Life is full of contradictions and, typically, whereas the political situation in the next few years was cataclysmic, my private life entered a period of calm and happiness that I look back on with fondness. Much of this was attributable to the mysterious disappearance of Edred. I went from chasing him around the Northumbrian vales, moors, forests and rivers to searching for a man who no longer existed. Or so it seemed. After a prolonged period without reports of raids, robbery and other outrages, I came to believe him dead, maybe haunting a cairn in some angle of the kingdom or else nothing more substantial than wind-borne ashes after a cremation. Yet, in the deepest recesses of my mind, I feared that he would reappear as suddenly as a will-o’-the-wisp in a bog, to lure me, unwary, to my
