Involuntarily Kristin glanced at the window hatch of Margret’s chamber as it slammed shut in the wind. She couldn’t discern any face up there, but it was quite dark.
As she knelt in the rain puddles, clamping her hand as tight as she could around Haakon’s wrist to stop the spurting blood, she was aware of Erlend’s men standing half-dressed all around her. Then she noticed Erlend’s gray, contorted face. With a corner of his tunic he wiped off his bloody sword. He was naked underneath and his feet were bare.
“One of you . . . find me something to bind this with. And you, Bj?rn, go and wake up Sira Eiliv. We’ll carry him over to the parsonage.” She took the leather strap that they gave her and wrapped it around the stump of the man’s arm.
Suddenly Erlend said, his voice harsh and wild, “Nobody touch him! Let the man lie where he fell!”
“You must realize, husband, we can’t do that,” said Kristin calmly, although her heart was pounding so loud that she thought she would suffocate.
Erlend rammed the tip of his sword hard against the ground.
“Yes—she’s not your flesh and blood—you’ve made that quite clear to me every single day, for all these years.”
Kristin stood up and whispered quietly to him, “And yet for her sake I want this to be concealed—if it can be done. You men . . .” she turned to the servants who were standing around them. “If you’re loyal to your master, you won’t speak of this until he has told you how this quarrel with Haakon arose.”
All the men agreed. One of them dared step forward and explained: They had been awakened by the sound of a woman screaming, as if she were being taken by force. And then someone ran along their roof, but he must have slipped on the icy surface. They heard a scrambling noise and then a thud on the ground. But Kristin told the man to be silent. At that moment Sira Eiliv came running.
When Erlend turned on his heel and went inside, his wife ran after him and tried to force her way past him. When he headed for the ladder to the loft, she sprang in front of him and grabbed him by the arm.
“Erlend—what will you do to the child?” she gasped, looking up into his wild, gray face.
Without replying, he tried to fling her aside, but she held on tight.
“Wait, Erlend, wait—your child! You don’t know . . . The man was fully clothed,” she cried urgently.
He gave a loud wail before he answered. She turned as pale as a corpse with horror—his words were so raw and his voice unrecognizable with desperate anguish.
Then she wrestled mutely with the raging man. He snarled and gnashed his teeth, until she managed to catch his eye in the dim light.
“Erlend—let me go to her first. I haven’t forgotten the day when I was no better than Margret. . . .”
Then he released her and staggered backwards against the wall to the next room; he stood there, shaking like a dying beast. Kristin went to light a candle, then came back and went past him up to Margret in her bedchamber.
The first thing the candlelight fell on was a sword lying on the floor not far from the bed, and the severed hand beside it. Kristin tore off the wimple which she, without thinking, had wrapped loosely over her flowing hair before she went out to the men in the courtyard. Now she dropped it over the hand lying on the floor.
Margret was huddled up on the pillows at the headboard, staring at Kristin’s candle, wide-eyed and terrified. She was clutching the bedclothes around her, but her white shoulders shone naked under her golden curls. There was blood all over the room.
The strain in Kristin’s body erupted into violent sobs; it was such a terrible sight to see that fair young child amidst such horror.
Then Margret screamed loudly, “Mother—what will Father do to me?”
Kristin couldn’t help it: In spite of her deep sympathy for the girl, her heart seemed to shrink and harden in her breast. Margret didn’t ask what her father had done to Haakon. For an instant she saw Erlend lying on the ground and her own father standing over him with the bloody sword, and she herself . . . But Margret hadn’t budged. Kristin couldn’t stem her old feeling of scornful displeasure toward Eline’s daughter as Margret threw herself against her, trembling and almost senseless with fear. She sat down on the bed and tried to soothe the child.
That was how Erlend found them when he appeared on the ladder. He was now fully dressed. Margret began screaming again and hid her face in her stepmother’s arms. Kristin glanced up at her husband for a moment; he was calm now, but his face was pale and strange. For the first time he looked his age.