“A good spot,” Agnar pronounced, looking back down the steep slope to see the Wave-Jarl on the beach below them. The Battle-Grim proceeded to make camp, scraping a pit in the ground, searching for dead wood for a fire and a stream to fill water bottles. As darkness settled, flames were crackling and a pot of stew hanging from an iron frame was bubbling away, the smell of mutton and fat making Elvar’s belly growl. Sighvat was ladling out bowls for the Battle-Grim, filling Elvar’s and then Grend’s behind her. Elvar turned to see Kráka, the Seier-witch, standing and staring up at the slab of moss-covered granite they were camped against. She reached out a hand, her fingertips brushing the rock face.
“What are you doing?” Agnar asked Kráka. He had been sitting with his back to the rock.
“This is an oath stone,” Kráka said.
“It’s a small mountain, is what it is,” Sighvat said, looking the granite up and down, a few of the Battle-Grim laughing.
“All of the oath stones have been destroyed,” Grend said beside Elvar, which she knew.
Agnar stood, frowning. “Hundur,” he called, and the Hundur-thrall loped over, head bowed, and took some deep, snorting breaths.
“I can smell nothing, lord,” the thrall said to Agnar.
“Here,” Kráka said, her fingers tracing lines through the moss. The thrall scraped the moss away and pressed his face to the granite, sniffing again.
“Yes,” he breathed. “It is there: blood spilled, oaths sworn, faint as a memory.”
He began to scrape more moss away.
“There is an easier way,” a voice said: the captured woman, rising from where she had been sitting with her husband and son.
“Uspa, no,” the prisoner, Berak, said. He moved to grip her hand, his chains clinking.
“Leave her,” Agnar snapped at Berak. “Easier way to what?” he asked Uspa.
“To see the oath stone,” Uspa said.
“I can see it already,” Sighvat said, frowning. “It’s so big it’s hard to see anything else.”
“I mean, to see what is inscribed upon it,” Uspa said.
Agnar looked from Uspa to the rock.
“Show me,” he said.
Uspa walked forwards.
“Mama,” her son called out after her.
“It’s all right, Bjarn,” she said, giving him a reassuring smile. As she drew close to the slab of rock and Agnar she held her palm out.
“Cut me,” she said.
Agnar drew his seax and touched it to Uspa’s palm, a line of blood welling. She let it pool, made a fist, spreading it, then opened her palm and pressed it to the space the Hundur-thrall had cleared of moss.
Elvar stared, realised she was holding her breath and forced herself to breathe.
Nothing happened. She saw Uspa’s blood trickle down the rock, a black, glistening trail across the granite, finding a path.
Then, a shuddering ripple passed through the granite, as if it were some ancient giant roused from death and taking its first tremulous breath. A cloud of dust drifted from the rock. Elvar heard Sighvat suck in a sharp breath as a glow spread from Uspa’s palm like a line of molten metal poured into a cast, spiralling out from the Seier-witch’s palm, spreading across the granite face, making the moss and lichen glow. More lines of fire appeared, filling the rock, down to its roots, wide and high. The moss and lichen began to blacken, to burn and hiss and peel, falling away to reveal the rock face beneath.
Elvar just stood, open-mouthed and staring, all of the Battle-Grim in silence around her. Grend put his hand to the axe hanging from his belt. Sighvat stood with a forgotten ladle full of stew in his fist.
And then Uspa pulled her hand away, stepping back to stare at the rock face, along with the rest of the Battle-Grim.
Runes traced across the granite face, and images, filling it, like a tapestry emerging from the ground at their feet and rising up to touch the sky, filling Elvar’s vision. Images of a pale dragon caged and raging, locked within a chamber among the roots of a great tree. A wolf upon a plain, a thick chain binding him, small figures swarming, stabbing, the wolf’s jaws wide as it howled.
“Ulfrir, wolf-god,” Kráka breathed.
“It’s the Guefalla,” Biórr whispered. “The gods-fall.”
So many images, Elvar struggled to take it all in: figures hanging from the boughs of trees, many of them, skeletal wings spiking from their backs.
“The Gallows Wood,” Elvar said. She remembered that tale, of how the gods Orna and Ulfrir had found their firstborn daughter slain, her wings hacked from her back. Lik-Rifa had done it, the dragon, Orna’s sister. As vengeance Orna and Ulfrir had hunted Lik-Rifa’s god-touched offspring and slaughtered them. Ripped their backs open and hacked their ribs apart, pulling them out in a parody of wings and hanging the corpses from trees.