The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft

of all our days once we grow old, but I did not think to find mine here. Go.”
    Saewyn packed all her jars and simples into her basket in a hunted silence, and ushered her son out of the door before her with almost the same movements she would use to drive out demons. That was not a comforting thought.
    Outside, the rain fell and mud-month was living up to its name. Rain slicked Cenred’s hair and dripped into the corners of those ungenerous eyes. It soaked through Saewyn’s wimple and began to trickle cold down the back of her neck.
    As she shivered, scarcely needing this to make her more miserable, a change seemed to come over Cenred’s face—the lines of it eased. His eyes came out of hiding and showed themselves blue and concerned. He took off his leather cloak and swept it around her shoulders. Took off too the oiled leather hood that he had not bothered to raise, and placed it carefully over her head.
    “I’m sorry.” He smiled, and it was the face of her young son, before the stones. “I don’t know what came over me. She was so…forward and lewd, it didn’t seem right for her to go about in the guise of one who was virtuous. It…offended me. Was that wrong?”
    Now she wanted to embrace and comfort him, for he looked so lost, as though he had been a long way off, watching himself act and puzzling over it. She thought again the thoughts she had put aside earlier. “Are you so very perfect yourself, son, that you must make yourself the right hand of God’s judgment?”
    “I do try.”
    She was relieved enough to laugh. “As do we all, and all fail, and all of us therefore must lay ourselves penitent at the Lord’s feet and hope for the mercy we are told must come.”
    He took the basket from her, letting her pick up her skirts as they both ran back from the huddle of houses where the potter lived among shared fields, into the burh and the great hall’s warmth. The leather cloak flapped around her legs and water dripped off the hood, and she was no more than damp when they arrived, though Cenred was so drenched he might have crawled up out of the moat.
    She watched his face light up as his friends among the warriors drew apart to make a space beside them for him, close to the fire, and felt love still, going all the way through her like the spit through a roast bird, when he turned to her and waited for her permission to join them. He is proud of me, she thought. No matter what he says of my work, he is proud of his mother. It made everything feel well again. A little pebble of unhappiness to swallow, instead of a boulder.
    “Will I try to teach you again?”
    “I would rather not, Mother. I am not suited to it.”
    You used to be, she thought, in those old days when you would trail after me, with rips in your knees and armfuls of muddy roots, with tangled hair and a smile that took up half your face. Before your father filled your heart full of stones. But you are the man of the household now and I suppose a man has to put down childish things.
    And all the strivings of the world are vanity. All of it shall be lost.
    She smiled and inclined her head beneath the supple gape of the hood. “As you wish. I would not force you to go where your heart tells you you do not belong.” I do not have that kind of influence over you any more.
    It should have been a hopeful thought. It was not.
     
     
    The ice creaked beneath Wulfstan’s bone skates, and the air was like a knife in his throat. It tasted of steel. St. Polycarp’s day had come with deepening snow, the last—so the farmers hoped—of the season. Soon there must come a thawing, so that mud-month might soften the earth for planting. Today the old and the soft were warming their stinging hands by the fire, and Wulfstan and the other warriors were at play, chasing one another over the deep ice of the fish pond, enacting skirmishes and ambushes throughout the burh, armed with chunks of ice and balls of snow.
    It was serious work, he knew, for the