text: Sigurd and his crew waited amongst the trees along with twenty of Alrik's warriors, all of them young men who had come north with Sigurd from the camp on the shore of Løgrinn. They were restless and most likely afraid, some of them having little or no experience of battle other than the night raid by Findar and the borg men. But they would play their part, Sigurd was sure, whether they liked it or not.
  
  'Beardless buggers'll have no choice but to fight when it comes to it,' Olaf had remarked when Bjorn moaned that they looked as green as grass. 'There's no better way for a man to learn how to kill than by trying to stay alive.'
  
  Furthermore, those twitchy young men with their shields, spears and axes must have taken heart from Sigurd's crew, who were eager and hungry for the fight, their blades honed to a wicked sharpness and their brynjur scrubbed free of rust. Even Thorbiorn looked the part in his war gear, which his father King Thorir had given him, comprising a brynja, a helmet whose brow band and nasal was silvered and decorated with knotted beasts, and a silver-hilted sword and scabbard to match, with gold and silver fittings which gleamed. Not that any of it looked to have ever been used, as Svein had pointed out, so that it was not surprising that all eyes were drawn to it, 'just like they are drawn to a pretty maiden who has never yet been swived,' as he had put it.
  
  'Though underneath it all, the lad couldn't look more like Sigurd if he tried,' Sigurd overheard Bram mutter.
  
  'He knows it too,' Svein said. 'But you never met Sigurd's brother Sorli,' he said to Bram. 'He was so pretty we called him Baldur.'
  
  'Good lads. All of them,' Olaf put in, and Sigurd pretended not to hear because he did not want to start talking about his brothers now.
  
  'Do you think the Allfather wants us to win?' a young man into his first proper beard asked Olaf, the knuckles of the hand gripping his spear bone-white as if he feared dropping the thing. 'There'll be many more of them than us,' he added, blinking too often, licking dry lips.
  
  'What is your name, lad?' Olaf asked him. Sigurd guessed the young man was about his own age. But he had not lived Sigurd's life. He had not waded through blood to reach manhood.
  
  'Kveld Ottarsson,' the young man said, standing a little taller at his mention of his father.
  
  'Well then, Kveld Ottarsson, you are right in that there will probably be more of the goat-fuckers than there are of us, and that can be a problem in a fight.' Olaf pulled his scramasax from its sheath above his groin and pointed it at Kveld. 'But that is the best kind of problem because we are able to do something about it. Every man you kill is a man who will not be killing you. Or me come to that. So be a good lad and kill as many of those pieces of arse moss as you can. Keep killing them and then you'll find there are more of us than them. Simple as that.'
  
  Kveld looked at Svein, who grinned and nodded, and then at Black Floki, who was showing nothing but contempt.
  
  'Just don't get in our way, lad,' Bram said, slapping the cold iron cheek of the long-hafted axe he was leaning on. 'Because when this troll-shortening beauty is in full swing, she does not stop to ask whose side you are on.'
  
  Kveld Ottarsson nodded, sharing a weak smile with some of the others who stood there sweating and invoking the gods, their arse cheeks flapping in their breeks.
  
  'And the other thing,' Olaf went on, sheathing his long knife, 'now is the time to empty your bladders. Go for a shit if you can. Better to do it now than when you are facing some growler who will think you have ruined your breeks on his account.'
  
  That was all the invitation most of them needed and they walked off into the trees, unslinging shields and pulling at belts as if they feared they might not get them undone in time.
  
  'Make sure you don't get lost, Thorbiorn Thorirsson,' Olaf called after the king's boy. 'I wouldn't want you to miss the whole thing.'
  
  'If you wanted to come and hold it for me, Olaf, you should've said,' Thorbiorn called over his shoulder, and if the lad was afraid he was doing a good job of hiding it.
  
  'I remember my first fight,' Solmund said, watching them go.
  
  'Ah yes, when Óðin still had two eyes and no beard to speak of,' Bjarni said, which got some laughs, though not from Solmund who was in the deep of his memory.
  
  'My father took me on a raid. Some feud over sheep. Or was it goats? Anyway, the raid went bad as milk left in the sun. Our enemies had seen us coming across the fjord and prepared us a proper welcome. We'd lost three men in the time it takes to haul an anchor stone in, and that was three too many for a few sheep. Ended up haring back to our boat, braids flying in the wind. I had never seen my father run before.' He still seemed amazed by the sight of it in his mind. 'We never spoke again of our hurry that day.'
  
  'Thank you, Solmund,' Sigurd said, jutting his chin at those men who had not gone off amongst the trees, 'for that is just the kind of story we all wanted to hear.'
  
  'Enough stories,' Moldof growled, waving his half-arm in the direction of the borg. 'Let's get on with the thing so that we don't have to hear about the old goat's second fight.' Solmund shrugged and held his tongue and nor did any of the others have anything more to say but were content just to wait for the sound of the horn from the east, which was the signal Sigurd had agreed with Alrik.
  
  For the three days since Sigurd had spun the plan in his head the warlord's men had been busy, cutting birch trees and making ladders in full view of those warriors on the borg's ramparts. To Guthrum's men it would look as if Alrik was readying to launch an all-out attack. As if he would throw his men at the palisade in the hope that they would break over it like a wave over a rock on the shore. It was likely the defenders would assume that Alrik had received word that Guthrum was nearby and that the warlord knew he must win the hill fort for himself now or else risk being caught out in the open and fighting on two fronts.
  
  'There is every chance it will not work,' Alrik had said when Sigurd had come up with the scheme. 'But if it does, and we take the borg today, I will make you a rich man, Byrnjolf.'
  
  If it didn't work, Sigurd considered now, he, his crew, and all the men standing amongst the trees with him now might easily die. No, not easily. Never that, he thought, hoping that Óðin Geirtýr, the spear-god, was watching them, that Loki, too, was not far away, for surely that trickster would appreciate the low cunning in Sigurd's scheme.
  
  And then there was no more time to think or hope, only to act, as the thin note of a horn made heads turn to the east, where Alrik's force would be taking up shields and drawing together, doing their best to look as if panic and fear were spreading amongst them.
  
  'Now, king's son,' Sigurd said with a nod, at which Thorbiorn snatched up the war banner from where it had leant against a tree. Being the banner man was a position of honour and only fitting for the son of a king. Not that that was why Sigurd had given Thorbiorn the responsibility. He had done it because it would be no easy thing, carrying that banner aloft over sloping, uneven ground, which would leave less room in the young man's head for the fear which fills even experienced warriors at times like this. Being the merkismaðr might even stop Thorbiorn from doing something reckless. Not that he had given any impression of wanting to prove himself, other than when it came to women and ale.
  
  'Stay with me, lad,' Olaf told him. 'That way I won't have to tell your father that you got yourself killed for some Svear warlord on some half-arsed hill in the middle of nowhere.'
  
  Thorbiorn nodded, lifting the banner which had been nothing but a boar spear and a scrap of tent cloth just two days before. Now, because they were sheltered amongst the trees and there was anyway little in the way of wind, the half-circle of black cloth below the blade hung limp, so that only a flash of the white shape embroidered on it could be seen. Nevertheless, Jarl Guthrum's sign of the war axe on a sea of black was clear enough on the shields which Sigurd's crew and four of the others carried now as they walked out of the tree line on to the open ground to the west of the borg. Alrik and Knut had confirmed that Guthrum's hearthmen boasted shields painted like that because Guthrum had famously killed his uncle, a jarl named Blihar, with an axe. Guthrum wanted the torc for himself and one day, when Blihar was dealing with a dispute between two farmers in his own hall, Guthrum struck him down in front of everyone. Anyone would have thought that would be the end of Guthrum then, and yet instead of avenging their jarl, Blihar's hirðmen swore an oath to Guthrum there and then, and he had taken the symbol of the axe as his own from then on.
  
  'The gods like a man to act boldly,' Asgot had said, seeming to admire the Guthrum of that story, and Sigurd had spun the scheme in his mind. Those black-and-white-painted shields, along with the war banner and the fact that Sigurd's crew were relatively unknown to Guthrum's men, might be enough to fool those in the borg now. From a distance and in their mail and helmets, Sigurd's crew might, if the gods were smiling on him, be taken for Guthrum's hirðmen rather than for Alrik's men, few of whom owned either.
  
  'Keep this pace,' Sigurd said to those around him as they marched north-east across the bumpy ground, mail and fittings clinking, feet tramping, men puffing. Then he could hear shouting from the borg, as men on its ramparts spotted them. He could not hear what they were saying but he hoped it was not that they recognized him and his men from the other night when Sigurd had killed Findar on the hill below the gate. It was dark that night, he told himself. They saw nothing.
  
  He growled at Thorbiorn to lift the banner so that what breeze there was might catch the cloth and make the axe on it dance. And he counted on the borg's men believing that they were looking at the vanguard of Jarl Guthrum's force, or even the jarl himself come out of the west to spin Alrik's doom.
  
  'How will we know if they've swallowed the hook?' Kveld asked, keeping his shield high to partly obscure his face as Sigurd had told him.
  
  'We'll know,' Sigurd assured him, looking to the southeast. Further down the slope, Alrik's men were forming into two shieldwalls, Alrik at the centre of one, Knut in the other, both men yelling commands and working their warriors into a battle fever. Another horn blast and then those shieldwalls were moving, one of them towards the borg, the other towards Sigurd, which was exactly as they had planned it. To those in the borg it would look as if Alrik was rushing to intercept the newcomers before they could reach the gate in the palisade on the borg's south side and safety. As for Knut's shieldwall, which was facing that gate, Guthrum's men would think that their enemies were trying to ensure that none from the borg came to the newcomers' aid.
  
  They'll be hesitant. Unsure without Findar, Sigurd told himself as the sweat trickled down into his beard.
  
  'Now, Sigurd!' Olaf hissed.
  
  But the command was already on Sigurd's lips. 'Shieldwall!' he roared, stopping and planting the butt of his spear on to the ground, and those warriors in loose order around him stopped too, and formed two lines, with him at the centre, their shields overlapping, their spears threatening Alrik's men down the slope to their right. 'Move,' he yelled, and they were shuffling forward, trying to stay together over the uneven ground and through the long grass.
  
  'And watch out for those arrows,' Olaf said, because two of Alrik's men had run forward with bows and were making ready to loose, which was not so dangerous from that range but would help the whole thing look right as far as the borg men were concerned. 'Here they come,' Olaf said as they lifted their shields to make the wall a little higher. Five heartbeats later an arrow hit Bram's shield and bounced off, and six heartbeats later Sigurd tramped on the other shaft, which was sprouting from the spring grass. Then Sigurd steered them to the right because he wanted to make it look as though he was willing to fight, that his skjaldborg and Alrik's would collide in a great clash of wood and steel, flesh and bone. Another arrow hissed overhead and Asgot caught its twin on his shield.
  
  Sigurd looked left up the slope. They were close enough to the borg now to smell the mossy damp wood of the palisade and the smoke of the cook fires within. They could make out the shouts of those spearmen on the ramparts, and Sigurd liked what he heard. Some of the borg men were telling him and his men to slaughter Alrik and shit on their corpses. Others, the wiser ones amongst them, were warning Sigurd's war band that there were too many of the enemy for them to fight and that they should retreat back into the woods and wait for the rest of Guthrum's army. Which was good advice seeing as Sigurd's thirty-four faced a shieldwall sixty strong. Then there was Knut's skjaldborg of about the same number, and still more besides, for Alrik had left a number of warriors behind to guard the camp.
  
  'Keep those shields up. Give the sods something to aim at,' Olaf said, for the risk of one of Alrik's bowmen putting an arrow in them was very real now that the men in the skjaldborg could not watch the shafts in flight and judge their arcing fall. From this range those arrows would be flying fast and almost straight. 'Here comes another,' Olaf warned, and two heartbeats later an arrow tonked off Sigurd's shield boss. A moment after that another whipped over their heads and Bjarni said he had heard it whisper Kveld Ottarsson's name, which was a cruel thing to say.
  
  'Nearly there,' Sigurd said, as Alrik's men began to strike their shields with the cheeks and polls of their axes, the hilts of their swords and their spear shafts, and if this hadn't all been part of the ruse that thunderous beat might have had those young untested men behind Sigurd pissing down their legs. Perhaps it did even so.
  
  'Now there's a face I have seen before,' Olaf said, 'six men to the right of Alrik as we look at them. See him?'
  
  'The one with two beard ropes?' Sigurd asked, having picked out the warrior, who was hammering his shield with his sword's hilt.
  
  'I've seen him around camp,' Sigurd said.
  
  'Aye,' Olaf said. 'We know him.'
  
  'I don't,' Sigurd said. To his eyes there was nothing familiar about the man and he glanced up the hill at the borg, which was behind him over his left shoulder now so that only the top of the main gate and the heads of two sentries could be seen above the crest of the hill.
  
  'When we go, we go fast,' Sigurd called.
  
  'As if Fenrir Wolf is snapping at our arses,' Olaf added, and they came on to the flatter ground an arrow-shot from the fort but only a spear-throw from Alrik's skjaldborg. Sigurd and Alrik locked eyes and the warlord roared a curse at him, calling him a dead man walking, which was the prearranged warning that chaos was about to slip its leash like Garm, the giant hound which guards the corpse-gate of Hel's freezing wastes.
  
  'Kill them!' Alrik bellowed, lifting his spear and pointing the blade at Sigurd. Sixty voices clamoured in response as Alrik's shieldwall shattered and his men broke into a run.
  
  'Stand!' Sigurd yelled, lifting his shield and bracing himself for the coming impact. 'Stand!' He sensed his own skjaldborg fragmenting around him, starting with the men at his rear. 'Stand, you swines!' he screamed, but they would not stand, because sixty warriors were running towards them, screaming death and butchery.
  
  'Now, Sigurd,' Olaf growled, and Sigurd looked left and right, then over his shoulder, and saw that only six or so yet stood with him, grim-faced but steadfast. Thorbiorn was one of them, not bothering to lift the banner now as the cloth was as limp as an empty ale skin. The rest of them were running uphill towards the borg. Which was exactly what they were supposed to do.
  
  'Now,' Sigurd agreed, then turned, screaming at his remaining warriors to run, and they did not need to be told twice. They fled up the slope towards the borg, which was lung-scalding work cumbered by mail, helmets, shields and weapons, and Solmund, who had been one of the first to flee, was already bent double and suffering, his old lungs creaking, but Valgerd grabbed hold of him and hauled him on.
  
  'Thought you said it wasn't much of a hill, Bear,' Svein growled at Bram, huffing and puffing, the two of them gripping their big axes by their throats as they ran. Then a man beside Sigurd stumbled and fell, landing awkwardly because of the shield which he had foolishly strapped to his arm, but Sigurd ran on because he saw that the gates in the palisade were opening inwards.
  
  'Come on! Hurry!' a man on the ramparts was yelling.
  
  Sigurd looked behind him and saw that the man who had fallen was Kveld Ottarsson and he looked to have broken his arm by the way that his shield was lying in relation to the rest of him. On his knees and right elbow now, he had drawn his scramasax and was sawing at the shield straps. He must have known that Alrik's men were almost on him.
  
  'Fool's going to scupper us,' Moldof said, looking over his shoulder as he leant on one leg dragging breath into his lungs because he was on the steepest part of the climb. Sigurd feared Moldof was right, but then Kveld hauled himself to his feet, pulled his sword from its scabbard and ran at those coming up the hill towards him, and it was Alrik himself who scythed the young man down with one swing of his massive sword, Sleep-Maker.
  
  Sigurd turned and plunged up the slope, over the crest to see Valgerd and Floki leading the rest across the bridge over the ditch and through the gap in the bank. Then they were through the open gate and Sigurd knew it could all come to bloody ruin now if they did not get enough bodies inside the borg before Guthrum's men fathomed their trick.
  
  He overtook Svein and Bram, Asgot, Solmund and Moldof, and thundered across the short bridge into the fort, where Jarl Guthrum's men were waiting. There were some twenty or thirty of them milling inside the gate, which some of them were already pulling closed so that Moldof and Svein had to turn sidewards to get in. And then those gates slammed shut and the locking beam was put in place and one of the men on the rampart above shouted down that Alrik's men had stopped halfway up the slope.
  
  'Flea-ridden whoresons are just standing there scratching their arses!' he called.
  
  'That's because the turds have no fight in them,' a black-bearded warrior shouted up at him, as those manning the ramparts jeered and hurled insults and waved the spears which they would have cast down on their enemies had the 'sheep-fuckers' and 'pale-livered nithings' the courage to come closer.
  
  'Who are you?' one of Guthrum's men asked Floki, his eyes jumping from man to man and from their shields to the banner which Thorbiorn still gripped. Those eyes bulged when they took in Valgerd standing there like something from a legend, her braids like golden ropes lying on the grey rings of her brynja. 'Where is Jarl Guthrum?' the man asked. A tall, greybearded warrior with rings up his arms, he was one of the only borg men wearing a helmet, which likely meant he was in charge. 'I do not recognize any of you,' he said, his hand on the hilt of his sword, and it was clear he was beginning to have very bad thoughts. 'Well?' he demanded of Olaf. 'Who in Hel's cunny are you?'
  
  Olaf looked at Sigurd, which was his way of giving Sigurd the great pleasure of dispelling Grey Beard's confusion. So, Sigurd stepped up to the man and grinned, dragging his right forearm across his head to wipe away the sweat. 'We are the men who you should not have opened your gate to,' he said, and then he cut the man down with one blow and brought the steel-chaos to Guthrum's borg.
  
  Black Floki planted one of his short axes in a man's forehead, and Valgerd ran her spear through a warrior's chest before he had his sword half out of its scabbard. Asgot opened a big man's throat with his spear blade and Svein ran at Guthrum's men, giving himself room to swing that big axe and sowing panic amongst his enemies. Olaf slammed his shield against another man's, then hurled his spear which went into a man's open mouth and punched out the back of his skull, and Bram was cleaving shields and lopping off the arms behind them. Even Thorbiorn gave himself to the iron-storm, thrusting the boar spear banner into a man who came at him with an axe and driving him backwards into the press of his companions.
  
  But Guthrum's men vastly outnumbered them, and once the initial shock had passed they were rallying, flooding from all over the borg towards the maelstrom at the gate. A rock struck Sigurd's shoulder and another smashed one of the Birka men's skulls, killing him instantly, and Sigurd lifted his shield up, looking round its rim to see that those up on the earthen rampart were trying to rain death on them from above. 'Shields!' he yelled, seeing Floki duck a sword swing and hack into a warrior's groin. His shield before him, Aslak forced a warrior back against the palisade, punching his scramasax into the man's neck over and over, so that blood sprayed across the timbers. 'Uncle! The gate!' Sigurd bellowed. Olaf nodded, wincing as a boulder the size of a man's head thumped into his shield which he held above him, causing him to stagger and go down on one knee in the mud.
  
  Blood slapped Sigurd's face and he knew it was from another of Knut's recruits, whose head burst apart in a welter of blood, skull and grey brains. Svein, Bram, Moldof, and ten of the others had already formed a skjaldborg to defend the gate, and were holding off three times their number because since Findar was gone, Guthrum's men had no leader roaring orders at them and their own shieldwall was not properly built. And yet other borg men, in their desperation to retake the gate, were trying to come round the edges of Svein's wall, which lacked the bodies to bend back on itself and prevent them.
  
  A thrown spear struck Bjorn's chest, knocking him down. A sword blow cleaved Valgerd's shield and then the borg man stepped up and rammed the hilt into the shieldmaiden's head, sending her reeling, but Bram strode forward and swung his long axe, hacking off both of the borg man's legs at the knee.
  
  'Help them,' Sigurd ordered the men standing with him.
  
  'Not you, Thorbiorn. You stay where I can see you, lad,' Olaf growled as Bjarni, Asgot, Crow-Song and Solmund ran to protect the skjaldborg's flanks. Still others of Sigurd's raiders were fighting to add their own shields to Svein's bulwark, and it was with grim pride that Sigurd saw the young adventurers who had marched north through the forests with them holding their own, trading blow for blow.
  
  A spear streaked down but Sigurd got his shield to it and it glanced off to land in the mud, as Valgerd launched her spear up at the man on the ramparts who had thrown it, taking him in the belly so that he clutched the shaft and toppled down the bank into the borg, landing at Sigurd's feet. Then one of the other men up there yelled down at his companions that they must retake the gate and hold it, because Alrik was coming, at which all the men on the ramparts turned and began hurling their spears and rocks at those outside the borg. For they knew that if Alrik's men came through those gates the fort would be his before dusk.
  
  Floki threw his shield aside, thrust his hand axe into his belt and scrambled up the earthen slope, pulling his scramasax free as he got to the top and punching it through the neck of a man whose back was to him as he loosed an arrow. Alert to the threat, another man turned and thrust his spear at Floki, which the former slave parried downwards with his knife, sending the spear blade into the earth and sweeping the scramasax back up along the shaft slicing off the man's hands at the wrists. The warrior staggered backwards, glaring at his spurting stumps, and Floki left him to it, pulling his axe free and planting it in another man's back a heartbeat before slicing his throat.
  
  'Here we go,' Olaf said as he and Sigurd lifted the heavy beam from its brackets and dropped it on the earthen bank. The gates swung inwards and Alrik himself stalked in with his hearthmen around him. The eyes behind the helmet's guards were wild as he took in the scene: the dismembered bodies of his enemies strewn in the mud around the big gates, the butchered limbs and the bloody puddles. The intestines lying in the filth.
  
  He grinned at Sigurd. 'Kill them!' he yelled to his warriors, hurling himself into the fray, running a man through with Sleep-Maker as his men poured into the borg, some of them throwing themselves into Svein and Bram's skjaldborg to bolster it. Others scrambled up the bank either side of the gate to deal death to those defenders on the ramparts, turning the borg into a slaughteryard.
  
  'This won't last long,' Olaf said to Sigurd as they picked up their shields, hefted their weapons and strode forward to join the others. And neither did it, although no one could say that Jarl Guthrum's men did not fight bravely and as well as anyone might hope to who was in a battle they could not win. Knut's sixty men followed on the heels of Alrik's band, flooding through the gate like wolves to the scent of blood, eager to wreak their vengeance on those defenders who had until now held them at bay. And it was Knut's arrival which proved to be the weight that tipped the scales.
  
  The fight went out of the enemy then; not individually – men still hacked and stabbed and struggled – but it was now a desperate instinct to survive which drove them, rather than a belief that they might hold out against Alrik and turn back the tide. Many broke and ran, haring off amongst the timber buildings, the byres and pens and workshops, the grain stores and reed-screened latrine pits, seeking to hide or hoping to regroup perhaps.
  
  'Byrnjolf!' Alrik yelled, and it took Sigurd a heartbeat to realize that the warlord was shouting at him. 'Run them down! Kill them all!' Alrik said.
  
  'We've not done enough?' Olaf said, spitting into the mud.
  
  But Sigurd nodded at Alrik, then turned and ran after those fleeing men.
  
  It was a common thing that the hunter admired his prey. How could he not respect the magnificence of the great bull elk? The ferocity of the bristling boar? The strength of the bear and the cunning of the fox? So Fionn was not surprised to find that he admired Haraldarson now. The young man's ruse had worked, much to Fionn and other men's surprise, and his band had got into the borg almost easily, something which Alrik had tried and failed to do so many times. If anything, Fionn had wished Haraldarson well as he saw him enter the place and heard the clamour of the ensuing fight. For he did not want Sigurd to die then. Had not followed his prey this far and into the maw of another man's war just to see him killed by another man's blade or arrow.
  
  And as much as Fionn hated the idea of being meat in the blood-fray, relying on the man either side to keep him alive, he had watched with rising panic as he waited on the slope with the sixty warriors in Knut's band.
  
  'We should go now,' he said, unable to rein in his frustration any longer as they watched Alrik lead his men through the gates.
  
  'Aye, those arseholes will get all the plunder,' another warrior said, thinking that same fear was what had motivated the Alba man to speak up.
  
  'We go when I say,' Knut had growled.
  
  But eventually Knut did say and they hurried up the hill in loose order, confident that the fight inside the borg was almost won and hoping to get their hands on what they could before all the silver and copper, bronze and ivory, blades, brooches and amber had found their way into other men's purses and nestbaggins. Before the best of the dead men's shoes were on new feet and the dead men's cloaks were on new backs. Though Fionn was not interested in any of that. He wanted one thing and one thing only. Haraldarson.
  
  And now he saw him. Haraldarson's crew had broken away from the main body of Alrik's force and were hunting amongst the borg's outbuildings, cutting men down in twos and threes. Knut's band had thrown themselves into the fight and this had broken Guthrum's men so that chaos was lord there now and it was hard to know who was who in the steel-storm. Fionn had put his sword in a man's side, hoping it was one of Guthrum's men, then some of Knut's men splintered off from the thickest fighting – the slaughter really, for that's what it was now – and Fionn took his chance. He rounded the grain store, his back brushing the planks as he moved across the thoroughfare to the side of a carpenter's workshop where he stopped for a moment, the sweet scent of pine shavings in his nose. Then he was moving again, following Sigurd from a distance, skirting the huge red-bearded warrior and the shieldmaiden who had cornered a broad-shouldered, big-bearded man who was growling insults at them as they closed in to kill him.
  
  He saw one of Guthrum's men hiding in the pig pen, crouching against the woven hazel fence. Fionn ignored him, moving on past a great pile of felled timber: pine trunks stripped and smoothed ready to be used for building; and there he saw Olaf and Haraldarson's godi and the one they called Bear, along with two other men facing down a knot of borg men who had locked shields. For all the good it would do them, Fionn thought.
  
  Then he caught sight of his prey again. It looked as though Haraldarson was making for the cattle byre and he only had one of his crewmen with him now. But that was the young man with the crow-black hair and he was dangerous, and so Fionn would have to be careful. And yet he might never get a better chance than this.
  
  He drew his scían, thrilling as always to the feel of the stag-antler grip in his palm, and went to claim his kill.
  
  Sigurd had long since lost his shield but he had picked up a discarded spear, so he held Troll-Tickler in his right hand and the spear in his left as he closed in on the bigger of the two men who had fled into the cattle byre. Floki was in there with him too, in that dark stinking barn, but he had gone down the opposite side after his man who was somewhere in amongst the cows themselves which were lowing in fear and panic. The beasts were thin and sorry-looking and perhaps starving, because since Alrik had come they had been moved inside the winter byre when they should have been outside on the hillsides feeding on the spring grass. Now their eyes shone in the dark and they emptied their bowels where they stood, terrified of the men with blades amongst them.
  
  Coming into this dark place had stripped Sigurd of some of the battle thrill which had carried him up that hill, through the gate and into the maelstrom of the struggle for the borg. Now, the clamour of the fight muted and far away, alone but for Floki, the beasts and the men they were trying to kill, Sigurd felt the gnawing of doubt in his gut. What were these last borg men to him? Had he not played his part? He did not need some desperate man jumping out of the shadows to put a blade in his neck. Not now.
  
  But then, he could not abandon Floki. Nor could he call out to tell him to leave these men with the cows without risking giving away Floki in the dark. So he walked deeper into that byre, which was longer than some rich karl's houses he had seen, and he told himself that this would be his last kill of the day.
  
  No fame to be had here, boy, a voice growled in his head.
  
  Then he felt it, almost like a change in the air behind him. Or eyes on his back, perhaps. He turned, lifting his spear, and peered through the stench-filled dark. But it was just one of Alrik's men, the Alba man who had joined up in Birka at the same time they had. The man put a finger to his lips and Sigurd nodded. No bad thing having another ally now, he thought, and gestured to the man that there were two enemies in there with them, hiding somewhere in all that dung and straw and lowing livestock. The Alba man nodded and peered off past Sigurd, lifting his long knife as he crouched and set off.
  
  So Sigurd turned back round and began to move forward again, steeling himself against any sudden blade-swinging borg man rushing at him out of the dark.
  
  Something made him glance behind him again, but too late to stop the blade which streaked through murk, slicing into the skin and following the line of his jawbone as he twisted and threw himself back. He fell against a cow which bellowed and skittered sidewards so that Sigurd fell into the filth. Then the man was on him and, having dropped his own weapons, Sigurd threw up his forearms to block, as the wicked long blade sliced again, across both arms, and the pain was searing. Yet somehow he got a grip of the hands which held the long knife's hilt, which were driving the blade down towards the hollow at the base of his neck.
  
  Gods but he was strong for a man with barely the flesh to cloak his bones and it was all Sigurd could do to hold that knife at bay, as his own blood dripped on to his face, the coppery iron tang of it in his nose.
  
  I'm losing, he thought. This little man will kill me.
  
  The Alba man's face was two hand spans from his own, close enough to smell his breath through his teeth as he strained, forcing that strange knife of his down so that its point was against Sigurd's flesh. He could hear Floki fighting somewhere in the dark, but even if he wasted his strength calling out to him, Floki would never get to him in time. So Sigurd glared into the Alba man's wide eyes and put all his strength into trying to deny that thirsty blade the blood which it craved. But the Alba man all but lay upon the knife's hilt, bearing down with knotty strength and iron will, and Sigurd felt the skin of his throat give way to the blade's point.
  
  Not like this, he thought. Not in the dark like this with only the cows to see it. Killed by a man I did not even know was my enemy.
  
  He wrenched at those hands but they would not yield. If only he could push the knife to the side, just by an inch, he would have a chance. But this man wanted his death. He needed it.
  
  'Shhh,' the Alba man hissed. 'It's over. Shhh, Haraldarson.'
  
  Sigurd could not speak but his eyes spoke for him. You're a dead man, they said, because all Sigurd knew was defiance. This is your end, not mine, he silently promised the man. But he was losing and somewhere deep in the mire of his own mind he knew it.
  
  'Shhh . . .'
  
  Then a sword scythed in the dark and there was a wet chop and the Alba man's head toppled off the stem of his neck and rolled into the straw and cow shit. Sigurd gasped for breath, pain flooding him. There, looming like a one-armed giant in the dark, was Moldof, his teeth set in a wolf's grin, the faint light of the half-open byre door at his back.
  
  Sigurd pushed the headless body off himself and took another breath, coughing from the straw dust clouding the air, then reached for the hand which Moldof offered him, letting the big man pull him to his feet. They both turned back to the dark interior to see another figure approaching. Moldof snatched up his gory sword and stepped forward, but then they saw that it was Floki emerging from the dusty gloom, his axes back in his belt because his hands were full.
  
  'Who is that?' Floki asked, looking down at the head in the filth. It lay in a pool of cow piss. He had two heads himself, one in either hand, their hair snarled round his fists. Both bearded and staring with dead eyes. Both dripping.
  
  'The Alba man,' Sigurd said, a hand clamped to his neck which was spilling hot blood as he bent to recover his sword and spear.
  
  Moldof crouched and rolled the severed head over to get a better look at the face, grimacing at the stink of piss.
  
  'Why would that piece of goat shit try to kill you?' Floki asked, tossing both his heads towards the door.
  
  'Why don't you ask him?' Sigurd said. His head was swimming now and his legs were weakening. He had two long cuts on his forearms, the one between his jaw and his neck and another small one in the hollow of his throat, and he was losing enough blood now that his body was beginning to shiver.
  
  'His blade is sharp and clean, I'll give him that,' Moldof said, thrusting the Alba man's long knife into its scabbard and handing it to Sigurd. He nodded at Sigurd's wounds. 'So long as we wash those out and thread them good and tight you'll live.'
  
  Sigurd tucked the strange long knife, which had come so close to sending him to the afterlife, into his belt and took one last look at the head of the man who had wielded it.
  
  Who was he? Why had he wanted Sigurd dead? Those questions would have to wait. For now Sigurd needed to get out into the light, was desperate to escape that reeking barn before his legs gave up on him and they had to carry him out.
  
  'We've done our work today,' he said.
  
  Moldof nodded. 'Let's get you back.'
  
  Floki spat on the Alba man's headless corpse and he and Sigurd held each other's eye in silent acknowledgement of how close Sigurd had come to death in that nothing place.
  
  'I need a drink,' Sigurd said, wincing at the pain, keeping his blood-slick hand pressed against the cut flesh of his neck.
  
  'You've earned one,' Moldof said.
  
  And with that they left the cows and the corpses and walked through the byre back out into the day.
  
  The butchery was great, the kind that even the gods cannot ignore, and that dusk, when it was done and Alrik's blood-thirst was sated, he called his war host to heel.
  
  They made a terrible sight, exhausted and gore-spattered, their teeth white against their crimson faces, their tunics and breeks blood-soaked as they knelt in the mud robbing the dead, searching for plunder like wolves, like crows and ravens stripping carcasses to the bone.
  
  As well as the wounded who had been unable to fight on, some twenty-three of Guthrum's warriors were alive at the end of it. Most of those had made a last stand at the rear of the borg between two longhouses, shields overlapped and seemingly willing to fight to the death, which Sigurd said was brave of them.
  
  'Aye, it's brave,' Olaf agreed, 'but it also says something about this Alrik who these men know much better than us.' Which was true, for had Alrik been a man known for his restraint and generosity in victory, Guthrum's men might have thrown down their swords and spears and pleaded for their lives. As it was, Alrik formed two shieldwalls, each three men deep, one in front and one at the borg men's rear. He sent bowmen up on to the roofs of the longhouses either side of Guthrum's men to rain their shafts on to those doomed warriors.
  
  Sigurd wanted no part in that final slaughter and led his crew away before the killing began, which Alrik himself did not seem to mind, not least when he saw Sigurd covered in his own blood and paling too.
  
  'Nor should he mind, for we have given him this borg,' Sigurd said. He was sitting on a felled pine trunk while Valgerd stitched his wounds, glad that it was she and not Solmund doing it, for the old skipper might get his own back for the mess Sigurd once made of sewing him up. First, though, the shieldmaiden had cut his beard and shaved his chin so that she might see what she was doing, and the others laughed to see Sigurd looking like a much younger man again.
  
  'I am a young man,' he said.
  
  'Aye, but you've already lived a handful of lives,' Olaf said, and Sigurd could not disagree with that.
  
  Of the others, more than half had taken cuts and sprains, though the real pain would come later, they knew. They stood around slaking their thirst, watching men picking the dead for plunder, listening to the spear din and letting the aftermath of the fight course through their veins as Alrik finished the borg men off.
  
  When Valgerd's work was done, and fine work it was too, Thorbiorn led them to a rain barrel and they washed off the worst of the gore. Then they walked through the place, stepping over the half-naked corpses and blood pools, and Bram threw a stone at a dog which was licking the gore from a young man's face. Soon the crows and the rats would come to feed. The wolves, too, would come sniffing out of the forest, drawn by the scent of all that butchered meat, trying to work up the courage to sneak into the borg if they could.
  
  'They've earned their places in the Allfather's hall,' Olaf said of Guthrum's one hundred and ten men, as the clash of arms and the screams of the dying followed them out of the gates.
  
  And so they had.
  
  They slept in a longhouse on dead men's benches, warmed by a raging hearth as the rain hissed in the black night outside where other men kept watch from the ramparts. Alrik had moved his entire force inside the borg as darkness cloaked the world, leaving all the dead where they lay. No one liked sleeping in those houses with so many corpses scattered like chaff in the mud outside, for men feared the ghosts of the dead. But with night coming and the choice needing to be made between dealing with the slain or moving the camp inside, most men would rather put up with the ghosts if it meant they had a dry place to sleep.
  
  Sigurd's crew took the benches nearest the hearth in the longhouse they were in, and no one seemed to mind. Or if they did mind no one said anything. If his crew had not got the respect of Alrik's other warriors before the fight for looking like war gods in their fine gear, they had earned their respect now. Running into that borg had been a risky thing to do.
  
  'It was bloody mad now that I think about it,' Olaf had said after. 'If Guthrum's men had held the gates shut behind us we would have been stuck like fish in a withy trap.'
  
  None disagreed. They would have been too tired to do so anyway, for after a fight like that their very bones craved rest. No one spoke much at all. Each was on a journey through his or her own thoughts, recalling moments of the fight, men they had killed, men who had nearly killed them, the sight of the mutilated and the screams of the doomed. After the mad confusion of the fray, warriors would try to make sense of what they had lived through, weaving the tale of it in their minds like scenes on a tapestry.
  
  I am getting used to it now, Sigurd thought with grim acceptance. It was always the same, he realized, looking into the fire whilst drinking the ale which Svein had given him. The muscle-trembling before a fight, the battle-rage and the bloodlust during it, and afterwards the flooding joy of knowing that you have survived. In the wake of all this came near-death exhaustion, a weariness of the body and soul which only a fjord-deep sleep could heal.
  
  And yet he would likely be dead now had a one-armed man not saved him. Even worse that it was Moldof, who had been his enemy and against whom his father had fought a battle fit for skald-song.
  
  'So who was he then, that shit from Alba who tried to slice you open at the gills?' Olaf asked.
  
  Sigurd shook his head. 'He knew my name though. Called me Haraldarson,' he said.
  
  'Maybe we can get some answers out of Knut, for he picked the man up in Birka,' Aslak suggested.
  
  'And have Knut and Alrik asking questions about us and why the turd would want Sigurd dead?' Olaf said. 'Better to let it lie for now.'
  
  Sigurd agreed with that. He drank again, then held a draught of ale in his mouth to sluice it clean of the bitter taste that lingers after so much death. He looked around. Svein was already asleep, leaning against a roof post, snoring like a troll. Olaf and Moldof were sitting on stools by an oil lamp playing tafl, which might have made for a strange sight even the previous day. But fighting shoulder to shoulder forges bonds between warriors, as does saving another man's life. It could not be said that Moldof hadn't proved himself, more so for being wolf-jointed and left-handed now.
  
  Sigurd's gaze drifted over to Valgerd as it so often did. A green bruise staining her skin from her left temple down to her cheek, she sat on one of the benches, a pile of some fifty or more arrows on the fur beside her. She had gathered them from the mud and from Guthrum's dead and was examining each one by flamelight, checking that the iron heads were securely fixed and sharp, and that the fletchings, goose or eagle feathers by the looks, were undamaged. She was putting the best ones into her quiver and leaving the others aside to repair later.
  
  Floki was working the edge of an axe against a whetstone, spitting on it now and then and holding it up to the light to inspect it. No surprise that it needed sharpening, after all the work it had been put to. The cleaving of shields, arm bones, necks, helmets, skulls.
  
  Crow-Song was humming a sad melody to himself and Bjarni, Aslak, Bjorn and Bram were trying to out-drink each other, for the borg was not short of ale, thank the gods. Asgot was casting the runes, though for once Sigurd was not interested in what they had to say. Too tired for it.
  
  Solmund had been sitting on the bench beside Sigurd, more asleep than awake, but now he stood, wincing and pressing a hand into the small of his back. The spear he had taken in the chest had ripped his brynja and bruised his flesh but the tough old helmsman was still in one piece. 'Gods but I'm old,' he said. 'Stiffer than a day-old corpse.' He swore. 'I'm going to find a dark corner and I'm going to lie down and none of you will disturb me if you know what is good for you.' He held a finger up to Sigurd. 'But do not let me die in my sleep, Sigurd. I will see Reinen again before I go.'
  
  'I'll have no one else at her helm, old man,' Sigurd said, forcing a smile through the pain as his friend shambled off to find a good quiet place to get his head down. In truth only the gods and the Norns knew when they would see Reinen again. Sigurd looked at Thorbiorn who sat across from him staring into the crackling fire. 'You did well today, Thorbiorn Thorirsson,' he said. Sigurd had not heard the lad say a word since they had walked away from the slaughter of those last brave borg men by Alrik's warriors.
  
  Thorbiorn looked up at him. There were tears in the young man's eyes. Tears which Thorbiorn did not blink away as he fixed his eyes on Sigurd's own. 'I have never wanted to lie with a woman more than I do now,' he said. But there were no women in Guthrum's borg because it was a place for warriors. It had been the forge in which Guthrum made his army, half of which now lay ruined in the mud outside.
  
  'We will have to make do with ale,' Sigurd said, drinking until his cup was empty. Thorbiorn did the same, then looked back into the flames.
  
  Sigurd did not want to think of the blood either, or the dead, or the Alba man or even the fight, which he had all but won for Alrik. Instead he thought of Runa, his brave, beautiful sister. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. And he wished she were with him now.
  
  They came for Runa in the night, Vebiorg and a young fox-faced Freyja Maiden called Drífa, who despite being just a couple of years older than Runa was the best archer on Fugløy. They woke her roughly and Runa sat up, shedding a dream of her mother in which she and Grimhild were sailing a small færing north up the Karmsund Strait, knives in their hands for the oath-breaker king.
  
  'Come, Runa!' Drífa hissed, tugging at the sleeve of her nightdress. 'She's back!'
  
  'Who is back?' Runa asked, scrubbing the sleep from her face. She was usually a light sleeper but she had been fjord-deep in that dream and parts of it still clung to her like sea wrack. Perhaps the others had forgotten about her, she being up there in the loft with the smoke.
  
  'The Prophetess!' Drífa said, her slanted fox eyes wide and shining in the light of the soapstone lamp which Vebiorg held before her. Drífa had been brought to Fugløy as a bairn, the rumour being that her father was King Thorir, he having begotten her on a bed slave then sent her to the Maidens to keep her out of the way.
  
  'She has been gone since the winter before this one just past,' Vebiorg said.
  
  'Come, Runa,' Drífa said. 'The others are there already.'
  
  Runa shuffled to the end of her bed and looked down over the ledge at the hall below, at the empty benches and furs, and the hearthfire which was already dying because no one was around to feed it. Two of the older women were still there but they were wrapping themselves in blankets and readying to brave the night outside, like warriors going to battle.
  
  By the time Runa had put on her over-dress, Vebiorg and Drífa were halfway down the ladder, and so she clambered on to it and followed them, their excitement having caught in her now so that she was almost trembling with it as she climbed down. At the foot of the ladder she stopped to tie her hair back, downed a wash of ale from an abandoned cup and ran through the hall out into the night.
  
  As eager as she was to see this Prophetess, she could not help but glance over at the smithy, hoping to catch sight of Ingel, hoping that the commotion had woken him from his slumber in the makeshift shelter at the back of the forge. For while the blacksmiths were no strangers to the women's beds, they were forbidden to sleep anywhere else than in their furs with their tools for company and the constant heat from the furnace to keep them warm.
  
  Suddenly Runa was falling, sprawling on to the ground because someone had shoved and tripped her. 'Climb back up to your nest, girl, and use your finger, for that is as close as you will get to a man's breeks snake.' It was Sibbe. She had come out of nowhere and Runa had not been ready. 'You are not one of us and have no right to hear what the Prophetess has learnt on her travels.'
  
  'Leave her be, Sibbe,' Drífa said, coming back through the throng like a salmon swimming against the current and placing herself between Runa and Sibbe.
  
  'Stay out of it, Drífa,' Sibbe spat, pointing at Runa. 'This jarl's brat is not a Freyja Maiden. She should not even be here.' Some of the other Maidens looked back but it was dark and they could not see what was happening and carried on into the tree line.
  
  'That is up to the High Mother to decide,' Drífa countered, shouldering past the woman to help Runa up. Runa had cut her hand open on a stone but she clenched her fist on it because she did not want to give Sibbe the satisfaction.
  
  'If you want to stop me, Sibbe, you had better draw your sword,' Runa said, squaring her shoulders to the woman and hoping Sibbe would not take her up on that challenge because she knew the Freyja Maiden would cut her down. Not least because the only blade Runa had on her was the scramasax she wore on her belt.
  
  Sibbe's hand fell to her sword grip, her eyes boring into Runa's, and even Drífa half drew her own sword because she thought a fight was coming. But then Sibbe curled her lip, turned, and spat onto the ground to show what she thought of Runa.
  
  'Not tonight,' she said. 'I want to hear the Prophetess. And after that I will rut with that man over there. I will ride that young buck until he cannot stand.' She grinned at the thought of that, then turned her back on Runa and Drífa and followed the others into the woods, where the Prophetess was waiting.
  
  'It seems to me your family has a talent for making enemies,' Drífa said as she and Runa walked on.
  
  Runa licked the blood from her cut palm. 'That may be so, Drífa, but believe me when I say that we are not the kind of people you want for enemies.'
  
  Drífa grinned at her and Runa grinned back, the salty iron tang on her tongue, and then they came to where the others were assembled amongst the trees by a moon-flooded clearing. In that clearing, glimpsed now and then through the shifting tide of Freyja Maidens ahead, Runa caught sight of the Prophetess, short and slightly stooped, old certainly, her face cowled and a staff in her hand. The air was thick with seiðr, tainted by the stink of the filthy cat skins in which the silver-washed figure was cocooned, and it was that smell as much as the snatched sight of the woman which chilled Runa's insides like a drink of melted snow. And then the galdr rose on a plume of hot breath, a song-like chanting which silenced every other voice on Fugløy. It grew, this reed-thin crowing, lifting into the cold night, raising the hairs on Runa's arms and the back of her neck.
  
  The witch. It was the witch whom Sigurd had found whilst out hunting wolves in the forest beyond Jarl Hakon Burner's old hall up in Osøyro. Runa had not seen the face beneath that cowl yet but she knew without a shred of doubt that it was the witch. She had lived in Burner's hall with them awhile. Watching. A darker shadow in a dark corner. And then she had gone, which no one had been sorry about.
  
  Not a seiðr-kona now. The Prophetess spun her galdr like a yarn, drawing the listeners in like each new tuft of wool on a spindle, until they were all under her spell. Runa could not say how long they stood there bound by the strange enchantment, but by the time the galdr stopped, cut off suddenly like a shears-cut thread, she was shivering with cold and her feet were numb.
  
  'We thank the Goddess that you are safely returned to us,' Skuld said, stepping forward to take the old woman's hands in her own. 'Let us all go back to the fire and hear your news.'
  
  The Prophetess nodded and at the High Mother's command the Freyja Maidens, released from the spell now, it seemed, made their way back to the main longhouse, gathering by the hearth which was encouraged to roaring leaping life until every face was lit and Runa's feet prickled with welcome warmth.
  
  Skuld the High Mother and the Prophetess talked for a while but being at the back Runa could not hear much of what they said. Yet she heard some of the others talking about her, caught their whispers in the smoke and more than one steely-eyed glance in her direction. It seemed Sibbe was not the only one amongst them who thought she should not be a part of this thing. They were right, she knew with sharp certainty. She was not a Freyja Maiden. She was an intruder. An interloper. Was it not bad enough that she had one enemy on that small island? Staying here to partake in this night, whatever it held in store, would earn her more, and that she did not need. And so she turned to sneak back to her own hall and her own bed, nevertheless hoping that Sibbe did not see her go because she would think it was Runa's fear of her that had driven her away.
  
  But she had only taken three steps when a voice stopped her dead.
  
  'And where are you going, Runa Haraldsdóttir?' Like an arrow in her back, that.
  
  She felt the air move as every head in that longhouse turned towards her, felt all those eyes on her as she stood there suddenly wishing she had snuck away sooner.
  
  'Creeping off like a forest cat when the hunter is around, hey?'
  
  Runa turned round and looked along the channel which the women had opened to give the Prophetess a line of sight to her.
  
  'Were you not going to say hei to your old friend?'
  
  Some fish mouths at that, Runa saw, and round eyes too.
  
  'I am not a Freyja Maiden,' she said, unsure how she should address the old crone who was clearly more than she had seemed up in Osøyro. 'This has nothing to do with me.'
  
  'Ha! So you say, do you?' The Prophetess laughed then, a sound not dissimilar to the galdr and which turned Runa's blood cold again. 'It has everything to do with you, girl,' she said, and Runa did not have to look at Skuld to know that the High Mother was watching her the way an eagle watches a vole shivering in the grass.
  
  'Should I stay then?' Runa asked, resisting the temptation to look at Sibbe whose gaze she also felt upon her.
  
  'You could not now walk away if you tried, Runa Haraldsdóttir,' the crone said, pushing back her hood and hissing at one of the Freyja Maidens to pull up a stool so that she could rest her old bones. Then she sat down, shrinking in that ring of women which drew tight around her like a knot because everyone there knew that she had something important to say.
  
  Runa was tempted to test the magic then, to see if she could walk away after all, but as if to prove the witch's seiðr she found herself pushing closer, eking into the gaps which the other women made for her because she was somehow now a part of this night, despite having known nothing about it until Vebiorg and Drífa had woken her. Had hauled her out of that dream she'd been sharing with Grimhild her mother, who waited for her in the afterlife. Almost without knowing how she had got there, she stood in the first ring now, looking into that known and yet unknown face, the stink of those cat skins, and of stale piss too perhaps, getting in her nose.
  
  Her staff laid across her knees, the Prophetess looked up at Runa and nodded, took the cup which Skuld offered her, drank long and deeply, then put the empty cup on the ground and closed her eyes.
  
  After a long while, during which the Freyja Maidens waited in patient silence, Runa thought that the old woman had fallen asleep. Not that Runa blamed her, for she was very old to have been wandering the world, as far north as Osøyro and then back here, and the gods only knew where in between.
  
  But then the Prophetess exhaled a long, sour-smelling breath and began.
  
  'I have walked far on these old feet since I was last here. More steps have I taken out there in the world than there are strands of hair on all of your heads together. I have walked with the wolf and the bear, the boar and the fox. I have soared with the eagle and talked with the gulls and the crows. I have seen the past and I have seen the future.' She shook her head then. 'And let me tell you that I prefer the past.'
  
  Perhaps she was seeing it all now behind those closed eyelids. Who could say?
  
  'The old ways are dying,' she said, her mouth puckering as she considered it. 'It is a slow death, yes, like that from a disease of the flesh. But there is no cure. Not that I have seen.'
  
  She was quiet again, this time for so long that Runa could have easily slipped out to relieve herself as she needed to. She wished she had done when the old woman picked up the thread of it again.
  
  'Our people are forgetting the ways of those who came before. They do not honour the gods as they should. And by not giving the Æsir their due, we weaken them. Do not the prize bull's ribs begin to show if he does not get good pasture?' Her dry lips pulled back from what few teeth she still had. 'There is a new god,' she said, as though the words were rancid. 'The White God. And his seiðr spreads like the roots of a great tree, a tree that will one day put Yggdrasil itself in the shade.'
  
  Some of the Maidens shook their heads or mumbled that this could not be so. Skuld herself looked unsure, as though she suspected the Prophetess of having made some mistake.
  
  'Shaking your heads will not change it,' the Prophetess told them. 'Just as the bear who lumbers off to his cave to sleep the winter away does not stop the winter coming. Nor does the fish who swims deep to stay warm stop the lake from freezing. This god already rules in distant lands where the old gods are long forgotten.' She extended an arm which looked like the branch of a silver birch. 'But now he reaches into the north. Even our King Thorir has dealings with this god's priests. He feasts them, shares his hall with them.'
  
  'King Thorir would not turn his back on the Goddess,' Skuld said, shaking her head, making a stand on that point.
  
  'No, he will not,' the Prophetess said, opening her eyes to look at Skuld. 'But many will. Not in your lifetimes perhaps, not here where the old gods still hold sway.'
  
  'Then what has this to do with us?' the High Mother asked on behalf of them all. She looked like a goddess herself standing there amongst them, all bearing and beauty and fiery red hair.
  
  'The time of kings and jarls is ending,' the old woman said. 'There will come a day when one king will rule everything beneath the sky as far in every direction as a raven can fly. And he will not support the Freyja Maidens. He will bend his knee to the White God.' She shook her head. 'All across the north, few kings and one god. That is what I have seen.'
  
  'Are you talking about Ragnarök, Wise Mother?' Vebiorg asked, the first of the other Freyja Maidens to dare to speak directly to the old woman.
  
  The old woman looked at her. 'Perhaps it is Ragnarök. Perhaps it is something else. But yes, the doom of the gods is coming.' She closed her eyes again, her claw-like hands white upon the staff across her legs. 'We and many before us have lived on this island, beyond the sight of men, our days given to prepare for when we might serve Freyja the Giver in the time of her greatest need. But I tell you now that we will be the last.'
  
  A murmuring hum rose from the women then, and it was clear that this news was more terrifying than a failed harvest, or when a village hears that a ship full of her men has turned over in some wind-driven fjord.
  
  'Quiet!' Skuld said, looking back to the Prophetess who had not finished yet.
  
  'Even though all I have said is true, for I have seen it while you have been hiding from the world, the old gods are not without power,' the old woman said, opening her eyes and grinning. 'There are still those men . . . and women, whom the gods love. The way they used to love the kings and heroes in former times. There are still those in whose lives Óðin, Thór, Loki and Freyja like to meddle.' She moved a hand out before her, some invisible thing gripped between her thumb and forefinger. 'Making a move here and there as though these beloved mortals are pieces on a tafl board,' she said, then rested her hands on her staff again. 'One such woman is amongst us here this night.'
  
  All eyes turned to Skuld now, but the High Mother had followed the Prophetess's eyes and those rested not on the Freyja Maiden but on Runa.
  
  'Runa Haraldsdóttir and her brother are threads in the hem of the kyrtill of all this which I have spoken of.' She twisted her scrawny neck, her gaze raking over every pair of eyes in that place. 'But your time, my fierce children, is ending.' She nodded at Skuld, who looked defiant, as though she did not accept any of it. 'Yes, High Mother, rage against it. Why not? The Storm is coming,' the Prophetess said, 'when the Allfather and Freyja and all their great war host will ride because they have been summoned. And the wind from their passing will raise a tide of blood.'
  
  The old woman bent and lifted the cup and one of the Freyja Maidens filled it from a jug. When the Prophetess had drained that cup she stood, planting her staff in the rushes.
  
  'What are you telling us to do, Wise Mother?' Skuld asked.
  
  'I am telling you what I have seen. Now you must decide what will become of us.'
  
  'We will live as we have always lived,' Skuld said. 'What else is there?'
  
  'Why not ask young Runa what she would do?' the Prophetess said, grinning at Runa.
  
  'She is not one of us and does not have a say in it,' Sibbe put in and some of the others let it be known that they shared Sibbe's feelings about that. And nor did Runa want a say in it. What did she know about such things?
  
  But Skuld looked at her and lifted her chin, a small gesture yet enough to make it clear that Runa was supposed to speak.
  
  'I know a warrior woman,' Runa said, suddenly knowing how Sigurd must feel when he was giving the commands and acting the lord in front of seasoned warriors and full-beards who would have every right to doubt him. 'She is called Valgerd and her grandmother Ingun was a Freyja Maiden living here on this island.' A couple of the older Maidens looked at each other then. Perhaps they had been girls here in Ingun's time. And it struck Runa that the Prophetess might have been the one who had let Ingun leave the island with her lover, the champion who would become Valgerd's grandfather. If so, had she known who Valgerd was when she had stayed with them in Burner's hall?
  
  'Valgerd lives in the world of men and she is respected wherever she goes because she is a great warrior. I have seen her fight in the shieldwall. I have seen men fall beneath her blade and I have seen them struck down by her arrows. She does not hide away. She is proud and brave, and you cannot tell me that the Goddess will not take her to Sessrymnir at the end of her days.' Some of the women looked excited, some looked confused. Most looked angry and Runa almost felt sick at the thought of the sword-and spear-training next day, for there were plenty of them in that longhouse who would repay her words with bruises.
  
  'Our life is here,' Sibbe said. 'We are sworn to it, just as men swear to their jarls and kings.'
  
  'More so!' another woman said. 'For an oath sworn to the Goddess is a heavier thing than one sworn to a man.'
  
  There were murmurs of agreement with that.
  
  'That may be so,' Runa said, 'but if what the Wise Mother says is true then perhaps you can serve the Goddess better out there in the world than you can here on this island. You can prove yourselves truly worthy of Sessrymnir.' She did not say that fighting real enemies was more proof of skill and courage than fighting practice bouts with wooden swords, but she did not need to, and Sibbe spat some or other insult in her direction though the words were lost amongst the rising hum as the Freyja Maidens began to argue amongst themselves. Some were hooked on this idea of leaving Fugløy and seeing something of the world beyond, as Valgerd's grandmother Ingun had done years before. Others claimed they did not have the right to abandon the way of life which had existed since the time of the Yngling kings. They would not be the ones to destroy it all, like a beautiful old mead hall burnt to ashes in one night's raiding. Still others could not believe what this night had dredged up, that there was even talk of leaving the island.
  
  Drífa's eyes were alight though. She had lived on Fugløy her whole life and for her this new idea of going into the world shone like hacksilver in the scales.
  
  'It cannot be just by chance that Runa has come amongst us,' she said. 'You all heard the Wise Mother.' She was looking from her companions to Runa, bringing all eyes with her. 'If Runa is beloved of the Goddess, then could it be that Freyja Giver gave her to us? Placed her amongst us for a reason? Perhaps to show us that we can better serve her out there like Runa's friend, this Valgerd.'
  
  The Prophetess was silent now. She had delivered her message and seemed content to let Skuld and the others decide their futures. If there was even a choice where wyrd was concerned.
  
  'Enough,' Skuld said, stilling every tongue. 'The Wise Mother has travelled far and needs her rest. All of you back to your beds. I will seek an answer from the Goddess. Then we will know what we must do.'
  
  The women seemed content with that and began to leave the longhouse, more than a few of them looking at Runa with different eyes now.
  
  'How will the High Mother learn Freyja's will?' Runa asked Vebiorg as they walked out into the night. Vebiorg had seemed less than sure about leaving the island, though Runa knew she would follow where Skuld led.
  
  'She will go under the cloak,' Vebiorg said.
  
  Runa had seen Asgot practise utiseta once, or sitting out as he had called it, for it involved sitting undisturbed in a wild place and then journeying either inwards to the very depths of self, or outwards to other worlds, perhaps even that of the Æsir.
  
  When he had done it, Asgot had gone two days without food or water, until at last the answer to his question had come, though Runa could not for the life of her remember the question or the answer. What were the ways of the godi to a little girl? Now look at me, she thought, considering again how she had never imagined that she would see the seiðr-kona again. And yet, here she was talking of the gods and of Runa and her brother in the same breath.
  
  'Look, there is Sibbe,' Drífa said, catching up with them. 'She meant what she said, then.' Runa looked over to the smithy and saw Sibbe standing there talking to Ingel, who looked half asleep, his face cast in shadow by the glow of the furnace behind.
  
  'She cannot get enough, that one,' Vebiorg said as Runa strode across the dewy ground towards that fire glow. Towards Sibbe.
  
  The Freyja Maiden heard her, or sensed her perhaps, and turned, her hand falling to the hilt of the sword at her hip even as Runa's fell to the handle of her scramasax.
  
  'I do not care what the Wise Mother says about you—' Sibbe began, pulling the sword, but she said no more because Runa reversed the long knife and hammered its hilt into Sibbe's head beside her eye and the woman dropped like a stone, her mouth still full of words.
  
  Ingel's own jaw dropped and if he had been half asleep before, he was awake now.
  
  Runa looked down to see Vebiorg who had run over and was crouched over Sibbe.
  
  'She's alive,' Vebiorg said, looking up into Runa's eyes, though Sibbe did not look alive.
  
  Runa took Ingel's hand, felt his fingers curl round her own. 'You coming?' she asked.
  
  The young man nodded. And together they walked off across the clearing, and Runa wondered how she would climb the loft ladder with her legs shaking so.