"And now I'll never remember half of what I did at all," she said.
He flinched then. She saw it, and she did not take it back. She went inside, and lay down, and did not sleep, and did not hear him come in until nearly dawn.
V
On the sixth day the green field frosted, and the kale that had kept Varmdal in greens through every winter of Eydis's life went limp and black at the edges. The fish pond grew a skin of ice. Kari took to going out to the stone each morning with a basket, because the wyrm, straining against its chains in the night, scraped scales loose against the iron; they lay in the frozen mud like shards of a broken pot, heavy as slate, and he gathered them and stacked them in the smithy without quite knowing why.
On the seventh night, the fear woke her.
It was not her fear. She knew that even as she came up out of sleep with her heart slamming. It was huge and low and animal, and it came up the hook into her chest like smoke up a flue — the fear of a creature that cannot run. She was out of the bed-closet and through the hall before she was properly awake, Sverrir's voice somewhere behind her, and she hit the doors with her shoulder and went out barefoot into the snow.
There were two men at the stone.
One of them was Geirmund. He had a wood-axe, an ordinary splitting axe, and he had already swung it once; she could see the bright scar on the chain where the blade had bitten iron instead of scale. The wyrm was up on its hind legs, wings half-open, as far back on the stone as the chains would let it go. Its jaws were wide. The light inside its throat was rising, yellow to white.
The other man was Arngrim.
The old Lawspeaker was in his nightshirt with a fur thrown over it, his white beard wild, and he had got both hands on the haft of Geirmund's axe and was hanging on it with his whole weight. Geirmund was thirty years younger and he was weeping and shouting at the same time — *my sister's baby, it's coughing blood, you old fool, it's coughing* — and he wrenched, and the old man stumbled, and for a moment the two of them were swung together around the haft directly in front of the wyrm's open mouth.
Arngrim saw it. Eydis watched him see it. He let go of the axe and put both hands flat on Geirmund's chest and shoved, and the young man went sprawling backward into the snow.
The wyrm breathed.
It was not a great gout of flame like the ones in the songs. It was short and dense and terribly bright, a cough of fire, and it caught Arngrim along his right arm and side as he turned away. His fur went up at once. He made a sound Eydis had never heard a man make.
She was there. She did not remember crossing the yard. She threw herself at him and bore him down and rolled him in the snow, beating at the burning fur with her bare hands, and the smell of it — singed hair, scorched wool, worse beneath — filled her throat. Sverrir was there a breath later, dragging the fur off, packing snow against the old man's arm with both hands. Others were coming from the houses with torches. Someone had Geirmund by the collar. Geirmund was not fighting. He was on his knees in the snow staring at Arngrim with his mouth open and the axe lying forgotten beside him.
And above them on the stone the light was rising again in the wyrm's throat.