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Updated: June 19, 2025
They rode within bow shot of the gates, which were closed, and there they paused, for a score of bowmen held their shafts to their ears. Edmund, for our readers have long recognised him, bade his forces halt, and advanced alone, with Alfgar, holding up his hand in sign of peace. "What, ho! men of London," he cried, "do you not recognise Edmund the Etheling?"
The Danish page laughed as he dodged the plaguing wand. "It is true that you owe something to my race, lord. He had great good sense, the Wide-Fathomer, to stretch his strips of oxhide around this dale and turn it into an odal." "Nay now, it was Alfred who had sense to take it away from him," the Etheling teased. But the boy shook back his long tresses in airy defiance.
As the hoofs rang hollow on the little bridge that spanned the stream, the Etheling spoke again in his voice of careless gentleness. "It is easy to enter into the sorrowfulness of your heart, youngling, and I think it no dishonor to your courage that you should mourn your kin with tears; yet I pray you to lay aside as much grief as you can. Bear in mind that no dungeon is gaping for you."
And now Mercia had sternly refused to be governed any longer by the "enemy of the Church," and chose the Etheling, Edgar, to be its king. Acting with the sanction of Odo, whom he deeply revered, the young Edgar, then only in his fifteenth year, accepted the offer, and the whole force of Mercia was gathering to support him when Edwy crossed the border.
"You forget," he said, "that Sweyn will shortly be here; your friend, the Etheling, may have told you that, if you did not know it before; he is telling it to everybody, but no one believes him.
After a searching glance around him, the Etheling took up his station in the shelter of a pillar. "Little danger or hope is there than I can miss her," he told himself, "if she is indeed here, as the page said. Yet of all the unlikely places to seek her!" he smiled faintly as the figure in elfin green flitted through his mind.
His wrinkled old face was so haggard with self-reproach that the Etheling hastily recanted. "Now I bethink me, I am wrong, and it is no one's fault. It comes of the curse that lies over the Island. Was there not something rotten in all English palisades, it would never have happened that the pirates got their first foothold. But we have shaken off the spell, and they have not mastered us yet.
It was a long time before either of us was composed enough to say much, but when we had a little recovered, the abbot who had brought them to my rooms introduced a tall young man in gleeman's garb, as Edmund the Etheling. At length we all sat down to supper, but talked so much we could eat little, and I soon learned all the news Alfgar had to tell.
Mentally he thanked God that Elfric, at least, was not there; and he turned aside his head in horror at the sight. He now inquired of the foreman of the labourers whether he knew where the Etheling Edgar would be. "You mean King Edgar, for the Mercians will acknowledge no other king. The people of Wessex may keep the enemy of the saints, if they like." "King Edgar, I mean. Where is he now?"
The Fates are no such step-mothers after all!" He turned in the direction from which he had come and made the other a sign. "This way, if you dare to follow. I am not afraid to go first, so you need give no thought of the chances of steel between your ribs." The Etheling took his hand off his weapon with a twinge of shame; but he was not without misgivings as he strode along at Rothgar's heels.
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