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by man echoed off the walls of the hall. There was a silence, and then everyone began to laugh as though they were possessed.
    Wulfstan whirled and caught the young harper taking his fingers out of his mouth, joining in with the laughter, the older one clouting him on the ear, though he smiled. The poisonous little bastard! He’d done it on purpose. By some harper’s magic, he had made the sound appear to come from Wulfstan, though actually produced elsewhere.
    Humiliation boiled up from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair and lifted him off his seat as though a giant had hauled him up by the collar.
    From his place by the Port Reeve’s side, Ecgbert said sharply, “Stop him,” and Aelfsi on his left, Cenred on his right caught an arm each and with some struggling forced him back onto his bench. He made two more attempts, almost unseating them, before the rage drained off, leaving him cold and sick and miserable.
    Familiar with his moods, Aelfsi patted the arm he had been holding and let go, and Cenred thrust a full beaker of mead into his hand, watched as he downed it and called for it to be refilled.
    Awareness came back slowly. At some point the young man had begun to sing, and it was a voice of bronze—powerful but subtle, beautiful but strong, its measured cadences and striding beats sweeping the listener along as if galloping on a spirited horse. As the humiliation faded, Wulfstan noticed with grudging thankfulness that no one was looking at him. They were all taken up in the rush of the song, reliving a well-known story, hearing it afresh as though they’d never heard it before.
    The mingled voices of harp and lyre—the gut strings of the harp mellow and rounded, the metal strings of the lyre silvery, shivery, triumphant—filled the firelit shades, wound up the pillars of the hall and pooled like the smoke in the ceiling, and everyone in that place quietened and stilled under its influence.
    Ecgbert leaned forward in his place. “You feel that?” he murmured, low enough to pass beneath the spell of the music. “They have no weapons because theirs is a strange magic. One that can soothe a hall full of men or drive them mad. One that can bring immortality or eternal condemnation. Whatever a man truly is, he is remembered only as the scops choose to remember him.” He passed Wulfstan a dish of apple dumplings drenched in honey and smiled.
    “It is better to be remembered as a gracious man, one who knows when to laugh, than it is to avenge a harper’s hurt. They are like priests. It’s easy to think they are of no consequence because they pose no physical threat. Their power is no less real than ours for all it lies in other things than steel.”
    Sullenly, knowing he was being sullen and hating himself for it, Wulfstan spooned a couple of the dumplings onto his trencher and ate, and the high, shrill sweetness of them joined the melody and worked a little miracle of calm. After a while he was able to put the spoon down and sigh, “Yes, lord.”
    Yes, lord. And if you had told me this an hour earlier, I might have been saved. I might not have run my ship quite so hard onto the rocks of fate. I might have stayed sinless all my life, a proper man.
    That was a lie too, as all his thoughts today had been lies. He was a creature made up entirely of pretense. What else was there but to pretend to be what he wished to be in the hopes that in time pretense became habit, and habit by degrees became the truth?

Chapter Two
    “As you see.” The hall warden smiled at Leofgar defensively as he gestured to the floor, where bedding had been brought out and stretched in one unbroken line from wall to wall. “We have no space to house you for the night.”
    The warriors were stripping off hauberks and piling them on the tables above their heads, lying beneath, shoulder to shoulder under their overlapped cloaks, crammed in and companionable like badgers in their sett. A few wealthy merchants and seafarers had