text: The tracks were fresh but the snow was old. Deep too, so that it was impossible to know how many animals there were, for each was using the same tracks as the one in front. The trail they made through the pines was narrow and straight. Or as straight as it could be in a forest.
  
  'Wolves waste no energy when they're on the move. Not like dogs,' Olaf had explained when they set out into the night with spears and bellies full of ale.
  
  'Aye, but a dog wouldn't waste a nice warm fire,' Svein had said, shuddering at the sudden cold and pressing a thick finger against one nostril to expel a wad of smoke-blackened snot on to the snow. 'So I am thinking that maybe dogs have more clever in them than wolves.' He glanced back towards the hall as though already regretting his decision to go with Olaf and Sigurd. 'More clever than us too,' he added, clearing his other nostril and pulling the wool back over his face, blinking smoke-stung eyes in the frigid air.
  
  They had wrapped their legs and hands with wool too and wore the same sheepskin or fur and leather hats that they had pulled on to their heads when the snows had come, and which they had rarely taken off since, even inside Jarl Hakon Burner's old hall. For that place was huge and there were never enough bodies inside to warm its edges, even with both hearths burning day and night.
  
  'Compared to wolves dogs walk as if they are drunk,' Olaf had gone on, cinching his cloak tight at his neck. 'Tend to drag their toes as well, whereas wolves have a cleaner stride. Leave neater tracks, see.'
  
  He had been right about that, Sigurd thought now as a shaft of moonglow arrowed through the trees, lighting the trail before them and threading the brittle mantle with silver, like wire inlay on a blade. The left and right paw prints were only slightly offset and it was clear that the wolves were making much lighter work of it than Sigurd and his friends. Sigurd could see where the lead wolf's body had carved a track through the snow like a karvi's sleek bow through a heavy sea. By contrast he and his companions laboured and puffed and sweated now despite the chill. For the pine canopy above had not prevented the snow settling deep in places, nor stopped the prevailing south-westerly wind piling it up in drifts against trunks, making it hard going.
  
  'Bollocks, but the lad's blowing like Völund's own bellows!' Olaf said a while later, pulling the woollen wrap below his chin and planting his spear butt in the snow as he and Sigurd turned to look at Svein who had fallen behind. 'The beasts'll smell his mead-breath five rôsts off and we'll never catch a glimpse of them.'
  
  Olaf had been Sigurd's father's closest friend and now he treated them all as a man will who thinks his having a few more years on his back is the same as having twice as much sense. Perhaps it was, too. And yet Sigurd knew that Olaf would take a spear in the gut or an arrow in the throat for him, and where was the sense in that? Olaf would say he owed it to Sigurd's father Harald – hard to gainsay, for you could count the dead jarl's still breathing hearthmen on one hand these days. On three fingers actually.
  
  Now, though, Olaf's own mead-breath was clouding around his face as though his beard were on fire and Sigurd suspected his stopping to moan about Svein had more to do with Olaf catching his own wind than it had to do with their big friend. Sigurd found himself smiling. He was a long way off Olaf's age and whilst he might have been clumsy compared to their prey he nevertheless felt a wolf's stamina thrum in his blood, felt the beast's vigour in his flesh, and believed he could keep this pace up all night if need be.
  
  'Better being out here with the silence in our ears than back there with them full of Crow-Song,' Sigurd said.
  
  'True enough,' Olaf agreed. 'By the time he has spun your killing of that treacherous, over-reaching crab bait Jarl Randver into your saga tale he will have you sharing kinship with the Allfather himself and I will be some troll-slayer with a dwarf-forged sword.' One of his eyebrows curved like Bifröst the rainbow-bridge. 'Fucking skalds, eh?'
  
  Sigurd felt the cold air on his teeth. 'He says the truth is as welcome in a good story as a fart under the furs.'
  
  They could have waited until morning before setting out, but Asgot had smelt new snow in the air, or seen it in his runes perhaps, and Sigurd would not risk another fall covering the tracks. Besides which he welcomed any excuse to get out of Hakon Burner's hall.
  
  They had gone up to Osøyro the first time harbouring the hope that Jarl Hakon Brandingi, who had earned his reputation as a hall-burner many times over, might help them fight the oath-breaker King Gorm. But arriving at Brandingi's hall they had found the jarl himself a living corpse and his son, Thengil, lording it around the place instead. Thengil had been a soft, slimy nithing, and perhaps that had been all to the good because he had died piss-soaked and strung up from the rafters, and the corpse jarl's last hearthmen, proper warriors to a man, had seen in Sigurd one last chance to live and die as men should. They had sworn loyalty to him, which was a heavy thing, they being warriors of so many fights and Sigurd being grass-green by comparison.
  
  He could still see those greybeards in the eye of his mind, standing there in their last shieldwall by Jarl Randver's hall in Hinderå, facing the jarl's warriors who, though younger and undoubtedly stronger, must have learnt a thing or two that day. For those old Sword-Norse had stood their ground so that Sigurd and the others could get to the sea and take ship away. Not that the greybeards' legs could have carried them fast enough even if they had wanted to live.
  
  After that steel-storm by the Nilsavika headland in which Sigurd killed Jarl Randver, whose bones now sat in the cold dark at the bottom of the fjord, they had sailed back up to Osøyro, to Jarl Hakon Brandingi's old hall. There, their ears had been full of the curses of those old women who blamed Sigurd that their men were now in the afterlife without them; and all Sigurd could do was give each a handful of silver, which the women took off to live out the rest of their lives in some village elsewhere, not wanting to dwell with their menfolk's ghosts nor with Sigurd's crew.
  
  But dead as Randver was, he yet had living sons and the eldest of them, Hrani, now had ships and men and a thirst for revenge. And then there was King Gorm and all the Sword-Norse he could call upon, and the oath-breaker would never have a better chance to rid himself of Sigurd. So like a hunted wolf, Sigurd had taken to his den to wait out the winter. But that huge hall, bigger than any Sigurd had ever seen or heard of, was a forsaken place. Its ancient soot-blackened timbers were corpse-cold. Its corners, in which men and women once fumbled, now writhed with rats. Its mead-stained benches lay up in the roof beams swathed in spiders' web thick as wool, and of the hangings on the walls keeping out the draughts, a few had been spun in recent years but most were old, faded and threadbare. It was a hall of ghosts and no amount of lamp or hearth flame could breathe life into it.
  
  Which was why Sigurd would rather be knee-deep in snow hunting wolves. For if they could find the creatures' den they could come back with more spears and dogs and traps.
  
  The beasts had dug their way into the sheep pen and killed two ewes; but there would have been little point trying to follow them had there not been snow on the ground and had the wolves not dragged one of the ewes off, which meant they were not moving as fast as they could have been. It also meant there was a chance that their den was nearby, and as Olaf had said, best to deal with them now – or else pay dearly for it in the summer when there would be no tracks to follow.
  
  'There,' Sigurd said, pointing to a patch of disturbed snow up ahead from which tracks radiated like spokes on a cart wheel. In the middle was the ewe, or rather what was left of it, and as they drew closer the little moonlight permeating the forest canopy turned the gore-smeared snow darker still.
  
  'Eyes sharp then,' Olaf murmured, lifting his spear a little higher, his own eyes scouring the trees around them. Knowing that spear-armed men followed them, the wolves had eaten what they could before vanishing like sea mist. 'I'd wager they're three rôsts away by now,' Olaf said, then nodded at the deeper forest which was gloomy as Hel's own hall, the pines like pillars beyond counting. 'But there's always a chance they're out there watching us and will risk a spear in the ribs to protect this kill.'
  
  'Well, that is it then. We turn back,' Svein said, 'get back to a fire.' He stamped his fur-lined boots in the snow, trying to put some warmth back in his feet.
  
  'May as well,' Olaf agreed. 'No point in freezing our balls off for we will not find the den now.'
  
  Sigurd did not want to go back yet, not while his blood was still thrumming with the thrill of having found the ewe. Not while the wolves might yet be close, for their kill was steaming where it lay in the bloody snow, the hot contents of its stomach meeting the night air, meaning that part of it was only recently ripped open. He was about to say as much when a wolf's howl cut through the night like a blade through flesh. Immediately other beasts joined the chorus and for a cold heartbeat the sound reminded Sigurd of the many war horns whose thin notes – all different in pitch – had pierced the day in the Karmsund Strait when his father had been betrayed by King Gorm and the fjord had turned red.
  
  'We didn't bring enough spears,' Svein said, peering north and rolling his great shoulders, for the howling filled the forest around them so that it seemed there must be a score or more animals.
  
  'That's the trick of it,' Olaf said, 'to make other packs think there are more of them than there are.'
  
  'It is a good trick,' Sigurd said, eyeing the tracks leading away from the kill.
  
  'Aye, low cunning,' Olaf agreed, 'but Svein is right that there are still more than we had bargained for.' He sniffed and hawked phlegm into the snow. 'Might be as well for us to leave them to it and set our traps near the pens rather than trudging all the way out here into their territory. Like fools pissing up against a neighbouring jarl's hall.'
  
  The howling was cut with yip yipping now as though the wolves were summoning their own bloodlust and encouraging each other to bold and reckless acts the way young warriors do in the shieldwall before a fight. It was a sound to turn your bone marrow to ice and none of the men needed to say as much to know that each thought it.
  
  'Could be those that took our ewe are back with the pack, meaning their den is close,' Sigurd suggested, still eager to do what they had come out there to do. 'We find their den and mark it. Come back in daylight. Or they attack us and we kill a few of them and the rest leave this place. Leaving our animals in peace.'
  
  Olaf and Svein looked at each other, their breath clouding before their faces. 'I suppose if they go for us and get their teeth into Svein they will be eating him for a week, giving us plenty of time to get away,' Olaf suggested, earning himself a growled insult from the red-haired giant. 'So, we ignore the beasts' warning and walk right up to their den, of which they are bound to be as protective as you would be of Reinen or your own hall.' He flapped a big hand. 'I don't include Burner's hall in that for I know you don't much care for the place, which is the real reason we're out here pissing icicles.'
  
  Sigurd had not known his dislike of Jarl Hakon's old place was so obvious.
  
  He pointed his spear into the forest. 'Does that not sound like a challenge to you, Uncle?'
  
  'Aye,' Olaf admitted, 'and you are your father's son.'
  
  Turning their backs on the slaughtered ewe they set off along the new trail, eyes sharp as rivet points, hearts hammering against their breastbones because it was no easy thing to walk towards that bowel-loosening clamour.
  
  'Remind me to tell you the saga of the ram which men called the Terror,' Olaf said, then glanced at Svein. 'Your father and Slagfid were both up to their necks in that mischief and all because we were young and stupid and could not turn away from a challenge.' With that he stopped and gestured with his spear, inviting Sigurd to lead the way. 'After you, Haraldarson.'
  
  Sigurd trudged ahead, putting his feet in the wolves' tracks, a wolf's grin on his own face. 'I am happy to lead the way, Uncle,' he said, 'for it is well known that wolves will go for the one lagging behind. They can easily tell which of their prey is old and will be less trouble to bring down.'
  
  'Ha! It is not difficult to see why you have so many enemies and so few friends,' Olaf said, nevertheless glancing behind him as they walked.
  
  But as they progressed along the track into a part of the forest where the trees were closer together and the snow was more shallow because of it, it was Svein who realized that although the howling might be the beasts issuing a challenge, the way one war band will hurl a spear over the heads of another, that challenge was not aimed at the three men lumbering through the snow after them.
  
  'Down!' he hissed, pulling Sigurd's cloak. The three of them crouched, which felt to Sigurd like a foolish thing to do, giving away their advantage of height to put their faces level with a wolf's jaws. But his eyes picked out the shapes in the gloom, told him that the wolves were not facing in their direction. Since they had turned off the original path where they had found the dead ewe, what little breeze there was carried their own scent eastward away from the wolves, so that there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that the creatures did not even know they were so close, particularly given all the noise they were themselves making.
  
  'They have some animal cornered,' Svein whispered.
  
  Above them a bird flapped in the snow-laden canopy: a raven perhaps, following the pack, waiting for it to kill again, and Sigurd saw Olaf touch the Thór's hammer amulet at his neck because where there was blood and death there were always ravens.
  
  'An elk. Or a bear,' Olaf suggested. The pack had surrounded its prey and Sigurd looked from one beast to another, trying to get a grip on their number in the half-light. Ten? Maybe more. He could not say, other than there were enough to bring down a bear, if Olaf was right and that was what had got the wolves baying for blood. But all Sigurd could see was the pack, the crouching beasts all snarl and noise and bristle.
  
  'Are you sure we should get involved in this fight?' Svein asked Sigurd, for if the wolves had cornered a bear the three men might be better off away from the tooth and claw of it all.
  
  'Unless you can tell me that you have heard a bear singing the galdr before, then I think we have walked into something else here,' Sigurd murmured, tapping his ear which was turned towards the howling chaos among the trees a spear's throw away.
  
  'Óðin's arse!' Olaf hissed.
  
  It was no easy thing to pick the human voice out of all that wolf singing, but once Sigurd had found the thread of it there was no doubt. And it was a woman too, though what a woman was doing alone out in the woods at night was itself a question to make a man's neck hairs stand up like a wolf's hackles.
  
  'I didn't come out here to tangle with a seiðr-witch,' Olaf said, flexing his hand around his spear's shaft to get some warmth into his fingers. The wolves were snarling more than howling now and it was a sound that Sigurd felt in his very guts like a rockfall in a cave.
  
  'She cannot be much of a witch or else she would have concealed herself from them,' Svein said, which was more sense than they were used to hearing from him.
  
  'There's not a spell I ever heard of that could fool a wolf's nose,' Olaf countered.
  
  'There,' Sigurd said, pointing to a dim shape which his eyes had sifted from the earth-packed root ball of a fallen tree. Against the dark of it he had not seen the woman before but now he had picked her out, standing there with her back to the roots, facing the snarling beasts. Chanting.
  
  'Aye, I see her,' Olaf said.
  
  'Have you thought that maybe she is speaking to them?' Svein said. 'That she is their master? For they have not eaten her yet.'
  
  'Keep watching, Red, and you'll have your answer to that,' Olaf told him, and Sigurd agreed with him, for though the witch's galdr was keeping the beasts at bay, some of them were edging closer, their bellies touching the snow. One wolf, a huge male standing well over three foot high at the shoulder, was now a mere spear-length from the witch, close enough to leap and snarling his threats, making it clear to the pack that he would draw first blood. Then the pack would join the kill and it would be a frenzy of feeding, those wicked sharp teeth shearing flesh from bone which the beasts would swallow in bloody lumps.
  
  'Ready?' Sigurd said and did not need to see them nod. Witch or no, none of them would crouch spear-armed in the dark and watch a woman ripped apart.
  
  'Don't let them get behind you,' Olaf said, as Sigurd stood, roaring, and the three of them lumbered through the snow towards the witch, and the wolves turned, their yellow eyes catching the moonlight, their lips hitched back to show those scramasax-sharp teeth.
  
  The pack leader bowed its body, throwing its great head over its left shoulder to growl at Sigurd who did not stop but tramped towards it and thrust his spear, but the blade missed its target as the big male twisted aside. Then it leapt and Sigurd brought the spear across though not fast enough and the beast's jaws, twice as strong as the biggest hound's, clamped round Sigurd's forearm as the bristling mass of muscle and bone barrelled into his chest, knocking him backwards into the snow. It was as if Völund's own anvil was crushing his arm. Those yellow eyes bored into his but Sigurd was roaring his own challenge into the beast's hot acrid breath, the fog of it the only thing between him and the wolf's muzzle. The weight of the creature pressed the spear shaft against Sigurd's chest as he struggled now for every breath to scream defiance. Yet as the beast sought to crush the bone and get to the marrow in his arm Sigurd managed to slip his right hand beneath the thick belly fur and haul the scramasax from its scabbard.
  
  The wolf was snarling death, a berserking fury shaking its head now so that Sigurd thought it would rip his arm from its socket, but to think was to die and so he punched the blade into the beast's side and felt the iron grate against a rib before tearing into the flesh. The wolf showed no sign of knowing it had a foot of blade inside it, gripped as it was by its own bloodlust, wrenching Sigurd's arm this way and that as Sigurd twisted the scramasax, trying to force the blade deeper and do even more damage. He thought he could hear laughter. Some god, perhaps, amused to see him on his back in the snow, his own limb the only thing between him and having his throat torn out. Then Sigurd pulled the scramasax from its fleshy sheath between the wolf's ribs and plunged it in again, screaming into that pointed muzzle, defying the wolf as Týr lord of battle must have done in the same heartbeat that the mighty Fenrir bit off his arm.
  
  Fast as an owl swooping from an oak bough, the thought crossed Sigurd's mind that the others must be fighting, too, for why else were they not helping him? Then his right hand and arm felt somehow on fire but he realized it must be the beast's blood, hot and sticky as pitch, and so he struck again and again, screaming death to the wolf, working the blade deep into its chest to slice into its thumping heart.
  
  The snarling stopped. Those great jaws weakened for all that the wolf tried to champ down still, was likely confused as to why it had not bitten through the bone. A shudder went through the beast, its muscles thrumming like a ship's rigging in a storm, and Sigurd watched its eyes roll back in its head. Then the huge head fell sidewards and the life went out of it and somewhere another wolf howled as though it knew its leader was dead, while Sigurd lay there under the weight of it: all that bristle, muscle, sinew and bone that was now only lifeless carcass.
  
  Then Olaf was there at last and he heaved the dead wolf off Sigurd, his worry plain to see by the light reflecting off the snow.
  
  'Your arm,' he said.
  
  'Is still mine,' Sigurd said, 'no thanks to you.' Olaf offered his hand and Sigurd took it in his right, letting Olaf pull him to his feet, his chest heaving for breath, his head wreathed in his own warm fog. Olaf toed the huge beast to make sure it was dead, as Sigurd looked around. The other wolves had gone and Svein was standing guard, spear raised after them. Besides the one Sigurd had killed there were two more beasts lying in the snow, one of them dead and the other still panting, its legs twitching as though it thought it were running.
  
  'Your arm,' Olaf said again, nodding at the limb. Sigurd lifted his left hand, clenching and unclenching his fist to make sure the tendons and muscles still did what they were supposed to, though his arm was full of pain. He bent and thrust his scramasax into the snow and when he pulled it out most of the blood was off the blade. Then he sheathed the thing and, gritting his teeth, shoved the sleeves of his tunics up to reveal the place around which the wolf's jaws had been locked moments before.
  
  A grin spread in Olaf's beard because there was no torn flesh, no sharp slivers of broken bone sticking out of a bloody mess. Instead there was the greave that Sigurd usually wore on his shin: the leather wrap with its iron splints and some of those splints with dents in them now, teeth marks that were better there than in Sigurd's arm bones. A man called Ofeig Grettir had bought the greaves off Sigurd with information, but Black Floki had slaughtered Grettir along with the man who had kept him on the end of a chain and Sigurd had been glad to have the greaves back. Never more glad than now.
  
  'A raging dog will always go for your arm if you offer it,' Sigurd said, wincing as he made a fist again. 'I thought a wolf might do the same if it came to it.'
  
  'Loki's own cunning,' Olaf said, turning to the witch now who stood in the shadows against the uprooted tree, watching and silent. 'And who are you, woman? That my young friend here nearly got himself on the inside of a wolf for.'
  
  The woman glanced at Olaf but then settled her eyes back on Sigurd where they had been before. Her right hand gripped the knob of a staff and she leant the thing towards Sigurd.
  
  'I am the then, the now and the may be,' she said and even hooded as she was her voice betrayed her many years, though there was no stoop or crookedness in her so far as Sigurd could see.
  
  'You are a seiðr-kona,' Sigurd said. More of an accusation than a question, and in his peripheral vision he saw both Svein and Olaf touch the Thór's hammers at their necks because a seiðr-wife was not someone you wanted to meet out in the forest by the light of a sliver of moon.
  
  'Not much of one,' Svein dared, 'or you would have used some dark magic to hide yourself from those wolves.'
  
  The head inside that lambskin hood turned to Svein, the hood's lining – catskin by the looks – as white as the snow they stood in.
  
  'I could make you vanish, giant,' she said, which was as good an admission as they could have hoped, or not hoped for. Because a seiðr-wife was as dangerous as the knife you can't see. They had all heard tales of such women hurling spells that addled their victim's mind by illusion or madness. And yet Sigurd had just wrestled with a wolf and the fight-thrill of that was still in him so that he was not going to be afraid of an old woman, especially a crone who would have been wolf food if not for him.
  
  'I am not surprised they came for you,' he said, nodding at the big wolf lying there on the snow, its mouth frozen in a snarl, those flesh-ripping teeth looking dangerous even now. 'With all the skins you are wearing.' Over a dark blue mantle the witch wore the fur of a forest cat and her legs were wrapped in fleece. She had on catskin gloves and shoes of shaggy calfskin, and the wolves must have reckoned they were in for an easy feast, for all that they would have thought her a strange creature.
  
  'And yet I am unharmed,' she said, and though he could not see her face in the shadow of that hood Sigurd knew those words had come through a smile.
  
  'You did not summon us here by some spell, if that is what you want us to think,' Olaf said, and that hooded head turned back towards him so that Olaf, who was braver than Týr himself, almost flinched. 'We were hunting them,' he said.
  
  'Because Sigurd does not like his new hall,' Svein put in, tramping through the snow to get a look at Sigurd's wolf because it was so much bigger than the ones he and Olaf had speared.
  
  'Which one of you heard the galdr?' she asked. She was looking at Sigurd, or at least her head was turned towards him.
  
  'We heard the beasts,' Olaf said, 'howling like their tails were on fire. The dead would have heard it.'
  
  'None of you heard my galdr?' she said.
  
  There was a silence, the kind that there can only be in a forest with deep snow on the ground and more swathing the boughs above. Then a bird flapped somewhere in the high branches and a stream of snow tumbled to the ground near the witch.
  
  So the raven would feed on the wolf, Sigurd thought, wondering at the strange omen in that.
  
  'I heard it, witch,' he said.
  
  'Ah yes, Fenrir-killer,' she said, and again Sigurd heard the smile in that.
  
  'It is good for you that he did kill the beast, old woman,' Svein said, 'or it would be snapping your bones like dry sticks by now.'
  
  'So you say.' The seiðr-wife took two steps and slowly brought the staff across, at which Olaf and Svein both lifted their own spears as if to defend themselves. But instead of hurling some spell at them the witch prodded the big wolf with the staff and looked up at Sigurd, her head cocked. A shaft of moonlight cut across half of her face, giving Sigurd a glimpse of white skin and the dark glossed jet of an eye.
  
  'What is your name?' he asked.
  
  'Ha!' The fog of that utterance hung in the moonlight for a heartbeat. 'You would more often hear a cat's footfall or the breath of a fish,' she said, then leant the staff towards Sigurd, who fought every impulse to put his own spear between them. 'Does a fox need gills? Or a mouse horns?' she asked. 'Folk call me witch.' Somewhere to the east the wolves were howling again and it sent a shiver scuttling up the back of Sigurd's neck because it reminded him of the wailing of the womenfolk when he had set fire to his father's hall, burning those of his village who had been slaughtered by Jarl Randver's men. 'But you have asked, wolf-killer,' the witch said, 'and so I will tell you. I was called Bergljot once. Aye, Bergljot,' she repeated the name, barely loud enough for him to hear, as if she had intrigued herself by speaking it aloud.
  
  'What are you doing out here alone, Bergljot?' Sigurd asked. He pointed his spear back along the tracks which they had made. 'We have come far. But you have come further by my reckoning.'
  
  He knew there were no villages for ten rôsts in any direction and that even had there been, this woman had not come from one of them. Then again, such as she probably lived alone in some herb-crammed hovel with only mice, birds and spiders for company.
  
  'It is safer for me to travel at night,' she said.
  
  'Oh yes, you have shown how that is so,' Olaf said, nodding at the dead beast nearest him, but Sigurd knew what the woman had meant and Olaf knew too, for some folk would sooner throw a sack over a seiðr-wife's head and fill her with spears than risk her dark magic shrivelling their manhood or sending them mad.
  
  'Do you see a scratch on me, Olaf Ollersson?'
  
  Sigurd and Svein looked at Olaf who looked at them, heavy-browed beyond the fog of his own breath, though it was not impossible that a witch should possess enough seiðr craft to know his name and his father's name.
  
  'Whereas these poor creatures are quite dead,' she said, crouching and thrusting a gloved hand into the thick fur of the wolf's ruff. 'As dead as your brothers, young Sigurd.'
  
  'Where are you bound?' Sigurd asked her, beginning to feel about as comfortable as a man whose breeks are running with fleas.
  
  'You know where, young Sigurd,' she said, standing, her face in the shadows now but the eyes in him like a cat's claws.
  
  'We came out here to hunt, woman,' Olaf said, 'not stand here freezing our bollocks off talking to some seiðr-wife, regretting robbing a wolf of his feast.'
  
  Even Svein, who was a mountain next to the old woman, tensed at those words. But the woman laughed. She laughed and you would have thought she had been rinsing her guts with mead all night, not tramping through knee-deep snow and being beset by beasts that would have ripped her to shreds had she not been saved by men's spears.
  
  'What is so funny?' Sigurd asked her, his own ire pricked to be laughed at by the crone.
  
  'Aye, share it with us, for nothing warms the belly like a good laugh,' Olaf said.
  
  'Nothing but spiced mead,' Svein rumbled. 'Which we ought to be drinking now instead of standing here growing snot icicles.'
  
  The witch lifted her staff and pointed the knobbed end at each of them in turn. 'You are out here hunting,' she said, the laughter gone now, vanished like breath in the air. 'You are hunting and yet you are the ones being hunted.'
  
  Sigurd felt dread's ice blade slide into his heart then, yet he shrugged her warning off like snowflakes before they could seep into the wool. 'I have enemies, old woman. What of it?'
  
  'Enemies,' she said. Sigurd thought he heard the creak of her brow warping as she said the word. 'You have enemies the way a herring has a whale.' She lifted one fur-clad arm and pointed at him, the catskin gloves white as the snow. 'I see you, Haraldarson. I see you well.'
  
  'What else do you see, woman?' Sigurd asked.
  
  'I see a flaming hearth and a plate of hot food,' she said.
  
  That got a laugh even from Olaf, but Sigurd was still snared by what some wandering seiðr-wife seemed to know about him. He stared at her and she stared back and no one spoke, so that the silence lay as heavy as the white mantle weighing down the spruce boughs above them.
  
  Then Sigurd thrust his spear into the snow and trudged over to the big wolf he had killed, squatting to get a hold of the beast, his face almost in the snow so as to heft the dead weight up and over and on to his shoulders. Gods, you are heavy, he thought. But the wolf was warm too and Sigurd welcomed the feel of that last shadow of its life on his shoulders and against the back of his neck, even as the copper tang of its blood and the pungent stink of the shit which had leaked from it in death filled his nose.
  
  Olaf and Svein hefted their own beasts and the three of them turned back to follow their boot-tracks home again.
  
  And the witch went with them.