text: They stood in the cool dawn shadows because the sun had not yet risen above the mountains in the east to flood the hillside below the king's hall with warmth. There was a hum in the air and fog rising from so many mouths as men grumbled and winced and complained about wounds that were still fresh and broken bones and bruised flesh. For all that they were still full of the ale and mead in which they had tried to drown themselves all night, seeking numbness.
  
  'I wish our fathers were here to see this,' Svein said, looking down on to the channel where the rocks showed still above the rising tide.
  
  'The others too,' Sigurd said, thinking of his mother and brothers and Solmund and Crow-Song, Hendil and Loker. And Valgerd.
  
  'Aye. Too many,' Svein said, wincing at the thought of all those who had fallen along the way. The spear had not gone deep into him and Runa had washed and stitched the wound, but time would tell whether or not the wound rot would come.
  
  'They're all here with us now, lad, on this hill,' Olaf said. 'Don't you doubt it.'
  
  And perhaps they were.
  
  'Not long now,' Runa said. 'I will be glad to see it finished properly.'
  
  No one disagreed with that. The storm had passed and the day would be calm by the looks, and there was much to do including burning the dead.
  
  Not that all the dead would be burnt.
  
  Gorm, whom men once called Shield-Shaker, was chained to the flat rock out in the channel below what used to be his hall and his land. Sigurd himself had rowed him out there and put the chains on, and Runa had gone with him, scowling at Gorm who was half gone with fever or pain on account of that missing hand. Olaf had bound the stump good and tight because they had not wanted Gorm to spill all his blood and die before they were ready for him to die.
  
  They were ready now though, and as Sigurd had bound him to that same rock upon which Gorm had drowned so many enemies, and even one of his wives, Runa had asked Gorm how it felt to know that he would never see Valhöll.
  
  'How does it feel to know you will spend the afterlife in the cold dark while better men and women feast at Óðin's table? And at Freyja's,' she added, thinking of King Thorir and all those Freyja Maidens whose corpses were barely cold and stiff.
  
  She got no answer from Gorm. He glared and shivered and said nothing, though the fear came off him like the stink off a wet dog, and Sigurd breathed it in.
  
  'We leave this rotting nithing for the crabs, Runa,' Sigurd said, turning his back on the chained man and climbing back aboard the row boat to take up the oars. He had nothing to say to the oath-breaker. There was nothing he could say which spoke louder than the act of chaining Gorm to that rock and letting the tide have him.
  
  But he did hold the oath-breaker's eye as he rowed them back to the shore and all those waiting on the grassy hill upon whose heights the king's hall – King Hrani Randversson's now – sat wreathed in morning mist.
  
  It wasn't until they neared the shore and Sigurd could no longer see Gorm's face that he had noticed the cloth which Runa clutched in her hand. Though he recognized the scene stitched into it.
  
  'The wild hunt,' he said, and Runa had nodded, telling him that the old seiðr-kona had been pushing her threads into that cloth until the day she died at some outlaw's hands.
  
  There, stitched by skilled hands, was a host of gods and warriors sweeping across the sky, led by Óðin who gripped his spear Gungnir and rode Sleipnir his eight-legged steed.
  
  'I don't think she would have minded my keeping it,' Runa explained, running a finger along the stitches of the sacred spear.
  
  '"And his passing raises such a rush and roar of the wind as will waft away the souls of the dead",' Sigurd said, recalling the words the prophetess had spoken to him up in Jarl Burner's hall.
  
  Runa's eyes were fixed on his like rivets in a ship's strake. The old witch had been right about that.
  
  Now there was a sudden gust which seemed to fly north up the Karmsund Strait and it pushed a ridge of water up the channel so that it swept over the rock and the man chained to it.
  
  Not enough to drown him. Not yet.
  
  'Even the gods want to be done with this,' Hrani Randversson said, his fingers going to the thick gold torc which he had taken from Gorm's neck himself. Sigurd had not minded seeing him do it. He had promised Hrani Gorm's high seat. Besides which, Hrani still had enough men left to be called a war host, so there was little Sigurd could have done even if he had changed his mind about putting the man up in that fine hall.
  
  'We all want done with it,' Olaf said, sharing a look with Asgrim, Jarl Guthrum's former champion who had somehow survived the previous day's carnage. Perhaps Asgrim and his handful of Svearmen would stay on with Sigurd now. More likely they would become King Hrani's men, for a gold torc draws warriors like carrion draws crows.
  
  They shivered in their cloaks and were for the most part quiet, as men are who are exhausted and still have the claws of the blood-fray in them. When they are wondering how they are still breathing and full of pains while so many friends and kinsmen have left such things behind.
  
  'Are you going to put that on or just hold it all day?' Olaf said, nodding down at the jarl torc in Sigurd's right hand. Bram had found it in a sea chest up in Gorm's hall, had got to it before Queen Kadlin had the chance to stash it and the rest of her husband's silver too.
  
  'He is waiting for the sea to take the oath-breaker before he puts it on,' Svein told Olaf and Sigurd thought that might have been it, at least in part.
  
  But there was more.
  
  He could not shake off the rest of what the old seiðr-kona had said. It clung to him like wet wool.
  
  And his passing raises such a rush and roar of the wind as will waft away the souls of the dead. And with it Haraldarson too.
  
  The old woman's words tumbled round his head as he looked at the ring of twisted silver that had belonged to his father, which Gorm had taken from the dead jarl's neck back when this whole thing began.
  
  And with it Haraldarson too.
  
  And yet I am alive. I am here while my enemy waits for the sea to spill into his lungs. I will live while he is a feast for crabs.
  
  He lifted the heavy torc and pulled it open enough to get it round his neck and the cold of it on his skin was enough to send a shiver through him.
  
  'So, Jarl Sigurd!' Hrani called. 'When this is done and that whoreson is drowned, we will drown ourselves in his mead, hey!'
  
  This got some ayes from Olaf and Svein, from Bram, Bjorn and Bjarni and from Thorbiorn Thorirsson who had surprised them all by turning out to be a proper warrior when the blood was flying. And as they talked of feasts and ale, women and mead, Sigurd laughed.
  
  Jarl Sigurd now, then, he thought. Haraldarson no more. That was what the witch had seen. Not his end but his beginning.
  
  Somewhere up on the hill behind him a raven croaked and Sigurd turned to see the bird sitting on the thatch of King Hrani's hall. It croaked again then took off into the brightening sky and for a while Sigurd watched it as it flew into the west.
  
  And in the channel below them the tide rose.