In the bathhouse the water had gone from scalding to blood-warm overnight, exactly as Thorhalla had said.
The Thing met in the hall at midday, because no one could pretend it should not. Arngrim sat on the Lawspeaker's stool beneath the shields with Hervor's axe across his knees. Sverrir sat in the high seat. Eydis did not sit in her place beside him. She stood near the door with her arms folded, where she could feel the hook and the cold both.
Steinunn spoke first. She was a widow of forty with three children and a face like a well-used knife, and she did not waste words.
"We ate Thorgils's barley," she said. "Half of twenty barrels, in a month. We owe him a carcass at Midwinter, or the grain back, and we have neither. What are we going to give him? The wyrm's goodwill?"
"We'll give him the truth," said Sverrir. "That the oath was answered."
"He'll give us a fine laugh for it. Then he'll give us a war, or a famine. Which would you choose, chieftain? You know him better than the rest of us."
That landed, as she had meant it to. There were people in the hall who had never forgotten that the high seat had come over the pass from Grimsfjord. Sverrir did not flinch.
"I know he keeps his word," he said. "So do I. I'll send to him today."
Geirmund stood up then, a broad young man with red in his beard and his sister's sick baby at home, and his voice cracked as he spoke, which made him angrier.
"Why are we talking about oaths? Hervor made that oath. Hervor's been dead two hundred winters. She's not hungry. Her children aren't coughing. Let it eat whatever it wants out of — " he caught himself, too late, glancing at Eydis — "and then let it die. There are enough of us. It's chained."
"The chains were made by men," said Arngrim. "So was the oath. One of them is holding."
"Then you break it! You had the axe up last night, old man. You were ready."
"I was ready to end an oath with no one bound to it," Arngrim said. "That was lawful. The Thing voted for it, and I'd have carried it out, and I'd have carried the weight of it too." He did not raise his voice. "This is something else. You're asking me to kill a creature our founder swore to protect while one of her blood is bound to it — and to do it in full knowledge, before witnesses. If we do that, Geirmund, we're not a clan that ended an old bargain. We're a clan that broke one. Who trades with us after that? Who marries into a valley where oaths are kept only until they're inconvenient? Not Thorgils. He'll take our grain and our boats and he'll be right to."
Geirmund sat down, red to the ears.
Then Thorhalla stood, leaning on her stick, and told them the rest of it: that the wyrm would wake nine nights, until Midwinter; that it would take from Eydis each night unless its belly was full; that a sheep a night would likely spare her entirely.