There was a stir among the Grimsfjord men at the gate. One of them, a lean man with a scarred lip, called out something about Varmdal oaths being as cheap as Varmdal herring, and from the fence Geirmund's friend Hauk called back something worse, and then — so fast that afterward no one could agree on who had moved first — there were men shoving at the gate. A knife came out. Kari, who had been standing too close, was knocked flat into the snow. The scar-lipped man reeled back with a long red gash opened across the back of his hand, and Hauk went down with his eyebrow split to the bone by the pommel of someone's sword.
"*Stop!*"
Sverrir's voice cracked across the yard like ice breaking. Thorgils's was half a breath behind it, roaring at his own men in the same tone, and for a moment the two of them sounded so alike that both sides stopped out of pure confusion. Blood dripped into the snow. Hauk was sitting up, holding his face. The Grimsfjord man was swearing and wrapping his hand in his cloak. Kari got up, white, with snow in his hair.
On the stone, the wyrm had risen. It did not breathe fire. It stood with its wings half-spread and watched.
Thorgils breathed out slowly through his nose.
"That," he said, "is what comes of men with empty bellies and a broken bargain between them. Next time it'll be worse. I didn't come for blood, nephew. I came for what I paid for."
"Then take what we have."
It was Eydis who said it. She turned to Kari and nodded, and the boy ran to the smithy and came back staggering under a basket, and another after it, and tipped them out in the snow at Thorgils's feet: a heap of charcoal-dark scales, heavy as slate, each one ridged like pine bark and edged sharp enough to cut. On top of them, wrapped in a scrap of sailcloth, lay a broken fang as long as a man's hand, which the wyrm had snapped off against the iron two nights ago.
Thorgils crouched and picked up a scale and turned it in his fingers. He tested the edge with his thumb.
"This is something," he admitted. "Not ten barrels. Not half. My buyer wants bone, not chips."
"Then there's one more way," Eydis said.
She walked across the yard to where Arngrim sat on his bench, and she bent and lifted Hervor's axe from where it lay beside him in the snow. It was heavier than she had expected. She turned with it in both hands.
"Kill it," she said. "Today. I'll carry the axe to it myself if the Lawspeaker can't."
Thorhalla said her name sharply. Eydis did not look at her.