I.
The shields on the back wall of the hall had been painted when Hervor's grandsons were young, and seven generations of smoke had worn them down to the colors of old bruises: a red gone brown, a green gone to moss, a yellow like the last light on the fjord in the dark months. Eydis had counted them as a child during long winter feasts. Eleven. One for each of the men and women who had come over the mountain with Hervor the Founder and stayed.
Tonight she did not count them. She stood beneath the high ridge of the roof, where the smoke gathered in the rafters like a second, darker ceiling, and watched the torches tremble in the hands of people she had known all her life.
They had come in furs and leathers, everyone in Varmdal who could still walk: the old men with their beards stiff with frost from the crossing between houses, the women with their hoods drawn close, the young men with their jaws set because they did not know what else to do with their faces. The children had been left in the byre-house with Steinunn's eldest daughter. That had been Thorhalla's word. Children should not see what came tonight, the seeress had said, in case it went the way it ought to, and in case it did not.
Nobody spoke. The long hearth had been let burn low, and the only sounds were the hiss of pitch in the torches and the wind fingering the door-planks. Somewhere a dog whined and was hushed.
Sverrir stood at her left shoulder. She could feel him there without looking, the way you feel a wall in the dark. His cloak was the heavy brown wool his mother had woven for him in Grimsfjord, and the round brooch of hammered iron that pinned it caught the torchlight when he breathed. He had trimmed his beard for the rite. That morning he had asked whether she would braid her hair, and she had said she always braided her hair, and he had said nothing more.
She had braided it the way she always did, tight along both sides of her head and loose behind, and afterward she had gone to the forge and beaten a blank of iron flat for no reason but to hear it ring. She had not washed the soot from her face. There were smudges along her cheek and at the line of her jaw. Let them see. Let them all see the dirt on her face tonight.
At the far end of the hall, Arngrim the Lawspeaker lifted his hand.
"It is time," he said.
Eydis and Sverrir turned together, as they had been told to — the founder's blood and the high seat, side by side — and walked the length of the hall between the torches. The people parted for them and fell in behind. She heard the shuffle of boots on packed earth, the creak of leather, and someone, Old Ozur maybe, murmuring the names of the dead under his breath.
Two men dragged the great doors open. Cold came in like water.
Snow was falling on the yard: large, slow flakes, the kind that came on windless nights and settled on everything without a sound. The torches turned it gold as it fell. Beyond the fence the mountains were only a deeper dark against the dark, and the fjord below could not be seen at all, but she could smell it, salt and ice.
And in the middle of the yard, where snow never lay, stood the stone.
It was a drum of gray rock as high as a man's chest and as wide as a cart is long, older than the hall, older than anything in the valley that had been made by hands. Steam crept from the seams at its base, where the warm water rose from under the earth and ran away in its stone-lined channel to the bathhouse and the green field and the fish pond. Hervor had found it so. The songs said that, at least.