‘Bastards won’t get a smell of me, lord.’

The sky cleared as we walked southwards. The wind was dying, gusting occasionally to stir our borrowed cloaks. There was warmth in the sun, which glittered off the flooded pastures. We met a small girl, maybe eight or nine years old, driving three cows northwards. She shrank onto the road’s side as we passed, looking fearful. ‘Better weather today!’ Beornoth called cheerfully to her, but she just shivered and kept her eyes lowered. We passed orchards where trees had been felled by the storm and one stout trunk had been split and scorched by lightning. I shivered when I saw a dead swan, lying with a broken neck in a flooded ditch. It was not a good omen and I raised my eyes in hope of seeing a better sign, but saw only the storm’s ragged rear-guard of clouds. A woman was digging in the garden of a small reed-thatched cottage, but seeing us she went indoors and I heard the locking bar drop into place. Was this, I wondered, how folk had behaved when they saw Roman troops approaching? Or Danes? Fæfresham was nervous, fearful, a small town caught again at the crossroads of powerful men’s ambitions.

I was nervous too. If Wighelm had told me the truth then Æthelhelm’s men in Fæfresham outnumbered mine. If they were alert, if they were expecting trouble, then we would be swiftly overwhelmed. I had thought to use the captured cloaks and shields as a means of entering the town unsuspected, but Eadric returned to tell me that a dozen spearmen were guarding the road. ‘They’re not lazy buggers either,’ he said. ‘Wide awake, they are.’

‘Just twelve men?’

‘With plenty more to back them up, lord,’ Eadric said grimly.

We had left the road to hide behind the blackthorn hedge of a rain-soaked pasture. If Eadric was right then an assault on the twelve guards would bring more enemy running and I could find myself in a ragged fight far from the safety of Spearhafoc. ‘Can you get into the town?’ I asked Eadric.

He nodded. ‘Plenty of alleyways, lord.’ He was a middle-aged Saxon who could move through woodland like a ghost, but he was confident he could get past Æthelhelm’s sentries and use his cunning to stay undiscovered in the town. ‘I’m old, lord,’ he said, ‘and they don’t look at old men like young ones.’ He discarded his weapons, stripped off his mail, and, looking like a peasant, slipped through a gap in the blackthorn hedge that sheltered us. We waited. The last clouds were thinning and the sunlight offered welcome warmth. The smoke from Fæfresham’s cooking fires drifted upwards instead of being flayed sideways by the wind. Eadric did not return for a long time and I had begun to fear he had been captured and Finan feared the same. He sat beside me, fidgeting, then went very still as a band of red-cloaked horsemen appeared to the east. There were at least twenty of them and for a moment I thought they might be searching for us and I half drew Serpent-Breath, but then the horsemen turned back towards the town.