'What did you use to close the wound?' I asked with a shudder.
Her lip curled as she lifted the ragged hem of her tunic from which she had pulled a thread to sew up the slash, and I caught a glimpse of her torn underclothes. 'It could have been prettier, but I left my best linen in Mercia.'
'I am sorry, Cynethryth,' I said, taking her hand and squeezing it. A wave of pain flooded my back. 'I'm sorry for what we did.'
She pulled her hand away. 'You are heathens. You do what you do. You are like beasts, wild creatures with no fear of the Lord's judgement.' She pointed a finger at me. 'But you should fear it, Raven.' I thought I saw the same hatred in her eyes that had been in Weohstan's.
'Then why did you save my life?' I asked. 'You could have run. Left me to those shit-faced whoresons.'
'I could have,' she said simply. Then she sat back against the trunk and looked out through a narrow slit at the black forest beyond. Somehow, she had hauled my heavy, mailed, unconscious body through that opening. 'I am a woman,' she said, 'but that does not mean I do not know what honour is. You men wear your precious honour like an ermine cloak, but you do not own all of it.'
'But you hate me, Cynethryth.'
'You came for me,' she said. Then she shrugged and peered out through the split again. 'You came.'
'No.' I shook my head. 'Weohstan came for you. I came for the book.' Just then a loud crack echoed off the forest trees and we held our breath. For a long time we stayed silent in the damp darkness of the hollow oak, afraid that the Welsh were prowling the forest. Then we slept.
In the morning, Cynethryth smeared a fresh poultice of herbs, crushed leaves and clay across the cut in my back and we ate the berries and nuts she had gathered in my helmet before dawn.
'You will need some meat to build up your strength,' she said, screwing up her face as she chewed a bitter berry. 'A man can't live on these.'
'The ones picked from the south side of the bushes are the sweetest,' I said, pouring a fistful of greenish berries into my mouth. 'They get more sunlight.'
'I know that, lord,' she said mockingly, and I shrugged, chewing the gritty fruit. It was a bright morning and our hiding place inside the old oak did not seem so safe now that daylight poured in through the split.
'You haven't speared me a boar for breakfast?' I asked with a weak smile, baiting the girl when I should have been thanking her. 'Thór's teeth, I shall never wed you, woman.' But Cynethryth had no smiles for me this morning.
'Do you think he is alive?' she asked. The gospels of Saint Jerome sat in her lap. I shifted back, afraid of the thing with its jewelled cover and hidden secrets. 'Speak truthfully, Raven. Whatever you believe.'
I tore my eyes from the holy book and looked into Cynethryth's. 'I believe he is dead, Cynethryth,' I said softly. 'After what we did to them . . .' I shook my head. 'Those bastards would have finished him.' In truth I thought there was another possibility and that was that the Welsh might have taken Weohstan for ransom or surety against Mercian raids. But they might just as easily torture him to death. Cynethryth did not need false hope and so I made her believe he was dead. Cynethryth's green eyes filled with tears, and when she closed them the tears spilled down her dirty face.
We stayed in the hollow old oak one more night, and that night Cynethryth found a dead raven by the tree. She took one of its wings and plaited it into my long hair so that the glossy feathers shone in the moonlight. 'Now you really are a Raven,' she had said, the ache of losing Weohstan dulling her eyes like a skin of ice. 'Now we can fly away. Far away.' I did not feel as though I would be able to walk properly, let alone soar like a bird, but I thanked her anyway.
'You sound like a pagan,' I had accused her, and she had made the sign of the cross then, but she left the raven's wing in my hair and I thought I would never untie it and one day it would be no more than a stinking, rotten scrag.
We ventured out into the forest then, hoping the Welsh war band had given up searching for us. They had already taken much Mercian silver from Glum and with any luck they would have slipped back into their own lands beyond King Offa's wall. I was weak, but Cynethryth said the wound in my back was healing well given that I was trudging across difficult ground instead of resting in straw. We were heading south. After all that had happened, I still had the book and I knew I must fulfil Jarl Sigurd's part of the bargain by putting the treasure in Ealdorman Ealdred's hands, for only then would Serpent and Fjord-Elk be returned to us. Though what I would do with two longships, I did not know. But for Sigurd's honour and perhaps my own too, Ealdred would have the book. I would have my freedom.