She had gone in the black middle of the night after they burned her mother, when the whole steading was drunk on funeral ale and asleep. She had gone barefoot across the frozen yard and laid both hands flat on the wyrm's warm, ridged side and told it, in a whisper, everything she would do to it if she could. She had wanted it to feel her hands. She had not thought, then, that anything could feel through stone.
"A touch in anger is still a touch," Thorhalla said. "It's still a door opened. I'm not blaming you, child. Ragnhild touched it in grief her first winter and it was the same."
"What happens now?"
The seeress looked at the fire. "Your mother kept it sleeping. You know how. One memory each Midwinter, laid in its keeping, and it chose which, and she never knew until it was gone. A sleeping wyrm dreams on very little." She was quiet a moment. "A waking one is hungry. It will take from you every night at moonrise until it's fed back to sleep. And while it wakes, its fire draws inward. The water will cool. By morning the bathhouse will be lukewarm. In three days the green field will frost."
"How do I put it back?"
"Midwinter. The dark of the year, nine nights from now. A memory freely given, with your hand on it, and it will sleep the year through." Thorhalla hesitated. "Until then, if its belly is full, it reaches for you less. Meat. A sheep a night, maybe, would stop it reaching at all."
There were thirty-one sheep in Varmdal. Eydis knew because she had helped Steinunn count them at the autumn slaughter, deciding which would be killed and which would be kept through the winter, and the counting had gone on far longer than it should have, because there was so little to count. The herring had not come in summer. The barley had rotted in the rain. And twenty barrels of Grimsfjord grain had come over the pass a month ago on Thorgils Hrafnsson's sledges, half-payment in advance for the body of a wyrm that was now standing in the yard with its eyes open.
The clan had eaten half of that grain already.
"No," Eydis said. "Not one sheep."
---
Their bed-closet was at the far end of the hall behind a carved partition, the high seat's privilege, and the wool curtains did nothing to keep out the noise of people who would not sleep that night. Eydis sat on the edge of the bed with her boots still on. Sverrir stood. He was too tall for the closet when he stood. He had always been too tall for it.
"You held me," she said.
"Yes."
"In front of all of them. Like a dog that's gone for the sheep."
"You'd have struck it with your bare fist in the middle of the Hold," he said. "Before the dead. Before Hervor's axe. With every person in this valley watching."