The Rose of the Heptarchy

Chapter 3

Wulfric moved forward, loosening the rope but not freeing her entirely. “Lord Blackwood, I found this woman beyond the eastern fence. She was wandering alone, evasive in her speech. Claims she’s from a burned village to the north, but her hands and her accent betray her. I suspect she’s a Mercian spy, or a runaway slave.”

Lord Blackwood set down his cup and rose slowly. He stood half a head taller than Wulfric, with thick shoulders and a back that carried an authority that brooked no challenge. He moved to stand before Ella, looking down at her with a scrutinizing gaze. Forced to tilt her face upward, she met those eyes—eyes rich with experience and suspicion. This time there was none of the young warrior’s brash heat only something heavier, more dangerous.

“You speak our tongue?” the lord asked in Old English, his words slow and deliberate, each one driving home like a nail.

Ella swallowed, forcing herself steady. “I do, my lord.” She used the word “hlaford”, shaping the vowel as authentically as she could.

Something shone in Lord Blackwood’s eyes. “Your accent is one I have never heard. You are not Wessex. Not Mercian either. Your gown is Saxon-make, but your eyes are those of one accustomed to command, not obey.” He reached out suddenly, seizing her right hand and turning the palm upward. The skin was fair; though mud-streaked, the fingertips were uncalloused, the flesh of the palm soft. “These hands have never gripped a sickle nor spun thread. What are you?”

Wulfric added from the side, “She claims her name is Ella, lord. Says their village was put to the torch by horsemen.”

Ella’s heart beat like a battle drum. She knew the laws of this era were pitiless to those without clear status; branded a vagrant or spy, she would face brutal punishment. She needed a plausible identity, yet nothing so specific it could be easily disproven. In a flash, she recalled a passage from a monastic chronicle she had once studied: around this period, small settlements were indeed destroyed in tribal clashes, their survivors left wandering. She steeled herself and modified her story.

“I speak only truth, my lord.” She let her sound carry a shake—not due to fear, but feigned cold and exhaustion.

“My village lies on the border between Mercia and Wessex. It is called Oakley. Last month, on the night of the full moon, a band of horsemen—perhaps Mercian outlaws—fell upon us. They burned the houses, slew the men, and carried off the women. I escaped into the woods and have walked the wild ever since, until today when I wandered into your lands. I—I aided the brothers in the village monastery, copying scripture. That is why my hands are not a farmer’s.”

The final sentence was a gamble. She caught the shift in the lean monk behind the lord when he heard the words “copying scripture”. In seventh-century England, literacy was vanishingly rare; those who could write were bound to the Church, and the Church held protective authority. If she could convince the monk of some connection to the clergy, she might buy temporary safety.

Sure enough, the monk moved forward. He was perhaps fifty, his hair iron-gray, dressed in an undyed wool habit. At his waist hung a small leather pouch, the end of a vellum scroll protruding from it. “You say you copied scripture?” His Old English carried a distinct Irish lilt. “In what hand? At which monastery?”

Ella’s mind rifled through her memory. In mid-to-late seventh-century Wessex, Irish missionaries held great sway; many houses used Irish-influenced uncial script. During her time at the Met, she had handled fragments from Lindisfarne, but it was safer to name some obscure local house that could never be verified.

“We copied the Gospels in Latin, brother,” she said, meeting the monk’s eyes, fighting to keep her speech level.

“The monastery was Saint Brigid’s, near Oakley. A small place—only seven brothers. The abbot was Brother Eoghan.” She invented the name on the spot; such minor houses were countless, their records lost to time.

The monk furrowed his brow and turned to murmur something to the lord. Ella caught only the words “Latin,” “perhaps,” and “must be tested.” Lord Blackwood’s expression remained stony, yet he hesitated. He seated himself again and gestured for Wulfric to cut the rope from her wrists.

Wulfric seemed reluctant, but he drew a dagger and severed the rough hemp. Ella rubbed her chafed wrists, careful not to show relief.

“Put her in the store-shed for the night,” the lord decided at last. “After sunrise tomorrow, let the monk test her Latin. If she lies, treat her as a runaway t****l. If she truly reads and writes…” He glanced at the monk. “She may be of use to you.”

Wulfric acknowledged the order and took her upper arm again, his grip lighter than before. He led her out of the longhall, around a side passage, to a low wooden shed. The door was a rough gate of lashed timber. Inside were stacked bundles of wool and several casks of ale, a corner piled with moldy straw that gave off a sour, musty reek.

“Inside.” He pushed the gate open and motioned her in. Ella ducked into the shed. When she turned, she found he had not left. He stood in the doorway, his blue eyes unusually deep in the murky after-rain light.

“When you spoke to the monk just now,” Wulfric said suddenly, his voice low, his Old English slower, “your eyes changed again. No fear. Instead… as if you were searching for something. What are you?”

Ella leaned against a rough post and looked up at him. Rain dripped from the ends of his dark auburn hair, rolling down the rings of his mail. She realized suddenly that this young warrior’s keenness was more dangerous than she had anticipated. She lowered her gaze and chose an answer that was vague but true: “Only someone who wants to live.”

Wulfric was silent a moment. Then he unfastened a leather waterskin from his belt and tossed it onto the straw at her feet. “Before morning, have your Latin ready.” His voice remained hard, but the gesture held a faint, unreadable softening. He turned and walked back into the rain. The gate was pulled shut, a wooden bar dropping into place from the outside.

Ella slid slowly down onto the straw, grabbed the waterskin, and drank—a thin, bitter ale. Darkness gathered in the shed, cut only by cold blue glimmers seeping through the plank cracks. She closed her eyes, yet she could not stop the images surfacing in her mind: the warrior’s face, the leaping light of the hearth in the lord’s hall. Her knowledge had won her a thread of life, and it had also placed her under sharper scrutiny. Tomorrow she would have to prove herself in Latin again—and she knew all too well how unnatural a literate woman was in a world where most could not even sign their names. She could not perform too well, nor too poorly.