Prologue
WULFRIC
September, 1066 — Ashford, Sussex
Every daybefore he broke his fast, Wulfric stood in the doorway of his hall and counted the things that could kill his people. Not aloud. A lord who muttered at the dawn would soon have his folk whispering that grief had cracked his wits. So he counted in silence as morning crept over Ashford in a thin wash of silver.
Three cows were coughing in the lower byre. Two sacks of barley had gone damp where the roof leaked over the store loft. One broken cart axle. Five men still limping from the fighting in the north. A dozen boys old enough to think themselves men and young enough to die proving it. And to the south, hidden beyond wood and field, the sea, were rumors no man in Sussex wished to hear.
Below him the village stirred. Smoke rose from the thatch, hens scratched and fussed in the mud, and a pig rooted beneath a fence as if it meant to reach Denmark by midday. Ashford sat tucked in a fold of land between forest and slope, too small tomatter to kings. Once he had counted that a blessing. Now he wondered if any such place remained in England.
Aelfwyn would have told him to stop staring holes in the morning and come eat before he turned sour enough to curdle the ale.
He heard her voice so clearly he turned his head, foolish as a green boy, but the hall stood empty behind him. There were rushes on the floor, shields along the wall, and the fire still banked low and red. A loaf of bread wrapped in linen sat on the table beside a wedge of hard cheese and a jug of small ale.
Two winters she had been gone, and still she crept up on him when he least expected it.
“My lord?”
Godwin stood at the bottom of the steps, gray beard neatly combed, though the rest of him looked as if one of the tavern wenches had spent the night using him for sport.
“What trouble now?” Wulfric asked.
“’Tis the Reeveson sons. At one another again.”
Wulfric closed his eyes for the space of one breath. “Land?”
“A goose.”
“Saints preserve us from men with too much blood and too little work.”
Godwin’s mouth twitched, though he was wise enough not to smile. “The goose is dead.”
“Then the goose has found peace before the rest of us.”
By the time Wulfric reached the muddy lane between the baker’s house and the Reeveson yard, half the village had gathered, wearing the solemn faces of folk who claimed to hate a quarrel and yet never missed one.
The goose lay in the middle of the lane, its neck at a sorrowful angle, white feathers splattered with mud.
Osric Reeveson had one hand fisted in his younger brother’s tunic whilst Edwin Reeveson had blood on his lip and murder inhis eye. Their mother, Hild, stood nearby with her arms folded, face red from the bakehouse and from her formidable temper.
“He killed my goose,” Edwin said.
“It was in my barley,” Osric snapped.
“It had strayednearyour barley.”
“It had its beak in it.”
“How much barley can one goose take?”
“Enough to vex me.”
Wulfric looked from one brother to the other, then down at the dead bird. “And now it vexes no one.”
Hild made a sharp sound. “It vexes me, my lord. I meant that goose for Martinmas.”
“Then you shall have it sooner.” Wulfric turned to Osric. “You will pay your brother half its worth in barley, and your mother will take the bird for her pot.”
