“You’re a good boy,” Signe told him, fastening her overdress with its twin brooches, and leaning over to kiss him on the tip of his nose. There was a tantalizing waft of her scent, that warm, enveloping smell that was part of her very self. “Not now,” she said, evading his searching hand. “You’re needed elsewhere today, and so am I. Come on, lazybones, up from that bed and into your clothes before I put you out into the alley stark naked. Not that you’d be left alone there long; there’d be some lonely widow quick enough to get her hands on you, I’ve no doubt.”

With some reluctance, Eyvind dressed and made his way back to court. He looked for Thord or Erlend in the stables, but there was nobody around but a couple of lads forking hay. It began to rain, droplets at first, then a sudden deluge. Eyvind ducked inside the first building he came to, which was a small annex to Magnus’s great hall, a place favored for embroidery and music and games, since its shutters could be opened wide to catch the morning light. The place was near empty. A couple of women were seated by the far doorway, chatting and sewing, and two people were sitting over a game board, both of them very still, apparently locked in an intense strategic duel. Today, Somerled had the sixteen small soldiers, and the player with the eight, and the tiny king, was a woman. Eyvind stopped in his tracks. Somerled’s opponents were always carefully chosen: visiting nobles, traveling merchants, skalds, or priests: none but the most accomplished and the most devious. He never played with women. And this girl was both young and comely, if not exactly to Eyvind’s own tastes. He liked a woman tall and generously built, fair-haired, pale-skinned, soft to touch: in short, a woman just like Signe. But he had to admit, as Somerled caught his eye and the girl rose to her feet, looking him up and down in that way the court ladies had, that this one was not lacking in natural charms. She was of middle height and shapely though slender. Her hair was a dark auburn and elaborately dressed in a coronet of plaits, threaded with some kind of sparkling ribbon; her features were pleasing if a little sharp, the mouth full and red, the eyes dark. Those eyes were very shrewd indeed; Eyvind thought she had assessed him already, and decided he was not worth much.