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The fourth night it took Kari's birth. She had been nine, and she knew from the shape of the hole that it had been large and frightening and bright: a long night, her mother's voice, rain. Kari told it to her the next day, sitting on the fence, because he had heard it so often from their father. Eydis had run all the way to Thorhalla's house in the dark without her shoes, he said. Eydis had been the first to hold him after the midwife. Eydis had said he looked like a boiled seal.
She listened to it as she might listen to a saga about people in another valley. When he finished, he was looking at her with his mouth pressed tight.
"You don't remember it at all," he said.
"No."
"You said nine things wasn't much."
"It isn't," she said, and put her arm around him, and he let her, which he had not since he was ten.
The fifth night, she did not sleep. She lay waiting for the moon, and the moon came, and the hook drew — and drew only a little. Something small and warm came loose. She could not even find its edges afterward; the color of a summer afternoon, perhaps, a smell of cut hay. It was the third night it had been small like that. The first two had torn. The last three had only plucked.
She got up and pulled on her cloak and went out into the yard.
There was a half-moon over the eastern ridge and the snow lay blue under it. The stone steamed less than it had a week ago; the ground around it had frozen again into black ruts. The wyrm was awake. She had known it would be. Its eyes made two low coals in the dark.
And someone was standing at the stone with his hand out.
She knew the shape of him before she was close enough to see. He was holding something flat to the wyrm's mouth, and the wyrm took it with surprising delicacy — a twist of the neck, a click of teeth — and swallowed, and lowered its head again.
"What are you doing?" Eydis said.
Sverrir did not startle. He turned and showed her his empty palm, and then the small leather bag at his belt. Salt cod. She could smell it.
"Feeding a wyrm," he said.