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Alfred, king of Saxons, king of nowhere and lord of nothing, disappears layer by layer like the cold, humid air of Wessex’s marshlands is clawing them from the frame of his bones.
The man it leaves behind is all but a stranger to Uhtred—a stranger draped in grey and white, wandering the village like a ghost come to haunt the living. He speaks with the king’s tongue and walks with the king’s gait, but that is where the similarities end.
By all rights, Uhtred should have left him to this place and this misery days ago, left him to all those other ghosts of the marshes.
Uhtred’s responsibility is no longer for himself alone: he has a wife to care for, however cold his heart has grown toward her, and a child to protect. A family. A legacy to keep. What is more important than that? What value does Wessex hold against that? The precious kingdom of the West Saxons is all but lost and its king with it. There is only grief here, in this forgotten corner of England. The hollow taste of defeat and little more.
There is grief in Uhtred as well, or something that resembles it. Somewhere in between Bebbanburg and Loidis, in between the cold waters of baptism and the searing heat of a longhouse burning bright and angry into a black night, he has forgotten how to separate it from rage. They both feel the same in the end. Like a cloak that lies too heavy on his shoulders.
Grief has an intangible quality in these marshes, a sourceless shadow that darkens his mood and weighs like lead on his soul. If he is honest with himself, he knows that his grief is not for Wessex or its people. They are both as strange and foreign to him as the day he first entered Winchester, that snakepit of a city with its stinking, rabid masses. He certainly doesn’t grieve for Alfred’s Church, which preaches humility and humiliation in the same breath, cloaking itself in pretences to steal every last piece of silver from the grubby hands of the starving and every last piece of joy from their hearts.
This defeat is theirs to share. It isn’t his.
The Danes captured the very heart of Wessex in a single attack because the Roman god demanded attention and Alfred was all too glad to give it to him.
It was Alfred’s weakness and Alfred’s blind belief that Guthrum would hold the peace. It was Alfred’s naivety that cost him. His mistake.
But Uhtred already threw all his rage into Alfred’s face, confronted him with all the anger overflowing from his soul, tried to hurt him and wake him to his failures, and Alfred in turn cloaked himself in steely silence and icy contempt, loath to admit defeat even when he is on his knees.
There is nothing left to say.
Despite all that, despite the defiant remains of that anger continuing to simmer in the centre of his chest, Uhtred can’t bring himself to leave. He feels responsible for the people he calls friends. Iseult will be with him whatever he decides, but Leofric would never leave the king’s side now that they’ve found him, and neither would Hild, and he won’t abandon them.
A part of Uhtred feels responsible for Alfred, too. It is an unspoken, unwanted duty that goes beyond any oath he made, but he can’t turn away from it regardless.
There is no one else left, after all. Wessex’s ealdormen fled the slaughter of Winchester without another look over their shoulder. All those most loyal of servants, all those self-righteous members of the Witan with their flat smiles and hungry eyes, they were the first to run and leave their king to his fate. Rats leaving the sinking ship. Snakes slithering into the brush.
Uhtred did too, of course. That day in Winchester, desperation aching in his belly and hatred searing like fire beneath his skin, he did not think once of Alfred. There were more important things to consider, more precious skins to save than that of the man who condemned him to this fight to the death in the first place.
But fate intertwined their paths again, and Uhtred knows better than to defy it. He’s not an oath-breaker and though that oath might not have mattered on that day, Alfred called it in once again with naught but a look, with naught but the unspeakable, unfathomable despair sitting in his eyes—too proud to ask for help even then, but pleading for it all the same.
There is no one else left, and so Uhtred remains. He keeps his distance, after that tense first day of accusations and arguments, but he remains. He doesn’t know how to approach the man Alfred has been reduced to—a shadow of the king who used to rule every room, who used to bend the wills of lords and warriors alike with the weight of his presence alone—and so he watches from afar, tries to take a measure of Alfred without raising his ire with his presence. He tries to read him, understand him: a fruitless, frustrating endeavour all in all, but one that at least occupies Uhtred’s restless mind.
Alfred doesn’t seem aware of the watchful eyes on him, but maybe he is too used to the old Roman halls of Winchester where privacy is not a luxury granted to kings.
Ælswith, on the other hand, answers Uhtred’s glances in kind. Her glares follow him and Iseult, the crying, sickly heir to Wessex’s throne and Alfred’s legacy clutched in her arms like she might cure with a mother’s love what a thousand prayers already failed to heal.
The others take their turn approaching their king like they might return the life to him with a few well-placed words, but they all fail to elicit much of a reaction at all. Only Alfred’s daughter ever manages to make a smile—small and shaky as it is—appear on his face these days.
Tonight it is Hild by Alfred’s side, crouching next to where he sits alone and withdrawn by a fire at the edge of the village. They have folded their hands in prayer and Hild’s head is bowed low, her eyes closed, but Alfred’s gaze remains fixed on the darkening horizon, his eyes glassy. Trying to find his god and his salvation in the swaying reeds at the water’s edge.
Uhtred’s attention keeps drifting toward them—perhaps hoping, despite his better judgement, for the same thing the others hope for, waiting for Alfred to straighten up and regain his strength, waiting for the decisiveness to return, for a sign that the war has not been lost before it has truly begun. He tries to busy himself and make himself feel useful while Edward continues to fight for every laboured, wheezing breath.
There’s no sleep to be found yet, no peace.
He takes to sharpening Serpent-Breath by the firelight, cleaning it before the moisture of the land and the perpetual idleness of exile let the steel rust. The blade seems to move and ripple with the reflection of the flames, like the shimmering scales of its namesake.
Iseult is by his side, but she is quiet and pensive, her warmth against his shoulder the only sign she is there at all. Her fingers keep trailing over his arm in a gentle, absent-minded caress.
In between the rough scrapes of the whetstone against Serpent-Breath’s blade, heavy steps sound on the wooden walkway behind them.
“You’ll ruin the blade like that, arseling.”
Leofric lets himself fall into the chair by Uhtred‘s other side, his armour and chainmail rattling like the drums of war.
Uhtred doesn’t spare him a glance, but he softens the strokes of the stone against the blade’s edge.
There’s a huff of laughter.
Leofric wipes the dirt from his brow and loosens the bracers on his arms, stretching his wrists. The half-dried mud of the marshes clings to his boots, evidence of the long hours of guarding and scouting the surrounding land.
“And?” Uhtred asks. “Fight any Danes today?“ He pauses his work for a moment, rolling his aching shoulders.
Leofric rubs at his eyes and shakes his head, staring up at the black sky. He says, “The rivers are empty, far as I could see. I asked around, too, but no one’s caught even a glimpse of those bastards. If they’re out there, they’re taking their time.” He tells a short tale of one of the nearby homesteads they scouted today, the villagers they talked to. Some volunteers to bolster their sparse ranks, a blacksmith who might be willing to help forge weapons for the right price.
It’s not a lot, and nothing they can act on without Alfred’s approval.
“We can’t win a war with villagers alone,” Leofric says. “We need the ealdormen at our side. Without them, we don’t stand a fucking chance.”
“We still have time,” Uhtred assures him. “The Danes won’t follow us into the marshes. They’re too smart to try.”
Guthrum is shrewd. A different kind of man than Ubba or Ivar, but fearsome in reputation in his own right. He knows how to kill kings as well as the brothers did, and he knows the value of patience. He knows he only has to wait, perched warm and safe in Winchester, protected by its sturdy walls. Either Alfred will die landless and forgotten in exile or he will come break himself against those very walls. The Danes win either way.
“So we wait?”
Uhtred shrugs. “Not much else to do.”
Leofric stares at him from the side for a long moment, before he follows Uhtred’s pensive gaze to where Alfred and Hild are still joined in prayer. “He‘s not going to disappear, you know. You don‘t have to keep staring at him.”
“I‘m not—”
“You are.”
Uhtred scoffs, all ruffled feathers and raised haunches.
Leofric speaks before he can begin defending himself. “She have any luck with the bastard yet?”
“Not really,” Uhtred says, though he isn’t sure what Hild is trying to achieve in the first place. She brought Alfred food earlier, but the little of it he touched he couldn’t keep down for long. The prayers now seem like a desperate salve, a last-ditch attempt.
“As expected, then,” Leofric mutters.
Uhtred and Leofric exchange a look, both too exhausted to repeat a conversation they’ve had too often these past few days. Strategy is a tiresome topic and not one suited to these hours.
“He’ll break,” Leofric says, quieting the words to keep them from ringing over the village. “Sooner rather than later.”
“You don’t think he’s there already?” Uhtred asks. Bitterness bleeds into his voice.
Leofric is silent. His fingers fidget around the hilt of his own sword.
“You should talk to him,” Iseult says softly.
Uhtred glances at her. Her wispy form is wrapped in furs, her face pale and ethereal in the fire’s light. “There’s nothing to say. Alfred knows my mind.”
“No,” Leofric says. He pauses, like he’s thinking through his words before he speaks them, arranging them with all the careful deliberation of the neat rows of bricks in Roman walls. “No, she’s right. It would do him good to hear from you, I think.”
Uhtred opens his mouth and closes it again. He is torn in between irritation at being delegated as a nursemaid and a strange sort of pride, the flattered vanity of being seen as the king’s confidant when that could not be further from the truth. Alfred neither trusts nor likes him and he is most certainly the last man Alfred would wish to hear from right now. “And what am I to say to him?” he finally asks, dry and sarcastic. “Am I to console him now? Or berate him? He is not a child and I will not treat him like one.”
He will not begrudge Alfred his grief, not even in his anger. He is entitled to it, like every man is.
Leofric leans forward. “He doesn’t need your opinions, he needs advice,” he says harshly. “He needs assurance. Guidance.” He frowns when Uhtred doesn’t answer. “Do you hear me? He needs a solid base to build his plans upon, so even if the boy dies, he will continue to fight. You need to be that base. If he breaks, we might as well throw ourselves on our swords now.”
“I’m not going to coddle him,” Uhtred says, an indignant edge to his voice. “I’ll guard his life and that of his family, but it’s not my place to make sure he’s happy. You can try if you want, I’m not stopping you.”
“He’s the king, arseling,” Leofric retorts sharply, like it’s the kind of self-evident truth to end arguments with. “You are his man, sworn to him. If it’s anyone’s place, it’s yours. He won’t listen to me.” He shrugs. “He might listen to you.”
Uhtred huffs. “If you believe that, then you’re as stupid as you look. The only man Alfred seeks guidance from is your pathetic god.”
Leofric doesn’t laugh at the jape, but he doesn’t continue to argue either. He lowers his head and stares into the flames, the lines of his face severe and shadowed in its glow.
Across the way, Hild rises to her feet. She touches Alfred’s shoulder. It’s a gesture of such ease and natural certainty, a touch so simple that it takes Uhtred aback. He has never seen anyone but closest family dare to touch Alfred, not even Beocca, but Alfred accepts the transgression without so much as a blink. He merely nods and says something soft that is swallowed by the night. He reaches up to cover Hild’s hand with his own.
Uhtred tears his eyes away, at once outsider and intruder to a moment not meant for him.
He sets the whetstone aside with more force than necessary and lets Serpent-Breath slide back into its fleece-lined scabbard, drawing Leofric’s glance once more.
They are right, of course. Both of them are right. They usually are. Leofric is wiser and more used to the dance of the court and the pitfalls of politics than most men give him credit for, and every word Iseult speaks is one that guides destiny. He knows that, just as he knows that he’ll relent in the end, no matter how acrid the thought of approaching Alfred tastes in the back of his throat. “I can try,” he says, “but he won’t listen. He has no love for me, much less any respect.”
Iseult still trails her fingers along his arm. Up and down and up again. Her eyes find Uhtred’s. “He will listen if it’s you,” she says with simple conviction.
Uhtred grimaces. He presses a parting kiss to Iseult’s temple and rises from the chair, stretching his aching back. “If he tries to drown me in the marshes, I expect you two to stop him.”
“I won’t make an enemy of Alfred,” Leofric says. A smile sits in the corner of his mouth, a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “Neither should you.”
“Whose side are you even on?”
The smile widens. That, and the accompanying silence, is answer enough.
Uhtred sends him a pointed glare. He tosses the sheathed sword toward him and Leofric catches it in the air.
“You sure you won’t need this to defend yourself, arseling? Alfred, he’s the vicious kind.”
Uhtred makes an unkind gesture in Leofric’s direction.
Leofric pulls the sword an inch from the sheath and presses a finger to the newly sharpened blade, testing its edge. Seemingly unsatisfied with it, he takes the whetstone and continues Uhtred’s work.
With a last glance toward Iseult and Leofric, he heads toward Alfred—now alone at his fire, as alone as he never could be in Winchester.
He passes Hild on the way and pauses for a moment, catching her gaze, asking wordless questions.
“He has not slept,” Hild says. “You will speak to him?”
“I will.”
“Good. That’s good.” She searches his face. “Be kind, Uhtred.”
His smile bares teeth like the snarl of an animal. “I always am.”
She frowns like Beocca sometimes frowns at him, like a displeased teacher despairing at an unruly child, but she lets him pass without another word.
Uhtred takes a breath. Then, he steps to the fire, letting its light reveal him from the dark.
Be kind, Hild said, but there never was kindness between him and Alfred. He was only ever a sword for Alfred to wield against Wessex’s enemies and Alfred was only ever a means to an end. There is no kindness between them, no friendship to call upon now.
“Lord,” he says.
He expects those cold eyes to find him, narrowed in displeasure as they usually are, like he is barely more than an unwelcome speck of dust on hallowed ground, but there is no acknowledgement of his presence, no movement to Alfred except the way he shivers in the night air. There is only silence. Only the ghostly calls of heron birds in the marshes.
Uhtred decides to take the silence as encouragement. It’s not a dismissal, and that is more than he hoped for. He pulls up a chair and sits. He doesn’t dare touch Alfred as Hild did, not even to catch his attention. There is too deep of a gulf between them to cross it now. “You should sleep, lord,” he says instead, careful to voice it as a plea, not an order. Alfred, the man, is still a stranger to him. He doesn’t know where the lines lie with him. Doesn’t know when he’ll overstep them.
Alfred continues to stare across the village to the place his wife and daughter rest, where his son continues to fret and cry and cough in the dark. He inclines his head, the softest of nods, but he doesn’t speak nor move to join his family.
His face is stone.
“Alfred.”
“Yes,” Alfred says, his voice strangely distant, like he barely heard Uhtred at all. He blinks. His eyes are wet and vacant, the surrounding skin shadowed purple with lack of sleep and unshed tears. “You are right, of course, you are right. I just…”
He takes a breath, soft and shaky. He doesn’t finish the sentence.
His gaze drops to where his hands are clasping his crucifix necklace in his lap, his knuckles pale from the force of his grip. The veins across the back of his hand are a stark blue against the white, like rivers in snow, like cracks in the marble of his skin.
“I would rather stay awake for a little while longer.”
Uhtred leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Your son will not recover faster if you make yourself sick as well. He needs you strong, lord. Wessex needs you strong.”
At that, Alfred’s lips twitch into a short-lived smile. “I already am sick,” he says.
“That is not what I mean.”
Alfred’s eyes flicker to him, just for a moment. They are still brimmed with red beneath his lashes. “Yes, I know,” he says, almost gently. “I am frail and I am weak, both in body and in soul, that is nothing new. More sickness might fell me.” His steady voice falters. He shakes his head. “It never should have been me.”
Uhtred holds himself very still, holds his tongue before it can cut the moment of peace short.
Alfred exhales a breath that sounds like strangled laughter, like a death-rattle in his chest. “It should have been Æthelwold. The crown is his by right. I know it now as I knew it then. His father was a strong man. A powerful king. In time, Æthelwold might become the same—perhaps we should have given him that chance. Instead, I cast him aside.”
“The Witan decided,” Uhtred says. He doesn’t know how to hold against the uncertainty sitting so openly in Alfred’s words, against the doubt suddenly bared to him like a festering wound. It’s candour he isn’t used to, not from Alfred, never from Alfred, never without a reason or an angle behind it. “It was your brother’s wish to see you succeed him.”
“But he might have been mistaken. I am not fit to rule, not fit as a husband, a father.” There’s a sudden agitation to Alfred, an unrest that shows in his shaking hands and the way his gaze keeps drifting around the village, unable to meet Uhtred’s searching eyes.
Edward coughs, hollow and painful, and Alfred brings his hands to his face. The simple, unadorned cross between his knuckles presses against trembling lips.
“Edward’s sickness has nothing to do with you. Children are frail.”
Alfred turns to look at him. “Yes, but he is my child,” he says, voice tight and tense and severe, every word clipped like the mere act of speaking them cuts wounds into his tongue. “My blood. It is my frailty in him, my weakness.”
Uhtred frowns. “Children are frail,” he repeats, more insistently. “Be they the children of kings or beggars. It makes no difference who their father is.”
Alfred’s pale eyes search Uhtred’s face with unsettling intensity. He doesn’t seem convinced, but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t argue, doesn’t dismiss him.
The silence sits between them like a shield-wall.
Uhtred takes a breath and lowers his head, letting the loose strands of his hair fall around his face. He searches for words and comes up short.
He’s certain that Alfred will dismiss all that he has to say, will take neither comfort nor assurance from the words of a heathen, but Iseult said he would listen and that alone is enough to make him want to try.
This isn’t Winchester, after all. They’re not standing in the throne room of the palace, surrounded by guards and lords with their disapproving eyes awaiting the smallest misstep from either of them, or in Alfred’s library with all the suffocating weight of Wessex’s past and England’s future around them to bear witness. There is no crown to burden Alfred’s head. Even Alfred’s god seems distant and meek in these marshes, so far removed from his opulent churches and snake-tongued worshippers: prayers are not heard here, pleas are ignored.
It’s just them. Just them, for the first time.
The thought sits with strange tenderness in Uhtred’s chest.
“I had a brother among the Danes,” he begins slowly. “He was… sickly. Like you, perhaps, in a way. Like Edward is now.”
“Your brother,” Alfred says, confused but still prodding Uhtred to continue. “Earl Ragnar, that is his name, is it not? The son of Ragnar the Fearless.”
“A second son, a younger son,” Uhtred corrects. “His name was Rorik.”
The memory is faded and faint like old ink on parchment: Rorik, Brida and him climbing the mast of a snekkja as spry and swift as squirrels, the breeze caught in their hair. Ravn’s voice from below. Ragnar’s laughter.
“His father was as strong and healthy as any fighting Dane, as strong a man as I have ever known. So is Ragnar. Rorik… Rorik was softer than them. He was ill often, too weak to play and fight and raid like the rest of us. He’d cry through the nights because of the pain.”
“I gather he did not survive, then,” Alfred says. His voice is flat.
“No. Despite his father’s strength.” Uhtred meets Alfred’s gaze with renewed urgency, trying to impart his words with the weight of their meaning. “Ragnar’s blood did nothing to save Rorik, just as your blood has not damned Edward. If destiny decrees it, the boy will live. Nothing else matters.”
“Destiny,” Alfred echoes.
“There is nothing else, lord.”
Alfred looks away. He is silent, his expression hardened. Stone once more.
The thought of the nornir spinning their threads of fate seems to bring no peace to Alfred’s mind. His piety forbids it. His God forbids it, as He forbids every earthly comfort. The Roman God, the Christian God: joy-stealer and hope-thief, God of kneelers, God of greed and misery.
Uhtred despises Him.
He pulls his chair forward, crowds closer to Alfred than he would otherwise dare. Their knees almost jostle against each other. “It is not his fate to die. I know it.”
Alfred glances up, but falls short of meeting Uhtred’s eyes again. Instead, his gaze catches on a point on Uhtred’s chest, in the hollow of his throat, and lingers there. A strange look crosses over his face.
“Do you claim to speak for your gods, Uhtred?” Alfred asks, without the heat he normally reserves for Uhtred’s insolence or any talk of pagan practices. “Do they speak to you? Do they impart their wisdom upon you? Their designs?”
He sounds tired.
Perhaps he does try to find comfort in Uhtred’s certainty, no matter how much his god forbids it. Just like he accepts Iseult’s medicine despite the mutterings of his priests and wife. He is smarter than Uhtred, smarter than most men, so perhaps he sees the value in those beliefs, even if he is too stubborn to ever accept the failings of his own religion. Too stubborn to admit mistakes, too. Too proud to ask for help outright, even if he takes all that is being offered all too readily and without a word of thanks. A hypocrite at heart.
Uhtred smiles tightly. “It’s not the gods who decide on destiny. They, too, follow what the weavers spin for them and one day they, too, shall die. Like all of us.”
Alfred frowns at that, like the idea of mortal, fallible gods is one of blasphemy. He looks down to his cross. It seems small and insignificant in his palm, but he holds it like it is the most precious thing in the world. “I ask God for guidance, but He remains as silent as ever,” he confesses. “I ask for intervention, but my son continues to weaken.” He curls his fingers around the crucifix and covers it from view. His hand shakes. “I could not bear to lose him,” he whispers.
The smile crumbles from Uhtred’s lips. There’s a sharp tug of sorrow in the centre of his chest, of sympathy. He thinks of his own son and the feeling of small fingers tightening around his thumb, of blue eyes watching him with the thoughtful curiosity of infants. A loss like that would break him too, just as it threatens to break Alfred. He tries to soften his voice. “Your brother was strong, you said so yourself. Your father, too, from what the people tell. Edward shares their blood as well. The blood of kings.”
Alfred’s knuckles grow white around the cross. “I pray you are right,” he says quietly. After a moment of hesitation, he meets Uhtred’s gaze once more with steadfast resolve. “As I pray for the soul of your brother. He is with God now.”
Uhtred feels a spark of ire ignite within him, searing and familiar and volatile, almost enough to drown out the grief he feels for Alfred’s plight. He isn’t certain if Alfred intends to insult or to console, if he calls upon his god to remind Uhtred of his superiority or in an ill-guided attempt to reach across the divide between them. The Alfred he knows wields his faith like a warrior wields a sword, but the Alfred before him now invokes the name of his god like it is the only thing that anchors him to sanity.
“He was heathen, lord,” Uhtred says through gritted teeth. “As am I.”
“God forgives children the sins of their fathers. They can not yet choose good or refuse evil for themselves. He would not bar His kingdom to them.” Alfred pauses. “I grieve for him,” he says, in the clipped manner of speech he reserves for formalities and matters of state. Polite but formulaic. Softer, he adds: “And I grieve for you.”
Perhaps he means it as a tentative offer of peace, but Uhtred has fallen into the traps laid so carefully by Alfred’s words one too many times to ever fully trust them again. He wants them to be true. He wants there to be peace between them, wants the trust and acceptance and respect that Alfred withholds like they’re something to be earned time and time and time again, like they’re the whip with which he can enact his will.
Uhtred lowers his head again and stares into the flames. He doesn’t answer.
Alfred keeps watching him for a moment longer, eyes bright with exhaustion, before he, too, looks away, apparently unwilling to force a repeat of arguments they’ve had too often.
They sit in silence, letting the wind in the reeds and the distant calls of animals soothe the tension from the air.
The cold of winter has not yet fully abandoned this land, and it slips with icy fingers down Uhtred’s back, but he doesn’t mind its touch. It cools the anger in the pit of his stomach and chases the weight of weariness from his bones.
It reminds him of home. Of ocean-gales roaring outside castle walls and the dust of snow on thatch roofs.
There’s peace in the memory.
In that silence, Edward falls into a violent coughing fit that quickly turns to hiccuping wails.
Alfred shudders at the sound. He wraps himself tighter in his cloak and his furs, his face pale and forlorn in the fire’s light.
The noise must have woken Ælswith from her uneasy sleep. Uhtred can see the shape of her move in the hut’s darkness, backlit by the dim, dying glow of a candle. She is tending to the boy, cradling and rocking him in her arms, trying to impart what comfort she can.
The commotion is enough to wake more of the village, candles flickering alight in more of the huts and tents and then being extinguished again as they recognise the sound. They’ve all grown used to this, to the endless misery of hearing an infant slowly waste away.
“Would it not be easier to leave, lord?” Uhtred asks softly.
Alfred’s gaze snaps up, his eyes training themselves on Uhtred with singular focus. There’s a sharp line furrowed between his brows.
Uhtred is quick to continue, taken aback by the reaction. “Staying by Edward’s side while he suffers will not make him recover faster. It only drains your strength. Would distance not help? I could speak to the locals, find a place further away where you could sleep in peace, where you might not hear him. No one here would think less of you for it.”
Alfred is silent for too long, his expression drawn tight with unconcealed despair. He looks away, slowly, like he has to force himself to. “No,” he mutters. His voice is barely audible. “No, I need to be here. I need to hear him.” He shakes his head. “It’s an agony to hear him suffer, but I prefer it to the torture of wondering every second if he still draws breath.”
Edward continues to sob and Ælswith’s attempts to calm him grow more desperate. She is crying too, walking back and forth in the small confines of the hut.
Alfred sighs. He shrugs the furs and blankets from his shoulders and slips the necklace back over his head, the cross falling to his chest. “I must see to him,” he says, “and to my family.”
He rises to his feet with deliberate slowness, a hand pressed to his ailing stomach and the other white-knuckled around the tightly woven armrest of the chair, but even so there’s a sway to the movement, an unsteady waver. He remains standing on the spot, still and unmoving like a man who is balancing a sword inside of his body, fighting for composure, for poise. Fighting for breath.
Uhtred reaches out a hand before he can stop himself, ready to catch him if he should stumble. His outstretched fingers brush against the coarse fabric of Alfred’s cloak, the loose folds of the sleeve. He draws back at the contact before he can meet the warmth beneath it. The movement is almost a flinch. It draws Alfred’s gaze, only for a quick moment before it is deemed inconsequential, but that brief acknowledgement is enough to make the breath catch in Uhtred’s throat.
His eyes rove over Alfred’s form, the narrow line of his back, the weary slope of his shoulders now pulling taut as he straightens himself. He is thin and pale like a spectre without the cover of the furs, clothed only in simple linen robes that whisper around his ankles—as always more priest than warrior—but something subtle shifts in his expression as he stands, like the mask of Alfred, King of Wessex, is being dragged back into place, leaving only the cracks and fault lines that exile has left in the cold marble to spot a glimpse of the man behind it.
He doesn’t look back at Uhtred.
There are no words exchanged between Alfred and Ælswith as he joins her side. None are needed. They move around each other with practiced familiarity, with the kind of easy intimacy that comes only with years of trust. He presses a steady hand to her arm, the other to Edward’s face, hidden against his mother’s shoulder.
Ælswith grabs the fabric of his robes, bunches it up in her fist as she all but falls into his embrace, taking her own comfort from Alfred’s presence while they try to soothe their son back to sleep.
Alfred pulls her close. He kisses the dark crown of her head.
Something lurches in Uhtred’s stomach, sharp and vile and ignoble. It almost overtakes him the longer he stares, a mounting tidal wave, a complicated knot of emotions pulling tight around his throat. He doesn’t dare untangle it, or even examine it too closely. If he tugs at it the wrong way or lays bare the dark truth that lies beneath, it will break over him and drown him.
Uhtred looks away.
The feeling stays. Acid and bile in the back of his throat. A sore tug in the centre of his chest, aching like a bruise.
He almost doesn’t expect Alfred to return, and he resigns himself to spending the rest of the night staring into the embers of the fire until sleep claims him, unwilling to return to Leofric’s questions and Iseult’s knowing eyes.
The conversation with Alfred is not something he wants to recount, not just yet. He’s still turning it over himself, trying to make sense of it.
His hand reaches up and closes around the pendant around his neck, the worn grooves of Thor’s hammer fitting familiar and comforting against his palm.
It’s what Alfred was looking at, he realises. When they spoke of gods and Rorik and wyrd, it was the hammer he was looking at, something pondering and peculiar in his eyes. Not like he was judging its worth against the cross held in his own hand, but like he was trying to decipher a riddle.
Uhtred doesn’t understand him. He supposes that is by design.
The wooden walkway creaks.
He glances up and meets Alfred’s eyes through the flames.
Edward’s cries have faded. The hut lies dark and silent.
Alfred stands alone in the darkness beyond the ring of light of the fire, shivering against the cold. He only looks at Uhtred, something raw burning with feverish heat in his gaze.
Uhtred rises slowly, like too sudden a move might startle him. “Is he—?”
“He is well,” Alfred says. “Considering the circumstances.” There’s a flash of a smile, weak and thin-lipped and gone as quickly as a trick of the flickering light. He’s holding the cross again, the cord that holds it wrapped tightly around his wrist. His fingers fidget along the edges of it. “He’s asleep, finally. We’ve said a prayer over the relics.”
“That’s good.”
Alfred takes a breath and exhales it through his teeth like a soldier readying for battle, like a king readying for war. He looks small where he stands.
Uhtred’s brows draw together, his gaze resting on Alfred’s face. He takes a careful step closer, around the fire.
“Uhtred, I—” Alfred begins, but he falters, pausing as if parsing his own words before speaking them. He sets his jaw. When he continues to speak it is not with strength but with haste, like he fears Uhtred might interrupt him before the words are spoken, like he might lose the courage to speak them before he is done. “I know this is not what you meant when you spoke of leaving Edward’s side, but the thought of leaving is one I have entertained before nonetheless.” His voice is low and soft like the admission itself is sacrilege.
Something grows cold and heavy in Uhtred, a sinking feeling within him.
Alfred clasps his hands in front of his body. He cannot meet Uhtred’s eyes. “I’ve considered it perhaps too often, in these past few days. More times than I care to admit. Leaving this place, this exile, this—this burden. Everything. Leaving it behind.”
Leaving, Alfred says, like the word is poison and sin.
There’s a deliberate weight to it, imbued with unspoken shame, that settles with crushing force on Uhtred’s shoulders as he realises its meaning.
His blood rushes in his ears, deafening like the surf crashing upon the shore, the ocean breaking itself against harsh cliffs.
(And he aches, too, for Alfred’s sake, aches for the pain cut into his every feature.)
Leaving. Leaving Wessex, leaving England, leaving the crown and kingship and the dream of a united land that burned so brightly within him mere months ago. A surrender.
It’s an admission of fear that Uhtred can’t reconcile with the man before him.
Of weakness.
He thought Alfred weak, the first time they met. He saw that scholarly little priest who called himself brother of the king, saw him dwarfed by shelves of worthless knowledge and crushed by the weight of his ailment, and didn’t bother to look beyond it. It blinded him to the sharpness of Alfred’s mind, to the wit and the ambition and the cunning hidden behind his unassuming stature.
That is the first mistake people make about Alfred. He has learned that by now.
But the man before him is not the man he knew. He is the hollow, brittle shell of a king, a figure of clay held together by the barest bones of defiance and undying stubbornness alone.
Uhtred struggles and fails to find the reassurances he’s supposed to find, to find words of guidance that will take the winds from that train of thought.
“Alfred,” he says, and the name burns like insolence on his tongue. “Lord.”
Alfred smiles a tired smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I do not need you to lecture me on duty, Uhtred,” he says. “I am aware of the weight of it and I do not take it lightly. I know I cannot abandon it and I will not, rest assured. I will not.”
Then why speak of it, Uhtred wants to ask. Why give the thought voice? Why give it room to grow and breathe and take on a life of its own?
Why tell him? Him of all people? Unwanted ally at best and hated adversary at worst, heathen and pagan and sinner and every other insult Alfred has slipped into his speeches with needle-precision, all those biting reminders that he is not enough, not Saxon enough, not Christian enough, more akin to a wild beast than to a man—a hound to be a chained, a sword to be wielded, but never an equal to confide in. Why tell him?
It is a tentative expression of trust extended his way and it is what Uhtred wanted, what he always wanted: just the smallest sign that he is more than the weapon Alfred likes to pretend he is, more than the lesser evil to be indulged so the greater evil may fall by its hand.
This private sincerity, bestowed upon Uhtred alone, feels precious and fragile like a single misstep, a single wrong word could be enough to shatter it.
Uhtred almost doesn’t dare breathe.
He crosses the remaining distance slowly, stopping in front of Alfred. “Any man in your position would feel as you do,” he says. “There’s no shame in it.”
Alfred shivers, but Uhtred doesn’t think it is from the cold alone. He wraps his arms around himself, shoulders curling forward. “It is a weakness I can ill afford,” he says quietly, candidly. “God seeks to punish me and I am not strong enough to withstand it.”
Uhtred has seen too many Saxons shake before the might of the Danes, cowering and kneeling and begging as their world burned around them, and he has seen too many Saxon kings die pathetic deaths at the hands of Ubba and Ivar and others of their ilk to believe Guthrum would show more mercy.
It’s not a fate he would ever wish upon Alfred. Wessex would be poorer for his loss, yes, but it is not the King of Wessex he would mourn. He would mourn the man before him now: Alfred, the man, no crown upon his head but bent beneath its weight nonetheless; no kingdom to call his own but consumed with love and duty and devotion for it all the same.
Alfred, clinging to the last thread of composure that remains in him, that last shred of dignity that he has somehow held on to for this long. There is strength to that—a quiet, unspoken kind of strength, the likes of which the Danes would never respect, but it is there like a core of steel.
Uhtred likes him better when he doesn’t wear the king’s face. This cannot last, he knows that. Alfred will not be content to stay in the marshes forever, no matter if Edward survives or not and no matter the doubt now plain and bare in every word.
And he is king. Even Uhtred can’t deny that. Alfred is king and he will soon enough stop being a man once more, because one cannot be king and man at the same time. To wear the crown means becoming its creature. It means becoming Wessex’s creature, much like Uhtred is. They are both shackled to this land—in very different ways perhaps, but it doesn’t really matter whether it is oath or duty that binds them. They are both here, in the end.
“I don’t think you’re weak,” Uhtred says gently, unable to help the way his voice strains, “and I don’t think you will fail.”
Shivers continue to wrack Alfred’s frame. Something complicated, unreadable passes over his face and he hugs himself tighter, fingers digging into his arms. He seems shaken by the words.
Uhtred continues on, pushing past his own apprehension, “You said your god does not punish the child for the sins of the father. Surely he would not test you with circumstances you could not overcome.”
“And what would you know of God?” Alfred asks in an undertone of bitter contempt. It lacks the bite Uhtred knows he’s capable of, a farce put on for the sake of propriety.
“I know what Beocca taught me when I was a boy.” The teachings are half-forgotten, long pushed aside by worthier memories, but Uhtred tries to unearth them from beneath the weight of time and make sense of them once more. “That the Christian god is a god of mercy. Of grace.”
Alfred smiles like he is in pain. “That is what Beocca would teach, yes,” he whispers.
He wavers where he stands.
Uhtred reaches for him without thinking. He realises, in that split second before his palm connects, that he is going too far, but he cannot stop the momentum of his own body. He can only watch with slowly dawning horror. His hand wraps firmly around Alfred’s upper arm, around the sharp bend of his shoulder.
He’s sure the gods are laughing at him.
Stillness takes over Alfred’s body, muscles pulling taut and breath caught in a stuttered inhale—all at once turning into cold Roman marble. He looks up. The full weight of his gaze pins Uhtred into place. There’s a glassy sheen to his eyes, but they are as piercing as ever, ever-watchful, ever-analysing, all-seeing.
The night seems to turn colder around them.
Uhtred can almost imagine the halls of Winchester’s palace rising up around them again—the harsh stone architecture draining every last bit of warmth from the air, the faceless spectres of thegns and ceorls lining the throne room, and Alfred at its head, as pale and unmoving as the ruins of Roman rule that still survive in parts of the land. Uhtred before him, a world apart.
But Alfred doesn’t move away or order him aside, doesn’t re-establish the distance that is customary between them. He only stares at Uhtred, that same peculiar look in his eyes, like he’s searching for answers in the lines of his face.
Uhtred swallows, strangely unsettled by his own stupid courage and Alfred’s concession of it, by the attention now fixed upon him. His mouth feels dry.
Whatever Alfred finds in him makes something soften around his eyes. Not quite a smile, but something precariously close to it. The tension drains from him in a single shuddering exhale and for a brief, terrifying moment he sways forward into Uhtred’s touch, pliant and fever-warm, before he catches himself.
Uhtred frowns at the heat of Alfred’s body, radiating through the coarse linen. He has to clear his throat. “Maybe you should sit,” he says.
Alfred’s brow furrows. He blinks rapidly and looks away. “Yes,” he mutters, yielding without a fight. He untangles his arms and finds his balance anew.
Uhtred takes the chance to swiftly pull back and bring distance between them. His palm tingles. He curls and uncurls his hand down by his side where Alfred cannot see.
He takes care to follow a half-step behind, takes care not to touch him again as they head back toward the warmth of the fire, though he cannot quite help the tug of concern keeping his eyes fixed upon Alfred’s back, waiting for the next stumble.
Alfred keeps his balance and his silence. He sinks into his chair with a wince that betrays his discomfort and cocoons himself back in the warmth of his furs and covers.
Uhtred pulls his own chair up next to his, shoulder to shoulder, where he doesn’t have to meet Alfred’s gaze unless he turns his head, can only see his half-shadowed form out of the corner of his eye. The flames feel hot on his skin. He’s glad for their glow, if only to hide the flush burning on his face.
Alfred curls up, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed low. He presses his clasped hands against his lips as if in prayer.
It is strange to see him supplicant for once, placing his life and soul in the hands of his god, and Uhtred can’t help but watch him.
It reminds Uhtred of the endless procession of ealdormen swearing their unwavering loyalty and unquestioning fealty after Alfred ascended the throne, kneeling before Alfred’s unmoving, rigid, regal figure and placing their hands in his.
Uhtred wonders if his god ever answers Alfred, or if he is as silent as the Norse gods are these days.
He hopes Alfred’s god, at least, is more faithful to him than his ealdormen proved themselves to be. The gods of the Danes, the true gods, would laugh at this display of servility, not reward it. They do not care to see men on their knees. But perhaps the Christian god will finally, for once, show the mercy his priests exhalt.
Uhtred sinks more comfortably into the finely woven wicker chair, stretching his feet toward the fire and sliding his hands down his thighs, trying to chase away the prickling remnant of Alfred’s warmth from his palm.
Without looking at him, Alfred speaks, “You are free to leave me, Uhtred. I fear I will find little sleep tonight.”
Uhtred scoffs at that. “I’ll stay,” he says. “I’m not tired anyway and someone has to guard you. Might as well be me.”
Alfred doesn’t refuse his company. He doesn’t order him to leave, though it would be within his right. “I am grateful,” he says instead.
“I swore an oath, did I not?” Uhtred searches for his gaze. “To protect you and your family until you are safe. Let me keep that oath, lord.”
Alfred reaches out as though across a dream and clasps Uhtred’s hand.
Uhtred inhales at the touch, a breath so sharp it feels like the entire world should feel it quake and shudder beneath their feet. But there is no one there to hear it in the calm of night, no one to feel the sudden unsteadiness of his hands.
No one but Alfred.
Alfred looks up at him. Calm and steady, a questioning furrow to his brow. There is a faint flush high on his cheeks, that same feverish glaze over his eyes. “I am grateful,” he repeats, a grave sincerity giving weight to every word. He presses his hand gently. “Uhtred of Bebbanburg.”
The cross between his fingers burns against Uhtred’s knuckles, but Uhtred doesn’t pull away from it, doesn’t dare to, doesn’t wish to. He lets it brand his skin and lets the cool, careful touch of Alfred’s hand on his soothe the jittery beat of his heart.
It is nothing more than an oath affirmed, yet Uhtred savours the moment, letting it imprint into his memory like a seal into hot wax.
“Will you try to sleep, at least?” Uhtred asks. “I’m sure Hild will have my head otherwise.”
“She is a good woman.”
“She scares me.”
Alfred smiles faintly. He sinks deeper into the chair, but his hand remains on Uhtred’s, a warm, solid weight on his knee, and his shoulder remains pressed against his. “Sleep has not been restful lately. But I will try.”
Uhtred huffs softly, something like a laugh but quieter, barely there. “Good,” he murmurs.
The fire crackles between them, eating away at the silence with flickering tongues of orange and gold. It casts strange, shifting shadows along Alfred’s face, making his exhaustion look all the more stark. His lashes flutter once, twice, as his breathing slows, his fingers relaxing slightly where they still rest against Uhtred’s knee.
It is an intimacy Uhtred does not know what to do with, does not understand, not from Alfred—not from a king who has spent so long keeping himself apart from those around him. He wonders if it is the fever loosening his restraint, or if it is something else entirely. A moment of quiet surrender. A flickering glimpse of the man beneath the crown, reaching for something outside the weight of duty.
Uhtred stays still, lets Alfred’s hand rest there, does not pull away.
Instead, he watches the slow collapse of Alfred’s shoulders, the way the tension seeps out of his frame inch by inch, as if he is only now allowing himself this moment of respite.
Beyond the glow of the fire, the marshlands stretch dark and endless, the distant whisper of water against the reeds the only reminder that the world has not stopped spinning.
It occurs to Uhtred, in a brief moment of unbidden clarity, that there are few—if any—who see Alfred like this. Not the king, not the strategist, not the visionary whose ambitions burn bright enough to consume him whole. Just Alfred, tired and human and too thin in the firelight, a man who bears the weight of an entire kingdom on his fragile, failing body.
Alfred sinks more heavily against Uhtred’s side, his head tilting just slightly, finding the slope of Uhtred’s shoulder like he’s unaware of the movement, like he no longer has the strength or the will to correct it.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to shift, to lean away and let Alfred catch himself, to maintain the careful distance that has always defined them. Alfred’s weight is barely there, but Uhtred feels it like a brand, the warmth of him pressing through the layers of fabric, through his skin, settling in the marrow of his bones.
He doesn’t move.
The fire pops and crackles, and for a moment, Uhtred wonders if Alfred has fallen asleep. But then there’s a sigh, quiet and weary, and Alfred shifts just enough to murmur, “Uhtred.”
Uhtred swallows. “Mm?”
There’s a long pause. Then, so soft he almost doesn’t catch it: “You will not leave, will you?”
Uhtred exhales, a quiet thing through his nose. He thinks of Wessex, of his father’s land far to the north, of his own name and the destiny that calls to him from beyond the marshes. He thinks of everything Alfred has taken from him, and everything he has given in return, and how tangled they have become despite everything.
“I swore an oath,” he says again, because it is the only answer he can give. And then, quieter: “I will see it kept.”
Alfred hums, something faintly content in the sound, a thought half-formed and left unfinished.
“Lord, I…” Uhtred halts, breath suddenly caught in his throat.
Alfred is asleep beneath the stars. The light of the fire dances across his face like the gentle touch of a lover, painting it into stark relief. Sickness and woe have turned his features more narrow than they used to be, have cast new lines into his forehead and new shadows under his eyes, but he looks more at peace now than he ever did awake. The burdens that usually darken his countenance into the severity Uhtred is used to are lifted, at least for a time.
Alfred is not a man to like. He is a man to fight or a man to follow, to despise or to admire. His soul is a pillar of steel and stone, unapproachable and impregnable. He is God’s king, God’s instrument.
Despite all that, Uhtred feels his chest set alight with warmth at the sight. With a fondness that is impossible to shake.
Alfred still clasps Uhtred’s hand in his own. Sleep has loosened the firm grasp of his fingers, but they remain curled around Uhtred’s.
Uhtred doesn’t pull away. He lets his thumb brush carefully over the ridges of Alfred’s knuckles. The skin is cool to the touch, colder than the feverish heat that continues to radiate from his body, but it begins to warm beneath Uhtred’s hand.
Not marble at all, Uhtred thinks, and he feels almost giddy.
Alfred’s breaths are soft and even against Uhtred’s shoulder, only their shallowness betraying the unrest seated so deep within him. His every exhale brushes warm against the sliver of Uhtred’s neck bared to the night air, like the softest of caresses against his skin.
It makes him shiver.
Uhtred lays his cheek upon Alfred’s head and breathes in the clean scent of his hair, the smell of wood smoke, and wonders quietly, secretly at the way his chest continues to ache with warmth he cannot name or put into words.
Uhtred knows he can never abandon this place now, even if he wanted to. Inadvertently, accidentally, Alfred has bound their fates together, has braided the strands of their lives into a rope that no man could ever cut, no war could ever tear, no god could ever unravel.
A part of Uhtred despises him for it, but that feeling is not at odds with the soft affection in his heart. He knows better than most that love and hate are not opposites: they are dark sisters, forever at each other’s side. They are one and the same, two edges of the same blade, cutting deep and clean and inescapable.
Alfred settles in his sleep, shivers against the night air.
Uhtred fights the urge to wrap an arm around his slender form and pull him close, but he allows himself the indulgence of reaching across and dragging the furs tighter over Alfred’s shoulders. Of letting his fingers linger against his arm for a moment too long. Placing a gentle hand on the back of Alfred’s head.
It is a strange thing, to be trusted in this way. A trust given not in grand declarations or oaths sworn before God, but in the quiet press of a fevered man seeking warmth, in the fingers curled loosely around his own, in the weight settled against his shoulder as if he were a thing to be leaned upon.
Maybe he is Alfred’s dog after all, leashed and loyal and docile, made soft by the promise of a kind hand and the weight of a burden shared.
How could he ever leave now? How could he ever go?
Their fates are intertwined, and Uhtred knows better than to defy the will of the nornir.
He sighs, tilting his head back to stare at the expanse of stars above them. The marshes are quiet, save for the distant lapping of water, and for the first time in a long time, the world does not feel like it is burning around him.
It will, come morning. There will be decisions to make, battles to fight, the endless dance of war and loyalty and survival.
But for now, Alfred sleeps, and Uhtred watches over him, and that is enough.