She was wearing a teal-blue gown of lightweight summer cloth: she always dressed carefully, a habit for which she was now grateful, for there was no time to change. She stepped outside and stood in front of the great hall to welcome her husband. Others quickly joined her.

The return of the army was a moment of agonizing tension for the women. They longed to see their men, but they knew that not all the combatants would return from the battlefield. They looked at one another, wondering which of them would soon be weeping tears of grief.

Ragna’s own feelings were even more mixed. In the five months that he had been away, her feelings for Wilf had hardened from disappointment and sadness to anger and disgust. She had tried not to hate him, tried to remember how much they had loved each other once; then something had happened that tipped the balance. During his absence Wilf sent her no message, but a wounded soldier had returned to Shiring with a looted Viking bangle as a gift from Wilf to his slave girl, Carwen. Ragna had wept, she had stormed and raged, and finally she had just felt numb.

Yet she feared his death. He was the father of her three sons, and they needed him.

Wilf’s stepmother, Gytha, well-dressed in her habitual red, came and stood a yard away from Ragna. Inge, his first wife, and Carwen, his slave girl, followed close behind. Inge had made the mistake of dressing down while the men were away, and now she looked shabby. Young Carwen, who felt constrained in the floor-length dresses of English women, wore a colorless shift as short as a man’s tunic, and her bare feet were dirty: the poor girl looked as if she would be more at home with the children playing in the pond.

If Wilf was alive, Ragna felt sure he would greet her first: anything else would be a gross insult to his official wife. But who would he spend tonight with? No doubt they were all wondering that. The thought further soured Ragna’s mood.

The noise from the town had at first sounded like a celebration, male roars of welcome and female squeals of delight, but now Ragna realized that there was no triumphant braying of horns or thudding of vainglorious drums, and there was a discouraged feel to the hoofbeats. The exultant greetings turned into exclamations of dismay.

She frowned, concerned. Something had gone wrong.

The army appeared at the entrance to the compound. Ragna saw a cart drawn by an ox, with two men riding on each side. A driver sat at the front of the vehicle. Behind him on the flat bed of the cart was a supine form. It was a man, Ragna saw, and she recognized the fair hair and beard of Wilf. She let out a short scream: was he dead?

The entourage was moving slowly, and Ragna could not wait. She ran across the compound, and heard the other women behind her. All her resentment of Wilf for his infidelity faded into the background, and she felt nothing but excruciating worry.