The thump of a boot in the back stirred him from torpor in the growing light of the next day. Shef sat up, conscious above all of the dry, swollen stick of his tongue. Round him the guards were cutting lashings, hauling bodies away; some had been granted Shef’s wish in the night. But in front of him squatted a small, slight figure in a stained and dirty tunic, drawn lines of fatigue on the sallow face. It was Hund. He was holding a crock of water. For some minutes Shef thought of nothing else, while Hund carefully, and with many agonizing pauses, allowed him to drink a mouthful at a time. Only when he felt the blessed fullness under his breastbone, and knew the luxury of being able to roll an excess mouthful round his tongue and spit it onto the grass, did Shef realize that Hund was trying to speak to him.

“Shef, Shef, try to take this in. We have to know some things. Where is Godive?”

“I don’t know. I got her away. Then I think someone else snatched her. But they had me before I could do anything about it.”

“Who do you think took her?”

Shef remembered the laugh in the thickets, the sense he had had, and had dismissed, that there were other fugitives in the wood. “Alfgar. He was always a good tracker. He must have followed us.”

Shef paused again for thought, dispelling the lethargy of cold and weariness. “I think he must have gone back, led Muirtach and the others to us. Maybe they did a deal. They got me, he got her. Or maybe he just snatched her while they were busy with me. There weren’t enough of them to risk following very far. Not after the fright they’d had.”

“So. Ivar is more concerned about you than about her. But he knows you got her away from the camp. That’s bad.” Hund passed a hand worriedly across his sparse, scanty beard. “Shef, think back. Did anyone see you actually kill any of the Vikings with your own hands?”

“I only killed one. That was in the dark and no one saw. It was no great deed. But someone may have seen me get into the pen and start freeing the prisoners—freeing Alfgar.” Shef’s mouth twisted. “And do you know, I broke the Viking shield-wall with a burning timber when all the king’s comrades could not do it.” Shef turned his palms and looked mutely at the pads of white skin, the tiny thorn holes where the blisters had been.