And then Elvar saw a mound to her right, large as a mead hall, lying stretched upon the ground. Moss and ash lay thick upon it, but a gleam drew Elvar’s eye, like a hook in fish’s mouth. She veered away from the column, Grend calling her name and then following. Elvar stopped before the mound, staring up at it, and stabbed her spear into the ground. It towered over her, larger than her father’s hall at Snakavik, and as wide. A looming entrance curved and draped with vine stood before her. She took a step inside and peered into the darkness. A smell wafted out, of decay, and with it a sense of unbridled malice, of blood and savagery so strong that it snatched Elvar’s breath away. A wave of fear rippled through her, thick and palpable and she stumbled back, out into the daylight. She breathed deeply, and let the gently falling snow cleanse her.
“Can you feel it?” Elvar asked Grend, who was stood beside her, scowling into the dark maw before them.
“Aye. Violence deep as the marrow,” he muttered. “It is putting a trembling in my bones, making me want to kill something.”
Elvar drew her seax and scratched at a small section of the moss and lichen-covered entrance, a curved beam, like a giant whalebone and long as two spears. Slowly the accumulation of detritus fell away, the decades of ash and moss and growth scraped clear by her blade, revealing the glint of something old and yellow.
Elvar stepped back.
“It is a tooth,” Grend said. “A wolf’s, or a bear, I think.”
“It is Ulfrir,” Elvar breathed, stumbling away, looking again at the mound. And she could see it now, as she put some distance between her and the mound: the outline of a huge wolf’s skeleton, lying upon its side, limbs sprawled, jaws wide in one last defiant howl or snarl. Moss and grass and ash covered it like a new pelt. Close by something glinted in the ground and Elvar nudged it with her toe, saw that it was a lump of iron jutting from the earth. A curve in it showing forge-craft before a sharp break.
“A link from Ulfrir’s chain?” Grend said, frowning.
“Aye,” Elvar said, remembering again the oath stone they had camped beneath, and the image of the wolf snared and bound by a chain, jaws wide as it howled while warriors swarmed it, stabbing with sharp steel.
“Come away from it,” Grend said, and took Elvar’s arm, guiding her back to the column of the Battle-Grim. Elvar tripped and stumbled over something, saw the glint of rusted steel, an ancient sword held in a skeleton’s grip, but Grend steadied her and led her on, back to the column.
“We have found Ulfrir’s bones,” Elvar blurted, her voice a rush, words tripping in her excitement and awe.
“The Ravener,” Uspa nodded, glancing back at the wolf-shaped mound. She did not stop, though, leading them on across the plain, winding through the mounds and hillocks, until they were close to the blasted stump of Oskutree, the great tree. Agnar held a fist up and the column drew to a halt. He strode on, Uspa and Sighvat at his side, Kráka, Ilmur and Biórr behind them. Elvar did not hesitate, but followed after, Grend padding beside her.
Elvar stared at the blasted stump of the ancient ash tree, wide as a lake, stretching jagged and sharp across the ground. The remains stood high as a mead hall’s wall, perhaps two men high. Something green against the blackened wood caught Elvar’s eye and she stared at it.
It was a sapling, the trunk as wide as a normal ash tree, boughs with green leaves sprouting upon it. New life, among the ash-grey wasteland. And into the tree’s trunk the likeness of a woman was carved, with flowing hair, a sharp jaw and wide, somehow-knowing eyes, a wooden staff in her hand.
Beside the new tree there was a flattened area of the ancient, fire-blasted trunk, that Elvar could have stepped on to. Filling much of the base and as wide as her father’s feasting hall was the outline of a great trapdoor, bolted a hundred times. As Elvar looked at it she could see a faint, rhythmic tremor running through the door like a pulse, as if the tree had a heart that was beating, deep within the ground.
They threaded closer, their path taking them towards the living tree, winding around what looked like huge, shattered branches until Uspa stopped before the last one that separated them from the stump. Elvar joined them as Agnar and his small band stared at it.
Elvar blinked, suddenly realising what it was.
A giant’s head, bigger by far than Hrung’s head in her father’s hall. And it looked to be carved from wood. Dry and dark as charcoal. Ashes lay thick in the carving’s eyes and mouth, which was open and stretched in a rictus scream. What Elvar had taken for branches nearby were in fact its body and limbs, broken and blasted, twisted, hands and fingers grasping.