“Good night.” The small, serious voice came back through the darkness. Eyvind lay down again and, for all the throbbing of his arm, he was soon overtaken by the exhaustion of a day spent stretching his body to the full, and fell asleep. But Somerled sat a long while by the fire, his dark eyes fixed on a place far beyond the farthest margin of clearing or forest or wide hillside, a place that only he could see. He held his bandaged arm against his chest as if it gave him some comfort. Only the gods heard the words he whispered into the darkness.

TWO

Somerled departed with no sign of anger and no trace of tears. He thanked Ingi in tight, formal words. He glanced at Eyvind and touched his right hand briefly to the inside of his left forearm as if to say, Don’t forget. Then, as abruptly as he had arrived, Somerled was gone.

A vow was a vow. But it was easy to forget when the days were warm and bright, and there were so many things to do: wrestling, or swimming, or playing a game they called Battlefield, which involved a very hard ball of straw-packed oxhide and ashwood paddles. Battlefield led to bruises and fierce rivalries and, on occasion, broken bones. When Eyvind went hunting, he took Sigurd or Knut or one of the other boys with him, and they did well. He swam across the Serpent’s Neck and back again without coming up for breath. In the evenings, he worked with knife and wood, and made a little weaving tablet with a border of dogs on it. He thought he might give this to Ragna, who did not have one of her own. But he remembered Sigurd’s joke about the ten children, and he noticed the way Sigurd had stopped pulling Ragna’s pigtails, and now made chains of flowers for her instead, and he slipped the small carving away in his pocket.

Three years had seemed forever when Eyvind was not quite twelve, but the seasons passed quickly enough. Sometimes Eirik would visit, and now, as Eyvind grew closer to being a man, his brother began to teach him new skills. There were some techniques you could not practice on a friend, in case you took it too far and maimed or killed him: a little twist of the neck, a thumb applied very specifically, a particular jab to the lower back, or a squeeze to the groin.