“I will help you,” he managed.

5

Auðr was kneeling beside a bed deep in the northern forest, when she heard the legionaries approaching. The girl she was tending gasped, her swollen belly bluish and rigid, the pallet beneath her soaked with blood, and Auðr hissed in frustration. The horses outside were distracting, and she needed all her powers for this. Her arms trembled with tension. Too much time had passed.

Outside the doorway, snow drifted over the pines. In her own land, the gods came in the northern lights, glancing their fires across the skies, spinning clouds from their looms, singing with the thunder. Here, they did not even know that her homeland existed. Oceanus, they called it, as though it were not a true place, as though the water stretched to cover the world apart from them. Still, she had been here for years, had come across the ocean to this forest. Her part in the pattern had dictated that she place herself here. The sound of hooves on the frozen land was distinct, and Auðr cursed quietly. She had not expected the Romans so soon.

Auðr was a fate spinner, a seiðkona, but for the first time in her life, she was unable to see the entirety of the future. Something grave had changed in the world, and for months she’d tried in vain to understand what it was. She knew only that there were torn threads in the pattern, a dark disturbance in the tapestry of time.

Destruction and bloodshed, old gods rising.

Death.

If all humanity was fated to die or to descend into pain and chaos, it was not the place of a seiðkona to try to change it, Auðr knew; she was not supposed to interfere in the fate of the world, but she could not stop herself. Though she was not as strong as she had been in her youth, Auðr had spent her life keeping chaos from finding purchase in an orderly universe. She did not fear death, but she feared that it would take her before she finished her work.

She was far from her home, far from her people, and she had broken the rules.

Two days before, she’d irrevocably transgressed by braiding the threads of her own fate to the ones that began the tangle.

Before her, the girl’s head lolled back, her eyes rolling like those of a terrified animal. The seiðkona curled her aching fingers about her distaff, her seiðstafr, twisting and arranging the threads of destiny about the girl and her child as quickly as she could. The girl screamed, and then writhed, arching up from the bed, her body controlled by Auðr’s power.

The fate spinner caught the baby between her hands. A girl child. Still. Pale as a fish. Lips and eyelids deep blue. No spark of life there, no heartbeat.

She’d been dead three hours, perhaps longer.

Pounding on the door, shouting, horses. The seiðkona clenched her hand around the distaff. Her fingers worked, reweaving the child’s threads into a new pattern. Everyone had a place in the tapestry, and this soul would have one. She would have a life filled with ordinary miracles. The seiðkona would give it to her. It would be the last thing she did in these woods.