I could not blame my son. Ælswyth was a fragile, delicate, and beautiful girl with hair like fairy gold, skin pale as milk, and a face that could drive a man crazed with desire. “She’s a goddamned elf,” Finan had decided when he first saw her, and my fear was that the elf would prove too delicate for childbirth, but she had survived her firstborn and now carried a second child. The wise women in the village and among my men’s wives declared that she was healthy, though to make certain they burned mandrake root, powdered the ashes that they mixed with cow’s milk, then smeared the paste on her belly. She was a Christian, of course, but when I gave her a necklace from which hung a little golden cat, one of the symbols of Freya who protected women in childbirth, she wore it. She was wearing it on the day that my son led his war-band south and west and, when he was gone from sight, I walked with her on Bebbanburg’s seaward ramparts. It was a blustery day and the sea was flecked with restless white, the breakers roared on the sand beneath us, and the wind lifted strands of her fair hair as we walked. “I love this place,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Of course, lord.”

“Your home in Wessex was surely more comfortable?”

“Oh yes, lord,” she said brightly, “but I feel free here, lord.” She offered me a smile that could have dimmed the sun. She had been thirteen when she came to Bebbanburg and, before my son ruined her father’s plans, had been reckoned as one of the most desirable brides in all the Saxon lands. Her father’s immense wealth and power would have ensured a dowry of royal proportions, and kings from across the sea had sent emissaries to her father’s hall, and those emissaries had carried back reports of her beauty. Her father had guarded her carefully because he planned to marry her to a man who would increase his power. He had intended that Ælswyth would be the bride of a great lord, or even a king’s wife, to be hung with jewels and crowned with gold, yet such had been his hatred of me that he had been prepared to offer her to my cousin to ensure that I never regained Bebbanburg, and, better still, died in the attempt. Instead my cousin was dead, Æthelhelm the Older was in his grave, and his prized daughter was walking the ramparts of Bebbanburg in a woolen dress, a sealskin cloak, and wearing a pagan amulet.

“You know,” I said carefully, “that I met your brother in Tamweorthin?”

“Yes, lord.”

“We hardly spoke.”

“You told me, lord,” she said meekly.

“What I didn’t tell you,” I added brutally, “is that he tried to kill me.” She was, I thought, too young to know how to respond, and merely uttered an elfin squeak of either surprise or shock. We walked on. “And I have to tell you,” I continued, “that I have made an oath.”