Ulfar said. He felt light headed. The ground tilted around him.
“Why not?” Gestumblindi said. His grip on the staff tightened.
“There is something I must do.”
“What?” the old man said.
A sudden flare of determination made Ulfar look the old man straight in the eyes. “I have to go to Uppsala. I have to find a man called Alfgeir Bjorne. And I have to tell him that his son is dead. I also have to tell him that it is my fault.”
The space between them appeared to stretch in all directions at once. Behind Gestumblindi the horizon warped, twisted in on itself, and became its own mirror; above them the sky stretched so far as to become the ground they stood on. Suddenly Gestumblindi looked impossibly tall, and Ulfar’s chest tightened; his breath came in ragged gulps. He staggered to keep his balance, but it was too late—his head felt ever lighter, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he crumpled to the ground.
He dreamed of spaces, of stars and cold black, and a big hall somewhere in a forest. He didn’t go in. The world spun around him, and he had to fight against the memories of Stenvik, the woman on the boat, the curse—the shock when Audun came back.
Later, Ulfar opened his eyes. There was nothing wrong with the sky above him. He moved his elbow to roll over—and something growled, something big and close. A base fear coursed through him, and Ulfar shuddered. He shifted his elbow again . . . another growl, this time more insistent. Curled lips over sharp teeth. A warning.
Ulfar eased onto his back and lay absolutely still. Glancing to both sides without moving his head, he thought he saw the shadow of something, but it was too big to comprehend. His heart thumped in his chest, and for a moment he thought he felt the fangs, the hot breath, the wet jaws clamped over his throat and shoulder.
But nothing happened, and Ulfar’s mind decided he was safer somewhere else.
When he opened his eyes again, the sun had traveled almost all the way across the sky and the smell of roasted hare made his stomach growl. The evening chill was just beginning to bite, but the soft warmth of a distant fire was creeping slowly from his feet toward his knees.
“Welcome back,” Gestumblindi said, somewhere out of sight. Ulfar’s reply was not much more than a mumble. “Shut up and lie still,” the old man continued, not unkindly. “Have you been feeding yourself recently, brave wanderer?”
“Not much,” Ulfar managed.
“You smell like you’ve watered yourself, though. Regularly,” the old man added.
Ulfar did his best to shrug while lying down.
“Here,” the old man said as he entered Ulfar’s field of vision. He had a knife; speared on its point was a bit of lean hare meat. It was burned crisp on one side; the other was rosy pink. Ulfar’s mouth watered and he propped himself up. “Gently,” the old man said. “You’ve been pushing hard, you’ve been drinking on a mostly empty stomach, and you’ve not been eating right. You just fainted.”
“Er . . . yeah,” Ulfar mumbled. He took the proffered knife and pinched the piece of meat with his thumb and forefinger. “Been . . . been walking a while, I suppose.”
Gestumblindi had gone back to the fire and was busying himself turning two hares on a spit. Geraz, sitting close to the warmth, followed his master’s moves intently. Something in the dog’s shadow caught Ulfar’s eye, but it disappeared again almost immediately.
“Here,” Gestumblindi said, passing Ulfar a distinctive silver flask etched with a picture of a well. “Drink this. It’ll make you better.”
“Thank—” The words got stuck in his throat, and he tasted bile. Swallowing it down, he raised the flask to his lips.
He could feel the water flowing through his body, tingling out into what felt like his fingertips, washing before it the dirt that was inside him. There were only a few drops in the flask, but it felt like a full flagon. Ulfar exhaled. His head cleared. The stars winked at him and told him exactly how to get to Uppsala. A weight lifted off his chest, and he felt for the first time since the decision that he would be able to do it, be able to face Alfgeir Bjorne.
“It’s what I keep telling them,” Gestumblindi said. His hands appeared to function with a will of their own. He turned the spit, sliced off meat onto a bit of