“Sigefrith!”
“Young runt!”
“Old Man!” Cynewulf corrected.
“What are you doing inside on such a sunny Midwinter afternoon?” Sigefrith demanded. “I saw Raegan and Liss out there getting their cheeks all rosy just for you!”
Cynewulf ignored this offensive innuendo and smacked his palms down on the two parchments before him.
“Father Matthew says I must learn these Bible verses for tomorrow, since I didn’t get my Latin lesson again.”
Sigefrith whistled. “Nomine patris! Bible verses on an afternoon the Lord God clearly intended for sledding!”
Cynewulf slumped back in his chair and sighed. “Father Matthew is the bane of my existence.”
“Father Matthew is?” the King wailed. “I thought I was! What am I, then?”
“You’re the…” Cynewulf sat up and squealed, “You’re the Dane of my existence!”
Sigefrith planted his hands on his hips and laughed aloud. Delighted, Cynewulf scrambled out of his chair and hurried around to meet him.
“That was a good one, wasn’t it?”
“Damned good, runt! I wish I’d thought to use that one on my old man while he still lived—God rest his bones!”
Sigefrith clapped his entire hand down on the top of Cynewulf’s head and shook it, which was not the same thing as tousling his curls.
“But tell me, runt, what do you want to be when you grow up—a priest or a man, by God?”
At most times Cynewulf was careful not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but sometimes the mighty gale of Sigefrith’s blasphemies simply blew all proprieties away.
“A man, by God!” he cried.
Sigefrith turned Cynewulf’s entire body half-way around by twisting the top of his head. “Then leave these Bible verses and come with me, by God! I’m about to give you a lesson in diplomacy! Where’s your father?”
Cynewulf ducked out from beneath the King’s hand and threw himself at the door. “He’s in his study! Come on!”
Cynewulf galloped down the short corridor and remembered only just in time that his father’s reeve was likely still there. He stopped his hurtling body with both hands against the door frame and then drew back his fist and knocked.
There was an eerie silence in the room. At last, instead of “Enter”, he heard his father call out, “Yes?”
Sigefrith shouted over Cynewulf’s shoulder, “It’s the young runt and the old man!”
“I’m the Old Man!” Cynewulf whined. He heard soft masculine laughter behind the door. He could not quite make out the voices, but he thought his father’s was among them.
Sigefrith reached past Cynewulf to lift the latch. “If you’re the Old Man then what am I?” he demanded.
“The Ugly Man!” Cynewulf said.
Then he remembered his joke of more recent vintage, and ignoring all proprieties and precedence, dashed in ahead of the King to tell his father.
“No, Father, do you know what he is?” he begged.
His father’s smiling gaze went up and up and up beyond him, doubtless to meet Sigefrith’s. “No, son, what is he?”
“I told him how Father Matthew was the bane of my existence, and he said ‘I thought I was so what am I’ and I said ‘You’re the Dane of my existence!’ That’s a good one, isn’t it?”
The bare-walled room echoed with the sound of hearty masculine laughter. Loudest of all was the King’s, laughing at the joke a second time, but Cynewulf heard one voice above the others: his father’s, ringing clear and true as of old. Perhaps it was not so important that there were now so many wrinkles around his eyes.
After catching his breath, his father tried out the new joke by proclaiming it like a herald: “Sigefrith! by grace of God the Dane of our collective existence! In your place, old man,” he added, “I would strike that title upon my every coin.”
“And I just thought of it myself!” Cynewulf cried. Beyond delighted, he skipped up and tugged on Sigefrith’s sleeve.
“And what can we call my father?” he begged, eager to top himself and see his father laugh again. “Father, you’re the… uh…”
Sigefrith promptly supplied, “The shit-stain of my existence.”
Then the squealing laughter Cynewulf heard most clearly was his own, until his father clapped his hands over his face and groaned behind them: “Cynewulf Sebright!”
The dread sound of his own full name was undeniably less menacing when pronounced by a father with a squashed nose. Cynewulf giggled, “What?”
“What do I always tell you?” his father demanded.
Cynewulf whined, “What?”
His father lowered his hands and said wearily, “Never ask that man for a rhyme, son. Just… don’t do it.”
Everyone laughed again—because of something his father had said! His father was not one to laugh too loudly at his own jokes, but even the new wrinkles around his eyes looked suspiciously like the old wrinkles his cheeks made when he smiled.
“But, Father, he’s a genius!” Cynewulf declared. “He has a rhyme for everything!”
The King bent his tall body down to Cynewulf’s height and confided, “It’s just a question of vocabulary, runt.”
“Oh!” Cynewulf breathed. “Will you teach me?”
“Old Man,” his father interrupted, “did I not leave you with some Bible verses to learn?”
“But Father!”
“But Alred!” Sigefrith echoed in the same tone of whine. “Don’t be such a bane!”
“Or anything that rhymes with it!” Cynewulf cried. “Like…”
Sigefrith grabbed him by the top of the skull and gave him a warning shake.
“Now, I promised the runt a lesson in diplomacy, and I mean for him to get it. Eohric…”
The reeve bowed. “Sire?”
“Ah… Huh.” Sigefrith scowled and scratched his head and paused to inspect beneath his fingernails.
Cynewulf looked up at the faces surrounding him, but they were all turned towards the King, respectfully waiting for the royal mind to be decided.
“Well, it wasn’t about that,” Sigefrith finally said, “but she still hasn’t talked. Heard anything from him?”
Eohric shook his head, and Cynewulf’s father said softly, “I don’t like to press him.”
Sigefrith grunted.
Cynewulf supposed the “she” was either Maire or Kraaia, but he could not guess who the “him” was, or what he might have said, or how he might have been pressed.
He sent a pleading stare at Conrad, who was only thirteen after all, and might be expected to be on his side. But the men young and old all looked at one other or at the King, weaving a wreath of glances that they held up high above Cynewulf’s ten-year-old head.
“I suppose we have a few more days yet,” Sigefrith muttered. He nodded at Eohric and said, “Thank you.”
Cynewulf stepped aside to let the reeve pass. For an awkward moment, he noticed, nobody looked at anybody, and most particularly not at him.
After Eohric closed the door, Sigefrith tossed his head towards it and asked, “Was that what that was about?”
“That was about two purses stolen down at the market,” Cynewulf’s father said.
“Hmm.” Sigefrith scratched his beard. “Life goes on, I suppose.”
“So what is this about?” his father demanded.
Sigefrith countered the surprising curtness of his father’s reply with a warm chuckle and a pat to the top of Cynewulf’s curly head.
“This is about giving this young runt a lesson in diplomacy. Watch closely now, Old Man—I shall only attempt this once.”
“Everyone stand back,” Cynewulf’s father sighed. Cynewulf giggled.
Sigefrith cleared his throat, bowed slightly, and said, “Alred, I should like to borrow your daughters for the night.”
“His what?” Conrad laughed. “That is quite possibly the least diplomatic question I have ever heard!”
Sigefrith whacked Conrad across the chest with the back of his arm.
“Nonsense, runt! I can see that you, too, are a rank beginner at this business. Basic diplomacy! Scare your man shitless by asking for far more than you need, and he’ll be so grateful when you scale it back that he’ll gladly give you more than he would have if you had asked outright. And if you do it right, he’ll even congratulate himself for talking you down! Are you paying attention, runt?” he asked Cynewulf.
“But it won’t work if you tell him that!” Cynewulf protested.
“Watch, I said! What I meant to say, Alred, was that I should like to invite young Condal to supper, but I have come to understand that inviting Condal without Gwynn is like inviting a turtle without its shell.”
Cynewulf laughed, but neither Sigefrith nor his father appeared to be joking any longer, and their quiet conversation went back and forth over his head.
“What do you want with poor Connie?” his father asked. “She’s grieving tonight.”
Sigefrith shook his head. “Come, Alred. No. Malcolm says she hardly knew the lady. I’m not asking her to dance or sing, only to eat her supper—which, I understand, even grieving girls must do.”
Cynewulf saw his father’s eyelids flutter. From where he stood he could not be certain, but it looked like his father had performed the forbidden gesture of rolling his eyes.
“Then what do you want with her?” his father demanded.
“To oblige my guest.”
“Who is?”
“Young Aed.”
Cynewulf’s father squinted up his face as if he were about to explode into a roar, but in the end he only let his breath out in a sigh.
“So he finally came.”
“He finally came,” Sigefrith agreed.
They were silent for a moment, as adults could be when each understood the gravity of a thing. Cynewulf did not understand, however, and he knew of only one means of finding out.
“Is he quite angry?” he asked.
Sigefrith smiled down at him, though there were wrinkles around his eyes now, too. “Why should he be, runt?”
“Because you locked his daughter up in a room?”
Sigefrith chuckled and roughed up the hair on the back of Cynewulf’s head—almost, but not quite, tousling his curls.
“Not Old Aed. Unlike you and your father, when I say young I mean young.”
“Is it his son?”
“Nooo…” He grasped Cynewulf’s shoulder to hold him still for the lesson. “Listen up. Now, Old Aed does have a grandson and heir of the same name and about the same age, but when men say Young Aed, that’s the man they’re thinking of.” He pointed behind his shoulder with his thumb, towards his own castle.
“How come?” Cynewulf asked. “Because he’s younger?”
“No… Because he’s Aedier.”
Cynewulf lifted his brows and looked dubiously up at him, but Sigefrith only nodded as though he considered he had just said something profound.
“He cannot have learned already,” Cynewulf’s father muttered.
Sigefrith looked away, and his face seemed to soar up even higher than his own towering height should have allowed: he was utterly, unreachably grown-up again.
“He knows now, but he never met Domnall on the road, praise God. That’s the last thing I need—for the old one to find out I’ve the young one here.”
“So what does he want?”
“Condal.”
Cynewulf’s father snorted and stomped, and his eyelids fluttered dangerously again.
“To meet her,” Sigefrith said, “or so I gather from the many times he has already inquired about her health and condition, and wondered when he might chance to greet her, to the entire exclusion of his other cousins in residence. From the maw of young Master Reynard, such artlessness can only be intentional. And from what Malcolm deduces from the route he took to get here, he looks to be taking a tour of potential brides.”
“And you want to introduce him to my daughters!”
Sigefrith hesitated only an instant, but an instant too long. Cynewulf’s father shouted, “No!”
“God’s wounds, Alred!” Sigefrith groaned. “I don’t mean to tuck them all into bed together and put out the lights! Supper, for Christ’s sake! At Eadie’s table! There won’t be mistletoe, there won’t be dancing, there won’t be anything but a pheasant pie and a roast pig and a bit of conversation in a language your daughters don’t even speak! One would think you’d never visited a court before!”
“I believe Connie has had her fill of amorous young gentlemen in kilts these last days,” Cynewulf’s father said in a sour voice. “And I use the word gentlemen broadly.”
“Damn it, Alred, it’s Young Aed! What would you have me do? Deny him what? Why? An introduction? Because of your own God damned delicacy?”
“Send him to me and I shall explain.”
“Explain what? You aren’t the girl’s guardian.”
“Nor are you!”
As soon as he said it, Cynewulf’s father winced and reflexively lifted his shoulder, as if his shield were on his arm and he expected a blow.
“And who is?” Sigefrith asked coldly. “Try telling him that and he’s likely to want to carry her off to rescue her.”
Cynewulf’s father shook his head.
“Explain what?” Sigefrith demanded again. “Why should I refuse to indulge him in something so harmless unless I meant to insult him? Why, Alred? What would you have me do? Two weeks ago I would have known what to do with him. Two weeks from now I would have known what to do with him. But I can’t afford to insult that young man now. Two weeks from now he and Gog may be the only allies I have left up north. If I have him at all.”
Cynewulf wondered what was supposed to happen in two weeks, but the Sigefrith who spoke in such a tone was not the Sigefrith who called him runt and shook him by the head, and he was a little afraid.
“Aed may already be in a stew if he’s learned that my idiot of a son went straightaway from his hall to pay a visit to his own sworn enemy—and God grant he returns safely so I can skin him alive!—but this business with Maire could be the end of everything. My only hope may be to crack that clan down the middle and keep the lesser half.”
Cynewulf’s father asked wearily, “Why can’t you simply send her home to her father and pretend she never happened?”
Sigefrith sighed. “You know why, Alred.”
“I know, I know…”
But Cynewulf did not know, and to his own surprise he blurted, “Why?”
Sigefrith clapped his palm to his forehead and rubbed it briskly, though when he lifted his hand away his face appeared to have more wrinkles than before. But then he looked down on Cynewulf and smiled.
“I was supposed to be giving you a lesson on diplomacy, wasn’t I, runt? Well, listen up. First of all, we have laws, and even a king ought never to disregard them if he can help it. It’s like pulling on a loose thread—you can get away with it a few times, but eventually your whole damned shirt will start to unravel, and you’ll be going around naked before long.”
Cynewulf tried to giggle, but Sigefrith did not pause.
“More importantly—here’s the diplomacy part, runt—I call myself a king and Old Aed doesn’t, that’s all. We’re allies, one might say, and we can ask each other anything, but if ever Aed demands something of me, I must say no. And he knows it, too, so if he demands I send Maire back to Scotland… that will be his way of telling me it’s the end. That’s all.”
He then addressed Cynewulf’s father by name, but he continued in the same gentle tone, making Cynewulf wonder to whom he had truly been speaking all along.
“Alred, if Aed’s capable of forgiving me for what my son did to him and for what I did to his daughter, I can certainly get away with showing that young man back there the courtesy of inviting his pretty little cousin to dine ever-so-chastely at his side. And if Aed’s not going to forgive it… then I had damned well better show that young man every courtesy I can. Half of Aed’s ships are in his hands.”
Cynewulf looked up at Conrad. He was almost surprised when Conrad looked down at him.
Conrad whispered, “Have you ever heard Sigefrith call anyone a young man?”
Cynewulf tried to remember an occasion, but Conrad looked away at once, as if the question required no answer. Even his thirteen-year-old face was already cloaked in a grown-up fog.
“Sigefrith,” Cynewulf’s father said, “now that he’s learned the trouble you’re in, have you considered the possibility that rather than you dividing that clan down the middle, young Master Reynard will be looking to drive a wedge between you and Aed?”
Sigefrith’s expression changed slightly, but from his height Cynewulf could only see that it soared off higher than ever.
“Alred, if I am the diplomat I believe myself to be, I shall contrive to do the former, and make that young man believe he has succeeded in the latter. And he will likely attempt to perform the same trick on me. Advanced diplomacy, gentlemen. I hope you will all be paying attention.”
Alred had better start getting better fast, or Cynewulf is going to start getting horribly worse.
So, uh, basically Sigefrith is hoping something will come up that will allow him to let Maire go (somewhere) while still saving face. Most likely that something could come from Aed, from Aengus, or have something to do with Egelric.
I'm too exhausted to write it again. But I appreciate the comments, and thanks for keeping me on my toes and giving me something to think about.
on St. Patrick's Day.
Chapters
Sorry I don't have a preview banner just yet. I'm plum out of pictures! I hope to take pictures for the next chapter tomorrow morning and will try to stay on schedule with the updates.
For now, you'll just have to imagine a close-up of Finn looking all... "What the hell just happened here?" That's probably what the preview will prove to be.