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Ethandun, Wessex, 878 AD.
Laywyn could feel the blood intermingling with sweat as it dripped down her neck, under the collar of the mail and tunic she had pilfered from Lord Odda's armoury, and trailed down her spine. She had been nicked by a knife-wielding Dane during a moment of distraction in the battle, when she had caught sight of Uhtred up ahead and called out for his attention. But it was only a flesh wound. It would not kill her.
Bodies were splayed across the field, leading up to the old Roman fort that was Ethandun.
Where Danes had once manned the tiny barricade, Saxons now swarmed, attending to the injured and collecting the corpses of their dead friends and relatives.
The dead. Laywyn blinked away tears as she refocused her attention on her lord, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, as he knelt by the bodies of their fallen friends, Iseult and Leofric.
It had been nigh on four turns of the moon since Laywyn had met the infamous warrior in service to King Alfred. Prior to then, Laywyn had been a ward of the church, living in an abbey in Cippanhamm and serving as a novice, like most of the orphans left on the convent's doorstep were wont to do. She had known nothing of the outside world except the small glimpses of it she would lap up when she successfully managed to shirk Hild's attention and sneak out into the town.
She had known nothing of death and suffering, and the wicked whims of men.
But all that changed when the Danes came to Wessex.
The fragile peace King Alfred had brokered with the Dane, Guthrum, following Wareham was shattered in a matter of hours, as the northmen took advantage of the king's annual Yuletide visit to Cippanhamm to attack the town-stead and begin their invasion of the last Saxon kingdom. Alfred had been forced to flee while his people were ravaged, and even the holy sanctity of the abbey had not been enough to spare Laywyn from the same fate.
Hild had been the primary influence in Laywyn's life since the young girl could remember. When she was very little, Laywyn even recalled thinking Hild was her mother. The abbess had said that it was Hild who brought her as a babe to the abbey's doorstep and Laywyn had assumed at the time that it was Hild who brought her into the world also. Other children she watched playing in the streets outside the abbey had mothers. Why would Laywyn not?
It was not until she reached the age of eight that Hild explained the circumstances surrounding Laywyn's arrival at the convent properly to the young girl. Yes, Hild had been the one to initiate Laywyn as a ward of the church, but the older woman was already on her way to being a nun at the time. She had never laid with a man and never planned to.
Hild was simply a friend of Laywyn's uncle — a man called Hefric, who Hild claimed was a great soldier — and when Laywyn's mother had died giving birth to her, Hild had offered to ensure Laywyn was cared for.
