It was a long chilly walk through the night back to his uncle’s holding where he and his mother lived now after being taken in on the death of his father. A light icy rain fell. The snow was hard beneath his boots, the slush frozen with the night’s cold. Above, the Great Ice Bridge once more spanned the night sky, glittering and forbidding. It had been obscured of late, what with the passing of the Foreigner, or Trespasser, as some named it. People had sworn it foretold the end of the Icebloods. But no such blessing followed. As he walked the path of frozen mud he wondered whether in time it would come to be seen as a portent of this gold fever and the crushing of the Icebloods beneath the boots of a horde of outlanders … if enough really did reach this far north. In that sense perhaps it truly was an omen – of whatever came to pass.

He pushed open the door to the draughty outbuilding his uncle had grudgingly given over to them and crossed to the chest against the rear wall. He cleared away the piled litter of day to day life: the wood shavings, the old bits of burlap, wool, jute and linen his mother sewed and darned to make clothes; a wooden bowl he’d carved, now clattering with buttons, hooks, awls and needles, all carved by him from bone and antler. He opened the chest and pulled out his father’s leathers, rolled up and bound together with belts.

The strong scent of his father wafted over him then: animal fat and smoke together with pine sap and earth. The smell of the high forest.

‘You are leaving,’ came the voice of his mother behind him. He turned. She lay beneath piled blankets. Her long grey hair caught the moonlight that brightened their one window of stretched sheepskin.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I see. Where will you go?’

He squeezed the heavy leather shirt and trousers in his hands, cleared his throat. ‘Down to the coastal kingdoms. Perhaps I’ll join with Ronal the Bastard.’

After a long silence she said, ‘Take Boarstooth.’

He straightened, surprised. Boarstooth was his father’s spear. It hung now over the stone hearth of his uncle’s hall. ‘Jal has claimed it.’

‘I did not agree to that. But I said nothing at the time. You were too young.’ Her eyes, glittering in the faint light, shifted in the direction of the hall. ‘Go now. They will all be abed.’

He rose, slipped an arm through a belt and adjusted the roll on his back. Inside, he knew, would be the tall moccasins that his father always wore bound with leather strips up to his knees. His mother rose as well. In her long white shift she glowed like a ghost and Orman felt a shiver of premonition of her death. She met him at the door, said, ‘Go quietly.’