The strait was mostly free of ice. We crossed it in less than twenty-four hours, landing on a broad white beach bristling with driftwood and the bones of long-dead animals.

We dragged the boat past the tideline, then picked up our packs and headed inland. The mountains seemed as far away as they had on the other side of the strait, and much of the land was forest; dark and deep and scented with pine and filled with plants and animals that none of us had ever seen. Here there were trees so straight and tall that they almost rivalled Yggdrasil; black squirrels that ran up and down the trunks; livid fungi as tall as a man. It was a strange and unsettling place, and as we moved further into the woods I felt more and more uneasy. Something out there was watching us. I could feel it in my guts.

‘Frightened of wolves?’ said Thor, and laughed. ‘That’s a good one. The Father of Wolves, getting jumpy about his relatives.’

I pointed out that just because I was Fenris’s father, it wouldn’t have stopped him snacking on me if the urge had taken him. Besides, if even mushrooms could grow this tall in this part of World Beyond, to what size could a werewolf grow – or even, gods preserve us, a snake.

‘Snakes?’ said Thialfi. ‘You think there are snakes?’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows? There might be.’

Thialfi shivered. ‘I hate snakes. Especially those green ones that hide in the reeds when you’re swimming, and the brown ones that lie by the side of the path and look almost invisible. Or the big ones that hang from the trees . . .’

This was when I realized that I might have found a travelling companion even more annoying than Honir. I considered closing his mouth with a cantrip of the rune Naudr, but he was Thor’s number-one fan, and I feared that the Thunderer might object if I muted his number-one fan. And so we went on through the forest, Yours Truly feeling increasingly jumpy, Thialfi talking cheerily and incessantly about snakes.

At this point, it began to rain. The kind of steady, drenching rain that might go on for ever. It ran down our backs, flattened our hair, filled the forest with the scent of rotting wood and sour, damp earth. I was getting hungry but there was no sign of game, and I wasn’t quite desperate enough to try eating one of the squirrels.

‘I’m tired,’ said Roskva. (I could tell from her trusting expression that she expected me to fix this.) ‘Isn’t it nearly time to make camp?’