"The Hold was answered," he said. "The oath stands. While one of Hervor's blood is bound, no axe falls on the wyrm. That is the law of this valley, and I will not break it with my own hands." He turned the axe, set its head in the snow, and leaned on the haft like a staff, and for the first time that night he looked like an old man. "I'm sorry, girl."
"I refused it," Eydis said. "I stood up at the autumn Thing and refused it in front of all of you."
"It doesn't ask," said Thorhalla.
---
They brought her into the hall and sat her by the hearth, and someone built the fire up, and someone else put a cup of warm ale in her hands that she did not drink. The people who had fled came back in twos and threes and stood along the walls under the faded shields and looked at her the way they had looked at her mother in the last years: kindly, and from a little distance, as if what she had might be catching.
Kari pushed through them. Her brother was fourteen and all elbows, his hair the same pale straw as hers, and he had been told to stay in the byre-house with the children and had plainly not.
"I heard it," he said. "Everyone heard it. Is it loose?"
"No," said Eydis.
"Is it — " He looked at her face, and then at Thorhalla's, and stopped. He was not stupid. He knew where the bond went when the bonded refused it. Everyone in Varmdal knew. It had been the whole of the argument at the autumn Thing: if Eydis would not carry it, the next of Hervor's blood was a boy who still slept with a dog across his feet.
"Sit down, Kari," Sverrir said quietly, and for once the boy did as he was told.
Thorhalla lowered herself onto the bench across the hearth. She was breathing more easily now, but her hands, when she held them to the fire, were not steady.
"Tell me what you felt," she said. "When the eye opened."
Eydis told her. The hook. The rope. Her mother's face turned over like a coin.
The seeress closed her eyes. "Then it's done. It reached for the nearest of the blood when the axe went up, and it found you. It knew you already." She opened her eyes again. "You went to the stone. After the pyre. Didn't you?"
Eydis said nothing. Across the hearth, she felt Sverrir turn his head.