On the stone lay the wyrm.
It lay as it had always lain, as it had lain on every day of Eydis's life: curled on itself with its head along its forelegs and its wings folded tight against its ridged back like a cloak drawn close. It was no larger than a yearling colt. Its scales were the color of charcoal gone cold, heavy and ridged as the bark of an old pine, and snow did not settle on them; the flakes touched and became beads of water and ran away. Across its chest three chains of black iron, each link as thick as a child's wrist, were bound and pinned into the rock with spikes the length of a forearm. In the torchlight it might have been carved there. Traders at the summer markets had sometimes asked who had made the statue.
Sótr, the old songs named it. Soot. The people of Varmdal mostly called it the Sleeper, when they called it anything.
Eydis's mother had called it nothing at all, in the end, because by the end she had not remembered that it existed.
They made their circle around the stone, torches high, breath smoking. Arngrim came through the crowd with Hervor's axe in his hands, the long-hafted bearded axe that hung all year above the high seat and came down only for oaths. He was a broad old man, white-bearded to the chest, wrapped in dark furs that made him look larger still. He had been her father's friend. He had wept at her mother's pyre. He did not weep now. His face was stone like the stone.
He lifted the axe high above his head, so that the blade stood up against the falling snow, and he shouted into the night in the old way, the word that opened every oath and closed it:
"Hold!"
Every person in the circle held. That was the law. Breath, body, tongue — held, so that the dead who had witnessed the oath might speak into the silence if they had any claim, and if they did not, the oath was ended.
The silence stretched. Snow fell into it.
Then the wyrm's eye opened.
It did not flutter. It snapped open the way a shutter is thrown back, and behind the lid was fire: a yellow-orange glow like the heart of a forge when the bellows are worked, split down the middle by a black pupil narrow as a knife's edge. It was looking at her.
Something behind Eydis's breastbone pulled.
It was like a hook set in meat. It was like a hand closing on a rope she had not known was tied inside her. And in the same instant, unbidden, her mother's face rose in her mind — young, laughing, the way she had looked before — and Eydis felt the face being looked at. Felt it turned over the way a trader turns a coin to test it with his teeth.
She did not decide to move. She was moving, her right fist clenched so hard her nails cut her palm, three long strides across the trampled snow toward the stone and the open eye —
A hand closed on her arm above the elbow and stopped her as though she had run to the end of a tether.