The days were indeed full of hard work, but it was a good time. The weather stayed fine; they found time to swim in the stream, and they made a rope swing, and ate their supper out of doors under the pale sky of long summer evenings. Winter-white skin turned golden brown under the sun’s warm touch. Sigurd put flowers in Ragna’s fair hair, and she blushed a delicate pink and did not scold him at all. Oksana kept her babe close by her, watched over by one of the girls, but the other children rode here and there on the shoulders of obliging lads, and learned to catch a ball, and fell asleep the instant they’d finished their supper. It was a happy time.

There were two huts on the mountainside, one for the girls and one for the boys. The boys’ hut was bigger, with a central hearth for cooking. The shepherds slept here by the fire, with the lads at either end of the hut on shelf beds built against the walls. The place had not the privacy of Ingi’s longhouse, where wooden partitions divided the sleeping areas. Oksana supervised the girls’ hut. This was not so surprising, although she was a thrall, for it was known that Ingi had given her the chance to earn her freedom. This summer’s responsibility was part of that. Ingi had made it quite clear to them, before they left home, that the girls’ hut was out of bounds to the boys. Anyone who broke that rule would never be allowed up to the shieling again. Eyvind was surprised his mother thought it necessary to warn them thus. Surely it was the sort of rule people understood without being told.

They talked about it one night, lying on their shelf beds: Eyvind and Somerled and the two other lads who slept at the south end, Ranulf and Knut.

“Which one do you think’s best?” Knut asked in an undertone. “Halla or Thorgerd?”

Nobody answered; it was late, and they were tired.

“I think Thorgerd,” Knut said. “I like the way she walks. And her laugh.” In conversations of this kind, nobody ever mentioned Ragna, who was without doubt the prettiest of the three girls. She might be only thirteen, but Sigurd had established a sort of unspoken ownership, which all understood well. And Sigurd slept not so very far away at the other end of the hut.

“Bet I’ve seen something you haven’t seen,” Ranulf whispered to Knut.

“Bet you haven’t. What?”

Ranulf whispered again. Knut snorted in disbelief.

“Shut up, will you?” said Eyvind. “Some of us want to get to sleep.”

“What have you seen?” Somerled’s crisp voice challenged.

“I’ve seen Halla with her gown down to her waist; I’ve seen a pair of rosy apples that’d be sweet to taste. The girls leave their candle burning when they undress. You can see right in through the window at the back; there’s a crack in the shutters.”