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By Root 2087 0

left again hurriedly without talking for very long. The young man was somewhat lame, but proud withal, and he looked at Brenna in a sneering manner. Margret saw that he was a nephew of Magnus Arnason of Nes, who accompanied him, and stood outside the booth while the negotiations, such as they were, went on. The Thing was nearly over, and Eyvind spent all of the last evening going from booth to booth and chatting about this and that, but the end of it was that Brenna and Finna did not find husbands after all, though Anna’s wedding was set to take place in Isafjord some days before the reindeer hunt, and there was much to be done before it should take place. As they broke down their booth and prepared to leave, Eyvind declared that he had done a deal of work and gotten a fair return for his efforts, and he was very jovial, although his daughters were not so merry. Seeing this, he began to tease them until they went from frowning to laughing to weeping, and then he spoke soberly to them all, saying, “It is not the case that daughters float by magic spells from the steading of their father to the steadings of their husbands but by such effort as all must engage in, for a husband is a bird that must be snared by rich bait or by guile or by great labor, and the first of these is not something to be found at an Isafjord steading.” And so Eyvind went about this job as he went about all jobs, Margret saw, by knowing the task for what it was and taking his loss at the beginning rather than being taken by it at the end.

As she was climbing the hill above Gardar, she saw Birgitta Lavransdottir. She saw that Birgitta saw her. Then Freydis came up to her and took her hand and they climbed over the ridge. When Margret looked back, Birgitta was already down beside the Einars Fjord jetty, loading Asgeir’s old boat with their belongings. Margret could clearly make out the distinctive purplish color of the Gunnars Stead wadmal that they wore.

Now Birgitta, Gunnar, Kollgrim, Finn, and two other servingmen that Gunnar had taken on got into the boat they had brought from Lavrans Stead and rowed out into Einars Fjord. Birgitta seated herself in the boat so that she could gaze upon Kollgrim as he rowed, for he was a handsome boy, and she had lost none of her fondness for him, though it was true as everyone said that he had many faults. The only person about the steading that he did not tease relentlessly was Finn Thormodsson, and from time to time the beatings he gained from teasing Gunnar persuaded him to avoid his father for a bit, but he could not hold off longer than seven or ten days, and then Gunnar would once again find his horses hobbled together or his parchment marked upon with lines that mimicked writing but meant nothing or his neighbors put out because their cows had been driven into the shallows of the fjord. The only rest from these mischiefs happened when Finn took Kollgrim off with him, which he did much of the time. As yet no evil had resulted from these trips, though Gunnar predicted it and Birgitta feared it silently. They never asked Finn where he had gone, but only received the two when they returned and admired the game they had got.

It was the case that a rift had formed between Gunnar and Birgitta on account of the two children, Kollgrim and Johanna, for each parent was set upon the virtues of one child and the faults of the other. As for Birgitta, the names of Gunnhild, Astrid, and Maria were always in her mouth—Gunnhild had been the most beautiful, Astrid the most lively, and Maria the most affectionate of daughters, whereas Johanna was sober and staring and reserved, not ugly but not beautiful, either, and with the same uncanny radiance that Birgitta had always felt from her. It had happened at Yule time, when Johanna was five winters of age, that the famous first tooth loosened and fell out and Johanna carried it to Helga and showed it to her, and when Johanna then went off again, Birgitta, who was in the room, called Helga over to her and demanded the tooth. But she could not see anything in it. It appeared to be