Except that I couldn’t sleep. Instead I lay in the cold sweat that fear had wrapped me in and stared at the night. Snorri’s death, the monster’s destruction, the blood of the Silent Sister or her northern twin. None of them easy. Each hard in its separate way.

“Ask the king for the Norseman’s head,” Sageous had told me. “It’s the easiest way.” Aren’t you good at easy? That’s what the writing seemed to say—offered up on his palms. Aren’t you good at leaving?

If I were good at leaving I would know where the blasted door was. I normally kept good tabs on such things, plotted my escape routes, got the lay of the land. But when the heathen left the room, a great weariness wrapped itself around me and I fell into the bed like a stone into the deepest pool.

“Kill the Norseman.” It sounded more reasonable each time he said it. After all, it would save Snorri the discovery that his family were dead. All he had before him was a long trip to the worst news in the world. Didn’t he greet battle like an old friend, eager to meet his end? “Kill the Norseman.” I couldn’t tell if I’d said it or Sageous.

I had sat in the softness of the great chair, facing the heathen, listening to his truths. Had sat? Was sitting? I sat opposite him now as he stood behind the ladder-back chair, fingers running over its rungs as if they were a harp on which a melody could be played. “So you’ll ask for his head.” Not a question. Those mild eyes fatherly now. A father and friend. Though lord knows, not my father; he always seemed embarrassed by the whole business of father and son.

Yes. Sageous was right. I started to say the words. “I’ll ask for his—”

The point of a sword emerged from Sageous’s narrow chest, and not your common or garden sword either but one as brilliant as the dawn, bright as steel drawn from the white heat of the furnace. Sageous looked down at the point, astonished, and it advanced until a foot of gleaming blade stood from his chest.

“What?” Blood ran from the corners of his mouth.

“This is not your place, heathen.” Wings unfurled behind the man as if they were his own. White wings. White like summer clouds, eagle-feathered, broad enough to bear a man skyward.

“How?” Sageous gargled blood now, spilling it down his chin with the word.

The sword withdrew and a head unbowed, rising above the heathen, a face as proud and inhuman as those wrought in marble upon statues of Greek gods or Roman emperors. “He is of the light.” And in a flash the blade took the heathen’s head, shearing through his neck as a scythe takes grass.

“Wake up.” Not a voice from the angel that loomed above Sageous’s corpse. A voice that came from outside the castle, huger than sound should be, loud enough to break stone. “Wake.”