Odin made it sound as if she was performing a crucial task on behalf of the gods and gave her a runemark of her own – Naudr, the Binder – and almost unlimited power – but only within her realm, of course. The Old Man was planning to avoid Death for as long as he could, but even then, in his prime, he was already laying the foundations for a possible alliance – with a view to finding a loophole when the inevitable occurred.

As for Angrboda – well. She went her way, I went mine. I hoped there were no hard feelings, although, with Angie, you never could tell. Sigyn’s arms were always open, and she was endlessly forgiving, but what with the chintz, and the animals, the cooking, the nagging, the lutes, the scented candles, the pot-pourri and the cuddling, I would have lost my mind if I’d stayed. And so I fled the domestic scene and returned to my digs in Asgard.

No, I didn’t abandon her – Frigg would never have let me do that – but I managed to convince her that I needed my personal space. By then she was pregnant anyway, and her energies had been channelled into knitting bootees and little hats. A good time for me to make my excuses, I thought – and after that, she had the boys to occupy her.

Yes, the boys. My twin sons, Vali and Narvi, with my green eyes and my temperament, whom Sigyn (wrongly, as it happened) assumed would awaken my sense of responsibility. In fact, they had the opposite effect, with the result that over the next few years I took every excuse to travel as far and as often from my loving family as possible.

What can I say? It’s my nature. Besides, what role models did I have? An absent father in Chaos, and an absent mother in World Above. That’s hardly a wonderful start in life. Still, if I’d done things differently . . .

But no. Regrets are for losers. What’s done is done, and there’s no point in wishing for anything else. Didn’t I pay for it in the end? Maybe I even deserved it. And maybe I should . . . but none of that now. It’s easy to be wise after the Worlds have ended. The Black Fortress of Netherworld is filled with that kind of wisdom.