How they all gazed at him with hopeful expressions! They were such a sturdy group, healthier than many because the forest provided so much, all but a steady supply of grain and salt which, they’d told him, they traded for. Even in lean years they could survive with less grain. They hadn’t any horses, but three milk cows. They had forage for their goats and sheep as well as certain plants and tubers out of the forest that could be eaten by humankind in hard times even if they weren’t tasty. They ate meat often, and they were proud of it, knowing that folk beyond the forest never fared so well.

He bent over the diploma. The lantern light made the pen strokes waver. He’d never read well nor did he like to, but the months in Queen’s Grave and the unrelenting supervision of Biscop Constance had forced him to labor over Dariyan, the language used both by the church and by the king’s schola for all decrees and capitularies.

They waited, so quiet that the sound of dripping rain off the outside eaves made him nervous. He kept expecting the rain to start up again. Luckily, it was not a long document. He stumbled through it without utterly shaming himself. King Henry’s promise was straightforward: the foresters would be free of service to any lord or lady as long as they kept the king’s road passable for himself and his servants and messengers and armies.

“The Eagle read it better,” murmured Martin’s wife to her husband, then blushed when Ivar looked at her.

“Eagles can’t read,” he said. “They learn the words in their head and repeat them back. That’s what she must have done.”

“Nay, she read it all right,” said one of the older men. “I recall that well enough. She touched each word as she spoke it. How could she know which was which if she weren’t reading? Strange looking girl, too, not any older than my Baltia here.” He set a hand on the head of an adolescent girl perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age. “I don’t know if she were pretty, but she sure caught the eye.”

“She was at Gent, too,” said Martin. “She was the one what saved us, those of us who escaped.”

“I know who you mean!” said Erkanwulf from his seat on the bench. “We rode with her, Captain Ulric’s band out of Autun, that is She was riding with Count Lavastine’s army, but she was a

King’s Eagle, after all. I’d wager it was the same one.”

Ivar sat down, clenching his hands. He shut his eyes, and at once they fussed around him and Martin’s wife, called Flora, brought him ale to drink to clear his head.

“I will never be free of her.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He laughed, seeing them stare at him. Erkanwulf looked skeptical. Martin looked puzzled. Flora’s mouth had turned up softly, and her gaze was gentle, as though she had guessed it all. She touched her young husband on the shoulder, and he started, glanced at her, and reading something in her expression—words weren’t the only marks that could be read!—he rolled up the diploma and stashed it away in the chest beneath the community’s other precious possessions.