“My grandmother,” Svart said, “cast the sticks when I was born. They said I’d be dead before I could walk.”

“Seven kings,” I poured him the last of the ale. “I’ll settle for one Norseman.”

Svart raised his pot. “To Sköll’s death,” he said.

“Sköll’s death,” I echoed.

Somewhere in the night a child cried and a hooded hawk screeched. I wished Mus had come with us. I prayed to the gods before I slept, begging them to show me the future in a dream, but if they did I could not remember it when I woke.

It was dawn on Eostre’s feast day.

Ragnar, who became my father after he captured me, always sacrificed to Idunn in the spring. “She brings us flowers, lambs, and women,” he had told me, “so she deserves a generous gift.”

“She brings us women?”

He had ruffled my hair. “You’ll understand one day.”

His Saxon slaves were given a feast on Idunn’s day, and they called it Eostre’s feast because their goddess of the spring was called Eostre. There were songs, there was laughter, there was dancing in the pastures if the weather was good and then folk would go to the woods to finish the dance. The hall was hung with boughs bright with petals and new leaves. Idunn and Eostre, I suppose they are the same goddess, bring us new life, they give us bud and blossom, fledglings and lambs. The feast is joyous and the land is adorned with flowers, with primroses and cowslips, bluebells in the woods, lilac and lilies. The Christians, unable to stop folk welcoming the rebirth of the year, made it their own feast day, a feast to celebrate their nailed god’s death and resurrection. Father Beocca liked to call the feast Pascha. “That’s the proper name,” he insisted to me, “Pascha,” but insist as the priests liked, everyone still called it Easter, which was Eostre’s day.

And that Eostre’s day dawned chill and wet. The rain came in great swaths from the west, poured from the thatch, and ran like streams down the hill where the old fort stood at Tamweorthin’s heart. It had not been a Roman fort, but a Saxon citadel of wood and earth, and all that remained of the old defenses was a ridge of turf above a steep, short slope that had once been the ramparts. A passage led through the ridge, beyond which lay the royal palace and Tamweorthin’s largest church. Sigtryggr and I, cloaked against the malevolent rain, climbed the hill toward the palace. Svart, Berg, and two other warriors followed us. Finan had gone to church as he always did on Eostre’s day, and Sigtryggr and I, bored with the Bullock’s small rooms, were exploring the town. “I was supposed to go to the church,” Sigtryggr told me.

“Supposed?”

He shrugged. “Hrothweard said it was expected of me.”

“Is the archbishop here?”

Sigtryggr nodded. “He is, only he won’t be quartered in a dirty tavern, will he? They’ll give him space in the palace.” He grimaced. “I was told I couldn’t bring more than sixteen followers.”