The feasting hall at Jarl Eirik's encampment was bigger by far than the one in the southern Viking outpost. The logs that made up the walls were thicker, too, standing sturdy and solid in the face of the cold winds. Paige and I found ourselves escorted to the table that sat on a platform a little higher than the rest of the tables – of which there were many, all looking to weight about a ton each, and all ornately carved and piled high with platters and plates and huge clay pots full of food and drink. I wanted to describe it as 'like a movie' but unlike the movies, there were the wonderful smells to take in. Roasted meats and vegetables, venison pies and sausages, the sweetness of the heated mead and the milky steam that rose from the pots of what looked like oatmeal – all of it tickling my nose and sending me into a near-delirium of hunger.

"Oh my God," I whispered to Paige as we took our seats – her next to Eirik at the head of the table, facing the hall, and me next to Ragnar at the side. She turned to me, smiling brightly.

"If the Vikings know how to do anything," she whispered back, "it's a feast. Just be careful to go slowly, or you'll be outside groaning and cursing yourself by the end of the night."

Jarl Eirik nodded at me when I sat down and Ragnar leaned in, as seemingly unperturbed by PDAs as Anja had been at scraping his cum off my thigh, and kissed my neck so slowly I half thought he was going to pull me to my feet and bend me over the table right there in front of everyone.

"You smell good, girl," he told me, kissing my earlobe. "I've suddenly lost interest in this feast."

My head tilted itself away from him, exposing my neck to be kissed even as I giggled and tried to pretend he was having no effect on me. When he slid one hand up my thigh, not stopping until his fingers rested against my sex (albeit through layers of linen and wool), I turned my face up to look at him.

"Ragnar," I breathed, "I –"

"That's all I wanted to see," he grinned. "That look in your eye, Emma. That's the state I want you in for all of this evening. Hungry, needful. And not just for venison and dried fruits. When I take you to bed later, I want to feel how much you want it."

And just like that, his words guaranteed that he was going to get exactly what he wanted. I actually had to look away immediately, because that feeling of welcome helplessness, the one that felt new despite my past relationships, was coming over me again.

It took a little longer for the hall to fill completely what with the numbers of people in the camp, but when it finally did Eirik stood up and waited for a hush to fall across the room. It didn't take long – as soon as his people saw their Jarl waiting for their attention, they gave it.

"The winter is almost at its darkest," he began, surveying the men, women and children seated at the groaning tables, making eye contact, acknowledging them. "But on the cusp of our first Yule in this new land an old friend arrives, bringing with him the memories of a childhood spent together. We played together at being warriors, in the ever-green fields of youth, and now we find ourselves become the thing we pretended." Eirik turned to Ragnar at this point, with respect and love openly written on his face. "I have missed you, brother. To see you again is to feel the joy of the first warm day of summer two moons early. We have much to discuss, and the path forward for our people to plan. We welcome you and your party to our outpost in the land of the East Angles, we celebrate your presence over the Yule time, and we offer you our hospitality. Welcome, brothers!"

At that point, Jarl Eirik took hold of the horn drinking flagon set in front of him and raised it up. His people mirrored his gesture with their own cups. And then, just before taking a swig, Eirik turned to me, grinning.

"And sister! Welcome brothers – and sister!"

"And sister!" His people shouted in unison, before everyone drank and the room transformed from quietly attentive to raucous in the space of less than a minute. Servers streamed into the hall, bringing the food that they had not been able to find room for on the central tables, and making their way down the rows of hungry Vikings, doling out huge chunks of chewy, dark bread and filling drinking cups to the brim from clay jugs sloshing with ale.

Because we were seated at a table that was not within reach of the meal, we were brought all of our food. Within seconds there was a bowl of what looked exactly like my mother's beef stew sitting in front of me – and it smelled heavenly. Vegetables followed, roasted and doused with copious amounts of melted butter, and then plates of smoked fish, bread, hard cheese and some kind of dark berry jam.

It was only after I'd tucked into a selection of all of it that I noticed Paige watching me. I caught her eye and she laughed. "See?" She asked. "It's not quite guts-pie, is it?"

Guts-pie. I remembered that conversation, before we had parted for what we both assumed would be the last time. I had believed that in the past – the one she was choosing to live in – people ate badly, subsisting on offal and fibrous, unidentifiable vegetables that required boiling for hours before they became edible. It didn't take more than a few bites at the Viking feast to see how wrong I'd been. It wasn't even that everything was comparable to modern times – it wasn't. It was far better. The butter wasn't a pale, almost flavorless spread – it was deep yellow, nutty, and it tasted very strongly of itself. The bread was dense and toothsome, but tender at the same time and, again, it tasted of the grain it had been made from.

"Oh my God," I exclaimed again, after tasting the stew and realizing with a pang of guilt that it was more delicious than anything my mother had ever made. "This is – yeah, this isn't guts-pie."

It didn't take long before I began to feel full. Jarl Ragnar warned me to slow down, that the feast was to continue on into the night, but everything was too good and I was too hungry – I didn't listen. Later, platters of what I at first thought was roast beef but was actually venison were brought in and what looked like a third of an entire deer laid right in front of us, at the high table.

Jarl Eirik stood then, taking a dagger from his waist, and carved a small piece of dark, still-bloody meat from the center of the joint. With loving ceremony he presented it to Paige, before bending down to kiss her. It was a simple thing, and one I could tell was a ritual for the two them, but something about it took my breath away. Was it the way they looked at each other? The way Paige's eyes shone with love and admiration when she took Eirik's gift? Was it Eirik's tenderness with his wife? I didn't know. It felt like a moment I wouldn't normally be witnessing, a fleeting glimpse into another relationship, one I was not part of.

At any other time it would have made me envious. Happy for my friend, because it was obvious she was loved – and loved well – but envious for the fact that no one looked at me that way, no one treated me with such solicitousness. At the Viking feast, though, instead of envy there was a kind of recognition. I'd caught Ragnar looking at me that way. Hadn't I? I turned to him, as if to check I had not been imagining things, and saw that he was not watching Paige and Eirik. He was watching me. And yes, there it was in the icy blue of his eyes – that same expression. He leaned in close and squeezed my thigh under the table.

"I saw it there, Emma," he said. "For a moment, I saw it. That strange emotion you see in women when one of their most loved friends finds the love that all women crave. I saw it approach you, and then I saw it veer away like a rabbit from a hound. You know already what's in my heart, don't you?"

I couldn't look at Ragnar at that moment. I turned my eyes up, as if to meet his, and then I focused on a point just above his left ear. Not because I didn't believe him, but because I did. And because I knew none of it could come to fruition – not the way it had for Paige and Eirik. I couldn't stay. And, when I got home, I couldn't come back the way she had.

And even as I looked into the distance, a deeper part of me – deeper than thought, deeper than rationality – knew it was already too late.

Before I could descend deeper into dark thoughts of the goodbyes to come, Paige's father appeared and took his spot at our table. In his arms he carried his grandson, who played with a string of large, orange-toned pebbles clutched in his chubby hands.

"Your son?" Ragnar asked, getting up from his spot as Eirik did the same. Paige and I watched as one Jarl passed his baby to the other. "How old is he? Ten moons?"

"Not five," Eirik responded, his voice bright with pride. "Born towards summer's end."

Ragnar raised his eyebrows and Paige turned to look at me as the men commented on the baby's size, his obvious robustness, the strength of his grip. She reached out, seeming to feel what was in my heart – the great, rising tide of affection at seeing Ragnar with a baby in his arms – and squeezed my hand.

"Tomorrow we'll go into the woods together," she said gently. "It's almost Yule, we need to gather boughs and greenery for the roundhouses and the camp. It's a special task, only women are allowed to perform it – and even then only some. We'll be guarded by warriors, there's nothing to fear."

Paige was reassuring me, telling me there was nothing to fear. But even as she spoke I could see that she didn't even believe her own words – and that she wasn't talking about dangers in the woods, either.

* * *

The feast went on for hours. Jarl Eirik gave more speeches. So did Jarl Ragnar. The food and drink came in endless waves, my bowl always piled high before I could clean it, my cup always filled before I could empty it. In the end I had no memory of the last hour or so – Ragnar told me the next say that I fell asleep on his lap and he carried me to the roundhouse himself and brushed the crumbs off my tunic before laying beside the fire to sleep it all off.

It was one of the most memorable and meaningful experiences of my life, one of those times that even at it happens you know you will carry with you always. The shining eyes of the happy people in the feasting hall – the Viking children and the men and women – and the contentment that came from feeling, strangely, as if I belonged there. These things would be with me for as long as I had the power to remember, I knew that.