the slaughter-fond gods, they who have taken numberless heads in battle, just because I took one little life? Who could love Baldur, the perfect god, the stinking lickspittle? Not so perfect he couldn’t die, eh?’
The witch had hardly spoken since she had been a girl, her only language what she picked up from initiates and servants who came to the caves late — aged seven or eight at the oldest. So she said nothing now.
‘You have given me something, you have granted me respite. What is it you want?’
He turned his head to hers. Even during her long training, in her conversations with the rock spirits, with the dwarfs and the elves, she had never seen such a terrible sight. His whole face resembled a blood blister ready to burst. The bowl was overflowing, her fingers swelling as the venom splashed on them. She flung the steaming liquid to the floor, but before she could return the bowl to its place, the venom of the snakes fell once more on Loki, singeing and blackening his flesh. The god screamed and vomited and the witch shoved the bowl back under the flow of poison.
‘Twice you’ve given me respite from this torment. What is it you want? For the first respite you gave me, I will tell you that you and your sisters are not long from death. You have grown too strong in magic and knowledge and he, the lore-jealous lord Odin, will strike at you. Odin is coming for you in your realm on earth. He has taken human form and is upon you, in the flesh, mighty in his corrosive magics.’
This puzzled the witch. She was close to Odin. She had looked for the god many times, and it was he she had expected to find through the ordeal of water.
Loki went on, coughing and retching from the effects of the poison. ‘For the second respite you granted me, I will tell you that you have it in your hands to avoid this fate. He does not yet sense himself. The god is not yet awake; he does not know who he is. Act quickly and strike at him. There are two boys, Fire and Frost. One to live, one to die.’
The bowl overflowed again, Gullveig cast aside the poison and replaced it above the screaming god. Now her own arms were swollen and burned, her fingers numb. Only her training helped her ignore the pain.
‘No one has ever stayed to offer me three bowls of respite,’ said Loki, ‘and for this service I grant you your answer. At the end of the world Odin will fight with the wolf and die. You must bring the wolf to earth as Odin is on earth. Make the spirit of the wolf come to flesh in a man as the god has come to flesh. This is your rune and your guide. It will kill a god. Take it from one who knows.’
A thought sprang into the witch’s mind: ‘Show me my enemy.’ But then the steam of the venom obscured her sight, the acrid smell choked her and she dropped the bowl. Darkness descended. For the first time in nine days she cried out, and the boys threw down a loop of rope to pull her from the stream.
The witch hacked and coughed out the water from her lungs as she was hauled from the sink hole. The boys moved back and the sisters came to her. They didn’t bring food, fire, blankets or medicine but the scrap of belt and the brooch pin. The witch looked down at her fingers. They were swollen and blackened. Despite her pain, she took up the brooch and carved a rune into the leather, then she threw it to the floor and collapsed onto her hands and knees, panting and retching.
The circle of sisters looked down at the rune and felt a muttering thought of disquiet pass among them. Half of them saw this.
It was not one of the twenty-four runes given by Odin that they had expected to see. It was a new rune, something that hadn’t been given to a witch queen for eight generations.
These witches knew it was something special, though they struggled to grasp its importance.
To some the resonance of the symbol was only slightly clearer than their existing forewarning of momentous change, which had come to them in the idea of a storm. It signified a thunderbolt. They took the feeling of the rune into their minds and turned it over. Then one saw the mouth of a river between two hills. Another saw a church on a hill and knew something important was inside it: two boys, each in his way important to them. A long magic was needed, taking years to make but lasting years too. What were the boys? One was the subject of the spell, the other something else. What? They couldn’t see. A helper? No. A sacrifice? No. Something different. The other boy was like the extinguished candle, like the bowl of rainwater, like a hundred other things the witches used to work their magic. A medium for something? Not quite. Then they saw it. He was an ingredient.
Others saw a different meaning in the rune, one that it would bear down the centuries until one day someone gave it a name. Wolfsangel. This was not a word the sisters would have recognised, though its sense was clear to them — wolf trap. They saw themselves flying beneath a heavy moon as a smudge of starlings to settle at midnight on the roof of King Authun’s hall, to call to the sleeping king and tell him that his wife would never give him a boy and that, if he needed counsel, then the witches would receive him. They saw the further future too. A girl on a hillside. She had bright blonde hair. She was important too, they could tell but none of them could see how.
Some of the witches who huddled around the rune saw the symbol on its side.
These sisters felt a chill, as ordinary people do when they hear wolves in the hills. The rune’s resonance went through their minds like a hungry howl. It said ‘werewolf’.
That was the point of the magic, what the two brothers were for: so that the wolf god could take form inside a man.
The witch queen was at the point of blacking out, unable to connect to her sisters in her normal way. Exhausted, her consciousness balled in on itself like a child left alone in the dark.
She tapped at the rune and, her voice cracking, she spoke.
‘Protector,’ she said.
7
The beauty of the summer seemed to fill him to bursting, the fjord sparkling with a light that was almost painful to look at, the meadow flowers among the green grass like flames beneath the sun. Away over the hillside a man was calling.
‘Vali! Vali! Where are you? You goat!’
‘He’s supposed to be hunting murmuring birds with me but he can’t even find where I am,’ said Vali, looking at the man from a hollow in the ground. He was about thirteen, ready to go to raiding almost, but still laughing like a little child.
‘You’ll be beaten,’ said the girl with him. She was the same age, in a full skirt. She was pale, had long blonde plaits and in her hair was a whalebone comb. Next to her was a basket of herbs that she’d been collecting for her mother.
‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said, and kissed her. It was the first time, just a peck.
‘Get off me!’ said Adisla, standing up. ‘Bragi! Bragi, he’s over here!’
And the big man had come running.
‘Prince Vali,’ he said, ‘you make things very difficult for me at times. Where is your spear? Where is your bow?’
‘I’m sure they’re around here somewhere,’ said Vali. ‘I left them down by the stream when I saw Adisla.’
Bragi, a battle-scarred old warrior of around thirty-five, shook his head.
‘Those weapons must never leave your side, you know that. When the time comes for you to go raiding, and it is awful soon, what are you going to do? Leave your shield and sword in the ship as soon as you see a pretty girl?’
‘I think that highly likely,’ said Adisla.
‘You, young lady, can keep your mouth shut. Look at you, pale as a princess. A farm girl like you should show more signs of honest toil.’
‘This conversation could be regarded as toil enough for a lifetime,’ said Adisla.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Bragi. ‘I’m going to speak to your mother.’
The girl shrugged in a do-what-you-like way.
Bragi pointed his finger at her.
‘I make no bones about it,’ he said. ‘I blame you for what has happened to him. Before he started ignoring
