text: Amid the raging storm, swaths of even heavier rain raced across the fjord like the shadows of gods, so that the glimpses they got of Storm-Bison were few and fleeting. Yet from what they could see, whoever was at her helm was earning his silver, as were those men breaking their backs with the bailers and those who had managed to lower the yard and roll up another few feet of sail before hauling it back up the mast. For Storm-Bison had somehow managed to avoid being wrecked on the rocks in the channel between east and west Bokn, and to do that she must have slanted her stem into the wind which is a good way of sinking a boat because it will ship water the way Thór ships mead.
  
  'How can they be afraid of a little færing like us?' Svein called into the wind, wondering why the Avaldsnes men would take such risks in flying from them.
  
  'It's not us he's afraid of, though he should be,' Olaf shouted above the hiss and roar. 'The oath-breaker knows his men have flown. He means to get back up to his hall on his hill.'
  
  'He'll try to raise more spears,' Runa said. She had unstrung her bow and buried the string inside her clothes to try to dry it.
  
  Olaf nodded, rain dripping from his beard. 'Whoreson'll bury his silver too, for he knows that Sigurd and Jarl Hrani will be standing by his hearth soon enough.'
  
  A rush of wind caught the sail wrong and the little boat heeled into a wave so that water spilled over the sheer strake before she righted again, and Sigurd swung his gaze back to Solmund to make sure he was still with them and not already drinking Óðin's mead.
  
  'She's not Reinen but she's brave enough for me,' Solmund called to let them all know he was still their helmsman and they should not get any other ideas about it.
  
  Svein was doing his best to fling the bilge water back into the fjord where it belonged.
  
  'There!' Valgerd said, pointing across the white-haired furrows which rolled past Bokn's headland, on towards Karmøy's craggy shore.
  
  There she was, Storm-Bison. And she was running wild.
  
  'She's keel-loose,' Olaf said, and Sigurd and Svein cursed to hear it. Storm-Bison was planing so swiftly on the surface of the water that she and her rudder had lost their grip on the fjord, meaning neither the king nor his helmsman nor anyone else aboard had control of Hríð-visundr now.
  
  This time Sigurd appealed to the Spear-God himself, growling at old One-Eye to let the oath-breaker live a little longer yet. 'He's mine, Allfather,' he gnarred, swiping the rain and salt spray from his eyes, willing Storm-Bison to ride out this horror of wind and fjord. 'Do not take him from me.'
  
  Because the king's ship was like a leaf on the wind now. Without its keel and steerboard gripping the water there was a very real chance that Storm-Bison could plunge sideways from a wave-top down into the valley in front and then be swamped by the wave from which it fell. If that happened there were not enough bailers aboard to stop her sinking down and down to lie in the grass of the fjord bed.
  
  'Get that sail down, you fools,' Olaf growled at the distant ship, as he and the others clung to that brave little færing and Sigurd all but threatened the gods themselves, and Solmund bled at the tiller.
  
  And then Storm-Bison's sail came down and she continued bare-masted and storm-driven, scudding across the Karmsund Strait, and beyond her prow Sigurd could make out the heather-furred rocks and scrub-covered islands, the shallow coves and the pine-bristled hills of a coastline which he knew better than any other. Though the sight of Karmøy brought him no comfort now, and he almost laughed to think of his wyrd, the threads of which led him back home again after the blood-soaked saga of it all.
  
  A hand clutched at his arm and he turned to look into Runa's eyes. She was still golden, his sister, even on a grey and red day such as this. 'What will happen, brother?' she asked.
  
  'They cannot stop her now for risk of turning into the wind and being tipped out like bad ale,' he told her. 'So her helmsman will look for the best place to beach her.' He grimaced. 'Not that he will have much choice in it.'
  
  And neither did he, whoever was at Storm-Bison's tiller. Not that Sigurd saw much after that because a skein of rain seethed across the wind-flattened water a long arrow-shot off the færing's bow, hiding his prey and the coast beyond.
  
  'He'll be a feast for the crabs,' Svein said, still bailing.
  
  But Sigurd refused to believe that. He clung on to the boat as he clung on to hope, his eyes thirsting for each glimpse of the oath-breaker's ship, as Solmund somehow rode their own little færing through the storm fury which should have swallowed them. Which would have swallowed them had any man but Solmund gripped the tiller. And Sigurd thought that this was what it would feel like to ride Óðin's own grey, eight-legged horse Sleipnir through the sky in the wild hunt.
  
  'Hear that?' Olaf said, flinging another helmet-full of water over the side.
  
  'That's no beaching,' Svein said, for they had all heard it, even above the wind's howl: the terrible snapping of a ship's keel and the splintering of its hull strakes. The screams of doomed men and, dangerously close now, the suck and plunge of the rock-smashed waves, which could have been the eager breath of Rán as she welcomes each corpse into her cold embrace.
  
  Sigurd saw Runa clutch the Freyja amulet at her neck and Svein grip the long haft of his axe now as if an axe would be of any use in Rán's dark kingdom beneath the waves. Storm-Bison was no more. Her back broken, she was being dismembered against the rocks, her skipper having missed, if only just, the sandy cove a good spit off her larboard. And the king's men were spilling into the churning swells, screaming as their mail dragged them down. Not all of them, however, and Sigurd caught sight of the oath-breaker amongst a knot of men scrambling from the wreck of his best ship, casting themselves up on to the shore like sodden wrack.
  
  But then the færing bucked and heeled and Sigurd was thrown against the side and blinded by a slap of salt water and he reached out to grip Runa's hand because she had fallen against him and he thought the boat would roll over and that they would sink to the bottom together.
  
  But then the boat righted itself and they were thrown back on to the benches and there was a deafening rasp and scrape of sand and stones against the hull as the færing rode up the beach and stopped suddenly, the water in her bilge flying over the prow and slopping back over her half-drowned crew.
  
  'They are watching, brother,' Runa told Sigurd, the two of them finding their feet as the others gathered their weapons and helmets and stumbled out of the boat. And Sigurd did not know if his sister was talking about their kin up in Óðin's hall, or the gods themselves.
  
  'Well that's going in the tale, you old goat!' Olaf called, he and Sigurd turning back to help Solmund out of the færing which was cast like driftwood up on the strand. 'Bollocks,' Olaf muttered. Sigurd cursed too and felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach, because Solmund lay slumped over the tiller, still gripping it though he had let go of his own life now. His tunic was blood-soaked and so was the bench upon which he still sat, and his face was white as old hearth ash. Somehow the old skipper had held on just long enough to win that last fight against wind and fjord and drive that little boat up on to the shore.
  
  Olaf took the old man's head in both hands and pressed his mouth against the sodden hair. 'Thank you, old friend,' he said.
  
  Sigurd clenched his face against the pain of the wound which Moldof had given him, Moldof who would have killed him if not for Crow-Song. Alive because of a skald, he thought, then gripped the dead skipper's shoulder. 'Tell my brothers they will have to wait a little longer for me, old man,' he said, thinking that the gods were surely laughing into their mead horns.
  
  'He is getting away,' Floki said, pointing his short axe up the beach where the king and his surviving hearthmen were making for the birch trees, Moldof himself turning to take one last look at their pursuers before lumbering after his king.
  
  'Oath-breaker!' Sigurd bellowed. And then he was running across the sand, a spear in his hand, and Floki was beside him, they two like predators on the scent of prey, their limbs young and strong and their blood thrumming with the arrogance that made them believe that they were invulnerable, that their wyrds were golden while other men's were only red. Behind them came Runa and Valgerd, Svein and Olaf, and together they were a wolfpack as they loped amongst the trees.
  
  Deeper into the woodland they went, keeping the heaving of the storm-tossed sea in their right ears because that way they knew they were going north towards Avaldsnes and the king's hall. That was where Gorm was bound, of that there was no doubt, for he would have men there, and weapons too, and so Sigurd pressed on, his lungs burning and his heavy brynja rusting on him as he ran, because he would get his claws into the oath-breaker before the worm wriggled back to his hole up on the hill.
  
  Then Floki lifted a hand and slowed, turning his right ear to the north, and the others stopped with him because they knew that his instinct was gods-given. No one spoke, each of them catching their breath as best they could and doing it quietly too as they peered into the dark pine forest around them, wondering what they had missed which Floki had not.
  
  'Be ready,' Floki told them.
  
  The higher boughs of the trees around them were filled with wind so that the tall trunks creaked like ships' masts, and now and then a brittle branch would snap off and fall to the pine litter. Yet for the most part the woods protected those within from the storm and there was a strange stillness which had enough seiðr in it to make the hairs on the back of Sigurd's neck stand.
  
  'The gods are here, Uncle,' he said in a low voice, feeling them in the very air around them.
  
  'The Valkyries too,' Runa said, stringing her bow, and Sigurd shuddered at that because perhaps Runa was right and the strange breezes searching in the trees were draughts from the maidens of death, the choosers of the slain, who swooped and glided unseen amongst them.
  
  Neither was it lost on Sigurd that these were the same woods in which he and his father had hunted with King Gorm those many years ago. Hunted a far nobler creature than the one which Sigurd hunted now.
  
  It was in these same woods too that Harald, and Sigurd's brother Sorli, and so many other good hearthmen fought their last battle and fell never to rise again. Where Harald had taken Moldof's arm in single combat.
  
  Yes, the gods are in this up to their necks, Sigurd thought, watching Floki, who was watching the shadows, and just then men burst from the forest around them.
  
  They came fast and hard and screaming, three big-bearded growlers of many fights, and the first dropped like a quern-stone ten feet from Sigurd with Floki's axe in his skull. Another man's spear would have spilled Sigurd's guts had he not swiped at the blade with his sword, turning it aside, but the warrior behind the thrust came on, bone, flesh and mail hitting Sigurd with enough force to send him flying. He looked up from the ground to see that spear coming again, the blade streaking down, then Svein stepped in, swinging his long axe double-handed to take the king's man in his side, cutting him clean in half and spraying Runa with blood.
  
  'Pick it up,' Olaf told the last king's man, who was slumped on his knees bleeding through the broken brynja rings over his belly. His name was Otkel and Sigurd recognized him as one of the king's closest hearthmen. 'Last chance, lad,' Olaf said, pointing his bloodied sword at the dying warrior's own which lay in the pine litter in front of him. Lad, though Otkel was Olaf's age if not older. 'Pick it up now.'
  
  His face all beard and teeth and pain-filled eyes, Otkel reached out and wrapped his fingers round the leather-bound bone hilt and looked up at Olaf who nodded, stepped up and held the point of his sword just inside the warrior's collar bone. 'Tell Jarl Harald it is nearly done,' he said, then he drove the blade down and the man gurgled and shit himself and died.
  
  'We'd best get a move on,' Olaf said, wiping his blade on the dead man's breeches while Floki pulled his hand axe from the skull it was sheathed in.
  
  Still winded, Sigurd nodded and set off, moving with less haste and more care now because he expected more Sword-Norse to burst from the trees looking to get their names in saga or song by putting their blades in him.
  
  'There,' Valgerd said, pointing her spear at a warrior who sat with his back against a pine trunk. He was corpse-pale but still alive.
  
  'His name is Alfgeir,' Olaf said, 'and he's been swinging an axe for Gorm for twenty summers or more.' An arrow jutted from this Alfgeir's neck, its goose feathers as white as his face.
  
  'He did well to make it this far,' Svein said as they came up to the man, who managed to spit a decent insult at the red-bearded giant and at Runa and her bow too, and perhaps it had been Runa's arrow before it was Alfgeir's.
  
  'You deserved better than to be sworn to that spineless shit, Alfgeir,' Olaf told him, meaning King Gorm.
  
  'Do it, goat turd,' Alfgeir growled up at him, blood welling in his mouth and spilling through his lips into his beard. He already gripped his sword in readiness for the long journey and so Olaf gave him his death cleanly out of respect for a warrior who had served his oath-sworn lord well.
  
  'Good,' Svein said, 'I was getting tired of walking,' and Sigurd looked up to see five men standing shoulder to shoulder a stone's throw away. The oath-breaker himself stood at their centre and it seemed the hunt was over. Not one warrior amongst any in that forest carried a shield now and so it would be a quick and bloody butcher's job this, and everyone knew it.
  
  'Stay behind me, Runa,' Sigurd said, and Runa nodded, pulling an arrow from her quiver and nocking it to the string.
  
  'Tonight you drink with your father, boy!' King Gorm bawled and Sigurd knew he was expected to answer this with insults and threats of his own but he would not waste the breath on them. The oath-breaker had already lived far longer than he should have, and so Sigurd strode forward, following the threads of his own wyrd, and his wolves matched him stride for stride.
  
  Steel sang and men shrieked and in less time than it would take to tell it, three king's men were down, but then Svein grunted and staggered forward, a spear in his back, and the king and Moldof were backing off, swords raised before them. Floki ran at the man who had thrown the spear but he turned and fled and Floki chased him.
  
  'Somebody pull it out,' Svein growled, unable to reach the shaft himself.
  
  'Help him,' Sigurd told Runa, as he, Olaf and Valgerd moved in on the king and the one-armed warrior who had come close to earning his sword-fame and a name that would fan the hearth flames for years to come. Close, but not close enough.
  
  'You chose wrong, Moldof Wolf-Joint,' Olaf told him. The world outside was still roaring, howling fury, but amongst those trees the air was heavy and thick and laden with consequence, so that Sigurd found it difficult to breathe. It was all destiny. 'Now I'm going to take your other arm,' Olaf promised, 'and you will have to find your mother in the afterlife so that she can wipe your arse for you.'
  
  'I am the king's prow man, Olaf,' Moldof said, lifting his chin, 'and an oath is not given lightly.'
  
  'You've more honour than your king, I'll give you that,' Olaf told him, at which Gorm spat in Olaf's direction.
  
  'Sigurd!' Runa yelled, and he turned to see her loose an arrow at a man who was running at her with a spear, and the arrow hit him but he came on and Runa had no time. Valgerd made three strides and on the fourth she cast her spear and it flew as straight and true as a spear ever did, taking the warrior in his chest and hurling him back with the force of it. But then Moldof was on Valgerd and she turned back in time to see his face as he thrust his sword into her and pulled the gore-slick blade out and the shieldmaiden fell. Runa screamed and ran at Moldof but Olaf was already there and Gorm's man did well to make three good blocks with his sword before Olaf lopped off his left arm at the shoulder just as he had said he would.
  
  Moldof staggered back and then simply stood there, armless as a post, his new stump spurting and his face warped like an ancient roof beam with the horror of what had become of him.
  
  'Leave him like that,' Olaf growled at Runa, but she was already on him, hacking at his neck with her scramasax and Moldof had the balls to stand still to make the thing more quickly done.
  
  'Crow-Song will be waiting for you in the hereafter, Moldof Stump,' Svein said, still on his feet but now holding the spear which had been sticking in his back. His brynja had taken the worst of the sting out of that throw. His brynja and his pride.
  
  'If the Allfather even wants him now, the worthless pile of dung,' Floki said, striding from the trees and throwing a severed head at Moldof. That head had belonged to the last of the king's men and now there was just the oath-breaker himself, standing there with his sword in one hand, his long knife in the other, and the thick gold torc gleaming at his neck.
  
  Sigurd looked at Valgerd who was lying there curled in on herself, clutching the terrible wound in her stomach but watching him still. Her eyes told Sigurd to finish it while she was still alive to see it.
  
  'Come then, Haraldarson,' Gorm said, beckoning Sigurd with his scramasax. 'Let us see if you are your father's son.'
  
  Sigurd could feel Floki's hunger, his blood-craving, but this was Sigurd's kill and Floki knew it. So did the others, and so they drew closer, just in case, but Sigurd knew that they would not interfere.
  
  Gorm came at him not like a man who had fought countless fights but like a drunken mead-soaked growler who can barely see the man he is trying to hurt. Sigurd caught the king's sword on his scramasax and punched his sword hilt into Gorm's face, knocking out his teeth and sending the king reeling. Then Sigurd strode forward and feinted and Gorm scythed his sword across, hitting nothing because Sigurd was already moving, and he stepped outside and brought Troll-Tickler down on to Gorm's right wrist, taking off his hand which fell still gripping his sword.
  
  The king could smell Valhöll now. He could hear the whispers of his father and his father's father and those of his line going right back to the beginning. Whoreson could almost taste the Allfather's mead. He even swung his gaze left and right then, as though he could sense the Valkyries swirling amongst the trees, closing in on him.
  
  And Sigurd would not give the oath-breaker that.
  
  'Olaf, Floki, we take him alive,' he said, and the king's eyes bulged with horror and he yelled and threw himself at Sigurd, who crossed his sword and scramasax, catching Gorm's long knife between his own blades. Then he stepped forward and drove his forehead into the king's face and heard the crunch of it and then Olaf and Floki had a hold of the king and Sigurd took the scramasax from him.
  
  'You are king of nothing now, oath-breaker,' Olaf spat in Gorm's ear, as the king stood there bleeding from his mouth and nose and from the stump where his right hand used to be.
  
  Sigurd ran back to Valgerd, beside whom Runa knelt gripping the shieldmaiden's hands in hers. Sigurd knelt too, seeing the blood and ruin that Valgerd was trying to hide by folding in on herself.
  
  Runa let go one of her hands and nodded at Sigurd, so he took the blood-slick hand in his and looked into eyes which did not seem to see him.
  
  'We did it, Valgerd,' he said. His whole body was still brimming with the battle thrill, trembling with it. But there was something else too. It was as if one of those unseen maidens of death had reached into his chest and clenched his heart in her icy grip.
  
  Valgerd blinked slowly and there, lasting no longer than the beat of a sparrow's wing, was the glimpse of a smile in the snarl of grimace. And a muttered word.
  
  'What did she say?' Runa asked and Sigurd could feel his sister's eyes on him.
  
  Sigurd swallowed and felt the tears drowning his eyes. The invisible hands squeezing his throat.
  
  'Ikorni,' he said under his breath. 'Squirrel.'
  
  For that had been Valgerd's name for Sygrutha, the völva with whom she had lived by the sacred spring in the Lysefjord. 'Ikorni,' he said again, smiling in spite of himself. Valgerd had loved Sygrutha. He had always known that. And perhaps the shieldmaiden could see Sygrutha now. Perhaps the völva was waiting for her beyond the veil which separates this life from the next.
  
  Sigurd leant in and kissed her cheek which was cold on his lips. 'Thank you,' he said.
  
  But she was gone.