The room quieted.
“I’ve watched people run toward danger because someone they loved was still inside. I’ve watched them refuse to leave because they were frightened of losing everything they owned. I’ve seen men twice your size become helpless because smoke turned the world black and they couldn’t find a door three feet away.”
Her hand curled once then opened.
“I know what fear does.”
That was the moment I believed her. Not the strange cloth, the stranger speech, or the way she had appeared from the coast. But I believed she had walked through fire. Some truths mark a person too deeply to be false.
Leofric leaned toward me. “Bind her.”
He spoke quietly. Only I and Godwin heard.
“She knows too much of our paths already.” His jaw tightened. “She comes from the enemy.”
“She ran from them.”
“So she says.”
I looked across the room where Darcy had gone back to the dirt. She was making Godwin name every route into the forest. The elder resisted each question as though surrendering a tooth, but he answered.
Wystan had moved closer. So had two of the women.
“What if the river rises?” Darcy asked.
“It will not,” Godwin said.
“What if it does?”
“It will not.”
Darcy looked at him. Godwin glared as she waited until at last, he sighed.
“There is higher ground east.”
“Good. Who knows that?”
I nearly smiled.
Leofric saw it. “My lord.”
The warning in his voice hardened me. I had no time to be charmed by a stranger. Outside these walls, William of Normandy was unloading an army.
King Harold had bled his men in the north. My own fighters were weary. The village looked to me. Every soul beneath every roof. The children, the old, and the men who had survived Stamford Bridge and those too young to have gone.
Aelfwyn had once told me I counted every danger before I counted a single blessing.
I had told her danger killed folk. She had told me so did forgetting why one meant to live. I remembered the argument because I had lost it. I lost most arguments with my wife. Not that I had admitted it while she lived.
My wife had been dead two winters. I could say the words plainly now. For a long while, I could not say them at all. The fever took her in three days. Three.
I had fought men with axes, broken a man’s arm with my bare hands, had stood in a shield wall while spears struck hard enough to split oak. None of it mattered against a fever.
I stood in the doorway while Aelfwyn burned and shivered and slipped away from me one hour at a time. At the last, she caught my wrist. Her hand had been too hot.
Keep living, she whispered.
I told her I would. She grew angry. Even dying, Aelfwyn could summon fury when she thought me deliberately stupid.
