And there was the boathouse.
Gray light. The smell of tar and wet rope and the sea. The storm had blown itself out in the hour before dawn and left the fjord heaving and sullen, and her father was lying on the boathouse floor under a sail, and she was sitting beside him because she could not yet do anything else. And Sverrir was sitting on an upturned bucket by the door with his hands open on his knees. He had rowed out alone into that storm, when no one else would launch a boat, and he had rowed all night up and down the skerries with a lantern until he found the body caught in a drift-net, and he had brought it home so that she would have something to burn. His palms were raw meat from the oars. He was shaking with cold. He had not said a word in an hour.
Then he said, *I'm sorry. I couldn't bring him back alive. I tried.*
And she had got up and crossed the boathouse floor and knelt and taken both his ruined hands in hers, and held them, and the light had come up gray and then gold through the gaps in the planking, and she had known — the way you know the ice will hold before you step on it — that she loved this man. Not had come to tolerate. Not had made the best of. Loved.
She saw it all, whole and bright and close, as she had not seen it in two years. That was the cruelty of it. The wyrm held it up to the lamp so she could see exactly what it was taking.
She felt her hand start to close the door.
It was not a decision. It was the same thing that had moved her across the snow nine nights ago with her fist clenched — the animal in her that would not let a thing be taken. She felt the door begin to swing. She felt the wyrm feel it, and pause, and wait.
*Don't hold the door, child.*
Behind her, Kari. Fourteen, with a dog across his feet at night. Steinunn's children with their bone broth. The green field black with frost. Arngrim's arm.
She let go.
It was very quick after that. The boathouse went out like a lamp. Something warm and heavy left her, and the hook behind her breastbone eased, and eased, until it was only a thread again, and the wyrm beneath her palm let out a long breath that smelled of smoke and summer. Its eyes closed. Its wings drew in tight along its back. Its head sank onto its forelegs.
From the seams at the foot of the stone, steam began to curl up into the starlight, thin at first, and then thick and white. In the channel the water started, faintly, to sound again.
Eydis took her hand away.
She stood there a long while. She knew something was gone. She could feel the place, smooth and cool, a large place, larger than any of the others. She turned around slowly, and looked at the three faces in the torchlight — the seeress, her brother, her husband — and her eyes came to rest on Sverrir and stayed there, and she knew, with a cold drop in her stomach, that whatever it had taken had been about him.