Strange as I know he often seemed to them, with his obscure vocabulary and his tendency to appear fascinated by various banal details of 21st century life, the people in my life welcomed Ivar. They saw that he loved me, they saw his solicitousness towards me – and eventually towards Ashley as well, and that was enough for them.

We all lived close to each other by early in the new year, my mother and I three houses apart on the same street, Maria just around the corner on the next street, and Maria's parents and grandparents next door to each other just a few houses down from her. River Falls had originally been a mining community, although its fortunes – and its population – had been on the decline since early in the 20th century. The town had originally been parceled out into 5 acre bundles, given to miners who came from the old country with their families on the promise of jobs and land of their own. Few of the original farms remained, most having been broken up into smaller lots long since, but there was a single half acre on the block where my house stood, and Heather purchased it from the elderly owners for a tidy sum. Her main residence, though, was in a rambling farmhouse about twenty minutes outside of town, set in 25 acres of idyllic countryside and free of neighbors.

It was to Heather's farmhouse that Ivar would retreat sometimes, when he needed to get away from the future for a little while and spend time in the natural world, chopping wood and talking about his old life with someone who had lived it herself.

His adjustment was more difficult, I thought, than the small one I had gone through when I traveled to his time. Culture shock is one thing – time shock is another. Heather, Paige, Emma and myself had had to get used to a different pace of life, an analog existence, to the lack of separation between the necessities of life and the acquiring of those necessities. I'd seen life and death in the Kingdom of the East Angles, reality unfiltered through the sanitizing lens of modern life. I'd seen simple things, things I had never had to think of before – the spinning of wool, the foraging for berries, the repair of a broken axe rather than the unthinking trip to the hardware store to buy a new one. But although I had never seen such things before – and this seemed crucial – I knew what they were. I knew what their purpose was, what they were for.

And it was in this way that Ivar and to some extent Heather – who was almost more astonished than he was by many of the futuristic changes to everyday life, because she'd experienced their predecessors – understood their new surroundings. The Viking understood the oven because he recognized the need for a heat source to cook food and boil water. He understood houses, even if they looked nothing like the roundhouses of his people, because he understood the need for protection from the elements. All humans in all time periods understand such things. But there were other elements of life he didn't understand. Even months after he'd been back with me I would still catch him looking away from photographs, or from a video playing on my laptop, with an expression on his face like no matter how much I reassured him that these weren't magical devices, he didn't quite believe me.

I couldn't explain TV shows to Ivar, or photographs. I couldn't even explain how cars worked. And he needed to have these things explained. He needed to learn how to read.

I hired Maria, who had always been by far the most patient of the two of us – and who now had a lot more free time on her hands with her parents being able to afford to hire staff at their restaurant – to teach him. And Heather, too, after she admitted one night that she'd basically forgotten how to read and write.

It was an early spring afternoon in March when I found myself driving home with Ivar from a visit with Heather. He was making swift progress, especially for an adult, and reading out the road and business signs as we passed them by. "Ri – Riv – River. River F – River Falls. Suh – Subway. Lah – Lahn – Landromat?"

"Laundromat."

"What the hell is a laundromat?"

I laughed, both at the consternation in Ivar's voice and his use of the word 'hell' – which was new.

"It's a place to wash clothes. Not everyone has a washing machine and a dryer, so you can take your clothes and blankets to a laundromat and pay a small fee and wash them there."

The Viking nodded, immediately understanding. "The Northwomen and the Angle women have to carry the dressings to the river, and beat the dirt out of them with sticks. And then they have to wring out the water and lay them on the grass to dry in the sunshine. It takes multiple days of that to wash the dressings and bed-dressings for a single family. If I took a washing machine back to them, the Angle women would surely crown me King."

That was one thing he didn't do, which I had almost expected him to. He didn't glorify inconvenience. Washing machines were impossibly quick and easy, and they did a better job than any Northwoman could do, no matter how clean the river or how strong her arms. As soon as he realized what washing machines did – or cars or any of the hundreds of machines that now did the jobs we used to have to do by hand – he pretty much accepted them as desirable. I didn't know how long it would last, this acceptance of the new, but it didn't waver in those first months.

"I think I'm starting to see why things are so different for your people," he said as we kept driving. "Look at all this – knowledge – around us."

"Knowledge?"

"Yes. Look at it everywhere. Look at all the words on the signs. There's too much for one person to understand it all! Look at you – you drive us back to River Falls in a car, but you don't understand how it works."

"Yes I do," I replied, a little hastily.

"But you don't woman, you –"

"Don't call me 'woman,' Ivar, it makes people think you're a savage."

The Jarl cocked an eyebrow up at me and grinned. "Savage or not, you still can't tell me how this car works."

"Yes I can! It's running because it has gas in it. I told you that already."

"OK, yes, you did. But how does it work? How does the liquid you showed me, from the gas station, actually make this car run?"

"The engine. The gas makes the engine run. There's a catalytic, uh, a catalytic – converter? – and it –"

Ivar leaned over to kiss my cheek. "My point," he said, "is that I can find all this out myself soon, can't I? I can find the knowledge about car engines in a book. Or on the internet, as you said. My point is that it's no wonder you have these machines, this whole layer of devices that seems to do most of the hard work for your people – it's because of knowledge and the passing of it between people. You can share it with each other. And you're beautiful."

I couldn't help but burst out laughing. "I'm beautiful, huh? I don't understand how anything works, but I'm beautiful? And your people can share knowledge, too, you know. They can –"

"Not like yours. Here you can write it down, and anyone else can see it – isn't that how you said it was with a book or with the internet? You can send a book across the world, and all of the information in it is available to whoever reads it?"

Even if I hadn't been in love with him, or pregnant with his baby, he would have been fascinating to have around for the insights into my own culture and society. I'd never thought about how little I actually knew about how things worked until Ivar pointed it out. I'd never realized how sweet even the supposedly non-sweet foods I ate were. Or how odd it was that everything from dish soap to laundry detergent was strongly and artificially scented. Heather and Ivar constantly commented on how much things in the future smelled, which was funny because I remembered learning in school that the past, without adequate running water and the technology to properly deal with sewage, must have smelled awful. And it was mostly true – I did smell a lot of things in the Kingdom of the East Angles. I smelled a lot of shit, for one thing – both human and animal. I smelled livestock and other people and the metallic liveliness of fresh blood when a deer was slaughtered. But both the Angles and the Vikings, although they didn't know what germs were or the technical aspects of how diseases were transmitted, understood that living close to your own filth wasn't a good idea. They understood that keeping food preparation areas clean was important, and that they would get sick if they didn't do it. It wasn't as uncivilized as I'd thought it would be, once I realized where I was.

And although Ivar was impressed with modern technology and our material progress – a nurse at the hospital actually had to ask us politely to leave after my Viking spent way too long staring at the vaguely baby-shaped blob on the screen during one of my ultrasounds – he was not indiscriminately dazzled by life in the future. Some things he outright disapproved of. He disapproved of how individually we lived, how little time we spent with our families. He thought it crazy that little children were given almost no autonomy. In the Kingdom of the East Angles, small children were always around, underfoot, but not often specifically supervised by an adult. They were allowed to roam almost as soon as they could walk, and would spend their days running around in groups, exploring and getting into trouble.

"Your children are like livestock," Ivar said once, eying the playground as we waited outside Ashley's school to pick her up. "Look at them. They're right next to the woods and they stay within the boundary of the – what did you call it?"

"The playground."

"Yes. They should be splashing in the streams, climbing trees, throwing sticks like spears. You can see they want to do it, too – all children have the urge to explore. But the parents stand there like shepherds, watching closely. How strange it all is."

"Maybe," I replied, "but our children don't need to learn how to throw a spear, because no one uses spears here."

Ivar grinned and leaned in close to kiss my cheek. "I should teach Ash how to use a spear – I should teach you, too."

* * *

If I could use one word to describe the time of my life that coincided with my second pregnancy, it would be 'idyllic.' It was idyllic. I was no longer worried about money, because there was enough. There was more than enough. Everyone I was close to had been well provided for and millions sat in the bank accruing interest, an insurance policy that would last for the rest of my life - and my children's lives.

There was also the Viking. He took care of me. He surrounded me with his steadfast love, a solid kind of love like I had never known before with a man. He seemed to be like a huge tree, stable and unwavering even in the highest winds – and best of all, he seemed to relish his role as anchor and protector. And because I felt safe with him – because he made me feel safe – I was able to relax into being with him, and into the journey to becoming a mother for the second time. No longer did I walk through life in a defensive posture, always alert to the ways in which things could go wrong, or I could fail.

"It's as it is," he said to me one night, when my belly was so big I had begun to waddle like an overfed duck. "I see the people here are so concerned with what might be taken from them that they no longer understand what a gift is."

I didn't understand. "We don't know what as gift is?"

Ivar smiled. "Perhaps not yourself so much. Your people, though – they worry about what might be taken, and not about what they give. It is the joy of my life to see you content, to see that worried look that you had when I first knew you gone from your eyes. It is the work of love, Sophie, and it is what men and women do for each other. There is no place in love to spend your time making calculations about what you've taken and what you've given."

He believed what he was saying. It was part of the reason I loved him – he knew I depended on him and he welcomed that dependence because he understood that he, too, was dependent upon me. But it was all new to me. My pregnancy with Ashley had been marked by stress, late nights tossing and turning in bed, worrying about where Jesse was, who he was with, whether or not any pretty, non-pregnant girls had caught his eye.

With Ivar, and with the money from the dagger in the bank, I woke every day with a feeling almost of serenity. I was no longer distracted by worries, and so I could throw myself into whatever it was I was doing at a given moment – talking to Ashley, baking bread, standing on the wraparound porch at Heather's house, just happy to be alive as the first pale green leaves unfurled themselves under the warm spring sunshine.

It didn't seem that life could get any better.

* * *

I went into labor on May 10th, shortly before my due date. I was with my Viking, checking the rows of vegetables he and my mom had planted in the new raised beds in the backyard, and exclaiming over their progress when what was at first merely a sensation of discomfort tightened my belly.

"Mmm." I said.

"What is it?" Ivar asked, looking pointedly at me because something in my tone seemed to have piqued his attention.

"I – uh – oh! My belly! I think – I think –"

"The baby?" He asked, smiling so hard and so wide it nearly outshone the sun. "Sophie – is it the baby? Does it come?"

"I don't know," I replied, no longer confident I'd felt anything.

But it was the baby, because soon enough there were more pangs, steadily increasing in intensity until they were actively painful and I was frowning and panting my way through them.

She came fast, the Jarl's daughter. My mom didn't even have time to get to the hospital before she made her entrance into the world, as her father stood by my side.

It was the first time I had ever seen him so astonished.

"Gods," he whispered, transfixed, as a nurse lifted the tiny, slippery bundle onto my chest. "Gods, woman. A child. Look at her. She's beautiful. Oh, she's beautiful."

And she was. Although a commotion went on around us, in those first few moments after birth, Ivar and I were cocooned in a bubble of quiet bliss, tracing our fingers over our daughter's tiny hands and feet and her perfect little nose.

"I've never seen such a wonder," he said quietly, as our baby's dark blue eyes looked up searchingly into those of her parents, seeming to hold a wisdom beyond time in their depths. "I – I've never seen such a thing."