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The door lay flat, torn off its leather hinges, the interior beyond streith bed furs, broken pots, scattered corn Snorri staggered in, searching through the furs with blunt fingers, seized by a shivering beyond his control, tossing the bedding aside, dreading to find nothing, dreading to find so

In the end he discovered only a pool of blood on the hearthstone, dark and sticky and sers the blood regained its cri left of his wife, of his children, but blood? At the door, a clued by a crack in the support, il” Snorri reached for his son’s hair with bloodstained hands Convulsions overtook hist the hides of grey wolf and black bear

How houls’ poison to leave him, Snorri could not have said The veno his heart and drawing back life into the tightest core, now restored all sensation as it left his syste the pain of returning circulation,wrapped with rief that already seerees both war laces with still-nu, pulled his boots on, crammed the last of the winter stores into his travel pack, dry hake and black biscuit, salt in a wrap of sealskin, fat in an earthenware jar He took his travelling skins, seal in two layers, trapping the down of the cliff gull Above it he wore a wolfskin, a grey beast that like the dark bears travel north with the su had won her war, and like the summer wolf Snorri would strike north and take what he needed

“I will find you,” he promised the empty room, promised the dent in the bed where his wife had slept, proh

And ducking the lintel, Snorri ver Snagason left his home to find his axe amidst the thaw

• • •

“And did you find it?” I asked, i snow, and Snorri lifting it with awful purpose

“Not first” The Norseman’s voice put so much despair into just tords I couldn’t ask him to speak more and held my peace, but a moment later he spoke on unprompted

“I found Eed, like a lost doll” No sound but for the crackle of the fire beside us I wanted hihouls had eaten h”

“I’ain and made me brave In that moment I wanted to be the one to stand between the child and her attackers To keep her safe And failing that, to hunt them to the ends of the earth “Death must have been a kindness”

“She wasn’t dead” No eht felt thick around us, the dark deepening into blindness, sing stars “I pulled two ghoul-darts from her and she started to scream” He lay down and the fire dih it had burned clean enough when set “Death was kind” He drew a sharp breath “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child”

I lay down too, no care for the hard ground, da the side of ic had left me My only desire lay south, back in the co in ht have been for little Eht have been for me—it probably was for me, but I’ll tell myself it was for both of us, and perhaps one day I’ll believe it

TWELVE

On theafter Snorri’s tale of horror in the North, we neither of us spoke of it He broke his fast in a soood humour had returned Much of the h We all practise self-deception to a degree; nocut at each turn There’s not enough roorief, each worry, each terror that he owns I’ on Snorri’s deht before while we sat watching the stars, but now he’d harried them back into some cellar of his own and barred the door once h in the world to drown in, but Snorri and I knew that action requires an uncluttered s aside and move on