[Lagertha tried to accept the different things that had happened to her in her life, the way fate and the gods decided what would happen to her. And her family. They had taken her daughter, her unborn child, and now her son was missing. The one thing she had left from the good time in her life. The time before her husband had sought the bed of another woman, creating a new family with Princess Aslaug instead of her. The time before she divorced him, leaving with Bjorn to start a new life.
It was her son that had ultimately convinced her to take fighters from her new husband's land, to go to Ragnar's aid when word of the raids on his lands reached them. And she had set out with those fighters (after fighting her husband for the right to do so) and her son. But now they were all gone, she had blank pages that wrote to her of strange things. Pages that showed the name of her first husband, but if it was really him, he pretended at not knowing what had happened to them in the past years. Of the very things that had pulled her away from Kattegat.
She could have made her way closer to Kattegat once she had agreed to see him. She could have gone in the opposite direction. But she was where she had last seen Bjorn and her group of fighters, and there was still hope in her mind that they would reappear if she waited long enough. So she was waiting near a small hollow of trees, perfect for holding a camp of fighters-gone-absent. It was where she remembered them camping, but now the grove held no sign of anyone but herself. And even the signs of her were small, a grazing horse without saddle, things piled carefully on the ground nearby. She made no fire as she waited, simply spread out a bedroll on the ground to sit upon.]