“Then you’d better carry the banner,” I said. I was fond of Berg, whose life I had saved on the Welsh beach and who had rewarded me with utter loyalty ever since. “Why didn’t you stay with your brothers?” I asked him.

“Egil said it was not their task to teach a boy how to fight. So they sent me viking with another jarl.”

“Who led you to a slaughter on a foreign beach.”

He smiled. “Fate was good to me, lord.”

I did more than prepare weapons and pack supplies. I sent more strong patrols west into the hills searching for news. Those patrols brought back reports that Sköll had retreated into the higher ground, presumably to Heahburh, though I would not let any of my men go close to where we thought that fortress stood.

Sköll knew we were searching for him and would be preparing for war, just as I was. He might hope that he had persuaded me to refuse battle, but even if I had taken his advice he would still have had to face an angry Sigtryggr, whose troops, I knew, were scouring southern Cumbraland. “Sigtryggr needs to leave troops south of Heahburh,” I had told Eadith on the night before we rode to Heagostealdes.

“Why?”

I gazed up at the smoke that drifted into our sleeping chamber from the great hall and tried to see an omen in its shifting shapes. I saw nothing. Earlier that day I had watched a cat stalking a mouse and knew that if the mouse died then Sköll would die, but the mouse had escaped. “Heahburh,” I said, “is a strong fort, but it’s evidently high in the hills and far from anywhere.” Sköll’s sorcerer had called it the fortress of the eagles, and eagles nested in remote high places. “We think Sköll’s staying in his fortress,” I explained. “None of our scouts have seen his troops moving, but if I was Sköll? I’d cross the hills and attack Eoferwic.”

“Why?” she asked again.

“Because Eoferwic is where the merchants are. It’s where the money is.”

“And money is power,” she said.

“And money is power,” I agreed, “and the land about Eoferwic is rich, and that means taxes and rents, and the money from taxes and rents becomes swords, spears, axes, and shields. And Sköll’s fastest road to Eoferwic is to go south.”

“And you think he’ll do that?”

“I fear he’ll do that,” I said.

Knowing what the enemy is doing or planning is always the hardest thing in war. Sigtryggr’s messengers reported that the Norse steadings around the Ribbel estuary had been stripped of men, and that, so far as they could determine, all those men had gone north to wherever Sköll was gathering his army. Sköll’s lunge to Eoferwic at winter’s end had been his declaration of war, and it had very nearly succeeded. His ride to Bebbanburg had been an attempt to persuade me to sit that war out because he knew that the coming battle would decide who ruled in Northumbria, but where would that battle be? If I had been Sköll I would have crossed the hills and brought the war to the richer eastern side of Northumbria, forcing us to pursue him and fight him in a place of his choosing, and that was why Sigtryggr was compelled to guard the routes that led south across the hills. We planned to approach Heahburh from the east, but feared Sköll might escape southward before we brought him to battle, and also feared that the forces guarding those southern routes would prove too weak to delay him while we struggled to catch up. Those fears kept me awake at nights, but all the reports seemed to confirm Sköll was staying in the high hills where his fortress stood, and where he was inviting us, daring us even, to assault him.