He took the baby from me, handed her to Edith without looking away from my face, then seized my shoulders.
I had never seen him that angry.
“You went back.”
“I had to.”
“Nay.”
The word came out rough enough to cut. Behind him, everyone had gone very quiet. Wulfric pulled me farther from the others, though not nearly far enough for privacy.
“There was a child.”
“There is always someone.”
His hands were still on my shoulders.
“You think I don’t know that?” I wiped the soot from my face.
“You think that means you must be the one to go.”
“I was the one who could,” I yelled.
“And if you had not returned?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Wulfric’s voice dropped. “What then, Darcy?”
I thought of Brian’s radio going silent, of standing outside the warehouse while men went in looking for him, and of every second stretching until hope became knowledge. For the first time, I understood the story from the other side. Someone waiting, listening, not knowing whether the person they loved would come back.
Wulfric’s face blurred.
“You are not only the hands that save them,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
Before I could answer, Godwin came running up the slope.
“My lord.”
Wulfric turned but didn’t release me.
Godwin’s face was grim.
“Riders on the south road. Normans.”
The forest burned behind us. Ahead, somewhere beyond the eastern ridge, our people waited beside the stream with nothing but what they could carry.
Wulfric said, “We have no more ground to surrender.”
And for the first time since I’d fallen into 1066, the question was no longer how to escape what was coming. It was how to build something strong enough to survive it.
Sixteen
WULFRIC
By the timethe Norman riders reached us, I had decided that I would not let them burn the settlement, that I would not waste the lives of my people defending ground we could not possibly hold, and that, should their commander prove to be one of those men who valued pride above profit, I would kill him before the others had time to cut us all down.
It was not, in truth, a particularly good plan, but after the past month I had learned to appreciate a plan merely for existing.
