Ragna said: “Why? We’d be sorry to lose you.”

“I shall have to go and fight the Vikings.” He was pretending to be pleased, but Ragna detected an undertone of fear beneath his bravado. “The king is raising an army to come and defeat Swein Forkbeard.”

Ragna stopped walking. “Are you sure?” she said. “King Ethelred is coming to the West Country?”

“So they say.”

Ragna’s heart leaped with hope. “Then he must surely learn of our imprisonment,” she said.

Elfgar shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Our friends will tell him: Prior Aldred, and Sheriff Den, and Bishop Modulf.”

“Yes!” said Cat. “And then King Ethelred is bound to free us!”

Ragna was not sure.

“Isn’t he, my lady?”

Ragna said nothing.

* * *

“This is our chance to find Ragna,” Prior Aldred said to Sheriff Den. “We must not let the opportunity slip through our fingers.”

Aldred had come from Dreng’s Ferry to Shiring specifically to talk to Den about this. Now he studied the sheriff for his reaction. Den was fifty-eight, exactly twenty years older than Aldred, but they had much in common. Both were rule keepers. Den’s compound testified to his liking for order: his stockade was well built, the houses stood in lines, and the kitchen and dunghill were in opposite corners, as far from each other as possible. Dreng’s Ferry had acquired a similar orderly look since Aldred had taken over. But there were differences, too: Den served the king; Aldred served God.

Aldred went on: “We now know for sure that Ragna never went to Cherbourg. Count Hubert has confirmed that to us and has sent a formal complaint to King Ethelred. Wynstan and Wigelm lied.”

Den’s response was cautious. “I’d like to see Ragna safe and well, and I believe King Ethelred would, too,” he said. “But a king has multiple needs, and the different pressures on him sometimes conflict with one another.”

Den’s wife, Wilburgh, a middle-aged woman with gray hair under her cap, had a more trenchant opinion. “The king should put that devil Wigelm in a prison.”

Aldred agreed with her, but took a more practical line. “Will the king hold court in the West Country?”

“He must,” said Den. “Everywhere he goes, his subjects come to him with demands, accusations, pleas, proposals. He cannot help but hear them, and then people want decisions.”

“In Shiring?”

“If he comes here, yes.”

“Here or elsewhere, he must do something about Ragna, surely!”

“Sooner or later. His authority has been defied, and he can’t let that stand. But the timing is another matter.”

Every answer was maybe, Aldred thought with frustration, but perhaps that was normal with royalty. In a monastery, by contrast, a sin was a sin, and there was nothing to dither about. He said: “Ethelred’s new wife, Queen Emma, will surely be a strong ally to Ragna. They’re both Norman aristocrats, they knew each other when younger, they both married powerful English noblemen. They must have experienced similar joys and sorrows in our country. Queen Emma will want Ethelred to rescue Ragna.”

“And Ethelred would do so, were it not for Swein Forkbeard. Ethelred is gathering armies to do battle, and as always he relies on the thanes to muster men from the towns and villages. It’s a bad time for him to quarrel with powerful magnates such as Wigelm and Wynstan.”

Which boiled down to another maybe, Aldred thought. “Is there anything that could sway the decision?”

Den thought for a moment, then said: “Ragna herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Ethelred meets her he will do anything she asks. She is beautiful and vulnerable, and a noble widow. He will not be able to find it in himself to refuse justice to an alluring woman who has been ill-treated.”

“But that’s our problem. We can’t bring her before him because we can’t find her.”

“Exactly.”

“So anything could happen.”

“Yes.”

“By the way,” said Aldred, “while I was on my way here, Wigelm passed me on the road, going in the opposite direction, with a small group of men-at-arms. You don’t know where he was headed, do you?”

“Wherever he was going, his route must have led through Dreng’s Ferry, for there’s no other place of note on that stretch.”

“I hope he wasn’t intending to make trouble for me.”

Aldred rode home with a worried mind, but when he arrived Brother Godleof told him that in fact Wigelm had not visited Dreng’s Ferry. “He must have changed his mind on the road and turned back, for some reason,” Godleof said.

Aldred frowned. “I suppose so,” he said.

* * *

Aldred heard the army when they were still a mile or more away from Dreng’s Ferry. At first he did not know what he was listening to. It was a noise something like the sound of Shiring city center on market day: the cumulative result of hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, talking and laughing, shouting orders, cursing, whistling, and coughing, plus horses braying and whinnying, and carts creaking and bumping. He could also hear the destruction of foliage on either side of the mud road, men and horses treading down plants, carts rolling over bushes and saplings. It could only be an army.

Everyone knew that King Ethelred was on his way, but his route had not been announced, and Aldred was surprised that he would choose to cross the river at Dreng’s Ferry.

When Aldred heard the din he was at work in the monastery’s new building, a stone edifice housing the school, the library, and the scriptorium. Resting a sheet of parchment on a board on his knees, he was painstakingly copying Saint Matthew’s Gospel in the insular miniscule script used for literature in English. He worked prayerfully, for this was a holy task. Writing out a part of the Bible had a double purpose: it created a new book, of course, but it was also a perfect way to meditate on the deeper meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

He had a rule that worldly developments should never be allowed to interrupt spiritual work—but this was the king, and he stopped.

He closed Saint Matthew’s book, put the stopper back into his inkhorn, rinsed the nib of his quill in a bowl of clean water, blew on his parchment to dry the ink, then put everything back into the chest where such costly articles were kept. He did so methodically, but his heart was racing. The king! The king was the hope of justice. Shiring had become a tyranny, and only Ethelred could change that.

Aldred had never seen the king. He was called Ethelred the Misled, for people said that his fault was to follow bad advice. Aldred was not sure he believed that. Saying that the king was ill-advised was usually a way of attacking the monarch without seeming to.

Anyway, Aldred was not convinced that Ethelred’s decisions were disastrous. He had become king when he was twelve years old, and despite that he had reigned for twenty-five years so far—an achievement in itself. True, Ethelred had failed to inflict a decisive defeat on the marauding Vikings, but they had been raiding England for something like two hundred years, and no other king had done much better against them.

Aldred reminded himself that Ethelred might not be in company with the approaching troops today. He might have diverted on some errand, arranging to rejoin the army later. Kings were not the servants of their own plans.

By the time Aldred stepped outside, the first soldiers were visible on the far bank of the river. Most were boisterous young men carrying homemade weapons, mainly spears with a few hammers and axes and bows. There was a sprinkling of graybeards and a few women, too.

Aldred walked down to the riverside. Dreng was there, looking bad-tempered.

Blod was already poling the ferry across. A few men swam the river immediately, impatient to get across, but most people could not swim; Aldred himself had never learned. One man led his horse into the water and clung to the saddle while the mount swam across, but most of the horses were heavily laden pack animals. Soon a waiting crowd gathered. Aldred wondered how many men there were in total, and how long it would take for them all to cross the river.

The time could have been halved if Edgar had been here with his raft, but he had gone to Combe, where he was helping the monks build town defenses. These days Edgar seized on any excuse to travel, so that he could continue his search for Ragna. He never gave up.

Blod landed on the far side and announced the fare. The soldiers ignored her demand and crowded onto the boat, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. They had little sense of how many the vessel could hold safely, and Aldred saw Blod argue fiercely with several before they reluctantly got off to wait for the next shuttle. When she had fifteen aboard she poled away.

As they reached the near bank, Dreng shouted: “Where’s the money?”

“They say they haven’t got any money,” Blod replied.

The soldiers disembarked, shoving Blod aside.

Dreng said: “You shouldn’t have let them board if they wouldn’t pay.”