One could not fault Margaret’s efforts to be a good wife. When the sickness had come, and cut the islanders down like so many fragile stalks of wheat, it was she who’d dispatched men and women to help, it was she who’d admonished those too fearful to enter a plague-ridden house, and bade them put others first for a change. Many days had passed before Ulf was fetched back from Holy Island. By the time that happened, Margaret had the harvest organized, and men digging graves, and women making soup and tending to motherless infants. Eyvind wondered if she herself were sick, for the elegant girl of Freyrsfjord now looked wan and tired, with a grim set about her mouth, which showed no sign of disappearing when her husband returned to add his own offers of help to those she had already set in place. Ulf thanked his wife before the whole household for what she had done in his absence, but there was a certain stiffness, a formality about it, and Eyvind saw the look of hurt in Margaret’s eyes. Privately, he thought Ulf’s wife would have greatly preferred her husband just to put his arms around her, hold her close, and tell her he loved her. He wondered if Ulf had thought of this, or whether the passions that compelled him to a new shore, a new faith, had driven the importance of something so simple out of his mind. Perhaps Ulf had forgotten how young his wife was.

When Somerled came back to the north, riding his newly won horse and leading two more, a slight flush appeared on Margaret’s pale cheeks and a trace of the old brightness returned to her eyes. It seemed not at all inappropriate for the two of them to go out riding, with Eyvind as their chosen escort. They might travel inland, Ulf suggested, and see what traces of game might be found in the hills there, for the men had been complaining of the constant diet of fish, supplemented only by a hare or two. Eyvind took his axe and a bow, expecting to use neither. It was an insult to Thor, he thought, that he was reduced thus to a token guard, and as soon as he got back to Rogaland he would set that to rights. It could not be long now. Delay much further and they would miss the autumn viking altogether.