He started walking, and she followed, her long-ago husband, her lost love, to the banks of the sacrificial bog, if bogs had banks. Aksel said, “But not the boy.”

“Not the boy what?”

“He isn’t my son.”

“What? No! He’s ten.”

“Ah!” said Aksel. “My mother said you were coming with a boy, and Flora thought maybe. She has a keen sense for these things.”

She saw on his face an old emotion, disappointment shading into woe. “What did you think?”

He turned to the bog. “I might have liked it. Flora has a son. It might have saved me.”

“Saved you? Viking you, or you you?”

The bog said nothing. Aksel said, “I can love anyone,” and took her hand. It was the first time he had touched her. A moment ago she’d thought that would be the last step of the spell, the magic word, the wave of the wand. But it wasn’t.

I could lie, she thought. She’d never really lied, not like that, a lie you would have to see through, a first step on the road to a hoax, an entirely different life, where facts and dates and numbers were fudged. Leo did exist because of Aksel. He would not otherwise.

But then Aksel dropped her hand, as though he’d been joking. “Women are lucky. God puts an end to their foolishness. But men, we are bedeviled till the end of our days.”

She said, with as much love as she could muster, quite a lot, “Fuck off.”

“All right, Johanna.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t want—” But there he stopped. The Viking village was all around them, smoke in the air, the bleating of sheep who didn’t know what millennium they were in, either. Or perhaps they were goats. She couldn’t always tell the difference.

“What didn’t you want?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “A fuss.”

“Jesus. I want the watch back.”

“We might have married,” he said. “But then it seemed as though we should have done it at the start.”

“Give me the watch. I’ll sacrifice it to the bog.”

“It’s worth rather a lot.”

“Then Leo should have it. My son. I mean, we spent four hours at the railway museum. I don’t know what I was thinking, giving it to you.”

He retrieved the watch from his pouch, his Viking pocketbook, and weighed it in his hand as though he himself would throw it bogward. Instead he wound it up—later, when Leo did become interested in old watches, she would discover this was the worst thing you could do, wind a dormant watch—and displayed it. First he popped open the front to exhibit the handsome porcelain face, the elegant black numbers. “Works,” he remarked. Then he turned it over and opened the back.