“There’s good salmon too,” I said. Dudda, a shipmaster who had once guided us across the Irish Sea, had told me the Ribbel was a marvelous river for salmon. Dudda was a drunkard, but a drunkard who knew this coast, and he had often told me his dream of settling beside the Ribbel’s estuary, and I could see why.

The settlers were Norsemen now. I doubted they had seen us. We had approached the river slowly, leading our horses, only moving when our scouts gave a signal. Most of my men and all our horses were now in a swale of icy puddles and brittle reeds, hidden from the river lands by a low rise crowned with trees and brush where I had posted a dozen men. I joined them, climbing the shallow slope quietly and slowly, not wanting to explode birds from their nests, and once on the crest I could see far across the estuary, and see rich steadings, too many steadings. As soon as we rode out of the icy swale we would be seen, and the news of armed strangers would spread across the river lands, and Arnborg, wherever he was, would be warned of our coming.

I was gazing at the closest steading, a substantial hall and barn surrounded by a freshly repaired palisade. The thatch on one of the lower buildings was new, while smoke rose from a hole in the highest roof. A boy and a dog were driving sheep toward the steading’s open gates where one man slouched. The man was far away, but Finan, who had the keenest eyesight of any man I knew, reckoned he wore no mail and carried no weapon.

“We go there tonight,” I told Finan. “You, me, Berg, and Kettil.”

I had no need to explain what I planned. Finan nodded. “And the second group?”

“Eadric can pick a dozen men.”

Finan looked up at the clouded sky. “There’ll be no moon,” he warned, meaning that we would be shrouded in utter darkness, liable to lose our way and blunder helplessly in the night.

“Then we go slowly and carefully,” I said. I watched the last sheep disappear into the steading and saw the gates closed. The raw wood where the palisade had been patched suggested that whoever owned the steading had gone to expense and trouble to keep his home safe, yet the man guarding the gate had looked anything but alert. My father had always said that ramparts don’t make you safe, it’s the men guarding the ramparts who keep your women from rape, your children from slavery, and your livestock from slaughter. I guessed that whoever was in the steading wished nothing more than to stay warm. It was a freezing winter afternoon, the sheep were safely home, and sensible folk would want to stay close to their hearth, confident that the wolves were locked out.

We waited deep into that dark night. It was cold, and we dared not set any fires. We shivered. The only lights were glimmers of firelight showing in a handful of the homesteads. The closest one showed no light except, at first, a faint fire-glow in the hole of the hall’s roof, and even that faded. And still we waited, too cold to sleep. “We’ll be warm soon,” I murmured to the men close to me.