‘Is King Æthelstan in Lundene?’ I asked Halldor.

Again he grimaced at the word ‘king’, but made no comment on it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘But you’re quite sure his men are?’

He nodded unwillingly. By now the coast of East Seax was in sight, a low, dull brown streak of mud topped with a fringe of summer green. The few trees were small and wind-bent, the mud speckled with the white of seabirds. The tide would soon be ebbing, which made any landfall on that coast treacherous. We could be stranded on a falling tide for hours, yet I was determined to nose Spearhafoc into the shore. I pointed ahead. ‘That’s Fughelness,’ I told the two prisoners. ‘There’s little there except sand, mud, and birds. And soon you too, because I’m putting you ashore there.’ Fughelness was a bleak place, windswept and barren, locked in by tidal creeks, marshes and mudbanks. It would take Halldor and the priest the rest of the day to find a way to firmer ground, and then more time to work their way back to Wintanceaster if that was, indeed, where Æthelhelm was.

We lowered the sail as we neared the shore, and then, using a dozen oars, nosed our way gently through small breaking waves until Spearhafoc’s cutwater slid onto mud. ‘It would be easier to kill them,’ Awyrgan said as Berg, grinning, prodded the two captives off the bows towards the water.

‘Why would I kill them?’ I asked.

‘They’re enemies.’

‘They’re helpless enemies,’ I said, ‘and I don’t kill the helpless.’

He looked at me defiantly. ‘And what about the priests you killed?’

I wanted to kill Awyrgan at that moment. ‘Anger leads to savagery,’ I said curtly, ‘and to stupidity.’ He must have felt my anger because he backed away. The priest was protesting that jumping into the water would give him a fever, but every moment we waited the wind was nudging Spearhafoc further onto the mud. ‘Get rid of him!’ I called to Berg.

Berg more or less threw the priest overboard. ‘Wade ashore!’ Berg called. ‘You won’t drown!’

‘Pole her off!’ I called, and the men in the bows shoved their oars into the sticky mud and heaved. For a heartbeat Spearhafoc seemed reluctant to move, then to my relief she lurched and slid back into safer, deeper water.

‘Same course, lord?’ Gerbruht asked me. ‘Hoist the sail and up the coast?’

I shook my head. ‘Lundene.’

‘Lundene?’

‘Oars!’ I shouted.

We turned west. We were not going home after all, but upriver to Lundene.

Because King Æthelstan’s troops were there and I had an oath to keep.

It was a hard row against the wind, against the tide, and against the river’s current, but it would become easier when the tide turned and the flood would carry us upriver. I knew these waters, knew the river, because when Gisela was alive I had commanded the Lundene garrison. I had become fond of the city.

We passed Caninga, a marshy island on the East Seax shore, beyond which was Beamfleot where, in Alfred’s reign, we had stormed the Danish fort and put a whole army to the sword. I remembered Skade and did not want to remember her. She had died there, killed by the man she had betrayed, while all around them the women screamed and the blood flowed. Finan stared and he too was thinking of the sorceress. ‘Skade,’ he said.