‘What happened here?’ Fritha asked, looking from the bonfire to the frozen corpse.

‘I reckon Bodil might have met your bear,’ Ulf said to Olin.

Drem looked at the ground, already covered in a thin layer of snow. He scraped some away and stamped on the ground beneath, sending a jolt up through his heel into his leg.

Ground’s frozen solid.

He still would have expected to see some sign of the bear’s presence, the memory of its great bulk vivid in his mind, but the snow was covering all, and there was little point in looking: Old Bodil’s wounds told the tale clearly enough.

‘Made the fire to scare the beast off,’ Calder said, looking from the corpse to the bonfire.

Drem felt himself nodding. That was a tactic that he and his da had used before, against wolven, not bears, but it worked much the same, as long as you kept the fire burning all night.

Didn’t work for Old Bodil, though.

‘We should raise a cairn over him,’ Fritha said.

‘Aye,’ agreed Olin, still checking over Bodil’s wounds.

‘Not if we want to be by our hearths by nightfall,’ Ulf said. ‘Won’t be digging any rocks out of this.’ He dug a heel into the ice-bitten ground.

‘Can’t leave him to be gnawed at,’ Calder muttered.

‘No. A pyre,’ Ulf said. ‘And quick about it.’

It didn’t take them long to gather more dead wood. Drem helped his da, Ulf and a few others carry the frozen corpse to the bonfire. Then flint and tinder were being struck, flames catching in the dry wood despite the falling snow, and soon hungry flames were clawing at the sky, the snow hissing and steaming.

They rode back to their homes in silence, Bodil’s pyre roaring and belching flame and smoke behind them. Drem didn’t like the smell: flesh sizzling and charring.

Fritha tried to talk to him as they rode through the trees, eerily silent as the snow fell thicker, but he was distracted, preoccupied with his thoughts. He had that anxious feeling he had in his belly when he felt something was wrong, tingling in his blood, all the way to his fingertips. An inexplicable dread.

A bonfire to hold back a bear, maybe, but what about the other fire we saw, in the distance, far to the south-west?

It was a question he wanted answered, but something else was foremost in Drem’s mind. He was thinking on the feel of Bodil’s corpse in his hands as he’d carried the dead man to his pyre, and the scar he’d seen on Bodil’s wrist when Ulf had tripped.

No, not a scar. A fresh wound. As if he’d been bound at the wrist and struggled to break free, like an animal in a wire trap.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: RIV

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

RIV