The Edge on the Sword Read Online Free

himself. And for his companions,” he added to Wulf skulking beside him. Flæd smiled again as she watched the pair go off among the royal family’s buildings in the direction of the kitchens. By habit they veered into the shadows as they turned to skirt the great hall.
    He will probably creep, after all, thought Flæd to herself, shaking her head as she started for her mother’s quarters. Strange, solitary Edward. And strange, solitary me, she added. Years of wandering with her brother had left her little inclined to find other acquaintances in the burgh. She had no friends outside her family members, she acknowledged glumly toherself, and now that lessons filled her days, she scarcely even spent time with them.
    If at that moment Flæd had looked back one last time, she might have seen a slinking shape that was neither her brother nor Wulf. The figure had drawn much closer after the dog turned aside to go with the boy. But Flæd did not look back.
    Moonlight fell around her as she, too, crossed the empty street. It touched the round silver brooch which fastened the grey cloak at Flæd’s neck, making the jewelry shine whitely like a tiny copy of the disk in the sky. Flæd was tall, with long legs and thin arms. She walked without clinging to the burgh’s concealing angles as her brother had done, but she held her wraps close and let her shoulders slope together, neither awkward nor graceful. In a few steps, like Edward, she had reached the group of spacious, single-roomed structures where her family lived. Silently she entered the passageway which ran between the king’s council chamber and the buildings made to shelter the queen and the royal children.
    Home, Flæd thought as she halted at her mother’s threshold. To her right stood the thatched quarters she shared with her sisters; to the left was the boy’s hut—the building where Edward slept with little Æthelweard, the youngest child. Between the children’s chambers rose the fine wooden dwelling her father had made for the comfort of his queen. Flæd stood there outside her mother’s door, chewing one finger. Edward was right—I’m hungry, she realized as her stomach gave a twist. I should have run to the kitchens with him. A pair of royal guards sauntered into the street from the great hall’s entrance, picking their teeth after the evening meal and hailing Flæd as they passed. She considered dashing into the hall to claim her supper. Too many people would notice her, and might wonder where she had been, she concluded. And she had kept her mother waiting too long already. At last she shook back her hood and entered the queen’s chamber.
    “Flæd, you’ve come so late.” Queen Ealhswith straightened beside the loom frame where she had been kneeling. She pushed back a loose strand of pale hair from her face. “And you’re very dusty,” she added, as her daughter unfastened her cloak. “Go wash, and then come help me hang the warp.”
    Without a word, Flæd went to scrub her hands and face at the nearby clay basin. She considered the mud she had tried to brush from her legs by firelight. Her undergown nearly reached her feet, and she still wore her shoes. That grime could wait, she decided, joining her mother at the wooden frame which leaned against the wall.
    Vertical threads, called the warp, hung from the top of the loom toward the floor. Her mother’s tall form was bent over to fasten red clay rings to the ends of these fine woolen strands, weighting them to hang straight toward the ground against the horizontal weft threads that would be woven across them.
    “Look at this fine spinning,” her mother said as Flæd knelt beside her and combed her fingers among the hanging filaments to separate them. “It will make a flannel as thick as the stuff of that dustcloud cloak you brought in.” Flæd’s cloak and Edward’s matching one had come from this loom in their mother’s quiet room.
    Flæd nodded. She had not wanted to speak as she