V?rn did not answer him.
The distant tremor rumbled louder, the bolts on the carven door rattling, puffs of ash rising in small clouds.
“What is down there, in Oskutree’s bowels?” Agnar asked.
Kráka stepped forwards.
“It is Lik-Rifa,” she breathed. “The saga-tales are true. The dragon is still caged deep within the roots of Oskutree.”
“Of course it is true,” V?rn said. She scowled at them. “And I vow to you, the only way for you to touch Oskutree is over my dead and splintered trunk. That will not be easy. And even if you managed to see me defeated and broken, you would have to face the three sisters. They would not take kindly to the door being opened.”
“The three sisters?” Elvar said, feeling her skin prickle, fear dancing down her spine at the thought of Lik-Rifa, the dragon-god, corpse-tearer, prowling in her prison chamber somewhere beneath their feet.
“Aye. Urd, Verdani and Skuld, Orna’s and Ulfrir’s daughters, gaolers of the dragon.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Sighvat mumbled from his prison of vines.
“You have my word,” Agnar said, “none of my company shall set foot near your dead tree. Come,” he called to those around him, turning away and raising his voice. “Let us do what we came for, and search this ground for the relics that will turn us into a saga-song of our own.”
The Battle-Grim let out a cheer and emptied out the carts, taking spades and axes, sheets of stitched linen and poles, and began to search through the mounds scattered all around them. Exclamations and cheers rang out as relics were unearthed, bones and weapons, armour and jewels, all of it being collected and piled together, wrapped in the linen sheets and carried to the carts.
Elvar and Grend set to work, digging at a mound close to the head of Aska, the dead Froa. They uncovered the skeletons of two people, twisted together in death. Elvar saw the teeth of one were unnaturally long and sharp. Seaxes of steel were in their fists, gold and silver glinting on the hilts. Elvar tapped Grend to show him, and saw that he had dropped his spade and was staring into the distance, back the way they had come. She stood and stared.
Through the snow she saw figures were emerging from wooded slopes: people on horseback, and wagons, many, many wagons.
“What is this?” V?rn said as she stood over Sighvat’s form. “I wait three hundred years and see no one, and then you humans all come at once.”
Elvar dropped her spade. The figures spilling down the slope towards them bore grey shields with the black wings of ravens upon them.
Ilska the Cruel had come.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
ORKA
Orka rode along a narrow path, a sharp slope falling away to her right. Far below the white-foaming headwaters of the River Drammur roared through a narrow spit of rock. In the distance she could see the vale of Grimholt Pass, passing between the steep slopes of the Boneback Mountains that seemed to reach high as the sky. Orka could make out the line of a wall built across the vale, just a dark smudge from this distance, and behind it a hall and tower rising from an outcrop of rock. Smoke rose in thin columns from the fortress into a blue summer sky. Behind her stones shifted and spilled down the slope, Lif’s horse neighing as the mare lost its footing. Lif called out as the horse slid, but then righted itself.
The path veered away from the river, up a sharp slope of loose scree, and then the ground levelled and Orka was dipping her head to avoid branches, riding back into more pinewoods. There was a sound of shingle sliding as Lif and Mord urged their horses up the path and then they were all in the woodland.
“Was that the Grimholt?” Lif asked as he urged his horse up alongside Orka.
“Aye,” she said.
He nodded and swallowed.
She felt it too. The time of reckoning was drawing in upon them. Frost glittered on the ground, and Orka spied a long, thick thread of ice-reamed web in the boughs above them, shimmering as it caught a shaft of sunlight.
“Be alert,” Orka said, scanning the boughs.
“What for?” Mord asked, riding up on Orka’s other side.
“Frost-spiders,” Orka said.
“Berser’s hairy arse,” Mord muttered under his breath, his head twisting in a dozen different directions as he tried to look everywhere at once.
“Mord doesn’t like spiders,” Lif leaned and whispered.
Orka stifled a smile as they rode on through the mountains.
Orka squatted behind a rock and peered out at the Grimholt.
She was sat on a cliff edge, a steep slope draped in pine trees falling away to the River Drammur about fifty or sixty paces below her. To the north lay the Grimholt, set within a timber wall that ran across the river valley, taller than three men, anchored to the cliffs at both ends of the valley. A gate stood closed, armed men and women visible on the walkway upon the stockade wall. Mail and helms glinted in the sunlight. Behind the wall was an open space like a courtyard, ringed with outbuildings: stables, barns, a smithy, barracks and coops and pens. At the top of a gentle slope reared a thick-timbered hall with a green-turfed roof, smoke rising from a smoke hole, and at its rear a squat tower that hugged the cliff face, tall enough to command a view of the valley, both north and south.