Free The Edge on the Sword by Rebecca Tingle Page B

group. The horse nearest to her raised its head to watch her coming. Then it turned and with the other horses began moving away. Flæd stopped, and the horses started to graze again, eyeing her.
    What was bothering them? In the center of the herd a dun horse looked up and snorted at something behind her. She glanced back. Red stood alittle distance away, unable to blend into a shadow or fade back against a wall in this wide open pasture. Flæd groaned. What could possibly endanger her out here? Trying to conceal her impatience, she walked back to him.
    “The horses don’t know you,” Flæd told her warder. “They’re nervous. Will you wait here? I’ll just go to the horses, and then come back.” Red looked around them for a long moment. No other human figures were visible in the vast open stretch of land. Then he nodded.
    “I will keep the book for you, Lady,” he offered. He was right—she ought not to risk the valuable thing among the animals. Flæd handed him the volume, then turned to approach the horses once again. This time they gathered around her, whickering softly and brushing her arms and hands with whiskery mouths. She patted their shaggy sides, and a few long winter hairs floated away. “Jewel-bright,” she said softly, remembering the name of the mare with the white star between her eyes. She scratched the fuzzy hollow between the mare’s jawbones. “Gold-friend,” she greeted the big dun gelding, leader of the little herd, who bumped her shoulder with his nose when she turned aside to smooth another horse’s mane.
    When the horses were sure she had brought nothing for them to eat, they returned to their forage. She looked around her and thought she understood why they had chosen this little rise for their grazing site. From this high place every inch of the pasture was visible. Flæd was surprised to find a slight bowl worn into the surface of the earth at the peak of the hill. The ground was very dry, almost sandy. The horses have used this place as a wallow, she thought to herself, hallowing it out as they roll in the dust. As if to prove her point, a sorrel yearling knelt down and began to roll, kicking his legs in ridiculous pleasure as he eased the itch of his first winter coat.
    Descending from the mound she looked back. No sign of the depression at its crest was visible from the pasture below. It hides the horses’ clumsy baths, she thought to herself.
    Flæd’s spirits sank as she returned to her warder. Duty brings me back, she sighed, as surely as duty kept my father on the plain at Readingas where the Danish earthwork defeated him so many times. No wonder her father had begun to use fortifications himself after such a crushing blow. She imagined the Danish horde, massed safely behind their protective wall. They would have been able to look down on the West Saxon armies and watch them come from a great distance off. Danish sentries lying flat at the top of the fortification must have been nearly invisible….
    All at once Flæd was no longer thinking of her father. Earthwork. A place from which to see, but not be seen. Her mind tumbled over thebeginnings of an idea that had just come to her. She would need to ask Father John more about that passage in the Chronicle she had read. She would need some way to cross an open space undetected. And here was the most difficult thing: Absolutely no one must suspect her until the moment she carried out her plan.
    “Three already, Flæd!” The girl jumped at the voice. Caught up in her thoughts, she had hardly noticed as she and Red approached the riverbank where Edward sprawled in the afternoon sun. Now the boy held up a stick with three fish strung along it through the gills, one almost the length of his forearm. “And look.” He pointed to the tangle of bushes on the opposite bank. Flæd saw a flash of green and blue plummet from a branch overhanging the water. Only a ripple, quickly swallowed by the eddying water, showed where the strike