Naturally, she protested. “I can walk.”
“Aye,” he said. “Later.”
Behind us, the southern edge of the camp erupted as flame climbed one shelter, caught the next, and raced across the dry roofs faster than anyone who hadn’t seen fire move before could believe.
We went toward the north trail. People stumbled, coughed, cried, swore, and dragged one another through the trees while the smoke followed, yet the path remained open because the children had gone first, the wounded were moving, and no one stood in the clearing thinking about going back for their belongings.
By the time we reached the ridge above the second camp, what we had built below us was burning. Wulfric stood beside me after Gilda had been carried to safety, and firelight moved across the hard lines of his face.
He had lost the ground, the shelters, the stores we couldn’t carry, and everything he had believed it was his duty to defend. Yet below us, through the trees, I could hear children crying, women calling out, and men beginning the count.
“They took the camp,” he said.
“Yes.”
His jaw tightened, and for a long moment I thought he might turn back toward the fire simply because every part of him had been taught that retreat was something a lord survived only by never ordering it.
“But not the people.”
“No.” We watched as the fire roared higher behind us, bright enough to stain the smoke red, and after a few minutes, Wulfric turned his back on everything he had lost, and looked forward.
Eleven
WULFRIC
By nightfall,I had counted the living four times, and although the number remained stubbornly unchanged, I could not bring myself to trust it.
I had counted men after battles before, standing ankle-deep in mud while blood dried black upon shields and the wounded called for mothers who had been dead twenty years. I knew how easily a name might be spoken once, twice, five times before someone finally admitted the man who bore it would never answer.
Yet here, beneath a ridge thick with beech and oak while smoke from the camp stained the southern sky, the number held.
Three dead.
Seven badly wounded.
Others were cut, bruised, burned, or shaken badly enough that they would wake screaming for many nights to come, but the children had survived, as had the old folk and nearly every man and woman who had entered the forest camp that morning believing it might keep them safe.
Behind me, what we had built was burning. It was not Ashford itself, though I knew better than to take comfort from that, for the Normans had come too near and would almost certainly search farther before they were done. The hall might still stand, along with the houses and byres, Aelfwyn’s herb patch beneath the southern wall, the carved lintel my grandfather had set over the door, and all the hundred small things a man never thought to cherish until he imagined them blackened by fire.
Yet the first camp was gone. The shelters my people had raised with their own hands, the stores we had carried from Ashford, the pots, blankets, tools, and winter grain we had been forced to leave behind had become flame and smoke before sunset, and now people who had already fled one home were huddled beneath trees, trying to make another before the cold settled fully over the forest.
“My lord.”
Godwin came to stand beside me, his gray beard darkened with soot and one sleeve torn nearly from the shoulder.
I looked him over. “You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
Glancing down, I was forced to concede the matter. My mail was streaked with mud and blood, my cloak had vanished somewhere during the retreat, and the front of my tunic bore a fresh tear where a Norman spear had come near enough to remind me that death sometimes missed through carelessness rather than mercy.
The old man lowered himself onto a fallen trunk with a groan, and I sat beside him in silence while the cold deepened and the sounds of the people drifted up from the camp.
Small fires had been hidden between banks of earth, their flames kept low lest the Normans see the glow through the trees. Women wrapped children in wool blankets as men hauled waterfrom the stream. Somewhere a baby cried, someone else cursed over the proper place to dig the latrine trench, and an old woman loudly informed anyone willing to listen that she had survived sixty winters without sleeping on the ground and saw no reason to begin now.
Life, I had discovered, was remarkably stubborn. Kingdoms could fall, armies could burn homes, and men could die with songs unfinished upon their lips, yet someone would still complain about the bedding.
A sudden commotion rose near the northern path, and I turned just as a boy came racing through the trees.
