"I'll pay," he said. "Whatever price the Thing sets. I'll pay it."
Arngrim looked at him for a long time out of the haze of the henbane.
"You'd have made us all liars," he said at last, hoarsely. "For a barrel of barley. You'd have made this whole valley forsworn." He closed his eyes. "But I raised the axe first. Seven nights ago. In front of everyone. I can't blame you for thinking you were finishing what I started." His good hand moved on the blanket. "Go and sit with your sister's child, boy. Pay me in the spring."
Geirmund went out and did not come back to the hall for two days.
Eydis sat with her bandaged hands in her lap. On her tally stick that night she cut nothing, because at moonrise the hook only stirred, and settled, and took nothing at all. Sverrir had not fed it. No one had. The wyrm had simply lain still all night with its head turned toward the hall, and she had felt it there in her, dreaming her mother's hands.
VI
Thorgils Hrafnsson came down out of the pass on the morning of Midwinter with nineteen men on skis and two empty sledges, and Bolli trailing behind them looking as if he wished he had been born in some other valley.
Varmdal met them in the yard. There was nowhere else to meet them; the wyrm was there, and the wyrm was the matter. Thorgils halted his men at the gate and came forward alone, a big gray-bearded man in a bearskin with a sword at his hip and a face weathered to the color of old leather. He had Sverrir's eyes. Eydis had forgotten that, or never noticed. He looked at the wyrm crouched on its stone, and the wyrm looked back at him, and he did not step any closer.
"Nephew," he said.
"Uncle." Sverrir stood before the stone with Eydis beside him. Arngrim had insisted on being carried out on a bench and sat wrapped in furs at the edge of the yard, gray and sweating, his bandaged arm in a sling; Thorhalla stood at his side. "You've had my message."
"I've had a boy reciting riddles at my hearth." Thorgils jerked his chin at Bolli. "The oath was answered. The wyrm wakes. Come and speak of the debt." He spread his hands. "I've come. I've brought sledges. I see a living wyrm, and I see a valley that ate ten barrels of my barley. My people are hungry too, Sverrir. The ice came early on our side. I gave you that grain because I had a buyer in Hedeby who'll pay silver for dragon-bone, and silver buys Danish rye. Tell me where the bone is."
"Chained to the stone," said Sverrir. "Bound to my wife. Under Hervor's oath."
"Your wife." Thorgils looked at Eydis. It was not an unkind look; it was a measuring one. "I heard she refused it."
"It didn't ask," said Eydis.