She pictured him riding, and the grey dog running beside the horses towards the sea.

+

Earlier that same night, a woman was making her way carefully across the fields of Rabady Isle, not precisely sure of her direction in the dark, and more than a little afraid to be abroad after moonrise alone. She could hear the sea and the waving grain at the same time. Harvest was coming, the grain fields were high, making it harder to see her way.

A little before, under the same waning blue moon, her exiled husband and only son had spoken together in a stream near Esferth. A coming-together that could only having been shaped—she would have said—by the gods for their own purposes, which were not to be understood. The woman would have been grateful for tidings of the son; would have denied interest in the father.

Her daughters were also away, across the strait on the Vinmark mainland. Neither had sent word for some time. She understood. A family disgrace could make ambitious husbands cautious about such things. There was a king in Hlegest now with increasingly clear ambitions of his own to rule all the Erlings, not just some of them in the north. Times were changing. It meant, among other things, that young men had reason to think carefully, mind their tongues, be discreet with family connections. Shame could come to a man through his wife.

Frigga, daughter of Skadi, once wife to Red Thorkell, then to Halldr Thinshank, now bound to no man and therefore without protection, was not bitter about her daughters.

Women had only so much control over their lives. She didn't know how it was elsewhere. Much the same, she imagined. Bern, her son, ought to have stayed by her when Halldr died instead of disappearing, but Bern had been turned from a landowner's heir into a servant by his father's exile, and who could, truly, blame a young man for rejecting that?

She'd assumed he was dead, after they'd gone looking for him and the horse in the morning and found neither. Had spent nights mourning, not able to let anyone see how much she grieved, because of what he'd obviously done, taking the dead man's funeral horse.

Then, a short while ago, at summer's end, had come tidings that he hadn't died. They'd stoned the volur for helping Bern Thorkellson get off the isle.

Frigga didn't believe it. It made no sense at all, that tale, but she wasn't about to say that to anyone. There was no one to whom she could talk. She was alone here, and still had no true idea if her son was alive.

And then, a few days ago, they had named the new volur.

One-handed Ulfarson, now governor, did the naming, which was a new thing. There were always new things, weren't there? But the young volur was kin to her, nearly, and Frigga had offered some small kindnesses when the girl had first arrived to serve in the women's compound. It seemed now to have been a wise thing to have done, though that wasn't why she'd done it. A woman's road was hard, always, stony and bleak. You helped each other, if and when you could. Her mother had taught her that.

She needed help herself now. It had brought her into the night (windy, not yet cold) and these whispering fields. She was afraid of animals, and spirits, and of living men doing what they were likely to do if they had been drinking and came upon a woman alone. She feared the moment, and what the future held for her in the world.

Frigga stopped, took a deep breath, looked around her by moonlight, and saw the boulder. They had done the stoning here. She knew where she was. Another breath, and a murmured thank-you to the gods. She had been to the women's compound four times in her life, but the last visit had been twenty years ago, and she had come by daylight, each time with an offering when she was carrying a child, and three of her children had lived. Who understood these things? Who dared say they did? It was Fulla, corn goddess, who decreed what happened to a woman when her birth pangs came. It made sense to seek intercession. Frigga moved to the stone. Touched it, murmured the proper words.

She didn't know if what she was doing now could be said to be sensible, but she was, it seemed, no more willing to be a servant than her son had been—to be ordered to bed any man-guest at the behest of Thinshank's first wife, the widow who'd inherited, with her sons.

Second wives had little in the way of rights, unless they'd had time to establish their ground in the house. Frigga hadn't. She wasn't far, in fact, from being cast out, with winter coming. She had no property, thanks to Thorkell's second murder. Nor was she young enough to readily persuade any proper man to take her to wife. Her breasts were fallen, her hair grey, there were no children left waiting in her womb.

She had lingered through a spring and summer, endured what she'd known would come from the day Halldr died, followed by that disastrous funeral: burning him without the horse, the omen of it, the unquiet spirit. She had hoped troubles would pass her by, seen they would not, and finally decided to come out tonight. Much the same path—though she did not know this—her son had taken with a dead man's horse in the spring. A roll of the gambling dice.

Women were not actually allowed to touch the dice, of course, for fear of putting a curse on them.

She saw the first trees, and the light, at the same time.

Anrid wasn't asleep. She hadn't been sleeping since the stoning. The images that came when she closed her eyes. It was wearing her away. Her elevation to volur hadn't changed this; it hadn't even been a surprise. She'd seen the unfolding of events in her mind, as if played out on some raised platform, from the time she'd gone to the governor. In truth, from the time she'd devised her course of action after he'd summoned her to come to him.

It had happened as she'd seen it, including the stoning, when she'd worn the serpent about her body for all of them to see.

She hadn't known this about herself: that anger could make her cause people to die. But the volur had had the snake bite her before knowing if its poison was gone. Anrid had been the newest girl, and alone here. Her dying wouldn't have mattered to anyone in the world. They had made her stand still, eyes closed in sick terror, and had goaded the released serpent with sticks, and it had bitten her. Then they'd sent her back out on watch duty, waiting curiously to see if she died. Anrid had been sick to her stomach in the yard, and then limped out through the gate to where she was supposed to watch. What else had there been for her to do?

And that night Bern had come. She'd seen him tie the horse and walk into the compound, and the volur had arranged to send him to a savage death. No uncertainty about that one, no testing of poison. He'd enter the town at sunrise, thinking he was safe, and would be taken and killed. A man who'd come to the seer for help. She had sheathed him in her wrinkled, dried-out flesh, deceiving him entirely. Laughed about it after. The crude jibes of the other old ones, peering through cracks in the wall, complaining they hadn't had their turn.

Anrid, turning away in disgust to the darkness again, limping, had taken her own first steps towards the stonings (savage death) later that same night when she spoke to the man, warning him. Bern Thorkellson was kin to her, almost. She told herself that now, over and again. You stood by kin in this world because there was no one else to stand by, or who might ever stand by you. A rule of the northlands. You died if you were too much alone.

But she saw stones striking flesh whenever she closed her eyes now.

When they knocked at her door and she rose and opened it and they told her a woman had come, she knew—they would think it was her power—who this had to be, even before her brother's wife's mother was led to her chamber. It wasn't power, it was a quick mind. A different sort of mystery; women weren't ever credited with that.