“Gull,” I whispered, for my heart was beating so hard I had to speak to someone, “this is my home.”

But no one came to the door. No round brown face looked out at me. I began to grow afraid.

I halted where I was. I got down from my horse and let it graze on the coarse salt grass as I sat on the rocks, looking down on the fisherhut with the soundless ringing of bluebells in my ears.

I sat there with Gull beside me, my mail catching the sun and cooking me, until day dimmed into evening. In the slanting orange light I saw Fisherfather’s coracle bobbing in to land, dark on the bright water. I saw him heave himself out of the boat and wade to shore. I saw a lad get out and help him drag the boat up on the beach for the night.

Then Fisherfather stopped what he was doing as he caught sight of me sitting there on the rocks. They both stared. I got up, stiff from sitting, and walked down to them with Gull trotting beside me.

“My lord?” Fisherfather looked old and tired and frightened. He and the young churl both stood bobbing their heads and pulling their forelocks, uncertain whether they must kneel, their faces so much alike that I knew the boy must be his son—the baby Nyneve had felt in Fishermother.

“No need to call me lord,” I told him. “You used to call me Tad.”

He gawked at me anew.

I said quietly, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Pardon, my—” He caught himself before he said “lord.”

“Your wife.”

“Ay, she’s dead. She died in the birthing of Kip here.”

The boy stood watching me, tired, like his father, and sullen also. Likely he envied me my great black charger and my shiny mail and my shiny white shield and my sword of Damascene steel, but I smelled the salt and heard the wash of the waves close to my feet and saw the terns flying to land for the night, and I would have traded places with him in a moment.

“She’s been dead these nine years,” Fisherfather said in that dank, weary way of his.

I stood watching the terns, their sharp white wings gilded in the late-day light. The fisherman and his son stood watching me.

I was still a lord to them, I realized. They could not move to go about their work until I allowed it. So I said, “Is the catch good?” and that let them haul it out of the boat to show me.