Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

She had risen up and cast off all the stones that Kristin had striven so hard to place over the dead.

as a mere illusion in the delirium of fever.

now he lived in a little hut down by the lake but he liked to come up to the farm in the daytime to putter around, in the belief that he was working very hard.

You had sown a thicket of brambles around yourself, with nettles and thorns. How could you draw a young maiden to you without her being cut and flayed bloody?”

“Things are such, Erlend, that few are born to rule, but everyone is born to serve; the proper way to rule is to be your servants’ servant.”

“Is that it?” threatened Sunniva. “Am I supposed to be the whip you use to punish your wife?”

That was the moment when she felt the first drop of bitterness rise up in her heart. God protect the boy. May he never see the day when he realizes that he has placed his trust in a hand that lets everything run through its fingers like cold water and dry sand.

Many a man is given what was intended for another, but no one is given another man’s fate.

“But that was twenty years ago, man!” exclaimed Erlend, overcome and confused. “Yes. But don’t you think she’s . . . worth thinking about for twenty years?”

No, he had never betrayed her, nor had he ever made her feel secure. And she could see no end to it all. Here she stood now, about to beg him to come back, to fill her goblet each day with uncertainty and unrest, with expectations, with longings and fear and hope that would be shattered.

She had once heard a saga about a murdered man who couldn’t fall to the ground because he had so many spears in his body. She couldn’t fall as she walked along because of all the eyes piercing through her.

Wound after countless wound she had endured in this life, but now she knew that they all had healed; the scars were as tender as raw flesh, but she knew that she would not bleed to death. Never had she felt more alive than she did now.