“Oi will, luv. They sleep ’ard as they play, at that age, eh?”

She looked after him and shook her head, then looked at Asgerd. Blue eyes met blue.

“Well, and how did you manage that? Without clouting him hard enough to crack the thick stubborn skull of him, to be sure.”

Asgerd ducked her head. Edain’s mother was mistress of this household, and she knew her manners.

“Good mother, I . . . I just told him I’d been raised on a farm and knew what to do when a man pulled his back, and not to be foolish but to lie down so I could fix it.”

She indicated the bench. Melissa Aylward came over and looked at the dish of improvised liniment, sniffing at it.

“Essence of meadowsweet and sunflower oil. That would do nicely. I add a little mint-water when I make up a batch for the stillroom.”

“My mother does too,” Asgerd said. “But there wasn’t any to hand.”

Melissa nodded. “So it isn’t all swords with you, then, girl?”

“Oh, no,” Asgerd said, surprised; though they hadn’t had much time to talk, or she thought much inclination on the older woman’s part. “I trained to arms, we all do in Norrheim just as you do here, but I wasn’t a shield-maid until my man Sigurd . . . the one I was to marry . . . was killed. By the Bekwa savages, led by a red-robe, a trollkjerring of the CUT. I heard that the night I first saw Edain.”

Quick sympathy lit the other woman’s face, and Asgerd turned her head aside slightly.

“That is a good loom,” she went on determinedly, walking over to where it stood tall at the other end of the big room. “My mother has one much like it—a bit higher, a little narrower.”

“Sam made it for me . . . sweet Brigid, twenty-three years ago last Imbolc,” Melissa said.

Asgerd touched the satiny finish of the wood, pegged and glued together from oak and ash, beech wood and maple, and carved with running vines at the joinings. Just now it was set up to weave a stretch of blue cloth with yellow flowers at the corners, half done but already lovely. One of the good things about weaving was that it could be interrupted for something more urgent and taken up again an hour or a day later; she supposed that was why it was usually woman’s work, though she’d known men who did it well. If there was anything that made for interruptions more urgent and more often than a small child, she’d never heard of it.

Melissa went on: “He copied it from Lady Juniper’s that she had from before the Change—she taught me to weave, like many another. We like to work here together in the winter afternoons, Sam and I; he’ll be at the bench, and I at the loom.”

Asgerd looked more closely, whistled under her breath, and traced one of the joints with her thumbnail. It was so close-set there was hardly even a catch when she ran it across the surface; the whole of it was like that, mortise-and-tenon joins pegged together with almost invisible smoothness. Even the king-bolts that could be taken down to disassemble the whole thing for storage were countersunk to be out of the way yet instantly accessible.