Eydis stood up and turned and put her hand on it.
She did not think. She did what she had done once before, barefoot in the snow after a pyre, except that this time she did not curse it. She laid her blistered palm flat against the ridged scales of its chest, just below the chains, where it was hot as a hearthstone. And the hook in her opened like a door.
She was in the wyrm.
Not in its body. In its keeping. It was like stepping from the dark into a long, low, smoke-hung hall lit by a hundred small fires, and every fire was a memory, and none of them were the wyrm's. A woman she did not know laughing at a wedding. A child's hand in a stream. A man's face, close, in lamplight. Seven generations of Varmdal's bonded had fed this creature their brightest moments, one each Midwinter, and it had not eaten them. It had kept them. It lay among them and dreamed them, over and over, the way an old man by the fire turns a single good memory over in the dark.
And among them — close, recent, still burning hot — she saw a bench by a hearth, and a small girl crying, and a woman's hands guiding short fingers through three strands of pale hair. *The braid will wait for your fingers to grow.*
She could see it. She could not have it. It was like looking at her own face through ice.
Beneath all the little fires, under everything, was the fear. It was very old. It was the fear of a creature that had lain down on a warm stone to sleep, once, long ago, when a starving woman came over the mountain and asked it to stay — and had woken, later, to find iron across its chest. It did not understand axes. It understood that the ones who fed it dreams had come in the night to make it stop.
*I know,* Eydis thought at it, with no idea whether it could hear. *I know. I came to make you stop too.*
The light in its throat went down.
Slowly, the wyrm lowered itself onto all fours on the stone. It folded its wings. It put its head down along its forelegs, close to her hand, and lay breathing, and the fear went out of the hook a little at a time, like water draining from a hull.
When she took her hand away and turned around, the whole of Varmdal was standing in the yard with torches, staring at her.
---
Arngrim lived. Thorhalla dressed his arm with cold moss and honey and linen soaked in snowmelt, and dosed him with henbane until he stopped making the sound. The burns ran from his wrist to his shoulder and down his ribs. He would keep the arm, the seeress said, if the wound stayed clean. He would not lift an axe with it again.
Geirmund came to the old man's bedside at dawn, gray in the face, and knelt.