Heather, the former thrall who was now my equal in Sophie's strange land, took the girl-child out for ice-cream that afternoon, knowing that we needed some time alone together. And when she was gone, and I had the sweet, warm weight of my love's body on my lap, I kissed her mouth and told her I wanted ice-cream too.

"I bet you do," she smiled, as our gazes intertwined and we burned with the anticipation that had been almost 3 moons in building. "I never met a grown man who liked ice-cream as much as you, Ivar."

My love of ice-cream had been a little joke between us during my recovery. She thought it funny that I loved it so much, I thought it funny that anyone who lived in Sophie's world could possibly eat anything else.

"Perhaps you will bring me ice-cream – barrels and barrels of it, huge casks of it – if I please you well enough now," I smiled, lifting her flimsy dressing up over her breasts and flicking my tongue over one of her nipples until her breath escaped her lips in a rush.

I'd not found pregnant women particularly attractive before that day. Not that I found them repulsive, but pregnancy as I'd only ever seen it until then had been more of a warning-off than anything that could inspire lust. It was the physical manifestation of another man's desire, a signal from nature herself to keep away. But holding Sophie on my lap, seeing already the beginnings of the child I'd put into her belly, had my manhood growing thick and stiff under my leathers, until it throbbed with the need to possess her again. I put my hands on her back and drew her to me, burying my face in her breasts, kissing and teasing and licking until her eyelids fluttered closed and she moved her hips against me.

It had been so long since I'd allowed myself to feel need like I did for her then. It was perfunctory since my return to Thetford, a grim ritual with my own hand, only performed to keep myself from tearing the heads off my thralls when they were late with my breakfast. But with my woman right there, with her soft thighs locked around me once again, the lust burned thick and hot in my loins and I pushed my tongue between her lips.

She teased me a little when the time came, holding herself over my aching length, lowering herself just until I could feel her wetness about to envelop me and then pulling back again, drawing air quickly into her lungs because she tormented herself as much as she tormented me.

"I missed you," she said, looking into my eyes, watching my reaction as she slid herself over my tip one more time. "Ivar – I – I missed you."

I grasped her hip when she moved down again, and held her in place until she whimpered. And when she gave in and moved to slide herself down onto me, I held her off, even as my body cried out for hers.

We didn't say anything, we just looked at each other, watching the dark clouds of desire flit across our faces, barely breathing with what we both knew was coming.

And then I brought her down onto me, guiding her body all the way, until I was buried in her, and she cried and squirmed and dug her little fingers into my shoulders until I was sure I was going to boil over right there.

I managed to hold off only by keeping her still for a little while, as I twitched and throbbed in her slippery depths.

"Ivar," she breathed my name when I finally allowed her to move again and she lifted her hips up, and then drove them down again. "Ivar. I – Ivar. Oh!"

What sweetness to hear the need in her voice, to know that there was nothing she wanted in that moment except me, nothing else that could satisfy her but me.

I sat back, watching as she worked herself up to a frenzy, controlling my breathing, holding on. And I was so primed when she began to clench around me, so sensitive and ready that I thought I might break my teeth I ground them so hard.

Her cries hadn't even faded when the moment came and I knew my peak was close, that there was nothing left I could do to hold it off. I lifted her up and lay her on her back, needing to be on top, needing to take her. And then she parted her legs for me, holding them open with her hands – I swear I could have finished at just seeing such a thing – and angled her hips up so I could go as deep as possible.

"Sophie," I breathed, as the pleasure began to spill through the restraints I'd set for it and her slickness turned the trickles and drops into a flood. "Sophie. Voss!"

I let go, jerking my hips down, pinning her underneath me as the ecstasy unspooled out me, hunching my body over hers and giving it all to her.

* * *

"Ivar. Ivar...?"

I opened my eyes, but there was only darkness. Where was I? I sat up, quickly, and her voice came again:

"Ivar, it's OK. You're in –"

"Where am I? Where –"

"You're in bed. You were so tired – I just thought you needed some sleep."

I was in bed. In bed in the cabin in Sophie's land, not in bed in the roundhouse in Thetford. In the dark, I reached out with my hand, seeking her body. And when I found it, I ran my hand over her midsection, almost in a panic.

"Still pregnant," she said, stroking my hair, knowing exactly what was on my mind. "You didn't dream it."

"How long did I sleep? Is it night?"

"It's about 3 in the – yes, it's night. It'll be morning soon. You slept for almost a whole day. Ashley thinks you're the gender-reversed sleeping beauty. She keeps sneaking up here to check on you and coming downstairs to report that you're still asleep."

"She's watchful," I replied, pulling Sophie into bed next to me. "Like her mother. She looks like you, you know. As soon as I saw her I knew she was your child. She has the same look in her eyes as you do."

"Does she? Everyone says she has her father's eyes, I –"

"No," I said. "I don't mean that her eyes look the same as yours, I mean the expression is the same, the way she holds one of her eyebrows slightly higher than the other, as if she's never truly convinced."

Sophie laughed. "What? You think one of my eyebrows is higher than the other? And what do you mean 'like she's never truly convinced' – are you saying I look like that, too?"

"It's no bad thing," I told her, nestling into her so I could kiss her neck. "It's just a characteristic, like all people have. I noticed it in your girl because I noticed it in you. It's a good thing, it'll keep the boys – when she decides boys are something she might be interested in – honest."

"She told me when she was 4 that she was never going to move out of the house, that she was never going to get married. She did admit she might have find a boyfriend, but apparently he won't be allowed inside and will have to live in the shed."

I softened to hear Sophie speaking of her daughter – and to think, for the first time in my life, of doing the same one day – laughing and joking with my own soon-to-be child as they grew and changed and figured out the world around them.

"What is it?" She asked, when she noticed I'd gone quiet.

"I was just thinking of the baby in your belly," I told her. "My baby. I was thinking of the conversations I'll have with her. Or him."

"Be careful what you wish for Jarl. You spend their first few years waiting for them to talk. Then when they do learn, they never shut up!"

I crept downstairs when she fell asleep, and poured myself a cup of water from the tap. Outside, all was darkness and silence. I thought of my child, floating in the darkness of pre-life. I thought of myself, too, back now in the world where the water ran clean and endlessly and the people, safe and well-fed as they were, lived apart from the rhythms of nature that marked life in my own time.

I rode out of Thetford with a mind to reuniting with my love. Possibly with a mind to persuading her to marry me, and then, possibly, to come back with me so we could live as Eirik and Ragnar did, with their wives from the other world. I thought it would take time, this persuasion. And now that I was back with her I saw that the only persuasion going on had been that of myself. Sophie wasn't coming back to the past with me.

"I'm still not used to the taps," a voice came from behind me – Heather. She was light on her feet, even in her older age – a skill only those who had lived in a place that necessitated being light on one's feet learned. "The water, I mean. Just having it right here all the time. No need to boil it or make ale, because it's clean already."

"And the lights," I added, as she flicked one on and set a pot to boil. "And the – the fire, the, uh –"

"The stove."

"The stove, yes."

"I was ten and ten and two when I decided to live in the Kingdom of the East Angles," she continued, taking a teabag from the box. "You are what, Jarl? Ten and ten and nine?"

I nodded. "Aye."

"Not so much older than I was, then. I was born here, in this place. I'm from here. And yet it is strange even to me, as if my own childhood were a dream I once had."

I watched as the water came close to boiling, still half in disbelief that it happened so quickly, that it wasn't some kind of magic. Was Heather speaking the truth, that her memories of the place where she grew to womanhood were so faded and long past that they were as a dream to her? I could not imagine my homeland being the same to me. I could not imagine forgetting the place as it was then in my head, so immediate as to feel that I only had to take a few steps in a single direction to find myself there once again, under the pale northern sun.

Almost at once, I put it out of my mind. I've never been a man to over-think, and I wasn't about to become one.

"Here," the older woman said, handing me a cup of steaming tea. "Lemon and ginger. Sophie drinks it all day long, to keep the baby-sickness at bay."

I brought the cup to my nose and sniffed. The scent was strong, unfamiliar. "Lemon and ginger?"

"Yes. Lemons are sour fruits that grow in hot, sunny places and the ginger is – well I suppose it is not wholly unlike the fire-root the Angles grind to a paste and take with their venison."

The tea did have a pungency to it, although it was of a gentler variety than fire-root paste.

"Has Sophie told you that she is a wealthy woman now?"

"Wealthy?" I asked, as we sat down at the table. "Everyone here is wealthy to us, are they not? King Edmund of the East Angles himself could not imagine what it is to live like even the lower people here. We –"

Heather fiddled with the teabag in her cup. "I don't mean it like that – like a comparison. I mean she is wealthy here compared to the other people. I am, too."

"Is it so?" I asked, confused. As far as I could tell, Sophie lived in much the same was as almost everyone else in her time. She told me once – during my first stay with her, and when I had commented on some little detail of her life in awed tones – that there were rich people in her society, too, and that I would never believe the opulence of their lives.

"It is so. But the wealth is new to her – and to me. It comes from the sale of a dagger that belonged to my husband – he was a Northman, too, you know."

"The sale of a single dagger has made you and Sophie wealthy?"

"Yes," Heather replied simply. "You have to remember, Jarl, that just as these people have things that the people in our time do not have, we also have things that they lack. Very few people own bladed weapons now, and even when they do the blades are made in a place like where cars are made – each blade is the same, and forged entirely by machines. A dagger like my husband's, made by a skilled craftsman of the North – such a thing does not exist here. It cannot exist here, there is no one alive with the ability to make it. And that made my dagger worth quite a lot."

"How much?"

"More than you can imagine. If you filled one of the traveling trunks three times over with gold, it would still not be a match for what that dagger sold for."

She was mad, the old woman. That must have been the explanation. "There is not that much gold between all the Kings of the Angles and all the Jarls of the North," I laughed. "And whatever gold there is, is worth more than a thousand, thousand daggers."

But she shook her head. "As I said, Jarl, the dagger is a precious thing here – more rare than gold and therefore more precious than gold. What I am saying to you, what matters, is that Sophie is a rich woman, and riches themselves mean more here than they do in the North."

"How is that?"

Instead of answering, Heather posed me a question: "What would a thrall do with a travel trunk of gold?"

"A thrall would never have a travel trunk of gold. But if he were to find one, or steal one, I suppose it would not be long before someone noticed it, and took it from him."

"Exactly. Because in the North – and in the Kingdom of the East Angles – the lowest people aren't free. A thrall has no use for a travel trunk of gold because no one will believe it's really his. We have no thralls here. Riches here are a kind of freedom, Jarl, that I do not know if you can understand. Sophie can do anything now. She can live anywhere. She can buy a house so large you will both be able to live inside its walls and not see each other for days. Not that she intends to do that."

"Why do you tell me these things?"

"Because you need to know that she is not your possession. Neither is her daughter or the child yet to be born. A woman is as free as a man here – and a woman with riches is freer than most men."

I could have been offended by the old woman's talk, I could have been angry. But the anger seemed to have subsided in me already. Also, although I did not know all the specifics, I had sensed on my first visit that the place to which I had now returned to was one in which women like Sophie had more of a say in their lives than they did in the North.

"It's as it should be," I said a moment later, thinking of the times when I had, as a child, noticed that my mother was in many ways quicker than my father – and yet she still needed to seek his permission to walk down by the river, even though the dullest men were free to do so at their whim.

"It is as it should be," Heather smiled. "I hope you will be of the same opinion when she tests you."

I ran my fingers over my chin. "Do you think she has not tested me already? Sometimes I think the gods sent her to me to do precisely that."

* * *

And as it turned out, Sophie was a wealthy woman. Not ten nights after I came back to her, she owned a new dwelling – a new house – in the town of River Falls. It was an old house, she told me, because she had a liking for old houses – and it had not cost very much because property prices in River Falls were not very high.

Of course I did not understand more than the smallest proportion of the things she said to me about the new house. All I knew was that it seemed to make her mood light.

The Yule season was fully upon us by then, and a great many people gathered at the new house. It was not so different, I thought, to the Yule festivals of my own people. The food was different, the songs were different, and there were strange little rituals I wasn't familiar with, but it was essentially a lot of food eaten with friends and family, a busy closeness with our precious ones punctuated by the quieter moments that come with the darkest time of the year.

I was included now, introduced to Sophie's mother, her friends, as someone important in her life, as the father of her baby. The main day of feasting saw everyone gathered at the new house, around a large table – not as large as those in the feasting halls of my people, but enough to seat ten and four people – and a feast of such variation and so many different flavors as I could never have imagined possible.

Instead of venison, pork stew, bread and preserved fruits we feasted on a turkey, which looked and tasted to me as would an enormous chicken, roasted vegetables, pies both sweet and savory and sweet biscuits that Sophie's mother had made herself and of which the child Ashley seemed particularly fond.

"Why don't you like the cookies, Ivar?" The girl asked me later that night, when she joined me outside as I sat in the cold air, hoping the chill might revive me from my food-slumber.

I watched her take a bite of a pale biscuit, filled in the middle with jam, but I did not take the one she offered me. They were too rich, too sweet. "They're not to my taste, child. Besides, I don't think there's room in my belly for any more food – perhaps not until the next moon."

"You talk funny," she said, in the way children say such things. "Grandma thinks so, too. But she says it's OK because you're a good man. Are you a good man?"

Light spilled out onto the deck from inside the house, along with the sounds of laughter and conversation. I missed being with my people at that time of year, but I could not pretend that Sophie and her people had not done all they could to welcome me. "I don't know," I told the child as she gazed curiously up at me, her expression so much like that of her mother. "In some ways, perhaps I am a good man. In other ways, perhaps not."

"Why?"

Ashley was, out of all the people I met in Sophie's world – including Sophie – the most recognizable to me. It was probably her age – she had simply not yet had enough time to become herself. She reminded me of Northern children, always brimming with questions, and unconscious of rank unless an adult impressed such things up on them. "I'm not sure," I told her, as a few snowflakes fell softly around us, "that I have done all my duties."

"What do you mean? What duties? You came back to my mom, didn't you?"

"You're quick," I told her, "just like your mother. And yes, I did come back. But in order to come back here, I had to leave other people."

"Other kids?"

"Some of them were children, yes. No doubt there will be more come the next summer."

"Your children?"

I smiled and shook my head. "Not my children, no. I don't have any children, save for the one growing in your mother's belly."

"Then why did you have to look after them?"

"Because I was their Ja –" I began, before stopping myself. Ashley did not even know what a Jarl was. "You don't have a King here, do you?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"But you have – you have leaders, right? If you go to war, there is someone in charge – is there not? And if an injustice is done –"

The sound of a door opening came from behind us, and Sophie stepped out. At once and almost in unison, her daughter and I both bid her return back inside, where it was warm. And then we turned to each other, grinning.

"I'm not going to be able to leave the house for the next five months with the two of you around, am I?" Sophie laughed.

"Ivar says he's a good man," Ashley said, looking at me. "And also not a good man. He feels bad because he's not with his family at Christmas."

Christmas, yes. That's what they called Yule. And once again, the child was right. Sophie gazed at me over the top of her daughter's head, and she didn't have to say anything because I saw in her eyes that she understood the weight of my presence there, with her, at that time of year.

"That doesn't mean he isn't a good man," she said, kneeling beside her little girl. "It means he is a good man. It means he cares about the people he loves. It means he misses them when he's not with them."

The child turned to me. "Did you miss my mom? Is that why you came back?"

"Yes," I replied, before her mother could shush her. "I came back because I missed your mom. I came back because I love her."