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He left three days after Midwinter with his uncle's sledges, wearing a borrowed sword-belt with no sword in it and no rings on his arms. Steinunn went too, with her three children, and two other households, eleven people in all — near a fifth of the valley. Steinunn stopped by the stone on her way out of the yard, her youngest on her hip, and looked at the sleeping wyrm a long moment.
"I don't hate it," she told Eydis. "I want you to know that. I just love my children more than I love Hervor." She hitched the child higher. "Come spring, if there's herring, maybe we'll come back."
"There'll be a place for you," said Eydis, and meant it, and did not know if it was true.
Sverrir said nothing at the gate. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and he went. She watched the sledges go up the white valley until they were dark specks and then nothing, and she did not cry, and she did not wave, and that night in the bed-closet she lay on his side of the bed because it was the warmer.
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The winter did not end because the wyrm slept. It went on, the way winters do.
The bathhouse water came back to scalding within a week, and the fish pond's skin of ice drew back from its edges, and in the green field about a third of the kale put out new leaves from its blackened stalks; the rest was gone. They ate the sheep slowly, one every nine days, and boiled the bones twice. Kari and the younger boys fished the warm outflow where it met the fjord and kept the ice open, and on good days brought back enough codling for broth. In Thorri the old dun mare died, and they ate her too, and Eydis did not go to watch.
Geirmund's sister's baby lived. Geirmund carried split wood to Thorhalla's house every morning until the end of winter, unasked, and stacked it by Arngrim's door.
Arngrim's arm healed hard and twisted, the skin like poured wax. When he could walk again he had Kari help him lift Hervor's axe back to its pegs above the high seat, where Eydis now sat in Sverrir's place because the Thing had not been able to agree on anyone else.
"It came down for an ending," the old man said, looking up at it. "First time in seven generations. It won't come down for one again while I'm alive." He glanced at her sideways. "Nor while you are, I think."
"Don't be sure," said Eydis.
He grunted, and did not argue, and that was a kind of respect.
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