‘All those things together don’t sound like income at all,’ Cecilia remarked with a frown. ‘It sounds like a loss. Because we also have big expenses maintaining the estate; there are many souls living here already, and there will be more this winter if I understand your plans correctly. And we have as many horses here as there are at the king’s Näs, and we don’t have enough winter fodder from our own fields. Are you quite sure, my love, that you haven’t been overcome by pride?’

At first he was completely silenced by her words; he took her hand in both of his and raised it to his lips, kissing it many times. She grew warm inside, but was not in the least soothed when it came to their business affairs.

‘In some respects you aren’t the same woman I left outside Gudhem, my love,’ he said. ‘You are much wiser now than you were then. You see things instantly that none of your kinsmen would ever comprehend. There is certainly no better wife than you in our kingdom.’

‘And that is exactly what I would like to be, your good wife,’ she replied. ‘But then I must also try to keep track of all your ambitious plans, because you seem to be building more than you’re thinking at the moment.’

‘That’s probably true,’ he admitted without looking in the least worried. ‘I had probably thought to leave debt and loss, profit and expenses to be figured out later, even though I know it has to be done.’

‘That’s a foolish way of thinking that could cost us a great deal, and many of us may pay for your recklessness with grumbling stomachs this winter,’ she said calmly. ‘Shouldn’t you stop and think about everything a bit more?’

‘Well, I can hear that I should leave the thinking about these matters to you,’ he said, kissing her hand again. ‘You know that in the beginning we can do business at a loss, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. I’ve done that myself, although back then it was not something I intended or even comprehended. But you’ll need a thick layer of silver at the bottom of the coffer, and you must be sure that things will get better in the future.’

‘Here at Forsvik we meet both these conditions. But what sort of losses did you experience, my dear?’

‘Cecilia Blanca, Ulvhilde, and I were the first to think of the idea of bringing in silver to Gudhem by sewing mantles, the kind that almost everyone in the kingdom wears nowadays. At first we sold them too cheaply, so we were spending more silver on buying pelts and expensive thread from Lübeck than we earned once we sold the finished mantles,’ she said.

‘But then you raised the price and soon everybody wanted to have such fine mantles, so you raised the price even higher!’ Arn suggested, throwing out his arms as though there was nothing to worry about either now or later.

‘Yes, that’s how we managed to correct our ways,’ said Cecilia, but her frown was back. ‘You said that we have silver, and you said that things will be better in the future. You’ll have to explain that to me.’

‘Gladly,’ said Arn. ‘We have plenty of silver. What we can sell first is glass, but that income will be less than what we have to pay for all the other things. As soon as we can sell weapons, it will all even out. Then there is pottery, sawed timber, and several other things that will quickly turn our loss to profit, as soon as we get going.’

‘Weapons?’ Cecilia asked suspiciously. ‘How are we going to sell something that people make for themselves on their own farms?’

‘Because we’ll make much better weapons.’

‘How are you going to make people aware of that? You can’t just ride around displaying the weapons in your hand.’

‘No, but it will take some time to make all the weapons needed at Arnäs. They must have weapons and chain mail for a hundred men. And Eskil will have to pay for all of it. Then we have Bjälbo, and after that one Folkung estate after the other.’

‘Now that’s a new way to do business,’ Cecilia admitted with a sigh. ‘But the most important thing is not the iron coming in from Svealand to Forsvik and finished weapons going out. More important is that all the wool we have from our own sheep has disappeared for your…what was the word?’

‘Felt.’

‘Felt, yes. But we normally use the wool to make clothes for everyone, high-born and low. So now we have to pay for all that wool?’

‘Yes, both for clothing and to make more felt.’

‘And we need more hides than we can get from our own slaughtered livestock,’ said Cecilia, ‘and more meat, especially lamb, than we have on hand now to get through the winter. And fodder for all the livestock, especially the horses.’

‘Yes, there you see, my love. You see everything so clearly.’

‘Well, one of us has to keep accounts so we can do the right thing at the right time, and that’s not a simple calculation!’ she declared at last when she had thought things over. She envisioned difficulties piling up like a mountain in the near future.

‘Can I ask you, my own dear wife, to take charge of this?’ asked Arn, a bit too eagerly, she thought.

‘Yes, you can. I have my abacus, but this task will be more than anyone could hold in their head. I need writing implements and parchment in order to handle this work. And I’ll have to talk to many people, so it will take some time. But if we don’t start making calculations soon, we’re going to starve this winter!’

He promised her at once that she would receive everything she needed to begin keeping the account books. He added self-confidently that here at Forsvik they would never go hungry. After that he seemed to forget about the whole matter and went back to his own frenzied work.

When King Knut told Arn that the castle church at his Näs would be the closest for residents of Forsvik, it was not entirely true. There were closer churches. But if the winds were favourable on Lake Vättern, it was still faster to get to Näs than to any other church, since King Knut still retained Norwegian oarsmen and sailors.

At Olsmas, early in the morning Arn and Cecilia went on board the ship called The Snake.Cecilia was glad when she saw the slender black ship, and she hoped that the helmsman was the same one she had met before. And it was, she soon found out, but his long hair had now turned white.

Arn was not happy to see this ship again. He had been aboard during its first journey, which had ended in the death of a king, but he said nothing of this to Cecilia or anyone else when he bowed his head, crossed himself, and climbed aboard. The Norwegian oarsmen smiled to one another, since they thought they had another West Goth passenger who had never sailed before. They still told the merry tale about the noble lady who asked Styrbjørn himself whether he wasn’t afraid that he would get lost sailing on little Lake Vättern.

They had to row only for an hour before they caught a good wind and could set the sail. Then the crossing proceeded at a furious pace, with the white foam spraying up from the bow of the ship.

After the mass and the bride’s third purification in the castle church, the two Cecilias went off by themselves, while Knut took Arn up to the battlement between the two towers. There he ordered benches and a table to be brought, along with food and drink, which he was unsuccessful in pressing on Arn on this holy day.

There was much to discuss and one day would not be enough, Knut explained sadly, stroking his almost bald head. But they might as well begin with the simplest problem, which was to arrange the wedding between Magnus Månesköld and the Sverker daughter Ingrid Ylva. Knut said that he understood that both Arn and the bride’s father Sune Sik might be reluctant to have Arn act as the groom’s spokesman and thus negotiate with the man whose brother he had helped to kill. But Birger Brosa had solved that problem as easily as cracking a nut in his hand.