We knew war. All too well. What we did not know was her.
The stranger looked from face to face.
“I can’t tell you how to fight your war,” she said. “But I can help you keep fear from fighting it for you.”
Silence settled over the hall. I had buried half a season’s worth of friends. I had walked the length of England with a spear on my shoulder, fought Norsemen in the north, and come home with men limping beside me to find the sea gone white with Norman sails.
I had no strength left for one more problem. Yet here she stood.
Darcy Patterson.
She had given her name flat and certain, the way a fighting man gives a watchword. The second name sat strangely in my mind. I had never heard its like.
Neither had I heard a woman say she went willingly into burning houses.
Wystan had looked at her as though she had just confessed to dining with demons.
I was not certain the boy was wrong.
“What are you?” Godwin asked.
The question came low and careful from beside the wall as her mouth tightened. I had already asked nearly the same thing. I suspected we would ask it many times before any answer satisfied us.
She looked down at her own strange clothing, then back at the elder.
“I told you. Where I come from, when buildings burn, there are people whose job it is to go inside.”
A murmur went through the room as Leofric crossed himself.
Darcy noticed. “Really,” she said. “That isn’t helping.”
A few of the younger men laughed. Leofric did not.
“You expect us to believe folk pay you to walk into fire?”
“Not enough, apparently.”
I did not understand the answer but I understood the manner of it. She had the look of a person standing near a cliff edge and making jests because looking down would be worse. I knew something of that.
Godwin leaned forward. “Why?”
Darcy’s eyes went to him. “Why what?”
“Why go in?”
Her expression changed again. The sharpness softened, not into gentleness, but into something quieter.
“Because people are still inside and if I don’t go in, they die.”
No one laughed then.
I watched her. The woman spoke no Christian tongue I knew, and yet somehow we understood one another. She wore clothing no loom could make. She had appeared from the direction of the Norman landing half drowned and alone, and she knew fear too well.
Leofric wanted her bound. The whole weight of the choice sat on me. That is what it is to be lord. Every man may offer counsel. Every woman may whisper what ought to be done. In the end, one man decides, and afterward the dead belong to him.
Godwin rubbed one hand over his beard.
“We have sent the youngest children with their mothers to the northern wood before.”