The smoke was hot, thick. It burned her throat, coiled into her lungs. Osthryth stumbled coughing into the building that was more flame than wood. She tried to call for the woman who was trapped, but Thyra Ragnarsdottir's name died in her throat. In her coughing fit, Osthryth groped for a surface her hand catching a table. On it, she dislodged a bowl of water, which crashed onto the wooden planks of the house floor.
A whimper came up through them. Osthryth gasped, more smoke filling her lungs. She groped on the floor, lying close to it. A cloth had soaked into the water amd she pulled ut to her mouth, her airways clearing suddenly.
A banging came from the floor where the whimper had come from. Outside, shouting. Osthryth crawled along to the floor, groping with the other hand as the damp cloth filtered the intensifying smoke.
Another breath and a crumble ahead as the front of the house took the flame. The heat was intense; it was like looking at a thousand suns.
A body, itself fuelling the fire caught Osthryth's foot and she stumbled, before pushing it away with her hands, lowering the damp cloth from her mouth. And that's when she saw it - the trapdoor, and the whimper was coming underneath.
When she thought she could stand it no longer Osthryth's hand caught a latch. Scrabbling, she pulled it open, the smoke curling and coiling around the square hole. The flame roared before her as the consumed wood crackled away. An out-draught of air shot into the house of Father Beocca. Osthryth plunged forward.
Siezing the body of Uhtred's adopted sister she pulled Thyra up through the hatch under which she had been trapped. Her head lolled back but Osthryth pulled her to her shoulder. The charred body of the dead man, whoever he was, fell in as Osthryth stepped through the remains of the floorboards.
Ahead of her, the door was a burning archway, the wood crackling around it making it larger and smokier.
Osthryth took her chance. With the might of her body she leapt to it, Thyra's tiny frame a negligible burden on her shoulder.
In the street feet running, feet pounding, voices calling, and calling.
Staggering, Osthryth stumbled into the street, Thyra falling beside her. The shouts were getting louder as the thatch lit up, white-hot peaks of flame stretched for the midnight-blue sky.
She swallowed and shouldered the woman again, pressing down a narrow passage into Aldgate. No Christian would help her now, Osthryth knew. But there was someone.
Ula would help. She had not seen the Britonnic healer for several months, not since she had paid for treatment in hackgold that Osthryth had stolen from her brother, no doubt stolen from the North Cymric in the first place.
Down Aldgate, through the passage near Gaolgate and into the slums of Micklegate. Mud-dark children slunk against the wall as Osthryth's voice broke over the words "Move!" and "Now!"
Everyone outside the law of Wessex came to Ula at one time or another. Women needing contraceptive herbs; pagans or Britons still adhering to their old religions who needed a poultice or medicine of jackdaw feathers and sacrificial blood. Or a scrying to put their souls at ease. At an unknown age, black hair braided with malachite beads and jet stones marked with what looked very much like rune-scratches to the trained eye, Ula had served these people right under the noses of the very Christian Wessex kings. When the Danes were at their height she was close to being turned over for witchcraft. But there were enough people who owed her their lives in Winchester to make her invisible.
Ula was leaning on a broom as Osthryth strode into her shop, permitted only because the woman was discreet and knew how to keep the church away.
"Help her!" Osrthyth demanded, unfolding the copper-headed Danishwoman onto the horsehair mattress. Ula raised an eye. Then, her fave became a mask of concern.
"I know her. She came for rune-sticks six months ago. She is married to a Christian priest."
"She was very nearly burned alive at her home," Osthryth snarled. I followed her out of the King's wake. She has breathed a good deal of smoke," Osthryth added.
"Thyra Ragnarsdottir," Ula nodded, but then alarm filled her face when Thyra screamed, the power behind it nullified by the burns on the inside of her throat.
"And how much will you pay this time, for this woman, and for you - " Ula began, slyly, picking at Osthryth's burned leather. But then the groan from Thyra caused her to jerk back her head.
"Pull the curtain, quickly!" Ula demanded, the candle-smoke trailing as she pinched out the flame." Osthryth did so, then stalked over to her, hands on hips.
"What is the matter with her?" But Ula did not answer. Instead, she tried to get Thyra, her singed skin on her face and neck crinkling as she did so.
"No, she is too weak to lift. Christian," Ula shot at her, "you must tilt her forward while I help her deliver."
Half an hour later, and Osthryth was pacing on the straw-and-dung- strewn alleyway.
"Come!" Ula shouted. Osthryth pulled back the curtain. Blinking, Osthryth strode in. She had been banished for her Christianity; Ula would empty Thyra of her burden the pagan way and somehow that involved Osthryth not being there.
A mewling came from a sun-bleached cloth; a tiny hand groped for the air.
"Take her," Ula panted, the effort of this little child's entry to the world sapping energy from her muscles and sinews and ligaments.
"Take her!" the healer demanded, holding her out to Osthryth. "It has barely been six months. I took life from you; I am giving it back."
Osthryth looked between the baby and Thyra.
"She used what strength she had left to bear her," Ula added, sorrow in her voice. She looked slowly over to Thyra and lowered her eyes. Osthryth looked too. Sonehow the woman, Father Beocca's pagan wife, looked at peace, nothing at all like she had been, screaming in terror at the fate that was to befall her.
"Take the child!" Ula insisted. "If you don't feed her now she will surely die like her mother." Ula held out the bundle.
"There will be no charge, Osthryth Lackland. I will send this good Dane on to Valhalla; you will raise her daughter."
Osthryth began to laugh. Take a child? A baby? She had no home, no place, nothing to offer a child. She cast her eyes on Thyra.
"Her parents died in a fire," Osthryth murmered. My brother told me. Only he didn't know that he had. That was the day he had laughed with his men over the antics of Mus, the Bishop's wife and devout carer of the poor and hungry, who sold her body in the tavern at night for the fun of it. That had been the night he had taken Mus for his own.
In Ula's arms the little thing tried to cry, but its lungs, underdeveloped and weak, could only manage a sound like a loud sigh. Osthryth cursed her body. Since paying for information on her back and conceiving from it, it had never been the same as it once had been.
"She will perish if you do not, Osthryth."
And then her body intervened in the impasse between mind and biology. Dampness oozed on the inside of her linen jerkin. Osthryth held out her arms and took the child, knocking the buttons of her leather jacket open with one hand.
The baby took it eagerly, though there was no fore-milk. It would have to do. Of course it would have to do. If she took the baby back to her father she would be put to a wet-nurse and, within a week, suffer the same fate as her mother.
"Sit," Ula said kindly. "Eat. Remember this, Lackland; she will want to know her mother; she is comnected to her mother so strongly." Ula turned her black head back to Thyra. "She will be strong, and a sorceress. But she will keep her Christianity." Ula looked back to Osthryth. "Like you, Osthryth. A Christian who, beneath it all, believes in the gods and feels their real presence."
She smiled. Osthryth looked down at her new, unexpected charge, and shuddered. Is this what her baby might have been like? Hers and...his? Tiny, squirming, mewling, desperate for food, for closeness?
"She must be baptised," Osthryth declared.
"But, of course; it is part of who she is. But, like you, she will never forget." Osthryth said nothing for, to her shame, she knew that Ula, the outlaw healer, spoke the truth.
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"Aedre", Osthryth said, almost to herself, when her heart had stopped hammering and the tiny baby was surviving next to her own skin, buttoned up against her chest.
She sat on the bed of the shack she rented for a shilling a month, an extortionate amount. For this she got the room swept clean by the landlady and food laid out in the mornings, feeling the sleeping girl snuffle in her sleep.
Yes, Osthryth nodded down to the sleeping infant. For that name was once dead, like the bearer, Aedre Uhtredsdottir. And now, like the child, it deserved to live once more.
