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IVE
    The autumn days are short now, so we retreat to the pit house earlier than in summer. I don’t much like the pit house. It’s not unfit for humans, like I thought that first night when I saw it looming in the dark. No, the eight of them, plus me and Øg now, all live fine inside here. But there are no windows, so when the door is closed, the only source of light and air is the hole over the fireplace in the center of the single big room. And there’s the fire, if it’s lit. And now and then a lamp. But none of that is enough. Each night I fall asleep staring into the dying embers surrounded by total blackness. From our bedroom window back in Downpatrick, I could look out over the whole farmyard inside the fort walls and see people milling about, and I could look up at the never-ending sky. Here there are no people to watch mill about: This is an isolated farmstead. And if you want to see the stars at night, you have to go outside. I feel caged.
    But tonight is better than most. By the time Thorkild and I came home with the mussels, his wife, Gunhild, and sister,Thora, had already piled the axes and tools and buckets into a corner and pushed the loom and the vats of pickled fish for this winter against the rear wall to make space. All because a stranger had arrived while we were out on the boat. It turns out that’s who the mussel feast tonight was for. We roasted so many, we’ll have mussels tomorrow, too. And still more wait in the current, the ends of their ropes tied to a tree that leans out over the water. They’ll stay fresh that way.
    The stranger calls himself Beorn, and he says his father was a bear, some kind of huge, ferocious animal. Beorn is even taller than Thorkild, so I half believe him, though I can’t understand how his mother wasn’t killed by the bear that was his father. She was human, after all.
    Where Beorn comes from, the bears have white fur. Like the fur of the white fox—the melrakki that Thora thought I was asking for that first night when I cried out Mel’s name. Beorn was the original source of those fox skins. He’s a traveler, by boat if he can catch a ride, or by land if he can’t. He carries things from one farm or settlement to the next, allowing trade all the way from the north country Nóreg, where his home is, to Heiðabý, a big city down south and the biggest port in all the lands around here. That’s where he’s heading when he leaves us. He says it’s a wonderful place, with traders from all over the world who have the most beautiful wares he’s ever seen. He’llboard a ship there and go back home before winter sets in. Then he’ll start his journeys next spring again, arriving at this farm in autumn, like always.
    Trading isn’t all he does, though; Beorn is a storyteller. All Norse people are storytellers, it seems. But Beorn’s special. Here the best kind of storyteller is called a skald . A skald goes from town to town, telling stories to the chieftains—just like seanchaís do in Eire. Beorn is a skald . Thora announced that proudly after dinner, for the benefit of Randolf and me. We’re the only ones who weren’t here in past years when Beorn has come through. And maybe for the orphan Åse’s benefit, too, since she’s young enough that her memory might not hold that well. Åse turns out to be only six—though I thought she was my age when I first saw her. They’re all so tall here.
    I’m glad that these people love storytelling; at least they have that much in common with the people of Eire. My own brother Nuada can tell tales that make you fall on the floor laughing or huddle together terrified. Now that his hand is cut off and he’s no longer perfect, he can never become king. So I wonder if he’ll become a great storyteller instead—a seanchaí . If I could only see him again, I’d tell him he’d be the best seanchaí