Shef realized that one of the giant figures was coming toward him—the tallest of them, the one with the spear. The mouse-man saw too and ducked back into the shadows, now visible only as the palest of blurs in the gloom.

A finger like the trunk of an ash turned Shef’s chin upward. One eye looked down at him, from a face like the blade of an axe: straight nose, jutting chin, sharp gray beard, wide, wide cheekbones. It was a face that would have made Ivar’s seem a relief, as something at least comprehensible, ravaged only by human passions like envy hate and cruelty. This was far different: One touch of the thoughts behind that mask, Shef knew, and any human mind would go insane.

Yet it did not seem entirely hostile, more thoughtful, considering.

“You have far to go, mannikin,” it said. “Yet you have begun well. Pray that I do not call you to me too soon.”

“Why would you call me, High One?” said Shef, amazing himself with his own temerity.

The face smiled like a glacier calving. “Do not ask,” it said. “The wise man does not pry or peek like a maiden searching for a lover. He looks even now, the gray fierce wolf, into Asgarth’s doors.”

The finger dropped, the great hand came sweeping across, over forge and anvil and tools, over benches and buckets and the smith all together, brushing them all away like a man sweeping nutshells from a blanket. Shef felt himself hurled into the air, spinning end over end, apron flying away from him, his last memory the little face-shaped blur in the shadows, watching and marking him.

In a heartbeat he was back on the grass, back beneath the open sky of England in the forest clearing. But the sun had moved off him, leaving him in shadow, cold and suddenly afraid.

Where was Godive? She had crept from his side for a moment, but then—

Shef was on his feet, wide awake, staring round for an enemy. Tumult in the bushes, thrashing and fighting and the sound of a woman trying to scream with a hand over her mouth and an arm round her throat.

As Shef sprang toward the struggle, men rose from their cover behind the tree-trunks, and closed on him like the fingers of doom. Leading them came Muirtach the Gaddgedil, a newly livid weal across his face and an expression of bitter, contained, contented fury twisting it.

“Nearly you got away, boy,” he said. “You should have kept running, not stopped to try out Ivar’s woman. But a hot prick knows no sense. It will be cold soon enough.”

Hard hands closed on Shef’s shoulders as he lunged towards the bushes, desperate to reach Godive. Had they seized her already? How had they found them? Had they left some trail?