“You heard what Somerled said. Get the girl out alive. That’s who he wants. Go on, he won’t thank you if you bring him back a pretty little charred corpse.”

“All right, all right.” One of the fellows was setting his boot to the cottage door; it gave little resistance, being almost as old as Rona herself. Clouds of dark smoke billowed out; the man blundered inside, coughing.

“What about over there?” It was one of the knarr’s crew, Eyvind knew him. “A cave or something; she could be inside. Come on!” He knew them all; men who had been Ulf’s loyal companions and men who had simply been hired sailors. Now all bore cold iron; now they were Somerled’s men.

“Nobody in there!” wheezed the fellow from the cottage doorway. Behind him the rafters were beginning to give; strange sparks fizzed and popped through the smoke, purple and green and scarlet. There would be little left of the wise woman’s possessions, meager as they were.

Now all five men were making for the howe, and suddenly there was Shadow, her growl menacing, her mouth a drooling trap of long teeth fit for rending bear or deer or wild boar. Her eyes, so mild when she walked by Eyvind’s side or played with her mate, now seemed the reddened orbs of some crazed, feral creature. The men hesitated.

“Odin’s bones!” their leader muttered. “What in the name of all the gods is that?”

“It’s a witch-wolf!” someone whispered. “One bite and you drop dead in agony.”

“Poison in the fangs,” agreed someone else in shaking tones. “Where I come from, they call them demon dogs. Better back off.”

But one fellow had a spear ready, and it was aimed squarely at Shadow’s heart. His arm went back, the shaft flew through the air, and Eyvind stepped out neatly from his hiding place to deflect it with his sword. Shadow began a ferocious barking.

Until that moment, Eyvind had not known what he would do: what he might say. Now he raised Biter high, and the flames of the burning cottage shimmered gold and orange across its blade. A voice came to his lips unbidden, a voice of wrath, powerful as the darkness in the moment before death. It rang across the hollow like a summons from another world. “Who dares challenge me?”

“Eyvind!” someone gasped in tones of abject terror. The men’s faces grew pale as cheese, their eyes filled with panic, and they began to back away, stumbling in their haste. “It’s Eyvind! But–but he’s dead!”