Free Far Traveler by Rebecca Tingle

you. You are a scholar, she said.”
    â€œI used to read with her. Now ... it’s difficult.”
    â€œI am sorry to hear that, child.” She paused. “But don’t you have a book with you, in your pocket?”
    I had forgotten the handbook, but now I took it out and handed it to my aunt. She opened it and gazed at its first beautifully illuminated page, which had been a gift from their father, King Alfred, to my mother. For several minutes she leafed through the book, and then she closed it gently.
    â€œIt seems a worldly thing to me”—Aunt Dove smiled—“mostly full of poems about lost people, from what I saw. But I’m glad you have it with you.” Aunt Dove looked into my worried face, then bent to kiss my forehead. “Peace, Ælfwyn, be at peace. I have asked the king to give you a choice.”
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    That afternoon I lay curled on my bed, with Gytha sewing nearby. I was remembering a story Mother had once read to me, an exemplum from the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great. A greedy nun crept into the abbey garden and gobbled up a lettuce, swallowing a little devil who rested there. The demon made the woman jump and shout, wracking her until a priest arrived to cast the spirit out.
    â€œPoor thing!” I had cried.
    â€œPoor devil, perhaps,” Mother had answered with a grin, “but do not pity the woman. She made her choice.”
    I sighed. Poems about lost people—that’s all Aunt Dove had seen this morning. She would not have understood Mother’s pleasure in the strange tale of the devil and the lettuce. A worldly thing, she had called the handbook. It was not the sort of reading a nun would do.
    â€œWhat do you think ... it would be like,” I asked Gytha hesitantly, “to go to Sceaftesburh? To join the sisters there?”
    â€œThey follow Saint Benedict’s Rule,” Gytha said slowly. “Do you remember how Pope Gregory describes it? The followers of the rule own nothing, though they are fed and clothed sufficiently. From the third to the ninth hour they labor with their hands, with calls to prayer and time for godly reading before and after. All things are done in moderation, as Benedict ordered.”
    Godly reading, I thought, not histories of battles or scops singing out from the page. I’ll face fasting, and night vigils, and holy thoughts until I am an old woman, until I am laid in my sanctified grave beside the abbey’s sheltering walls.
    â€œWe should go find something to eat.” I stood up fretfully, peering at the lowering sun. The ninth hour. At Sceaftesburh they’d be calling me to prayers now. I should eat and drink as much as I want—as much as I can hold—while I still can.
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    â€œWhat should I choose?” My question burst out desperately as Gytha and I sat on the storeroom steps, biting into the barley cakes and withered apples we had collected. “What would Mother have wanted?”
    â€œI don’t know, Wyn,” Gytha said with a helpless shrug. “She always used to tell us to give you time.”
    Time to read, I thought, fingering the sack that held our food. Time to think and learn. She gave me books, too, of course. And a horse—beautiful, strong Winter, so unsuitable for a poor rider like me. She might have given me several splendid books instead, and I would have loved them. She must have known that.
    â€œDunstan used to tell me stories about the time when Lady Æthelflæd was a girl in Wessex,” Gytha was saying, still trying to answer my question. “She ran away from her father’s home and got lost, more than once! She even stole books to take with her. I wasn’t to tell you those tales, Dunstan said.” Gytha smiled. “But I always did think it was funny, to imagine the Lady of the Mercians doing such things.”
    That passed away —my mother’s childhood willfulness had disappeared by the time I was