Menewood by Nicola Griffith

Author:Nicola Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

The men of Gwynedd ate around cookfires in the bulging northeastern corner in the wide space between walls. Aldnoth was right: nowhere near the twelvescore Cuthred spoke of. Sheafs of arrows stood in pots by the wall, and throwing spears leaned in triangles. The men wore their mail or leather, but were not yet helmed. If Cadwallon were among them, he looked no different from the others, and she knew of no king who suffered to look the same as his men. He was not here.

* * *

Down by the tree, one of the captured men had a rope tied around his arm, and both hands wrapped around a water bottle.

The other lay slumped in a pool of darkening blood.

Hild looked at Bryhtsige.

“He would not answer my question. The other”—a nod at the man drinking water—“did. And more besides.”

The man was following everything Bryhtsige said with the attention and eagerness-to-please of a beaten dog.

“The lookouts, he tells me, were instructed, in case of an occurrence in the dark, to shoot a burning arrow as a signal. If, as they all believed to be more likely, nothing occurred, then they would be relieved before undern.” The curious new rhythms of Bryhtsige’s speech were more pronounced. Learnt, like these methods, from his captors?

“No password or secret sign?”

“He says not.”

The man with the water nodded vigorously, or as vigorously as he dared. By now he would know that should he prove a liar the unearthly Anglisc would tie his hands together and unbind his arm, and he would be as good as dead before he took a breath.

“He said also that two of Craven’s scouts—clumsy fellows, by his account, poorly concealed—watched them enter the fort. But they were left unharmed, for the lord Cadwallon wishes the lord Osric to have word of their number.”

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