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by slowly, stopping several times while the driver peered out into the trees. Finally it left.
    Sune had asked himself a thousand times if he shouldn’t just go home, but he realized that was no longer an option. He had defied the men, the brotherhood, by not receiving the ring and swearing an oath of silence together with the others.

6
    C amilla closed the heavy front door, kicked off her running shoes, and barged into her husband’s office in her wet clothes.
    “When you gut a buck or whatever the hell it’s called, you could clean up, you know. There’s practically a lake of blood out in the forest.”
    Frederik looked up. “What is this, what’s happened to you?”
    “I fell flat on my face in a big puddle of blood.”
    Camilla didn’t know much about hunting or forest management, though she did know that Frederik had been out several times lately hunting bucks. But she had no idea what happened after the animal was killed, except that it had to be split open on the spot and gutted to make sure the meat wasn’t spoiled.
    “As far as I know, there haven’t been any bucks gutted out there,” he said. “We haven’t hunted in over a week now. Where was it?”
    “I don’t know exactly. But there’s a big tree, partly hollow, close to a clearing with a bonfire site. It looks like someone has been there.”
    Frederik stood up. He didn’t work at home very often. Most of his waking hours were spent in the management offices at Termo-Lux, a window manufacturer. But the board of directors had just accepted his ultimatum: If he was to stay on as managing director of the family business, he had to have one day off a week to work on his film manuscripts—and also to see something of his wife, he’d added, when telling Camilla that they had accepted his demands.
    She had met Frederik Sachs-Smith in California, where over the years he had established himself as a film scriptwriter. He’d already had a hand in several big Hollywood productions; she had considered him a mixture of upper-class bohemian and cool businessman. The scriptwriting was something he did simply because he enjoyed it. While doing research for an interview with him, she had discovered that he was a more-than-competent investor; he’d turned his inheritance from his grandparents into a sizable fortune. He didn’t need to work.
    When they fell in love, the plan had been that she and her son, Markus, would move in with him in Santa Barbara. But after the death of Frederik’s brother and the announcement that his sister had chosen for personal reasons to step down as managing director, their plans changed. He returned to Denmark.
    At first, Camilla didn’t understand; Frederik had never hidden the fact that he had left Denmark to avoid becoming part of the family dynasty. He’d said numerous times that there had to be many others well qualified to head up the business. Gradually she came to realize that he had accepted the job for the sake of his father, not for the business. Walther Sachs-Smith had been forced off the board of directors of his own company the year before, as he had begun to prepare for his successor. Greed and a lust for power had driven Frederik’s two younger siblings to betray their father, who all too late discovered what they were up to.
    Which was why Frederik put on a suit and tie four days a week now, to lead the business his grandfather had established many years ago.
    “It sounds like you’ve been out at the sacrificial oak,” he said. “Which means it’s probably pig’s blood you slipped in. They buy it from the butcher.”
    “They? Who in the hell are ‘they’?” Camilla bellowed. She began ripping off her jogging pants.
    “The people who make sacrifices to the gods. They believe in Odin and Thor, and once in a while they meet out in the forest and perform rituals.”
    “Are they some of the people from over at the Viking Ship Museum?”
    “No.” He laughed and shook his head at her. “These people