The chest burns

Egelric was exhausted by the time he arrived home. It was close to dawn, and he had promised Gunnilda to come by around breakfast time. Any other night he would have sat up and read, but when he considered that he had spent the previous night in a barn…

So very much had happened since he and Sigefrith had awoken that morning in the barn at the edge of the valley. He felt as if he had aged a year or two. And he was exhausted. He would have to sleep a few hours.

He set the candle down on the chest and began to undress. That chest. What a beast he had been. What had bothered him the most? Was it that Elfleda’s chest had been opened? or that Gunnilda had been the one to open it?

What had Baby said? Elfleda wouldn’t be angry at him any longer. Well, he wasn’t so sure about that. She still had her claws in him it seemed. And—what a beast he had been. He was becoming just what Elfleda had been—cruel—out of habit, perhaps, as Gunnilda seemed to think. Or could great unhappiness do that to anyone?

It would be good to get away again, after all. He had missed Baby unbearably, but Elfleda was still haunting this house. Finn was still haunting this house. He had felt free when he was out there with Sigefrith—he had felt like a young man again, before he had married and before all of his possibilities had narrowed into one certainty.

He wished he had traveled north to find his grandfather’s people before he had—well, before he had married. It was likely he wouldn’t have come back. Perhaps he would see some of them again soon.

He would just… he would just try to dream about that tonight. What if he had gone north ten years ago? What if he had gone to war alongside his cousins? What if he had married one of their black-​haired sisters and—no, he wouldn’t dream about that. But he would try to dream what might have been, just enough to forget what had.

He woke with a start. Was that smoke? It was fire!

What a fool! He must have left the candle burning on the chest when he fell asleep. Never in his life had he been so stupid, no matter how exhausted he had been. He thanked God that Baby was at Gunnilda’s and ran to the kitchen to get water.

Fortunately the fire hadn’t taken firm hold, and he was able to extinguish it with the water in the kitchen barrel. But the chest was ruined, and when he opened it he found that everything in the right half of the chest had been scorched and ruined as well.

He pawed through the folds of fabric with hands that still trembled. He found the humble tansy that Gunnilda had added, and in the layers below the rarer, sweeter flowers that Elfleda had left behind. There was her wedding dress, ruined, and her first baby’s gowns. There was the shawl she had embroidered with hundreds of tiny white flowers, and which he used to wrap protectively over her shoulders when they went out for a stroll on spring evenings all those years ago. She had always smelled of the lilac and lavender she folded into her gowns—and everything reeked of smoke and tansy now.

He let the lid fall with a loud crack and stood. That was over. These things were ruined—and those few things that weren’t, could he give them to Baby now that he had some idea of how she remembered her mother?

No. They wanted to burn, they would burn.

He jerked his clothes on and then opened the chest again. He took an armful of gowns and headed outside to a spot in the yard where the wind had cleared the snow away, and he tossed them there. He brought out another load and another, dropping tansy stems and lilac petals behind him as he went. Then he took an axe and went back inside to break up the chest itself.

As dawn broke, some of his men began coming out into the yard, and he saw them moving uneasily beyond the firelight. He wondered whether they thought him mad. Perhaps he was.