“No time.”
“That wasn’t the answer I was looking for.”
“I am occupied.”
“It goes in your mouth. You can keep walking.”
“You are remarkably troublesome for a woman under my protection.”
“And you’re remarkably stubborn for a man who needs calories.”
“What are calories?”
“Something you’re currently lacking.”
I pushed the oat cake into his hand, and he stared at it for a moment before turning that same look on me.
“Eat,” I repeated.
“You command much for a foreign widow.”
“Terrible habit.”
He took a bite, which I counted as a victory even though the thing looked capable of removing a tooth.
With a dubious look at the oat cake, I took a bite. It was even harder than it looked.
By the time we reached the rise, the men had gone back to work. Wulfric moved amongst them, shifting archers, sending two men toward the northern path, checking some part of the defenses that meant nothing to me and everything to him.
The light was fading over Ashford, turning the wet fields bronze beneath a bruised gray sky while smoke rose from the thatched roofs below. The air smelled of damp earth, burning oak, onions, and the pork stew Gilda had been cooking since midday.
Men talked while they worked, sometimes laughing too loudly, not because anything was particularly funny but because people did that when they were tired and afraid and needed the world to feel ordinary for another few minutes.
Wulfric finished speaking to Godwin and came toward me as I looked past him toward the rise.
“Where will you be?”
“When?”
“If they come.”
His expression gave me the answer before he spoke.
“Here.”
“At the front?”
“A lord does not hide behind his men.”
Something tightened beneath my ribs.
“I didn’t ask whether you’d hide.”
“Then why ask?”
Because I wanted to know where he would be if everything went wrong, and because apparently four days was all it took for my brain to begin noting the location of one certain Saxon as though that information belonged on an incident board.
“What happens if you have to fall back?”