“You said you’d give us your blessing, Lord Ivar,” he said. “Will you do so?”

“I’ll do so.”

He rose. Old memories clung. They were a stink he would never be rid of. Liath had never been his, and she would never have chosen him. She sure caught the eye. He wasn’t the only man to have thought so. But it no longer mattered. The world had changed in a way he did not yet understand.

“Stand before the hearth fire with clasped hands,” he said to Martin and Flora. He’d never witnessed a commoner’s wedding. Rarely did a deacon officiate in any case, since the law of bed and board made a marriage. He dredged for scraps of verse, God’s blessings for fecundity, the wedding of church and humankind as bride and groom, the necessity of holding fast to faith.

“For healthful seasons, for the abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray. Have mercy upon us, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.”

Flora wept. Martin sobbed. Their son skipped around them in glee while the baby waved its chubby arms. Balt and his daughter broke out a flute and a fiddle, and the others took the table down and cleared a space for dancing. Erkanwulf tested his healing ankle by spinning Uta round and round, and he came back, laughing, to sit and rest and grimace.

“Don’t be so grim,” he said to Ivar. “Standing there with your arms crossed and a frown like my grandmam’s! Heh! She never smiled one day in her long life! My da used to say that a spell had been put on her when she was a young sprite that she’d drop dead if she was ever happy, so there you are. She was the oldest person I ever saw till the day she dropped dead.”

The story teased a grin out of him. “Was she smiling?”

“She was not! It wasn’t the curse that felled her. She got hit in the head by a piece of wood that flew free when one of my uncles was chopping up a log. A little like my poor horse, now I think on it.”

“Erkanwulf! How can you speak so disrespectfully of the dead?”

“She was a mean old bitch. That’s just how it was. No one was sorry to see her go except the dog.”

Like me. But he shook himself. It was a lie he told himself, and he didn’t know why. He had told himself that lie for years, ever after Hanna had chosen to go with Liath over him. But he had seen how false the lie was the day Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod had cried to see him risk his life for Biscop Constance. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin had given up his freedom for the rest of them. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin wept, believing him dead. Maybe Hanna, and Liath, had scorned him, but there were others who needed him. Who were waiting for him.