Hild: A Novel Read Free Page B

the world!”
    “—and when we’re gone the wolves will come, and the foxes, and the wights.”
    Hild wasn’t afraid of foxes, perhaps not even of wolves, not in summer when they were well fed. But wights …
    Her mother was nodding. “They will breathe on your face as you sleep and you will be trapped in a cold dream forever and ever and ever.”
    Hild picked up her box, began searching for her treasures—the wooden brooch Cian had carved and painted for her, the shark’s tooth Hereswith had given to her last Yule, her magic pebble that fit just right in her hand. She frowned. The pebble seemed smaller than it had.
    “But why?” she said.
    “Why what?”
    “Why do we move all the time?”
    “It’s how it is.”
    “But why?”
    “Because otherwise we’d eat ourselves out of house and home.”
    Hild pondered that. “When Fa was ætheling, we didn’t send all the gallopers first.”
    “An ætheling is one of many, a maybe-king,” Breguswith said. “Your uncle is the one king. He travels with five hundred people. The king can’t just pack a loaf and a sack of salt and head for the horizon. He must first send a message to his reeves: How was the harvest? How are the roads—and the wood supply? Where is the honey flowing, where are the royal women needed for the weaving, where do bandits need to be warned away, and where is the hunting good? Then he must gather food and other supplies for the journey. And then his galloper rides ahead—tells the vill steward to begin brewing beer, slaughtering cattle, strewing rushes. Only then may we travel.”
    “And when we get there,” Onnen said, “we eat them out of house and home and move on.”
    Hild set her pebble aside. It was just a pebble. “But why can’t we stay? Why can’t Uncle Edwin have a home like everyone else?”
    “The whole land is his home.”
    “Yes, but why?”
    “He must be seen.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “And he can’t simply have a steward on each estate sending him tribute. Because a steward, unless reminded by the presence of the king, begins to think himself a thegn. He begins to see the land as his, to wonder why he shouldn’t send only a portion of his food, his ale, his honey, to the king. The revolt always begins when the steward wants to be king. A lesson the Franks never seem to learn.”
    But Hild was no longer listening. She was playing with her special pinecone, remembering the tufty red squirrel she had frightened away the day she found it.
    *   *   *
    Every summer Edwin took war on the road with his war band, tenscore gesiths, sworn to death or glory, and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handfuls of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts—though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankish work—or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted alike. Hild’s mother told her to stay out of their way. “Our time is not yet come. For now we live like mice in the byre. Everyone knows we’re here, but we’re not worth attention. Quiet mouth, bright mind.”
    Breguswith taught her the gathering and drying of herbs, and began to spirit Hereswith away for mysterious lessons that, when her sister tried to share them with Hild, made no sense.
    They were sitting with a tablet weave—the simple band weaving that would do for a border on a neck or cuff—and Hild was telling Hereswith about how swallows never came until the white butterflies born from colewort were outnumbered by the black-and-red jewel-winged kind.
    “Beat the weft,” Hereswith said.
    “But I beat it just after I turned,” Hild said. “It’ll spoil the