Hild: A Novel Read Free

already, I see.” Cian’s whole arm tightened as he squeezed the bar behind the boss of the little shield. “And now the other.” The king put the sword hilt in his right hand. He smiled and said, looking at Onnen, “Don’t stab your—those girls’ eyes out, or your mother will have my hide.” Then he turned away, and Hild realised to her astonishment that it was because Onnen was weeping.
    “Come,” Onnen said eventually, in a voice Hild hardly knew. “Come. Quick, quick. The king has spent enough time over three wet-headed children.” And she gathered them to her and they left.
    They walked in silence past the grain house, and suddenly Cian stopped, and shouted, and banged his shield with his sword. “I have a sword!”
    “You have a shield,” Onnen said. “Wherever you go.”
    A sword given to his hand by a king: a shield and a path.
    *   *   *
    Autumn blew, leaves fell, flames flickered, and in hall song turned to war. Hereswith refused to speak anything but Anglisc, and Breguswith—when she wasn’t teaching Hild that while one jay was bad luck two meant not double but opposite—was at the side of Burgræd, her chief gesith, talking persuasively, talking, talking. Most of their other gesiths already slept and drank with Ceredig’s men.
    “Your lord is dead and your oath with him,” Breguswith said to Burgræd one dark afternoon as Hild half drowsed at Onnen’s hip, lulled by the repetitive twist-twirl of spinning. “He left only the girls, no æthelings whose honour you can fight for. And perhaps swearing your sword and honour to Ceredig now seems to you worthy. He is a king. But even as this peat burns Edwin retakes Deira. Before the frost he’ll be secure and he’ll turn to Elmet. He will crush it. Ceredig can no more stand against him than a leaf can defy winter.” She leaned back, the very picture of ease and Anglisc wealth with her smooth honey hair, fine-draped dress, and gold winking at throat and wrist. “No doubt there will be much glorious death.” She looked over at his stripling son playing knucklebones with Ceredig’s men. “Though not Ceredig’s.”
    Burgræd, a stocky man with grey streaks on either side of his mouth and one cheekbone higher than the other, ran a callused finger around the rim of his cup and said nothing.
    “You will die for him, for you’ll keep your oath. You’re Anglisc. But would he die for you? How much is a wealh oath worth?”
    She took his cup and poured him ale, and as she took up her own she glanced about the hall. Hild shut her eyes tightly. Even at three, she understood the danger of overhearing a hint that a king in his own hall was an oath-breaker: Never say the dangerous thing aloud.
    They sipped. A servingman laid more peat on the fire; it hissed. When he had gone, her mother said, more softly than before, “Know this. We will leave this wood before Edwin king falls on Ceredig. We’ll go to him in Deira. In time my daughters will rise high in Edwin’s favour. You could rise with us. And you wouldn’t be sworn to a gesith’s oath. You could take it back anytime.”
    After Burgræd left, her mother bent down and whispered, “Quiet mouth, bright mind, little prickle.”
    For a while it seemed nothing would change. Cian wouldn’t walk anywhere without his wooden sword and wicker shield, and he became tedious, issuing challenges to vicious branches or charging without notice at a shelf of mushrooms growing from a sickly birch. It made Hild’s time at the edges of things less than easy. How could she be still and listen and watch when Cian’s yell made the rooks croak and fly away or the deer bound into the undergrowth? How could she study an old dog fox who sat in the thin morning sunlight to comb his chest hair with his tongue, if he ducked into his run when Cian rolled and tumbled with invisible enemies in the leaves?
    She helped Onnen collect eggs and was proud to break not a one, and tried to help gather hazelnuts with