The first frost came early to Eikvik that year, and the second came on its heels.
By the third frost, the grain in the byre had begun to rot from the inside, which no one had ever seen before. By the fourth, the gulls had stopped crying over the water. By the fifth, Old Tova had walked out of the burial mound where she had been laid three winters past, and her son Bjarki had cleaved her skull with a wood-axe before she could speak.
Halvard had been there. He had held his cousin while Bjarki wept.
What had come out of Tova was not Tova. The thing in her had moved her jaw the way a man moves a puppet, and when Bjarki’s axe came down it had laughed — once, soft, with her tongue — before the skull broke. The smell that came out of her was older than rot. Halvard had vomited into the snow and tried to make it look like he had not. He had been sixteen winters old then. He was older now, and worse things had happened, and he had stopped trying to hide it when he was sick.
That was a month ago.
Tonight the longhouse was full and the doors were barred, and Halvard sat with his back against the timbers and listened to the rain hiss on the turf roof and tried to understand what his father was not saying.
Twelve men sat at the long table.
His father, Eirik Greybeard, at the head. To his right, Jorund the shipwright, whose hands could read the grain of a tree the way other men read the sky. To his left, Kjartan, who had the long-faced look of a man holding a song he did not want to sing. The others Halvard had known all his life — uncles, cousins, two brothers from the next steading, the Hebridean who had married in years before. All of them quiet. All of them with the same tightness around the eyes.
“How many,” his father said.
“Seven from Vikvágr,” said Jorund. “Three from up the fjord. The man who came down today says there are more, but the path is bad.”
A pause.
“He saw a child.”
“A child.”
“Walking. Yes.”
Eirik Greybeard closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a long time.
Halvard found that he was holding the wool of his cloak in his fist and could not remember when he had begun.
“And the binding?” his father said, without opening his eyes.
No one answered.
Halvard looked from face to face. Jorund would not meet his eye. Kjartan was looking at the fire as if it had asked him something cruel.
“The binding,” Halvard said, quieter than he meant to. “What binding.”
His father opened his eyes and looked at him, and Halvard saw something he had never seen before in that face. Not anger. Not weariness. Something older. Something his father had been carrying alone, perhaps, for a very long time.
“Go and fetch the seer,” Eirik said. “Tell her it is time.”
Halvard ran.
The path up to the seer’s hut was a path he had not taken since he was a boy. It wound through the pines above the village, past the standing stone that no one tended and no one cut down, and the rain had made the moss treacherous under his boots. He did not feel the cold. He felt the word binding the way one feels a stone in a shoe.
Halfway up, he saw the girl.
She was kneeling beside the path with her hands flat on the wet earth and her hair undone in the rain, and she was speaking to the ground in a low, even voice. Sigrún, the seer’s apprentice. He had known her since they were children, the way one knows a season. Last summer at the harvest fire she had looked at him across the smoke for a moment too long, and then had not looked at him again, and the not-looking had said more than the looking had.
He stopped on the path. She did not lift her head.
“It’s coming,” she said.
“I know.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
She turned her face up to him then, and her eyes were full of a thing he could not name, and the rain ran down her cheeks like she had been weeping for hours and only just now noticed.
“Halvard,” she said. “Whatever she tells you to do tonight. Do it. Even if you don’t understand. Even if it’s terrible.”
“Sigrún —”
“Promise me.”
He promised.
She bent her head to the earth again, and her lips moved without sound, and the rune-stones laid out beside her hand were glowing, faintly, in a way that rune-stones did not glow. Beneath her palms the soil was steaming where her hands pressed. He saw it. He did not understand it. He climbed the rest of the path running.
The seer was waiting at her threshold.
She did not look surprised to see him. She did not look anything at all. She was a small woman, smaller than he remembered, wrapped in furs the color of a winter sky, and she held her staff in one hand and a leather bundle in the other. She had been ready, he realized, for some time.
“Tell your father I am coming,” she said. “Tell him to gather the young.”
“The young —”
“Every child in the village who can walk. Every man and woman not yet thirty winters. Down to the strand. Now, Halvard. Now.”
“Mother —”
“Now.”
He went.
There were forty-three of them on the strand by the time the seer arrived.
Halvard stood among them and tried to count and could not, because some of the small ones would not stop moving and some of the older ones — Kjartan among them, and Jorund’s eldest, and the Hebridean’s tall son — had taken up arms and were watching the dark water and the dark trees with the particular stillness of men who expected to die before morning.
Sigrún came down from the path with her hood up and her hands inside her sleeves and would not look at him.
The seer set her staff in the wet sand.
She began to speak. Halvard knew some of the words and not the rest. The words he knew were old words, the words his grandmother had murmured over his cradle in the dark, the words men muttered when a sail tore in a storm. The words he did not know were older than that. They were older, he understood with a cold certainty, than the village. Older than the longhouse. Older than the gods his father swore by.
The rune-stones came out of the leather bundle, and the seer set them in a circle around the gathered young, one by one. As each one touched the sand it kindled — not with flame, not with anything Halvard had a name for, but with a light that was the color of nothing and that hummed behind his teeth.
Beneath his feet, deep, deeper than the strand, deeper than the bedrock — something heard her.
He felt it the way a man feels a door open in another room. A vast, slow attention turning. Hungry. Patient. Older than the keeping.
The seer’s voice rose to meet it, and her nose began to bleed.
A horn sounded up the fjord.
It was not a horn the village kept.
Halvard turned toward it and felt his father’s hand close on his shoulder. He had not known his father had come down to the strand. Eirik Greybeard’s face in the rune-light looked like a face on a coin — hammered and old and far away.
“That is Brand Wolfsbane’s horn,” his father said quietly. “He has come to take what we hold.”
“Father —”
“He will not have it. None of them will have it. Listen to me, Halvard. You will not remember this.”
“What —”
“You will not remember me. You will not remember her. You will not remember the village or the boats or the name your mother gave you. This is the price.”
“Father —”
“It is the only door left, Halvard. She has shown me. There is no fight to be won here tonight. Only a door, and a long road, and a hope that one day you will find each other again, and remember, and come back, and finish what we could not.”
Halvard could not speak.
“Listen to me.” His father’s hand tightened, and Halvard felt something pass from the hand into him — warm, then warmer, then almost painful — like a coal pressed under his skin and left there. “Listen. There is a thing under the land that should not have woken. Older than the gods. Older than the keeping. The keepers before us were not men, Halvard. We were the last of their blood, and we have failed them. The dead walk because of what we have failed to hold, and what walks the dead is hungry, and it eats from below, and it knows your name. So she is taking your name from you. She is taking all your names. She is feeding it the only thing it cannot follow you through. Do you understand.”
“No,” Halvard said.
“Good.” His father almost smiled. “Then it will not find you in your dreams.”
The seer’s voice cracked the air now. Blood ran from both her nostrils and from the corners of her eyes. The horn sounded again, closer — and behind it, the long throat-cry of men coming on in number through the trees.
Sigrún found his hand inside the circle of rune-light and held it. Her grip was very cold and very sure. The light came up around them like water rising in a well, and it was warm, and it was wrong, and it smelled like the inside of a thunderstorm and like the hot copper of a slaughtered animal and like nothing he had ever smelled at all.
The last thing Halvard saw was his father, standing at the edge of the light with the warmth gone out of him already, raising his axe toward the trees.
The last thing he heard was Sigrún — very quietly, in his ear:
“Find me.”
And then there was only the light.
And a long falling.
And, somewhere far above him, a sound that might have been a great stone door shutting, or a man laughing softly through a woman’s broken jaw, or both.
And after a long time —
a very long time —
a hotel alarm clock, beeping in the dark.
End of Prologue.