“He is not my father, though I call him that. Eighteen summers ago the Vikings raided here. Wulfgar was away from Emneth then, but my mother, the lady Thryth, was here, with her baby son Alfgar—my half brother, her child and Wulfgar’s. A servant got Alfgar away when the raiders came in the night, but my mother was taken.”

Edrich nodded slowly. All this was familiar enough. But still his question was not answered. There was a system in these matters, at least for those of rank. After a while, surely, the husband might have expected to hear from the slave-marts of Hedeby or Kaupang, to tell him such and such a lady was ransomable, at a price. If he did not, then he could have considered himself a widower, free to marry again, to set his fine silver bracelets on another woman who would rear his son. Sometimes, it was true, such arrangements were disturbed by the arrival, twenty years later, of some withered crone who had managed to outlive her usefulness in the North and bribe her way, God knew how, onto a ship that would take her home. But not often. Neither case explained the young man sitting before him.

“My mother returned, only a few weeks later. Pregnant with me. She swore that my father was the jarl of the Vikings himself. When I was born she wanted me named Halfden, because I am half a Dane. But Wulfgar cursed her. He said that was a hero’s name, the name of the king who founded the race of the Shieldings, from whom the kings of England and Denmark both claim descent. Too good for me. And so I was given a dog’s name instead. Shef.”

The young man dropped his eyes. “That is why my stepfather hates me and wants to make me a slave, why my half brother Alfgar has everything, and I nothing.”

He had not told the full story: How Wulfgar had pressed and pressed his pregnant wife to take birthwort, to kill the rapist’s child in her womb. How he himself had only been saved by the intervention of Father Andreas, who had denounced fiercely the sin of child-murder, even of a Viking’s child. How Wulfgar in his rage and jealousy had taken a concubine, and bred on her Godive the beautiful, so that in the end there had been three children growing up in Emneth: Alfgar the trueborn; Godive, child of Wulfgar and his slave-lemman; Shef, child of Thryth and the Viking.

The king’s thane passed back the hand-forged blade in silence. Still a mystery, he thought. How had the woman escaped? Viking slavers were not usually so careless.

“What was the name of this jarl?” he asked. “Of your …”

“Of my father? My mother says his name was Sigvarth. The jarl of the Small Isles. Wherever they are.”

They sat for a while in silence, then stretched out for sleep.