His gelding ran all out, but he was too late. When he reached the forest edge, they were already gone.

Long, long ago, in your grandmother’s day or your great-grandmother’s day, lived a man and woman who loved each other with all their hearts. He fished in winter in the briny sea, and grew barley in summer in his fields on the hills, while she kept the cow and brewed the beer and made the cheese and bread. Their only sorrow was that they had no children.

Their only sorrow, that is, until one stormy winter’s night his ship did not return from the briny sea.

And in her despair she came home from drinking his funeral ale to a silent hall, and she called on the lords of voima to hear her. Her man was dead such a short time, she argued, he could not yet be in Hel, in the realm of the lords of death. Voima must still reach him. She demanded the lords of earth and sky to listen, demanded incessantly for three days. And on the third day, when she had almost lost hope and had returned to her duties on the farm and was once again brewing the beer, a Wanderer came to her.

“So you want your man again,” he said, standing in the door of the brewing house and looking at her from under his broad-brimmed hat. “All it will take in return is that which is between you and the vat.”

“Between me and the vat?” She looked down and saw the silver funeral buckle at her waist. “Of course,” she said. “I shall gladly meet your terms.” But even while she was loosening the buckle the Wanderer disappeared.

She looked wildly for where he had gone, then forgot him, for she heard a voice in the yard and a step she had thought never to hear again. But as she turned to rush from the brewing house she suddenly gave a great cry and collapsed in agony.

For the lord of voima had not meant her buckle. And she had not known until that moment that she had been with child.