Sverrir. He pulled her round to face him. His eyes were dark and very steady, and his voice was low, meant only for her, but in that held silence it carried to every edge of the circle.
"You will not dishonor this."
The wyrm's jaws snapped. The sound was like a trap springing, and from between its teeth burst a shower of orange sparks that flew up into the snow and hissed out one by one in the cold air above their heads.
Thorhalla the seeress stumbled forward out of the circle with one hand clutching the great round brooch on her breast, as if her heart were trying to leave her. Her long gray hair had come loose beneath her fur hat, and her lined face was white.
"The bond! It's waking up!" she gasped.
On the stone, the wyrm rose.
It came up onto its hind legs in one long, terrible motion, claws shrieking on the rock, and the chains across its chest drew taut and sang. Its wings unfolded — wider than Eydis had ever imagined they could be, leathery and black and veined like dead leaves, blotting out the torches behind it. It strained forward against the iron. The spikes groaned in the stone. And it threw back its head and roared into the night, a sound that went through the ground and into the soles of her boots and up through her bones to that hooked place behind her breastbone, where something answered it.
Then every torch in the yard guttered at once, as if a great breath had passed over them, and the dark came down.
II
When the torches were lit again, the wyrm was still standing.
It stood on its hind legs on the stone with its wings half-spread and its head low, and the chains bit into the ridges of its chest. It did not roar again. It breathed. Each breath came out of it in a long smoking rush, and with each one Eydis felt the hook behind her breastbone draw and slacken, draw and slacken, as if the two of them were pulling the same oar and could not find the stroke.
Half the circle had broken. Some had run for the hall, some for their own houses; a torch lay spitting in the snow where someone had dropped it. The rest had drawn back to the fence. Only four people still stood near the stone: Arngrim, with the axe lowered across his body; Thorhalla, one hand still at her brooch; Sverrir; and Eydis, whose arm he still held.
She looked down at his hand. He let go.
"Lawspeaker," Sverrir said. His voice was quite even. "Speak."
Arngrim looked at the wyrm for a long time. Snow gathered on his beard and his eyebrows. When he spoke, it was in the flat voice he used at the Thing for boundary quarrels and blood-prices.