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CHAPTER XI

Will ducked in out of the night, through the low door into the entryway of the great hall. He came into the main hall through another low door.

The room went silent. It was like Wild Bill Hickok entering a saloon in a Western movie. Will would have enjoyed it under other circumstances.

He wasn't sure how he'd gotten here. He wasn't sure he wanted to come inside. But the shadowed forest frightened him. The last thing he remembered was his hot coupling with the Old One woman. He wasn't even certain he'd enjoyed it. And if he'd hoped to learn how to get home from here, he'd been badly disappointed.

The benches along the walls were crowded with the jarl's men, feasting at trestle tables. Thrall women moved among them, keeping the ale horns filled.

Midway down the north wall, on Will's left, Jarl Feng rose from his high seat and cried, "Amlodd! Amlodd my nephew, we'd given you up for hill-taken!"

Will stood silent, scratching his head.

"Come up and drink with me, Amlodd!" Feng said. "Tell us what passed with the woman from the sea!"

Will trudged down the rush-strewn hearthway. He climbed up on the bench and sat at Feng's right. He took the horn offered him and drank deeply. His throat was dusty; he needed the drink. The drink, he discovered with a cough, was not ale but mead—a fermented honey drink too strong for a man confused.

"Who was the woman?" Feng asked. "Some say they did not recognize her; others say she looked like Katla."

" 'Twas my mother," said Will. It didn't sound right, but he felt fuddled.

"Your mother? No one said aught about your mother!"

" 'Twas Katla."

"Katla! Did Katla leave the village today?" Feng called out.

"No," said Amlodd's mother from the women's table at the end. "She was here all day. I was with her much of the time. Surely she never went as far as the sea."

" 'Twas one of the Old Ones," said Will.

The room went silent again. Hands crept behind backs as men crossed their fingers against the Evil Eye.

"And what happened with this Old One?" Feng asked.

"We lay together." The words seemed loud in the breathless hall.

"Where did you lie?" Feng asked, hoarse. "Did she take you under the hill with her?"

"We lay on a horse's shoe, and a cock's comb and a bit of roof," said Will. The words sounded familiar. Oh yes, it was Saxo again. So be it.

Whispering, like a swarm of flies over a dead thing, filled the hall. Will sensed he was in danger. He was too weary to care.

"We have a gift for you," said Feng. He clapped his hands and thralls came in carrying a long bundle wrapped in woolen cloth. They offered it to Will, who took it.

He unwrapped the cloth. He found a sword in a sheath there.

"A sword," he said. "It's beautiful."

"Don't you know it?" asked Feng.

"No."

" 'Tis your father's sword. You cut yourself with it, so we made a change to protect you."

Will tried to draw the sword. He couldn't get it free. He looked at it closely and saw that a rivet had been fixed through sword and sheath together.

The hall erupted in laughter. Will's face burned.

Amlodd's mother came and took the sword from Will's hands. " 'Tis naught, son," she said. "We'll hang the sword on the wall in honor of your father."

Feng coughed and took a drink from his horn. To Amlodd he said, "Perhaps you are tired and would go to your house to sleep."

Will clutched his arm. "Not alone!" he cried. "And not in the dark!"

"Gerda, take your son to his house," said Feng to Amlodd's mother. "Guttorm, you go along. But bear this in mind—he's already injured a man, and I'll not have my people put at risk by madmen, even of my blood. If the boy kills anyone, I'll send him to England on a raid. There he may die honorably, or perhaps get his wits back."

Amlodd's mother and Guttorm led him out to the house where he'd woken. Guttorm lit a fish-oil lamp with a bit of flaming stick from the hearth. Will lay down on the bench.

"I dreamed," said Will. "I dreamed I lived in a distant land, where men can fly, and travel at great speeds in carts made of steel, and speak to others across the sea as if face to face. They have lamps without oil there, and no one is sure what the difference between a man and a woman is. And my mother tried to kill me."

"Your mother loves you, my Amlodd," said Gerda, sitting and taking his head in her lap. "She would never do you harm."

"Beware the pearl in the cup, Mother," said Will. He wrapped a blanket around him and curled up to sleep.

He dreamed it again, as he had so many times.

How his mother had wakened him on a Sunday morning, saying, "Get up and get dressed. We have somewhere to go."

He had brushed his teeth and combed his hair, wondering where they could be going. A visit to relatives? Certainly not to church. They never went to church.

When he went downstairs to the kitchen, his mother found fault with his shoes and slapped him. She told him to shine them, "And God help you if you get any polish on your nice white shirt!"

He toiled with the polish and brushes and soft cloth, checked himself desperately in the mirror and recombed his hair, and went down to her again in the kitchen. He was hungry and wondered if she had forgotten breakfast. He didn't dare ask.

When she saw him, she quickly put down the glass from which she'd been drinking. She came close to him and looked him over, running a finger over his wet hair like a Marine officer with white gloves. It was a touch without tenderness.

"I suppose it'll have to do," she said. "Come upstairs with me."

I thought we were going somewhere, he thought to himself, but he said nothing. He had learned never to question her orders. He didn't question them now, even though she told him to lie down on his bed. He started to take off his shoes, because shoes on the bed were grounds for a beating.

"Leave 'em be," his mother said. "Just lay down."

So he lay down, trembling with the strangeness of the thing. How was he supposed to know what to do when the rules kept changing?

Then his mother took a pillow and pressed it down on his face.

"DON'T FIGHT ME!" she cried. "YOU DAMNED DISOBEDIENT CHILD, CAN'T YOU JUST ONCE DO AS YOU'RE TOLD?"

But this time he fought her, terrified of the dark and choking. He thrashed his way out from under the pillow, tore his way out of the clutching hands, and ran downstairs and out to a neighbor's garage, where he crouched in fear for more than an hour, still trying to keep his clothes clean for her.

She hadn't come searching for him. When he had finally returned to the house, not to enter but to peek through a window, he had smelled gas. . . .

When he woke he felt clearer headed. He seemed alone in the house. The hearthlight cast low shadows on the walls, and he knew, though he could not remember, that he had heard someone speak.

"Who's there?" he whispered, crab-walking back to the wall, drawing his belt knife.

"No one's there, but I am here," said a woman's voice. Katla stepped out of the shadows into the half-light.

"Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember'd," said Will.

"I heard you speak of your mother as you slept," Katla said, sinking to the bench. "Tell me of your mother."

"Which mother? My true mother, or my . . .  true mother?"

"You said your mother tried to kill you. I'd know more of this."

"I never speak of it."

"I understand—'tis like a worm under a rock. It grows in the darkness."

"If I turn my rock for you, will you turn yours for me?"

"I cannot share what I do not have. My memory is a ring that fell down the privy. 'Tis there, and I know where it is, but I'll not leap in to fetch it."

"Then why should I dredge for my ring?"

"Because you wish to."

"You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery."

"I am mad and you are mad. We both are mad together. One of a kind knows the other."

Will ran his hands through his hair. She was right. He wanted to speak of it. Far from his home, far from his time, no person in the world could be hurt by his unburdening to this woman.

"I was born in a place called Minnesota, in a distant land," he said.

"Were you free or thrall?"

"Both. We were free in law; we were thrall in our hearts. My father was a thrall to his fears. My mother was a thrall to her past, and to drink.

"My father bore his fears as long as he could, but he could not carry the weight of them. I think my mother wed him because he was weak and could be ruled; yet she hated him for the same reason. She shamed him before outsiders, she shamed him before me. He stood it as long as he could, and one day he was gone.

"Without him to torment she turned to me. I was just like my father, she said. I was nothing and would never be anything. Nothing I did was good. That which was not flawless was a crime, and all crimes were treason.

"One day she dressed me in my best clothes and tried to slay me. I fled her, and she slew herself instead.

"I spent the rest of my childhood in fosterage in the homes of strangers. No one loved me, or if they tried, I would not let them. I've fled love ever since. My own mother could not love me; how can I hope for love from anyone else? It hurts less to push them away than to wait to be pushed."

"But your mother loved you."

"No. You think of Gerda, but that is not the mother I mean."

"No. I meant the mother who tried to kill you. No mother ever did such a thing but out of love."

Will almost snarled. "Love does not kill."

"You are wrong. Love is the murderous thing, and the more love, the more murder. When we love someone more than all, more than life, more than wealth, more than the gods, then we make them our god. We expect them to be as gods to us, to give us what only gods can give. This they cannot do. They always fail. And then we hate them. We may even hate them enough to kill.

" 'Tis for this reason we must make love outlaw. Of all man-slayers, love is cruelest."

"I have been cruel for love," said Will. He laid a hand on her arm, lightly. "Perhaps we should love each other. We are wiser than the sound minds. We'd know not to trust so much to love."

Somehow Katla did not run from these words. Instead she put her face near his and giggled. "Would that not be a sight—a madman and a madwoman, together in incest, with all their mad children?"

They laughed then, long and hard, like a boy and a girl at some silly game. Will had not laughed this way in a very long time. And he had never in his life felt such closeness to a woman.

They lay down together—to sleep, no more—and Will spread his cloak over both of them. She smelled of barley meal and flowers. She was precious. He cherished her. Having her there warmed him, deep in his heart.

They were wakened when their cloak was snatched away. The light from the open door said morning. Guttorm stood over them, eyes wide.

"What have you done together?" he demanded.

"Nothing of shame," said Will. "I would not dishonor my sister."

"Well begone, Katla," said Guttorm, "before tongues begin to wag." The girl dashed out.

"Your mother would speak with you, Amlodd," said Guttorm.

"We shall obey, were she ten times our mother," said Will.

"Ten times?"

"Tell her I'm coming."

"I'll bear you company."

"As you wish."

They walked to the kitchen, a small building hard by the great hall. Guttorm waited outside while Will went in through the entry.

The kitchen had a floor of stone flags and a large hearth in the center. The house had been built over a small rivulet, which ran down the hearthway to one side of the fireplace. Hams and iron pots of various sizes hung from the rafters, along with cleavers and spits. Gerda sat on one of the benches, working at a sock with a single bone knitting needle. She stopped her work and looked up at Will.

"We must speak," she said.

"Now, mother, what's the matter?"

"I need to know. Are you mad or do you feign?"

"I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

She threw her knitting down and stood to face him. "I am your mother! Play not your games with me! If you've set aside our plan, then tell me plainly; if you carry on as you have, I can only believe you've truly lost your wits!"

"Our plan?"

"We are alone, Amlodd. You may speak plainly, so long as you shout not."

Will did not know how to answer.

"I truly know not what you mean, lady," he told her.

"Mad indeed?" asked Gerda. "I feared it—you've been so far unlike yourself; I never marked in you such a gift for snakishness."

He sat beside her on the bench. "Is it true?" he asked. "Did we have a plot, you and I?"

"Dare I tell you? Can I trust a blood secret to a madman?"

"Believe me, lady, I am a fool of silence—nonsense, like bubbles in a well, buoys in me and bursts to air; matters of weight, like gold, sink down and lie secret."

She sat again. "What avails it?" she said. " 'Twas your own plan, whispered to me when first they brought you back from the hunt. We thought to get vengeance for your father by stealth—feigning your madness to lull Feng's fears, then burning him and his men in the hall when the time was right. But what can we do now, when you are mad in truth?"

"The man I am—the man who speaks to you—is not a killer," said Will. The theory of revenge in literature was one thing. To kill men, for an injury not even his own, was another entirely.

"So I feared. What shall we do?"

The noise brought Will to attention before his mind had recognized it. Amlodd's reflexes still functioned. He knew the noise meant danger and he knew where it came from—behind a chest in a corner. He hurried there and found a man crouching in the shadow.

The man pulled a knife and leaped to meet him. Will drew his own, with Amlodd's skill. The spy, whom he recognized as one of those who'd threatened him in the surf, aimed a cut at his ribs and Will did not parry, but leaped backward to avoid the cut, then moved in with a stab as the man's momentum left him with his flank exposed.

The man twisted away and came around in a full circle, aiming a slash at Will's knife arm. Will avoided it by dipping the arm, at the same time grabbing for the man's shirt with his free hand. The man sprang back and slipped on one of the wet stones that lined the rivulet. Will was upon him in a second, straddling him with one knee in the water. Each held the other's knife hand, corded muscles standing out on their necks.

Slowly, with bull-like strength, Will pushed his own knife down toward the man's chest. I can't be doing this, he thought. This is not something I'd do. For just a moment he hesitated, paralyzed by the fear in the man's blue eyes.

Then he drove the knife home. He felt it scrape along a rib—his gorge rising. The man's back arched and he shuddered. He did not die at once. It took a few minutes, as Will restrained him. The horror was compounded by the thoughts in his own head.

Don't fight me, he was thinking. Can't you just once do what you're told? 

The rivulet ran red from the corpse to the outlet under the wall.

A violent shaking overtook him and he swung away from the dead man to sit on the bench with his back turned.

Gerda had been standing, watching. Her face showed no emotion. "If this killing comes out, you'll go to England. It would delay our vengeance long. Can you bear to cover a mankilling?"

"Manslaying is not a thing I take pride in."

"Indeed you are not yourself."

"Go. I'll handle it."

She looked searchingly at him, then went out the door.

Will followed her out and looked around the yard. People were everywhere—there were no idle hours in the steading. The thralls at least were always about at some duty or another. He walked toward the low stone wall that ringed the yard. The rivulet that ran through the kitchen drained into a pond on its other side. He saw that there were bones there, and many two-toed tracks in the mud. He knew those tracks from childhood visits to a farm.

He remembered how Amlodd had concealed the body in Saxo's book. He didn't want to do it that way. But for the life of him he couldn't think of a better one.

He went back into the kitchen house, steeling himself for nasty work.

His mother appeared at the door with a bundle. "You've blood all over your clothing," she said. "Change into these clothes."

"In a moment," said Will, taking them and closing the door on her. "What I'm about to do is best done naked.

"In what sense am I Will Sverdrup?" he wondered as he undressed and knelt by the corpse. "I'm doing things Will would never do." He wondered what it was that defined a man—what he thought or what he did.

The worst part (well, almost the worst) was knowing he'd have to go to England anyway.

So why was he doing this?

Because he had a mother here who loved him, and she wanted it. For her he'd have chopped up the whole village.

Except for Katla.

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Framed

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Contents

CHAPTER XI

Will ducked in out of the night, through the low door into the entryway of the great hall. He came into the main hall through another low door.

The room went silent. It was like Wild Bill Hickok entering a saloon in a Western movie. Will would have enjoyed it under other circumstances.

He wasn't sure how he'd gotten here. He wasn't sure he wanted to come inside. But the shadowed forest frightened him. The last thing he remembered was his hot coupling with the Old One woman. He wasn't even certain he'd enjoyed it. And if he'd hoped to learn how to get home from here, he'd been badly disappointed.

The benches along the walls were crowded with the jarl's men, feasting at trestle tables. Thrall women moved among them, keeping the ale horns filled.

Midway down the north wall, on Will's left, Jarl Feng rose from his high seat and cried, "Amlodd! Amlodd my nephew, we'd given you up for hill-taken!"

Will stood silent, scratching his head.

"Come up and drink with me, Amlodd!" Feng said. "Tell us what passed with the woman from the sea!"

Will trudged down the rush-strewn hearthway. He climbed up on the bench and sat at Feng's right. He took the horn offered him and drank deeply. His throat was dusty; he needed the drink. The drink, he discovered with a cough, was not ale but mead—a fermented honey drink too strong for a man confused.

"Who was the woman?" Feng asked. "Some say they did not recognize her; others say she looked like Katla."

" 'Twas my mother," said Will. It didn't sound right, but he felt fuddled.

"Your mother? No one said aught about your mother!"

" 'Twas Katla."

"Katla! Did Katla leave the village today?" Feng called out.

"No," said Amlodd's mother from the women's table at the end. "She was here all day. I was with her much of the time. Surely she never went as far as the sea."

" 'Twas one of the Old Ones," said Will.

The room went silent again. Hands crept behind backs as men crossed their fingers against the Evil Eye.

"And what happened with this Old One?" Feng asked.

"We lay together." The words seemed loud in the breathless hall.

"Where did you lie?" Feng asked, hoarse. "Did she take you under the hill with her?"

"We lay on a horse's shoe, and a cock's comb and a bit of roof," said Will. The words sounded familiar. Oh yes, it was Saxo again. So be it.

Whispering, like a swarm of flies over a dead thing, filled the hall. Will sensed he was in danger. He was too weary to care.

"We have a gift for you," said Feng. He clapped his hands and thralls came in carrying a long bundle wrapped in woolen cloth. They offered it to Will, who took it.

He unwrapped the cloth. He found a sword in a sheath there.

"A sword," he said. "It's beautiful."

"Don't you know it?" asked Feng.

"No."

" 'Tis your father's sword. You cut yourself with it, so we made a change to protect you."

Will tried to draw the sword. He couldn't get it free. He looked at it closely and saw that a rivet had been fixed through sword and sheath together.

The hall erupted in laughter. Will's face burned.

Amlodd's mother came and took the sword from Will's hands. " 'Tis naught, son," she said. "We'll hang the sword on the wall in honor of your father."

Feng coughed and took a drink from his horn. To Amlodd he said, "Perhaps you are tired and would go to your house to sleep."

Will clutched his arm. "Not alone!" he cried. "And not in the dark!"

"Gerda, take your son to his house," said Feng to Amlodd's mother. "Guttorm, you go along. But bear this in mind—he's already injured a man, and I'll not have my people put at risk by madmen, even of my blood. If the boy kills anyone, I'll send him to England on a raid. There he may die honorably, or perhaps get his wits back."

Amlodd's mother and Guttorm led him out to the house where he'd woken. Guttorm lit a fish-oil lamp with a bit of flaming stick from the hearth. Will lay down on the bench.

"I dreamed," said Will. "I dreamed I lived in a distant land, where men can fly, and travel at great speeds in carts made of steel, and speak to others across the sea as if face to face. They have lamps without oil there, and no one is sure what the difference between a man and a woman is. And my mother tried to kill me."

"Your mother loves you, my Amlodd," said Gerda, sitting and taking his head in her lap. "She would never do you harm."

"Beware the pearl in the cup, Mother," said Will. He wrapped a blanket around him and curled up to sleep.

He dreamed it again, as he had so many times.

How his mother had wakened him on a Sunday morning, saying, "Get up and get dressed. We have somewhere to go."

He had brushed his teeth and combed his hair, wondering where they could be going. A visit to relatives? Certainly not to church. They never went to church.

When he went downstairs to the kitchen, his mother found fault with his shoes and slapped him. She told him to shine them, "And God help you if you get any polish on your nice white shirt!"

He toiled with the polish and brushes and soft cloth, checked himself desperately in the mirror and recombed his hair, and went down to her again in the kitchen. He was hungry and wondered if she had forgotten breakfast. He didn't dare ask.

When she saw him, she quickly put down the glass from which she'd been drinking. She came close to him and looked him over, running a finger over his wet hair like a Marine officer with white gloves. It was a touch without tenderness.

"I suppose it'll have to do," she said. "Come upstairs with me."

I thought we were going somewhere, he thought to himself, but he said nothing. He had learned never to question her orders. He didn't question them now, even though she told him to lie down on his bed. He started to take off his shoes, because shoes on the bed were grounds for a beating.

"Leave 'em be," his mother said. "Just lay down."

So he lay down, trembling with the strangeness of the thing. How was he supposed to know what to do when the rules kept changing?

Then his mother took a pillow and pressed it down on his face.

"DON'T FIGHT ME!" she cried. "YOU DAMNED DISOBEDIENT CHILD, CAN'T YOU JUST ONCE DO AS YOU'RE TOLD?"

But this time he fought her, terrified of the dark and choking. He thrashed his way out from under the pillow, tore his way out of the clutching hands, and ran downstairs and out to a neighbor's garage, where he crouched in fear for more than an hour, still trying to keep his clothes clean for her.

She hadn't come searching for him. When he had finally returned to the house, not to enter but to peek through a window, he had smelled gas. . . .

When he woke he felt clearer headed. He seemed alone in the house. The hearthlight cast low shadows on the walls, and he knew, though he could not remember, that he had heard someone speak.

"Who's there?" he whispered, crab-walking back to the wall, drawing his belt knife.

"No one's there, but I am here," said a woman's voice. Katla stepped out of the shadows into the half-light.

"Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember'd," said Will.

"I heard you speak of your mother as you slept," Katla said, sinking to the bench. "Tell me of your mother."

"Which mother? My true mother, or my . . .  true mother?"

"You said your mother tried to kill you. I'd know more of this."

"I never speak of it."

"I understand—'tis like a worm under a rock. It grows in the darkness."

"If I turn my rock for you, will you turn yours for me?"

"I cannot share what I do not have. My memory is a ring that fell down the privy. 'Tis there, and I know where it is, but I'll not leap in to fetch it."

"Then why should I dredge for my ring?"

"Because you wish to."

"You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery."

"I am mad and you are mad. We both are mad together. One of a kind knows the other."

Will ran his hands through his hair. She was right. He wanted to speak of it. Far from his home, far from his time, no person in the world could be hurt by his unburdening to this woman.

"I was born in a place called Minnesota, in a distant land," he said.

"Were you free or thrall?"

"Both. We were free in law; we were thrall in our hearts. My father was a thrall to his fears. My mother was a thrall to her past, and to drink.

"My father bore his fears as long as he could, but he could not carry the weight of them. I think my mother wed him because he was weak and could be ruled; yet she hated him for the same reason. She shamed him before outsiders, she shamed him before me. He stood it as long as he could, and one day he was gone.

"Without him to torment she turned to me. I was just like my father, she said. I was nothing and would never be anything. Nothing I did was good. That which was not flawless was a crime, and all crimes were treason.

"One day she dressed me in my best clothes and tried to slay me. I fled her, and she slew herself instead.

"I spent the rest of my childhood in fosterage in the homes of strangers. No one loved me, or if they tried, I would not let them. I've fled love ever since. My own mother could not love me; how can I hope for love from anyone else? It hurts less to push them away than to wait to be pushed."

"But your mother loved you."

"No. You think of Gerda, but that is not the mother I mean."

"No. I meant the mother who tried to kill you. No mother ever did such a thing but out of love."

Will almost snarled. "Love does not kill."

"You are wrong. Love is the murderous thing, and the more love, the more murder. When we love someone more than all, more than life, more than wealth, more than the gods, then we make them our god. We expect them to be as gods to us, to give us what only gods can give. This they cannot do. They always fail. And then we hate them. We may even hate them enough to kill.

" 'Tis for this reason we must make love outlaw. Of all man-slayers, love is cruelest."

"I have been cruel for love," said Will. He laid a hand on her arm, lightly. "Perhaps we should love each other. We are wiser than the sound minds. We'd know not to trust so much to love."

Somehow Katla did not run from these words. Instead she put her face near his and giggled. "Would that not be a sight—a madman and a madwoman, together in incest, with all their mad children?"

They laughed then, long and hard, like a boy and a girl at some silly game. Will had not laughed this way in a very long time. And he had never in his life felt such closeness to a woman.

They lay down together—to sleep, no more—and Will spread his cloak over both of them. She smelled of barley meal and flowers. She was precious. He cherished her. Having her there warmed him, deep in his heart.

They were wakened when their cloak was snatched away. The light from the open door said morning. Guttorm stood over them, eyes wide.

"What have you done together?" he demanded.

"Nothing of shame," said Will. "I would not dishonor my sister."

"Well begone, Katla," said Guttorm, "before tongues begin to wag." The girl dashed out.

"Your mother would speak with you, Amlodd," said Guttorm.

"We shall obey, were she ten times our mother," said Will.

"Ten times?"

"Tell her I'm coming."

"I'll bear you company."

"As you wish."

They walked to the kitchen, a small building hard by the great hall. Guttorm waited outside while Will went in through the entry.

The kitchen had a floor of stone flags and a large hearth in the center. The house had been built over a small rivulet, which ran down the hearthway to one side of the fireplace. Hams and iron pots of various sizes hung from the rafters, along with cleavers and spits. Gerda sat on one of the benches, working at a sock with a single bone knitting needle. She stopped her work and looked up at Will.

"We must speak," she said.

"Now, mother, what's the matter?"

"I need to know. Are you mad or do you feign?"

"I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

She threw her knitting down and stood to face him. "I am your mother! Play not your games with me! If you've set aside our plan, then tell me plainly; if you carry on as you have, I can only believe you've truly lost your wits!"

"Our plan?"

"We are alone, Amlodd. You may speak plainly, so long as you shout not."

Will did not know how to answer.

"I truly know not what you mean, lady," he told her.

"Mad indeed?" asked Gerda. "I feared it—you've been so far unlike yourself; I never marked in you such a gift for snakishness."

He sat beside her on the bench. "Is it true?" he asked. "Did we have a plot, you and I?"

"Dare I tell you? Can I trust a blood secret to a madman?"

"Believe me, lady, I am a fool of silence—nonsense, like bubbles in a well, buoys in me and bursts to air; matters of weight, like gold, sink down and lie secret."

She sat again. "What avails it?" she said. " 'Twas your own plan, whispered to me when first they brought you back from the hunt. We thought to get vengeance for your father by stealth—feigning your madness to lull Feng's fears, then burning him and his men in the hall when the time was right. But what can we do now, when you are mad in truth?"

"The man I am—the man who speaks to you—is not a killer," said Will. The theory of revenge in literature was one thing. To kill men, for an injury not even his own, was another entirely.

"So I feared. What shall we do?"

The noise brought Will to attention before his mind had recognized it. Amlodd's reflexes still functioned. He knew the noise meant danger and he knew where it came from—behind a chest in a corner. He hurried there and found a man crouching in the shadow.

The man pulled a knife and leaped to meet him. Will drew his own, with Amlodd's skill. The spy, whom he recognized as one of those who'd threatened him in the surf, aimed a cut at his ribs and Will did not parry, but leaped backward to avoid the cut, then moved in with a stab as the man's momentum left him with his flank exposed.

The man twisted away and came around in a full circle, aiming a slash at Will's knife arm. Will avoided it by dipping the arm, at the same time grabbing for the man's shirt with his free hand. The man sprang back and slipped on one of the wet stones that lined the rivulet. Will was upon him in a second, straddling him with one knee in the water. Each held the other's knife hand, corded muscles standing out on their necks.

Slowly, with bull-like strength, Will pushed his own knife down toward the man's chest. I can't be doing this, he thought. This is not something I'd do. For just a moment he hesitated, paralyzed by the fear in the man's blue eyes.

Then he drove the knife home. He felt it scrape along a rib—his gorge rising. The man's back arched and he shuddered. He did not die at once. It took a few minutes, as Will restrained him. The horror was compounded by the thoughts in his own head.

Don't fight me, he was thinking. Can't you just once do what you're told? 

The rivulet ran red from the corpse to the outlet under the wall.

A violent shaking overtook him and he swung away from the dead man to sit on the bench with his back turned.

Gerda had been standing, watching. Her face showed no emotion. "If this killing comes out, you'll go to England. It would delay our vengeance long. Can you bear to cover a mankilling?"

"Manslaying is not a thing I take pride in."

"Indeed you are not yourself."

"Go. I'll handle it."

She looked searchingly at him, then went out the door.

Will followed her out and looked around the yard. People were everywhere—there were no idle hours in the steading. The thralls at least were always about at some duty or another. He walked toward the low stone wall that ringed the yard. The rivulet that ran through the kitchen drained into a pond on its other side. He saw that there were bones there, and many two-toed tracks in the mud. He knew those tracks from childhood visits to a farm.

He remembered how Amlodd had concealed the body in Saxo's book. He didn't want to do it that way. But for the life of him he couldn't think of a better one.

He went back into the kitchen house, steeling himself for nasty work.

His mother appeared at the door with a bundle. "You've blood all over your clothing," she said. "Change into these clothes."

"In a moment," said Will, taking them and closing the door on her. "What I'm about to do is best done naked.

"In what sense am I Will Sverdrup?" he wondered as he undressed and knelt by the corpse. "I'm doing things Will would never do." He wondered what it was that defined a man—what he thought or what he did.

The worst part (well, almost the worst) was knowing he'd have to go to England anyway.

So why was he doing this?

Because he had a mother here who loved him, and she wanted it. For her he'd have chopped up the whole village.

Except for Katla.

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Framed