As night fell and the party feasted outside in the warm air, Samra finally came out of the house. Alfred saw her, looking up at the starlit sky. As he came across, beyond him she saw Hugh de Bayeux, talking energetically to Edward of Wessex. Samra pulled Alfred towards her, keeping out of sight behind his body.
He could feel she was trembling, as she whispered to him. ‘Who is he?’
Alfred looked behind him. ‘Hugh de Bayeux is one of the Normans my brother keeps company with. I do not like him, though I fear Edward has made promise to him.’
‘What promise?’
‘Hugh lacks land of his own. If he helps Edward regain the throne of England, he will be rewarded there.’
‘Then let your brother return to England quickly,’ said Samra, ‘and take this man with him. For I do not trust him.’
‘As quickly as he may.’
Samra and Alfred turned at the voice, to find Wulfstan standing behind them. The blood streaked on the boy’s face had darkened, and as he gnawed the last of the meat off a bone, in the flickering light of the fire the small, stocky figure looked more prey than hunter. He threw the bone to a dog that had been waiting nearby, watching him with its ears pricked.
‘Wulfstan and Eadric also have cause to return to England,’ explained Alfred. ‘Their father Rædmund is a thegn – that is, an English lord – dispossessed of his manor; his house and lands.’
Samra looked at Wulfstan, as he chewed his mouthful of meat. Gilbert had told her how he had upstaged his brother in the hunt, leaving Eadric cowed and shame-faced. But she did not sense any malice in him; only the bravado of youth – and a strange sense of connection that she could not place. His blue eyes meeting her black, Wulfstan looked back with frank curiosity at the dark woman from the south in front of him, out of place in a northern forest clearing.
‘Where is this… “man-or”?’ Samra asked.
Wulfstan laughed at her pronunciation of the word.
‘At Berewic.’
And Samra felt a thrill run through her body, like panic; but like hope also.

Mildrythe sat down on the block and drew the girl gently toward her. Now she was close, Mildrythe saw the roots of the child’s hair on the grimy skin of her scalp were ash–blond.  
‘Do you have a name?’ A puzzled look. ‘Who do you belong to?’ A shake of the head. ‘Who is your lord?’ Still puzzled. ‘Any family?’ Another shake of the head. Mildrythe sighed. ‘The fact is, child, you owe us compensation; you or your family. Nine shillings, for a little finger. I doubt you have money on you. And if my man dies, you will owe us his wergild. Do you know what that is? The price of his life; two hundred shillings, and you would never pay that, if I wait till judgement day.’
The girl looked fixedly at her, and her blue eyes reached into the woman’s soul. Mildrythe had not seen such a colour since the ice storm nearly twenty years before, when every tree in the Andredswald was wrapped with a crystal glaze, and the sun through it was like blue flame.
‘Well, you shall have a name; I will call you Flame. And you will stay here, and work, to pay your debt to us. We will feed you, and clothe you, and give you shelter.’ She dabbed a finger in the blood still drying on the block, and made one stroke down the child’s forehead, then another across. ‘And this is our pledge to you; that you need fear nothing from us, or from those who come among us. So long as we live, you will have our protection.’  
Flame looked at her, then longingly across to the cooking pot.

Ælfwyn follows Ralf out into the cool air. He is looking up at the darkening sky in which pinpricks of light are emerging.
‘The light of ten thousand stars, my grandmother says.’
Ælfwyn looks across the valley, to the clumps of trees sliver grey in the moonlight. ‘Do you remember—'
‘Yes. Everything, as if it were yesterday.’
‘You hated me then.’
‘You hated me more.’
She stops looking across the valley and turns to him. ‘I still do.’
He stops looking at the sky and turns to her. ‘So do I.’
And they face each other, Ælfwyn looking fiercely at Ralf, and he with the cowed look he has when she does. So she looks fiercer still, and he looks even more cowed. But they are smiling. Suddenly they are in each other’s arms in a tight embrace; hope and grief, and longing and fear, overwhelming them in a moment of connection as utter as it is swift. Overhead the stars shift slightly in the sky; the same stars that will be seen from Normandy, from Spain, from Scandinavia, and from Egypt.
Just as abruptly they pull away, awkwardly, one looking back to the valley and the other to the sky as before.
‘Look at us,’ says Ælfwyn, brushing herself down.
‘Thrown together,’ says Ralf, shielding his eyes with a hand as if looking at a particular star.
‘Nothing in common.’
‘Not even a language.’
By now they are facing each other.
‘A marriage neither of us wanted,’ Ælfwyn adds.
‘And no wedding rings to show for it.’
Ælfwyn hesitates, recalling the dream. ‘We have both lost our mothers.’
‘And both lost our fathers,’ Ralf says.
Ælfwyn looks away. ‘I grew up knowing only that my father had nearly been the ruin of Berewic, and with stories of two men dying at his hands. I know now that that was true.’
‘For my whole life I grew up with my grandmother grieving the loss of the book,’ Ralf answers, ‘and my mother never able to add to it, except onto the beech tablets I brought to Berewic with me. And I could never draw on its knowledge, except from what little the priest told me. The book is to my family, as Berewic is to yours.’  
Ælfwyn nods. Ralf stoops to his ankle for a moment. When he straightens, he is holding the knife in the palm of a hand.
‘I will find the book.’
Ælfwyn puts one hand under his. ‘And I will be thegn of Berewic.’ She rests her other hand on the knife.
‘And the foretelling on the knife will come about.’ Ralf puts his other hand on top of hers.
They look into each other’s eyes. The book, and the knife.

Ælfwyn stumbles into the chamber, glad now not to have drunk any of the wine offered her. Around her, everything is in disorder. A chest is open, with a tunic and a fur from some animal hanging over its side. Weapons are everywhere; propped up against the walls, lying on the floor. Among them is a plate with mouldy bread on it. Ælfwyn pushes it away with a foot. Whatever Hereward’s concerns, tidiness is clearly not among them.
But there is a bed. Going to lie down on the rumpled covers, for a moment Ælfwyn is in another place, seeing a figure already there; Eadric, watching her, and waiting. Stopping her movement towards the bed, Ælfwyn whirls round, almost expecting to see her own chamber in her own hall house. But the disorder confirms where she is, and now she is glad of it.
Slowly Ælfwyn lowers herself onto the bed, and pulls her knees up to her chest for warmth, and for comfort, remembering lying like this against her mother’s back when she was a young girl. She shuts her eyes against the tears forming in them, but it is not Æadgytha she sees in her mind’s eye. It is a more recent image, of the starving man on the road from York she tried to help, and it makes Ælfwyn catch her breath. Tried to help him with a piece of bread, as mouldy as the one on the floor, that he had struggled to swallow, his skeletal hands clutching at hers. Now she sees the image of Hugh de Bayeux as she turned to him, distraught that she could not help more of the dying, looking at her with pain in his deep-set eyes.  
‘One act of kindness lights up the whole world,’ he had said.  
Ælfwyn breathes out. Now she can sleep.