"I'd have done the same to a wyrm that ate my mother." He grunted. "But I'd not have married him." He turned back to Sverrir. "A year. Your rings, your sword, and your back. And anyone from this valley who'd rather work for grain at Grimsfjord than starve here can come with my sledges, and I'll feed them through the winter for their labor. That's my price."
"Done," said Sverrir.
He held out his hand. His uncle took it.
Eydis stood in the trampled snow with Hervor's axe hanging from her hands, and found that she could not lift it after all, and that she did not know whether it was because of the weight.
VII
The longest night of the year came down over Varmdal before the middle of the afternoon.
They went out to the stone after full dark, only four of them, because Thorhalla said the giving was not a thing for a crowd: the seeress with her stick, Kari carrying a single torch, Sverrir, and Eydis. The Grimsfjord men were bedded down in the hall. Arngrim lay in Thorhalla's house in a henbane sleep. The sky had cleared, and the cold was the kind that made the snow squeak underfoot and the hairs freeze inside your nose, and above the eastern ridge the stars were so thick they looked like frost on black iron.
The wyrm was waiting. It lay low on the stone with its head on its forelegs, and its eyes, when the torchlight found them, were half-closed and dim, like coals banked for the night.
"Don't choose," Thorhalla said. She stood close, speaking low, her breath smoking between them. "That's what your mother never learned, because she never had it waking. You can't choose what it takes. If you try to hand it something small, it'll pass it by and go looking. Only open the door and stand aside. And when it goes in — " the old woman's hand tightened on her arm — "don't hold the door, child. Whatever it reaches for. If you hold the door, it'll wake again by spring, and hungrier."
"I know."
"You don't. But you will."
Eydis stepped up to the stone. Behind her she heard Kari's breathing, quick and shallow, and Sverrir saying something quiet to him. She took off her mitten and laid her bare hand, still pink and tender from the burns, against the wyrm's chest beneath the chains.
The door opened.
This time she felt it come into her. It moved slowly, unhurried, the way a man walks with a lamp through his own storehouse in winter, lifting this and that and setting it down. She felt it pass over her first iron, and her wedding feast, and a summer day swimming in the warm outflow with Kari on her shoulders. She felt it pause at the night of the pyre and move on. She felt it come to a door in her she had not known was there and push it open.