I knew at that moment I was making a mistake, that he had fooled me, that I was doing just what he wanted. I suddenly remembered the fight on the terrace above the Temes and how he had gripped my mail coat. That was how he fought. He wanted me close so he could grab hold of me and shake me as a terrier shakes a rat. He wanted me close where his height, weight and strength could overwhelm me, and now I was very close. I was passing him, still going to my right, and I saw his left hand reaching for me and I almost pulled away, but the thought was too late, I was committed and so I thrust the seax. I ignored the fiery pain in my left shoulder and I just rammed Wasp-Sting as hard as I could. It hurt, that thrust, it hurt terribly. The effort to drive Wasp-Sting deep made me gasp aloud, but I kept thrusting her, ignoring the pain.

Waormund had been reaching to grip one of my cheek-pieces, but Wasp-Sting was quicker. She pierced mail and leather. She broke through thick muscle. She buried half her length in his gut, and his reaching hand fell away as he turned quickly, grimacing, so quickly that he tore Wasp-Sting’s hilt from my hand so that she stayed in his belly, blood just showing in the links she had pierced. I backed away. ‘You’re slow,’ I said, the first words I had spoken to him.

‘Bastard,’ he spat and, ignoring the seax in his gut, came for me again. He was angry now. He had been contemptuous before, but now he was nothing but fury, hacking Serpent-Breath in savage short strokes, her blade ringing on my blade as he forced me to retreat by the sheer weight of the blows. But his anger was hot, it made him unthinking, and the blows, though brutally hard, were easy enough to parry. I taunted him. Called him a beef-witted piece of shit, said his mother had shat him instead of giving birth, that through all Britain men called him Æthelhelm’s arse-licker. ‘You’re dying, you maggot,’ I mocked him, ‘that blade in your belly is killing you!’ He knew that was probably true. I have seen men recover from ghastly wounds, but rarely from a gut stroke. ‘It will be a slow painful death,’ I told him, ‘and men will remember me as the man who killed Æthelhelm’s arse-licker.’