One morning, the longhouse resonated with a cry as long and sharp as a bone. Aslaug was having her baby.

Sansa was shooed away by Siggy who, along with helping-women, brought in pails of hot water, cold water, furs and linens. Ragnar sat outside, drumming his fingers on the wooden floor, getting up, sitting down again, throwing a dagger at the railing. Once he missed and Floki bent like a reed in a strong wind to avoid it, then putting his hands out very deliberately in a question mark. Ragnar just glared back at him.

Aslaug's cries were terrible. They sounded strong enough to rent the house in two. To break the sky. Everyone walked past swiftly and silently and did not look at Ragnar.

The daylight passed and still she screamed, or hurled out sobs like packs of crows releasing themselves from the trees.

Sansa brought Ragnar a cup of weak ale. He looked at it listlessly, before tipping it up and draining it in one, throwing the cup into the mud. He flung his eyes on her. 'Why do you tell us so much about your home? If I was in your land, I would not tell them about my home. My people.' There was an anger there she had not heard before, though she knew it was not really directed at her.

Sansa stood by his arm. 'My people are dead.'

His head jerked away from her towards the bay, fingers rattling on his thigh. The twilight was shuddering into night. 'Your father?'

'Dead.' She saw him in the yard at Winterfell, his face creasing in laughter, his hands folded over his elbows.

Ragnar's fingers danced more slowly. 'Your mother?'

'Dead.' By your father's side, a hand tucked into his arm. Her voice of measured admonishment, keeping her amusement in.

'Brothers and sisters?' His hand had stilled.

Everyone else, the focus of her parents' attention, chasing each other around in the mud, Rickon on Robb's back, Arya running her own arrow-target, Bran stomping his foot. Jon, too. 'Two brothers. Young. As well as my brother who was King in the North. A sister. A –' how did you say half-brother? 'Another brother.'

She did not say it again, but he understood just the same. Who was to say if Jon was alive?

A scream, worse than a hurricane, and Ragnar flinched, hissing between his teeth as if he was the one in pain. 'Go,' he said.

Sansa picked up the cup, staying well out reach of his feet in case he felt like kicking her, and returned inside. Carefully, she walked to the far end of the longhouse and pulled the curtain back.

There was a smell like iron, and a smell like sweating onions. Aslaug was kneeling on the floor, her arms being held outstretched by a helping-woman on either side, her head hanging down. One of the women was singing, low and keening, and Aslaug's whimpers wove their own, thin song.

Blood covered the floor.

V*V*V*V*V*V

His wife lies, bloodless, soulless, all her dragon-fire gone. His son has emerged from her a stone, pale as whalebone, a winter leaf.

He has five sons and all he sees is this one he has lost, and the mother who has borne them all, reduced to bones under the thinnest bark. He sits by her side as night passes back into day, ignores all offers of food or drink, and watches his wife.

Helping-women sing their prayers to Eir. He thinks of them all, the shining white healer-goddesses, sees them lined up by the bed. Hlíf, Hlífþrasa, Þjóðvarta. Björt, Blíð, Blíðr. Fríð and Örboða. They know he is angry with them all.

Siggy brings a whalebone that a healer-man has scratched into. The runes look meaningless to him, but he allows her to place them under the bed nonetheless. He senses their shapes like a criss-cross of bones in the earth.

Once his wife had woken up and stared at him, the eyes of a cat, the eyes of winter. 'I must accept my fate. I must prepare for death.' she had said.

'No,' he had said. 'No.'

The princess-girl is there, a flicker of flame at the door. 'No,' he says. 'Go away.'

She doesn't move. Instead, she sits on the other side of his wife, a cup in her hand. 'Vinegar,' she says. 'Garlic leaf. Sage.'

He nods and she leans over, helps Aslaug tilt her head up, though she is drowsy, half-asleep, and Sansa must catch it as it trails down her chin. The girl sits back down, folds her hands, as Athelstan did when he was first here.

There is an owl at the window. A little-ear, eyes bright as bekkeblom, feathers dappled like rain on bark. It makes a cry, just once. Disappears.

A sound, and for a moment you think it is the owl's cry in the deep folds of night, but it is not. Sansa has begun to sing. She is looking at his wife and singing, in her own tongue, words which sound like rainfall. She sings well. He sits back, watches his wife.

The song ends. Aslaug's eyes remain closed.

Nothing is said. He knows she is lost.

V*V*V*V*V*V

Sansa and Athelstan sat in what had become his workplace, a shed which had once housed goats – and in fact, did still harbour a baby goat or two, bumbling in accidentally and being nudged out by Athelstan, or grabbed by Sansa. Athelstan had created a small library of thin bark-pieces, storing their two languages, piled up in rows on a rough table.

It was very quiet outside. Rollo had taken men with him on his journey around the coast to meet with earls, and many other families were gathering in final harvests.

Slowly, Aslaug had begun to improve. That long night, Sansa had sat with Ragnar and sung Gentle Mother, as Old Nan had done when Rickon was born, shrieking out into the world and causing their mother such pain that her father had slung swords into the pond. Over the days that followed, a little berry-colour had returned to the queen's cheeks and she slept less, though remained in bed. Ragnar, however, did not lighten as his wife's health returned. He slunk around the village, clad in the woollen hooded coat he sometimes wore, his eyes diamonds in a dark room. Everyone seemed to walk on tiptoes, as if they knew not to disturb their king.

In the library-shed, Sansa watched Athelstan as he leant over his newest bark-sheets, his dark eyebrows furrowed. This time he wasn't writing. He was drawing, showing her the decorated borders he used to create on his books in the monastery, using knife-sharpened charcoal to trace ornate curls and plaited lines that made her think of Cersei's finest jewels.

He sat back on his heels, a small laugh of frustration coming out in a breath. 'It's not the same. I need ink, and pigments. This should be red, and this green.'

'It's still beautiful.'

Sansa had always known that Athelstan was different, but she had thought that perhaps he was from another part of this land – that his family lived further away, and perhaps Ragnar had found him and wanted him for his languages. Now she knew his story, how he had been a holy man – a monk, in his tongue, and had lost his family.

She thought of her dead. She thought of them like a book, no longer as bodies but memories pressed onto paper, pages she turned carefully, with effort. Athelstan was just the same as her – plucked away from his homeland, a place where he had lost everything, starting afresh here.

'Do you miss it?' she said. 'Eng-land?'

'No. I have been back. It – it wasn't good.' He swallowed and looked into the fire. Something seemed to have taken him over, a heavy coat of resin.

'Athelstan?' she said, very gently. 'What happened?'

He seemed restless suddenly, his hands folding over themselves. 'I only know the word in English. I was _.'

When Sansa looked confused, he took a piece of fresh bark and drew. A long, thin horizontal block and another, shorter one crossing it. A body appeared, and her heart rose to her throat as she realised what it was. It was him. The marks on his hands were from nails, hammered in. Nails in his feet. A garland of nails, or perhaps rose-thorns, around his head. She wanted to be sick.

Instead she said his name, slowly, as if naming him for the first time. 'Athelstan.'

He swallowed as she took his palm, turning it over to look at the scar, finding its point mirrored on the other side of his hand. She said his name again. There weren't even words in her own tongue she could say now. Not for this.

He smiled at her, but it was a smile that held back only pain, and horror. And she carried on cradling both of his hands, her thumbs on the wounds, and turning them over, as if hoping that at some point, the mark would not be on the other side, and a final turn would make them gone.

V*V*V*V*V*V

'Ragnar.' Floki is there.

'What is it.' He doesn't make it much of a question, sitting on his balcony, looking out onto a bay that gives no answers.

Words in his ear, like little insects. 'It is Winternights. The village needs to know if we are to feast tonight.'

Feasts. Wild Hunts. Why should he hunt – what for? The seer had told him the gods had taken little and given much. Words that sat like pebbles in his stomach.

Ragnar stands, pulls his hood over his head. 'Yes, you should feast. I will not.'

And he walks away, up the village path, towards the mountains.

V*V*V*V*V*V

NOTES

Norse school of childbirth and midwifery:
I had had an idea that Sansa could cure Aslaug with some ingenious developed medicine, seeing as there's approximately three hundred years between the worlds. But looking into medieval birthing practices, they really weren't any further along, relying just as much as the early Norse people on songs and charms. The Norse sang galdr-songs (healing songs) and carved runes into bones, placing them under the bed. I figured that Sansa singing her own hymn was as good as anything else.

Norse Mythology School:

Eir: Norse goddess of healing; much was left to fate, not medicine, and healer-gods were as much about simply deciding who would live, rather than necessarily curing.

I found these other healer-goddesses in a verse from the Prose Edda poem Fjölsvinnsmál; this text is I think far too late for 8th-century Vikings, but I loved the sounds of the names:
Fjölsviðr spoke:
"Hlíf (Helper) is one named, Hlífþrasa (Help-Breather) another,
Þjóðvarta (Folk-Guardian) call they the third;
Björt (Shining) and Blíð (White), Blíðr (Blithe) and Fríð (Peaceful),
Eir and Örboða (Gold-Giver)"

Norse wildflower school (hhm, probably starting to overdo this a bit):
Bekkeblom – the yellow marsh marigold