After an age a shutter high above broke open, scattering ice and snow upon Snorri’s head. By the time he looked up the shutters had closed once more. He pounded the door again, knowing his mind clouded with the slowness and stupidity that cold brings, but unable to think of an alternative.

“You!” A voice from on high. “Who are you?”

Snorri looked up and there in wolf furs, leaning out for a better look, Sven Broke-Oar, face unreadable in the red-gold swirl of his hair.

“Snorri . . .” For a moment Snorri couldn’t summon his full name to numb lips.

“Snorri ver Snagason?” the Broke-Oar boomed in amazement. “You vanished! Fled the battle, men said. Oh, this is most fine. I’ll be down to open the doors myself. Wait there. Don’t run away again.”

So Snorri stood, white hands tight around his axe, trying to let his anger warm him. But the cold had wrapped around his bones, sapping strength, sapping will and even memory. Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

The scraping of the doors shook him from his reverie. He startled backwards. The grunting of men at labour as the two great slabs of timber juddered back over icy stone. If they had simply left him waiting he might never have moved again.

Ten yards back, beyond the thickness of the walls, standing in the open courtyard, Sven Broke-Oar waited, axe in one gloved hand, his small iron buckler across the other.

“I could have finished you with a spear from the walls, or let the snows have you, but the champion of the Iron Fields deserves a better end than that now.”

Snorri wanted to say that a man concerned with honour, or with the rights and wrongs of how a warrior dies, should have come to Eight Quays in the daylight, sounding his horn across the fjord. He wanted to say a lot of things. He wanted to talk of Emy and of Karl, but ice had sealed his lips and whatever strength remained he would use to kill the man before him.

“Come then.” The Broke-Oar beckoned him in. “You’ve come this far. It would be a shame for fear to keep you from the last few paces of the journey.”

Snorri made a shambling run, his feet too frozen for speed. Sven Broke-Oar’s laugh—that was the last thing he remembered before the club struck the back of his head. The men who had drawn open the doors simply waited behind them and brought him down once he’d passed by.

A blazing heat woke him. Heat in his arms, stretched above him. Heat in his extremities, as if they burned. Heat across his face. And pain. Pain everywhere.