He struck fist in palm. “About what’s wrong with you, hell take it! Are you sick? Bewitched? You go through the days like a walking stone. Your face is haggard, your eyes are ringed with darknesses like bruises, at night you lie stiff whatever! do and then afterward toss about till dawn so I too get scant sleep. What ails you?”

“It is where we are.” Not yet did she look his way nor have any hue in her voice.

He stood for a while starkly thinking. Wind whistled, withdrawing breakers seethed. “Why?” he asked at last.

She drew breath. “Once you made a stave for me,” she said. “I have been making one for you. Will you hear it?”

His nod jerked. “Say on.”

Now her look went straight at him. She spoke with more life than he had heard from her for a while.

No home can I have upon the strand.

The barking seals break my sleep.

Billows burst across the rocks.

And rob me of rest in my fog-wet bed.

Too soon does the scream of the gull arouse me,

Filling my ears with its ugliness.

Never it lets me lie in peace,

But always I hear it harshly mewing.

Better by far to be on the fells.

Here are no heights, no lordly quiet,

But shattering waves and shrieking fowl.

He stood wordless, arms folded, head bent down toward the sand.

“Well,” said Ragnhild, “I will outlive it. In summer we go back to Norway.” She stopped. “No?”

Hadding straightened. “No. I cannot be gone so long.”

“You could last year. It seems me a fair trade.”

“To swap wretchedness for wretchedness?” Hadding gusted a sigh. “Ragnhild, in the uplands the wolves kept me awake, though never had they done so before when I lay out in the woods on a hunt. Nor do I think the gulls at Nidaros ever troubled you. It’s when a place grows hateful in itself that the little things begin to gnaw.”

“That may be I told you, on the fjord in Norway I knew I could be quickly back in my mountains.”

“I think there’s more to it than that,” he murmured. “But we’ll never understand what. Well, we need not live here any longer. We can hold ourselves mostly to the towns—and, yes, now and then call at Nidaros.”

“And even make a meager short visit to the uplands?” she cried. “No! You have your man’s freedom to ride around wherever you will and then sail off overseas. I will take whatever freedom a woman may have.”

He swallowed hard, but had the wisdom to say no more that day.