Free The Edge on the Sword by Rebecca Tingle

hungrily as she sat down beside him.
    “You knew about the book?” she asked him abruptly.
    For a moment he stopped eating, and then said simply, “I guessed.”
    “You found the fallen tree in the marsh?”
    “I watched from the top of a tree yesterday. You weren’t as careful. One of your father’s guards sat at your door last night instead of me.” He waited for a moment in silence, and then began tearing at the bread again. A slow grin spread across Flæd’s face.
    “You had no sleep, and no breakfast?” she asked.
    “None,” he agreed, returning her smile.

8
A Mound on the Plain
    W ITH A CRY OF FRUSTRATION F LÆD FELT THE NIB OF HER QUILL give way and watched another blot spread across her scrap of vellum. Her little piece of parchment had begun to look like the skin of a blighted fruit. Glumly she gazed at the feather pen’s frayed point.
    “Four pens ruined in a day,” Father John intoned, appearing at her shoulder. He shook his head. “Surely, my lady, you can do better than that.” He glanced sideways at her as her shoulders slumped forward, then continued, “I ruined seven on my first day.”
    Catlike, John sidestepped the quill his pupil tried to fling in his direction as she attempted not to smile. He seated himself smoothly beside Edward at the other end of the bench. “You will have noticed,” he lectured, “the many differences between quill and stylus. By this latest experiment you have revealed another: A feather is an even less effective missile than a stick.”
    Sighing, Flæd turned back to the irregular page of writing in front of her. The parchment had never been a thing of beauty. Holes and scars marked the surface of the thin animal hide, which had been cured not to white perfection, but to the hue of tallow. The edge of the sheepskin had spoiled the squaring of the page, so instead of four corners the page showed just three, and one ragged diagonal side. Father John had deposited a handful of quills by her place at the table that morning. With small, sharp knives the two of them had shaped the quill points, and then he had left her alone with ink and a passage of religious history to copy.
    It was past the eighth hour, and Flæd bit her lip with concentration as she leaned over her work. She dipped the last of her prepared quills gingerly into the ink. Three characters later Flæd stopped, watching the ink of an
s’s
long tail bleed into the
m
and the
o
which had preceded it.
    “For a moment I felt certain that blot spelled
mos
,” Father John announced, looking over her shoulder again. “Yes,
Mos
, the Latin word meaning ‘custom.’ Surely the custom of our own classroom would permitan early finish to a day filled with such, er, diligent application of the pen. Read a passage of the Chronicle before you come tomorrow.”
    With relief Flæd cleared away her things and left the scriptorium along with Edward and Wulf. The three of them trudged through the dusty street toward their quarters, with Wulf frisking back once to touch his nose to the hand of the warder, who walked behind them.
    “Come fishing with us, Flæd,” Edward said. Flæd almost stopped walking in surprise. Edward had not invited her to join him for a ramble in weeks—ever since the grim little walk they had taken to the riverbank. She had tried to resign herself to their new relationship—together in the classroom, conversations at meals, but no real time to themselves.
    “You know I can’t come alone,” she said, lowering her voice.
    Edward glanced back at Red. “I forget about him now, most of the time,” he said softly to her. “It doesn’t matter if he’s with us. Come to the river.” Flæd felt a lump rising in her throat. This is the best we can do, Edward seemed to be saying. But it was good—it was better than simply missing him each afternoon. Flæd pretended to brush a fly from her face, hoping her brother would not see her emotion. I’d better do the reading Father John wants first,