My toes and feet began to develop the white bloodlessness I remembered seeing in my father's feet as a child, during particularly cold winters. Even in my fur and leather boots, with more furs on top of us and huddled together with Eirik and our men in the shelter made by a fallen tree, my feet would simply not warm up.

It was miserable, as those early days of Yule often are for the warriors. Our bellies growled with hunger. In the evenings, when the shadow-eyed gothi would clasp the drinking bowl in both his hands and offer it up to me, sometimes I would retch at the mere smell of the dark liquid within. And then I would drink it – all of us would drink it – and so begin the journey into the place where the stars floated under my feet and the earth over my head.

We didn't speak of it amongst ourselves, as it's not considered a thing to speak to other men about, but I wondered if they saw the same places that I saw – if their nostrils, too, took in the sulfurous scent of the candles and hearths in the Great Hall. I floated above the figures of the warriors who had gone before me, up to a ceiling of such height the men became as small to me as mice, and watched as they took their eternal feast, listening as the songs sung by the living, of their greatness, traveled between the worlds.

I found Eirik at dawn one morning, wild-eyed and jabbering that he'd seen one of his young warriors, lost in a raid not two winters ago.

"He's here!" Eirik said, clutching at me and looking around as if the man was just hidden behind one of the trees. I could see that the gothi's tea still worked its magic on my old friend. "He's not dead! He's here! Help me find him again, Ragnar!"

But the young man was not there, and when the tea's effects wore off Eirik became quiet. We all became quiet. At first I missed Emma, my sweet little foreigner, for the usual reasons men miss women. I missed the sound and warmth of her sigh in my mouth when I brought her to completion. I missed the way it made me feel more a man than anything else to bring her to that state.

But by the end of the time with the gothi, barely having spent any of it in the feasting hall or the roundhouse, and none in Emma's soft embrace, what I most missed was no longer so specific, so focused. The women greeted us at the threshold of the settlement after the last day of early Yule. At least I think the other women were there. All that I saw, as I ran across the frozen ground with what felt like the very last of my strength, was her.

She stood beside the end of the palisade, her arms stiffly at her sides, as if they did not know what to do with themselves without me to give them purpose. And when I took her soft little face in my hands, and she looked up at me with those eyes brimming with everything that was passing between us, I almost cried.

Combat – even difficult combat – often stokes a man for more. More fighting, more food, more women. Deprivation strips a man away. I remember blinking my eyes, suddenly terrified that I was back in the woods and that Emma herself was just another one of the tea-visions.

But she wasn't a tea-vision, she was herself. Warm and soft and as real as the earth under my feet.

"Ragnar!" She exclaimed when I collapsed into her arms and buried my face in her sweet-smelling hair. "Ragnar, you're freezing! You're filthy. Are you hungry? Come with me. Come with me now, we'll get you warmed up and washed and fed."

The gothi said that without suffering, there can be no recompense. It's not that I ever doubted him, it's not that I did not know the truth of his words. It's that I didn't feel their truth until that moment with Emma, until she spread her warmth around me like a blanket and led me, stumbling and near-delirious with hunger, back to the roundhouse.

If anyone had seen us they would have thought, there goes the young Jarl Ragnar with his woman. They might have wondered where it was I led her. But I didn't lead Emma anywhere that day – she led me. First, she led me to the feasting hall where some of the other warriors from the early Yule rites sat already, also attended by their women and children, some of the youngest by their parents. And then she helped me to sit down at the table, as my body ached and creaked, and brought me a bowl of rabbit stew.

It sounds the simplest thing in the world, I know. But I swear when I saw the look of concern on her face, and smelled the stew, and felt Emma's arm around my shoulders, I nearly wept again for the gratitude that washed over me.

"Go slowly," she warned, concerned as if for a young child. "If you eat too fast you might get sick."

And so I bent down over my meal and spooned it into my mouth with shaking hands. I tried to heed her advice at first – to go slow – but it tasted so delicious and I was so hungry that I was soon wolfing it down, nodding because my mouth was too full to speak when a serving thrall asked me if I wanted more.

When I had consumed almost four bowls of the stew, and my belly finally felt full, Emma took me again and led me out of the feasting hall. I thought she was taking me back to the westerly roundhouse but she seemed to head towards the heavy gate in the western palisade. When she bid the guards open it and let us through, and pulled me out through them, I balked.

"It's hardly the time for a walk, Emma," I said, leaning down to kiss the top of her head and stopping in my tracks. She tried to pull me but even in my weakness she was no match for my strength.

"Just come with me, Ragnar. Stop being stubborn, come on."

"No, girl. Where are we going? I've had enough of these woods, and enough of the spirits that dwell within them. Take me back to the roundhouse and let me see what's under those furs."

She cocked her head at me and laughed. "I see the stew is already taking effect. But if you think I'm letting you lay a hand on me while you're caked in filth, you've got another thing –"

I pulled her against me, then. "Don't play such games with me, Emma. You forget I've seen the way you look at me when I take you into my arms. Do you think the other women are taking their warriors to the bathing roundhouse before –"

"I don't care what the other women are doing," she replied pertly. "I'm taking you to the hot-spring, because your hair is thick with dirt – I can see leaves in it, Ragnar – leaves! Besides, sometimes a little waiting isn't so bad."

"Mmm," I growled into her neck. "Eirik is probably already at his wife's side, and you see fit to punish me – to drag me out again into the snow where I have already –"

"Come on!" She called, and I went with her, because the truth was I simply enjoyed teasing Emma. I probably would have spent another night in the open winter air if she'd demanded it, helpless as I seemed to be when it came to denying her anything she wished.

At the springs, watching the steam rise off the dark water in the moonlight, Emma caught me hesitating. I'd already noticed she seemed peculiarly unafraid of the between-world beings, but it surprised even me to see her lack of fright there.

"What is it?" She asked, unlacing her wool tunic after laying her fur cape down.

"Aren't you scared?" I replied, gesturing to the spring and the surrounding area. "Do you know what kind of bad spirits are said to live in dark waters?"

Off came her tunic, and her fingers got to work on the layers of linen under-dresses. If she was pretending a lack of fear, she was doing it well. "Bad spirits?" She asked, chuckling. "Ragnar, it's a hot-spring. There aren't any spirits in it. You're not tripping balls anymore, are you? It's –"

"I'm not what?" I started. "I'm not tripping what –"

But I never did get to finish that sentence because that was the moment she managed to get her linens loose enough to pull over her head – which she did. And then she stood there in front of me, allowing the freezing wind to skim over her nakedness and the light from the full Yule moon to pick out the ripe swells of her breasts and the delicate bones of her shoulders before she stepped into the hot-spring and submerged herself with an ecstatic sigh.

Bad spirits or not, a half-moon of starvation and freezing and travel to liminal worlds or not, there is scarcely a stronger power on earth than the need of a man for a woman. A dark flower of lust bloomed in my loins at the sight of my girl and I began to wrestle with my own dressings, bellowing angrily at one point when I could not find the leather strap on one of my boots and then kicking it off in frustration.

When I lowered myself into the water – and Emma's outstretched arms – I let out a low moan of relief. But even as I moved to pull her into my lap, to pull her thighs around my body and guide myself into the place where she was warmer even than the water, she wriggled away, giggling.

"Not yet! Ragnar, not yet."

It was then I noticed that she had brought with her a small wooden vessel filled with the perfumed soap that was used in the bathing roundhouse, on the higher women.

"Jarl Eirik's camp woman – Hildy – will have you whipped if she sees you stole that," I told her, as she scooped some of it out and rubbed it between her palms. Not that I would have allowed anyone to lay a hand on her, as it is.

"I don't care," she whispered in my ear as she began to rub the soap into my neck and shoulders. "I want you clean. I want you clean and fed and smiling and happy."

Even as I had been making fun of her for wanting me prepared like a ham for the stew-pot, I knew what Emma was doing wasn't really about herself. She would have let me take her back to the roundhouse before we bathed in the hot-spring, if I'd insisted. I wouldn't have had to insist – all it would have taken was a well-placed hand, a certain kind of kiss. No. What Emma was doing was about me. I almost feared, as she lifted one of my arms to rub the soap into every inch, that I might get too used to such treatment.

"What is it?" She asked, seeing the expression on my face. "Why do you look worried all of a sudden? You know bad spirits don't exist, don't you Ragnar?"

"You're wrong about that," I replied, leaning my head back and closing my eyes as she ran her fingers over my scalp, washing the filth of the Yule rite out of my hair. "But no, it's not spirits that trouble me. It's you."

"Oh is it?" Emma smiled playfully, kissing me again on one cheek, and then the other. "What is it, Jarl? Do I touch you too roughly? Would you rather a different girl scrub the dirt out from under your fingernails? Five girls, maybe? Shall I go back to the camp and ask Hildy to –"

I reached up and smacked her bare ass when she briefly climbed out of the spring to fetch something that sat out of reach. "You've grown even bolder without me around this past half-moon," I commented when she shrieked and giggled and fell back into the water. "Haven't you, girl? What will my warriors say when they see how boldly you speak to me? You must be put back in your place – and I daresay, come the morning, that you will be."

Emma came closer to me, allowing her thighs to straddle me, although she still floated too far away to give me any real satisfaction. "You can do whatever you want with me, Ragnar, when we get back to the roundhouse. But first, we must finish here."

And so that's what we did. It seemed to take a very long while – a few times I even found my head slipping back onto the cold rock as my lovely little foreigner pulled my limbs this way and that and made sure every part of me was clean.

"What have you done?" I chuckled sleepily when she announced that she was finished. "I'm as perfumed as a maid on her wedding night."

We didn't get fully dressed before racing back across the frozen ground to the westerly roundhouse, where a fire had been stoked high to warm the air for our arrival, and a small cask of ale and a plate of buttered bread set on a table. Not that either of us took any notice of any of those things.

I dropped Emma's wool tunic, which I had held loosely around my waist to run back to camp, to the floor and stepped towards her, taking her face in my hands and slipping my tongue between her lips as all the life-force in my body flowed to my center. Her linen under-dress, wet and transparent, clung to every single one of her curves, and I knew, feeling her finally fully against me, that it was not going to be long before I took my satisfaction.

Not that she tried to slow me – not anymore, not by then. She had missed me just as much as I'd missed her. Her body opened up under my touch, her muscles loosening and her mouth falling open when I pulled the under-dress off over her head and pulled her against me.

The frenzy was instantaneous, each of us like a predator getting that first taste of warm blood on its tongue. I was as thick and stiff against Emma's soft belly as I had ever been, aching to feel her slippery warmth around every inch. And she was no less needy, turning away from me almost at once, pushing her hips up and back, offering herself to me.

I remember putting one hand on her hip, and guiding myself between her slick folds with the other, each of us gasping when I thrust into her, and then instantly falling into a quick, desperate rhythm. It was like all the pain and suffering of the past days was coming to this point, all of it built up and held inside.

Emma was going to draw it out of me, though. I bent my body down over hers, letting my eyes roll back in my head at the feeling of her underneath me, the way her back arched with her eagerness to give herself to me.

"Ragnar!" She cried, as her knees threatened to buckle and her fingers clawed helplessly at the table's rough surface, seeking some purchase in the rough seas of my overwhelming need for her.

"Emma," I moaned into her back, squeezing one of her breasts as it bounced with my every thrust and sensing her closeness to the edge. "Emma, Emma, Emma..."

Her entire body stiffened and contorted under me when she came to her ending, as if she'd lost control of everything except the place deep inside where she pulsed around me, bringing me to an acute, agonized peak. I took her hips in my hands, knowing my final thrust was coming, and then burying myself into her with a ragged, howling groan as my thoughts fled my mind and bliss exploded out of me.

We stayed where we were for a few minutes, panting, letting our souls come to rest. And when it came time to stand we stumbled apart, laughing, and fell into our fur-laden bed.

Spent, I fell asleep before I could speak a word. Every part of me was empty, depleted, drained. And in that state Emma did her woman's work of finishing the rites of Yule for her man; laying me down to sleep so I could begin the process of rising again, stronger and wiser than before.

* * *

The next morning – if it could even be said to be morning when I finally awoke – I found that, almost as if by magic, part of my depletion had rebounded during the night. Emma lay in bed next to me, gazing at me with her eyes the color of a sun-dappled summer forest – a riot of green, brown, the odd flash of amber, moving shadows – and I could see that she had been awake for awhile.

"Have you eaten?" I asked slowly, in the midst of moving from the dream life to the waking life. "Why do you stay in bed with me, Emma? You should eat something, girl."

Soothed by food, warmth, cleanliness and mostly by Emma herself, I was no longer the poor wretch of the previous day. In fact I was at pains to reassure myself that I hadn't asked too much of her somehow, or relied too heavily on her for comfort. She saw it at once and reached out to stroke the hair off my brow.

"Shh," she said quietly. "Slow down, Ragnar. I saw Paige earlier this morning, she says the warriors – and the Jarls – who have been with the gothi for the early Yule are free now, until the feasting days begin in three night's time. You don't need to get up. And you don't need to make a show for me."

"Make a show for you?" I asked, genuinely confused. "What do you mean when you say that, Em?"

"I mean you don't have to make a big production of being busy and important if you're feeling guilty about last night."

She looked so delicious lying there in her linen under-dress, pulled open as it was at the neckline to expose the curve of one of her breasts, her skin like milk. It was difficult to concentrate on the conversation as my manhood stiffened further than it already was. "Guilty?" I asked, reaching out and pushing the fabric up over her legs. "What would I be –"

"I don't know," she told me, looking me seriously in the eyes. "Sometimes men feel uncomfortable if they let you take care of them. Sometimes they feel their masculinity has been questioned."

I smiled and kissed her soft lips, and then kissed them again as she opened herself for me, allowing me to spread her thighs and find the nub of flesh above her opening, the one that made her squirm whenever I touched it. "What kind of 'men' have you been spending your time with?" I asked. "Boys, maybe, if they worry about such things. No, it's not worries about my manhood, sweet Emma. It's worries about you – that somehow I asked too much of you, or that you found me so involved in the things I was missing that I forgot that you, too, had gone without. Either way," I rolled her over onto her back and positioned myself between her legs, "I'm going to make it up to you."

"Rag –"

She started to say my name but she didn't finish, because I pressed my tongue against the place that her hips were guiding me to, even if she hadn't quite realized it yet. Her voice melted into a high-pitched little sigh and her thighs fell the rest of the way open for me.

It's not that there was no rush inside me that morning – for there was always a rush inside me where Emma was concerned – but that I controlled it. I wasn't just going to finish her, I was going to near-finish her. Not once, or twice, or three times but many more. I was going to see her panting and begging, lost in her own desperation, before I mixed the pain of her need with the pleasure of its satisfaction and made her completely, utterly mine.

Her voice started out steady – high, yes, but even. After the first two times I brought her right to the edge and then backed away at the last second, barely able to look up at her face because I feared seeing how in need she was would destroy my promise to make her wait, some of that steadiness slipped. She began to roll her head from side to side, pausing every now and then to lift it and look down at me, her eyes pleading.

"Please, Ragnar. Please – please."

I enjoyed her begging. I enjoyed it so much I had to stop moving against the furs underneath me, lest I let myself go far too early.

And then I buried my head in her sweetness again, flicking my tongue up and over and around, going faster and firmer until she was flailing her arms, tearing at my hair and lifting her hips up off the bed. Again I pulled away, and that time removed her hands from herself when she reached down to finish what I wouldn't.

"No, Emma," I chided as she chewed her lip and clenched her fists. "No, not yet."

Finally, when I could hardly take it anymore than she could, after I'd wound her up like a tightly coiled rope, I finished her off. She seemed almost hesitant, suspicious that I was going to pull away again. When I didn't she leaned back on the furs, bucking her hips up to me in a frenzy and then screaming, loud and full-throated, when she slipped away into the white sea of sensation. And before the pleasure had finished I pressed my thumb down where my tongue had been, determined to wring everything out of her, and moved up to push my thickness into her swollen, soaking sex.

It had been too much, witnessing her as I had. I spilled myself into her almost at once, moaning hoarsely and clutching the furs in my fists as Emma happily took my tongue between her lips and my essence into her belly.

Shall I say we spent the rest of the day as one does at Yuletide? That we shared a mid-day meal and then a late supper in the feasting hall with the warriors and with our friends? That Emma went with Paige to the woods to cut fresh boughs from the holly trees? We did none of it. We spent it in my roundhouse, naked and at ease, as if the fire beside the bed of furs were the sun and the roundhouse walls the bounds of the world and Emma and I the only people in it.

We lost count of the times we made love – only knowing that it seemed impossible to get enough of each other, and that as soon as one or both of us told ourselves surely, that was all there was, lust would spring up again like water from marshy ground.

And all the while, as Emma gave me her entire body over and over, as if nothing was too much for her if it meant pleasing me, I found myself attended by a strange but growing feeling that somehow, somewhere, part of the girl I was wrapped entirely up in was holding something back.

On the second morning after the end of the early Yule rites, as our bodies were sore and raw and spent and we lay next to each on the furs, laughing at what the people of the camp must have been thinking of the sounds that had been spilling out of the westerly roundhouse for the past two nights, I told Emma that I loved her.

It was not such a shocking thing, as far as I was concerned. Isn't that what happened with love? You found someone who gave you the feeling that you didn't want to be with anyone so much as you wanted to be with them, someone whose every utterance, every little movement and quirk and thought, was unspeakably fascinating to you, and that was love? It's how I had always heard it described. Before Emma I thought maybe I had loved a few girls. I'd missed some of them, when I wasn't around them. Others may have given me a tiny smidgen of the fascination I now felt for the bold little foreigner, even as I recalled my mother listening to my past descriptions of my feelings and shaking her head.

"No, Ragnar," she would say, smiling to herself and speaking of this girl or that one. "It's not this girl who will take your heart and carry it around in her leather satchel."

And when I asked her how she knew she would say, cryptically and maddeningly, that she just knew – and that when I did love, I would know it, too – it would be that obvious.

And then the day came when it was that obvious. Why would I not have spoken it aloud? It was obvious for Emma, too. She even parted her sweet lips to say it back to me, the words only barely unspoken before she caught them and held them in her throat. And as soon as it happened something inside me just knew that what Eirik warned me of was true.

It was confusing, though, because other things, also seemed true – Emma loved me, I was sure of it. She needed me in the same way I needed her. But she was going to leave. I'd been worried when Eirik spoke of it, and then worried by her avoiding it when I brought it up the first time. But this time, I knew it in my bones.

"Why?" I asked her, my brow furrowing as she lay beside me. Nothing in the world could have pulled me away from Emma. Not a message from my father to come home to the Northlands, not a call to battle, not Odin himself. So what – or who – was it that had such a hold on her?

I didn't have it in me to be angry with her – that was impossible after being as close as a man and a woman can be for the previous two days. But I did have it in me to be sad. She must have seen it in my face before I lay back on the furs because she was sat up, the dreaminess of pre-sleep fading from her eyes.

"Why, what?" She asked, attentive after having seen a cloud flit across the blue sky of my expression.

Part of me didn't want to mention it. It would have been so easy to tell her that she was mistaken, there was no trouble, that she should come back to my arms and lay her head on my chest again. But I'm not the kind of man to slide around important matters in that way, as if failing to speak of them makes them disappear.

"Why do you say nothing when I tell you of my love?" I asked. "You're not entirely here. Or you're here, but your heart hears voices from afar – part of you is elsewhere. How long before you go back to that place?"

She opened her pretty mouth, and then closed it, and opened it again – but no words came out. I didn't need confirmation of Eirik's prediction that Emma would leave, but there it was anyway.

"What I don't understand is why," I told her again. "I see the happiness on your face, girl. I see the contentment – I saw how you had to stop yourself from telling me you loved me. So why must you leave?"

Emma looked away before she answered, and busied her fingers with a leather tie that held the furs to the bed, twisting and untwisting it over and over. "It's too early to talk about love."

Her voice was low and quiet, I did not quite hear what she said. "What?" I asked and she turned to me quickly then, and her voice was no longer quiet.

"I said it's too early to talk about love!" She replied. "Why would you even say something like that to me, Ragnar? That you 'love' me? What am I supposed to do with –"

"I say it because it's the truth," I told her.

"But you don't!" She laughed, but it was not a soft laugh. "You can't! How can you love someone after knowing them for such a short time? You're just – you're just trying to make me stay with you. And I don't think it's entirely fair."

My girl was no longer on her back, relaxed and open. Now she lay tightly on her side, her arms crossed over her breasts, her eyes still refusing to meet mine. I watched her for a moment, waiting to see if she would break and admit she was playing a trick, being silly. But she did not and so it was my turn to laugh.

"I had taken you more as a woman than a girl," I said. "And now I see you lying there like a very young girl of ten and five, pretending to herself that she feels nothing for this boy or that boy, so that she doesn't have to risk her heart. Why are you lying to me? And if you think you believe what you're saying, why are you lying to yourself? I can see it plain as day how you feel about me, Em –"

"Don't turn this around on me!" She snapped, before I could finish. "You already told me that Eirik said I was leaving – and I know you don't want me to leave. So don't act like this is about anything except you trying to stop me from doing that."

"Girl!" I roared, drawing myself up in the bed, incensed at her childishness. "If I want to stop you from leaving it's as simple as calling my warriors and ordering them to keep you with me. Do you think you would ever escape if I wished otherwise? Voss! Why do you try me in this way, after giving me yourself so sweetly?!"

But she wasn't going to give in just because I was angry. If anything I'd just made it worse. She caught my eye then, finally, and whispered her response: "But if you kept me here against my wishes, I would hate you."

"Hate?" I bellowed. "Look who speaks of hate so soon after she had to catch the opposite word on her tongue!"

"But I would," she continued, quietly insistent. "It doesn't erase anything else, it wouldn't make these past couple of days or any of our time together meaningless. It wouldn't even erase how I actually feel about you. But if you kept me prisoner, yes, part of me would hate you. You would be the same if I did it to you, Ragnar, and you know it."

It was too much. She was too much. As perfect as she seemed, as pliant in my arms as any man could wish to hope for, there was a part of Emma that seemed dedicated to testing me. What other woman would dare speak to a Jarl of hate after he had shown her such care, such love, as I had shown her? I rose from our bed and dressed as she lay waiting for me to respond. And when she saw that I wasn't going to respond, that I was in fact going to leave without another word to her, she, too, got to her feet and tried to grab my arm as I was leaving. I pulled it easily away and she stumbled backwards, having not expected such roughness from me. I paused, just briefly, instantly regretful – but I was too angry. She shouted after me to come back as I strode out of the roundhouse and barked at the guards to make sure she wasn't allowed to leave except to relieve herself – and even then that she should be accompanied.

"She must be watched at all times," I told them, aggrieved. "Such a troublesome woman!"

One of Eirik's men approached me as I stormed – where was I storming to, exactly? I didn't know – across the camp, but I waved him off before he could speak and he bowed his head respectfully, stepping away to let me pass when he saw my face. Soon I was near to the cooking pits, and then to the pens where the livestock were kept during the night, and then to Eirik's roundhouse, where I thought I could hear soft, murmuring voices from within.

A surge of anger at my childhood friend came up as I thought of him in there, his wife in his arms, his heart secure in the knowledge that she was his, entirely his. It wasn't fair to feel such things towards Eirik, and part of me knew it. But I was on a rampage, and anyone who got in my way was going to feel the heat of my anger.

* * *

Eventually I found myself on the rocky headland that struck out into the sea on one side of the bay where my ship was tied. A high wind blew in off the water, a touch warmer than it had been for days, and I stood tall in it, facing it down, holding my chin high in greeting.

And then I began to laugh – at myself, and without much mirth. What was I going to do – fight the wind? It seemed only slightly less useless than trying to fight Emma. I didn't even know why I was fighting Emma. I loved her. She loved me. And yet she was filled with dodges, with averted glances and mumbled words. What foul thing was keeping her from giving her whole heart to me? It wasn't a child, as I could see from her body she had no children. A man, then?

Standing on the beach that morning, filled with the righteous anger of a young man unused to hesitation from a woman, I gave the idea of Emma with another man full reign to run wild through my head, as if torturing myself would make anything better. I knew she'd been with men before, that was as it is – virginity was not common past ten and ten in Viking society, whether a girl was married or not – but I hadn't actually thought about it in excruciating detail before. Buffeted by the wind and stung by Emma's refusal to meet my open declaration of love with her own, I began to picture her in another man's arms, whispering in her soft voice in another man's ear that she loved him, that she was his.

It didn't take long for me to work myself up to a real peak of rage and set off back to the westerly roundhouse, to show that girl that she was mine, no one else's, and that she was staying with me – whether she wanted to or not.

When I was almost there I suddenly found myself grabbed from behind and whipped around, my hand already on the hilt of my sword, to see Eirik standing before me.

"Where do you go with such unhappy haste?" He asked, noting my expression and dropping his eyes to where my hand still stood ready to draw my sword.

I pulled the hand away, realizing even in my childish anger that two allied Jarls getting into a swordfight over nothing would be unforgivably stupid.

"It's her!" I told him, running my hands through my hair, almost panting with emotion. "It's that demon woman! She tries me, Eirik – she tries me like no woman has ever tried me before! And the worst of it is, she does it without sorrow, as if it were her right – her right! – to speak to me that way. To me! Her Jarl! How dare –"

A strange expression came over my friend's face at that time. Very briefly, I almost thought he was about to smile. And then he bent his head and sighed and ran his hand over his brow.

"Come to the feasting hall with me, Ragnar. I don't want you rampaging through my camp in this state – you'll just as likely kill anyone who gets in your way and I don't need that kind of trouble."

"I'm not hungry," I told him, although it was a lie. "I need to speak to Emma. I need to make her understand that she is not the queen of – whatever backwards place it is she comes from – and that she's not the queen of – of – me."

"Come," Eirik said again, placing one arm around my shoulders. "Things often seem less impossible when one has a full belly, my friend. And then we can talk about how very little you care for this impertinent foreign wench."

Was he joking? Was he making fun of me in my torment? I looked at him to see that, yes, he was smiling. But instead of going for my sword again something inside me gave in and I stopped, bending forward and putting my hands on my knees.

"I'm a fool," I told him a few moments later when I was beginning to understand how silly I was being. "Voss, I'm the worst kind of dull-wit. Listen to me. Listen to the idiocy I speak! Listen how I tell you she is not the queen of me, as if I were a child refusing to obey its parents. Gods, don't speak of this to anyone, I beg you. My men would lose their will to heed my commands."

Eirik slapped me on the back as we walked towards the hall, chuckling. "They do have that ability, don't they? Women, I speak of. They have a way of making a man – even a Jarl – into a foot-stomping little boy. Come, friend. We'll drink ale and eat smoked fish and bread and figure out what to do."

A short time later, after eating, Eirik and I sat alone in the feasting hall. "Sometimes I think she's not from the land across the sea," he said, picking his teeth with a length of dry grass. "Paige, I speak of. And your Emma seems to be the same as her, does she not? I've noticed even the smallest things, when I watch the two of them, that are similar. What I mean is that it isn't just their teeth or their skin more flawless than an infant's, it isn't just in appearances. Have you noticed that neither seems to understand when or how to speak to their highers? Paige is a Jarl's wife now, so it's right that she speaks to whom she pleases, and how she pleases. But even before we married she was just like your Emma, as willing to snap at a King as she was a thrall, and just as likely to be incensed by being given an order."

"She says she is not a queen," I replied, "but what you say is right, she acts as if she were."

"Paige says the same, that she is no one where she comes from. She tells odd stories sometimes as well, often before catching herself and laughing and saying she made it up."

"Odd stories?" I asked, grabbing a piece of straw to clean my own teeth and thinking of something Emma had said the previous day, about the way a series of crop-fields look from the air: 'Like a patchwork blanket of green.' When I'd questioned her on the phrase 'from the air,' not understanding her meaning, she'd changed it to 'from a great height' and when I'd then asked her how she had managed to see fields from a height great enough to cause them to appear as a blanket, she had no real response.

"Well, she seems to know things she shouldn't, for one thing," Eirik replied. "I've caught her correcting the healers before. Of course there is always someone who corrects the healers, but the thing is Paige turns out to be right. And she – I almost hesitate to say it as I don't want you to think me insane – but she sometimes almost seems to know my future plans. Plans I have not spoken to her about. Not three nights ago we lay in bed and she turns to me and warns that it will not always be so easy. 'It will not always be so easy, Eirik,' she says, and when I ask her what she means she speaks of us – of our people – and our presence here, our plans to move inland, to settle."

"Has she overheard your men talking?" I asked, assuming there could be no other explanation.

Eirik shook his head. "No – and I don't speak of specific things. She doesn't know we're raiding an estate before I know it. But she warned me about pushing further into the Kingdom of the East Angles, she told me that the King would need to be appeased or killed, and that – voss, it's difficult to explain! Maybe it's not what she speaks of but how she speaks? As if she knows how these events will turn out, as if she's seen the battles, and the years ahead of us already."

"But how can she?" I wondered aloud, a little shaken by what Eirik was saying because it matched so perfectly with something Emma had said about the children of the East Angles – the 'children's children's children's children and so on,' as she'd described them, 'and even further down the line,' one day thinking of us, the Northmen, as their own people. Like Eirik with Paige, I hadn't understood. I explained to Emma that we were invaders, that the East Angles and the Mercians and the others in this land would never think of us as anything else. But she had just smiled at me and said that maybe, once enough time was past, the descendants of the East Angles would talk of their Northmen as if they were as much a part of the place as their own people.

Eirik shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know. It's so many things like that, though. You meet someone, even a woman from a foreign place, and you assume certain shared experiences and thoughts of life. And yet there are so many little things, so many comments from her that sometimes I get the feeling we aren't the same at all. It's as if she sees things in a whole different way. Even matters as basic as time and distance."

"Yes!" I agreed, sitting up straighter. "I was just thinking of Paige doing the same. She spoke just recently of ten-by-five generations ahead of now, of how they would think back to us, of how the Northmen and the East Angles and the Mercians and all of us would be no more separate but blended into one kind. Who thinks of such things? And with such seeming certainty in her tone – as if she weren't speculating but speaking truth, speaking fact?"

We spoke of our women almost until mid-day, when Hildy came in with her girls to lay out the bread and cured pork for the afternoon meal and Eirik burst out laughing.

"Look at us!" He exclaimed, pulling me to my feet along with him. "We speak like two besotted girls! Come, friend, I will bring my advisors to the meeting roundhouse and we will plan the move inland, and what messages to send back home."