"It was in me." She heard her own voice rise and could not stop it. "It had its hand on my mother's face. Do you understand? It was looking through her. It was choosing."
He was silent. The torchlight through the curtain gap laid a thin bar across his face, over the dark beard, the mouth set hard.
"I didn't know," he said at last.
"No. You didn't."
"Would it have mattered? If you'd reached it?"
"I don't know." That was the truth, and she hated it. "Maybe nothing. Maybe I'd have broken my hand on it. Maybe I'd have — I don't know. You didn't let me find out."
He sat down beside her then, not touching her. They had been married four years. It had been a marriage made over a feud, his uncle Thorgils's sister's son sent across the pass to wed the Varmdal chieftain's daughter so the two fjords would stop drowning each other's fishermen. Neither of them had asked for it. And then her father had gone down off the skerry two winters ago, and the Thing, to everyone's surprise including Sverrir's, had put the Grimsfjord man in the high seat — because he was steady, because he did not drink, because in two years among them he had never once said a thing he did not then do.
She had loved him for that. She was not sure, sitting there with her nails still crusted with her own blood from her clenched fist, what she felt for it now.
The moon rose a little before dawn. She knew the moment without seeing it. She was lying on her back with her eyes open, Sverrir still and awake beside her, and the hook drew — gently this time, almost courteously — and something came loose inside her like a tooth.
She lay very still and tried to find what it was.
Her father. It was something of her father's. She could see him: the gray-shot beard, the broken nose, the way he stood in the stern of the boat with his weight on one hip. She could remember the words he used to call her in from the shore when she was small and stayed out too late among the rock pools — *Eydis, the light's going* — she knew the words exactly.
She could not hear them. She tried, and there was nothing. It was as though someone had written them on a stick in runes. She knew what they said, and the voice that had said them was gone.
She did not make a sound. But after a while Sverrir's hand found hers in the dark, and she did not pull away, and she did not hold it either.
III
By morning the snow had stopped, and the yard around the stone had melted down to black, steaming mud in a circle twenty paces wide. The wyrm crouched on its pedestal with its wings folded but not tight, its head up, its fire-colored eyes half-lidded and following anyone who crossed the yard. Children were kept indoors. Dogs would not go near it.