Asgerd Karlsdottir looked at him and raised one yellow brow. She was only a finger shorter than his five-nine, but with a slender strength in contrast to his broad-shouldered, thick-armed, barrel-chested build; she wore breeks and tunic rather than the kilt, a seax-knife and Norrheimer broadsword at her belt but a Mackenzie-style quiver on her back. They both took the steep way effortlessly, ducking and twisting now and then when tree branches or undergrowth nearly caught at the arrows in their quivers, their feet making little sound despite the boots they wore. Now and then one would bend a fern gently aside with the tip of the longbows they both carried in their left hands, leaving no trace of their passing.

Neither was conscious of taking care not to make noise or leave trail. It was a manner you learned when you hunted for food’s sake, not to mention scouting and tracking and skirmishing across a continent with life and death for the table stakes.

“What’s the jest?” she asked.

“No jest; just thinking that I’m a lucky man.”

“Lucky in your lord, or your wife?”

He grinned at her; freed from the helmet his oak-colored curls tossed around his tanned face, and she restrained an impulse to smooth them back.

“The both, which is as much luck as a man can decently ask of the Powers, eh?”

They both made protective signs, though different ones; he the Invoking Pentagram, she Thor’s Hammer.

“And I was happy that the Sword gave Rudi a happy vision for once, those children he told us of. It’ll be a fine rare thing to have a little princess and prince about.”

Asgerd sighed. “I wish we had such a foretelling,” she said.

“Well, as a general rule folk don’t need a vision from a magic sword to produce children, you see. The usual way suffices,” he said solemnly.

A glint came into Edain’s gray eyes as he deliberately looked her up and down. “We’ll just have to keep practicing over and over until we get it right, so to say . . .”

He dodged as she pretended to clout him along the head with her bow, then said more seriously: “Though we’ve plenty of time; we’re both of us younger than Rudi and his lady. Why, look at me ma and da; I come back after only two years away, and I’ve a new brother and sister tumbling about the place like puppies. Twins, I admit, and born no more than nine months after I left almost to a day, but it’s scarce daycent, at their ages. Da’ll be seventy, come Samhain and a bit!”

Asgerd snorted. “Your mother is younger, and that’s what counts.”

“Aye, eighteen year younger, near nineteen; she lost her first man in the Change, my half sister Tamar’s father, he was some place far away. And Tamar was nobbut a wee one then. Not that I’m not glad to have little Nigel and Nola, of course. The more Aylwards the better for the Clan and the world—”