Osferth gazed at the enemy. Sköll was in the center of their line, looking huge in his great fur cloak, and next to him was a slim rider with long white hair and a long white beard wearing a pale robe that fell to his stirrups. It had to be Snorri, Sköll’s feared sorcerer. He stared at us with his empty eye sockets and I felt the unease of that distant gaze, then he turned his gray horse and rode out of sight beyond the horsemen. Those horsemen carried bright-painted shields, their spear-points caught the winter light, and their horn defied us with its harsh notes. They had stopped some three or four spear-casts from us, but Sköll’s younger men, the brave fools, cavorted on their horses nearer to us, calling out challenges and insults, daring us to face them in single combat.

“Finan?” I said softly, “choose thirty men.”

“What are you doing?” Osferth demanded with some alarm.

“Lord Prince,” I said, using the title to annoy him, “might I remind you that you are in Northumbria? That I am an ealdorman of Northumbria? And that if a lord of Northumbria wishes to hunt pigeons in his own country he does not need the permission of a West Saxon bastard?” I smiled at him after the insult, and he said nothing.

“You are . . .” Father Oda began, then stopped as Osferth held up a hand to check the protest.

“Lord Uhtred only speaks the truth,” Osferth said coldly, “if uncouthly.”

“Finan!” I called, and he trotted his horse to me. “Dismount,” I told him, “and lead your horses back to the wood. Do it slowly.” Then I told him what he would discover in the wood and what he was to do, and Finan just grinned because he was eager for the fight to begin. And there would be a fight because to our left the leafless trees stretched to the crest of the western ridge, and halfway up that slope some pigeons had just clattered through the branches to fly in circles. There were men there. I could not see them because the underbrush was thick on the slope, but I knew they were there. Sköll had pulled his scouts off the eastern ridge, but had left men on the western hill, and those men were now coming slowly and cautiously down the long wooded slope. They believed we had not seen them, that we only had eyes for Sköll and his main force, but the startled pigeons had betrayed their presence.

Osferth was a clever man, as clever as his father King Alfred, but clever is not always cunning. He had formed a shield wall because his scouts had told him I was approaching. He did not make the wall because he expected me to attack him, but because he wanted to look resolute and strong. He evidently had some message for me from Æthelstan, and it did not take cleverness on my part to know what that message was. Osferth had decided that this was not to be a meeting of old friends, but a harsh demand that I submit myself to Æthelstan’s authority, and so the shield wall was meant to impress me.