The Hunger of the Gods

Book 2: The Bloodsworn Trilogy

by John Gwynne

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Set in a Norse-inspired world and packed with myth, magic, and vengeance, this second book in John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn trilogy is the next chapter an epic saga that follows a band of warriors as they face the wrath of ancient gods and change the shape of the world.Lik-Rifa, the dragon god of legend, has been freed from her eternal prison. Now she plots a new age of blood and conquest.      As Orka continues the hunt for her missing son, the Bloodsworn sweep south in a desperate race to save one of their own – and Varg takes the first steps on the path of vengeance.      Elvar has sworn to fulfil her blood oath and rescue a prisoner from the clutches of Lik-Rifa and her dragonborn followers, but first she must persuade the Battle-Grim to follow her.  Yet even the might of the Bloodsworn and Battle-Grim cannot stand alone against a dragon god.    Their hope lies within the mad writings of a chained god. A book of forbidden magic with the power to raise the wolf god Ulfrir from the dead . . .and bring about a battle that will shake the foundations of the earth.  Praise for The Shadow of the Gods“There is not a dull chapter in this fantasy epic.” —Vulture (Best of the Year) "A satisfying and riveting read. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from a John Gwynne book." —Robin Hobb "A masterfully crafted, brutally compelling Norse-inspired epic." —Anthony Ryan "A masterclass in storytelling . . . epic, gritty fantasy with an uncompromising amount of heart." —FanFiAddict  For more from John Gwynne, check out: The Bloodsworn TrilogyThe Shadow of the Gods Of Blood and BoneA Time of DreadA Time of BloodA Time of Courage The Faithful and the FallenMaliceValorRuinWrath

Release date: April 12, 2022

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 673

Sample

Orka stood in a tempest of fire and smoke. Flickering flame and clouds of ash were a storm-lash all about her. Death’s-reek hovered thick in the air, clawing into her throat. The crackle and hiss of fire drowned all else out as the world burned. A shadow overhead and a turbulence in the air, like the beating of great wings. Then a child’s scream ripped through the storm, her son Breca calling for her and she twisted and turned, searching, desperately seeking in stumbling footfalls, but the world was all acrid clouds of billowing smoke and grasping, flayed fingers of bright-searing flame. She tripped over something, a figure lying prone upon the ground at her feet, blood oozing, dead eyes staring. Thorkel, her husband, her friend. Her love. His glazed, empty eyes held her gaze and his lips moved, a death-rasped, snake-slithering hiss of breath issuing from his husked corpse.

“They took him.”

She jerked awake with a gasp, eyes snapping wide, and saw a shadow looming over her in the wolf-grey light. Without thought she was moving, one hand shooting out to grip the shadow’s throat, her other hand ripping a seax from its scabbard on her weapons belt, which was rolled and clutched close like a pillow.

A choked gurgle.

“It’s… me,” a voice squeaked. “Lif.”

Orka froze, the seax’s sharp tip a finger’s width from Lif’s eye. She fought the urge to kill, the silent storm that had been lurking dormant in her veins now whipped to sudden life. A tremor rippled through her and she shoved Lif away, sat up, sheathed the seax.

She tasted blood in her mouth, licked her teeth, crusted and clotted, spat and rose to her feet with a groan. Her body ached, muscles and joints protesting, the weight of her mail brynja heavy on her shoulders and she glowered at Lif.

“What?” she growled.

They were standing in the burned-out remains of the Grimholt’s hall, Queen Helka’s fortress that guarded a pass through the Boneback Mountains. Members of the Bloodsworn lay about them, wrapped in cloaks, snoring and twitching. One man groaned, face shuddering in some dark dream. A hearth fire had burned itself out, grey ash in this grey world. It was sólstöður, the long day, when night was banished from the sky for thirty days, but judging by the pewter haze that leaked through the roof of the torn hall it was somewhere around dawn. Orka stretched, bones clicking.

“Wanted to talk to you,” Lif said. His face was pale, blue-tinged lips looking black in the half-light, the remnants of frost-spider venom still lingering in his veins. He held something in his arms.

Orka stooped and swept up a long-axe from the floor. Earlier, she had taken it from a warrior, carved him open with it, and then turned that hooked blade on a score of others. Its blade was clean, now, as were her two seaxes and a hand-axe hanging from her belt. The rest of her was thick with clotted blood, but she had tended her weapons before sleep had taken her. She rested the long-axe across her shoulder, a shiver running through her at the familiar weight. She loved it and hated it at the same time.

“Talk, then,” she said striding away, towards the hall’s entrance and out into the day. She bit back the harsh words that formed on her tongue, not wanting to talk to anyone. The sound of Breca’s voice from her dream still lingered in her thought-cage, echoing like some Seiðr-magic spell. All she wanted was to find her son. She thought she had found him yesterday, thought she had heard him calling for her, and the joy of it had lit a fire in her veins. She had carved a bloody path to get to him. But it had not been Breca, though she had found other Tainted children, bound like thralls, all stolen by Drekr for the dead gods knew what.

But not my Breca. His absence had hit her like a sword-blow, piercing deep, almost breaking her. Grief had flowed from her like blood from a sword thrust. But today the wound was seared and stitched closed again, her heart cold and hard. She would go on. She would find him, and did not want the distraction of anything else. Of anyone else. But there was grief carved into Lif’s face and dripping from his lips like poison from a wound. He had watched his brother Mord die, shackled to a wall and gut-stabbed by that niðing, Guðvarr. A bad death, and so Orka pressed her teeth together and did not snarl at him to leave her be when the slap and scrape of his footfalls followed her.

A cold breeze tugged at her blonde-braided hair as she marched down wide steps splattered with congealed blood. The bodies were gone, now, piled in a fresh-dug trench in the courtyard. Despite the mountain-cold, the flies were already buzzing, a cloud hovering over the heaped corpses. The courtyard was ringed by a cluster of outbuildings that tumbled down to a river, a track curling down a slope towards walls and a barred gate. Near the gate a hearth fire crackled, a pot hanging over it and Orka saw Glornir, chief of the Bloodsworn, standing and talking with a handful of his warriors. Einar Half-Troll was there, a shadowed boulder of a man, stirring whatever was in the pot and talking to Jökul the smith. He had a bandage wrapped around his thinning hair, and his snarl of a beard had more grey in it than she remembered. She put a hand to her belt and the bronze buckle and fixings, remembered him forging them for her. She saw other figures lurking in the shadows of buildings, another by the gates of the Grimholt. One of them looked at her, a man, wolf-lean, his hair short for a warrior of the Bloodsworn. His mail coat glimmered and he held a spear in his fist, shield slung across his back and a helm buckled at his belt. She returned his gaze with her own flat-eyed stare and he looked away.

Orka reached the river, flowing cold and fierce from the Boneback Mountains, the sound beneath her feet changing as she walked out a few strides on to a wooden pier. There had been two snekkes moored here yesterday, shallow-hulled and sleek-straked, like a drakkar, but smaller, only a dozen oars on each. They were both gone now, frayed ropes dangling in the water testifying to the haste and desperation of those fleeing her vengeance as they leaped from the pier to the boats, cutting at the ropes, rather than taking the time to untie them from mooring posts. Peering over the pier’s edge, she searched the ice-blue, white spume frothing around boulders that rose from the riverbed like slime-covered broken teeth. Deep in the clear water, nestled among the boulders she saw the tip of a chitinous, segmented tail. Spert, sleeping still after yesterday’s fight. His tail twitched and thrashed as if he were dreaming, stirring a cloud of silt. Close by on the riverbank, Orka spied the shape of Vesli the tennúr laying curled asleep, one thin, membranous wing cast over her hairless body like a cloak. She held a small spear clutched in one pale fist.

Breca’s spear.

Orka placed her long-axe and weapons belt on the wooden boards of the pier, then leaned over, heaving her brynja up and slithering out of it like a serpent shedding its scaled skin, tugged her boots and nålbinding socks off and then her breeches, finally pulled both her woollen and linen undertunics off in one movement, and stood there, huffing clouds of cold breath as her skin goose-bumped. Then she bent her legs and leaped into the river.

A shock like a hammer blow, snatching her breath away as she splashed into the river and sank beneath the surface, felt the current tugging at her but she kicked her legs and carved through the water like a salmon, swimming out into deeper waters, almost to the bottom, then turned, her feet and toes sinking into mud. She paused there a moment, looking around. Sound muted, light filtering around her in fractured beams from above, a many-hued flickering like the glow of the guðljós in the northern skies. Here everything seemed to slow, the noise of the world, the anger and terror that raged through her, all stilled for a moment, frozen and languid in this mountain’s heartwater. Her chest began to burn, aching for a breath, pressure building in her head, and still she waited, grateful for this respite from the world above. Finally, when her burning lungs could not take any more, she pushed hard against the riverbed, shooting towards the light and breaking the surface in a spray of water. Lif was standing on the pier beside her weapons and discarded clothes, holding something in his arms. With sharp, deft strokes she swam to the riverbank and stood, still half submerged. Reached down and took a stone from the riverbed, sat on the flat side of a rock and began scrubbing it across her skin, scrapping away what blood and filth the river’s current had not managed to scour from her.

Eventually she waded from the river, water falling away like glittering streams of ice. Lif held out a woollen cloak for her, which she took and dried herself with. She looked at her pile of clothes on the pier, all stiff and coated in blood and sweat.

“Here,” Lif said, holding out the bundle he had been carrying in his hands. “I found it over there, think it was a store-room for the garrison here.” He held clean breeches, linen under-tunic and a thick wool over-tunic. “They’re the biggest I could find; I think they’ll fit you.”

“My thanks,” Orka said, taking the clothes and tugging on the breeches, thick wool, then a plain linen under-tunic and finally a blue-grey woollen over-tunic. She rolled her shoulders, stretching the linen and wool, which clung to her damp skin. Then she fetched her nålbinding socks and boots from the pier, tugged them on and hefted her brynja, realised it needed cleaning before she put it back on. Buckling her weapons belt around her waist, she slung the coat of mail over her shoulder then squatted and lifted the long-axe, leaning on it like a staff.

“You wanted to talk?” she said, fixing Lif with her gaze.

He sucked in a breath, mouth open, the words sticking in his throat.

“Three things,” he muttered, then closed his mouth again, shuffled his feet.

Orka looked at the sky, then back at Lif.

“The day will not wait for you,” she said. “Nor will I.”

“You are Tainted, the blood of a dead god in your veins, a remnant of their power in you,” Lif blurted, the words spilling from his mouth in a rush.

“Aye,” Orka nodded. She pushed her tongue into a gap in her teeth and worked free a sliver of something stuck there, spat out a glob of meat, not wanting to think about where it had come from. More than her long-axe had been used to carve her way through the warriors of the Grimholt yesterday. “I am Tainted,” she said. A shiver rippled through her at hearing the words out loud. Such a closely guarded secret that her life had depended upon. She looked hard into Lif’s face, waiting for the disgust and revulsion, for the fear and hatred that usually accompanied such a revelation. But what she saw in his eyes was… hurt.

“You never told me. Us,” Lif said. “All that time together, fighting together. We saved your life in Darl, pulled you out from under Drekr’s axe…”

Orka sighed, wiped her palm over her face.

“It is not something I am used to saying out loud,” Orka said. “It is the kind of thing that could put a thrall-collar around my neck, or see me swinging in a cage. It has been a secret long-guarded.”

But Lif trusted me, followed me, and I have kept this secret from him.

“I should have told you and Mord,” she shrugged. “You are right, you both deserved that.”

Lif nodded. “We did,” he said. “In the tower, you said that this Drekr is stealing Tainted children.” He paused again, chewing over his words. “I did not know that, but of course it makes sense, now. So Breca is Tainted, too?”

“Aye. Breca is Tainted, has my wolf-blood flowing in his veins.”

Lif nodded, clearly thinking it all through.

“The second thing?” Orka asked.

Lif looked back up at Orka.

“That man yesterday, the bald grey-beard.”

“Glornir, chief of the Bloodsworn,” Orka said.

“He called you Skullsplitter.”

Orka looked away, then slowly nodded.

“You are the Skullsplitter? You said the Skullsplitter was dead?”

“Skullsplitter died the day I walked away from the Bloodsworn,” Orka said. Fractured images burst into life in her thought-cage. She did not want to talk about it, had never spoken of those times, even with Thorkel. They had walked away from that life, locked the memories in a cage, buried all physical reminders in a chest in the earth of their steading. Lif looked at her, grief and awe carved into his face like runes in an oath stone, and she felt the sting of her shame, and the whisper of her old life, like a ghost-fech in her ear. She sucked in a deep breath.

“Breca was in my belly, then, and I wanted no more of the Bloodsworn’s life. Death and blood, never ending. Thorkel felt the same, so we left.” She shrugged. “A harder decision than saying it makes it sound, and a longer one, but that is the short of it. That is what we did. During a ship battle we leaped into the sea and swam for shore. The Bloodsworn thought we had fallen in battle. Many did that day, never to be found, their bones lying in those murky depths still, no doubt.”

“When I saw you yesterday, saw what you did…” Lif said. “You were like… someone else.”

Orka blew out a long breath. “I have locked the Skullsplitter away all these years. Breca’s scream, what I thought was Breca’s scream, it burst the bars of her cage. And then this came to my hands…” she looked at the long-axe in her fist and shrugged. “Skullsplitter is back now, and she will help me find my Breca.”

A silence grew. Vesli the tennúr whimpered in her sleep, twisting on the ground.

“The third thing?” Orka said.

Lif looked back over his shoulder at the remains of the hall and tower, frowned hard. “Will you help me bring Mord down and raise a cairn over him? I tried, but he is chained to the wall, still.”

Orka looked up at the tower, or what was left of it. Most of the roof gone and two walls burned away, blackened beams twisted like desiccated fingers.

“I will,” she said.

Together they strode back across the courtyard, up the stairs and into the hall. Bodies were stirring, warriors rising from their cloaks. Orka walked past them all to the rear of the hall, where a doorway led to rising stairs. Timber creaked as she began to climb, ash thick on the floor and walls, Orka’s feet stirring small clouds as the stairwell groaned and shifted beneath her weight. Then she was in a corridor, one wall fallen away so that she could look out across the Grimholt’s courtyard to the river. A room stood before her, the door charred to nothing and she walked carefully in.

Bodies littered the ground, limbs severed, all blackened, twisted husks.

The floor creaked as Lif joined her and they both stood, staring at the dead. Mord lay against the far wall, a charred corpse. One arm was raised, manacled to the wall, the rest of his body slumped and curled around the sword-wound in his belly.

Orka stepped on a twisted, charred staff and it crumbled beneath her weight. She strode forwards carefully, raised her long-axe and swung it, sparks exploding, as she chopped into the iron chain pinned to the wall. A crack and screech of metal as the chain broke and Mord’s arm dropped to the ground. Orka took off her cloak, lay it next to Mord’s corpse and then rolled him into it, Lif helping her.

Patches of charred flesh fell away under their fingertips as they moved him and Lif turned away, vomiting on to the blackened floorboards. Orka rolled the cloak around Mord, tied it tight, then lifted his body, which felt weightless to her now, and gently laid him across her shoulder.

“Let me help,” Lif said, spitting a mouthful of bile and wiping tears from his eyes.

“I have him,” Orka said.

Footsteps on the stairwell, the framework protesting, and a figure appeared in the doorway. A man of medium build, braided red hair tied back at the nape, a silver ring holding his oiled, rope-knotted beard in place. He wore a gleaming brynja with sword and seax hanging at his belt, rings of silver thick on his arms. His breeches were pale blue wool with dark winnigas wraps from knee to ankle.

“Skullsplitter,” the man said, dipping his head.

“Svik,” Orka nodded, pausing for a moment and the two warriors regarded each other.

“You look like shite,” Svik said.

“And you look as if you are fresh-scrubbed for the Yule-Blot,” Orka answered.

“It’s important to look your best,” he said with a shrug. “Who knows what each day will bring. What lucky lady may find herself in my presence.”

“Still an arseling, then,” Orka said with a snort.

Svik laughed, small white teeth glistening through his beard, but the laughter did not reach his eyes. They stared at Orka, and slowly his expression changed, the humour flickering to something else. Something tragic, a fleeting image of grief and heartbreak.

“You left us. You swore your oath, and still just left us,” he breathed.

Orka stared at him, the words in her head not finding their way to her tongue.

Svik blinked, looked away. “Glornir asks for you,” he said.

Orka just grunted and walked on, Svik stepping aside to let her through the doorway. Lif swept up Orka’s long-axe and followed her, Svik falling in behind them. The three of them strode down the stairwell and out into the courtyard. More fires had been started, pots bubbling, and Orka smelled porridge and honey. Warriors of the Bloodsworn milled around the courtyard and grounds of the Grimholt; a few stood on the palisaded walls to north and south.

Glornir was waiting for her, his beard more grey than black, now. He was regarding her with his dour eyes, his long-axe resting easily in one large fist. The echo of his brother lurked in his eyes, in the lines and crags of his face, making Orka wince at the memory of her dead husband. Others stood around Glornir that Orka recognised. Einar Half-Troll, blotting out the sun, and Jökul Hammer-Hand, the smith. Edel with her braided silver hair, ruined eye and wolfhounds, and Røkia, lean and whip-hard. There were others that Orka did not know, most of them younger. A dark-skinned man with head shaved clean, apart from one long black braid, no beard but long, leather-tied moustaches. A curved sabre hung at his hip and he wore the baggy breeches of Iskidan. A gold-haired woman with a nose that had been smashed almost flat on her face, and the man Orka had seen watching her earlier, his hair short and beard little more than tufts of stubble among these braided warriors. He wore good kit, though, his brynja dark-oiled and gleaming, a seax and hand-axe hanging at his waist alongside a fine spectacled helm buckled to his belt. A silver ring coiled around one arm.

Orka strode to Glornir, stopping and gently laying Mord’s wrapped corpse at her feet. Lif stopped at her shoulder and handed her the long-axe, and Svik walked back to stand with Glornir and the other Bloodsworn.

“Much to talk on, Orka,” Glornir said. “When we found you, you were Úlfhéðnar and in your grief, yesterday, the wolf loose in your blood.”

She just nodded, knew the truth of that. She remembered broken moments, of blood, the screams of the dying, finding a shed full of bairns. How she had thrown her head back and howled when she realised Breca was not among them. And Glornir’s arrival with the Bloodsworn at his back as she had sat on the steps, gore-drenched and drowning in misery. She remembered him holding her.

Looking at him now, though, she saw a misery of his own in his eyes, in the set of his muscled back and shoulders.

“What is it?” Orka asked him.

“Vol,” Glornir said, his lips twitching into a snarl. “She has been taken. By a niðing Galdurman.”

“Skalk,” Orka said, putting a hand to her head, a blood-crusted lump where he had clumped her with his staff. “He was here,” she spat. “With a drengr warrior and a prisoner, slung across a horse’s back.”

“That is them,” Glornir said, more growl than words. Orka could see the Berserkir in Glornir shivering and pulsing in his blood. “I have searched for their bodies, for any sign of them.”

Orka closed her eyes, thinking, sifting through the fractured images of yesterday’s slaughter. “They fled. On a snekke moored at the river.” She nodded towards the pier, Glornir and the others following her gaze.

Vesli the tennúr shifted in her sleep beside the riverbank, twitching and crying out. She let out a high, piercing shriek and Orka strode over to the vaesen. Vesli’s eyes snapped open and she sat up, whimpering.

“The corpse-ripper is free,” Vesli squeaked, cowering, her small eyes searching the skies above them. Some of the Bloodsworn lifted their gaze and looked, too.

“A dream,” Orka said, resting a big hand on Vesli’s shoulder, even as she recalled her own dream, of fire and ash and beating wings.

“No,” Vesli said, “Lik-Rifa has been freed from her cage beneath the ground.”

Orka frowned, and voices among the Bloodsworn muttered.

“I also dreamed of a dragon last night,” a voice among the Bloodsworn said.

“Just bad dreams,” Glornir said, though even his brow was knotted in a scowling thundercloud.

A bubbling from the river and Spert’s head burst through the surface of the water, the vaesen bobbing on the current. He looked at them all with his bulbous black eyes in his grey, candle-melted face.

“Vesli speak true,” Spert rasped, “Lik-Rifa is free.” He licked his lips with a thick, blue-black tongue. “Spert hungry. Mistress make porridge?”

Elvar watched Sighvat the Fat lay the last stone on Agnar’s cairn. Her face twisted with the horror of it. Only yesterday, Agnar had led them on to the plain of Oskutreð, the great Ash Tree, and Elvar’s heart had been full to bursting with the joy of the riches there. The thought of their fair-fame spreading around the world like a saga-tale; Agnar and his Battle-Grim, the finders of fabled Oskutreð, where the gods had fought and died, where gold and silver and the relics of the gods were supposed to hang from trees like bunches of ripe fruit, ready for the picking.

We found it, sure enough.

Elvar stood upon a grey-mantled plain, a gentle breeze sifting ash into swirling whorls like dark-flaked snow. All around were humped mounds, many of them skeletons, large and small, all smoothed by a thick-rimed cloak of ash. And elsewhere were fresher corpses, less than a day old. A handful of the Battle-Grim wrapped in cloaks and ready for their barrows, and over a dozen of Ilska’s Raven-Feeders, still lying where they fell. Flies crawled on them and crows pecked at their flesh.

And we found more than we bargained for. We found battle and blood. We found death.

“Here lies Agnar Broksson; warrior, chief, friend,” Sighvat intoned, his voice bellows-deep, a tremor croaking through the last word. “Battle-Grim, Fire-Fist, Slayer of Dragons.” A tear rolled down Sighvat’s cheek.

All true names, Elvar knew. The last of them brought a vivid-bright swell of fear and joy rising in her chest at the memory of Agnar’s holmganga with Skrið, the Tainted dragon-born. Hulking and viper-fast, Skrið had been a fearsome foe. It had been a fight that skálds the world over should be singing of, where Agnar had fought a dragon-born and slain him, and Elvar had yelled herself hoarse at the weapons craft, courage and battle-cunning of her chief.

The Battle-Grim all added their voices to Sighvat’s, grunts and heyas of agreement, even Grend, who stood at Elvar’s shoulder like a storm-weathered cliff.

Elvar knelt and touched one of the stones of Agnar’s cairn, grimaced with the pain in her shoulder at even that small movement, and with her other hand gripped the troll tusk that hung from a leather thong around her neck. Agnar had given it to her, for her part in the slaying of the troll back on Iskalt Island. That felt like a lifetime go.

“You will be missed, Agnar Battle-Grim,” she breathed. “You already are.” And then. “I will avenge you. Biórr will die for his betrayal.”

Just the whisper of his name on her lips made Elvar shiver with rage. Biórr, her lover, who she had trusted, bound by oaths and battle and much, much more. And he had betrayed her, betrayed them all. Betrayed Agnar most foully with a spear-thrust through his throat as Agnar held out an arm to him.

She rose with a hiss of pain, Grend steadying her.

“So, what are we to do, now?” Sighvat said, looking around at them all.

They stood in silence, little more than thirty of them left, Sighvat staring back at them, his expression morose and unsure. Red weals and welts tracked lines across his exposed flesh, his face, wrists, forearms, where he had been bound by living vines that had burst from the ground at the Froa-spirit’s command. Elvar glanced at the blackened stump that had been Vörn, the guardian of the Ash Tree. Ilska and her dragon-born kin had set her ablaze with their rune-magic and now she lay blackened and twisted like a dead branch thrown on the fire.

“What we came here for,” Huld said with a shrug. She was youngest of the Battle-Grim after Elvar, dark-eyed and angry. “We have earned the battle-fame, now we take the treasure.”

“Aye,” said Sólín, steel-haired and wire-muscled, gap-toothed from their recent encounter with a nest of tennúr. “We take what we can and get out of here. That’th what we do.”

Others of the Battle-Grim nodded and muttered their agreement.

“Agreed,” Sighvat said. “What we find and can wear, we keep. The rest we pile in the wagons and share as an equal split.”

Orv the Sneak, so-named on account of his light-footed stealth, nudged a small ash-covered mound at his foot, turning over bleached bones and revealing the glint of metal. He crouched and lifted an arm ring of age-blackened silver, then slipped it on to his arm, looked up and smiled.

The rest of the Battle-Grim began searching among the ash, all of them battered and carved up from their hard-fought battle with Ilska’s Raven-Feeders.

Elvar turned away and strode back towards their makeshift camp, which was little more than a cluster of wagons, some tethered ponies and cloaks for pillows and blankets. Ash rose in puffs and whorls around her feet, and she heard the trudge of Grend following behind her. Ahead was the tide-line of yesterday’s battle, where the corpses of their enemy still lay, marking where the Battle-Grim had formed their shield wall and stood against Ilska’s warband. Elvar could remember the stink of it, the deafening battle-cries and clashing of steel, the crash and thud of shield against shield. She felt a swell of pride in her chest, to have stood with the Battle-Grim against such odds, and prevailed. They were hard men and women, these Battle-Grim, reavers and hewers, battle-scarred but unbowed. And they had been winning against the Raven-Feeder’s greater numbers.

Until the dragon burst into our world.

She shook that memory away, trying to scatter it like flies from an open wound.

Uspa the Seiðr-witch was seated on the tailboard of a wagon, staring towards the great hole where the stump of the ash tree had been. Huge splinters reared up from the ground as long as the strakes of a sea-shattered drakkar, where Lik-Rifa the dragon-god had exploded from her underground gaol and scattered them all like chaff on the wind. Uspa’s fair hair was braided and bound, rune-curving tattoos visible above the neck of her tunic and curling up to the line of her jaw. Her hands were clasped, knuckles white, fingers clenching and unclenching like a fist full of night-wyrms.

A figure lay on the ground at her feet. A woman with great rust-coloured wings and braided red hair, an empty sword scabbard at her hip. She was bound at wrists and ankles, and still unconscious. No one really knew who or what she was, other than Vörn the Froa-Spirit had mentioned her as one of three sisters, guardians of the dragon. All agreed that if she had been guarding a dragon for three hundred years that it would not be wisdom to just let her wake up unrestrained.

“She will likely be upset that Lik-Rifa has escaped,” Huld had said.

“Aye, and that her sisters are dead,” Orv the Sneak added.

Elvar had agreed to the right of that, and they had bound the winged woman with leather cords.

“We must be moving,” Uspa said to Elvar as she drew close, Elvar walking to her pile of kit. A shattered shield, her rent coat of mail, a bloodied hole in it where a spear had burst the links and stabbed into Elvar’s shoulder.

“Moving where?” Elvar muttered.

“After my Bjarn,” Uspa said, eyes narrowing. “You made an oath.”

“Aye, to get your son back from Ilska once you had guided us here, I know.”

“And I have held my part of the bargain,” Uspa said.

“Agnar dead and a corpse-ripping dragon set free in the world was not part of that bargain,” Elvar said as she squatted and began rummaging through her kit.

“I warned you this would not end well,” Uspa hissed.

“I did not think that meant fighting dragon-born and dead gods flying free in the skies.”

“Once you unlock a door you cannot control what comes out of it,” Uspa spat. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “None of it matters, anyway. We swore an oath and it is binding.”

“Good luck with convincing them of that,” Elvar said with a nod over her shoulder at the Battle-Grim. Shouts of discovery were ringing out. “They are doing what they came here for, searchin