Title: We double-edged swords
Fandom: The Last Kingdom
Characters: Hild. Mentions of Uhtred, Iseult, Gisela.
Rating: T
Notes: Set before the party returns to Winchester from where Gisela was (in Epchester) at the end of 2x03. Some mentions of violence (a beheading, to be precise).
Length: 1010 words
Summary: Hild ponders what makes someone a friend or an enemy.

 

The amber gleamed golden with firelight as it borrowed life to its captive insects while their company all slept soundly — and abbot Eadred’s corpse sank in his fresh grave somewhere.

Only Hild sat awake, watching. Light danced within that unusual pommel of Uhtred’s sword, of a sword she had kept sharp with the passing of the seasons so its master could make use of it when he was released from slavery. Such delicacy gladdened Uhtred, her rescuing of him becoming even more wonderful than it was. Uhtred had been thankful; Uhtred had then murdered the abbot on holy ground, deaf to her pleas.

She winced. Her fingers played idly with the large crucifix that hung from her neck.

The abbot lay bloodless in some burial ground and there Uhtred slept guiltless beside the woman his crime had saved from a marriage to martyrdom. His brow uncreased, his still recovering body loose and unworried like that of the lord into whose clothes he would soon relearn to fit now that the slaves’ rags had been discarded. There he lay as a saint in his peace — there he lay as a Pagan.

Hild looked around her. All slumbered just the same, Christian and Pagan, Saxon and Dane alike. Only she remained up, painfully conscious.

Uhtred’s brother in chains, the Irishman Finan, was as lost in dreams as Uhtred’s brother in all but blood, that Dane Ragnar.

The blond beard styled in the foreigner’s way that grew from Ragnar’s chin reminded her of another: one Hild had pulled at in fury as she sawed a man’s head off with a knife. She, too, had let blood spill over a cross. And, while they lay asleep and harmless as sheep, it would be all too easy to wet it in a dash more of Dane blood as retribution for the killing of an abbot…

She shook her head.

Hild had not liked abbot Eadred, nor did she now owe him anything apart from prayer, perhaps. He would have made enemies of friends for his own earthly satisfaction as the voice that muttered into a king’s ear — just as he had turned Guthred against Uhtred and against his own sister, Gisela; just as the memory of him now would have her slay a man she had so long been sworn and sought to save after he had been good to her, respected her, protected her and all those around him.

With a sigh, Hild let aside the thought and sight of swords to look up at the night sky and all of its stars. The shadow of concern chased her regardless.

Perhaps she should have drawn her own blade so as to intercede for the holy man, as impetuous as Uhtred himself was prone to being, wielding weapons in front of even the King as he once told her he had done out of a sense of justice; perhaps, if she had faced him, slowed him, the offence would not have been completed… By staying Uhtred’s hand, however, Hild knew she would have condemned Gisela to a life of abuse.

Perhaps, in the end, this disastrous outcome of a church man’s murder which seemed to weigh solely upon her conscience was for the best after all. God’s will, somehow.

She stifled a yawn and blinked away the blurriness of the stars that had come with creeping drowsiness — blurry, as often were the lines between friend and foe.

War demanded clear distinctions. Raiders, invaders, thieves, killers; godless blood-thirsty brutes on one side and those who resisted, farmers, priests, warriors of one sole land, one sole faith and one sole God on the other. Simple, crude, so that death and dying at the point of a spear did not seem so strange or unreasonable as it truly was.

And yet, all was paradox: Uhtred was both Dane and Saxon, acted at times as both ally to her and adversary to her church; his viking brother Ragnar had been as faithful in trying to find him at her side as a Christian King would do for his worthiest subjects; abbot Eadred had been a holy man and he had been abhorrent, his guardianship over Saint Cuthbert’s remains and his murky divine visions notwithstanding.

And she, Hild… Was she not nun and warrior, containing peace and violence at once, defying definition?

A toad’s croaking nearby brought her attention back from the heavens to the fire that kept them warm, to the amber pommel, to Gisela sleeping peacefully next to the owner of the remarkable weapon that housed the resin object. Hild could have sworn she saw in Gisela the face of another woman, a ghost, another contradiction, if one she had much more readily seen and accepted than those pertaining to the enmities between men.

She thought she saw Iseult.

“There is good in Iseult,” Hild had once told lady Aelswith without a hint of uncertainty in her voice.

And she had been Pagan, she had been a witch, and still Hild had not hesitated — as Iseult had not much hesitated to help her in her time of need. Sometimes, there was no ambiguity at all, no need to simplify what was complex.

God was not simple either, only loving Him was. The same applied to people here below…

“Is everything alright, Hild?”

The whisper dispelled her thoughts, but Hild did not lose her recently gained tenderness when she found Gisela staring up at her from where she was.

“Yes, lady.”

“Do you not sleep?”

Hild looked upon her, upon the happy, sleeping lump of a man Uhtred currently was beside Gisela, and then at the stars again.

“I was merely praying in thanks for the safety of my friends.”

They exchanged a smile and nothing else as both acknowledged the act. They rearranged themselves in their spots to resume their rest, the nun to begin hers.

Light shining through amber made it into a lively, benevolent eye. It watched over them all until morning and beyond as they rode back into Winchester, leaving behind only dust and doubt.