The faring was harder yet, but they reached the Troll’s Hood a little before noon. The peak reared stark, overlooking crags, cliffs, ridges, rock-strewn slopes, stretches of ice, and snow, all lifeless but for mottling lichen, moss in clumps where stones gave shelter, starveling grass tufts here and there. Nowhere was it flat, though the top was broad enough to hold a few great boulders. Today it also held a mound of split wood, higher than a man’s head. Wind went bleak through an empty heaven. The men felt short of breath.

“I see why the thurs chose this for the tryst,” Hadding said. “Not only could no troop catch him unawares, they’d lack footing and room to fight.”

“How then shall one man?” wondered ‘Thorfinn.

“We’ve been over that. Let’s make my lair.”

They had thought about this, using Thorfinn’s memories of the two or three times he had come here. That was years ago, he a boy, his father a hunter and trapper. The search for wild reindeer, wolverine, fox, and birds often took them from one ground to another across these heights. Then it was a mettlesome thing for him to scamper off and scramble onto the Troll’s Hood. It showed him fearless of the beings said to haunt it. Something like that stayed in one’s head.

Two outsize boulders leaned against one another at the rim of a downslope. Only a crack was between them where they faced the peak, while behind lay a kind of three-cornered room some four feet long, with a three-foot opening onto the mountainside. A man could sit there hidden, unless his foe climbed up from straight beneath, and scree would hinder that.

Hadding and Thorfinn set about making it a little better. The king might have to lurk a while. They took lengths of wood from the heap and wedged them overhead where they wouldn’t show. To this they tied a leather cloak for a roof of sorts. A second such cloak covered the damp stones below. The men chinked the inward opening with pebbles and bits of turf, taking care that it was nothing anybody would likely mark, lest a straight-on glance or a stray sun-flash off iron give Hadding away. They brought in a skin of water, dry food, and blankets they had carried hither.

As they worked, they spied a stirring and a gleam afar, winding over the high waste from the north. Soon Hadding’s keen eyes told him it was half a dozen folk. “We’re none too early,” he said. Thorfinn had taken a roundabout way through the mountains, not to leave spoor for others to see. “Make haste, and keep clear of the skyline.” His hopes hung on utter surprise.

They ended their task in time. “Begone,” Hadding bade. “Thank you. You shall have the honors you’ve earned.”

“More honor would be for me to fight beside you,” the Norseman said.