The Reluctant Berserker (33 page)

“If your vow holds you, come here.”

Swallowing, he took hold of his pride in both hands and, using it as a stick to support him, walked slow and stiffly forwards, dragging Wulfstan along with him.

“Kneel.”

This was harder, but he managed it by remembering the golden Christ in the workroom, telling himself he knelt to it, not to the man who had held him down by the hair, almost tearing out a fistful in the process. His head ached at the memory, but he knelt and did not cringe even when Tatwine’s large hand came down on that exact spot and stroked it.

“I release you,” his lord said at last, after a long pause during which Leofgar thought he was enjoying himself too much. “I release you from my service and from obedience to my commands. Yet because you have saved my life, which is the deed of a man, I name you my gesith, and you shall have shelter and aid at any homestead where my writ rules.”

He lifted his hand, and Leofgar scrambled away from it, a little faster than was polite.

As he did so, the inner door banged open, and the abbess herself strode up the aisle, ahead of two lay brothers with staves in their hands. Gewis scurried behind. Rescue, thought Leofgar, come hilariously too late, but appreciated nonetheless.

“I have heard of a sword drawn in this holy place,” said the abbess, as soon as she was close enough to do so without shouting. A younger woman than Leofgar had expected, she had a thin, sharp face that might have been beautiful had it had a little paint on it, and an expression less calculated to freeze the blood.

Tatwine smiled at her, half with the automatic condescension of a killer to one who has never lifted a blade, half with the wariness of a man who nevertheless acknowledges the presence of a power he does not understand. “A misunderstanding, lady, and all put right.” The condescension was less veiled when he looked behind her to the men with staffs who followed. “We ask your pardon for disturbing the peace of this sanctuary.”

She was a woman used to authority, Leofgar could see it in the way she gathered their gazes and weighed them. Her stare seemed to pick him apart from the skin to the bones and leave no secret untold within. He smiled to confirm Tatwine’s words. Hunlaf nodded, Deala’s shoulders lowered, and Wulfstan slumped under her regard.

“You have my pardon,” she said, in return for this submission. “For I see that the saint has been among you, resolving your quarrel. It is not my place to hinder her mercy. But I wish to speak further to the man at fault. Which of you was it?”

“Me, lady.” Wulfstan raised his head, but Leofgar noticed that his gaze was focused on the abbess’s chin, where the material of her cap tied with a thin white thread.

“Come aside with me then.”

An uncertain moment, as Wulfstan obediently followed her into the saint’s chapel, and Leofgar dithered between following and feeling as though he should wait for Tatwine’s dismissal. Tatwine solved his dilemma by reaching out and once more ruffling Leofgar’s hair in a way that made him prickle all over and want to hiss like an offended cat.

“You should have told me.”

“I should,” Leofgar replied, meekly enough.
I should have told you falsehoods from the start, not
trusting you to listen. You failed me, my lord, and now you have chosen to believe an easy lie in place of a hard truth.

What good would it do to say these things? Perhaps that was what Anna had tried to tell him at the salt pits—that one praised what other people found praiseworthy, because if one did not, they did not listen. That folk could not hear the voice of one speaking in a different tongue.

It seemed a poor, defeated lesson to learn, but it fitted well enough with the job of a scop, which was to tell well-crafted tales which no one now knew were true or not. To use those tales to create peace and pride and comfort in the minds of the listener. Did it matter if those things came at the cost of a lie?

Something in him said yes. Truth mattered. It mattered in itself. It was whole and glorious, as objectively good as a jewel in the hand. But if truth caused strife, created pain, opened wounds now given the chance to close—was it still good? He wished he could be sure.

“I should have told you,” he repeated, sighing. “I did not know, then, the breadth of your kindness, and I was afraid.” Could he say this, with the imprint of Tatwine’s hands like ink under his skin? He breathed in hard again and acknowledged to himself how very much worse things could have gone if Tatwine had not chosen to relent now. “I see now how much I have to be grateful to you for. Wherever I go, I will sing your praises.”

It was the right thing to say. Tatwine beamed, and Hunlaf smirked a little in approval. “And come back and tell us of your travels and the great world outside these isles. You may not be my scop any more, but a gleeman will always receive glad welcome in my home. Doubly so if it be you.”

“I will come if I can, lord,” Leofgar promised, and made a dozen plans in the back of his mind that led to him being unable to. Perhaps Tatwine saw that too, for his smile was a harder thing as he turned away, and with a gesture of his right hand gathered up his retainers and was gone.

Leofgar turned, gave Gewis a quick, wide-eyed look as if to say he would explain all later, and ran to the open door of St. Aethelthryth’s shrine, bursting in just as Wulfstan and the abbess rose together from their knees where they had been praying beside the grave.

The abbess, who must only have been his own age, but had the poise of a king’s daughter, gave Leofgar a smile that made him feel like a naughty child being humoured. “Be at peace. I have not hurt your friend.”

That was clear enough from Wulfstan’s face. Leofgar took a half step back at the sight of it. He had grown used to a Wulfstan whose eyes were full of secrets, doubts and fear, and he almost did not know this man, who looked so clear and so glad.

“What
have
you done to him?”

The abbess raised her dark eyebrows at his tone, but he couldn’t feel sorry for it. Was Wulfstan his own man? The thought pierced his belly like a spearhead—what if Wulfstan, who already dwelt in the spirit world more than half of the time, had decided to put down all of his worldly cares and enter the cloister? What if he had taken Leofgar’s rejection of him last night to mean they had no further chance of taking life side by side?

“Don’t look so frightened,” Wulfstan said, and his face was gold leafed with joy. “I told her that I wanted to pledge my life to the saint. That I have many sins to atone for. And she—”

“Received his sacrifice.” The abbess smiled, and Leofgar felt the chill of last winter’s killing cold again all the way down to the marrow of his bones.

“No. You were going to… I…” It had been such a comforting thought while he lay fretting in Tatwine’s burh—the freedom and the solitude of the road. Now he had it, he saw at once he didn’t want it any more. Not without Wulfstan. He didn’t want anything, any more, if it were without Wulfstan.

Words choked him. His mouth moved of itself once or twice in silence, and then the string of his thought snapped, and he turned on his heel and prepared to walk away.

Wulfstan caught him by the elbow as he was halfway through the door. “Stay,” he said, wonderingly—and his red-brown eyes were full of new understanding, as though he had understood from Leofgar’s devastation exactly how much he meant to him.
Of course, when it is too late.

“The monastery needs warriors to accompany the pilgrims,” Wulfstan said, and as this did not fit into the shape Leofgar had prepared for it, he was slow in understanding what it meant. “To protect them on their journey. They have bookland set aside to provide for such warriors.”

A little inkling of it, like a fresh breeze stirring the ashes of a burned-down house.

“You said you wanted to see the world,” Wulfstan urged, his presence warm against Leofgar’s side. His hand raised as if to touch Leofgar’s face, but fell back at the abbess’s rustle of skirts. “A scop pays his own way wherever he goes, so we could journey together, I protecting the pilgrims and you entertaining them. We could do it together. What do you say?”

Flung straight from the worst possibility to the best, Leofgar swallowed disbelief that tasted of tears. He wouldn’t believe it all at once, for perfection was an elvish thing. It ought to be approached cautiously, in case it might be frightened off.

All the same, his laugh sounded suspiciously like a sob when he let it out, and there was a shocking lack of art to his words. “Do you offer me everything I want—the road and you and the world’s wonders, all at once? They say there is no certainty in this world but death and the love of God, but I am certain my heart could not want for more than this. I say yes. Of course, I say yes.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The rest of the day, Wulfstan spent in the scriptorium, watching a young Briton labour over three copies of the documents he would have to sign to transfer his land to Saewyn, and those which would give him possession of the rents of part of the abbey’s bookland. It was a long, patient process, and he did not envy the clerk his crabbed crouch over the desk, his inked fingers and narrowed red-rimmed eyes.

About an hour into this process, Leofgar wandered away. Wulfstan felt certain he would find him again lurking around the organ with Gewis, talking scop-craft and shared history.

The space at Wulfstan’s elbow felt too empty without Leofgar there, but he couldn’t begrudge him his friends. In truth he couldn’t begrudge him anything at the moment. They had not spoken about this thing between them—well, a little perhaps, last night, but the words had been insubstantial. Nowhere near as solid a thing as Leofgar’s sworn agreement to stay with him, to travel with him.

All of a sudden, he could look forward to the future as to a feast. He was happy to wait the long day away quietly on a stool while the quills scratched around him, if it meant that tonight he lay down with a man he could trust, and tomorrow he rose and faced the world beside him.

When he had signed the rolls of parchment—“make your mark here, beside the cross,” the clerk said, impatient with his graceless fumbling—he gave one to Saewyn and watched her leave with a satisfaction like that of standing again for the first time since a broken leg. It ached, but it felt well.

After which he had had enough of holding his joy secret and tight inside, and hunted Leofgar down so that he could share it. The scop was not in the church after all, but out at the stables talking with the stablemaster.

A flush of pleasure, pink as the evening sky, rose over Leofgar’s cheeks as he saw Wulfstan approach. His half-moon of a grin looked too wide to fit on so narrow a face. “I have been saving coin,” he said, secrets dancing in his eyes, “and bargained for a corner of the hayloft instead of a pallet in the hostelry. I hope you will not mind?”

“Let me show you how to get up.” The ostler took them inside, through the stalls where horses snorted curiously at them, to the ladder at the side of the building. Climbing this, they crawled and wriggled into a heap of straw, warm as summer but sharp as scratching nails. The ostler leaped down, leaving them alone together a bare forearm’s depth below the ceiling—the loft was packed so high with hay.

Wulfstan had just leaned in and pinned Leofgar tight beneath him when the creak on the steps said the ostler was coming back. They sprang apart and grabbed the blankets passed up to them with what must have been a suspicious show of innocence.

With the blankets below them, the straw no longer pressed against their skin like cat’s claws. Wulfstan remembered with a stab of delight that he didn’t have to pretend to be what he was not. Unpinning his cloak he flung himself down on his back on the bed, smiled invitingly up at his man. Outside, the darkening sky was slipping into blue, and Leofgar’s form was drawn in shades of silver and indigo. So inhumanly beautiful it was hard not to think of him as being part elvish, if the blood of mankind and that of the
ylfe
was capable of mixing.

The thought of Leofgar as an uncanny creature, older and stronger than man, gave him a delicious thrill that only built when the slighter man came crawling over him like a hunting wolf. He smiled and tilted up his throat in offering for the teeth.

Leofgar lowered himself down to pin Wulfstan where he lay, and his weight—the sharpness of his hip bones that dug into Wulfstan’s flesh harsh enough to leave bruises—made Wulfstan turn into liquid light again and lose track of where his body ended and began, except where it was pinned down by his scop’s.

Kissing him until they were both gasping, Leofgar ravaged his throat with suck marks and bites. This was enough, Wulfstan told himself. He could push up against the rough slide of clothes and come from friction and kissing, maybe a hand. Nothing shameful. Leofgar need not fret over anyone’s dishonour—he need not protect Wulfstan from a shame Wulfstan no longer felt. This would be enough.

These thoughts were false. But it was a falsehood Wulfstan could live with. He could bear the small frustration of sex in which his body cried out in empty yearning to be filled. He’d lived with it this long already, why not continue? A small sacrifice for such happiness as this.

Then Leofgar was kneeling up, a black shape against a dark blue sky, and tugging off his tunic, and everything in Wulfstan gave a sharp, delighted throb. He fumbled with his belts, forced limbs gone heavy with need to grasp his skirts and pull them over his head. The clothes joined the pile atop them both, and the heat restored that beautiful flush to Leofgar’s fair skin—a thing he could feel rather than see, a hot silky slide across his chest and loins as they lay back down together.