He'd actually grinned, Bern remembered, behind the red beard. His father had rarely smiled.

"The Anglcyn in the west rebelled against King Cuthbert after that, which is when Athelbert became king, then Gademar, and Aeldred. Raiding got harder, and then Siggur died in Llywerth. That's when I decided to become a landowner. Spend my days fixing broken doors."

He'd had to escape first, alone and on foot, across the breadth of two different countries.

You act as if it can be done.

"I'm crossing to the mainland," Bern said quietly to the girl in that darkness by the wood.

She stood very still. "Steal a boat?"

He shook his head. "Couldn't take the horse on any boat I could manage alone."

"You won't leave the horse?"

"I won't leave the horse."

"Then?"

"Swim," said Bern. "Clearly." He smiled, but she couldn't see it, he knew.

She was silent a moment. "You can swim?"

He shook his head. "Not that far."

Heroes came to thresholds, to moments that marked them, and they died young, too. Icy water, end of winter, the stony shore of Vinmark a world away across the strait, just visible by daylight qui f the mist didn't settle, but not now.

What was a hero, if he never had a chance to do anything? If he died at the first threshold?

"I think the horse can carry me," he said. "I will… act as if it can." He felt his mood changing, a strangeness overtaking him even as he spoke. "Promise me no monsters in the sea?"

"I wish I could," said the girl.

"Well, that's honest," he said. He laughed again. She didn't, this time.

"It will be very cold."

"Of course it will." He hesitated. "Can you… see anything?" She knew what he meant. "No."

"Am I underwater?" He tried to make it a joke.

Shook her head. "I can't tell. I'm sorry. I'm… more a youngest daughter than a seer."

Another silence. It struck him that it would be appropriate to begin feeling afraid. The sea at night, straight out into the black…

"Shall I… any word for your mother?"

It hadn't occurred to him. Nothing had, really. He thought about it now. "Better you never saw me. That I was clever by myself. And died of it, in the sea."

"You may not."

She didn't sound as if she believed that. She would have been rowed across from Vinmark, coming here. She knew the strait, the currents and the cold, even if there were no monsters.

Bern shrugged. "That will be as Ingavin and Thünir decide. Make some magic, if you have any. Pray for me, if you haven't. Perhaps we'll meet again. I thank you for coming out. You saved me from… one bad kind of death, at least."

It was past the bottom of the night, and he had a distance to go to the beach nearest the mainland. He said nothing more, and neither did she, though he could see that she was still staring at him in the dark. He mounted up on the horse he wouldn't leave for Halldr Thinshank's funeral rites, and rode away.

Some time before reaching the strand south-east of the forest, he realized he didn't know her name, or have any clear idea what she looked like. Unlikely to matter; if they met again it would probably be in the afterworld of souls.

He came around the looming dark of the pine woods to a stony place by the water: rocky and wild, exposed, no boats here, no fishermen in the night. The pounding of the sea, heavy sound of it, salt in his face, no shelter from the wind. The blue moon west, behind him now, the white one not rising tonight until dawn. It would be dark on the ocean water. Ingavin alone knew what creatures might be waiting to pull him down. He wouldn't leave the horse. He wouldn't go back. You did whatever was left, and acted as if it could be done. Bern cursed his father aloud, then, for murdering another man, doing that to all of them, his sisters and his mother and himself, and then he urged the grey horse into the surf, which was white where it hit the stones, and black beyond, under the stars.

TWO

"Our trouble," muttered Dai, looking down through green-gold leaves at the farmyard, "is that we make good poems and bad siege weapons."

A siege, in fact, wasn't even remotely at issue. The comment was so inconsequential, and so typical of Dai, that Alun laughed aloud. Not the wisest thing to do, given where they were. Dai slapped a hand to his brother's mouth. After a moment, Alun signalled he was under control and Dai moved his hand away, grunting.

"Anyone in particular you'd like to besiege?" Alun asked, quietly enough. He shifted his elbows carefully. The bushes didn't move.

"One poet I can think of," Dai said, unwisely. He was prone to jests, his younger brother prone to laughing at them; they were moth prone under leaves, gazing at penned cattle below. They'd come north to steal cattle. The Cyngael did that to each other, frequently.

Dai moved a hand quickly, but Alun kept still this time. They couldn't afford to be seen. There were just twelve of them—eleven, with Gryffeth now captured—and they were a long way north into Arberth. No more than two or three days from the sea, Dai reckoned, though he wasn't sure exactly where they were, or what this very large farmhouse below them was.

Twelve had been a marginal number for a raiding party, but the brothers were confident in their abilities, not without some cause. Besides, in Cadyr it was said that any one of their own was worth two of the Arberthi, and at least three from Llywerth. They might do the arithmetic differently in the other two provinces, but that was just vanity and bluster.

Or it should have been. It was alarming that Gryffeth had been taken so easily, scouting ahead. The good news was that he'd prudently carried Alun's harp with him, to be taken for a bard on the road. The bad news was that Gryffeth—notoriously—couldn't sing or play to save his life. If they tested him down below, he was unmasked. And saving his life became an issue.

So the brothers had left nine men out of sight off the road and climbed this overlook to devise a rescue plan. If they went home without cattle it was bad but not humiliating. Not every raid succeeded; you could still do a few things to make a story worth telling. But if their royal father or uncle had to pay a ransom for a cousin taken on an unauthorized cattle raid into Arberth during a herald's truce, well, that was… going to be quite bad.

And if Owyn of Cadyr's nephew died in Arberth it could mean war.

"How many, do you think?" Dai murmured.

"Twenty, give or take a few? It's a big farmhouse. Who lives here? Where are we?" Alun was still watching the cows, Dai saw. "Forget the cattle," Dai snapped. "Everything's changed." "Maybe not. We let them out of the pen tonight, four of us scatter them north up the valley, the rest go in after Gryffeth while they're rounding them up?"

Dai looked thoughtfully at his younger brother. "That's unexpectedly clever," he said, finally.

Alun punched him on the shoulder, fairly hard. "Hump a goat," he added mildly. "This was your idea, I'm getting us out of it. Don't be superior. Which room's he in?"

Dai had been trying to sort that out. The farmhouse—whoever owned it was wealthy—was long and sprawling, running east to west. He saw the outline of a large hall beyond the double doors below them, wings bending back north at each end of that main building. A house that had expanded in stages, some parts stone, others wood. They hadn't seen Gryffeth taken in, had only come upon the signs of struggle on the path.

Two cowherds were watching the cattle from the far side of the fenced enclosure east of the house. Boys, their hands moving ceaselessly to wave at flies. None of the armed men had emerged since a cluster of them had gone in through the main doors, talking angrily, just as the brothers had arrived here in the thicket above the farm. Once or twice they'd heard raised, distant voices within, and a girl had come out for well water. Otherwise it was quiet and hot, a sleepy afternoon, late spring, butterflies, the drone of bees, a hawk circling. Dai watched it for a moment.