“It might be that no jarl ever had more longboats at his command than Olaaf Rikeson, or had brought more treasure across the North Sea, won with axe and fire from weaker men. Even so, it took more than his word to gather ten thousand from the bleak shores of the fjords where a hundred men were counted an army, and to march them into the Bitter Ice.

“Olaaf Rikeson had a vision. He had the gods at his side. The wise echoed what he said. The rune stones spoke for him. And more than this. He had a key. Even now the völvas argue over how he came to own it, but in the tale Snorri’s father told, Loki had given it to Olaaf after he burned the cathedral of the White Christ at York and slaughtered twice a hundred monks there. What Olaaf had to promise in return was never told.

“The fact that the god’s gift had been a key had always disappointed Snorri, but then Loki was the god of disappointment, amongst other things, things such as lies and trickery. Snorri would have preferred a battle ram. A warrior destroys the door—he doesn’t unlock it. But his father told him that Olaaf’s key was a talisman. It opened any lock, any door, and more than that—it opened men’s hearts.

“The oldest legends have it that Olaaf marched to open the gates of Niflheim and beard the frost giants in their lair, to shame the gods and their false Ragnarok of many suns, and to bring about the true end of all things in a last battle. Snorri’s father never denied the tale but spoke of how one thing might hide another, like a feint in combat. Men, he said, were more often moved by more basic wants—hunger, greed, and lust. Stories grew from seed and spread like weeds. Perhaps the gods touched Rikeson, or perhaps a bloody-handed reaver took a few hundred men north to raid the Inowen and from his failure sprang a song that bards wove into a saga and placed amongst the treasured memories of the North. Whatever truth there was, years have stolen it from us.”

• • •

Snorri left his son’s pyre, the last logs still blazing, the snow on all sides retreating to expose the black earth of the Wodinswood. Behind him embers swirled skyward amidst dark smoke. He trekked the hills of the hinterland, leaving the Uulisk far behind, tracking Sven Broke-Oar and the men of the Drowned Isles across the boulder fields of Törn, where vicious winds shape the rocks themselves. Above Törn the Jarlson Uplands, and beyond those, the Bitter Ice.

What he would do when he reached his enemy, Snorri had no idea, other than to die well. Grief and guilt and rage consumed him. Perhaps any of these on its own would have destroyed him, but in conflict, each with the next, they achieved a balance within him and he carried on.

The pace the raiders set was fierce and Snorri couldn’t think it one that Freja or Egil, with just ten years to his name, could match. In grim visions he saw them dead, marching with the tireless corpses that had come ashore at Eight Quays. But Karl had been alive; they had shackled prisoners—it made no sense to be taking them inland, but the necromancers had wanted live prisoners, that much was clear.