Free Hild: A Novel by Nicola Griffith Page A

happen again, over and over. Couldn’t they see?
    She lifted her face to the sky. The clouds were as dense as the tight black wool of the upland sheep. She wished it would rain now.
    “And you?” Edwin said to her, his eyes glimmering and green in the darkening morning. “You have seen this, too?”
    Hild had a sudden hideous thought: What if everything that had ever died lay rotting where it fell? All the frozen birds, the misborn lambs, the leverets savaged by foxes. One stinking charnel pit. What if the world never came clean? “It will all wash away,” Hild said desperately. It always had before. “It will rain, and the blood will wash away and the carcass will be taken away and all will be fresh and new.” Wouldn’t it?
    Then a fat droplet burst against the back of her neck. She lifted her face to the rain, cold and clean.
    Coifi looked at her. His eyes were black and blank, like a stoat’s when it eyes a fledgling fallen from the nest, but then Breguswith pulled her mantle up over her head and her elbow broke the priest’s line of sight. Though not Edwin’s, not the gesiths’, not Anaoc’s. Her mother wanted them to remember what she’d said: All will be fresh and new. She had no idea why that was important and her heart was kicking like a hare. But she had been trained to show a still face so she raised her own mantle and looked back. Anaoc made that flickering hand gesture over face and chest that Christ priests made when they were afraid.
    The drover reappeared, this time with Coelgar. As they spoke to the king, the drover shifted from foot to foot. Edwin listened and nodded and turned to his entourage.
    “The wagons are miring themselves so rapidly they’ll sink to meet the root of the one tree if we delay much longer. We will leave now.” The look he directed at Coifi and Anaoc as they backed away respectfully was dissatisfaction. The gesiths ambled off as they pleased; they were the king’s chosen, they had never needed to learn the obsequiousness of priests.
    Edwin turned to her. “So you’re a weather worker, too.”
    She started to shake her head but her mother put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed and said, “She is filled with a light she does not yet understand, my king.”
    “Though you do, of course.” He laughed shortly. “Then ride in my wagon and we will discuss Cwenburh and her health and where to look for these new beginnings.”
    In the wagon her mother and uncle talked of marriage prospects. Hild listened as best she could, recognising the names of some Kentish princesses and East Anglisc æthelings and, to her surprise, Hereswith. That’s what Edwin wanted: not just the alliance forged by a peaceweaver but a new wife, bringing her own, even more powerful bond to another kingdom. Coifi hadn’t understood. Her mother had, and had plans … But Hild had had a fright and was now safe from the priests and with her mother. She didn’t want to think about it. She fell asleep.
    *   *   *
    At York, Edwin’s counsellors and thegns and gesiths agreed that the Isle of Vannin, midway between Ireland and the mainland, could and should be taken. The war band left just as the leaves began to turn. Cwenburh’s belly grew during the two months before Yule, grew during the twelve days of feasting at the kingless court, grew as the royal women and their personal retainers—men like Burgræd and his now-strapping son, Burgmod—made their slow way by ship down the river to Brough and then transferred to bigger ships and sailed up the rocky coast of the northern sea to Bebbanburg. As the sea dashing against the fort’s stone foundation turned from the cold, heavy waves of winter to the restless turbulence of spring, the queen’s belly grew. It grew as news came that the cattle at Yeavering were swollen with calf and in the vales the bumblebees were out early and in large numbers and it would be a spring of plenty.
    In the stone fastness Hild watched her mother, who, in