The Price of Blood. Patricia Bracewell

experience. When he had first wearied of his Norman bride, Elgiva had kept him spellbound for many a month. Her father had been behind that, he was certain. And Ælfhelm was likely using Elgiva now to snare some powerful ally among the disgruntled lords of the north. To what purpose he could not say, but he could make a very good guess. The men north of the Humber had never liked bending the knee to southern kings. It would take little to push them into betraying the oaths they had made to the House of Cerdic.

      Betrayal. That might very well be the evil that Wulfstan’s prophet saw boiling over the land.

      He glanced down at the gathering before him, to where the queen’s women sat at a table just below the dais. Ælfhelm’s troublesome vixen of a daughter should have been among them, and when he could not find her he breathed a quiet curse. When Wulfstan had been drawn from the table by a cluster of priests, Æthelred turned to Emma.

      ‘Where is the Lady Elgiva?’ he asked.

      Emma’s green eyes considered him with innocent surprise. ‘I presume she is still in Northampton, my lord. You gave her leave to attend the wedding of her cousin Aldyth to Lord Siferth of Mercia.’

      Christ, he had forgotten. But that had been a month ago, when the court had been at Sutton and Ælfhelm’s estate but two days’ ride away. Since then the queen had gone on pilgrimage, and the court had moved here to Wiltshire.

      ‘So she never joined you on pilgrimage?’ he asked.

      ‘No, my lord. I expected to find her here upon my return.’

      He frowned. ‘I should have been told that she was still in Northampton.’ Ælfhelm had had his she-whelp with him for a month. Christ alone knew what mischief they were up to. He glanced at Emma. ‘Wulfstan suspects that there is something amiss in the north. I’ll wager half my kingdom that Ælfhelm is at the bottom of it and that Elgiva may have a role to play in his schemes.’ Jesu, it might indeed cost him half his kingdom.

      Disgusted with himself, his queen, his archbishop – and with God more than all the rest – he stood up, calling for a light bearer to lead him to his chamber. He would send a messenger to Ælfhelm tonight commanding his entire family’s attendance at the Easter court. The ealdorman’s response would direct his next move.

      As he stalked from the hall, he ignored the men and women of his household, for his gaze was turned inward as he considered all that the archbishop had said, and all that he had hinted. Wulfstan’s counsel may not have given him much insight into Ælfhelm’s mind, but he had other tools besides the archbishop – other eyes watching whatever events might be unfolding in the north. He would discover what treachery Ælfhelm and his offspring were plotting, and then he would find a way to stop it. He would strike, he vowed, before his enemies and their foreign-born allies could tear his kingdom away from him.

       Chapter Three

       March 1006

       Aldeborne Manor, Northamptonshire

      When Elgiva learned that a messenger had arrived bearing missives from the king to her ealdorman father, she did not wait for a summons to the hall to hear the news. Such a summons, she knew, might never come. Her father liked to flaunt his power by being niggardly with information.

      So, with a servant girl at her back bearing a cup and a flagon of mead strong enough to loosen even a giant’s tongue, she entered the great hall, where her father had been meeting men from his various estates. Reeves, grooms, armourers, huntsmen, and their underlings – perhaps a score of men all told – stood in groups about the chamber waiting for an interview with their lord.

      Whenever her father was in residence the hall was peopled almost exclusively with such men, and he would not suffer her to stay among them for long. Since she had returned here from her cousin’s nuptials, he had kept her mewed up, out of the sight of these fellows in case someone should look at her with covetous glances.

      In his zealous regard for her chastity her father seemed to have forgotten that once, hoping to gain greater influence over Æthelred, he had turned a blind eye while she had been the king’s leman for near a year. No doubt he had expected, as she had, that the king would set aside his Norman bride and wed her. But Emma and the bishops had persuaded the king that his queen could not be easily disposed of and, to Elgiva’s father’s fury and her frustration, the king’s ardour towards her had cooled and she had gained nothing from the dalliance but a few golden trinkets.

      Since then Æthelred had shared his bed with an assortment of favourites whose kin were far less prominent than her own, while she was kept like a caged bird under the queen’s watchful eye. And now, even worse, she was spending her days and nights here, fettered by her father’s far too rigorous protection.

      As she made her way through the crowded chamber she searched for her father and found him standing in a narrow beam of sunlight that spilled through one of the hall’s high, glazed windows. She tried to gauge his mood from the expression on his face, but it told her nothing. Like his temper, his countenance was ever cold, dangerous, stone-hard, and grim. He was a fearful man to look upon – his face seamed and roughhewn, as if it had been carved from rock that had been cracked and broken. His black hair, coarser than hers but just as thick and curly, was shot through with skeins of white, and the once-black beard was mottled with grey. He was not a gentle man, as likely to greet her with a cuff as with a kiss, although he would welcome the honey wine readily enough.

      She took the brimming cup from the servant and, walking boldly forward, she offered it to him.

      ‘Good day, my lord,’ she said, casting a slantwise, inquisitive glance at the parchment in his hand that bore the king’s seal.

      Her father took the cup, drank deeply, fixed her with a steady gaze, and said – nothing.

      She waited, silently cursing him for this little show of power over her. He knew what she wanted, yet it amused him to make her wait upon his pleasure.

      He drank again, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and waved the parchment at her.

      ‘I suppose, daughter,’ he said, ‘that you wish to learn what news the king has sent me, eh?’ He bent towards her with a sneer. ‘Trust me, lady, it is of no consequence to you.’ He tossed back the rest of the mead and held out the cup to the servant for more.

      Elgiva winced. She had brought the mead to loosen his tongue, not addle his wits. Her father was difficult to deal with when he was sober. He was impossible when he was drunk.

      ‘Yet it is news,’ she said, careful to keep her voice mild despite the seething anger his bullying always sparked in her. ‘I would be glad to hear it.’ She smiled at him, but he responded with his usual scowl.

      ‘The king’s second son has died,’ he said, carelessly tossing the parchment to the floor.

      She stared at him, willing his bald statement to be a lie even as it echoed in her head. She had thought to wed an ætheling – either Athelstan or Ecbert – for it had been foretold to her that she would one day be queen. How else could that come about if not by an alliance with either the king or one of his sons? But the king, tied as he was to his whey-faced queen and her half-Norman brat, had gone beyond her reach. And now, if her father spoke true, Ecbert, too, had been taken from her.

      ‘I don’t believe, it,’ she whispered. ‘He was well enough at Christmas. What happened to him?’

      ‘The missive does not say.’ He shrugged. ‘The king has sons enough. He’ll not miss this one overmuch.’

      ‘Even so, it will mean a dismal feasting at the Easter court.’ Still, Athelstan would be there and would perhaps need consolation in the wake of his brother’s death.

      ‘That, too, is of little consequence to you,’ her father replied, ‘for neither you nor I will be attending