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wildflowers in the meadows before the snow had started. She had yet to see anything like that in these heathens.
    A woman’s voice stopped the heathen from another shove. Not gentle, this voice was a scold, high, shrill and demanding. An older woman with shorn hair stepped down the shore toward them, snugly wrapped in fur against the wind. She stood square before the man, looked up at him and berated him with a wagging finger. The other men laughed and cat-called. The one taking her tongue-lashing dropped his head and blushed, though he hid a shame-faced grin in his beard. With a final sharp flourish, the woman turned to them and eyed them critically but not unkindly.
    “Seasickness is a bitch, ain’t it?” she said in Saxon.
    “I—er, yes.” Wilda was too taken aback to say anything else.
    “Well, you’re off the boat now. You’re to come with me, my lady. Agnar and his wife Idunn have got the job of keeping you for now.” The woman pointed up the shore to a grim-looking man with a ruddy, weathered face and a gut just starting to turn to fat. The woman next to him, the first Norsewoman Wilda had seen, was handsome but stern, her fair hair gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck and covered with a scarf, making her face seem even sterner.
    “What about me?” Myldrith asked. “I should stay with my lady. Please, I have to stay with my lady.”
    The woman snorted and her eyes slid over Wilda with a cold, contemptuous look before she looked more kindly on Myldrith. “You belong to Sigdir, you’ll be in his house and I don’t envy you.” She crossed herself and muttered under her breath.
    Myldrith clutched at Wilda’s arm, but seemed to be rendered speechless with fear. Wilda held on to her, an arm around frail, hunched shoulders.
    Wilda managed to squeeze her hand before she was taken. “God is with you.” A poor comfort, perhaps, but all Wilda had to spare for her. Time for no other words of comfort before a heathen dragged Myldrith away sobbing. Wilda couldn’t bear to watch, to think what might happen to Myldrith. To her.
    Finally the cries stopped, cut off by the slam of a door that was a slam to Wilda’s heart too. In a godless land, her and Myldrith, and each alone. Survive, only survive. Do what you must.
    “I’m Bebba by the way,” the thrall said. “Come on, my lady, let’s get you to the smithy for your collar. At least it’ll be warm in there.”
    “Collar?” Wilda asked, but she knew well enough. Saxons and Northmen both kept their slaves in collars, but it was the reality of it that brought it home, even more than Sigdir and the others’ treatment of their new slaves.
    “Aye, collar. Like this, see?” Bebba pulled the tatty fur away to show an iron collar welded shut around her neck. “Mark of the thrall. Well, the hair too. Of course, your ladyship gets something different. Sigdir said you’re to keep your hair, for a start. Won’t make you no more free though.”
    “Why…why did they bring me?” Wilda stumbled after Bebba, who led the way off the windswept shore, watched by the avid eyes of half a score of heathens and their women. “Why didn’t they just raid the town, kill us?”
    “Because slaves is wealth. And they brought you for a special reason. Don’t know what it is but you’re to be kept up at Agnar’s house, all quiet like.” Bebba shot her a sharp glance. “It won’t be good, I reckon I can tell you that. They ain’t all bad, I’ve had worse Saxon masters than old Agnar and his wife. He ain’t too bad for a heathen, the old goat. Idunn is a fine mistress too, firm but fair. But there’s some of them… There’s a curse on this village. I knows, I sees it. They don’t, not all the while they’ve got gold coming in, while Bausi and Sigdir make them strong. But they will.”
    Bebba led them up the shore past Agnar and Idunn’s watchful eyes, onto a path that wound up the steep slope where the village looked out over the fjord. A river tumbled down