On the Cold Coasts

trying to hold back moisture. It had been twenty-three years since their marriage in Hvalsey. None of her close relatives had been alive to give her away, all of them dead from the plague, and she herself a widow. She gave herself to him, in her own church. Not much persuasion was needed; he came from a family that was as wealthy as hers, though his holdings were not quite as extensive. And with him she returned to Iceland, leaving behind the churchyard that held five of the six children she had borne in Greenland, along with the man who had been chosen for her by her parents when she was still a child. She left the grief and the biting winter frost behind, and the ominous draft that had a way of slipping into children’s lungs even when they were swaddled in woolen blankets and seal and polar bear pelts laid under them in the crib. She had given him a daughter and a son, stillborn. The boy would have been an idiot had he lived, his tiny face round like a full moon and his dark-blue eyes more slanted than those of a Greenlandic Skraeling, and moreover with a harelip. He was buried to the north of the churchyard, outside its walls, according to custom. And she had painstakingly tended to his resting place, more than any other, every summer; she had brought flowers from far and wide and made his a colorful grave, much larger than the coffin that had been put together around him. And now she, too, was gone. The breath had abandoned the tortured flesh, and with it her life, leaving behind a cold and rigid corpse. How swiftly it had happened. She who had never been unwell until last summer, who had never complained of any illness before then.
    Little Ingvaldur, the legitimate and longed-for heir, broke the silence with his crying. He was a robust boy who needed to drink often—so often, in fact, that his mother had hired a young, healthy wet nurse to better be able to nourish him.
    “She was a good and gentle woman,” Thorsteinn said and turned, leaving the room quickly. Thorkell followed him.
    The sisters began to wash their mother’s body.

A BED-CURTAIN MADE OF VELVET
    Nearly all the residents of Blonduhlid came out for the funeral, as did the people from Vidvik district and beyond. The church at Akrar was filled to the rafters, so many had to stand outside. Some people remarked that it might have been better to hold the funeral service for such a good, well-liked woman at Holar cathedral. But such an idea was quickly dismissed. For one thing, Sigridur’s parents, Bjorn the Rich Brynjolfsson and Malfridur Eiriksdottir, and her siblings, Malmfridur and Olafur, had all been buried beneath the floor of Akrar church. Sigridur would have wanted to rest with her kin. Furthermore, it was being said that warmth between the lawman and the bishop was at an unprecedented low, after the latter had offered sanctuary to English lawbreakers.
    Michael should have been in the front row with Thorsteinn, the father and son from Holl, and other men close to the deceased. Instead, he had been elbowed by the crowd towards the southern wall of the church. He stood pinned between Bjorn the magistrate and a lumbering, frocked monk whose face was concealed by a hood. He had arrived late at the church and so had only himself to blame that he wasn’t able to be at the grave that had been opened in the stone floor. Yet he was near enough to smell the scent of moist earth. His mother was at the north end of the church with the other women; she and Kristin were probably sitting on his grandmother’s pew. Surely Thorsteinn would not notice Michael’s absence. He had barely spoken to anyone since Sigridur passed, and he appeared to have aged many years during those three days that had passed since the body had been laid out.
    The boy had felt strange on the inside when he kissed his dead grandmother. There was like an empty coldness in his chest where previously there had been a warm feeling toward her. At first he had been happy to come to Akrar after a year away. He had even been tempted to ask whether he could be spared from returning to Holar, where he was at the mercy of the schoolboys and expected only scorn and ridicule. But upon seeing his grandmother’s body, the feeling vanished and he was overcome with feelings of terrible loneliness and heartache. There was no longer anyone who cared for him at Akrar, so it was no longer his home. No matter that Kristin and Helgi would soon move from Hofdastrond and take up residence there. His