“Good God!” He stared at me, thinking I had gone as mad as Ieremias. “Make an alliance with the Scots?”

“We have the same enemies.”

“The Norse, yes, but who else?”

“The Ænglisc, of course.”

Now he really did think I was crazed. “But we are the Ænglisc!” he protested.

The Ænglisc! I think that was the first time I ever called the Saxons of Britain by that strange name. Now, of course, we all say we are Ænglisc, but it still seems weird to me. The Ænglisc of Englaland! That was King Alfred’s dream, to make a new nation out of old kingdoms. “We’re not Ænglisc,” I growled, “we’re Northumbrians.” And so we were, which meant that we were the smallest kingdom of all those that had been settled by the Angles and the Saxons. I was not being serious about an alliance with the Scots, of course; the only alliance they would ever offer Northumbria would be conquest and subjugation. I suppose that if Sköll had not killed my daughter it would have made sense to reach an agreement with Cumbraland’s Norsemen, and perhaps, I thought, with Sköll dead, many of his men might swear allegiance to Sigtryggr, and Northumbria would then possess enough strength to fight off the Ænglisc to the south and the Scots to the north. If Sigtryggr even survived the next few days, and that fear prompted me to touch my hammer. “We’re Northumbrians,” I said again to my son, “and we’re something else. We’re the lords of Bebbanburg.”

He looked at me strangely, sensing that I was no longer speaking lightly. “We are,” he agreed uncertainly, troubled by my tone.

“So one or two days from now,” I went on, “when we fight, one of us must live.”

He touched the cross at his breast. “I hope both of us live, Father.”

I ignored that pious hope. “We have to keep Bebbanburg,” I told him, “and your son won’t be of age until he’s much older, so you have to keep the fortress for him.”

“Or you can,” he muttered.

“Don’t be a fool!” I snarled. “I can’t live that long!” I touched the hammer again. “Bebbanburg has been in our family for almost three hundred years, and it should still belong to us when the world ends.” I thought of Snorri’s prophecy, that the Dane and the Saxon would unite against me, that I would die by the sword, that Bebbanburg would be lost, and my children’s children would eat the dung of humility. I pushed that memory away, telling myself that Snorri had deliberately been trying to frighten me with riddles. “You have to survive this fight,” I said harshly.

“You want me to hold back from fighting?” my son asked bitterly. He still felt the keen shame of losing so many men to Sköll’s ambush and the need to prove himself all over again.

“Yes,” I said harshly. “You hold back. If I die, you must live. If we lose this fight, you have to escape, and you have to live long enough to see your son become the Lord of Bebbanburg.”