“He’s there,” she said.

The hut was nothing but reed thatch, wattle, and sunbaked clay. The entrance was so low that we would have had to crawl inside, so instead I drew Serpent-Breath again and rammed her blade into the moss-covered thatch. A woman screamed from inside, then screamed again as I tore the reeds apart, opening up a gaping hole in the roof, then hacked again to widen the hole down to the low doorway. Finan and Berg helped, pulling away timber, withies, and thatch, and then at last we could look down into the hut’s interior.

Where there were two people sitting on the far side of a hearth where a small fire burned. One, a girl, was clutching a robe to her breasts and staring up at us with wide, frightened eyes, while next to her, looking equally terrified and with an arm around the girl’s thin shoulders, was a man I did not at first recognize. Indeed, I feared I had broken into the wrong hut because the man sheltering the girl had no tonsure, instead he had a full head of dark hair. Then he looked up at me, and I did recognize him. “Brother Beadwulf,” I said.

“No,” he shook his head wildly, “no!”

“Or is it Brother Osric?” I asked.

“No,” he whimpered, “no!”

“Yes,” I said, then stepped into the ruined hut, bent down, and seized Brother Beadwulf by his black robe. He yelped, the girl gasped, then I dragged him out, pulling his unresisting body across the burning hearth so that he screamed in pain and his woolen robe started to smolder. I threw him down among the wreckage of the thatch and watched him beat out the small flames. “Brother Beadwulf,” I said, “we need to talk.” And so we did.

It was the girl, of course. Her name was Wynflæd, she might have been thirteen or fourteen. She was a Saxon slave, and as skinny as a peeled willow wand. She had large and timid eyes, a pointed nose, reddish hair, and prominent upper teeth. She looked like a half-starved squirrel, and Brother Beadwulf was in love with her. He had taken an oath of celibacy, which is one of the more stupid things that Christians demand of their monks, but squirrel-faced Wynflæd had proven far stronger than Beadwulf’s solemn promises to his nailed god. “I married her, lord,” he confessed as he crouched at my feet.

“So you’re no longer a monk?”

“I’m not, lord.”

“But you’re dressed as a monk,” I said, nodding at his scorched habit with its grubby black cowl and rope belt.

He shivered, whether out of fear or cold I could not tell. Probably both. “I have no other clothes, lord.”

The squirrel crept out of the hut’s ruins to kneel beside her lover. She lowered her head, then put out a small pale hand and Beadwulf took it. Both of them were shaking in fear. “Look at me, girl,” I ordered her, and the timid eyes, pale blue, gazed at me fearfully. “You’re Saxon?” I asked.