The village went quiet around them. No hens. No hammer. No children calling from the lane. Even the pig stilled beneath the fence, as if the beast had more sense than half the men in England.
Godwin crossed himself. “William.”
“Aye.” Eadric swallowed. “The duke has come.”
Wulfric looked south, though the forest hid the sea. King Harold had marched north to break the Norseman at Stamford Bridge. Half the men who followed him were dead or weary, the roads churned to mud by marching feet, and now William had come while England still drew breath through broken teeth.
The songs would make courage of it. Songs always did. They never sang of damp barley or frightened children, of old women with bad knees or lame men or dead geese, or of the way every face in a village turned to its lord, thinking he was made of stone.
He was not, but he had learned long ago how to stand as if he were.
“Ring the bell,” he said.
Godwin hesitated. “For council?”
“For all.” Wulfric raised his voice so it carried down the lane. “Bring in the outer herds. No one goes to the fields alone. Hunters to the forest paths. Osric, Edwin—fetch every spear fit to hold and every bow with a sound string. Hild, set the women to packing meal, beans, cheese, salt, whatever can be carried. Anya will know who needs help moving.”
Folk began to move, and in moving, in having a purpose, they steadied. Give fear nothing to do and it would gnaw through a village by nightfall. Give it work, and sometimes it pulled the cart.
Godwin stepped close. “Do you think they will come this far?”
“I think men who cross the sea with horses and fire do not mean to stand upon the shore and admire it.”
“You mean to fight?”
Wulfric looked at the village. At Tova, standing in her doorway with one hand wrapped in her mother’s skirt. At Hild, already shouting orders. At the Reeveson brothers, grim-faced now, the goose forgotten. At the hall Aelfwyn had filled with laughter, candles, and her truly terrible singing.
There was no one else to ask. That was the whole of being lord. Every soul in Ashford could turn to him, and he could turn to no one at all.
“We prepare,” Wulfric said. “We stand if we must. We move the weak if we can. And if the damned Normans come to Ashford, we make them pay for every step.”
Godwin nodded, sorrow sitting deep in the lines beside his mouth. “Your father would have said the same.”
His father had died in a shield-wall, brave and dead and of no further use to anyone. Then he thought of Aelfwyn, fever-bright and fading, her fingers curled around his wrist.
Keep living,she had whispered.Not breathing. Any fool can breathe. Living.
He had not yet learned how.
The bell began to ring, iron on iron, calling Ashford in from its morning.
Wulfric tightened the belt at his waist and felt the small wooden horse tucked there. Broken, but not beyond mending. Not yet.
One
DARCY
Present Day, September — London, England
Most people gotit wrong about fire. They expected it to be loud from the start. The panic was loud, sure enough. People screamed, alarms shrieked, glass cracked, and somewhere a dog always barked itself hoarse. But the fire itself started out quiet and greedy, feeding behind walls, crawling through ceilings, tasting paint and plaster and wiring and wood. By the time you heard it roar, you were already late.
“Stairwell’s compromised,” I said into the radio, voice steady. “Heavy smoke pushing from the first floor. Possible extension to the second. We’ve got one confirmed inside, elderly male, last seen upstairs in the rear bedroom.”
The terraced house sat squeezed between two others on a narrow London street, its brick face blackened above the front windows. Smoke rolled out of the broken glass in thick brown folds, ugly and hot, the kind that told you more was burning inside than anybody outside wanted to admit. Blue lights flashed against the wet pavement, and a woman in a pink dressing gown stood barefoot behind the cordon, sobbing into someone’s coat.
“My dad’s in there,” she kept saying. “Please, my dad’s in there.”
I clipped my mask into place and checked my air. Beside me, Brian tugged once on his glove and looked over.
