‘Gerbruht!’ I called. ‘Cut the forward line!’

‘You can’t leave him here,’ Eadgifu screamed at me.

‘Cut it!’ I bellowed.

Gerbruht sliced through the bow line with an axe and I drew Serpent-Breath and moved to the aft line. Eadgifu clutched at my arm. ‘Let me go!’ I snarled, shook her off, then sliced through the sealhide rope. Spearhafoc trembled. The tide was pushing her onto the wharf, but the wind was against the tide and there was just enough wind on the furled sail to float us out into the channel. Beornoth helped by seizing an oar and thrusting against a weed-thick piling. The three horsemen had reached the wharf. They threw themselves from their saddles and ran. I saw the terror on Awyrgan’s face because Æthelhelm’s men were close behind, their horses’ hooves drumming loud on the wharf’s timbers. ‘Jump!’ I shouted. ‘Jump!’

They jumped. They made a desperate life-saving leap, and two collapsed sprawling on Spearhafoc’s rowing benches while Awyrgan fell just short, but managed to grasp Spearhafoc’s low midships rail where two of my men took hold of him. The pursuing horsemen reined in and two of them threw spears. One blade thumped into the baulks of timber supporting our mast, the second missed Awyrgan by a finger’s breadth, but the men in Spearhafoc’s bow were using oars to pole her off the channel’s muddy bank and north towards the wider waters of the Swalwan Creek. More spears followed, but all fell short.

‘If we’d stayed,’ I told Eadgifu, ‘those horsemen would have rained spears on us. Men would have been wounded, men would have been killed,’

‘He almost drowned!’ she said, her eyes on Awyrgan, who was being hauled aboard.

So that, I thought, was why she had come to Cent? ‘And they’d have aimed their spears at your sons,’ I said.

She seemed not to hear me, but instead went forward to where the half-drenched Awyrgan was sitting on a bench. I turned and caught Benedetta’s gaze. She held my eyes, as if daring me to speak aloud of what I suspected, and I thought again what a beauty she was. She was older than Eadgifu, but age had added wisdom to beauty. She had a dark skin, which gave her grey-green eyes a striking intensity, a long nose in a slender, grave face, wide lips, and hair as black as Eadgifu’s.

‘Where to?’ Gerbruht distracted me. He had come aft and taken the steering-oar.

The sky was darkening. It was dusk, a long summer dusk, and no time to begin a long voyage. ‘Cross the creek,’ I said, ‘find somewhere to spend the night.’

‘And in the morning, lord?’

‘We go north, of course.’

North to Bebbanburg, north to home, and north to where no kings died and no madness ruled.

We crossed the creek in the dying light and found an inlet that twisted deep into Sceapig’s reeds where we could spend the short summer night. The ships we had set on fire burned bright, throwing lurid shadows on the small harbour, their last flames only extinguished as the first stars showed.