Years and years later, I still start in the deepest part of night with his agonized face before me. And always, in these helpless dreams, I am helpless to ease his suffering.
I will tell the tale then, in hope the last ghosts may be put to rest, if such a thing can ever happen in this place where there are more ghosts than living souls. But you will have to listen closely - this is a tale that the teller herself does not fully understand.
I will tell you of Lord Sulis, my famous stepfather.
I will tell you what the witch foretold to me.
I will tell you of the love that I had and I lost.
I will tell you of the night I saw the burning man.
Tellarin gifted me with small things, but they were not small to me. My lover brought me sweetmeats, and laughed to see me eat them so greedily.
'Ah, little Breda,' he told me. 'It is strange and wonderful that a mere soldier should have to smuggle honeyed figs to a king's daughter. And then he kissed me, put his rough face against me and kissed me and that was a sweeter thing than any fig that God ever made.
But Sulis was not truly a king, nor was I his true daughter.
Tellarin was not wrong about everything. The gladness I felt when I saw my soldier or heard him whistling below the window was strange and wonderful indeed.
My true father, the man from whose loins I sprang, died in the cold waters of the Kingslake when I was very small. His companions said that a great pikefish became caught in the nets and dragged my father Ricwald to a drowning death, but others whispered that it was his companions themselves who murdered him, then weighted his body with stones. Everyone knew that my father would have been gifted with the standard and spear of Great Thane when all the thanes of the Lake People next met. His father and uncle had both been Great Thane before him, so some whispered that God had struck down my poor father because one family should not hold power so long. Others believed that my father's companions on the boat had simply been paid shame-gold to drown him, to satisfy the ambition of one of the other families.
I know these things only from my mother Cynethrith's stories. She was young when my father died, and had two small children - me, not yet five years old, and my brother Aelfric, two years my elder. Together we went to live in the house of my father's father because we were the last of his line, and among the Lake People of Erkynland it was blood of high renown. But it was not a happy house. Godric, my grandfather, had himself been Great Thane for twice ten years before illness ended his rule, and he had high hopes that my father would follow him, but after my father died, Godric had to watch a man from one of the other families chosen to carry the spear and standard instead. From that moment, everything that happened in the world only seemed to prove to my grandfather that the best days of
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