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through her hood.

Eight
    Her bonds were loosened and retied, all the more tightly, using a length of some sort of fabric she did not recognize. Once again she was flung over her captor’s muscular shoulder. Hallgerd tried to calculate where they were, how high above the village, the strangers’ boots soft across the turf on one of the high sheep meadows.
    A stream gushed, and splashed as they forded a current, Stag Brook, one of the many watercourses full of snowmelt this time of year. They were traveling faster higher, footsteps crunching snow. Hallgerd was surprised at the path they seemed to be following, a little used, rocky passage up through the mountains.
    Hallgerd had heard of such captures, she reminded herself—they were the stuff of fireside tales, told to chill children and teach them caution. A jarl’s daughter, forced into marriage or held for some political gain, would find herself powerless, far from friends and family. While the Norsemen of her experience treated neighboring women as respected equals, the women of far-off places were sometimes little more than prey.
    Surely, she told herself, her father would retake her before the Danes could reach their ships.
    By the time hands unfastened the sack from around her neck it was full morning, the sun nearly blinding off the mountainside snow. Someone behind her unknotted the leather gag and loosed the bonds around her wrists.
    She blinked at the sudden sunlight, and kept silent. They were on the far side of the mountain ridge, out of sight of her village.
    After her long journey, half-breathless and upside down, the sky swung slowly back and forth, and even the chirp of mountain birds sounded unfamiliar. Armed men were panting hard, flushed from their long climb. There were only half a dozen men, so badly winded that one or two slumped to the ground. Their armor was dark and well oiled, unlike the yellow, cracked armor of Spjothof’s fighters. Their sword pommels were well-polished bronze. A man with long blond hair and gray eyes held forth a goatskin sack, and she accepted it, tasting water pleasantly flavored with mead.
    This honey wine was not a common beverage in her own village, although foreign merchants sometimes traded it for cheese and sailcloth. The gods enjoyed mead every night, according to the poems. Only the wealthy men and women of the kingdoms to the south were so fortunate.
    Which one of these men had carried her over the mountain?
    â€œDid they hurt you?” the gray-eyed man inquired in that lilting, foreign accent of the Danes. His voice was soft, not unpleasing, and he wore a sword buckle of polished silver, an amber finger-ring on his hand.
    Hallgerd said nothing. She could not trust herself to speak, and her bladder was about to burst.
    Not far down the mountainside four ships nestled in the deep shadow of Wulffjord, the fjord to the south of her homeland. The tops of the spruce wood masts just caught the sunlight. Far in the distance was the early morning cooking smoke of the tiny village of Ard. She counted her enemy, and did not see enough to work so many ships.
    â€œTell me, jarl’s daughter,” he insisted gently, “if you have suffered so much as a single bruise.”
    She would choose her words carefully, and above all she would delay. Hallgerd expected to hear her father’s battle cry very soon, and to see Hrolf’s sword flash in the bright morning light. Now that she felt confirmed in her understanding that she was not going to be raped and butchered immediately, she tried to recall her father’s ability to negotiate with difficult strangers. Act as though the outcome is of no concern .
    And remember , her mother had always advised her, who you are .
    Hallgerd’s parents had often counseled her on her behavior in recent years, helping her to see that while she could continue to wear her hair loose around her shoulders like any unmarried woman, she would have to speak with a