But for a moment she was possessed by a bitter longing for the hard pine scent of the homeland winds, the pale light of the short midsummer nights gleaming on the silver bark of the birches, and even the bright chill of a winter morning when the land seemed crusted with diamond and the air crackled in your nose. There was no point in talking of any of that. She had made her decision, for reasons which still seemed good, and she would abide what came of it. Edain best of all, and where he was she would make her home.

“The harvest was fine,” she said instead, the surefire conversational gambit; she couldn’t imagine anyone not being interested in that. “The heads in the sheaves were thick and heavy.”

“Fifty bushels the acre if it’s one, despite pushing it just a wee bit early for the war’s sake and letting the grain dry in the stooks,” Edain agreed. “Nor any sign of the rust. As good as any can remember since the Change.”

He cocked an eye at her. “And you pitched in very well, with not a word said. Everyone was pleased, and more than one told me so.”

Asgerd flushed, happy and a little angry at the same time that anyone could have doubted her. She’d seen lands where a few rich lorded it over all others and despised toil and sweat, but she was glad that among Mackenzies everyone worked, and fought when needful. Back in Norrheim she’d often seen King Bjarni with his hands on the handles of a plow or the haft of an ax, and Queen Harberga busy with loom and churn or helping get in the hay.

“Who but a nithing would do otherwise?” she said. “When there’s real work to be done, you do it with all you have. The wights give no luck to the lazy, nor would Frey and Freya if I lacked respect for Their gifts.”

Edain chuckled. “I know you, acushla, and have for a year now; and I know your folk a little, so I know why your back’s up and bristling like an angry cat. There’s no harm making a good impression on those who don’t know you or them, though, eh? We Mackenzies think well of a hard worker too, and you’re the new wolf in the pack here.”

She nodded. I haven’t met many Norrheimer men who are as good at following a woman’s thoughts, she mused. He’s a troll-killing terror in a fight, my Edain, and a stallion in the blankets, and he can hunt anything that flies or runs, but in some ways he’s as sensitive as another girl.

The thought gave her a flush of pleasure. She hid it by cocking her head to one side and considering Dun Fairfax itself, seen as a bird or a God might view it and away from the confusing thronging closeness that had blurred her vision of it before. There was nothing quite like a Dun of Clan Mackenzie in Norrheim. The thorp of a godhi, the home-place of a ring-giving drighten chief, would come closest; but that would be dominated by the Hall, and none held quite so many dwellers. Most Norrheimers lived each family of yeoman bondar by itself in the center of its allodal family land, the way her own parents and siblings did, with perhaps a few dependents’ homes to make a hamlet for the most prosperous.