“No more forests,” I said.

Snorri wiped the soot from his eyes and nodded.

We trekked a mile, another mile, and collapsed on the side of a gentle rise, looking back to watch the smoke and flame swirl above the burning forest. It seemed inconceivable that such an inferno, lofting embers into the heavens and scorching the clouds themselves, could have started with the tiny spark struck from my flint and nursed by my breath. Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing. It might be said that the whole course of my own adventure sprang from a die that should have rolled a five or a two, landing instead with a single snake eye pointing at me, a pitiless eye watching me plunge further into Maeres Allus’s debt.

“That,” I said, “was close.”

“Yes.” Snorri sat knees to chest, watching the fire. He pulled a stick loose, tangled in his hair.

“We can’t go on like this. The next time we won’t be so lucky.” He had to see sense. Two men couldn’t carry on against such opposition. I’d gambled on long odds before—not my life, but my fortune—but never on so hopeless a bet as Snorri offered. Without prize or purpose.

“I would have given Karl such a pyre.” Snorri waved a hand at the burning horizon. “I built his beside the Wodinswood from deadfall. The trees were too heavy with the winter’s snow for the fire to spread, but I would have burned them all.

“He should have had a ship, my Karl. A longship. I would have laid him before the mast with my father’s axe and such armour as would serve him in Valhalla. But there was no time and I couldn’t leave him for the dead to find and use. Better wolves have him than that.”

“He told you about a key?” I said. Snorri had spoken of it back in the ruins of Compere but fallen silent. Perhaps now, with mile upon mile of blazing forest burning as Compere had burned, he would speak again. His eldest boy broke bones to escape his shackles and his last words to Snorri had been of a key.

And in the darkness of the grassland, with Gowfaugh burning red behind us, Snorri told me a story.

• • •

“My father told me the tale of Olaaf Rikeson and his march to the Bitter Ice. I heard it by the hearth many times. Father would spin it out on the deepest nights of winter when the ice on the Uulisk made sharp complaint against the cold.

“It takes more than a warrior or a general to lead ten thousand men into the Bitter Ice. Ten thousand who were not Viking would die before they reached the true ice. Ten thousand who knew enough to survive would know enough not to go. There is nothing there for men. Even the Inowen keep to the shore and the sea ice. Whale, seal, and fish is all that will sustain men in such places.