and the look on her face made . . . It made the fire go away.” Audun took another, deeper, swig of mead. The sweetness was cloying. “I couldn’t stay. His friends would have rounded us up and killed us. My mother pleaded with me, insisted I take all she owned, which turned out to be three pieces of silver. She cried so much that I took them. Then I broke into the forge and took a hammer. I left the silver. I have been running since.”
Fjölnir nodded. “Thank you for telling me your story.” They sat quietly for some time until the old man rose, picked up a poker, and moved to the fire. “Look,” he said and blew on the embers. Flames danced toward the ceiling, tendrils stretching like flowers to the sun. “The flame is dangerous. It burns. But you decide how bad it gets.” He looked at Audun. “It does not own us. It does not decide who we are. We do.” He walked over to the chest by the door, picked it up, and placed it in front of Audun. “I want you to have this,” he said. “It belonged to my son, but he has no claim to it now.”
“I can’t take it,” Audun said. “Whatever it is.”
“I would ask you to do it for me, as a favor. There will be a lot of trouble on your path before your journey is done, Audun Arngrimsson.”
Grinning, the old man reached into the apparently bottomless food basket. “Now we eat till we’re fat and drink till we’re drunk, and I’ll tell you a story of what happens if you spend a night in the forest when the moon is full!”
Audun accepted the refilled mug Fjölnir thrust at him and took another deep, long swig. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for my food. Thank you for—” His words failed him. “Thank you.”
The old man smiled. “Shut up and drink. Now, there are many places you can go when the moon is round as a whore’s teat, but my forest is not one of them. Let me tell you a story . . .”
The hammer blows from outside reverberated around the inside of Audun’s sore head. His mouth felt like an old sock, and his bladder was full to bursting point. He rolled out of bed and banged his knee on the chest. Muttering a curse, he stumbled to his feet and noticed that the hammering had stopped.
Fjölnir’s voice rang out across the farmstead. “Well met, strangers! What brings riders to my end of Setr Valley?”
VALLE, WEST NORWAY
OCTOBER, AD 996
The air in the barn stank of moldering hay and horse sweat. Ulfar’s stomach turned. His skin was clammy, intermittently cold and hot, and he could feel the sheen of dirty sweat on his forehead under the greasy strands of long, black hair.
She was writhing under him, trying to make a good show of it, whoever she was. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, stranger. Come on.” There was an odd sort of desperation in her urging, he thought. She groped for him, with little luck. He tried to focus on her face. Sparkling blue eyes, blonde hair, tiny upturned nose. Freckles. She was pretty, in a country sort of way. He reached for her name but got lost in a fog of mead. Nothing was right. All he could feel were his breeches rubbing against the underside of his deflating cock.
He rolled off her. The straw scratched at him. She didn’t even say anything, just made a sound in her throat, a mixture of disappointment and disgust. He felt her buck her hips next to him as she struggled to adjust her clothes.
“Fucking wimp,” she spat as she rose and stormed off.
Ulfar didn’t care, wouldn’t have cared even if he were considerably less drunk. Still, if he hadn’t been so busy drinking away his winnings, he wouldn’t have boned her—or tried to, at any rate.
He snorted, rolled his eyes, and mumbled something that might have been a joke as he tugged up his breeches and pulled himself to a position that was almost standing. When he stumbled outside the stables, the cold air hit him like a slap in the face. All the smells of the autumn night were amplified: the manure, the sour reek of horse piss and wet hay, the rotting leaves in the forest just past the fence. His stomach lurched, and he felt the bile rising. He leaned against the wall and