or more, each as vivid as the day they were painted.
Gyda fell to her knees in the poppies. “Heltar,” she shouted. “Heltar.”
It’s no easy thing to meet your dreams head-on. We stood by, silently letting the druid come to terms with the final leg of her quest, not speaking, not rushing her forward.
While Gyda knelt at the base of the hill, the yellow-horned owl circled the sky, finally coming to land on the white roof of the Hall, where it regarded us coolly. Gyda rose to her feet and raised her hand to the bird. It watched her for a moment, head tilted to the side, and then disappeared back into the sky.
We began to climb the hill, our boots slicing through poppies. We passed several outbuildings and empty pens—I imagined there had once been dozens of shacks and huts leading up the hill—but the spell had not protected them, and they had fallen in time and dissolved into dust.
“The air smells different here than in the forest,” I said softly. “It smells of … magic.”
I was the first to reach the main steps, but I held back so that Gyda could lead. She touched the two doors gently, as if stroking a lover, then she put her shoulder to the heavy wood and pushed.
“We are the first people to enter Esca’s Hall since the sagas,” I said softly as my bootheels hit the floor behind the druid.
Gyda turned and took me in her arms. “Heltar,” she whispered in my ear.
The main room was cavernous. I saw a high table, still covered with a linen cloth and set with hammered metal dinnerware, as if the Hall had been emptied only moments earlier. Several other tables stretched the length of the room, each lined with fur-covered benches. There was a grand central stone hearth with several hanging cauldrons—it was big enough to heat the room and prepare food for an army.
A crimson throne sat on a small platform at the far end of the Hall, behind the high table. It was carved from a blood tree, and the wood was so highly polished that the red hue seemed to shimmer in the slanting sunlight that beamed down from the opening in the roof.
“Esca’s red throne,” Ink whispered with a nod.
There was a tale in the Moon Serpent Saga about Esca’s red throne, about how he quarreled with a witch in the Brocee Leon Forest after she’d stolen his Iber horse and sacrificed it to her god. Esca forced the witch to fell one of the blood trees, carve a throne from it with her bare hands, and then carry it, strapped to her back, all the way to the Green Wild wood.
We approached the stone tree last. It rose up from the center of the Hall, thick, gnarled, and misshapen, with bulbous growths on the side of its twisting trunk, like one of the sinister tree gods from Ink’s Ash and Grim. Its thick branches had been woven closely into the wooden ceiling, as if stitched together by one of the Seam Weavers from the east, and its large, curving roots surged out of the Hall floor like the twisting tentacles of a giant sea creature.
I put my hand to the trunk. The stone did not feel dead and cold—there was life inside, a very faint pulse tapping against my palm. I shivered and then climbed up onto one of the roots and gazed on Esca’s legendary sword.
The blade was simple. No jeweled hilt, no golden shaft, just pure steel wrapped with a leather strap to give it a grip. The final two feet of the sword were embedded in the thick trunk. I touched the edge with my thumb, and droplets of blood bubbled up from my skin—it had not dulled in all the years since it had been cast into the tree.
My blood went hot, my skin flushing. Staring a myth in the face … It takes courage.
“Wrath,” Gyda said, climbing up beside me. “The sword is named Wrath.”
Several letters in Old Vorse had been carved into the stone beneath the sword. I traced them with my fingertip. “Can you read them, Ink?”
She shook her head. “Like Sven’s book, only a Scholar would understand them.”
“We know what the words say.” Gyda touched the hilt of the sword with her hand and then grasped it in her fist. “The Moon Serpent Saga tells of it. Obin carved the words after casting the blade … Whoever pulls this sword will inherit