“Ha, if I keep you from that, I’ll make it up to you. Bide here. It will be good guesting.”

Eagerness flickered in Ivar’s eyes. He had not stopped at Haven without unspoken hopes of his own. Being a trader, he kept his face blank and said merely, “As the king wills.”

Hadding lifted his beaker. “Come, let’s drink, let’s be merry,” he cried. “Hard thinking can wait till tomorrow.”

“All at once you’re ashiver,” his leman, Gyda, whispered to him.

He laughed. “Well, at last I’ve something to be impatient about.”

However, mirthful though he was for the rest of that day and evening, he beckoned men one by one to the high seat and talked softly, earnestly with them—men of weight and wisdom. In the morning he sent messengers off, bidding some more who had not been there to come at once. These messengers went no farther than two days’ hard ride. Meanwhile he was much alone with Ivar and with the redegivers he had called upon earlier.

On the third night, as they lay in their shutbed, Gyda said to him, “You are going to Norway, are you not?”

“What makes you think that?” he asked.

“I have come to know you as well as anybody does, though that is not very much,” she sighed in the darkness. “You will be leaving soon, too. If you felt no need of haste, you’d have sent for chieftains from more widely around, to get everything battened down here at home.”

He chuckled and laid an arm around the warmth of her. “You’re shrewd, my love.”

She stiffened. “Why are you bound off? What is this to you?”

“Well,” he answered slowly, “as I said before, it’s wrong that a high-born maiden fall into the grasp of a filthy unbeast that wins her by running wild through her father’s land. If such a tale got around, it’d hearten too many outlaws. Best the thing never happen.”

“You’ve more in mind than that.”

“True. The Niderings are the strongest folk in Norway. It would be helpful to have bonds with them, loosely though Uffi holds the southern shires. He’d think twice about attacking us.”

“Bonds of wedlock? The Norsemen call Ragnhild comely.”

Hadding laughed. “I’ve never seen her myself.”

“But she is a king’s daughter. After you are dead, the Danes would more likely hail a son of yours by her than any of the by-blow, you’ve got scattered around among them.”

“I ought to look beyond my own lifetime, yes. A fight between sons of mine could wreck everything I’ve wrought.” Hadding laughed again. “But you stray from what we know or can foresee. AM know tonight is that you are shapely and you are here.” He drew her to him. The straw mattress rustled beneath them. Her unbound hair smelled summery “Give me a glad send-off.”