Hild: A Novel by Nicola Griffith Read Free Book Online Page B

a friend of Onnen, who is cousin to your wife’s brother, Ceredig ap Gualloc, who was king in Elmet wood.”
    He paused, shot a startled look across the hall.
    “Drink, my lord. And tell me, for Onnen, is he well?”
    He sipped and swallowed, nodded slightly.
    She switched back to Anglisc. “If you drink more the cup will be easier for me to hold and you will have my gratitude. And,” in British again, “the housefolk have said that the mead from the hall jars is not of a strength of that first poured for the king. He will be amazed at your steady head.” She grinned. “Though who knows who has paid which man to say what in the hope of foolishness?”
    They took a moment, the grown man in clothes foreign to him and the young girl in splendour she could barely carry, and understood each other. He laughed.
    “You are a strange little lass,” he said in Anglisc, for all to hear.
    “I am the light of the world,” she said, clear and high, and the scop, always sensitive to dramatic possibility, drew an uncanny chord from his lyre, and at that moment a great gust of wind made the torches on the upper level gutter then flare.
    The hall fell silent.
    “I drink to you, little light!” He drained the cup, upended it, and the men beat their palms on the boards and the scop nodded to his whistle man and his drummer and they plucked a few measures of a lively air and, while the other women now moved to fill drinking horns along the benches, she could recross the hall without too many people paying attention.
    But as she approached Edwin he gestured to a houseman, who ran down the benches, and up, and said, “The king desires that you sit with him for the feast if, being a little maid, you are not too tired. And he desires me to take the cup from you now, so that you may walk with ease to his bench. Your lady mother and sister may join also, should you wish it.”
    Hild looked at Edwin and nodded. “Yes. I thank the king. But my sister can carry the cup. The girl with honey hair and the green dress.”
    Another houseman ran to bring Breguswith to Edwin, and Hereswith to Hild, to take the cup. Hereswith, twelve years old, brilliant in beryl green, with a silvered-tin brooch at her breast, gave Hild a complicated look as she reached for the cup, but looked startled when she felt its weight. “Thunor!” she said. “That’s heavy.”
    “Hold it tight,” Hild said, and she was glad to have a sister to walk beside her down the hall. The housefolk watched them closely. The boy who had stuck his tongue out at her poked his head through the curtained doorway and the houseman standing there—the kitchen chief, Hild saw—shooed him back. The chief seemed tense.
    Hild understood: He couldn’t serve until the cupbearer sat. “Let’s go faster,” Hild said.
    Breguswith timed her arrival at the head table to match theirs. Edwin stood, the æthelings and Lilla with him, and a fuss was made of seating them all: Hild, as cupbearer, to the king’s immediate left, her mother and Hereswith and Mildburh between the princes.
    The minute they sat, housefolk poured into the hall with roast pigs in apple-scented crackling and tubs of roasted vegetables and great wooden bowls of soup. At other tables, Hild saw, the men and their women shared the soup, passing the table bowl back and forth as they would a drinking horn, but at the king’s bench, each guest was brought his or her own birchwood bowl.
    Her mother gave her a meaningful smile— Talk to the king! —then turned to Osfrith. Hereswith looked at Eadfrith and nodded as though they had always sat side by side, and he said, “How do you, lady?” though his voice squeaked a little and his spotty skin reddened. The scop began a pleasant tune, with an endless feel to it, like spinning, and Hild understood she would be here a while. She wished her feet touched the floor.
    The king lifted his bowl and slurped. He wiped his beard with a heavy-ringed hand, wiped his hand on the cloth