After all, he thought later, her brothers, younger than her, looked up to her. Their goodwill was important to him. Shrewd and bold, she could very well speak to her landsmen on his behalf, softly as behooved a woman but with steel underneath, and send news to him of how things were going. She might even help nudge more kings in the high North to swearing fellowship with him. Though Hunding of Svithjod was his friend, who knew what ill hap might suddenly take Hunding off, or what foes might raven in from elsewhere?

The upshot was that in spring they sailed to Nidaros, and he came back without her. They gave out what was true as far as it went, that she would spend a while being his eyes and ears in these parts. If she did some of that while off in the wilderness, who dared question the Dane-queen? Otherwise let tongues wag as they would.

Their last night together had not the lustfulness they once knew, but it left them feeling closer in their hearts.

Hadding bade farewell and hoisted sail for Denmark. There he would have no dearth of women. Mainly, though, he found himself among men, from jarls to crofters, wrights to warriors.

It was the warriors who most thrust their wishes upon him, his housecarles, youths everywhere, even graybeards who had been keeping their battle axes whetted. Too long had they lain idle or plodded the rounds of farm and burgh. Where now were masts aslant and rig athrum, new shores upheaving from the waves, shield-gleam and weapon-clash, great deeds, fearless dyings forever remembered, booty and brags brought home for the wonderment of maidens, the bond between man and man that goes deeper than love? How could a hero forever sit still?

“I remember how we slogged through mud and shivered beneath rain, how the flux came on us in camp, how the newly dead stink and stare, how ready one is to kill one’s comrade if he belches just once more in the selfsame way,” Hadding had said once to Ragnhild. “And yet—”

Besides, he could not well keep strength in being if he never used it.

In the following summer he led a fleet across the Baltic. They harried widely among the Wends, they rowed up the rivers of Gardariki, they came back loaded with gold, amber, furs, and thralls. Thus for a while afterward there could again be peacefulness in Denmark.

On the way home, Hadding sent most of the ships on ahead while he, with a few, grounded on Scanian shores. There he and some guards got horses. They rode to Bralund that he might call on his friend and jarl, Eyjolf.