“Odin’s bones, Eyvind, where do you think you’re living, in some hero tale? That’s not the way life is in the real world, my friend. It’s high time you traveled beyond the farm and broadened your horizons a little.”

“What you did was wrong,” Eyvind said doggedly. The more he thought about Somerled’s tale, the more it worried him.

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if I were you,” Somerled advised, his voice a murmur in the strange, cold light of the summer night. “I’m sure Eirik doesn’t.”

The next day, Eyvind offered to check and mend the shutters on both the huts, part of the summer maintenance of the buildings, and Knut and Ranulf called him a spoilsport, but he did the work anyway. That night he moved down the other end where Sigurd and Sam slept, and Somerled narrowed his eyes at him but said nothing.

Somerled was supposed to help with hunting, but he had wrenched his ankle and was confined to camp until it mended. Eyvind was pleased to be on his own, and took to spending all day away, returning with his spoils only in time for meat to be prepared for the pot. That way he could put his skills to the test, stretching his body, challenging his senses, listening, in the silence of the forest, for the voice of Thor whispering in his ear, Be strong, be ready, so you can endure the trial.

One evening when he came back, Oksana seemed edgy and cross, and Ragna was absent from supper; she was sick, and abed early, the other girls said. The next day, the three girls were very quiet at breakfast. Halla chewed her lip, and Thorgerd would not look up from her platter. Ragna sat between them like a pale ghost, her blue eyes ringed with dark shadows. Oksana was grim and silent, ladling the porridge. When Eyvind came home at the end of the day under a rosy sky, with a hare and three rabbits slung over his shoulder, the first person he saw was redheaded Sigurd, chopping wood for the fire. Only Sigurd was not chopping, exactly; he halved the log with a single savage blow, and quartered it, and then instead of throwing the pieces on the wood pile and starting another, he smashed the axe into the chopping block, and wrenched it out, and smashed it in again, and Eyvind could see that his amiable, broad face was blotched, and his eyes wet with furious tears.

“Sigurd?”

He had to say it three times before the other boy heard him.

“What’s wrong? The way you’re going, there’ll be nothing but splinters to put on the hearth. What’s happened?”

Sigurd scrubbed a hand across his face and turned away. “Nothing,” he growled.

“It’s not nothing,” Eyvind insisted. “What are you so angry about? What’s happened?”

“I’m not the one you should ask,” snapped Sigurd. Then he seized another log and began to swing the axe again with such ferocity that Eyvind was forced to retreat to avoid injury.