And so we wheeled those big horses through the encampment, our hooves hurling up clods of mud, our spears sharp. If a man resisted, he died, if he ran, we made him run faster. I saw Folcbald, a huge Frisian, spear a flaming log from a campfire and toss it onto a shelter, and others of my men copied him. “Lord!” Finan shouted to me. “Lord!” I turned to see he was pointing south to where men were running from the tents toward the clumsy barricade that faced the city’s eastern gate. Those were the real warriors, the household troops.

“Rorik!” I bellowed. “Rorik!”

“Lord!” He was twenty paces away, turning his horse ready to pursue three men wearing leather jerkins and carrying axes.

“Sound the horn!”

He spurred toward me, curbing his horse as he fumbled with the long spear and tried to retrieve the horn that was slung on his back by a long cord. One of the three men, seeing Rorik’s back turned, ran toward him with a raised ax. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but Finan had seen the man, twisted his horse, spurred, and the man tried to run away, Soul-Stealer flashed, her blade reflecting the flames of a fire, and the axman’s head rolled off. The body slewed along the ground, but the head bounced once, then landed in the fire where the grease that the man had rubbed into his hair while cleaning his hands flared into sudden and bright flame.

“Not bad for a grandfather,” I said.

“Bastards don’t count, lord,” Finan called back.

Rorik blew the horn, blew it again, and kept blowing it, and the sound, so mournful, insistent, and loud, drew my horsemen back together. “Now! Follow me!” I shouted.

We had wounded the beast, now we had to behead it.

Most of the folk fleeing our rampage had gone south toward the big tents, which evidently housed Cynlæf’s trained warriors, and it was there that we rode, together now, knee to knee, spears lowered. Our line of horsemen only split to avoid the fires that spewed their sparks into the coming darkness, then, as we spurred into a wide open space between the miserable shelters and the tents, we quickened. More men appeared among the tents, one carrying a standard that stretched out as he ran toward the barricade that was supposed to deter the defenders from sallying out of the city’s eastern gate. The barricade was a crude thing of overturned carts, even a plow, but it was still a formidable obstacle. I saw that the standard-bearer was holding Æthelflaed’s banner, the daft goose holding a cross and a sword.

I must have laughed, because Finan called to me over the sound of hooves on turf, “What’s funny?”

“This is madness!” I meant fighting against men who fought under a banner I had protected all my grown life.

“It is mad! Fighting for King Edward!”

“Fate is strange,” I said.

“Will he be grateful?” Finan asked the same question my daughter had asked.