She must fail, he repeated with silent vehemence. She has to!
Lord Gilbert’s guest bed lay ready to welcome him but his nerves were tight as a snare wire and he could not bear the thought of trying to rest. He paced, leaned against the wall looking down at the fire pit, clearly visible some twenty paces down the track which led from the manor house to the village, then paced some more. Slowly the night passed.
Hrype left Edild and Lassair in the little cottage on the edge of the village, promising to be back early in the morning. He crossed the village on swift and silent feet to the house he shared with Froya and Sibert. Sibert! he thought, anguish searing through him. So much depended on the girl. He and her aunt had worked as hard as they knew how and even greater demands would be made on them in the morning, for he knew, as he was sure Edild did, that they would not leave Lassair’s side until it was over. One way or another. .
‘She will do it,’ he said quietly but very firmly.
He opened the door and let himself in, closing and barring it behind him. Froya had gone home some time ago and now was sitting hunched on the floor before the hearth. She was cradling a small square of woollen blanket, smoothing it, stroking it with those restless fingers. He recognized it as the comforter Sibert had treasured as a small child. He’d had no idea she had kept it.
He crouched down beside her and wordlessly she leaned against him. He put his arms round her, reaching up a hand to gently and rhythmically stroke the fair hair away from her high, broad forehead.
‘I cannot bear it if he dies,’ she said.
Neither can I, he wanted to agree. But instead he said firmly, ‘Lassair is strong and brave, Froya. She is full of courage, for she is convinced she can pass the test.’
‘And can she?’ Froya asked bleakly.
‘She can.’ He reinforced the words by briefly squeezing her shoulder. ‘Her aunt and I will be with her. We will not let her falter.’
She nodded and he thought she was reassured, but then her body convulsed in a great sob and she said despairingly, ‘He is not strong! I think of him in some horrible, stinking cell, knowing that he may hang in the morning, and I feel that my heart is being torn apart within my breast!’
‘I know, I know,’ he murmured. He too had been fighting images of Sibert imprisoned, shaking with fear, weeping in the cold darkness.
Would Lassair do it? Or would she burn like a tallow candle and watch from agonized eyes as Sibert was strung up and hanged?
She will succeed, he told himself.
In time Froya’s weeping came to an end, although the storm had left her shaky. Gently he got her to her feet and over to her bed on the far side of the cottage, where tenderly he helped her off with her tunic and settled her beneath the covers. He resumed the slow, steady stroking motion across her head. ‘Sleep,’ he murmured. ‘Sleep, dear Froya, and sleep deep.’ He spoke more words, incomprehensible syllables, and his low, hypnotic voice seemed to fill the small room, echoing with a forceful, muted boom like the sea in a cave.
The spell worked. Froya slept.
Hrype waited for some time, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest. He tucked the covers more closely around her and then, moving without a sound, let himself out of the cottage.
He made his way to a spot on the fen edge where alders stood close, their trunks wading in the bracken and the low, scrubby bushes. There was a cleared space within the undergrowth where a small circle of hearth stones, carefully chosen and even in size and shape, had been set out. Firewood and kindling lay at hand, protected from the elements by strips of turf. Hrype set a small fire and lit it with his flint, his hands moving with swift efficiency for he had performed these actions many times. It was his secret place, and a mild enchantment lay over it that prevented others from going too close.
When the flames took hold he quickly controlled them so that they rose no higher than was necessary for his purpose. Then he untied the thongs of a small leather pouch that hung from his belt, the leather soft and smooth from long handling, for it had belonged to Hrype’s forefathers before it had been his and each successive owner had used it frequently.
He opened the bag and took from it a neatly folded square of fine linen, hemmed with tiny stitches. This object was Hrype’s own; it was the first magic tool that he had made and even now he could readily recall the day he had cut the cloth and sewn those careful stitches. He had been eight years old.
He spread the linen square on the earth, smoothing it until there were no bumps or wrinkles. Then, holding the leather bag in both hands, he closed his eyes and murmured a long incantation, calling on the spirits of the place, on the ancestors, on his personal guardians and, pleading and supplication in his chant, on the gods themselves. When he sensed that they were with him, he upended the bag and, as its contents rattled down on to the linen square, opened his eyes.
The rune stones were made of jade, so fine that, held up to the fire, the light of the flame could be seen through them. The jade came from the east; from the vast lands beyond the great inland seas where his ancestors had travelled and traded, pushing onwards, always onwards along the rivers that penetrated the huge, unknown interior. Hrype did not know which of his sorcerer ancestors had cut the raw material and made the rune stones; whoever he was, he — or perhaps she, for women too were sorcerers — had done a skilful job and the rune stones were very beautiful.
They also held prodigious power.
Hrype gazed down at them, lying there in the pattern in which they had fallen. The gold-filled incised marks on their surfaces glittered in the firelight, giving the stones the illusion of movement. Of life. Quickly he read them, his agile mind making connections and forming pictures as he had long ago been taught. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he looked again, for something had caught his eye.
He stared for a long time then finally sat back, his eyes closed as he pondered. The runes were almost always ambiguous and it took a well-trained mind to penetrate the smokescreen that frequently they threw up. The way in which they had fallen tonight gave one message — the first aspect that Hrype had read — but underlying that there was something else.
Something that both puzzled and, he had to admit, worried him. He was puzzled because, although the question he had framed in his mind had to do with fire and air, the underlying aspect warned of danger from water.
He sat for so long that anyone observing him would have thought he was some stone figure, left from a bygone age. Eventually, barely aware that he was stiff and very cold, he collected up the rune stones, clutched them for a moment in his hands as he uttered his thanks, then put them away in their pouch and fastened it to his belt. He trod out the dying remains of his fire and scuffed at the earth until its small scar barely showed. Then he went home.
I smelt the fire the moment I woke up. I raced to open the door and peered out. Just visible far along the track, at the point where it curved round to approach Lord Gilbert’s manor house, I saw a long pit from which flames rose so high that they would have burned off my hair.
I made a whimpering sound in my throat.
Instantly Edild was at my side. ‘The flames will have died down before you walk,’ she said calmly. ‘Now, come and eat your breakfast. You will need your strength today, for deep concentration is draining.’
She might have been referring to a day spent doing nothing more alarming than learning new remedies. Her serenity pulled me back from the brink of hysteria and, to my amazement, I found myself munching a slab of buttered bread spread thickly with honey — Edild was spoiling me — and drinking a sweet and pungent brew which, I was quite sure, was mildly alcoholic.