POV: the-stranger
Summary
The first person in Ealstan's entry to recover from Ulric's killing is the thegn's wife, Rowena. She kneels beside Oswald's body, names what he did defending the hall, and dispatches a guard for Hairud — she will speak to Hairud, then to Oswald's mother, prepare an urn, and place the boy in their barrow. The stranger, watching from the armoury door, lets out a long breath at how nearly that had been him. Ealstan punches the wall and shakes the whole structure, demanding to know what Ulric did and that someone fetch the skop — then trails off as Sefawynn moans from beside the stranger's feet.
He steps around her, hands raised. Ealstan curses and drops to one knee with his wife and guard behind him, and addresses the stranger as honoured spirit: it was his imprisonment that drew this evil down, he will find all the quest objects and more, please take no more of his people. The stranger has no idea what to say. He glances out the door, then quickly away from what is in it.
Sefawynn pushes past him before he can answer. He is no spirit, she says, no lord, no aelv — if he were any of those he could have helped, and he did not. She turns to Ealstan, knife white-knuckled in her hand, eyes red, and asks for his fastest horse. He stays kneeling. He apologises for letting her brother be taken. He tells her she shall have no boasts of his household. She tells him he could not have fought what that was; the only one in the hall who could have was her, and she did not speak. A horse, now, please. The stranger asks what she means to do. She means to ride after them until they stop, and then to bind or loose the monster as if it were aelv or spirit — and if it is a god, well, then. He tries to tell her Ulric is just a man — a regular violent person, possibly part ape — and that she will get herself killed chasing him. Her glare answers him in full.
Ealstan rises and promises a horse. He tells Sefawynn the creature is bound for Wellbury, so she will find Wyrm in Wealdsig's house, and that so long as the boy holds his tongue he should be safe. Rowena begs at least to send supplies and guards. Sefawynn will accept supplies and one guard, but she must not be seen approaching; she will retreat first to the founder's wēoh to meditate and gather powerful boasts. The second guard takes a lantern and walks her out into the dark. Rowena, with the practical familiarity of a woman who has done this before, covers the upper half of Oswald's body with a shield and gathers women to help her see to it.
Everyone, the thegn included, gives the stranger a wide berth. He stands in the middle of all of it telling himself Sefawynn is as good as dead, that she will recite poetry at Ulric and he will laugh until he shoots her, and that none of this is his fault — and feels the justifications go hollow on contact. After the armoury, after the panic, he knows exactly what he is. He catches a passing servant carrying a piece of Oswald wrapped in cloth and asks where his "incantations" might be kept. She points a nervous finger toward the room with the firebox and scuttles off.
The room is remarkably smoke-free. In a larder at the back, his handbook pages are dumped in a singed, crumpled, disorderly heap. He lights a lamp from the fire, drags a stool over, and sits down. As much as instinct says to bolt, the pages might tell him who and *when* he is. He blinks up the nanite control protocol three times — a warning tells him he has been awake forty-eight hours and has another day or so before he needs sleep, which is fine — and reaches for the pile.
He springs upright. The pile is now neatly stacked. The larder and great room are empty. He sits back down, heart kicking. The folded pages are now unfolded and laid on top. "Oh, come on!" The wights, or whatever they are, leave him alone once he starts grouping the pages by their numbers in stacks of ten. As he works, one page stands out: a printed questionnaire from the back of the book, with lined spaces for handwritten answers, evidently intended to jog the traveller's memory once he arrived.
At the top: *What is your name?* Below it, in blue ink in his own handwriting, John West. Oh, hell. That was his name. *What was your profession before you became an Interdimensional Wizard™?* That part is burned, but the legible remnant is one completely unexpected word.
*Cop.* Memories follow it — the academy, a uniform. He was not a thief. He was a specialist detective in the Seattle Police Department: Anti-Cartel and Illegal Augments Division.