“So,” he said, “we found Enar and Njall’s bodies. Enar was an incompetent fool, but Njall had promise. Who killed them?”

“I did.”

“While they were tied to a tree? You are brave, old man.”

“What is he saying?” Osferth hissed.

“Nothing important,” the priest said, “just insults.”

“So who are you?” Sköll asked me.

“The man who killed Enar and Njall.”

Sköll sighed, while his three companions scowled at me. All three wore gray wolf cloaks and had weather-tanned narrow faces. One had a black beard plaited into short stubs, a second had a scar that slashed clean across his swarthy face from the left jawbone to the right cheekbone, so that he appeared to have two nostrils, one above the other, while the third smiled at me to show that he had filed his teeth into points.

Sköll sighed again and looked up into the sky as though seeking inspiration. A heavy ax hung on his right side, held from the saddle’s pommel by a leather harness, while at his left hip was a huge sword, scabbarded in leather. The hilt was dull steel, the grips bound with wolf skin, and I knew that had to be Grayfang, the weapon that had killed my daughter. Sköll looked back to me. “You brought a sorcerer,” he said, nodding toward Osferth’s priest, “you fear me that much?”

“Why would I fear a failure like you?” I asked. “You ran from Ireland like a frightened child, and I hear that a woman chased you from Jorvik.”

He nodded as if acknowledging the truth. “But the woman died,” he said, “I killed her.”

At that moment I just wanted to draw Serpent-Breath and slice him to red ribbons, but I was steeling myself to be calm. “You killed a woman,” I said, “you are brave.”

He shrugged. “She was brave, certainly, but she should not have fought us.”

“She was a sorceress,” I said, “who used the skull curse. Is your sorcerer good enough to avert that curse?”

Sköll gazed at me, judging my words. “If she was so powerful a sorceress,” he said, “why did she die?”

“The Norns told her she must die,” I said, “that it was her time, but that there was a purpose in her death.”

“And how do you know that?” he asked. He still spoke calmly, but I noticed how he and his companions had all touched their hammers when I mentioned the skull curse. There was, so far as I knew, no such curse, but it was enough to unsettle Sköll. “How do you know she had a purpose?” he asked again.

“Because she spoke to me in dreams, of course.”

“You invent stories like a child, old man.”

“And the purpose of her death,” I went on, “was to send you to Niflheim where the corpse-ripper will gnaw your flesh through the rest of time. You will writhe in agony, scream like a baby, and weep like a child. The sorceress told me the worm would gnaw the flesh from your bones, but you will never die, and as you suffer, as you whimper, you will hear the laughter of the heroes in Valhalla. All that she told me.”