They walked on, horses neighing and cartwheels creaking.
Elvar was in the vanguard today, Agnar shifting the marching position of all of his crew daily, and so she walked with Agnar and Sighvat, Grend at her left shoulder. Biórr was close as well, walking with Ilmur the Hundur-thrall.
They moved on in silence, following a path that ran north-east through the woods, Elvar’s eyes constantly flicking left and right, the movement of swaying corpses in the branches snagging and snaring the eye. It was unsettling. She picked up her pace until she was walking beside Agnar.
“Can you feel it?” she said to him.
Agnar glanced at her. His eyes were bright with excitement, but she could see a tiredness deeper within him, almost exhaustion, with dark pools around his eyes, his skin pale and red-veined, a hunch beneath his bearskin cloak to his shoulders and frame.
“I can feel something,” he said, “though I do not know what it is.”
“The presence of the gods?” Elvar wondered out loud.
“But they are all dead,” Agnar said. He looked around. “At least, I hope they are.”
“Aye, but we are close to where they died. Their blood spilled on this land, soaked into the ground we are treading. Perhaps something of them still lingers.”
“I hope so. Their bones and their power, that we can harness or sell.” He flashed a grin at her. “We will be rich beyond all imagining, our fair-fame known throughout all Vigrie and the world beyond.”
“Yes,” Elvar said, Agnar’s smile and excitement infectious, banishing the sense of dread and unease that had been building within her.
His eyes lingered on her. “You are… happy?” he asked her, hesitantly. “With him?” His eyes flickered to Biórr.
“I am,” Elvar said, her own grin spreading.
“You sound happy enough,” Agnar said. “Your humping behind the carts each night has been keeping me awake.”
Elvar flushed.
“I am glad that you are happy,” Agnar shrugged. “And I am glad you are here, part of the Battle-Grim. You are a fighter, no question of that, but you are an oath-keeper, too. Someone to be trusted. That is a rare thing in this world.” He looked at her, no smile, eyes serious. Elvar did not know what to say. Agnar just nodded to himself and they strode together in silence.
They were walking up a slow, gentle incline, the trees around them thinning. Elvar felt the gentle flicker of something on her cheek, looked up and saw it was starting to snow. Uspa walked ahead of them, leading their column. She reached the top of the incline they were climbing and stopped. Agnar broke into a run to reach her and stopped, staring at something over the ridge.
“Behold, Oskutree,” Uspa said.
Elvar felt her heart quicken in her chest and broke into a run. She stumbled to a halt as she reached the crown of the slope, and stared.
A wide, treeless valley opened up before her, rolling in all directions as far as her eyes could see. The undulating ground was covered with snow, here and there tugged by the swirling wind. Great mounds lay scattered across the plain, covered in earth and moss and snow. Elvar saw the gleam of rusted steel, the glint of yellowed bone. Other shapes, the twisted and blackened branches of a tree, but longer and thicker than a drakkar, lay strewn across the plain.
Straight ahead and set deep into the plain like the iron boss of a huge shield stood the stump of an ancient tree, blackened as if lightning-struck, wider than the fjord of Snakavik.
Snow fell from the sky, gentle and cold as winter’s first kiss, the lights of the gueljós flickering behind the clouds, and behind or beneath it all there was a sound, a dull thud, more a feeling than a sound, vibrating through Elvar’s bones.
There were gasps as other Battle-Grim reached the ridge and stopped, staring. The creak of carts and whinnies of horses.
“It is a saga-tale made real,” Sighvat sighed.
Grend stood silent at Elvar’s shoulder.
Ilmur and Biórr ran on a few steps, both grinning like bairns on their name-day.
Uspa’s eyes swept the plain, a frown etched deep into her brow.
“Not much of a tree,” Sighvat huffed as he reached them.
“It was burned and broken in the last battle,” Uspa said.
That makes sense, Elvar thought, though in her mind she had expected to see the Ash Tree rearing impossibly tall and wide.
“On,” Agnar said, his eyes alight, back straightening, exhaustion falling from his frame like a discarded cloak.
They moved on, a fast march now, down a gentle slope and on to level ground. Elvar looked down and saw that it was not snow that coated the ground, but ash. Grey flakes stirred and swirled as they moved through them, sticking to Elvar’s boots and leaving footsteps where no one had trod for three hundred years. Elvar passed by a hundred ash-covered shapes, her urge to run and uncover what lay beneath each one overwhelming, but the broken stump of the tree seemed to call to all of them, drawing them across the plain like a rope-hauled drakkar.