“Yes, yes. Bring him inside and lay him on the bed, there.” She indicated a narrow pallet enclosed in a box of carved wood. Like everything else within Gudrun’s home, runes covered it, etched deep into the wood. Runolf stared at the bed and I wondered if he could decipher the meaning of the angular letters.

I went to the door and called for Bealdwulf and Drosten to help Sygbald inside. While he shuffled into the hut, Gudrun busied herself pulling pots and pouches from nooks and shelves that dotted the walls. She plucked leaves of woundwort, vervain and betony from where they dangled from the rafters. When Sygbald was on the bed, pale-faced and panting shallowly, she shooed us outside.

“You cannot all crowd in here. Leave me now to do my work.”

Bealdwulf hesitated by the door.

“I will do my best for your comrade,” she said, her voice softening. “But I need space and no distractions.”

I told Bealdwulf what she had said, and again, she looked at me, seemingly intrigued by my control of two languages.

“Tell her to make sure he lives,” Bealdwulf said, not daring to look directly into her strange, otherworldly eyes.

I translated, and she nodded, curtly.

“I will do my best. You have my word. But your friend’s life hangs by a thread. If the gods should choose to cut it, there is nothing I can do. No mortal has such power.”

With that, she closed the hut’s door behind us and left us blinking in the sunlight.

Gersine wandered off into the woods. I thought he had gone for a piss, but when he returned, he carried an armful of dry wood. He shrugged.

“We will be glad of it, if we are here when night falls.”

Hereward nodded his approval.

The rest of us had slumped down on the grass, enjoying the warmth of the sun, and trying not to think what might be happening inside the hut. Gudrun was singing, and from time to time, snatches of her song, lilting and strange, reached us. I could not make out the words, but the sound made me shiver, as if a cold wind had blown through the glade.

“Do you think she has the power to heal Sygbald?” I asked Leofstan, keeping my voice low. Some of the others conversed quietly, but there was something about this place, or Sygbald’s precarious predicament, that made us all feel we could not speak normally. It felt as if to make a loud noise might disrupt whatever spell Gudrun was weaving inside. I shuddered at the thought.

“I know not what power she possesses,” Leofstan said. “But listening to her words, she said his life was in the hands of her pagan gods. That to me would imply she has no real power. No more than any man or woman. Pray for Sygbald, for you and I both know her gods can do nothing to help him.”