Blood Feud by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

track, my moon-shadow running beside me. There was no one on the track so far as the ford or on the rising slope beyond it. But just across from the steading gate was the apple garth, the trees just breaking into blossom, small and wind-shaped, bent all one way. The kind whose apples are scarcely worth eating at harvest but withered and yellow and honey-sweet at Midwinter. The moon filled the place with dapplings and stripes of black andsilver, and markings of a wildcat’s hide. Almost anything could have been among those trees, so long as it did not move. Then something, someone, did move, on the path that skirted the trees on its way down from the fellside. A moment more, and I saw that it was Thormod. He checked and looked back the way he had come, up towards the dark hummock on the open fell, where we had howe-laid the old Master of Sitricstead that morning. Then I knew that he had indeed been about his farewells; taking leave of his father, now, rather than in the daylight before the eyes of other men. Taking whatever vows he had to take, apart from the customary vows of vengeance that he had taken, half drunk, and bragging of its bloody splendour, at the Arval the night before. There are things that a man needs to do by himself, and I knew then that I should not have come. I was turning back, but my foot caught a loose stone in the side of the track and sent it rolling; and Thormond swung round.
    ‘Who? Jestyn, you again!’
    ‘I – it was a mistake –’ I stammered. ‘I’ll away back –’
    ‘No, but why did you come?’ Thormod came out on the track, and touched his breast, where the piece of amber hung beneath his sark. ‘I did not leave it behind me this time. Did you think I needed your shoulder against mine in this also?’
    ‘I was afraid you had gone without me.’ I sounded like a child in my own ears.
    ‘Do you think I would do that, not even telling you?’ he said, seriously.
    ‘I – no – but I woke and you were gone. Maybe I’m still stupid with ale – I’ve never had so much before. But –
I come with you!
’
    There was a moment’s pause, and I heard the faint stirring of wind through the apple boughs. Then Thormod said. ‘Do you? I take up the Blood Feud for my father’s death, but there is no call for you to follow the same road.’
    ‘Your road is mine also. Two against two makes a fair fight.’
    ‘“Two brothers against two brothers.” So said Blind Thorn.’
    ‘I had all but forgotten that,’ I said.
    ‘Never forget what Thorn says. The eyes of his body do not see as other men see, but he has another kind of seeing.’ Thormod held out his hand. ‘You have your knife on you? Give it to me.’
    I pulled the knife from my belt, and he took it and turned his left hand palm upward. In the white fire of the moonlight I saw the paler skin inside his wrist, and the place where the blue veins branched as the veins of an iris petal. He drew the point of the knife across, leaving a line like a dark thread in its wake. A few beads of blood sprang out, black in the moonlight; and he gave me the knife. ‘Now you.’
    I made the same cut across my own wrist, and we rubbed the mouths of the two cuts together. A few drops spattered down and were lost in the long grass, and the thing was done.
    ‘Now we are one blood, you and I,’ Thormod said. ‘Two brothers against two brothers. Now the sign of the Blood Feud is on your forehead also, as Dark Thorn saw it, and my road is your road, to Miklagard and beyond.’
    So I took up the Death Feud, the Blood Feud for a man I had never seen living.
    And we went back to the warm darkness of the hayloft for the rest of the night. And next morning Thormod took leave of his kin, and we set out. We rode a couple of scrub ponies; and for the first time in my life I felt the slap of a sword against my thigh, the pull of the sword-strap over my shoulder. It was an old sword from the weapon kist, the wolfskin sheath worn almost bare in places, the