At first Hadding roamed happily about with her, hunting, fishing, or climbing cliffs that belike no human had ever dared before. It took him back to his boyhood. He wondered how Vagnhöfdi and Haflidi fared. He remembered Hardgreip, and uncouth though she had been, the thought of her stung more than he had awaited. He shied back from it, into the sport he shared with Ragnhild.

But as the days dragged into weeks, pleasure dwindled out of him. She blossomed; his answers to her mirth and her singing grew ever shorter. Here he sat, the lord of a few servants, doing nothing more heroic than chasing deer, his mind taken up with nothing more meaningful than next day’s outing, while beyond these hemming heights the world roared. He began to hate them. They held him back from his greatness, they barred him from the sea. In the end he wanted only to break loose from them.

Like most well brought up men, he had some skill in skald-craft. On a day when rain held everybody indoors, hunched in chill and gloom at stinking fires, the bitterness crashed forth as a stave. He prowled the length of the room, a shadow in which eyeballs and teeth caught flickers of what light there was, his footfalls heavy, and spoke what was in him.

Why must I dawdle, huddled in darkness,

Caught in a cleft of the barren mountains?

The freedom of faring on waves have I lost.

High through the night goes the howling of wolves;

Never their noise lets rife shut an eye.

Wildly they wail as they prowl the clouds;

Grimly the bears growl at their prey;

Lurking lynxes yell when they pounce.

Empty reaches and rocky wastes

Hold for heroes only horror.

Foul to them seem the rearing fells.

Ill it is to live in this land.

They long for the sea that lures them hence,

To plow the waves with the prows of ships,

Winning in war a deathless name,

Starkly striking from off the waters,

Bearing homeward an outland booty—

That is a handicraft fit for heroes,

Rather than squat by the scaur of a berg

Or build and bide in useless woods.

“Are you that weary of my homeland?” asked Ragnhild sharply through the twilight.

“Well, the time is overpast for me to get back where I belong,” he mumbled.

“Yes, doubtless we must,” she sighed. “Next Year we’ll return.”

He said nothing to that, but busied himself making ready to go. They did not speak much on the way to Nidaros, nor afterward when sailing to Denmark.