The wooden spears were long, and had been thrust in with considerable force. There had been a rage in his people that day. By the time he had wrenched out the first and lowered its pathetic burden to the ground his hands were shaking, and he realized this would be a slower job than he’d thought. A pick or lever of some kind would help, and a bag, for each of these poor, decaying things was part of a man, and must be carried across to the island with a modicum of respect. One could hardly grip them by the hair, as if transporting a carcass for the pot. Eyvind searched inside the darkened corners of the small hut, finding, to his surprise, a pile of fishy-smelling sacks, a shovel or two and a dangerous-looking bar of heavy iron, with a pointed end. Someone, it seemed, had been here with the same intention as himself. Indeed, the longer he stayed on the shore, the more he felt that prickling of the scalp, that shiver of the spine which suggests others are nearby, unseen, watching. Foolish. There was nobody there. The only eyes that observed his labors, his wrenching out of each cruel stake, his careful stowing of their trophies into the waiting sack, were the empty eyes of the slain: brave old man, sturdy warrior, fierce-hearted boy. Their faces held nothing now but the creeping shadow of decay. What they had been, four days since, was wiped away. Even so had Somerled erased these people’s future. So quick: as quick as the time it took a lad to swim across the Serpent’s Neck and back again, or sweep a winter roof clean of snow.

He came to a spear that had scratches and gouges in the hard earth at its base. Someone had indeed been there before him, and had failed in this work. This one must wait, for now the bags held as much as they could: the remains of six men. Six long shafts of ash lay neatly on the shore. He had laid them close to the water. Perhaps the sea would take them; wood was as scarce as precious amber here, but these, he thought, would never be used for their purpose again, nor taken to form the frame for a cottage roof or warm a man’s hearth in the chill of night. They were cursed.

Now came the walk across the narrow pathway between the lovely, many-hued pools of the tide’s ebb, fringed by dark fronded weed, strewn with thick, glistening rods of wrack, and dotted with myriad small, scurrying creatures. The sky looked up at him, blue and wide, from the small cups and channels of these ephemeral waterways. He saw Nessa’s eyes there, as deep and dazzling as this vision of sky in sea; he saw her little smile. He walked on over, and up to the place where King Engus’s hall had stood.