1
THE VALE OF GUÐBRANDR, CENTRAL NORWAY LATE AUTUMN IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1217
Corpses sprawled atop a low hill, beneath a sky the color of old slate. They lay in their tattered war gear: mail riven, shields broken, and helmets split asunder by ferocious blows. There were scores of them, arranged not in the perfect windrows borne of clashing shield walls, where the dead fall like grain beneath a thresher-man’s blade, but rather in heaps and mounds—as though the Tangled God himself, cunning Loki, had decided to reshape the land with the bodies of slain Northmen. Their blood mingled with other vital fluids, turning the early snow underfoot to a scarlet slurry.
A cold north wind moaned through the evergreen spruces ringing the hill. It rattled the shafts of spears that grew from bodies of the slain like corpse-flowers, their blades rooted in bellies and spines; it snapped the fabric of cast-off pennons. Some displayed a wolf’s head against a white field. Others, more numerous, bore a stark black cross. The wind faded; utter silence returned.
Amid this desolation, there came a single flicker of movement. A chestnut-haired giant clad in a ragged corselet thrust himself to his feet, notched sword clenched tight in his bloody fist. His breath steamed as he panted from the exertion of battle. Blood and spittle dripped from his beard; he turned his gore-blasted face to the heavens. Unsteady on his feet, he staggered from the tangle of corpses marking the crucible of the fight and searched above for even the smallest sign of God’s favor for this victory—a rent in the clouds, a finger of light from the celestial realm, something. But he saw only a limitless expanse of deep gray, as solid as arctic ice. Tears welled in his eyes; he raised his sword hilt-first to the sky.
“C-Christ!” he said, voice cracking. Then, louder: “Christ!”
“He can’t hear you,” someone behind him purred in answer.
The man whirled.
From the same welter of the dead, a woman arose. A one-handed daughter of Odin whose left wrist ended in an iron fist made to hold a shield. Blood clotted like rubies in the links of her mail hauberk—hacked and ragged now that this spear-shattering had run its course.
“Úlfrún Hakonardottir,” the man said, lips peeling back in a snarl of hate.
The woman, Úlfrún, leaned heavily on the long oak haft of an axe. With her good hand, she drew off the ruin of her helmet, its crown ruptured along the seams where it took the blow that should have killed her. Úlfrún tossed it aside. Sodden hair the color of wood ash uncoiled and fell around her shoulders. “Heimdul Oath-breaker,” she growled.
“Woman, you have more lives than a cat! I saw old Guthrum deal you a mortal wound.”
“That? A child’s blow,” Úlfrún said. “Your Guthrum thought to spare me, and he died for it.”
“Then he sits in a place of glory by Christ’s right hand, alongside the saints and martyrs.”
She gave a bark of laughter like the sharp grate of stones. “Does that lie bring you comfort, Oath-breaker?”
“I stand, having girded about my loins the belt of truth,” Heimdul said. He cracked the bones in his neck and rolled the tension from his shoulders, then struck the flat of his sword against the heel of his hobnailed boot, knocking the rime of bloody ice loose from its edge. “And having donned the breastplate of justice.”
Úlfrún hefted her axe, its bearded blade forged from Spanish steel; hard iron straps crisscrossed the haft. “Let those be the rags you and all your dogs wear, who sit outside the doors of Valhöll and beg for scraps off the Allfather’s board! You turned your back on him! Tore down his altars, burned the sacred groves, and for what? So your wretched king might have his crown blessed by some cross-kissing fool in Rome? No, Heimdul Oath-breaker, you will know truth soon enough!”
“Heathen bitch! There is only one Father of All, and he’s not the one-eyed fairy tale we tell children! Odin? I spit on your Odin! I piss on your Odin! I am a son of God, sworn to the White Christ!” Quicker than his brutish frame belied, Heimdul struck. He swept his jagged-edged blade up in a vicious backhand blow.
Úlfrún did not flinch. She did not shy away from the whistling blade that sought to end her life. Instead, she stepped in and caught it on the knuckles of her iron fist. The sword sparked, rebounded; the clangor of impact reverberated. Far to the north, from among the cloud-wreathed peaks, came the echo of thunder as if in answer. Úlfrún tilted her head back, listening to something only she could hear; she bared her teeth in a fierce smile that did nothing to soften the hard planes of her face. “I told you,” she said, lowering her gaze to meet his. Her blue eyes gleamed with a fey and terrible light. “Your Nailed God can’t hear you.”
And Úlfrún Hakonardottir—Úlfrún of the Iron Hand—came on like a tempest. She fought like the she-Wolf that was her namesake, her guile and finesse tempering the savage spirit woven by Fate into the skein of her life. And like that of the she-Wolf, the strength in her lean muscles and corded sinews was no less than that of any man. The blade of her axe flashed in autumn’s pale light, and she rained blow after furious blow down upon the guard of her enemy. A rush of breath, a ringing crash, and the rasp and slither of steel on iron were the only sounds as she batted aside Heimdul’s clumsy riposte and very nearly took off his head. A hasty backward leap was all that saved him.
Úlfrún gave him a moment’s respite—long enough to feel the cold hands of the Norns as they gathered together the loose strands of his life, their shears poised. He stood in the shadow of his own doom and could not see it. It was writ plain in the deep notches scoring his sword, in the sweat that burned his eyes, and in the tremble of his limbs. So close was he to the brink that he lacked even the breath to call upon his Nailed God. Úlfrún took all this in with a single glance … and laughed.
That sound, the stinging rebuke of a woman, struck Heimdul as no physical blow could. It bit through mail and leather and bored into his skin. It slipped past muscle and bone; as it lanced the naked heart of his fragile manhood, Úlfrún saw Heimdul wince. In that moment she reckoned he had thought for neither the love of his White Christ nor for divine salvation. Could he even recall the admonitions of his so-called Lord to turn the other cheek or to love one’s enemies? No. Úlfrún watched as the Northman’s face suffused with rage. No amount of forgiveness would suffice. Only blood would mend this hurt. Her blood. He bared his teeth in a savage grin. Whitened knuckles cracked as he grasped his sword hilt in both hands. Then, with an incoherent cry, Heimdul charged.
Úlfrún met him halfway. She did not seek to test her strength against his, for he was like an enraged bull stung to madness. Rather, she sidestepped, dancing away from a blow that would surely have split her from crown to crotch had it connected; she pivoted on the balls of her feet as Heimdul lumbered past. Before he could turn, before he could recover, Úlfrún’s axe flashed in a tight arc; it connected high, near the base of his skull. Bone crunched. Blood spurted. And Heimdul’s cry turned to a rasping gurgle. His sword dropped from hands gone slack and nerveless.
Úlfrún loosed her grip on the haft of the axe.
But even with her blade lodged deep in his spine the stricken Northman continued on, dragging his feet a handful of steps through the churned and blood-spattered snow. He tottered, half-turned, and finally crumpled to the ground like a child’s marionette, its strings clipped.
Silence returned.
The dull echo of thunder rolled down from the north.
Úlfrún exhaled, then, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She staggered over to Heimdul’s body and grasped the butt of her axe with her good hand. Úlfrún worked it back and forth; then, placing one foot on the back of the slain man’s head, she wrenched the blade free.
Grunting with effort, she struck him again. And again. With each strike came the slaughterhouse sound of butchery—the popping of gristle and snapping of tendons, the soft squelch of bloody tissue parting beneath the edge of her axe, the rasp of splintered bone on steel as she drew it forth again; on the third blow, Heimdul’s head came free from his corpse.
Úlfrún stooped and caught it up by its mane of blood-matted hair. “Odin!” she roared, brandishing her foe’s severed head toward the northern horizon. “Odin! Look here! Look…”
She reeled, a sudden sick weariness robbing her of strength. The clouds overhead boiled and throbbed; the evergreen trees around her swayed like supple maidens, dancing to a tune none could hear. On the field where slayer met slayer, only the slain remained … and they, too, soughed and sighed before her blurring vision—a sea of red and white, of flesh and blood and riven mail, whose steel-edged combers threatened to break above her.
“O-Odin!”
Úlfrún of the Iron Hand took a dozen steps before the sun’s pale light suddenly dimmed. She sank down onto the crust of snow, then toppled to the side with Heimdul’s hair yet caught in her fingers. She lay still, and like a soothing coverlet the darkness rolled over her.
How long she lay there, she could not say. Time had no meaning. A minute, a day, a year, a lifetime—all were one to her, but the world spun and the wind sighed and far away, she heard the murmur of thunder like the war drums of Ásgarðr. Inexorably, Úlfrún felt life creep back into her limbs. She flexed her frozen extremities, moving muscle and sinew despite innumerable agonizing pinpricks, willing her fingers to relinquish their hold on the dead man’s hair. Slowly, she rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. Night had fallen, and eerie green lights flickered through rips in the clouds.
With a start, she realized she was not alone.
Úlfrún bolted upright, her hand clawing for a weapon. A sudden sharp pain kindled in the stump of her wrist; though it had been years, the memory of the crippling blow that parted her hand from her body was strong enough to wrench a gasp from between clenched teeth. She snarled through the pain.
An ominous presence stood near, scarce illuminated by the guttering emerald light seeping down from the heavens. It bore the shape of a man, though hunched and as twisted as the staff he leaned upon; the stranger was clad in a voluminous cloak with a slouch hat pulled low. A single malevolent eye gleamed from the utter darkness within.
Úlfrún bit back a curse. She knew him; she’d known him since childhood, since he’d picked her from the others and set her upon the path to greatness. She had called, and he had come. The Grey Wanderer; the Raven-God; Lord of the Gallows; the shield-worshipped kinsman of the Æsir. “I have harrowed the earth with their blood, Allfather,” she said. “The blood of these Christ-lovers and oath-breakers!”
A chuckle, low and cruel, escaped the stranger’s throat. “Niðings, they are. Wretched and depraved. The minions of the White Christ infest this Miðgarðr like vermin.” His voice was harsh and rasping. “But the hour of their doom draws near.
“When the years tally | nine times nine times nine,
again, and war-reek | wafts like dragon breath;
when Fimbulvetr | hides the pallid sun,
the monstrous Serpent | shall writhe in fury.”
Úlfrún rocked back on her haunches. “It is time?”
“It is long past time, child of Man,” the stranger said. “Gather the úlfhéðnar and the berserkir, the sons of the Wolf and the sons of the Bear, and make your way to the land of the Raven-Geats. The White Christ will send his own champion, and there you must join in battle against him. But be ready,” the stranger admonished. “Watch for the Wolf to devour the moon, and wait for the Serpent’s coils to shake the earth! Only then will what you seek be within your grasp!”
“Sárklungr,” Úlfrún replied in an awed whisper.
“Aye, the mighty Wound-Thorn! Forged in the dark fires of the Dwarf-realm, Niðavellir, and given to your kinsman Sigfroðr the Volsung to avenge the dragon-slaying of his people. It rests, even now, beneath Lake Vänern’s waves.
“From the depths a barrow | rises through the water,
the stone-girdled hall | of Aranæs, where dwells
Jörmungandr’s spawn, | the Malice-Striker.
Its dread bones rattle | and herald an end.
“Fetch the blade forth, Daughter of Strife! Drag it from the dragon’s lifeless skull and bring it against this champion of the White Christ! Tear him asunder! Peel the flesh from his spine and hack through his ribs! Haul the lungs from his riven corpse! And let his blood call down upon this Nailed God’s rabble the doom of Ásgarðr!”
“Let it make an end of them, once and for all,” Úlfrún said through gritted teeth as she clambered to her feet. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and ere its echo could fade the Grey Wanderer had disappeared. She was alone.
Úlfrún of the Iron Hand staggered over to where her axe lay propped on the rigid corpse of Heimdul Oath-breaker. “Soon,” she muttered, her breath steaming in the cold. “Soon, all this will be over.”
2
THE LAND OF THE RAVEN-GEATS, ON THE NORTH SHORE OF LAKE VÄNERN EARLY SPRING IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1218
Torches flared and guttered, casting a thin orange glow over the procession as it moved through stands of ash and oak. Thrice-nine men and women wound their way down from the fortress-crowned heights of Hrafnhaugr—that keel-shaped bluff men called Raven Hill. They walked in ominous silence. No cortege for wedding or funeral was this, for neither flute nor drum nor voices raised in gladness or mourning set their pace. Only the jangle of war-harness and the creak of worn leather; each was clad in the barbaric splendor of a bygone age, in ancient mail of bronze and iron, in wolf skins and skulls, in girdles of brazen scale and pectorals of hammered copper. The pale flesh of the north was lost beneath swirling tattoos done in cinder and woad, beneath streaks and daubs of lampblack and ash that gave them a peculiar cast—more beast than human. Black-nailed hands cradled axes and sheathed swords, or clutched at the feather-hung shafts of short stabbing spears.
They followed a path that brought them down near the water’s edge, to a ramshackle dock where a small boat waited, tied fast to the timber pilings. The shoreline, here, formed a natural bight—a deep bay called Skærvík where the black waters of Lake Vänern lapped at the steep, snow-clad flank of Raven Hill. As they approached the dock, the men and women parted to allow one of their number to shuffle forward. This figure was smaller than the others and swathed from crown to calf in the pelt of an immense gray wolf, its skull still attached. The blue eyes that glared out from beneath the beast’s heavy brow were sullen, angry.
The eldest woman present, hale and silver-haired, a shield-maiden in her youth whose skin bore more scars than wrinkles, stepped up to the smaller figure. “Dísa Dagrúnsdottir!” she said, her voice hard as flint. “The Fates have called you forth. They bid you take your place in the shadow of the Hooded One. Do you accept this charge?”
Eyes blazed from beneath the wolf’s skull; the smaller figure said nothing.
“Do you accept?” thundered the old woman, scowling.
And Dísa Dagrúnsdottir, who would enter her sixteenth year with the next new moon, drew herself up to her full height and shrugged free of the ancient beast’s pelt—which stank of sweat, and smoke, and old blood. Beneath, she wore a long black tunic, belted at the waist and heavy with runic embroidery worked in silver thread. Though small and wiry, she had the sharp, hungry eyes of a raptor. Like the other women present, Dísa’s right cheek bore the tattoo of a raven; it marked her as a daughter of an ancient bloodline, a sisterhood as old as the foundations of Hrafnhaugr itself. Dísa flicked her head, causing rune-carved fetishes of bone woven into her black hair to click together like impatient thoughts.
“Do you accept?”
Dísa’s thin lips peeled back in a snarl that spoke less of the fire of youth than of a long-cherished dream denied. Her sharp breath steamed.
“I do.”
The old woman stared at Dísa for a long and uncomfortable moment, her seamed face an unreadable mask. Finally, she nodded. “Then go, and prove yourself worthy.”
The old woman stepped aside.
Glowering, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir brushed past her and stalked to the end of the dock. She sprang into the boat and arrayed herself on a bench in the bow. The old woman gestured; two from their number, a man and a woman, followed Dísa. The man clambered aboard and ran out the oars even as the woman untied the ropes holding the boat fast to the dock and shoved off; in the last possible instant, she leapt aboard and took her place at the steering tiller.
No words of farewell passed Dísa’s lips; she stared daggers at the spine-rigid old woman as the oars bit into the dark breast of Skærvík and the boat shot away, the creak of wood, the hiss of water, and the guttural whuff of the oarsman’s breath the only sounds.
And slowly, the boat vanished into the murky night.
A man came to stand alongside the old woman. Heavyset, his chestnut beard shot through with silver, he thrust his hands into his gold-threaded girdle and rocked back on his heels. “If the Hooded One rejects her, I might yet be persuaded to find a place for her in my household. What say you, Sigrún?”
The old woman, Sigrún, glanced sidelong at the man. Hreðel, he was called; the torque of twisted gold he wore around his bull neck marked him as a man of consequence. For all that he was master of Hrafnhaugr, and her chieftain, Sigrún had known Hreðel since he was a lad—soft, sleepy-eyed Hreðel, who drank too much and worried too much and coddled his only son the way southern matrons coddle their daughters. “Will you and your boy share her, then?”
Hreðel frowned. “Don’t be crass. I make the offer in good faith. She has no mother, her father is dead, but my lad, Flóki, has taken a shine to her. If she returns—”
“If she returns,” Sigrún said, nostrils flaring, “and the mantle of priestess is not hers, then she will have no place among the Daughters of the Raven.”
“Surely you would not exile your own granddaughter?”
Sigrún turned her head; her fierce gaze pierced and held Hreðel like a huntsman’s spear. “Exile? No, Hreðel, if the Hooded One sends her back in dishonor, nothing as fragile as kinship will save her. If she fails, that daft girl dies by my hand.”
* * *
THE PROW OF THE BOAT surged in time with the oarsman’s strokes. Overhead, stars peeked through jagged rents in the clouds; the night grew old. Soon, dawn would stain the eastern sky, and where would she be? Dísa sat in silence, contemplating the answer as the far shore drew nearer—looming like an ominous prophecy she could not escape. Would dawn find her a slave? Or would she even live to see the sun’s rise?
In one fist, Dísa clutched a smooth stone bearing a deeply graven rune—Dagaz. She bore its twin inked into the flesh of her shoulder, done by her father’s own hand when she was but an infant. That rune … this stone, these were the foundations of her doom.
Like the sacred runes, the Daughters of the Raven numbered twenty-four. Never more and never less; drawn from the ancestral families who founded Hrafnhaugr, the Daughters each bore a tattooed rune corresponding to the first letter of their name. The rune was how the Fates decided who among the Daughters would serve as priestess to the Hooded One, who was the Tangled God’s immortal herald, and the law-speaker and protector of Hrafnhaugr.
Dísa recalled the anticipation, the fear that crackled through the village a week past, when hunters found the old priestess—a crone called Kolgríma—dead near the mouth of that ravine they called the Scar. As the eldest of the Daughters of the Raven, it fell upon Sigrún, Dísa’s own grandmother, to oversee the selection of a new priestess. It was, Dísa thought, a very simple matter: Sigrún gathered the other twenty-three Daughters together by the Raven Stone at the center of the village. She dispatched a nimble youth to shimmy up the face of the Stone and retrieve from its niche a sealed clay pot. For fifty-eight years, this pot had rested in the carved recess at the crown of the stone, placed there when old Kolgríma had taken up the mantle of priestess. It was light, hollow, its surface scoured and pitted by the elements. Gingerly, the youth passed it down to her grandmother.
As Dísa and the other Daughters watched, Sigrún smashed the pot against the side of the Raven Stone and from the shards drew forth the graven rock the young woman now held in her hand. Her rune, Dagaz. And in a twinkling, Dísa’s saw her hopes dashed. She did not wish to serve the Hooded One. The mantle she wanted most was that of shieldmaiden, to raid the Norse and the Danes for cattle and gold, to wield sword and spear against the enemies of the Raven-Geats; she wanted her name spoken in awe as much as she wanted to draw the eye of blessed Freyja, who had first choice from among the slain heroes of the ages. But no. The Gods had decided her fate in an instant, when this flat rune-carved river rock peeked forth from shards of dark clay, from the remains of a pot that had sat in a niche for decades. She—
The keel of the boat scraped the rocky shingle that was their destination. Dísa started at the sound. A single lamp burned on a post near the water’s edge. The girl exhaled as the woman in the stern left the tiller and came to her side.
“It is time, cousin,” she said, placing a reassuring hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. Like Dísa, the woman had black, fetish-hung hair and a raven tattoo on her high-boned cheek. A white scar bisecting the bridge of her nose, twice broken, did nothing to soften the hard planes of her features. She’d known Odin’s weather, and Dísa knew jealousy.
“Eager to get shut of me, Auða?” Dísa bridled at her cousin’s touch. Shrugging off her hand, she stood and vaulted over the side of the boat. The lake was shallow, here, and its icy water lapped at her ankles. “Go, then, and leave me to it!” Dísa slapped at the boat’s hull and tried to push it off the shingle, but to no avail. Flustered, she spat and made to turn away. Auða leaned down from the prow and caught her arm. Iron fingers dragged her back around.
“Go to him like this, with an anger-filled heart,” the older woman hissed, “and he will send you back shorter by a head. Do you understand? These tantrums end now, or they will be the end of you.”
The man at the oars, who was Hrútr, Auða’s bedmate, ducked his head and looked away.
Dísa said nothing for a moment; she stared at her feet, at the foam-flecked pebbles of the shingle and the dark waters splashing and ebbing over them. Her shoulders trembled. “I do not want this, Auða,” she said, her voice hoarse with pent-up resentment. “The old hag sends me to live a thrall’s life, and death!”
“And more the fool you are if you believe that,” Auða replied. “You think this is Sigrún’s doing? That she placed your rune in a jar a generation ago, when she was but a girl herself? Do you not see the hand of the Gods in this, Dísa? They’ve chosen you, singled you out for greatness … or for failure. If you go to your death it’s only because you did not prove yourself worthy of their gift.”
“Gift? Call it what it is, cousin: slavery! The Gods have chained me to the ankle of the Hooded One! I will be no better than one who lives and dies in obscurity!” Dísa knotted her hands into fists; she wanted to smash something, to vent her rage before it filled her throat and choked the life from her. She wanted to scream. “Where is the worth in that? Where is the glory?”
“In the Hooded One’s shadow, cousin, there is no room for the obscure. In her day, men from Uppsala to Jutland feared Kolgríma’s name. Your name will spread even farther. You have my word on it,” Auða said.
“How?”
The older woman seized a handful of Dísa’s dark hair, and gave her a playful shake. “It begins by not standing here whining like a spoiled child.”
Dísa drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She nodded to Auða, though a hundred more questions boiled around in the cauldron of her skull. Questions like: why did men fear Kolgríma? Dísa knew her as a doddering old crone who fell to an ignominious death. How had her name spread? How would her own spread, as one poised to become little more than a handmaiden to the inscrutable Hooded One? Dísa had enough inborn wisdom to know her questions would find no answers, here. Not with Auða. She glanced over her shoulder at the lamp-lit pole, its crest carved with a stylized eye—the sigil of her soon-to-be master; beyond, she could see the beginnings of a stone-paved path beneath a mantle of snow. It led inland … but to where? To what? Glory? Death? Immortality? Or mere servitude until the weight of her years caused her to stumble along a well-worn trail and fall into obscurity and a shallow grave?
“Maybe you’re right, cousin,” Dísa said, turning back to face Auða. “Maybe I am a spoiled child. But maybe I am only angry because I would at least have liked to have had a hand in deciding my own destiny.”
“Wouldn’t we all.” Auða reached down against the strakes and came up with a cloth-covered basket that contained Hrafnhaugr’s offerings to the Hooded One—slices of smoked meat and fish, barley bread and hard cheese, dried apples, flasks of last year’s mead, bits of silver and gold, and scraped parchments bearing a litany of ills that needed to be addressed, from boundary disputes to blood feuds. Dísa took the basket and set it safely ashore. “Go now, cousin, and come back in the Hooded One’s favor.”
The two women’s eyes met; a look of knowing, of understanding passed between them, and then Dísa put her shoulder into it and shoved the boat’s keel off the shingle. She watched as Hrútr backed water; she watched her cousin’s face, a glimmer of white in the snow-flecked darkness. She watched it fade into the night.
“Or don’t come back at all,” Dísa finished for her, in a voice that did not carry. She exhaled, then, her breath steaming, and turned. It was time to sort out her fate. Time to rid herself of the worry of not knowing. Nodding to herself, she slipped her rune stone into a pouch at her waist and caught up the basket. Striding to the head of the path, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir made her way inland.
* * *
SHE WALKED HALF A LEAGUE, ascending along the path through snow-clad trees and around great boulders. This trail was not unknown to her; two years before, she had followed Jarl Hreðel’s son, Flóki, up this way, to see with her own eyes the boundary between their world and the Elder World. An ancient compact promised death to any who crossed it, save the priestess of the Hooded One. Only she could approach him, only she could look upon him, only she could speak to him. As far as Dísa knew, the Hooded One never set foot in Hrafnhaugr—despite being its protector. None alive, save Kolgríma, had ever laid eyes upon him. There were stories, of course. Jarl Hreðel boasted he saw him as a boy, tall and forbidding; Auða claimed she saw him near the bridge over the Hveðrungr River, at the edge of their territory—a shadowy figure wearing antlers, his face like naked bone; a dozen others shared the same tale. All save Sigrún. That old crow kept silent, though hers was the last generation to fight beyond Hrafnhaugr’s borders—surely she had laid eyes upon him?
Dísa wondered: was he truly beyond mortal reckoning, as the legends professed, a deathless úlfhéðnar, grim and inscrutable? Or was “Hooded One” merely a title borne by a succession of up-country brawlers, a mantle embroidered by skalds and passed from father to son? With no little trepidation, she wondered if the duties of priestess included bearing sons. Regardless, it was an arrangement as old as Hrafnhaugr itself.
The boundary stone lay at the crest of the hill, in a clearing that was open to the sky. Dísa paused and looked around her. Dawn was still more than an hour away. A heavy pall of cloud lay over the earth, and fat flakes of snow swirled down to hiss in the greasy orange flames of the remaining torch. Behind, Dísa could see the waters of the bay called Skærvík and beyond, the faint twinkle of lights atop Raven Hill; ahead, the path plunged into a deep valley. She approached the boundary stone—a waist-high eidolon that bore the faint suggestion of a squatting figure, perhaps a troll or some manner of landvættir. Old offering pots lay at its feet, weathered and broken; scraps of rune-etched wood and old parchment were jammed into its grasping hands. For an instant, Dísa wondered what would happen if she simply dropped her basket here and walked away, if she refused the honor of serving the Hooded One. Come back in his favor or not at all. How long would she survive in the wilds as one of the vargr, as an outlaw? Not long enough, she decided.
Dísa clutched her basket tighter. Then, holding her breath, she stepped over the boundary and into the shadow of the Elder World.
Nothing happened.
She exhaled.
There was no shift to her senses, no feeling of dislocation. The sky did not change, nor the ground underfoot. Indeed, none of the things Flóki had warned her about came to pass—no lightning, no thunder, no guardian spirit demanding tribute, no test of worthiness. Merely the wind off the lake and flakes of snow drifting from one side to the other with apparent ease.
“Flóki, you lying wretch.” The beads in her hair jangled as she shrugged and continued on her way. Down into the valley she went; but for the poles with their guttering torches, she’d soon have been lost. Despite the thin light, Dísa picked her way with exaggerated care, mindful of eroded ruts, tangling roots, and scree. A quarter of an hour later, she heard the gurgle and splash of water, and caught the strong, earthy stench of a mire. Beneath it was a darker scent—one she had known as a child, when her father would come back from hunting: the smells of smoke, dried blood, and offal.
Her destination lay at the bottom of the valley, at the heart of a string bog that drained through crevice and cleft into the dark waters of Lake Vänern. The natural path ended and a corduroy of logs led to a small hillock. Torches lit the approach; more flared at the crest of the hillock, where an ancient longhouse stood like a sentinel from a bygone era.
Though largely lost to the cloak of night, enough ambient torchlight spilled over the structure to give Dísa a hint as to its size and grandeur. Great carved posts of age-blackened timber upheld a roof of mossy shingle, like the scales of a great serpent. Smoke leaked from the gables, and from the clerestory atop the roof. Dísa found her gaze drawn to the porch, made by a pair of beams overhanging the gable, their ends hewn into the shapes of a dragon and a snarling wolf; beneath this, a door yawned.
The young woman shivered, clutched her basket as though it were a talisman with the power to protect. A cold sweat of fear slithered down her spine, taking with it her resolve; Dísa felt eyes on her. Malicious. Unseen.
You belong here, she told herself. You belong here. You are the priestess of the Hooded One. Thus, by tamping down her fear of the unknown and shoring up her courage, she was able to place one foot on the corduroy path. Then the other. Again, nothing leaped from the darkness to challenge her. Shadows danced in the flickering torchlight, and the feelings of scrutiny did not abate.
Slowly, she walked to the foot of the hillock. Stakes and spears thrust up from the damp loam around her; some flew tattered banners from clans that had long since vanished from the North. Others bore grisly reminders of the Hooded One’s writ to protect the lands of the Raven-Geats: skulls of naked bone alongside severed heads in various stages of decay. She could smell the violence, like the musk from some feral beast that rose from the corpses that lay half-buried in the bog—smears of whitish-blue flesh in the dank undergrowth, rusting helmets and armor, rotting shields, broken blades.
And looking about, Dísa apprehended the truth: it would be no mere man she served.
You belong here. You are the priestess of the Hooded One. For a moment, surrounded by the sights and smells of death, that thought brought a crushing sense of despair to Dísa. You belong here. The Gods have decreed it. Till the end of your days you will be a creature of shadows, a servant who toils for the Tangled God’s herald. You will bear witness to the inhuman things that snuffle at the threshold of the world so the folk of Hrafnhaugr can sleep soundly at night. But Dísa shook her head, beads ticking, and shrugged off her seeming hopelessness. No! “I will write my own destiny,” she said aloud, her voice profaning the eerie silence. And with a newfound sense of purpose, she placed one slender foot on the lowest step leading up to the longhouse porch …
And stopped. Her spine went rigid with fear. For behind her, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir heard a cold and humorless chuckle, as harsh as the fall of stones into an open grave. The voice that accompanied it came from no human throat:
“Will you now? And what will this destiny say, eh? That you died a lost little bird, bound for the stewpots? Nár, after I skin you and joint you, there won’t even be a stringy morsel left.”
Copyright © 2020 by Scott Oden
