being allowed to live?”
“It is. You spoke of loyalty. Prove it.”
The Erling was still a moment, considering. Torches moved in the yard around them. Men were being carried inside, or helped if they could walk.
“Best kill me then,” the red-bearded man said.
“If I must,” said Brynn.
“No,” said someone else, stepping forward. “I will take him as a man of mine. My own guard.”
Rhiannon turned, her mouth falling open.
“Let me be clear on this,” her mother went on, coming to stand beside her husband, looking at the Erling. Rhiannon hadn’t realized she was even with them. “I believe I understand. You would fight an Erling band that came upon us now, but will not reveal where your fellows are?”
The Erling looked at her. “Thank you, my lady,” he said. “Certain things done for life make the life unworthy. You become sick with them. They poison you, your thoughts.” He turned back to Brynn. “They were shipmates,” he said.
Brynn’s gaze held that of the Erling another moment, then he looked to his wife. “You trust him?”
Enid nodded her head.
He was still frowning. “He can easily be killed. I will do it myself.”
“I know you will. You want to. Leave him to me. Let us get to our work. There are wounded men here. Erling, what is your name?”
“Whatever name you give me,” the man said.
The Lady Enid swore. It was startling. “What is your name?” she repeated.
A last hesitation, then that wry expression again. “Forgive me. My mother named me Thorkell. I answer to it.”
RHIANNON WATCHED the Erling go with her mother. He’d said before, in her rooms, that he could be ransomed. A lie, it now emerged. From the look of him—an old man still raiding—Helda had said she doubted it. Helda was older, knew more about these things. She was the calmest of them, too, had helped Rhiannon simply by being that way. They had almost died. They could have died tonight. The one named Thorkell had saved her father and herself, both.
Rhiannon, hands steady as she gathered linens and carried heated water with Helda for the wounded in the hall, remembered the wind of that hammer flying past her face. Realized—already—that she would likely do so all her life, carrying the memory like the two scars on her throat.
Tonight the world had altered, very greatly, because there was also the other thing, which ought to have been pushed away or buried deep or lost in all the bloodshed, but wasn’t. Alun ab Owyn had ridden an Erling horse out of the yard, pursuing the archer who’d shot at her father. He hadn’t yet come back.
Brynn ordered a pit to be dug in the morning, beyond the cattle pen, and the bodies of the slain raiders shovelled in. Their own dead—nine so far, including Dai ab Owyn—had been taken into the room attached to the chapel, to be cleansed and clothed, laid out for the rituals of burial. Woman’s work after battle, when it could be done. Rhiannon had never performed these rites before. They had never been attacked at home before. Not in her lifetime. They didn’t live near the sea.
They tended the wounded in the banquet hall, the dead in the room by the chapel, lights burning through Brynnfell. Her mother stopped by her once, long enough to look at her neck and then lay a salve—briskly, expressionlessly—and wrap the two wounds with a linen cloth.
“You won’t die,” she said, and moved on. Rhiannon knew that. She would never now be sung for a pure white, swan-like neck, either. No matter. No matter at all. She carried on, following her mother. Enid knew what to do here, as in so many things.
Rhiannon helped, as best she could. Bathing and wrapping wounds, speaking comfort and praise, fetching ale with the servant girls for the thirsty. One man died on a table in their hall, as they watched. A sword had taken off most of one leg, at the thigh, they couldn’t stop the bleeding. His name was Bregon. He’d liked fishing, teasing the girls, had freckles on his nose and cheeks in summer. Rhiannon found herself weeping, which she didn’t want but couldn’t seem to do much about. Not very long ago, when tonight had begun, there had been a feast, and music. If Jad had shaped the world differently, time could run backwards and make it so the Erlings had never come. She kept moving a hand, touching the cloth around her neck. She wanted to stop doing that, too, but couldn’t.
Four men carried Bregon ap Moran from the hall on a table board, out the doors and across the yard to the room by the chapel where the dead men were. She looked at Helda and they followed. He used to make jokes about her hair, Rhiannon remembered, called her Crow when she was younger. Brynn’s men had not been shy with his children, though that had changed when she came into womanhood, as did much else.
She would lay him out for burial—with Helda’s help, for she didn’t know what to do. There were half a dozen women in the room, working among the dead by lantern light. The cleric, Cefan, was kneeling with a sun disk between his hands, unsteadily intoning the ritual words of the Night Passage. He was young, visibly shaken. How could he not be, Rhiannon thought.
They set Bregon’s board down on the floor. The tables were covered with other bodies already. There was water, and linen clothing. They had to wash the dead first, everywhere, comb out their hair and beards, clean their fingernails, that they might go to Jad fit to enter his halls if the god, in mercy, allowed. She knew every man lying here.
Helda began removing Bregon’s tunic. It was stiff with blood. Rhiannon went to get a knife to help her cut it away, but then she saw that there was no one by Dai ab Owyn, and she went and stood over the Cadyri prince where he lay.
Time didn’t run backwards in the world they had. Rhiannon looked down at him, and she knew it would be a lie to pretend she hadn’t seen him staring at her when she’d walked into the hall, and another lie to say it was the first time something of that sort had happened. And a third one (a failing of the Cyngael, threes all the time?) to deny that she’d enjoyed having that effect on men. The passage from girl to woman being negotiated in pleasure, an awareness of growing power.
No pleasure now, no power that meant anything at all. She knelt beside him on the stone floor and reached out and brushed his brown hair back. A handsome, clever man. Needful as night’s end, he had said. No ending to night now, unless the god allowed it for his soul. She looked at the wound in him, the dark blood clotted there. It occurred to her that it was proper that Brynn’s daughter be the one to attend to a prince of Cadyr, their guest. Cefan, not far away, was still chanting, his eyes closed, his voice wavering away from him like the smoke from the candles, rising up. The women whispered or were silent, moving back and forth, doing their tasks. Rhiannon swallowed hard, and began to undress the dead man.
“What are you doing?”
She’d thought, actually, that she would know if he came into a room; that already she would know when that happened. She turned and looked up.
“My lord prince,” she said. Rose and stood before him. Saw the cousin, Gryffeth, and the high priest behind, his face grave, uneasy.
“What are you doing?” Alun ab Owyn repeated. His expression was rigid, walled off.
“I am … attending to his body, my lord. For … laying out?” She heard herself stammering.
