Sigrid has only herself to blame

Sigrid sat at the opposite end of the long bench from Estrid, with Synne in between. The latter two girls bickered merrily over the selection of threads for the broad panel they were embroidering, but Sigrid felt herself shut out of this, as she did out of all things. In any case, she would be gone long before the panel was ever hung on the wall.

She had not anticipated any of this.

If she’d believed that Eirik had gone sorrowfully away from her out of a sense of duty—and she was not sure that she had—she’d found upon his return that he was not overjoyed to see her again. He still called her Siri, and he was polite and gentlemanly when they were together, but he no longer joked about his dog, he no longer smiled at her from across the room, and the kisses that he gave her were chaster even than their inevitable audience would require. She wondered now whether he had ever loved her. Certainly he was not pleased that she had obliged him to marry her in this wise.

Nor had she expected that he would take her away from her family. She’d thought things would go on as they had for Sir Sigefrith and for Brede, with a knighthood, a new house, a bit of land, and much visiting about. While she had awaited her brother’s return, she’d even thought that she would be pleased to get out of this gloomy house and away from the depressing influence of her uncle, but she had not thought of going all the way to a foreign country, where the people did not even speak her language, and where she might never expect to see her family again.

Estrid had been trying to teach her a little Norse, but Sigrid was a poor pupil because unwilling, and also because she still harbored a secret hope that somehow it would not be necessary after all. This angered her brother. It was a slight to Estrid, in the first place, but it was also another example of what he called her “making things harder for herself.”

His opinion of her fate at this point was simply that she had no reason to complain, as she had only herself to blame. If she had expected sympathy from her brother, she had received very little.

Most trying for her in the meanwhile was Estrid’s reappearance, which indeed she had not anticipated at all. She had grown past the slight jealous prejudice she had held against her at the beginning, when Freya and Ana had first told her of Estrid’s interest in her brother, but now her presence served to underscore Sigrid’s own misery in every way.

Estrid was lady of the house, and she sat in the place Sigrid had occupied. When the ladies came to fuss over her as a new bride, it only reminded Sigrid that her own approaching nuptials were treated as a thing it was best not to mention. When they inevitably spoke of how happy they were to have Estrid back again after thinking her lost to a foreigner, it was as gall to Sigrid, who would soon be gone herself, lost to a foreigner, never to return.

She was to be married in two days’ time, and she knew that Eirik planned to leave soon afterwards so as to avoid the storms of autumn. In less than a week, perhaps, she would sail away to a strange land with a man she scarcely knew. She looked forward to her wedding as if it were her funeral. Brede had been right, for indeed at times she wished it were.