Free The Hallowed Isle Book Two by Diana L. Paxson Page A

to defend them. So he has sent me to Aelle.”
    â€œDoes Aelle have them?”
    â€œNot enough—hence, this meeting. Your grandfather’s people have held Cantuware long enough for there to be a few younger sons who need new holdings. If they come to the Isle of Vecta, my father will make no objections. But I will need to bring more men from Germania to settle the land around Clausentum, along the estuary of the Icene. From there I can drive northward into the heart of Britannia. Maglos thinks he can defend the land with Saxon settlers and still call it British. But when I rule in Venta, I can strike northward to the British heartland!”
    Listening to him talk, Oesc understood how it must have been for Hengest and Horsa when they were young. But in Durovernum the scars of warfare had been repaired, the burnt houses scavenged for building material or allowed to go back to the soil. The British who remained there were grateful for the protection of their new masters, and the Saxons were rooting themselves ever more deeply into the soil.
    â€œAnd what about you?” asked Ceretic, as if Oesc had been thinking aloud. “Will you push westward as well? You are young, with your name yet to win. Have you no ambitions to take Londinium?”
    â€œLondinium and the British lands around it divide us from the Anglians in the fen country, as Lindum divides them from the north. We would be stronger if we could take it,” Oesc added thoughtfully, “but the city was more important when there was trade with the Empire. In itself, it is not so useful now.”
    â€œGo around it, then. If I push northward and you move west, our armies can join forces, and who will stop us then?” He threw his head back, laughing. In the flickering light his hair was as red as the fire.
    â€œWhat armies? Are you Woden, to breathe life into these sticks your son is playing with, and make them men? Let us wait at least until the seed is planted before we sell the tree!” exclaimed Oesc. “When you have brought your warriors from Saxony and I command the men of Cantuware, we may talk of this again.”
    â€œIt is so! It is so!” shaking his head, Ceretic hunkered down and began to help his son pick up his scattered men. “Always, my dreams have outstripped reality. But it will happen. Among the Saxons a second wife has equal standing, and my mother went willingly to Maglos’s bed. But the Christian priests called her a Saxon whore and me a bastard. I had to fight for every scrap of food and nod of approval, but the sons of my father’s Christian wife were killed in battle, while I survived and took a wife from my mother’s people. Maglos has no choice now but to trust to me and my Saxon kin to defend him. I have come too far already not to believe it is my Wyrd to be a conqueror.”
    Oesc believed him. Ambition pulsed around Ceretic like heat from the flame. And what is my Wyrd? he wondered then. But even as he questioned, a memory came to him of lamplight on dark water, and a breath of wind.
    My Wyrd is to be a king . . . .
    Hæthwæge dipped up a spoonful of broth, tasted it, and decided that she could add a bit more of the infusion of galluc root and mallow without rendering it so bitter the king would refuse to drink it down. As she poured, she bent over the pot, whispering—
    â€œGalluc, Galluc, great among herbs,
    You have power against three and against thirty,
    Against poison and all infection,
    Against the loathsome foe that fares through the land. . . .”
    In her mind’s eye she saw the plant from which that root had come, its broad leaves frosted with prickles, the pale pink-purple flowers trembling like bells in the breeze. Boneset, they called it sometimes, but it had great power also to heal internally. The mallow would soothe and smooth it on its way.
    Hengest would not admit that he was ill, though the cough he brought home from his visit