Free Hild: A Novel by Nicola Griffith

of ash was a good mile or so up the river. Hild had been there with Cian only a few days ago. It had been wet then, too, and Cian had been wondering aloud, again, who would sponsor him for his sword. The leaves would fall soon, he said, and it would be his birthday, and Hild’s, and one day his fifteenth birthday would come and there would be no one to give him his sword. Hild had told him, again, that all would be well, she knew it would be, she just wasn’t sure how.
    The drum stopped. Coifi handed it to the young man behind him, raised his bare arms. “Woden! All father! Husband to Eorðe.” Edwin leaned forward and Hild sensed her mother move slightly; she had realised something. But Hild didn’t dare look at her. “Here stands your many times son, Edwin the son of Ælla, the son of Yffi, the son of Wuscfrea, the son of Wilgisl, the son of Westerfalca, the son of Sæfugl, the son of Sæbald, the son of Segegeat, the son of Swebdæg, the son of Sigegar, the son of Wædæg, the son of Woden, god of gods, and of his wife, Eorðe. He asks that you both guide my hand as I give to you a bullock, so that you may speak your wills in the matter of a peaceweaver for your son and his wife, Cwenburh.”
    He held out his hand to the assistant with the drum, who handed him the black knife.
    At Goodmanham, and in the enclosure here at Sancton, Coifi had roofless temples floored in boards that were scrubbed white before every sacrifice. Hild wondered how the blood patterns would be read on the wet and already slippery grass.
    The bullock knew something was up. Perhaps he smelt the blood awareness in the tightening attention of the gesiths. He bellowed and tried to kick out at Coifi’s assistants but one managed to grab the bullock’s tail and lift it, and the bullock stretched out his neck and lowered his head. Coifi, slick as goose grease, slashed its throat with one diagonal backhand slice. Blood dropped like a red sheet from the open neck, like something in a mummer’s play. It spattered and gurgled and just as the bullock’s front legs buckled Coifi moved again, but this time Hild saw his muscles bunch and strain as he whipped the knife along the beast’s underside. Its guts fell out.
    They fell in one neat package, a good omen, though still attached by the intestine, and in some ugly turn of fate looked like nothing but a gigantic stillbirth, dangling its umbilical cord. Coifi cut the gut cord swiftly, but everyone had seen it.
    “The blood, my king,” he said, and pointed with the knife. His whole forearm was red-sleeved and glistening, but even as Hild watched wiry hairs on his arm sprang upright, like red worms after rain.
    The king, like all of them, had difficulty moving his eyes from the obscene gut package to the edge of the blood moving sluggishly, as a cold snake might, downslope to the elms.
    “Woden has spoken!” Coifi shouted. “He calls the blood to him. He accepts your sacrifice. You will have your peaceweaver.” But without the enclosure his voice was trained for, his pronouncement sounded insubstantial, a cast skin rather than the snake itself.
    No one said anything for a moment. The smell of blood was overwhelming, thick and sweet. The gesiths didn’t like it, it reminded them of too many brothers fallen. Edwin was shaking his head. He didn’t like it, either.
    Clouds thickened and darkened overhead and birdsong changed. It was about to rain again.
    Breguswith slung one side of her wrap over her shoulder and stepped forward, her hand touching the crystal seer stone on her belt. She gestured at the sack of entrails glistening by the gutted bullock. “This is the smell of the queen’s bed.”
    Edwin said, “You have seen this?”
    “Waking and sleeping.” Dreams were the most powerful of all prophecies. “There will be no peaceweaver from this queen.”
    This queen.
    Hild’s stomach tightened down to a lump as hard as twice-baked bread. The smell was terrible and her mother would make it