"I know what happens," she said. "I've been in it. It keeps everything it's given. If it dies bound, the bond tears, and everything it's taken from me goes with it — and maybe everything else too. Maybe I end like my mother. Fine." Her voice did not shake. She had practiced this in the dark for two nights. "Then the oath ends with no one left to hold it. Then Kari never carries it. Then Thorgils has his bone and Steinunn's children have their grain and the green field can freeze for all I care. Seven generations of us have paid for that warm water. Let it end with me."
Nobody spoke. Snow ticked down out of a white sky.
Sverrir walked across the yard and stood between her and the stone.
He did not grab her arm. He did not touch her at all. He only stood there, with his back to the wyrm and his face to her, close enough that the axe-head, if she lifted it, would have had to go through him first.
"No," he said.
"Get out of the way."
"I stopped you once," he said quietly, "and you hate me for it. I'll stop you again, and you can hate me twice. I'll carry that. I won't carry this."
"It's not your oath — "
"It's my valley. I sit in its high seat." He turned, then, not to her, but to his uncle. "Thorgils. I swore to you a carcass at Midwinter. I can't give it without breaking an older oath that isn't mine to break, so I'll break mine to you instead, before witnesses, and pay for it. Take the scales and the fang. Take my arm-rings and my sword. And take me. A year at Grimsfjord, in your boats and your byres, as your man, until the rest of the debt is worked off. Next summer Varmdal sends you the first of the herring, if the herring comes."
Thorgils stared at him. "My sister's son," he said. "My bondsman."
"Your oath-breaker," said Sverrir. "Make me pay for the smaller oath, Uncle, so this valley can keep the larger. That's the only honor I have to offer you."
For a long while the big man said nothing. He looked at the heap of scales, and at the old Lawspeaker on his bench with his ruined arm, and at the wyrm on its stone, and last of all at Eydis, still holding the axe.
"You'd have done it," he said to her. It was not a question.
"Yes."