Out of the Dawn Light by Alys Clare

Author:Alys Clare [Clare, Alys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2011-04-01T06:00:00+00:00

We did the journey in three marches. That night we slept deep in woodland just short of the road we’d been heading for and the next night we were on the fringe of the Thetford Forest. Early in the evening of the third day, we were approaching the place where our roads diverged.

‘I’m not coming all the way to Aelf Fen,’ I said wearily. The idea of the long miles I still had to cover before I reached Icklingham was daunting but it was even further to Aelf Fen. I’d been tempted to go on to the village with Sibert and knock on my aunt Edild’s door to beg a bed for the night – after all, I’d used her as my excuse for absenting myself from Goda’s house – but I thought I had better not involve her in any other way. If Goda ever checked up on me, that would be a different matter but otherwise, the less anybody knew about where I’d been and why, the better. As far as Edild and everyone else in Aelf Fen were aware, I was over in Icklingham looking after my sister.

Sibert and I stood eyeing each other. We had shared so much and we had done a momentous thing. Were we thieves, in the eyes of the law? I did not know. Romain would say that we were, and only a couple of weeks before he would have had some justification, in that what Sibert carried in his leather bag had been hidden on Romain’s land. But now the king had taken the manor and everything in it, so in truth, I supposed, we had stolen from him.

It was alarming, to say the least.

I reassured myself with the thought that morally, if in no other way, the crown belonged to Sibert as the descendant of the man who had made it. I had longed to ask him about this all the long miles of our journey home but he had changed. The Sibert who possessed the crown – or, more likely, it was the crown that possessed him – was not a man of whom you could ask unwelcome questions, and every sense told me that this was not a matter he wished to discuss with me.

I turned away, leaving him standing at the crossroads, and headed off down the track to Icklingham. I was dog tired, my feet ached, I was hungry, thirsty, filthy dirty and my face was hot and prickly with sunburn. I had done what I had been asked, and what had I got for my troubles? Nothing.

I trudged on, deep in self-pity.

But then as I drew near to my destination and at last a proper bed to sleep in, I realized that I was wrong. I had got something, and its value far outweighed money or treasure.

Romain – who, I admitted to myself, I liked so much that it felt like love – had been in deadly peril. Death had shadowed him and I had seen its black cloud over his handsome head as we stood by the sea sanctuary.

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