“It’s too low hereabouts,” she said once. “You can never see farther than from your own height. Nor is there much that’s worth beholding.”

He pointed to a hill, steep against the lowering sky, ling-decked to the crest, where sheered a menhir raised of old by a folk unknown. “I’ve always thought that a tall sight,” he told her.

Her laughter scoffed. “In Norway we’d call it a hole in the ground.”

She brightened whenever they had guests with something to say that she cared to hear. This was less often than when they had lived deeper within the kingdom. Still, chieftains, traders, outlanders, and others not of the ruck were bound to have dealings with the king; skalds brought their verses, wanderers their gifts of strange things from afar, in hopes of reward; the hall would ring and seethe with their gathering, gold would gleam and ale gurgle forth, and on the high seat Ragnhild would be a queen in truth. Yet when the guests had gone she sank back into moodiness.

“Do you feel left out of the world here?” Hadding asked her bitterly when she had been two days well-nigh unspeaking after the Yule feast ended. “Maybe this is not Haven, but more happens than ever did in Nidarcos. And—you dwelt months in the uplands, where we saw hardly anyone for weeks on end, without yawning or sulking.”

She stared away from him, “I had been so long gone from my mountains. Oh, I would have come back down again to be among men. But in Nidaros the mountains are always near.”

He growled deep in his throat and stalked off.

The year died in sleet and spindrift. Slowly the sun climbed up toward the new year, higher every day. Snow lay in dingy clumps, melting to mud, puddles, and clucking streamlets. Snowdrops scattered white across earth, and from darksome, leafless woods the thin piping of lapwings sounded through the creaking of the gulls.

Hadding found Ragnhild by herself on the strand. She gazed across a gray sea that tossed and crashed below a gray sky. A ways out yonder, seals thronged a reef. Their calls went. hoarse through the wind that skirled above the booming surf. That wind was too bleak to carry much smell. It fluttered her. cloak and a stray lock of red hair, the only real color inside this worldrim.

He stopped beside her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

Her glance kept northward. “What do you want?” she asked dully.

“Nothing.”

“Then why did you seek me?”

“I thought if I came on you alone, we could talk freely.”

“About what?”