“Six, lord.”

“And how many with Arnborg?”

She shrugged. “Many, lord?” She plainly did not know, but I pressed her anyway.

“Many? A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Many, lord!”

“To join Sköll?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes, lord. To join Sköll.”

“Sköll is a great king!” her son called defiantly. “He is a warrior of the wolf! He has a sorcerer who turns men into ice!”

I ignored him, dismissing his words as a child’s boast. “And Sköll,” I still talked to Fritha, “where did he go?”

“East, lord,” she said helplessly.

“And Arnborg’s hall,” I asked, “how far is it?”

“Close, lord.”

“And how many men has he left there?”

She hesitated, then saw me glance at her son. “Maybe twenty, lord?”

We shut the gates, put the horses in the smaller hall and the barns, fed the great hearth, ate Hallbjorn’s food, and some of us slept, though only after we had questioned every captive and learned that Arnborg’s hall truly was close, built beside the Ribbel where the river widened out to the great estuary. Fritha, scared for her son’s life, was eager to talk now and reckoned it was less than an hour’s walk. “You can see it from our roof, lord,” she said.

“He’ll have left men there,” Finan said to me in the dawn.

“But where has he gone? Where has Sköll gone?”

“East,” Finan said unhelpfully. “Maybe just a cattle raid? A big one?”

“In winter? There’ll be few cattle outside.” We slaughtered our herds as the autumn faded and winter’s grip chilled the land, keeping alive just enough beasts to breed for the following year, and most of those precious animals would be behind palisades. I had the dread feeling that I had made the wrong decision, that I should not be seeking the treacherous monk, but hurrying back to Bebbanburg. But Fritha had said her menfolk had left two weeks before, which meant that whatever they had left to do had probably been done already. And we had come this far, so we might as well find the monk with the scarred tonsure. If, indeed, he had returned here.

Which meant we must capture Arnborg’s hall.

Nothing in war is simple, though fate had been kind to us on the night we took Hallbjorn’s steading. We lost one horse that broke a leg when he stumbled into a ditch, but otherwise the worst we suffered was cold.

Assaulting Arnborg’s hall would not be so easy. But at least the capture of Hallbjorn’s steading had taken us close to the hall, and better still we had been undiscovered. We were on Arnborg’s land, and none of his men knew we were there. Yet the moment we left the steading we could no longer hide, we must race across the winter ground to reach the palisade before any news of our coming alerted the men left to guard the hall. We had questioned Fritha and her people and had learned that the hall was built beside a creek of the Ribbel, that it was surrounded by barns and huts, that it had a strong palisade, and that Arnborg had left a garrison to protect his home. One servant, who had carried eggs to the hall the day before, agreed with Fritha that there were perhaps twenty men, “Or maybe thirty, lord?”