I spat into the road. “Damn your barbarian logic.” It was all the counterargument I could muster.

“So it’s settled, then. We’ll go.” Snorri smiled and walked on up the track.

I nudged Sleipnir after him. “Surely if she’s so all-powerful she won’t just see the likes of anyone.”

“We’re not just anyone, Jal,” Snorri called over his shoulder. “I’m a hauldr of the Uuliskind. You and I bear unusual magics, and Sleipnir is possibly the descendant of a horse of legend.” Ten more paces and then, “And you’re a prince of somewhere.”

Damned if I ever wanted to see another witch long as I lived—I hadn’t even wanted to see the first one—but options were running short if I didn’t want to find myself on a boat sailing heathen seas in search of an unborn captain of the Dead King’s army.

I drew level with the Norseman. “So how do we find her?”

“That’s the easy part,” Snorri said. “We catch a train.”

• • •

What a train might be I had no idea, but I wasn’t going to let the Viking taunt me with my ignorance again, so I followed without complaint.

We passed a few farmsteads, locals carting the harvest to be sold and stored against the winter. All of them remarked us, Snorri in particular, and whilst it still irked that a commoner, and Norseman at that, upstaged a full-blooded prince of Red March, it was pleasing to see he was as much a rarity in his stature in the North as in the South. Part of me had secretly worried that all men might be built along Snorri’s lines up amongst the fjords and I might find myself a dwarf amidst giants.

Some amongst the fit-firar tried to speak to Snorri in the old tongue of the North, but he answered them in the Empire Tongue with good humour, thanking them for their courtesy. Each person we encountered told the same story about Skilfar. The völva had arrived without warning a month earlier, and none had seen her save those foolhardy enough to seek her out. Snorri asked for the nearest station, and armed with directions we abandoned the road north and headed out across open country.

The station turned out to be nothing more than a broad and grassy ditch in the ground, overhung on one side by some kind of stone lip. We reached it under grey skies and a chill drizzle.

“She lives in a ditch?” I’d heard of trolls living under bridges and witches in caves . . .

“Now we follow the tracks,” Snorri said, and headed off along the side of the ditch, bound north and east.

In time the ditch became shallow, then invisible, but we carried on through moor and meadow, finding the line again, now as a ridge, raised a yard above the surrounding terrain. Not until we reached the uplands did I first get an impression of what a fearsome creature the train must have been to leave such tracks. Where a man might go around, or weave a path of least resistance up a slope, the train had just ploughed on. We walked in one place along a rock-walled ravine thirty yards deep where the train had scored its path through the bedrock.