The Reluctant Berserker

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Authors: Alex Beecroft
reminded her of his father.
    A giggle from the girl told her it was flirtation she saw and not intimidation, but her own mouth dried and her heart rattled in her chest like the feet of a fleeing deer, even so. He had begun to resemble Cenwulf so much, and not just in the outer man. Less in flesh than in spirit, indeed.
    “Son,” she said, as gently as she could manage, “I need your help. Rake me up a handful of these ashes and put them in the cauldron, with a little water and the fennel from my basket. Build up the fire so that the water boils. I may not put the apple down now.”
    Cenred’s sigh was unrestrained. He rolled his eyes at the girl, as if to say, I am beset about by interfering women, but see what a loyal son I am , and took the four steps from the end wall of the house to the firepit with as much labour as though they were a hundred miles. “You should have put the ash on first.”
    “As I would, if I had not brought an assistant to whom I wished to teach some of my lore before I grew too frail and it was too late. Cenred, I am trying to give you a gift. A gift of power.”
    “Women’s power.” He shrugged as though a raven had landed on his shoulders and he could twitch it off.
    “It is neither women’s power nor men’s power,” she replied, her voice calm, though it felt that the organs inside her had grown heavy with her sadness. “It is anyone’s power who has the gift of it, and you should have, by your blood. By my blood.”
    “You know what they whisper about me.” His round face should not have been able to look so hard. Yet she remembered many times in the past when his eyes had been swollen shut and his cheeks purple with bruising, and thought that each time his father’s hands had touched him they drove hardness into his skin like stone. “That my blood is the blood of a coward. You would mend that by suggesting it would be better to be known for having the blood of a woman?”
    It is a punishment, surely , she thought, because after him I took it into my hands to bear no more children for my husband. Bad enough that he should hurt this one in his heart, but no more. It is a punishment because—when Cenwulf died—I felt glad. The Holy Lord must not have finished teaching me the lesson Cenwulf was meant to teach, that now he repeats it with my son.
    “If I die,” she said, bending her head over the mortar, working the herbs into a powder and mixing them with the ashes and the juice of the apple, “your lord’s household will have no healer. More warriors will die, more babes and their mothers, more of the common men who grow our food and more of their cattle will die for the lack, and we will all suffer together. Do you think the elves and the unfriendly spirits who surround us in this world of shadows will go away when I do? Who will defend us, if you will not?”
    “I will defend my people with force of arms, like a man.” Cenred retreated to the far wall again, too angry as yet to look at the young girl he had been trying to charm. “The church will do the rest. There is no need for you and your heathen witchery in Ethelwulf’s England.”
    Saewyn did not gasp, though the feeling of being pressed down from within grew harder to withstand. She arranged the folds of her wimple on her shoulders as an excuse to drop her son’s gaze and look away. It was a strange and ugly thought, but sometimes she wondered if his father’s dying spirit had found some way to stay on earth, to leech itself to her son’s body, drive out the sweet child he once had been.
    No, she would not entertain it. Instead, she put a faggot of wood on the fire and watched the bubbles come up around the edges of the soot-dark liquid. When it boiled, she pulled the sleeve of her underdress down over her hand to protect it and lifted the cauldron off.
    “I apologise,” she said to the potter, in what she was proud to say was an encouraging tone, “for bringing into your house the secrets of my

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