The Price of Blood. Patricia Bracewell

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      Æthelred paced his inner chamber as he waited for Emma to respond to his summons. It was late and he was weary but, by Christ, he would not face another night in his bed alone. His dreams were a torment, filled with phantoms – the dead come to haunt him. His brother, his mother, even his father had troubled his sleep for a week. Their faces, decaying and putrid beneath golden crowns, hovered over him, as if they would warn him of some coming disaster. Last night it had been Elgiva, beautiful and naked, riding him hard until suddenly she was no longer Elgiva. It was her father whose dead weight pressed upon his chest and whose rough, bearded mouth covered his own, drawing all the breath from his lungs until he woke, crying out in terror.

      The menace of that nightmare still clung to him, yet it offered a glimmer of hope, for it could mean that Elgiva, too, was now rotting in some unhallowed grave.

      So far, she had not been discovered in either Mercia or Northumbria, and he dared to hope that some mischance had befallen her – the last of Ælfhelm’s brood of vipers.

      Alive, wedded to some powerful Danish lord, she could be a threat – a rallying point for Ælfhelm’s disgruntled northern kin.

      Dead, she could do no more than haunt him.

      He paused at his work-table to finger a pile of scrolls and wax tablets that bore news from Kent, where the Danes continued to burn and plunder. His fyrds were doing exactly as he had ordered, shepherding his people into the burhs to protect them. From within the safety of their fortress walls, though, they had to watch as their homes were torched and their livestock driven away. They were powerless to stop it, for they had not the numbers to confront the better-armed shipmen and their savage leader – some bastard, he saw scrawled on one of the tablets, named Tostig.