Free Daughter of the Wolf by Victoria Whitworth

‘We’ll see to Storm for you.’
    â€˜I can’t.’ Cudda looked trapped. ‘My father told me to be back at the forge by evening. He said he’ll lam me else.’
    â€˜And I’m telling you to help me here.’
    Where had the lad learned that imperious tone? Ingeld turned on the pair of them. ‘You – Cudda? If your father wants you home, then you must go.’ He could sense Athulf bristling. ‘No arguments. Go.’
    And Cudda went, at a pace that suggested his father’s threats had a heavy hand behind them. Heahred was at his elbow with a bucket of water.
    â€˜Father abbot. Give me the reins. Wash your face. You’ll frighten the children.’
    Obedient for once, Ingeld knelt on the packed earth and splashed his face. Now that it was wet, the blood smelt sharp again. He leaned further forward and dipped his whole head in the water, a shock of cold that brought him startled to his full senses. Keeping his head under as long as he could, he ran his fingers through his hair until he felt the spikes of dried blood begin to loosen and come away. He came up gasping.
    The water in the bucket had darkened, but his hands were still spattered with leaking clots.
    Athulf had taken Storm into her stall, and Ingeld could hear the boy’s voice, soothing and clucking.
    A good boy, really, this son he had almost forgotten he had. His child with a girl who had died so long ago, and yet he remembered her more often than he did this boy in front of him.
    Ingeld took the towel that Heahred was offering, tousling and rubbing, smearing the linen’s glassy surface with Widia’s blood, diluted to a dog-rose hue but still staining everything it touched.
    Damn Radmer.
    It had not been his fault. Widia was the huntsman; the hall lands were his preserve. Widia had known there were boar about, he should have read the spoor better, the dung, the bruised undergrowth.
    Between them Abarhild and Radmer had dragged him away from his home in the archbishop’s household, back to provincial, dreary little Donmouth, his mother promising him everything she imagined he wanted, his brother berating him about his duty to God and his obligation to king and kin and land alike. Did they think him an ass, at once to be beaten with a stick and tempted with a handful of withered grass?
    And he had saved Widia. How was he to blame? Dunstan, the sword-bearer, the man of blood, had just cowered under the brambles. But he, the man of God, had gone in screaming and jabbing with the boar-spear as the great brute had stood over the huntsman’s body, rooting in his ribs with its tusks. He alone had driven it snorting and squealing away.
    A moment of triumph. That increasingly rare sensation of being fully alive, every vein and nerve thrumming.
    Damn Radmer, for spoiling his moment of glory.
    â€˜Bring me another bucket, Heahred.’ He would have to change his clothes. But what little his mother didn’t know about getting stains out of linen, whether candle-wax or tallow-fat or blood, wasn’t worth the knowing. He peeled off his tunic and linen undershirt in one sticky mass, and left them in a crumpled heap. The blood had soaked right through to his skin.
    The water in the new bucket was warm, and this time there was real pleasure in plunging his head under and keeping it there as long as he could before flinging it back with a spray of drops, his lungs gasping like bellows.
    When he opened his eyes, a girl was standing in front of him, blurred and sparkling. He stared as his vision cleared. Cream, and the first ripening blush of strawberries, and her hair pale tendrils of spun silk that clung to her flushed skin. For a good moment he thought he was dreaming, still giddy from the lack of air. Quale rosae fulgent inter sua lilia mixtae... Had he said that aloud?
    â€˜What?’ She was as short of breath as he was himself. ‘What are you talking about? I need to know what happened