The Edge on the Sword (10 page)

Flæd mounted Apple and cantered out into the meadow with Oat close behind them. She passed the limit of her previous rides and rode further still. Looking back, she thought she could see Red leave the wall and come toward her at a quick walk. She would have to act now, or not at all.

Flæd urged her mount into a gallop, riding crouched at the withers. Her guardian would not be able to reach her on foot, she confirmed with another backward glance at his struggling shape. At her bidding, the two grey horses veered around and headed toward the little knoll where the herd had gathered as usual. With her mount’s other side toward her warder, Flæd slipped down on the near side as she had practiced, urging
Apple forward until he had crested the hill, which slowed him to a canter. All at once Flæd released her hold on Apple’s mane and dropped into the dusty hollow. She rolled away, speaking one final command, which sent the pair a little further on before they slowed to a trot and turned back to join the grazing herd. Flæd crept to the edge of the little bowl and lay still while her breathing quieted, listening.

She heard Red’s footsteps when he reached the foot of the hillock, heard him talking softly to the horses as he moved among them and found the greys, but not their rider. Chin pressed to the ground, she peered through the short grass and saw Red stroking Apple’s wet neck, and swinging up onto his back. Her warder looked right and left, searching the flat land for some sign of his charge. Then he turned the horse toward a cluster of trees beside the river, the only cover nearby. As he rounded the foot of the rise Flæd could hear him speaking under his breath, “Stupid slave. Still a stupid slave.”

Apple’s hoofbeats faded, but Flæd kept watching until Red, Apple, and Oat, who tagged along after them, had disappeared among the branches of the distant trees. When she was sure they had gone for good, Flæd rolled onto her back to look at the soft clouds that had covered the afternoon sky. She considered what she had done. She had strained the limits of duty. She had used her family’s horses and her father’s battlefield history to deceive a man devoted to her protection. Flæd knew these things, but at this moment, alone and unwatched by any other person, she closed her eyes and felt satisfied.

What were the strange words Red had said?
Still a stupid slave.
Flæd had not understood this, and now she decided that she didn’t care. She listened to the horses as they moved about the little hill, hearing their soft breath and the swish of their tails. One trotted past the edge of the hollow where she lay, and she opened her eyes as the hoofbeats thumped up. The colt was rolling its eye so that the white showed. Silly thing, she thought, arching her neck to see it go. Several other horses nearby tossed their heads and followed.

“Don’t be nervous,” she murmured. “You know me, remember? This is our safe place, our own earthwork.”

She never saw the heavy sack as it descended over her head. She heard her own strangled screams as the cloth was pressed firmly against her face. She struggled weakly against the deft hands that bound her arms, her ankles. Someone was wadding the sacking into her mouth and pushing up her lower jaw so that almost no sound could escape her heavily muffled mouth. Soon it was all she could do to keep from suffocating. A thong bound the gag in place. Her shoulders were lifted, then her ankles. At least
two of them, she registered through her panic, taking me away…
where is Red?

T
HE
WOOLEN
SACK
RASPED
AGAINST
FLÆD’S
CHEEK
AS
IT
WAS
jerked away from her face. Cool forest air poured over her as she lay on the ground. She flailed onto her side and tried to scream again, but a powerful hand clamped across her mouth. Her chin was wrenched up and the point of a blade touched the hollow of her throat.

“No. Do not call.” The words were spoken in strangely accented English. Flæd grew still, and after a moment the hand was removed, although the dagger remained. The jolting run from the pasture had seemed to take forever as her captors roughly bundled her along with them, but now she guessed that not much time had passed—the sun coming through the trees still stood high in the afternoon sky. She lay stretched out on the ground in a thicket. The man who had spoken was no longer looking down at her, although his dagger never left her neck. His head was cocked, as if he listened for some sound. Two other men crouched nearby, looking out toward the meadow and speaking quietly to each other in a language Flæd didn’t understand. They were strongly built, and Flæd could see that they were dressed in a light, leather armor like the kind her warder wore. These men were prepared for combat.

One of them addressed the person holding the knife, who then turned his dark, bearded face back to Flæd.

“You walk. Hide us from the thane.” He gestured to include all four of them, then stared at Flæd until she nodded. These men have been watching me, she realized with a fresh burst of horror. They have learned that I know these woods better than they do, and better than the “thane”—my warder. Holding his dagger between his teeth, her captor began loosening the bonds at her ankles until she could take hobbled steps. The three men took up positions around her, and with the knife against her spine, they set off.

Flæd stumbled forward, her mind teeming with ways these men might intend to hurt her. My fault, my fault, a voice inside of her repeated. My
fault for leaving Red. How will he find me? How will anyone find me? Tears of shame and terror blinded her as she tramped on, goaded by a rough hand on her elbow, the prick of the knife on her back. Gradually her jolting steps focused her attention back on the path. She saw a familiar group of rocks, then a tree she knew. A memory rose up among her crippled thoughts.
Red walking back with her from the marsh. “Would your father leave your sisters, your youngest brother, or Edward in danger?…A king must take care of his people as well as your father takes care of his children, the way we all try to protect our families.”
Red would fight to protect anyone entrusted to his care. He will not stop looking, Flæd suddenly felt sure. Trying to ignore the scrape of the blade against her clothes, she began to make a plan.

Shuffling forward as if she were reluctant to choose this route, Flæd led the men across the river at a place close to the ford she and Red had used earlier that spring. As they entered the marsh where Flæd had hidden the great codex, the men exchanged words again, and Flæd thought she heard approval in their voices. I think they saw me lose Red here, she shivered. They must have been watching us all that time.

When they reached the fallen tree, Flæd was made to sit among the roots. Her feet were lashed tightly together again, her wrists bound to the gnarled wood. They are waiting for something, she realized as her limbs began to grow numb.

They are waiting for darkness, she understood at last, wrists and ankles throbbing with her heartbeat as the long minutes stretched into hours, and the sun sank lower and lower into the west. One abductor had settled down in front of her while the other two took turns keeping watch at the edges of the knoll. I was wrong to think of coming here, after all, she thought hopelessly. Red has not remembered.

The man who had spoken to her in English wandered up to the giant log, his eyes fixed on Flæd. In the language the three men shared, he said something to Flæd’s guard—a question, Flæd thought. The other man responded with an ugly smile, and Flæd jerked in fright as he stood, and the two of them approached her.

With a rush of wings, a flock of birds took flight on the outskirts of the marsh. Flæd’s captors crouched down, and the man standing at the edge of the hillock hissed out to the other two, who went to join him, running low. They huddled at the little vantage point, and Flæd wondered in vain what they could see. A jolt of hope had surged through her when the birds rose, and as soon as she was left alone, she had begun to strain futilely and painfully at the leather thongs they had used to tie her. Would a big man
like her warder be able to creep secretly through the marsh as she had, even with three pairs of hostile eyes watching for him?

“Be silent,” a familiar voice murmured in her ear. One by one Flæd felt her bonds strain and give way to a blade. “Get behind me.” She was shoved back into the hollow as Red finished freeing her and rushed out.

Flæd could barely feel her arms and legs. She tried to get up and flopped onto her belly, her face pressing into the decayed wood underfoot. Whimpering and trying to rub life back into her limbs, Flæd heard the sounds of the struggle outside—grunts punctuated by harsh words in the foreign tongue of the three enemies, the scuffling of feet in the grass, bodies falling, a gurgling scream and more running steps, then silence.

Three of them, and he was all alone, she thought frantically as she fought to make her limbs support her. They will come for me next! She scrabbled in the rotting wood for something to use as a weapon. There was a rock she could lift just outside the stump, she thought she remembered. Crawling on hands and knees afire with pain, Flæd inched forward into the clearing.

Red was kneeling a short distance away from her, breathing heavily. Beside him lay one of the men who had taken Flæd. Flæd’s mouth was still dry with fear. She found she still could not stand up, so she kept crawling toward her guardian.

“Lady.” Red got to his feet and came to her. “Are you injured?” He touched the welts the bonds had left on her arms.

“Where are the others?” she croaked hoarsely. “There were three….”

“Two ran. One of them was the leader, I think.” Red helped her to her feet and brought her to the form lying in the grass. Still catching his breath, he crouched down and rolled the man over. It was not the one who had spoken English to her, who seemed to be the leader, as Red had rightly guessed, Flæd could not remember which of the others this had been. He was clearly dead. “When he went down,” Red was saying, “the two others disappeared.” Flæd was shaking. She had seen the blood of slaughtered animals, but this was different.

“What happened in the pasture?” she heard her warder ask. Flæd could not stop staring at the man on the ground. This person had bound and threatened her—for this she would have wished him punished, hurt, and shamed. But the man lay dead. She had believed her warder would protect her. She had not considered the fact that he would kill for her. Flæd was still foolishly clutching the rock she had crawled outside to find, and now she dropped it. Her warder had asked her a question. How could she ever explain what had happened?

“I—I fell from the horse,” she rasped, putting her hand to her parched throat. “They surprised me.” Flæd turned away so that she wouldn’t have to look at her warder, or the body beside him.
A man is dead because of me.
She couldn’t tell Red what she had done.

“I thought you ran away.” Red shook his head, rummaging in the litter of the camp to find a waterskin, which he brought to Flæd. “She might go to the marsh again, I told myself. So I came here. When I heard them coming, I hid. I wanted to free you sooner, Lady,” he said, sounding angry at himself as he held out a hand to steady her as she drank.

“I hoped you-would remember this place,” Flæd mumbled guiltily. “Something frightened the birds—I thought it might be you.”

“No. Your horses,” Red said. “I left them by the stream.” His hands were busy now searching the dead man’s clothes. He pried the dagger from the man’s hand and gave it to Flæd. “We need to go,” he told her. “The others may come back.”

Red would not let Flæad ride alone. He mounted Apple and pulled her up behind him. At the burgh wall they sent the greys back to the herd, and Flæd stood with her head down, knowing more surely than ever that she should tell her warder what had really happened. But still she could not make her tongue say the words, and Red spoke instead.

“Lady, I must see the king. I ask you to come with me.” His voice was hard and empty, and above the dull metal around his neck, his face was grim. Humbly Flæd nodded, and at Red’s gesture preceded him along the street toward her father’s chambers.

They found him there with Asser and Father John. The three of them looked up from a manuscript when Flæd and the Mercian warder entered, and all stood as Alfred greeted the envoy.

“Welcome, thane of Ethelred. The light is fading, and still we abuse our eyes with this Latin script at the end of a long day. You have spared me a difficult passage of translation which my bishop and mass priest are too polite to finish for me,” he said with a tired smile. “Please, tell us how we may be of use to you.”

“I have been of little enough use to you,” Red said in a low voice. “King Alfred, I must surrender my duties. I do not deserve the trust you have placed in me to protect the lady Æthelflæd.” Flæd drew a sharp breath. Somehow she had expected a rebuke, not this. Alfred and his advisors exchanged looks of confusion.

“Surely you have kept her safe—she is here with us now, well and carefully guarded. What trust have you broken?” Alfred wondered.

“I have not kept my vow,” Red insisted. “Today she was stolen from my care.” Tersely he described Flæd’s disappearance, and the fight in the
marsh. He showed them the marks on her wrists and ankles, and the tiny cut where the dagger had pressed against her throat. “I should never have lost sight of her,” he declared, his voice heavy with self-condemnation. “I ask that you release me from your service and let me go back to Mercia. Your own thanes will serve you more honorably than I have.” Red looked around him, suddenly uncertain what to say next. “I will wait at the lady’s quarters,” he said slowly. “I will keep watch this last night.”

Alfred gazed at the man for a long moment, then nodded. “Go then and in the morning we will make a better farewell.” He watched the envoy turn and disappear through the doorway. “But I would know more of this matter,” the king said under his breath. He looked at Flæd, who stood motionless where her warder had left her. “What happened, child?” Alfred asked.