‘Drem, we’re talking to you,’ Ulf said to him now.

Drem blinked and focused back on Ulf, Hildith.

‘You coming or not?’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the goats, standing and staring. Heads swivelling from Ulf to Drem, as if they were waiting for his answer.

‘No,’ Drem said.

‘All right then. Too painful. It’ll bring it all back, I understand.’ Ulf nodded, turning his horse in a circle. ‘Wanted to make the offer, though. I’ll bring you a set of claws to match the one round your neck.’

Drem didn’t say anything to that and after a moment’s silence Ulf clicked his horse on, back to the gates and track. Hildith hovered a moment, then dipped her head to Drem and followed.

Drem waited until they had faded from sight, the track empty, just churned snow and ice and sentinel trees. He drew in a deep breath and sighed.

‘Best be on with it, then.’

Drem stopped at the gates to Fritha’s hold and stared at the wreck of her cabin. A cairn stood to one side, between the cabin and some stables.

Drem had returned to the cabin the same day as he’d given Asger his package. He’d found it exactly the same as the last time he’d seen it – no kin or friends of Fritha and Hask to raise a cairn over the body.

Apart from me, he’d thought. So he’d carried Hask’s corpse out into the yard, and the hound’s, too, laying Hask and Surl side by side, and then gathered rocks from the field behind the cabin, loading them in a wain he found in the barn, and bringing them back to pile over the two bodies. When it had come to saying some words for the dead he’d stood there silent a while, thinking with sadness that Hask’s only mourner was a stranger who knew almost nothing about him.

I knew his granddaughter, though. And to have raised a woman so fine and brave and kind – well, he must have done something right.

And so Drem had said so, spoken words out loud to the stones and snow, adding something about the hound’s loyalty and Hask’s spirit.

He waved a spear at my da, that was spirit enough!

Then he’d left.

But before carrying the bodies into the yard and raising a cairn over them, Drem had spent half a day going over the destruction of the cabin; every splinter of wood, every handspan of the room, the floor, the walls, the gaping entry and exit holes, meticulously checking both bodies, their wounds, fingernails, teeth, claws. Everything. It hadn’t been pleasant, limbs part-frozen with the cold, blood congealed and black.