The Edge of Light by Joan Wolf

mane, for warmth and for comfort. Silken continued placidly to eat his hay.
    What was she going to do?
    After a few minutes the barn door opened again, sending a gust of cold air down the stall aisle. Someone came in. Elswyth stayed perfectly still, hoping whoever it was would do what he had to do quickly and then leave. She was in no mood for talk.
    Light footsteps came down the aisle, then stopped in front of the stall next to Silken’s. “How are you, fellow?” came the clipped, distinctive voice of the West Saxon prince. There was the sound of crunching as his stallion took the apple he had been offered. Alfred stood for a moment, murmuring softly to the chestnut; then he too slipped into his horse’s stall. “Let me see that leg,” he said. Silken raised his head to eye the stranger in the next stall, and Elswyth turned to watch also as the prince bent down to feel the chestnut’s off hind below the hock. As Alfred straightened up he saw her. Even in the pale light cast by the single lamp near the door, Elswyth could see how his eyes widened in surprise. He did not jump, however, made no move that would frighten his horse. “Elswyth!” he said. Then, frowning and peering at her in the dimness of the stalls: “Are you all right?”
    To her own considerable surprise, she answered, “No. I am not.”
    They regarded each other gravely across the stall partition. Both horses lowered their heads to resume eating hay. Then Alfred said, “Might I help?”
    She shook her head. “No one can help.” She sounded utterly desolate.
    He patted the chestnut’s shoulder, opened the stall door, and went back into the aisle. Then, to Elswyth: “Come out. We can sit on the hay bales in the corner and you can tell me about it.”
    Rather sullenly, she did as he commanded. She dragged her feet as she followed him to the bales of hay, but she sat down beside him when he gestured to her, and looked at him almost sulkily. His return look was perfectly serene. “Now,” he said. “Tell me.”
    “You cannot help me, Prince,” she repeated. She heard herself, heard how like a spoiled child she sounded, and scowled ferociously.
    “Call me Alfred,” he said. “And we’ll never know if I can help unless you tell me what is wrong.”
    She shrugged. He would be on Athulf’s side, she thought. He was a man.
    “Elswyth …” he said very softly. It was quiet in the barn, and the smell of horses and of hay was comforting. It could not hurt to tell him, she thought. And, pulling her cloak around her shoulders tightly, as if for protection, she recounted her interview with Athulf. “I thought they could not force me, you see,” she ended bitterly. “But Athulf said he would put me in a convent if I refused.” She still could not believe he had said that to her. But he had. And he had meant it, too. “I could not bear a convent,” she said. “I should go mad shut up like that.”
    To her utter horror, her voice quivered and tears stung behind her eyes. She clenched her whole face in a frantic effort to regain her usual composure.
    He seemed not to notice her humiliating lapse of control, but said only, “You have not the temperament for religious life.”
    His matter-of-factness helped where sympathy would only have deepened her shame. “It is not fair!” she said. “Just because I am a girl, I can be forced to a marriage I hate and fear. They would not do this to me if I were a boy.”
    She straightened her spine and stuck her nose in the air and waited for him to preach her a sermon on woman’s lot in life. Instead, he said in a strangely quiet voice, “No, it is not fair. I have often thought that.”
    Surprise jolted through her. She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You do not think I am being unreasonable?”
    “No.” He was not looking at her now, was looking into the distance, as if he were seeing something, or someone, else. The lamp hanging near the door drew a faint glow from his hair. It was nice hair, she found