Fenrir

and offer ourselves as workers, profess ourselves displaced by war. Let us leave her. Let us leave this magic.’

But his sister had sat, stirring the pebbles in front of her with her feet, looking out from the mountain over the valleys. Then she had swallowed the mushrooms, gone back to the dark, and he, impelled by their bond, had gone with her, had joined her in her sufferings, given his mind to magic as her protector.

He had seen, crammed into the tiny space of the cave, sealed in by rocks that the wild woman piled over its mouth, he had seen. The god had come to him, lain next to him pale in the darkness — the one-eyed god of the shrieking runes, his face blank with madness, the strange hangman’s knot at his neck. Louis — he had still been Louis then — had touched his skin and found it cold. And though the god was dead, his mind was a web into which Louis felt he might fall. He shrank from the corpse god in the tunnel, pressed himself into the wall, but when he opened his eyes, the rocks at the entrance of the cave had been moved away; the weak light of the misty mountain was coming in, and it was only his sister who lay next to him on the stony floor.

When he emerged from the cave he was weeping, but his sister came to him, told him that the path to magic was not easy.

‘What was it in the darkness?’ he’d asked, but his sister said nothing; she just sat holding his hand. Then she had gone back to the dark, and though he loved her, he could not follow her in.

The wild woman had come and sat by him. ‘He is coming here — ’ she tapped the ground with her foot ‘- to die by the teeth of the wolf. The god you met in the darkness will take flesh on earth to fight and die against his eternal enemy. When he does, you die, your sister dies. Many people.’

He tried to ask why but he was raw-headed and tired. A feeling like grief was inside him.

The woman just looked into his eyes.

‘How shall I prevent this?’ he said.

‘Serve him.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘At the centre of the universe sit the weavers of fate, the Norns, three women beneath the world tree Yggdrasil. All the nine worlds are beholden to them — gods and men. The god is doomed to die at the twilight of the gods. The Norns require it. So the god offers them many deaths in many ages, rehearsing the end to please those fateful women and forestall his own annihilation. You are caught in that grim cycle, part of a ritual the king of gods offers to the fates. Your sister too. You are destined to die.’

‘How do you know this?’

She put her hand to the burn on her face, to her blood-red eye. ‘I gave this and lifetimes of silence to see it. I too am caught in the schemes of the gods.’

‘How can I prevent it?’

‘Protect your sister. While she lives it will be harder for the god to come to earth.’

‘Why?’

‘Some things, Hugin, must be taken as a matter of faith.’

The name seemed resonant to him, to speak to his core. He turned from her and went hunting on the mountain. The thing in the tunnel had wakened something in him. His eyes were sharper, his hand surer, his step quieter. When he drew back his bow and let fly, he couldn’t miss — hare, sheep, even wolves fell to his arrows. He was strong, and when men came, they learned to bring tribute and requests for healing, rather than axes and swords.

He would sit in the dawn watching the darkness drain into the valleys as the sunlight freed the gold in the gorse, and he sat in the evening as the tide of shadow rose from the rivers to submerge the hills once more.

In the winter they built a fire in the mouth of the cave and sheltered from the mountain winds, huddling together beneath furs and fleeces.

The wild woman had sung a song in her native tongue, of two brothers who the gods had destined to kill each other, and he had understood it. The god of the north had awakened the speech of the north in him, connected him to something he had been when he had lived before and that language had been his birthright. The brothers had to dance to a song the gods sang, a song that foretold the death of the gods. The boys’ fate was to die as the gods would die on their final day, by the teeth of the wolf. Their mother hid the boys — one with the wolves in the woods of the east, one with a family in the Valley of Songs — hoping to keep them apart. But a woman, within whom lived an ancient rune feared by the gods, threatened to draw the boys together, so the mother had sent one of them to kill her. He had done this, and though it saddened the boy, his lands and his family prospered.

The darkness of the cave, the presence of the god, the starving and the freezing, had seemed to knock Louis’s mind sideways. The song seemed almost as real as the mountain, the cold and the mist, real as his sister’s affinity for that terrible cave. It was about him, he knew.

‘He is waking in you,’ said the woman, ‘this…’ she touched his arm ‘… and this…’ she touched his eyes to indicate his sight ‘… are him. In you. They are him. You are a raven, flying on the wind.’

‘And Ysabella? What is happening to her?’

‘She is learning what she carries inside her.’

‘She’s having a child?’

‘No child. The runes.’

He had seen them, the strange symbols that glowed and twisted in the blackness of the cave, the runes that chimed and sang, brought light, rain and the smell of the harvest into the tiny space.

‘I’ll go to her.’ He turned and made to go into the back of the cave, to the tunnel in the rock, to remove the pile of stones that he had used to block the passage when he had left.

‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘The god walks beside her. She is beyond your help. She will be your guide now. When the weather lifts, I’ll be gone.’

‘Where?’

‘Away. I have other work to do to prevent your death. I will leave you a gift.’

‘What gift?’

‘Something even the wolf fears. When the god is dead, it will kill the wolf. Treat it carefully — it is poisoned with the nightmares of witches.’

Then she had said nothing, just sat staring past the fire, into the mountain mists. He had slept, and in the morning the wild woman had gone. In her place was the sword, the slim curve of steel in its black scabbard. He had drawn it and watched it shine in the morning sun. An echo of his previous life came to him. He thought that from the sale of such a sword he could eat for years, live in comfort if he could find some town or village where he could spend his money without coming to the attention of the nobles. Perhaps he could become a merchant? He had seen the pack trains labouring up through Lombardy on their way to the Frankish kingdoms. They were free men, those merchants, not tied to any count or margrave.

But then his sister had emerged from the cave to sit filthy by the fire. He made her stew, fed her roots he had foraged and baked and tried to make her comfortable, but she had only stayed long enough to regain her strength. Then she had gone back.

He could not bear her to face what was in there alone, so he had gone with her and when he emerged was something different.

He had left Louis sleeping in the darkness. Now he was Hugin, sharp-eyed and strong, bound to the god who had come to him in the tomb dark of the cave. Ritual and self-denial became the basis of his life. He tended to his sister, found the mushrooms and roots she needed for her trances, hunted, fed and grew ever stronger. It was as if the plants of the mountain could speak to him. He knew which to pick to cure, which to send himself spiralling into trances of gods and monsters. Munin shared the magic she dug from the darkness, allowing the god to touch and bless her brother. In the sightless space, the air wet and the rock cold, Hugin felt the corpse god hold him and whisper his name: ‘Odin.’ Hugin knew what that meant. He had been claimed as a servant of death.

He saw things too. The cave seemed to grow and to flicker with the light of candles. He stood before a gigantic wolf, sheltering his sister from its teeth. He saw a huge warrior, one-eyed and fierce, thrusting a spear into the wolf on the final day. It was coming, he knew, the wolf to kill the god, drawn on by a terrible rune. He saw it writhing in the air in front of him and he knew that it lived inside a person, as the runes seemed to live inside his sister. It hissed with threat like the cobras which the merchants had brought to the monastery to delight the monks.

They had been on the mountain four summers when his sister emerged from the cave and gestured to the valley with her eyes. His bond to her was now so strong it was without words. He only had to touch her to feel what