“We saved Godive once,” said Shef. “Now I am going to do it again. I need your help. I cannot tell anyone else what I am doing. Will you help?”

Hund nodded. Hesitated. “I’ll help you any time, Shef. But I have to ask. Why have you decided to do this now? You could have tried to get Godive back any time the last few months, when there was far less on your mind.”

Shef coldly wondered once more how much he could safely say. Already he knew what he needed Godive for: as bait. Nothing could enrage Alfgar more than knowing Shef had stolen her away. If he made it seem like an insult from the Way, Alfgar’s allies would be drawn in. He wanted them to pursue Godive like a great fish striking. Onto the hook of Ivar. And Ivar too could be baited. By a reminder of the woman he had lost, and the man who had taken her.

But he dared say none of this to Hund, not even to his childhood friend. Hund had been a friend of Godive too.

Shef allowed concern and confusion to show on his face. “I know.” he said. “I should have done it before. But now, suddenly, I am afraid for her.”

Hund looked his friend steadily in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I dare say you have good reason for what you do. Now, how are we going to work it?”

‘“I’ll get out at dusk. Meet me where we used to shoot the catapults. During the day I want you to collect half a dozen men. But listen. They must not be Norse. All English. All freedmen. And they must all look like freedmen, understand. Like you.” Undersized and underfed, Shef meant. “With horses and rations for a week. But dressed shabby, not in the clothes we’ve given them.

“And there’s another thing, Hund, and this is why I need you. I am too easy to recognize with this one eye”—the one eye you left me with, Shef did not say. “When we went into the Ragnarsson camp that did not matter. Now, if I am to go into a camp with my half brother and stepfather in it, I need a disguise. Now, what I thought was …”

Shef poured out his plan, Hund occasionally altering or improving on it. At the end the little leech slowly tucked his apple-pendant, for Ithun, out of sight, adjusting his tunic so nothing showed.

“We can do it,” he remarked, “if the gods are with us. Have you thought what will happen here in the camp when they wake up and find you gone?”

They will think I have deserted them, Shef realized. I will leave a message, to let them think I have done it for a woman. And yet it will not be true.