“He can be headstrong,” I said.

“Like you,” she responded with a smile and put her arm through mine. “He’ll come back, I promise.”

“You see the future?” I asked skeptically.

“You tell me to trust my instinct,” she said, “and I tell you he’ll be back.”

Eadith had once been my enemy and now was my wife. She was a clever woman, skilled in the intricate dance of ambitious men, the steps of which she had learned as the mistress of Æthelred, Æthelflaed’s husband, who had been the ruler of Mercia and another enemy of mine. I had told Eadith of my pact with Æthelstan, and she had approved. “He’ll be the next king,” she said.

“Æthelhelm will fight to prevent that.”

“He will, but the men of Mercia will fight for Æthelstan.” And that, I thought, was probably true. Edward, when he had inherited the throne, had been embarrassed by the brand of bastardy that was attached to his eldest son, and so had sent the boy Æthelstan into Mercia to be raised by Æthelflaed, which is how I had become his protector. Æthelstan might be a West Saxon by birth, but to most Mercians he was one of their own. “And you say Archbishop Athelm is opposed to Æthelhelm?” Eadith asked.

“I think he is.”

“Then the church will support Æthelstan,” she said.

“Not the churchmen who take Æthelhelm’s bribes. Besides, the church has no warriors.”

“But most warriors fear for their souls, so they listen to the church.”

“And the moment I’m dead,” I said bleakly, “the church will encourage Æthelstan to invade Northumbria.”

She smiled. “Then it’s a good thing that your son is a Christian.”

“Damn him,” I said, touching the hammer. “If he’s even alive.”

Eadith touched the cross at her breast. “He is alive,” she said, “I know it.”

She was right, my son was alive, and lucky that he was. He had left with forty-three men and returned with just twenty-seven, and six of those were wounded. They came through Bebbanburg’s Skull Gate looking like beaten men, which they were. My son could barely meet my eyes. “We were ambushed,” he said bitterly.

It had been a carefully designed ambush. My son had almost reached the far end of the great Roman wall, and as he went he had inquired at every steading and settlement for news of úlfhéðnar or for rumors about Sköll, and he learned nothing until he reached the settlement beneath the largest fort of the long wall, a fort built above the River Irthinam. We called that fort Spura, because its walls stood on a commanding hill spur, and the settlement was built beneath it on the Irthinam’s southern bank. “A man told us he knew where Sköll lived,” my son explained, “he said Sköll had captured his two daughters and he claimed he’d followed the raiders south afterward.”

“And you believed him?” I asked. “A villager daring to follow úlfhéðnar?”

“The other men said the same, lord,” Redbad put in. Redbad was a Frisian and devoted to my son. “Two of them had lost their daughters too.”