearby villages had come to Gleawecestre in hope of sharing the feast offered by the bride’s father. There were jugglers and magicians, tumblers and harpists, and a man leading a massive brown bear on a chain. The marketplace had been cleared of stalls, and a heap of firewood showed where an ox was to be roasted. The rain fell harder. A greasy-haired priest harangued the passers-by, shouting that they should repent before Christ returned in glory, but no one seemed to be listening to him except for a mangy dog that barked whenever the priest paused for breath.

‘I don’t like this,’ I growled.

‘What don’t you like?’ Stiorra asked.

‘You going into the palace. It’s too dangerous.’

She gave me a patient look from beneath her cloak’s hood. ‘So you’ll just ride in yourself, father? Ride in and start a fight?’

‘You sound like your mother,’ I said, and did not mean it as a compliment. But of course she was right. I could not ride in without being challenged and recognised, and then what? I would fight my way into Æthelred’s palace and find his daughter? There were not only Æthelred’s warriors in the palace, but Æthelhelm’s, and King Edward’s men too, and it was probably the presence of the West Saxon king that made the guards on the gate so watchful. They had seen us approaching, and two of them moved to block the archway with massive spears, but stepped back when we sheered away into the street that ran alongside the palace wall, close to where my third wagon was parked. ‘So what will you do?’ I asked Stiorra.

‘I shall find Ælfwynn, tell her she’s welcome to come away with us, and if she agrees I’ll bring her,’ she said as if it was the simplest task imaginable.

‘And if she says no?’

‘She won’t. She hates Eardwulf.’

‘Then do it,’ I said to Stiorra. Hella, the maid, would go with her because no well-born woman would ride without a female companion. They would be escorted by two warriors, Eadric and Cenwulf, who had both served me a long time. There was a chance, a small one, that they might be recognised as my men, but I preferred their experience to sending a pair of youths who might panic if challenged. I could, of course, simply have said that the mare was a present from me, but that generosity might raise suspicion, and it was better to pretend it came from Æthelfrith in far-off Lundene. I doubted that the guards on the gate would realise that there had not been time for the news of the wedding to reach Æthelfrith yet. Those guards were cold, damp, and miserable, and probably would not care whether the mare was a gift from Æthelfrith or from the holy ghost. ‘Go,’ I told the four of them, ‘just go.’

I dismounted, and the pain was such that I had to lean against my saddle for a few heartbeats. When I opened my eyes I saw Stiorra had taken off the big dark cloak so she appeared now in white and cream, hung with silver, and with flowers in her hair. She spread the pale cloak over her mare’s rump and rode straight-backed and tall in her saddle. Hella led the gift mare by the bridle, while Cenwulf and Eadric rode at either side of my daughter. ‘She looks like a queen,’ Finan said quietly.

‘A wet queen,’ I said. It was raining harder.

The guards still blocked the archway, but Stiorra’s very appearance made them draw back their spears. They bowed their heads respectfully, recognising her as a highborn lady. I saw her speak to them, but what she said I could not hear, and then the five horses and four riders vanished through the high stone gateway.

I walked back along the street until I could see into the palace grounds. Beyond the archway was a wide courtyard where grass grew. There were a few saddled horses being led up and down by servants and at least twelve more guards standing by the far buildings. That seemed a large number of guards, but other than that there was little sense of urgency, so little that I wondered if the wedding had already happened. ‘When is the wedding?’ I asked one of the spearmen at the gate.

‘Whenever Lord Æthelred decides,’ was the surly reply. The man could not see my face, which was deeply shadowed by my cloak’s hood.

‘He might wait for the rain to end?’ a younger guard answered more helpfully.

‘It’s set in for the day,’ the older one said. ‘It’ll piss till nightfall.’

‘Then Lord Eardwulf will have to wait, won’t he?’ the younger man said mischievously.

‘Wait for what? He takes what he wants. The poor girl can probably hardly walk this morning.’

And that was another worry. Had Eardwulf claimed his bride early? Was she in his rooms, and if she was then Stiorra could never reach her. I paced through spreading puddles. Rain dripped from my hood. I had the cloak fastened with brooches to hide the mail I wore and to hide Serpent-Breath, which hung at my side. Stiorra and Hella had both dismounted and vanished into the palace, not into the great hall, which was made of Roman stone, but through a small door that led into a long, low wooden building. The guards there had questioned them, but let them pass. Cenwulf and Eadric waited close by the door. Both men still had their swords. Weapons were not permitted inside the palace buildings, but the two men would be left alone unless they tried to enter any of the doors. I sent Sihtric to look inside the church. ‘See if it looks ready for a wedding,’ I told him.

The rain was sheeting down now, running in the road’s central gutter and pouring off the roofs. ‘The girl won’t come out in this rain even to see a unicorn,’ Finan grumbled, ‘let alone to look at a horse.’

‘Father Pyrlig saw a unicorn,’ I said.

‘He did?’

‘In the mountains. He said it was white and ran like a hare.’

‘He likes his ale, does Father Pyrlig.’

‘There are strange things in Wales,’ I said. ‘Snakes with two heads. He said the unicorn’s horn was red.’